This Week in Google 753 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff's here. Paris is here. We've got Alphabet's quarterly earnings. I thought they looked pretty good. The Stark Market says you lose Google. We'll also talk about Amazon and Roomba. The deal is off and then using Python to find a neighborhood nuisance. It's all coming up next on Twig podcasts you love

TWiT (00:00:26):
From people you trust. This is T Twig.

Leo Laporte (00:00:35):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 753 recorded Wednesday, January 31st, 2024. Jeff's brother and Paris is Cannon.

(00:00:46):
This weekend Google is brought to you by Rocket Money. If I asked you how many subscriptions you have, would you be able to list all of them? Could you tell me how much you're paying? If you'd asked me that question before I started using Rocket Money, I would've been sure I knew, but I could tell you I would've been so wrong. Rocket Money has saved me thousands literally in subscriptions. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending, it helps you lower your bills too. Rocket money. It has more than 5 million users, including me, and has helped saved its members an average of $720 a year with more than $500 million in canceled subscriptions. You could see all your subscriptions in one place. If you see something you don't want, you tap it, you cancel it. You never have to get on the phone with customer service. They do it for you. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocket money.com/twig. That's rocket money.com/twig. Rocket money.com/twig. It's time for Twig this weekend. Cool. Whatever we don't want to talk about cool with our favorite people. Paris Martin know is here from the information. I love the flickering fire in the background. It's a cozy,

Paris Martineau (00:02:08):
So will my candle burn out before the end of the show? Let's stay lit. Stay tuned.

Leo Laporte (00:02:12):
It's the Cozy Twig today with Paris Martin. Now from the information also with us, he's emeritus, but he's real. He is the Leonard Tower Professor Emeritus for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark. Craig

TWiT (00:02:28):
New

Leo Laporte (00:02:29):
Graduate school Journalism at the City University of New York. Hello, Jeff Jarvis. Hello. How are you boss? I am well. Neither any of us. None of us were willing to watch the testimony this morning in front of Congress. They brought all chose

Paris Martineau (00:02:49):
To practice self-care,

Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
Self-care. Precisely, yes, precisely. Who was there? Mark Zuckerberg was there. All the social network people. Linda Ya, Carino, CEO of Twitter was there. The

Paris Martineau (00:03:06):
CEOs of

Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
TikTok, Evan Spielberg

Paris Martineau (00:03:10):
And Discord,

Leo Laporte (00:03:12):
And I don't know the name of the TikTok or Discord. You were saying that federal marshals had to actually force them to testify.

Paris Martineau (00:03:20):
Yeah, the only ones that showed up voluntarily to the hearing were Zuckerberg and TikTok. CEO US Marshals had to show up and deliver subpoenas to the headquarters of Discord and I believe also SNAP and X in order to get them to show up, which I think is kind of telling Snapchat

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:41):
Agrees with this stupid law. I don't know why they'd be so

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
Regulatory capture. So what they're talking about is, is it COSA that these hearings

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:49):
Cosa? Yep, this is Blumenthal and

Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
Cosa. Okay, so the issue is ostensibly child abuse on the internet. COSA is in theory a bill that will protect children online. There's some real question whether that's the case. It really seems to be more political thing than anything else, but it is

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:15):
Grandstanding. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:04:16):
Yeah, it is. I have to say a bipartisan effort. Here's Mark Zuckerberg apologizing. This is from the Washington Post to the families of a cyber bullying incident. Lemme turn on

Zuckerberg (00:04:33):
That. Curls between 13 and 15. Josh Hawley. We were exposed to unwanted nudity in a week on Instagram. Would

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:39):
Josh Hawley saved that because we

Zuckerberg (00:04:40):
Creeps Senator. This is why we're building all, who did you fire? Senator? I don't think that that's, who did you fire? I'm not going to answer that. You anybody. Right? You didn't take any significant action. It's appropriate to talk about it's not appropriate HR decisions. Do you know who's sitting behind you?

Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
This is pure political grandstanding. You've got families.

Zuckerberg (00:05:02):
Oh, he's awful nation whose children are either severely harmed or gone and you don't think it's appropriate to talk about steps that you took, the fact that you didn't fire a single person. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Have you compensated any of the victims? Sorry? Have you compensated any of the victims these girls? Have you

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
Compensated? I don't normally say poor Mark Zuckerberg, but

Zuckerberg (00:05:23):
Why not? But that I'm

Paris Martineau (00:05:25):
Shocked that they did not prepare him for this. Didn't take

Zuckerberg (00:05:28):
Any action. You didn't fire any. I

Leo Laporte (00:05:29):
Think you can't. How can you prepare for that?

Paris Martineau (00:05:31):
No. So when CEOs go to these hearings or any executive, they have mock versions of this where you hire, if you're a smart company, you hire people who've carefully studied the tactics of the various,

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:48):
Oh, Nick Cle sat him down, no

Paris Martineau (00:05:49):
Doubt who are going to sit there and they bully you in a mock like hearing in order to get you to

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Be calm under pressure.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:58):
One of the shouldn't haves most fun things to do. Paris, my old boss would have me do that before interviews. It was just the greatest fun. I could say everything mean to the boss to prep him. It was great.

Leo Laporte (00:06:10):
Senator Tom Cotton repeatedly asked tiktoks, CEO showed J, are you a member of the Chinese Communist Party? To which show replied, I'm from Singapore, I'm not Chinese. And then Cotton said, but do you know any members of the Chinese communist Party? To which show replied again. By the way, this is the second time testifying before this Congress. No, I'm Singapore Singaporean. I'm not from China. I know I look like English. I'm China. To those of you who aren't paying attention, sorry.

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:43):
They speak English in Singapore, by the

Leo Laporte (00:06:44):
Way. Oh yeah. He speaks perfect English. It's ridiculous. Blatant racism. Yeah, it's blatant racism. Lindsey Graham says Zuckerberg has blood on his hands, but so does Joe Biden sucker the problem.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:01):
Leo, you missed the amazing part of that Zuckerberg

Leo Laporte (00:07:05):
Clip the apology. You keep

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:06):
Going. He turns around.

Leo Laporte (00:07:07):
Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Compensated

Zuckerberg (00:07:10):
A single victim. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. There's families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now they're here. You're on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your show 'em the pictures? Would you like to apologize for what you've done to these people?

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:29):
Grandstanding.

Zuckerberg (00:07:33):
Sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:07:35):
He says, I'm sorry for everything you've been through is terrible. No one should have to go through the things your family has suffered

Zuckerberg (00:07:41):
And this is why we invested so much and that

Leo Laporte (00:07:49):
Mark's not a politician. So he's going to be office balance on this. It's hard to compete against somebody like Josh Hawley. Here's Lindsey Graham courthouse

Lindsey Graham (00:07:59):
Door. Until you do that, nothing will change until these people can be sued for the damage they're doing. It is all talk. I'm a Republican who believes in free enterprise, but also believe,

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:12):
Oh, we don't. What you believe in

Lindsey Graham (00:08:13):
Has been wrong, has to have somebody to go to complain. There's no commission to go to.

Leo Laporte (00:08:21):
Why can't they be sued? I thought they could be suspect. They're being sued.

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:24):
No, it's two 30. It's two 30.

Leo Laporte (00:08:25):
Oh, it's section two 30. He doesn't want Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:28):
Yeah, yeah. They should be sued. They should be sued. They should

Leo Laporte (00:08:32):
Be sued. So I just want to emphasize that of course, these companies can withstand lawsuits. They get 'em all the time under, if section two 30 is withdrawn, it's not these companies that you should be concerned about. It's companies like mine. It's our chat room, it's our forums, it's our discord. That would go away because we would be open to those lawsuits because the idea is section two 30 is that we are not publishers that we are. By providing those platforms giving you a chance to speak and you should be liable for your words, not us. And of course we are very aggressive. I am very aggressive personally in moderating all of our platforms. We're very careful about the content that's on our platforms, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't be shut down by frivolous lawsuits

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:21):
And worse. Dana Boyd had a wonderful, who's the expert in this who wrote the book, it's Complicated, who studied teens and online for much of her career. She had posted a very upset about this CSA talk and she says to quote here, the problem is not technology causes harm. The problem is we live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don't invest in resilience or build social safety nets. There's a much bigger problem here that this distracts from at the level of politicians who should be paying attention to other things and they're not young people. There are horrible stories. Absolutely. But there is also the case that young people are under tremendous pressure from us elders for academic performance, for their social performance, for getting into schools. They're worried about getting shot in their schools. They're worried about getting into colleges. They're worried about the economy and their future and jobs. It's not their phones. And when you act like it is just their phones, you ignore everything

Leo Laporte (00:10:27):
Else. Dana acknowledges children are dying. She says they're in crisis. We are not providing with the support they most need. This bill is not that many aspects of the tech industry she says are toxic, but people are politically prudently using children. It doesn't help children and it doesn't address the core issues in tech. She says the definition is wrong and it's not Instagram. She says, solutionism is counterproductive. The technological fix is just more of the same. It doesn't solve the problem. She says, for the last few years I've been stunned to watch how the tech lashes evolved from attempting to call into question these foolish logics, the logic that people are obsessed with. Tech think tech will solve everything to outright blaming tech companies for intentionally causing arms. Somehow we've shifted from tech will save democracy to tech will destroy democracy. Hint, democracy was in deep dooo before tech. The weird thing about this framing is that it's technologically as technologically deterministic as the tech industry's own orientation.

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:37):
So Paris is the person here who grew up with the internet. What's your thought about all this?

Paris Martineau (00:11:42):
I mean, I agree with everything you guys and Dana have said. It seems like this is, I feel like we encounter a version of this problem every time we get one of these grandstanding hearings. The actual problem at hand or being discussed is kind of just a facade for whatever political machinations the various players want to push, and in this case its children and their mental health, which that's a real impressing concern. It's multifaceted and I don't know, levying some fines or slapping companies like Facebook and TikTok on the wrist isn't going to address the systemic

Leo Laporte (00:12:29):
Issues. Making Mark Zuckerberg stand up and apologize to the families is not what those families and other families need. They need access to affordable. This is Dana talking high quality mental health services. You don't see Congress working on that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:44):
Holly exploited those families and their paying today.

Leo Laporte (00:12:47):
Yeah, he actually did something worse than what Facebook did.

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:52):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
Oh well. All right. So that's the Senate Judici Judiciary Committee. Alright. Especially

Paris Martineau (00:12:58):
Because I mean bringing families like that to a hearing, you are in some way telling them or promising them this will provide a solution to your grief and in this case that's incorrect. Nothing is going to provide a solution to their grief.

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:15):
So Paris this morning on morning Joe, which I watched just to get my blood pressure up and remind myself I'm alive.

Paris Martineau (00:13:22):
I was going to say very geriatric of you to be watching people news in the morning.

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:27):
Yes it is. Thank you very much, kid. So they had on B withal and then they had on a mother of a child who lost, she lost her child to this and when they asked at the end, well what can we do to solve this? Well pass cosa.

Leo Laporte (00:13:41):
By the way, she didn't lose her child to this whatever this is. That's a very individual personal issue. Could just as much be the parents, could be her school, could be her schoolmates. It's much more likely the people around her than a Silicon Valley company. But we don't want to solve that problem. It's easier to go after Silicon Valley companies, especially because it's politically expedient to go after big tech. Right now the good news is in 2023, Congress only passed 27 bills.

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:16):
Oh God,

Leo Laporte (00:14:17):
They are not.

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:17):
This one may passed. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:14:18):
Effective right pass. Maybe it wouldn't be so sad if that's what passes.

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:25):
Lindsey Graham just said today that this bill will come out a committee unanimous and he's probably right.

Leo Laporte (00:14:30):
Yeah, because it's very difficult to say no to it because it looks like you're in favor of child pornography or you have no sensitivity for these bill families. Alright, let's look at COSA directly.

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:42):
And then Canada's got a really bad one too. Canada doesn't stop.

Leo Laporte (00:14:47):
Hey,

Paris Martineau (00:14:47):
North Americans, we stick together.

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
It's the kids online safety net.

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:51):
Puritanism man. Yo Puritans.

Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
Dick Blumanthal of Connecticut, Democrat of Connecticut is its sponsor. Well, all this stuff is crossed out here. Wait a minute, lemme get to the not crossed out part. Well, I don't know what I'm,

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:09):
It's about sex. You can't read

Leo Laporte (00:15:10):
It, Leo. Yeah, apparently it's prohibited. Let's look at the PDF. Maybe it won't be crossed out there. Oops, wrong. PDF.

Paris Martineau (00:15:21):
I'm reading the Blumenthal's press release about it, so I'm sure this is a lot of spin. But it says the bill provides parents and gives them safeguards to protect kids' experiences online requires social media platforms provide miners with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features and opt out of algorithmic recommendation. That's

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:42):
A big one. It

Paris Martineau (00:15:43):
Creates accountability for social media's, harm to kids, a duty for social media platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to minors such as content promoting of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse and sexual exploitation.

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
That's all the benefits. That doesn't explain how it does it. Of course, I think

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:03):
It allows suing, I don't know if it gets around two 30 or how it does that, but it's also demonizing the algorithm though recent research has shown that going without the algorithm is worse. It's a raw feed and the

Leo Laporte (00:16:21):
Algorithm isnt what's causing the problem. I really not at all, not they want

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:25):
To blame that.

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
Let me see what chat g BT says. I'm going to ask it to some. You

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:31):
Could ask your new

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
Browser. I could

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:33):
Browser thing.

Paris Martineau (00:16:34):
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says today's version of Costa would require surveillance of anyone's 16 or under. It would put the tools of censorship in the hands of state attorneys general and when greatly endangered the rights and safety of young people online

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:50):
And speech for all of us because we're all going to have to, I am using a candidate example here, but they're going to require even probably search engines to require age verification.

Paris Martineau (00:17:01):
So it seems that it would require the filtering and blocking of legal speech essentially, attorneys general would decide what content is dangerous to young people and then that would have to be blocked by social media companies. There would also be age verification and I think you could see where the attorney's general issue would cause problems in certain states. If you take a look at any of the legislation and rhetoric coming out of Florida in the past couple of years about anyone in the queer community, it could go very south very quickly.

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
Yeah, I mean honestly, the attorney's general of Florida and Texas both proposed bills that really were more about protecting conservative voices in social media than protecting kids. And I think a lot of this is also, they want the control however they can get it. And if they have to use kids to get it, they will. And that's really what's shameful about this is just as Josh Hawley getting those parents to come and stand up. So Mark Zuckerberg could do this kind of mock apology to them is a very cynical use of kids and kids suffering to get at your political enemies and garner votes and that's just shameful.

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:20):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:18:22):
Alright.

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:23):
So meanwhile, can I bring up Canada for one second here?

Leo Laporte (00:18:25):
Blame Canada, Michael Geist. I think it's their fault.

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:28):
Well, so Canada did the horrible ca team, which I've complained about in the show and they've had other things that are stupid, but they keep coming out with bad internet laws. So there's Michael Geist who's been covering this really well in Canada. The most dangerous Canadian internet bill you've never heard of is a step closer to becoming law having passed the Senate bill S two 10. And it's similarly about kids and pornography in this case. So it would require the offense for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. So that means you've got to have a prescribed age verification method to limit access, things like facial recognition and other things. It also means according to Geist, it could mean that even search engines would have to verify age. It could get you to bad stuff. And so it really screws up the entire net and this North American puritanism is spraying around and this is going to affect the speech of everyone.

Leo Laporte (00:19:33):
Yeah, I think part of the goal of this is really to put pornography out of business. This is a kind of a stalking horse for really getting rid of pornography and that's what's happened in some of these states where they haven't implemented age verification laws is companies like PornHub have abandoned those states because they say, well, we don't want to do that. It would be invasive of our users' privacy because by the way, age verification only works if everybody does it. Adults and children.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:59):
Right. Well, and also, I mean Foster Esta and I write about this in my next book, much evidence now shows that it made things worse for sex workers and for people and for trafficking because it took away places that were cooperating with law enforcement, including back page where law enforcement knew how to go to them and do things. And yes, it had pornography and yes, it enabled escorts and sex work, but now it's worse. It's worse for everybody.

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
Yeah, because when you push that stuff under ground, those people are actually more vulnerable and are more exploited. Alright, well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:41):
Alright, that's enough for government. There

Leo Laporte (00:20:42):
Was the circus in Washington, the usual circus in Washington. Thank you very much. Let's hope it joins the hundreds of other bills. There were 700 votes last year in the house. Only 27 bills passed. Let's hope it joins the 700. Well I guess that's what is that 663 or whatever it is, but ridiculous. I'm

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:04):
Just glad I didn't have to turn around and apologize to anybody when I was in the Senate

Leo Laporte (00:21:10):
And I am not a Mark Zuckerberg fan, but that's as bad as have you. No shame sir. Well, actually that's a good guy saying that. But it's as bad as yes, that as McCarthy and the blackness I have

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:23):
In my hand.

Paris Martineau (00:21:24):
Listen, I feel no sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg because frankly his team should have prepared him for that. If you're going to one of these hearings, they know in advance that those families are going to be there. His team should have had prepared with the line and response.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:38):
What could he have done?

Paris Martineau (00:21:39):
Listen, I don't know off the top of my head, it's not my job to come up with the best possible PR strategy for this, but I'm sure something exists that looked less miserable than that.

Leo Laporte (00:21:50):
Like any politician, he should have done this sincere turn around and be sincere. Don't be humble and sincere. Say, I am so sorry. We are doing the best we can. We care about your kids. I have kids myself. I'm a father too. I feel your pain. It's a horrible, horrible thing and we have to work better in this country for mental health and for the safety of our kids. And we here at Facebook are, do everything we can to make sure your kids are protected. And I'm so sorry. He could have said that

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:26):
You're probably not going to like this opinion, but I think that there is, and focusing everything on Zuckerberg, I think there is a hint of antisemitism.

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised. Wouldn't be surprised. The

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:40):
Jewish guy

Leo Laporte (00:22:42):
And Harvard Jewish guy, even worse,

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:46):
East

Leo Laporte (00:22:46):
Coast elite Jew trying to take over our children. It's a nasty stew of Yik. It's a shame. The

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:57):
Internet has done wonderful things. It's

Leo Laporte (00:23:00):
The

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:00):
Stuff too, but it gets ignored.

Leo Laporte (00:23:02):
I think Dana's point, which is that there are things you can do and should be doing instead of this. This is just show boating. So it really, I think we

Paris Martineau (00:23:11):
Mean, I think that it's certainly a good thing to have guardrails on the activities of tech companies and how they're policing content. It's good to have conversations like this, but you should take at the very least half of the vigorous approach that you are taking to cracking down on companies like Facebook for a teenage mental health crisis and apply it to the actual mental health crisis. I mean, it shouldn't be all Facebook's fault,

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
But this is what we do in Washington. We do it with the immigration crisis. We do it with everything else. We Taylor Swift Solutions with Taylor Swift. Do

Paris Martineau (00:23:55):
It with, yeah, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey.

Leo Laporte (00:24:00):
So Google actually had a decent corner, believe it or not, but that wasn't, stock market wasn't, it wasn't decent enough for the stock market to reward them. Greedy

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:11):
Bastards.

Leo Laporte (00:24:12):
Oh my God. So Google alphabet shares tumbled when Google revealed that instead of making 65 and a half billion dollars, which was by the way up from 59 billion the year before, they made that, instead of making $66.1 billion, which is what the market expected, and as a result, Google was punished. 6% drop in after hours trading look went from 59 billion put upon you went from 59 billion in ad revenue a year ago to 65 and a half billion this year. That sounds pretty good growth of pretty good, pretty growth of six and a half billion dollars. Remember in three months, that's more than 2 billion growth in a month, but it should have been 700 million more in those three months. Forget it. This is absurd.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:12):
Go ahead.

Paris Martineau (00:25:13):
I was going to say, I will also say for the first time, Google disclosed during earnings this time that it generated 15 billion in subscription revenue last year from YouTube and other consumer services like photo storage interest. But I assume most of that is YouTube, but 15 billion is not much. It's nothing to scoff

Leo Laporte (00:25:31):
At. No, it's good. Those are Apple numbers.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:34):
My money paying for Google, whatever they call it, g-spot now.

Paris Martineau (00:25:38):
Yeah, I was about to say a significant percentage of that is Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:43):
Angry, Jeff Jarvis,

Leo Laporte (00:25:46):
Google, poor,

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:47):
Poor, unemployed, retired old man, Jeff Jarvis paying Google is hard earned money from the past by future,

Paris Martineau (00:25:53):
Just so you know. Kids inherit store all of your photos of your headshot that have not yet been used for books.

Leo Laporte (00:26:01):
Should point out by the way that that is revenue. The actual profit was a mere 20.7 billion up from, that's almost 7 billion a month. Yeah. Oh, you Google. I'm selling my stock. You're just doing so terrible. I think these weird incentives are actually a big part of the reason. For instance, 25,000 people were laid off in the tech sector this month, mostly from companies who are doing just swell like Google.

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:31):
Yeah, but only to please the stock market. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:37):
Generator of AI is boosting cloud growth, says Sundar, phai, Google Cloud revenue beat expectations, still a fraction of its business. Only 9.2 billion in revenue. Microsoft's cloud, by the way, shrank or no, I'm sorry. It did not. It grew 30%. Google's cloud grew 25.7 0.7%. Anyway, I think it was a perfectly good quarter, but the stock market, okay, capital expenditures were up. Google's spending a lot of money despite Ruth Poat trying to make more money, capital expenditures up 45%, 11 billion, and they'll be even higher for the rest of the year, says Chief Financial Officer, Ruth Poat. A lot of that's ai by the way. The cost of ai, generative AI is very expensive.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:29):
Yes. Paris, back to your point about subscriptions, I just looked up, but Amazon manages to register 35 billion from subscriptions. Well, they've been doing it for a long time with a lot of offerings, free delivery and entertainment and all kinds of stuff. For Google to already get up to half that amount in subscriptions is pretty impressive.

Paris Martineau (00:27:46):
Yeah. I mean it's pretty impressive. The interesting thing though is Amazon subscription kind of just acts as a way to get people bought into the Amazon system. Amazon is not, I don't think the calculus is that you're a hundred and whatever dollar a year Prime subscription is going to pay directly for all the services you get from Prime. It's to make you think, oh, well, I've got an Amazon subscription, so I'm going to order stuff from Amazon.

Leo Laporte (00:28:13):
So a lot of people are a people I'm starting to hear some people say, maybe I don't need Amazon Prime and actually canceling it. A lot of the you don't need because Amazon will ship it to you the next day anyway, Amazon Prime TV is adding ads now

Paris Martineau (00:28:28):
To their Prime video. You've got ads for the regular TV or 2 99. Yeah. Pay 2 99 extra to get rid of them.

Leo Laporte (00:28:35):
So I'm really wondering.

Paris Martineau (00:28:36):
It's absolutely ridiculous it

Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
Do you subscribe to Prime Paris? Yes. Why? Same here.

Paris Martineau (00:28:45):
Because until recently I was reporting on Amazon, so it seemed prudent. But I will say, I guess unrelated to work, I do it because it's convenient. I will sometimes need to order some batteries or something quickly that only Amazon has.

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:05):
Their batteries aren't very good, by the way.

Paris Martineau (00:29:07):
No, they're

Benito (00:29:07):
Not. This is Beto. I, so I canceled my Amazon Prime two years ago, but every time I need to order something from Amazon, I go to Amazon and they're like, Hey, we'll give you two weeks of Prime. And I'm like, sure. And get the free delivery.

Leo Laporte (00:29:18):
Yeah. I honestly think you don't need to pay for Prime

Benito (00:29:20):
To get the Tesla, and then when I need it again, I wait for the free Prime. I'm like, alright, I'll take the free prime again for another two weeks. Thanks. That's what I've been doing.

Leo Laporte (00:29:27):
I'm wondering if there's much of a value proposition these days in Prime. I think a lot.

Paris Martineau (00:29:32):
Honestly, that's a good point.

Leo Laporte (00:29:34):
I think I'm like you Paris, which I just pay for it. Well, yeah, yeah, I do too. Paris

Paris Martineau (00:29:41):
Didn't use it. If I didn't use it, I wouldn't pay for it. I am thinking now though, I pay for one medical every year. It's long before they were acquired by Amazon. I've always used it. I actually saw my one medical doctor, Dan today for my annual physical die. Doctor Dan. Every time he's like, Paris, how's Amazon? What's up? Since we had a long conversation about it, he feels like they're being squeezed a little bit, but I've heard that. I think Amazon recently made an announcement that if you link your one medical account with your Amazon Prime account, you get a discount on one of the two. So

Leo Laporte (00:30:11):
We should mention Amazon owns one medical. They bought it last year.

Paris Martineau (00:30:15):
Yes. That's

Leo Laporte (00:30:15):
The subtext here. It was a kind of clinics all over the country. Wasn't quite concierge medicine, but that was kind of the idea. And Amazon is showing some really interesting moves in medicine as if they maybe want to become the country's medical profiler. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:35):
Walgreens now owns the medical practice I go to. They bought a one here. Paris,

Leo Laporte (00:30:41):
Further co comparison. You think these be profitable businesses from the way Medical Insurance companies act? I know our HMO out here, Kaiser claims to be losing billions, but maybe there is a way to Paris. I know

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:55):
For another comparison, Costco total membership revenue in 2023. You want to guess?

Paris Martineau (00:31:02):
10 billion,

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:04):
Four and a half.

Paris Martineau (00:31:05):
Oh wow. That's low.

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:07):
Yeah, that is a strategic part of their business.

Paris Martineau (00:31:10):
I subscribed to Costco. I'm part of that four and a half billion. So

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:14):
You get huge amounts of toilet paper in your New York apartment?

Paris Martineau (00:31:17):
I do, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:18):
Oh, actually, I should take it back. Kaiser lost money in 2022. They started making billions of dollars. Maybe it is a good, maybe there's been a turnaround in the medical business now that Covid is over. It's

Paris Martineau (00:31:30):
Interesting. One medical, I've done some reporting on various, it's this subset of the health tech industry. They're kind of like primary care providers. They also have a tech stack and platform, and one Medical is always sets itself apart in this category because they've been able to, the big problem that a lot of these companies have is because you're a new primary care provider, you don't have negotiating power with large insurance payers. So you get crappy rates and you get crappy reimbursements. But one Medical has somehow been able to negotiate itself into really good rates through its partnerships. Like in today, when I went to the doctor on the door, it said One medical with Mount Sinai, and the people I've talked to in the healthcare industry are like, yeah, that with Mount Sinai means that one medical gets to charge Mount Sinai rates, which are significantly higher than any other normal primary care provider.

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:27):
So Paris explained this to me. Did you choose one medical or did your employer

Paris Martineau (00:32:33):
I chose one medical because years ago when I was working at Conde Nast, I dunno, I was having a hard time getting a good primary care doctor. I wasn't finding luck doing random appointments throughout the city. I'd heard about it. I was like, I'll do a trial. I'll see if I like the doctor, and I was able to get a next day appointment. 9:00 AM was Dr.

Leo Laporte (00:32:54):
Dan

Paris Martineau (00:32:54):
Was. Dr. Dan had a one hour intake session and he's been my B fff

Leo Laporte (00:32:58):
Ever since. Can I ask you though, and this is personal, don't answer if you don't want to, but my kids were on my medical until they were 26 to get kicked off. Did you get kicked off of your

Paris Martineau (00:33:08):
Parents'? Oh, I've been paying for my own insurance since I was like 18. Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte (00:33:12):
Good for you. Oh, good for you. I'm going to send my daughter and son over to talk to you. Yeah. Do you pay for your own cell phone too?

Paris Martineau (00:33:22):
Oh

Leo Laporte (00:33:22):
Yes. Oh, I'm sending my kids over. I got two lines on there. Oh God.

Paris Martineau (00:33:26):
When I called my dad once to help, I was like, I need you to send me the code so I can detach it from your at t. He's like, are you sure? I was like, yes.

Leo Laporte (00:33:35):
Oh, God

Paris Martineau (00:33:35):
Bless you. I keep paying for my

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
Own. Oh, they're so proud of you. That's wonderful. Wow. By the way, I went to One Medical and said, Hey, you're an Amazon Prime member. It's only $9 a month, but that's just a membership, right? That doesn't get you anything.

Paris Martineau (00:33:48):
Well, yeah. I mean, the thing that I like about One Medical, I'm not trying to sound like I'm genuinely a big fan. I've been doing one Medical for five or six years. It's phenomenal. The thing that you're paying for, basically you could use One Medical's doctors without paying that subscription fee. You wouldn't be able to use the app and whatnot. Be fine. I like it because what I think I'm paying for is my doctor today, I came in, we had a 20 minute conversation about journalism and what's up in our lives. That's really nice. Before we even got to the appointment,

Leo Laporte (00:34:19):
They have hour. That's because he doesn't have 5,000 patients, which

Paris Martineau (00:34:22):
Yeah, and he's like, since we've been bought by Amazon, this is just his anecdotal experience, but he's like, since we've been bought by Amazon, there's been a little bit of a more push. I'm seeing slightly more patients, but he's like, I've still got a lot of time. He's like, whenever I have a medical question or something, I'm able to call him or hop on a video call pretty soon. The thing I really like about One medical, in addition to the quick turnaround times for appointments and whatnot, is they've got kind of a telehealth feature in their app, but it's basically free. I had a sinus infection a month or two ago and I knew it was, and so I called in five minutes. I was on the phone with the doctor, didn't have to pay anything. They prescribed me my antibiotics and I was good to go.

Leo Laporte (00:35:03):
Yeah. See, that's a really smart specialist on both sides. Everybody's happy with that. What about your

Paris Martineau (00:35:08):
Specialist? Specialist wise? They are able to, they're within the Mount Sinai network. What's

Leo Laporte (00:35:13):
Going to happen when you need hip replacement parish? That's

Paris Martineau (00:35:17):
A great question. I'm sure I could call you guys, right? 50

Leo Laporte (00:35:21):
Years now, we'll be some people. Let me tell you about my walker. It's really good Medicare pay.

Paris Martineau (00:35:32):
It's pretty high inside.

Leo Laporte (00:35:33):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:36):
My father was still alive. He switched. He was on a walker last years, but then he fell with me and we got him a wheelchair, an electric wheelchair. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
Nice.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:48):
Oh, it was the greatest thing. It gave him freedom. It was wonderful to watch, but it was hilarious to watch the little old ladies going to get out of the way.

Leo Laporte (00:35:54):
Here I come mom still. I just got mom on a walker like three months ago, but I think it would be nice to get her in the little scooter. I want to get one of those scooters.

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:05):
This is not a scooter. This is a wheelchair that's motorized.

Leo Laporte (00:36:08):
Motorized wheelchairs, scooter, very different.

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:11):
Well, scoot scooters look more like George and Seinfeld having a race

Leo Laporte (00:36:16):
Finally says Joe in our discord and our club, twit Discord, a show that's tailored to me this week in Gramps.

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:26):
I resent that. Why isn't Leo's face there?

Leo Laporte (00:36:30):
He's Jeff's riding one of those really handy. By the way, little elevators that go up the stairs,

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:35):
They're so slow.

Paris Martineau (00:36:37):
Listen, it's keeping you safe. You wouldn't want to take a

Leo Laporte (00:36:40):
Fall at your age? Oh, no,

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:42):
No, no,

Leo Laporte (00:36:42):
No, no. We've already had one hip replaced Our show today brought to you by, I got to tell you, if you are one of these young hipsters living in Brooklyn, this is what you need. She's shaking her head. I'm not supposed to do that one anyway. I won't tell you what you need. Paris. You know, actually everybody needs this. Our show day brought to you by Bit Warden. We love Bit Warden, the password manager, open source password manager that offers a cost effective solution that can dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online. I am a huge fan of Bit Warden. Account switching has come to the Bit Warden browser extensions. Now, users can log in up to five different separate accounts and switch seamlessly between them in the desktop and mobile apps and browsers. Why would you want to do that? What about work and personal accounts?

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Jeff Jarvis (00:39:10):
This week wheelchairs

Leo Laporte (00:39:12):
Walking this weekend. New knees for everyone. I'm just telling you, Paris, take care of your knees because you'll thank me 50 years from now when you're my age.

Paris Martineau (00:39:26):
I did take a little fall over the weekend and it hurt my knee and I was like, wow. Knees are quite important.

Leo Laporte (00:39:32):
Knees Paris.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:33):
I have the podiatrist of the stars in New York. If you ever meet,

Leo Laporte (00:39:38):
He's seen some of the most pre prestigious feet in the world. Yes,

Paris Martineau (00:39:42):
Wiki feet trembles. When you say his name,

Leo Laporte (00:39:46):
This man knows that we all have feet of clay ultimately, however big we have become. So University of Massachusetts, Amhurst has decided they want to know how many videos are on YouTube. How many do you think different? Unique? A few. A few.

Paris Martineau (00:40:09):
I've spoiled myself. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:40:10):
So have I Oh, you've already read this story.

Paris Martineau (00:40:13):
Yeah, we do our jobs and look to

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:16):
Run down. Yes. Yes, we do our homework. Unlike you, we actually read ahead.

Leo Laporte (00:40:18):
I like to be surprised. Ryan McGrady is part of that team that has spent the last year figuring out how to calculate how many YouTube videos are there. Are. They published a paper last month. They'd say, we believe it's the most comprehensive analysis of the world's most important video sharing platform to date, to the point it's so big that it is more than just a video sharing platform. It is a platform for communication. He says YouTube may have started his video platform. It has now become the backbone of one of the 21st century's core forms of communication. I'd agree. Yeah, I'd agree.

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:57):
I read the paper last month and I thought we talked about it. Maybe we didn't. He added some really interesting arithmetic to figure out how many videos there were by names and all kinds of search. It was a funny thing, but I couldn't because I can't

Leo Laporte (00:41:12):
Do math. So for the nerdy amongst us, this is what he wrote in the Atlantic this week. We used a complicated process that boils down to making billions upon billions of random guesses at YouTube IDs. So when you look at a video, when you're watching a video in the URL, there is this long ID number, we call it dialing for videos, inspired by the random digit dialing used in polling. It took a sophisticated cluster of powerful computers at UMass months to collect a representative sample. We then spent another few months analyzing those videos to paint what we think is the best portrait date of YouTube as a whole. Wow. YouTube doesn't publish this. In fact, many of the videos on YouTube are private. They're not even published to the public. We do add a lot. Actually, videos with 10,000 or more views account for 94% of the site's traffic, but less than 4% of the total uploads just under 5% of all the videos on YouTube, 5%. One in 20 have zero views, 75% have no comments. Even more have no likes. They found that popularity is entirely algorithmic. There's no comment. No.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:28):
What does that mean?

Leo Laporte (00:42:29):
That means it doesn't matter how many subscribers you have or views you have, how popular you are has everything to do with YouTube's recommendations, not subscriptions. So people are going for the high number of subscribers. That's not going to make a difference.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:45):
But let's also say that in the research about right wing videos on YouTube, they found that internal recommendations did not lead to the traffic at all. It was all from outside that YouTube is a shelf upon which they put the videos and it's Breitbart and company linked to it. So I think that that's jumping ahead in the conclusion here. If they're thinking that it's algorithmic, a lot of it is from external links. I don't think

Paris Martineau (00:43:11):
Most of it. Yeah. I mean, I think at least what we're able to say is that it doesn't seem correlated with subscriber numbers. So the answer is probably broader than just, and thus, that's fair. It is the recommendation algorithm. It is that it is the recommendation algorithm and other things.

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:29):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:43:30):
Although they did find a correlation between recommendations and views, but I think that's not surprising either. Right? Yeah. I think he says, in other words, people tend to watch just a sliver of what YouTube has to offer, and on the whole, they follow what the algorithm serves to them. Maybe the entry point is that link outside of YouTube, but what are you going to watch next and after that? And remember also that the people who most watch YouTube are young people. And I know I've watched people under 25 watching YouTube and often it's on autoplay.

Paris Martineau (00:44:07):
I would love, I need to watch people watch YouTube. You

Leo Laporte (00:44:10):
Have to watch people

Paris Martineau (00:44:11):
Watching YouTube. YouTube, because I am woefully not represented. You are such an outplay. Do you guys watch YouTube? Do you autoplay videos? I've never autoplay the video in my life.

Leo Laporte (00:44:23):
Here's the real question. Have you ever played YouTube on your real TV as opposed to your computer? Oh yeah. All the time. I do that all the time. All the time. All the time. And the younger you are, the more you do that, it has become the equivalent of a cable channel or a network. It's one of your channels

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:42):
Going to do something. Even sadder is that I need a TV on to go to Sleep timer and you

Leo Laporte (00:44:49):
Leave YouTube on.

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:50):
I leave YouTube on with stuff like Berlin before the wall came down. Of course I won't go to sleep. Right, and

Paris Martineau (00:45:02):
You'll wake up in the middle of a Nazi documentary.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:06):
I sent the timer for the TV then to an hour. But I think that it probably goes most of the night going through video after video and video. So you should see my recommendations now. They're really wacky. Jeff recognize my mom watching

Leo Laporte (00:45:19):
The relaxing winter jazz, cozy Living room ambience with unwind, smooth Jazz Snowfall and Fireplace channel.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:27):
I don't like jazz. This

Paris Martineau (00:45:28):
Is a strange AI hate You don't like jazz

Leo Laporte (00:45:32):
I something

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:32):
Wrong with it. When I started Entertainment Weekly, I actually nearly had a staff revolt where I said, I really don't want us to cover jazz.

Leo Laporte (00:45:39):
What

Paris Martineau (00:45:40):
Jazz

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:41):
I know. I know. I'm disappointed you.

Leo Laporte (00:45:42):
So there are hundreds of those kind of ambient music channels. I'm sure. I would hate

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:49):
That. That would keep me awake while reading my

Paris Martineau (00:45:51):
Teeth. Okay. The most famous is Lo-Fi beats to study or sleep to.

Leo Laporte (00:45:55):
Yes. Lemme see if I can find it. How about Ethereal? The only, you might like this one. The

Paris Martineau (00:46:00):
Only YouTube videos that have been on my TV in the past, actually, I guess there's three genres in the past year. Our last year's Ball Drop, which I played a video of on New Year's Eve Eve, a video of that train that grows across Norway, which was playing on the TV prior to the Ball drop and taskmaster the uk. Yeah, just keep it running. Variety game show that's available on YouTube.

Leo Laporte (00:46:28):
Here is a, maybe you'd like this better. This is a sci-fi ethereal. Cyberpunk ambient. You could pretend you're in Blade Runner.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:39):
These people talking.

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
You need to have talking. How about white out shipwrecked space music for winter? Let's jump right in. The

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:51):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
No.

Paris Martineau (00:46:52):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:46:53):
How about

Paris Martineau (00:46:55):
What if you just search sounds of people talking why out? Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:46:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Ambiance. People

Paris Martineau (00:47:01):
Talking one hour, people

Leo Laporte (00:47:02):
Talking. No, I think there's a whole category. There's things

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:06):
Of like a coffee shop where it's just like ambient talking coffee shop.

Paris Martineau (00:47:10):
Oh, no,

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:14):
No. I think we should have this fomo. We

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
Should have this running through the show.

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:20):
Yes, we, yeah. That's pretty good.

Paris Martineau (00:47:24):
Bring it back.

Leo Laporte (00:47:27):
Here's the busy coffee shop noise. Maybe this would be better for

Paris Martineau (00:47:29):
You. I want a laugh

Leo Laporte (00:47:35):
Track. I really will. This, there's 10 hours of this.

Paris Martineau (00:47:42):
It loops shortly.

Leo Laporte (00:47:44):
No, they probably just put a recorder in. Let's see what else. How about muffled talking? Oh, the TV's playing in another room. You might like this.

Noise (00:47:58):
Did you ever see a giraffe Ben down? Does

Paris Martineau (00:48:02):
It? He just say, how many videos? Did you ever

Leo Laporte (00:48:08):
See a giraffe bend down? Is that what he said? Here's one. Oh, Jeff, this is for you. Sleeping on the couch at a party.

Paris Martineau (00:48:24):
So if you want not watching, it's a a low angle shot of empty two champagne glasses. What's the yellow thing?

Leo Laporte (00:48:36):
I dunno. Is that a lamp?

Paris Martineau (00:48:39):
I don't know. It

Leo Laporte (00:48:40):
Does get busy sometimes. I don't know. Here's a, oh, there's little music in the background. How about sleeping in the back of my Impala

Paris Martineau (00:48:51):
With talking? Boy, this is an exciting show for you tonight. The folks. Yeah. How about,

Leo Laporte (00:49:00):
I don't know what this is.

Paris Martineau (00:49:00):
We're going to get content

Leo Laporte (00:49:01):
Warnings. This is from Adult Swim. Joe Perra talks to you, talks you to sleep for 10 hours, I guess is a character in Adult Swim. What show is this

Paris Martineau (00:49:13):
But don't,

Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
Oh, it's actually a show called Joe Perra talks with you. I'm waiting for him to talk.

Paris Martineau (00:49:20):
Fast forward a little

Leo Laporte (00:49:21):
Bit, will. Let's hear him. Some

Joe Perra (00:49:22):
Guy cheats on his wife. What's the big deal? Thinking further down. The same

Leo Laporte (00:49:31):
Line of thought. They stole my idea for a podcast

Joe Perra (00:49:34):
Tiny and Insignificant.

Leo Laporte (00:49:35):
It was just going to be me mum into myself. Anyway, that's just a handful of the, are you ready? Drum roll please. The number billion, 14 billion videos on YouTube. More than one and a half videos for every person on the planet, and that's the ones that are publicly visible.

Paris Martineau (00:49:57):
I love the long walk we took to get there. That

Leo Laporte (00:49:59):
Was a long way. We played half of them. I hope you enjoyed this tour of YouTube. We doubled the audience to some of

Paris Martineau (00:50:08):
Those videos.

Leo Laporte (00:50:10):
Elon has put a chip in somebody's brain. It happens. He

Paris Martineau (00:50:13):
Says, I want to know who it is. Someone out there.

Leo Laporte (00:50:17):
It's probably somebody. Remember the FDA gave them approval about nine months ago and they asked for people who are paraplegic or cannot see or cannot, people who really have severe brain impairments to volunteer for this. Elon just says that it happened, or he tweeted that it happened, and he says he's recovering well, but we don't know anything else. I don't know if I really would want this thing put in my head, especially since it's not, I don't

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:53):
Want anything from Elon in my head,

Leo Laporte (00:50:58):
So listen to how it happens. This from Gizmoto to integrate neural lys chip, human surgeon is tasked with cutting a small hole in your skull that the human does, and then this is actually scary. A seven foot tall robot named R one. Why is it seven feet tall? Got to be big. Why does it have a name?

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:24):
That was the size of the one that went after my prostate? Yeah. I walked into the puffing room and then looked up and just said, be nice to me

Leo Laporte (00:51:35):
And just cold metal. I guess the robots can do ultra delicate things. They suture electrified wires from the implant into the brain. If the surgery is successful. There's a phrase, the company's hardware is designed to rest in the portion of the patient's skull that was removed right below the scalp, while tiny wires carry data back and forth between the brain and the servers. Now, what's interesting, I think that this is AI driven because we don't exactly say, oh, yeah, when that neuron fires, that means you want water. We don't know. So they have to train the device and I assume that the patient is part of this training process. Okay. Think of raising your left hand. Okay. Think of it again and slowly train this device. These are what the signals look like when the thought pattern raised. My left hand is it's apparently they were able to get a monkey to click a button. I think so. I'm nervous about doing this, but on the other hand, the potential Wait, wait,

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:42):
Wait. The monkey has no language. How were you trained? Yeah, that makes no sense.

Leo Laporte (00:52:47):
Just use your imagination. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:54):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:52:57):
I don't know. They put a Okay, jelly bean on the button. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:05):
Okay. Okay, Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
It's all right. It's all, it's

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:08):
All, it's all right.

Leo Laporte (00:53:09):
A few monkey died. We've got a seven foot tall robot here to solve the problem. A few monkeys died. You can read if you want to know more. Just a few. The story in Wired from last year, the gruesome story of how neural lynx monkeys actually died. It's really depressing, but you know what? We've done this before. This is how medical research proceeds. Sometimes I just give you, you could probably figure this out, but you've got a monkey that's normal hole and intact, and you train it to do something, maybe reach for a lever and he gets a reward. Reach for lever, gets a reward. Then you impair them, implant one of these things and ring the bell or whatever it was. That triggers the monkey and the monkey, even though he can't reach for the reward, thinks he's reaching for the reward. And then you go, yeah. See

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:03):
What's the next

Leo Laporte (00:54:03):
Story? Yeah. See, I told you, use your freaking imagination figured out.

Paris Martineau (00:54:08):
Well, we know you can't imagine it. You've just got a black hole inside there,

Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
Right? I can't visualize it. I

Paris Martineau (00:54:14):
Can't imagine. You can't visualize that monkey at all. No,

Leo Laporte (00:54:16):
That's right. I forgot about that. Were you actually seeing a monkey when I, can you

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:19):
See the

Leo Laporte (00:54:20):
Monkey? No,

Paris Martineau (00:54:21):
I was, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:21):
Oh God. I'm so sorry. It

Paris Martineau (00:54:24):
Was really cute until it got impaired.

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:27):
Yeah, that's what threw me off too. Oh gee. We just handicapped the monkey.

Leo Laporte (00:54:34):
Well, they have to. It's part of the thing. What do you think? You think face creams come untested. You got to do some work.

Paris Martineau (00:54:46):
I love this segment where you're stumping for animal cruelty.

Leo Laporte (00:54:52):
Sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up. I said, use your imagination. I did, but clearly that wasn't sufficient, so I had to paint a picture for you. But see, it's really true though. You raised an interesting point. Paris. Maybe I am insensate to it because I don't see a cute monkey. But you do. I don't see nothing. Yeah,

Paris Martineau (00:55:11):
I saw that monkey go limp. Oh, it was sad. Sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:55:15):
Oh my God. And

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:16):
You did it, Leo. You did it.

Paris Martineau (00:55:18):
You killed that. My imagination monkey.

Leo Laporte (00:55:21):
It's never

Paris Martineau (00:55:22):
Going to live a fulfilling

Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
Life. You know what else went limp? Amazon's bid for iBot dead as a doorknob. Yep. I'm surprised. How long did that, it took them a year right before the offer was a long time ago. They, yeah, it's

Paris Martineau (00:55:37):
Been quite a while. And the EU put the kibosh on it.

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
94 million cancellation fee goes to iRobot. Not enough to save iRobot's business. They've been struggling. They're going to cut 30%. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:52):
They're hurt. They hurt the company. They hurt all the employees.

Leo Laporte (00:55:56):
They, I phones are laid off. Yes, they

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:58):
Impaired it. Yes. Now, now Paris is

Leo Laporte (00:56:04):
Seeing cute little, little vacuum. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:56:07):
I'm just imagining a Roomba being smacked. I think

Leo Laporte (00:56:09):
You

Paris Martineau (00:56:10):
Have a on the top with a, do you have a I don't have a room though. I've got, my floors are too uneven in this project

Leo Laporte (00:56:16):
To have a Roomba, you can't have a Roomba in Brooklyn. I can just see Gizmo though, riding the Roomba around happily.

Paris Martineau (00:56:24):
She'd be so cute.

Leo Laporte (00:56:25):
She'd be so happy on a Roomba. So iRobot, which made those robot vacuum cleaners has, I guess they were just holding out hope that the suckers at Amazon would complete the 1.4 billion acquisition. Amazon is. So the business has

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:40):
Not been

Leo Laporte (00:56:40):
Good? No. They're embarking on a restructuring plan, firing 31% of the workforce. The shares held 19% at their lowest level since 2009. Good work

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:53):
Eu,

Leo Laporte (00:56:55):
How did you help Anything, right?

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:57):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:59):
Even with a 94 million termination fee, the EU said, you can give us these remedies. But the Amazon was declined to do any of the things the commission had asked them to. The commission had warned Amazon could be attempted to demote other robot vacuum cleaners on its platform, promote its own products with labels like Amazon's choice or works with Echo. The regulator also said Amazon might find it economically profitable. Shut out rivals. Yes, of course. If you're the nation's grocery store market, there's a real risk of that. Of course.

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:40):
But Amazon does. This is what drives me nuts about them. Amazon promotes every single competitor it makes available for sale, every single competitor. It makes a whole marketplace for new competitors to be created just like Google, which gets accused and shopping Google Links to every competitor of Google. What other company does that does Conde Nast link to Hearst?

Leo Laporte (00:58:02):
That's a good point. Yeah, you're right. Is NBCI

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:05):
Think it's more nbc. No,

Paris Martineau (00:58:06):
The comparison is more Your grocery store has a store brand and other brands in it. I don't know that the Conde Nast or NBC exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:58:16):
Much. No, but that's a good one. Works as much. They don't prohibit generics or grocery store brands. I buy Safeway signature meats often. To my regret,

(00:58:28):
This outcome, David Polsky, Amazon Senior Vice President, said, I agree with Jeff Jarvis. This outcome will deny consumers faster innovation and more competitive prices, which we're confident would've made their lives easier and more enjoyable. The EU has made your life less enjoyable, says ky. Yes, it's true. Undue and disproportionate regulatory hurdles discourage, entrepreneurs should be able to see acquisition as one path to success, and that hurts both consumers and competition. The very things regulators say they're trying to protect. On the other hand, do you really want startups to start up with the sole goal of being purchased by Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Well, they're not

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:08):
Going to start up if there's not an exit. That's the real issue. The startups, we now don't know. It won't start because of this.

Paris Martineau (00:59:16):
That is, I guess, more of an issue with the venture capital model generally, is there's, most companies should not raise tens of millions of dollars because they're not going to experience growth that would make that investment worthwhile. Good point. They're not going to grow and scale in the same way that a Facebook or an Amazon would.

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:41):
Right. But you couldn't. They forced to. I robot had to have venture capital investment because it was expensive to invent the technology and create it, and so they were stuck. So the next person who comes along with a really neat idea to give Leo the kind of browser he wants on his phone or something venture, he could get money.

Leo Laporte (01:00:01):
Bloomberg's senior intelligence analysts. Goyle says, financially this deal is immaterial to either sales or profit of Amazon. But broadly speaking, she said the termination supports our view that large technology, this is actually probably the most important point in the whole story. Large technology companies will have a tough time closing any acquisition given the current regulatory climates. Not just in the eu, but here in the us.

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:28):
What happened to Figma after It couldn't

Leo Laporte (01:00:32):
Conservation. I don't know. I mean, they got at least a billion,

Paris Martineau (01:00:37):
I believe, a billion dollar termination fee. They are refreshing stock. I'm sure it's not good for them. I mean, you have a whole employee base that thought they were going to be multimillionaires because that's the biggest

Leo Laporte (01:00:49):
Hurdle.

Paris Martineau (01:00:50):
Suddenly they are. I was going to say in a financially rough place, but probably not. Suddenly they're just millionaires. Or couple hundred thousandaires.

Leo Laporte (01:01:00):
You cover Amazon. I know. Among other things at the information, which is why you have a prime membership. Paris Martin. Huh? That's true. But

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:10):
Got to eat the dog food.

Leo Laporte (01:01:11):
Man. Got a dog food. Bloomberg points out that iRobot was, Amazon's was their biggest customer at times. Accounting for more than a quarter of sales.

Paris Martineau (01:01:23):
Mean iRobot like many, I don't know, tech device companies sells their products predominantly through Amazon. So I think when Amazon was trying to enter this segment of the home technology market was, I mean, it's kind of what Amazon ended up doing with One Medical. It was like rather than build their own version of it and compete, why not just buy the best thing out there and fold it into the Amazon ecosystem?

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:57):
In a way, Amazon was probably going to hurt itself in its revenue, not in a big way, but I just searched for a robot vacuum on Amazon and various of these are ads that are put Robo Rock S eight Pro Ultra Robot, vacuum and mop another brand. So that's advertising revenue that Amazon, if it chose to promote iRobot, would've probably given up that advertising.

Leo Laporte (01:02:24):
Yeah,

Paris Martineau (01:02:24):
I mean, I'm sure Amazon probably would've still taken that advertising revenue. It just would've also had an in-house brand be top the stack.

Leo Laporte (01:02:34):
Do you have any robot vacuums, Jeff, in your home?

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:38):
No.

Paris Martineau (01:02:39):
How many robot vacuums do you have, Leo, in your

Leo Laporte (01:02:41):
Home? I have them all.

Paris Martineau (01:02:44):
I was about to say, it wasn't a question of Do you have them?

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
No, actually I banned them. I'm surprised you haven't heard this story, but I know Jeff has heard this story of my Roomba. It was a sad story. It was a sad, sad tale. We bought the most

Paris Martineau (01:03:00):
Play a tiny little violin.

Leo Laporte (01:03:02):
Yeah, you might want to, we impaired it, shall we say? Lisa bought the top of the line Roomba. But even though it was the top of the round Roomba, it had some bad habits. We made it so it would only, you want it to only go when you're not around, but for some reason it would fall off its charger. It has a little garage that goes into it would charge it, so for some reason it would fall off its charger and its programming would get lost. So even though I programmed it to go when we're at work, it would invariably go off at three in the morning and the Roomba makes a little happy sound when it starts to goes, and then it goes and it comes out of its little house and wanders around. And the Roomba was just the perfect height to get stuck under a sideboard that we had.

(01:03:51):
It couldn't quite get, it was trying to get under it, but it invariably got stuck and then so I'd wake up first I'd hear the, but maybe if I was able to go back to sleep, then I would hear boom, boom, boom as the Roomba boom boom after trying to either get in or get out. I'm not sure of under the thing. So for the first 20 times that happened, I would gently go and the room has a little handle and say, oh dear, dear little boy. I pick it up and I'd stick it back in its little house so it could charge and work properly on the, and maybe even set the clock. The 21st time I picked it up by its little handle, I brought it out to the garage and I gently placed it under the wheels of Lisa's car.

Paris Martineau (01:04:35):
Aw,

Leo Laporte (01:04:36):
That's beautiful. Yeah, I was hoping to send it to the little Roomba farm in the sky, but fortunately, I guess for the Roomba, Lisa saw it, didn't run over it, but it was not my favorite device now. But John, you love your Roomba. Yeah, John loves his Roomba bonito. Do you have a robot in your home? I do not. Yeah, they're very, there's

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:58):
A sale on Amazon right now, not surprisingly, from 37% off, just like the staffing at the company

Leo Laporte (01:05:06):
From

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:06):
2 69 to 1 69.

Leo Laporte (01:05:08):
Yeah, but that's not the best Roomba. You want the best Roomba, which is self emptying. It's a robot vacuum and mop.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:18):
So when I got my hair cut the other day, I'd never seen this before. Maybe you've all seen it. The nice person swept up all my white locks

Leo Laporte (01:05:27):
As one does and

Paris Martineau (01:05:27):
Into a little hole in the ground.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:29):
No, into a machine that when they just swept it next to it and then it went, has sucked up all of the foam

Leo Laporte (01:05:35):
Before. You've never seen this before? We

Paris Martineau (01:05:37):
Haven't yet. It's a little hole usually on the sideboard there, on the floor, on the side thing, and you sweep it in there and it goes,

Leo Laporte (01:05:46):
We have one of those in our house, in our kitchen. Yeah, it a central, it's called a central vacuum system and you have a big thing and you could plug it into holes. Every room has a little hole instead of toting a vacuum around and then in the kitchen on the floor, there's a little, I never use it by the way. There's a little vent that

Paris Martineau (01:06:06):
Sounds so luxurious.

Leo Laporte (01:06:07):
And so when you're done sweeping the pile, you lift the vent and you go and it goes, sucks it up. You've never seen

Paris Martineau (01:06:14):
That. I just have a Dyson. Where does it go? A Dyson air stick. Where

Leo Laporte (01:06:17):
Does it go? No one knows. I've never emptied it. I

Paris Martineau (01:06:24):
Think you listen closely in the background. It's the sound of Leah's house catching on fire.

Leo Laporte (01:06:30):
There is a giant canister in the garage where I think things go, but I don't, can't be bothered to check.

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:38):
That's very 1960s.

Paris Martineau (01:06:40):
Yeah. Yeah, it is. I would just hold gizmo my cat up to it and get all of a fur off of her and just one swoop.

Leo Laporte (01:06:47):
We don't use either of those, to be honest with you. We

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:53):
Had one in this house that we took out.

Leo Laporte (01:06:54):
We have impaired monkeys.

Paris Martineau (01:06:56):
A central vacuum system.

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:57):
Yeah. Well this house was built in the seventies. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:59):
See, there you go.

Paris Martineau (01:07:00):
Why would you take that out? That's so cool.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:04):
No, it was the canister hanging in the garage.

Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
Yeah, and

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:08):
It's not very good. It sucks. It's sucking

Leo Laporte (01:07:11):
Well. You didn't have a good one. Ours really sucks. I mean it really, I'm always worried about losing a toe. I mean, it's got quite a f suck. All right, I'm going to take a break and then I'm going to show you the AI powered alarm clock. My next Kickstarter purchase coming up, but first only can Mean Trouble. First a word from our sponsor Cash Fly. When I say we are brought to you by Cash Fly, I mean quite literally. Cash Fly brings you our content. There are Content Delivery Network For over 20 years, cashflow has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. Organizations like ours consistently choose cashflow for their scalability, their reliability, and their unrivaled performance. With cashflow, you get ultra low latency video streaming. You can get video live delivered to over a million concurrent users at the same time.

(01:08:13):
Lightning fast gaming that delivers faster with zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages, all for websites. You'll love mobile content optimization. This is an automatic and simple automatic runs in the background image optimization tool that creates images for every size screen so your site loads faster no matter what kind of device your visitors are using. You'll get flexible month to month billing for as long as you need. You'll get discounts for fixed terms once you're happy. We did that. We designed our own contract and you will too. When you switch to Cashflow, and by the way, you got to consider Cashflow's Elite managed Packages. We have one. You get the VIP treatment, your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring smooth implementation and reliable 24 7 support when needed. Delivering rich media content up to 159% faster than other major CDNs. Join Cashflow, the world's fastest CD n. We know we've been with 'em for more than 10 years. Jumpstart your journey with cly. Get a complimentary first month or give it a whirl with a free five terabyte account. Just go to cly.com/twit cly.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support of this week in Google. Are you ready? It's a Kickstarter project. I love Kickstarter as you know. I'm a sucker.

Paris Martineau (01:09:36):
I stopped. I stopped.

Leo Laporte (01:09:38):
Somebody stopped me, please. Cold Turkey. You're going to want this. This is

Paris Martineau (01:09:41):
The, oh, look who's there? Gadgets there. G is there. Gizmo.

Leo Laporte (01:09:45):
Oh, look at the pretty Are you

Paris Martineau (01:09:46):
Want about

Leo Laporte (01:09:47):
Gats? She wants her own robot or he wants his own robot. You could write,

Paris Martineau (01:09:52):
She does want her own robot. You'd be too powerful if

Leo Laporte (01:09:55):
You had, if she's a girl, shouldn't she be Gizmo?

Paris Martineau (01:09:59):
That's probably true. Yeah, but unfortunately she's gizmo. Here

Leo Laporte (01:10:05):
Is maybe Gizmo would like this. The poem one, an AI rhyming clock.

Paris Martineau (01:10:12):
Oh God,

AI (01:10:13):
I made a clock. That tells a time with poems composed by chat. GPT One new poem every minute, every day. It's called poem one. The campaign details are below right now. I want to show you a demo.

Paris Martineau (01:10:25):
He's smiling. I know you're all idiot. You're going to give me money for this

Leo Laporte (01:10:29):
Easy.

AI (01:10:35):
This is the very first prototype I made.

Leo Laporte (01:10:37):
I could make this, John, I should make this with my pie. Maroni. You could

Paris Martineau (01:10:41):
Get $60,000 the

Leo Laporte (01:10:44):
One I want him to show. Here it is. Here's some poems.

AI (01:10:47):
Here's the development board. This is the screen and wifi module that'll be sharing

Leo Laporte (01:10:51):
In. Stop talking Australian fellow all. Here you go. This is a poem with steam that rises a cup. So fine. 9 41. It's coffee time. How about that? There's only one problem. The clock strikes 1 38 afternoon, sun shines bright with fate. How do you like it? Does it have the Joe Biden poem?

Paris Martineau (01:11:15):
Alright, that's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
Here's those one little problem. It hallucinates Benji Edwards writing for our Technica says rhyming AI powered clock sometimes lies about the time and makes up words. Now he's doing all right. He's raised more than his goal already in the first couple of days of the Kickstarter. So Matt's going to be a, okay,

Paris Martineau (01:11:41):
I'll say if somebody came at me with a Kickstarter, it said, I'm pitching a clock That will lie to you about the time. I might go into

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
That,

Paris Martineau (01:11:51):
But if you pitch me as a clock that's supposed to tell me the time and then it lies to me about the time. No

Leo Laporte (01:11:56):
Dices $126. You know what? I'm so tempted by what? Leo? Leo. This is old Leo. So let's see. You don't have to pay for the api. They

Paris Martineau (01:12:12):
Do. Hey, warn the guy has warned potential Kickstarter. It might don't rely on this clock in situations where timekeeping is vital.

Leo Laporte (01:12:21):
Well, I'm just curious what his prompt is. So lemme just tell me what time it is in a, you know what? I need an AI to write these AI prompts in a poem from chat GPT-4 in the Dance of the Clock. Subtle hand where minutes and moments in silence stand 12 hours past noon or midnight's veil the current hour softly hails. Boy, this is going on and on. This is really

Paris Martineau (01:12:57):
Long.

Leo Laporte (01:12:58):
This is already five for one verse. And it never told you the time. It didn't

Paris Martineau (01:13:03):
Tell you the time.

Leo Laporte (01:13:04):
Now me one, give me the current

Paris Martineau (01:13:06):
Time

Leo Laporte (01:13:08):
Of poetry. That tells me maybe it doesn't know. Yeah, ask him. What time is it? It might actually not know that. Huh? In the Quiet Night under Starry Dome, it's 11:27 PM Where? Coming from? Where's it 11? Somewhere Ask it. It's probably also 22 by the way. It is as we do this 3 27 here. So it's in the uk, right? So it's GMT? Yeah, GMT. Oh, okay. And by the way, it'll write a little program for you if you want Python. Yeah, a little python. Let's do this. Ask it what date it is. What's the date today? No, no, I could do this. I'm just going to say give me a limerick telling the time in the Pacific Standard time zone. Right time. The current time. You might have to say us specific current.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:17):
It's a big world now.

Leo Laporte (01:14:19):
Okay. In the US Specific, I think. Geez, you guys are such penance. Alright, here we go. Let's see's the robot. It's a robot. You got to,

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:27):
Yeah. Prompting is the new Petry.

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
It is. It's the worst in programming, frankly. Alright, boy, it really, it has to think. It's really working hard on this. It's okay, here we go. In a land with a Pacific wave sway at a time when the sun lights the day, it's precisely, I find half past three or 3 28, you'll unwind in the zone with the palm trees play. The time is accurate. That is accurate. Okay.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:55):
I still wanted to ask, what's the date today? I want to know if it's 2020 to its

Leo Laporte (01:15:00):
Mind. Oh, that's a good question. What is today? See, I had a reason to ask date. You don't have to have a reason. You can ask it anything. G PT four is updated though, isn't it? Yeah. This is G PT four. This is, oh, okay. Analyzing today's date. January 31st, 2024. So there, well, it's got it. I'm have to say I love RAI over Lords. I really do. I'm very happy. I know. We know that Leo. We know that you love them.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:30):
Take away his credit card before he buys that

Leo Laporte (01:15:31):
Stupid thing. Okay. By the way, some are saying that you shouldn't call it hallucination. You should call it a confabulation.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:40):
Yes. That's the term of art among the,

Leo Laporte (01:15:44):
It's a confabulate because you know why? Because most people dunno what that means. Yeah, we got him. We got the kid who was doing a lot of swatting. I don't know if he was doing all the swatting California teenager who allegedly uses the handle. Tor swats has been arrested and is being extradited to Florida. He's 17, but he will face adult felony charges in Florida. The FBI has actually, the way it happened is kind of interesting. He had swatted or was allegedly, I guess I have to say allegedly swatted a number of well-known Twitch streamers, and they hired Brad Dennis, who's a private eye, and he's been hunting this kid for two years. Finally was able to get some information that he sent to, I guess I think maybe he engaged somebody, the PI to use tour SWAT's handle on a peer-to-peer chatting service called talks under the guise of ordering a SWAT in December, 2022.

(01:16:57):
By recording the network traffic, he caught his IP address along with a username in January of last year. He handed the evidence to FBI special agents FBI then used that information to get subpoenas with YouTube and Discord. They were finally able to narrow it down. Wired, which wrote this article, thinks that the FBI knew his identity since last July. They executed a search warrant, seized his devices ices, and they got him. Whether he's the only one, I don't know, but it does send a strong message that this is not a joke. This is not a prank, this is a felony and it should be. It's a deadly, deadly thing. I mean,

Paris Martineau (01:17:43):
People get hurt.

Leo Laporte (01:17:44):
Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:17:45):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:17:51):
I love this story. I'm just going to do a silly one if you don't mind. Do you know what an You have my permission? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Do you know what an agricultural air cannon is? I could not figure

Paris Martineau (01:18:03):
Out why this was, I'm going to guess. It's a cannon that shoots seeds.

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
Does not. The problem is Canadian geese and this time of year,

Paris Martineau (01:18:14):
Oh, these are the cannons that poof. The

Leo Laporte (01:18:16):
Geese. I know. I think it scares 'em. I don't think they actually, but maybe it poofs them. I don't know. That's a good question. It doesn't impair them. I like there's poofing, but it was a problem in Corvallis, Oregon area, farmers who are beset with Canadian geese, overwintering in the Willamette Valley scare the geese with propane air cannons on timers. They're 120 db, which is enough to actually damage your hearing. Five gallons of gas gives them 18,000 booms. But the problem was January 5th, earlier this month and air cannon began firing every two minutes all day and all night in the area, and it was driving neighbors crazy. This is an article by the guy who fixed the problem trying to figure out where they were. They drove around, they did all sorts of things. They figured out kind of where it was near the airport, but they couldn't pin it down more accurately. So what did they do? They did what any geek, intelligent geek would do. He took three people stationed at remote locations using a synchronized clock on the cell phones. They each waited over the same 10 minute period noting the exact time for each of the five canon shots that we heard. So using that information, he wrote a python script to triangulate based on the differential. In times of the observers,

Paris Martineau (01:19:44):
There is a literal triangle that he drew.

Leo Laporte (01:19:47):
Yeah, here it is. The triangle listening. And they were able to actually pinpoint the canon. Here's the python script. Wow. He wrote, they were actually able to pinpoint the cannon. He called the county tax assessor to find out. The owner of the property then called the owner a farm, asked if they used an air cannon. They said, yeah, yeah, we do. I said, do you run it all night? They said, no, no, no. We'd never do that. It's

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:17):
Like Leo's Roomba.

Leo Laporte (01:20:20):
20 minutes later he called back saying, no, no, we don't run the cannons at night. And even then you couldn't hear it more than a mile away. Well, weirdly enough, in an amazing coincidence, the air cannons stopped that very evening and they have fallen silent ever since.

Paris Martineau (01:20:37):
I love this story.

Leo Laporte (01:20:38):
I do too. That's science at work. Ladies and gentlemen. Math,

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:43):
You thought trig was going to be useless? You see, I don't even know if that's trig. I dunno what's tri. Listen,

Paris Martineau (01:20:51):
I'm not even going to try and think what type of math that

Leo Laporte (01:20:53):
I think it's geometry. It's simple geometry.

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:55):
I love geometry. Simple

Paris Martineau (01:20:56):
Geometry. Probably.

Leo Laporte (01:20:57):
Yeah, you could say it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:58):
SAT geometry. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:02):
Bad news for TikTok. This is the last day. TikTok will have access to universal music group's music. They have not been able to make a deal. TikTok says Universal has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:20):
That's true.

Leo Laporte (01:21:21):
Universal. I think that is true. Maybe Universal says TikTok tried to bully them into a deal worth less than the previous pact. We want those numbers to go up, not down. It's

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:30):
All negotiation. They're doing it in public. Just like the New York Times soon and open ai. It's just negotiation.

Leo Laporte (01:21:36):
Well, yeah, because the musical go away today. This is the last day

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:41):
That includes, by the way, about past songs.

Leo Laporte (01:21:43):
Oh, everything owned by the UMG. No more licensing. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:47):
You mean? Well, if they did license it in the past, I made a video with it in the past. I presume it's still okay,

Leo Laporte (01:21:52):
But listen to who you lose. You lose your Taylor Swift. You bad Bunny. Your Sting your Weekend. Dear Alicia Keys. Your za.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:00):
It's a right, right. Winging plot.

Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
Yeah. sza, Steve, Lacey, Drake, Billy Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Rosalia, Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Adele, you two, Elton John, Jay Balvin, Brandy Carlisle, Cole Play, Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan, and Post Malone. Problem

Benito (01:22:17):
Is, I know who all these people are, so I don't think Gen Z cares.

Leo Laporte (01:22:20):
Ah.

Paris Martineau (01:22:21):
I mean, I don't think with Gen Z, the artist's names aren't particularly relevant. It is just certain clips from songs can take off as backing for different TikTok trends and from that people discover new music.

Leo Laporte (01:22:41):
Yeah. Honestly, this takes the place of radio, doesn't it? For, I'm sorry, I was playing some TikTok. I apologize. This takes the place of a radio for some of these kids for song discovery. My son here uses, what is he using for this song? So my son always uses music, but he uses very weird, I mean, he's got the strangest music in his stuff. So I mean from Edith Poff, but I think Taylor Swift, if I were Taylor Swift, I would be pretty upset. I would say. I mean,

Paris Martineau (01:23:21):
I don't think this Taylor Swift probably doesn't care.

Leo Laporte (01:23:24):
She doesn't need it. Yeah, no,

Paris Martineau (01:23:27):
I think the artists that are being hurt are umg any smaller artist.

Leo Laporte (01:23:33):
Right. They're hurt more. I mean,

Paris Martineau (01:23:35):
Just this week I was looking, there was some song I think by called Touch Tank by Quinnie that had been in my Spotify discovery playlist. I had discovered it through then there months ago, and I was looking off the artist. I was like, oh, where did this person come from? And it's like that song had blown up from the artist releasing a short bit of it on TikTok. Exactly. And then she became a popular artist from that. That's how a lot of this happens nowadays.

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
It wasn't TikTok. Where did little Nas X get started with his song?

Paris Martineau (01:24:10):
I don't know. Was it YouTube?

Leo Laporte (01:24:13):
I feel like it was not the normal way of getting started. Old Town Road. Lemme see, I'm looking on Wikipedia for where he first published Old Town Road. He bought the beat for the song anonymously on Beat Stars from a Dutch producer for $30, sampling a nine inch nails track from their sixth studio album. Recorded it at a humble Atlanta studio on their $20 Tuesday took less than an hour to make it, and then he put it on TikTok at Little xp.

Paris Martineau (01:24:56):
It's not how true this is because this is from kickstart side hustle.com, but it says numerous memes led to the creation of the hashtag Yeehaw Challenge on TikTok, which included the Old Town Road song uploading videos of themselves drinking ye juice, then transforming into a cowboy or cowgirl to the beat of Old Town Road.

Leo Laporte (01:25:18):
So this is what Wikipedia says, little Ns Xian creating memes to promote Old Town Road. So he may well have created that meme before it was picked up by short form video social media TikTok users. Yep. He estimated he made about a hundred memes to promote it. It went viral. This is Wikipedia says too, in early 2019, due to the Yee-Haw challenge meme on TikTok

Paris Martineau (01:25:44):
Kickstart side hustle.com guys, that's where I get all my news.

Leo Laporte (01:25:51):
I love that story. And isn't it, Jeff? That's kind of what we internet utopist thought the internet would bring as everybody gets a chance. Yes. It's still there, Leo. It's just hidden.

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:02):
We have to find it. We have to look

Benito (01:26:04):
For it. No, it's gate kept algorithms now.

Leo Laporte (01:26:06):
Yeah, that's the problem in UMG and everybody, right? I think Mark Zuckerberg's little NAS X an apology. That's all I can say. Well,

Benito (01:26:14):
I mean the thing is, it's not curated by people anymore is the problem. Is

Leo Laporte (01:26:17):
It? It's

Benito (01:26:17):
A, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:19):
Well, so what do we do about that? That we start new services to do just that? I was talking to a newspaper guy today and he said, is there a role for us? I said, yes, there is. Go find in New Jersey, there's 400 people trying to do local news. New Jersey, who's good, who's bad, help direct us help curate manually. Yes. Where you see a problem, look for the opportunity

Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
We are doing for Stacey's Book Club Stacey still. She was on TWI on Sunday. Stacey abo them, our former host and Stacey's. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:49):
So she leaves Twig, but she can be on the rest of the network. Oh, I see. Stacey. Oh, it's okay. We got Paris.

Leo Laporte (01:26:58):
Anyway, I'm holding down the fourth the best I can. You're doing a great job. You're doing a great job. Great job. Stacey's going to be back with her book club on Thursday, February 6th, no sorry, eighth at 3:00 PM and we're doing a book called The Water Knife, which is a really interesting dystopian novel about kind of end of the world and to climate change. And one of the protagonists is a journalist, a female journalist. She files on the social, she's not working for any publication, but she has, she's written two books already and she has a bunch of followers and it's all hashtag based. So she owns the hashtag Phoenix down the tubes because part of the book takes place in a dust bowl Phoenix. And that's really interesting because I mean, this is Pao Bache Gallup is the author's vision of journalism in 20 years, and I don't think he may be as far off.

(01:27:57):
Maybe that is the future is you own the hashtag that's as good as owning the New York Times in some ways, right? If people follow that hashtag. Anyway, we'll be talking about that. That'll be fun. February 8th, Stacey's book Club, the water Knife. I'll be hosting along with Stacey at 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern. I'm sorry aunt. You can join us if you want. Just be glad you didn't read the book. I could tell you it is grim, but I mean it's a dystopian, it's a great, great advertisement. Look like it's a dystopian future. Well, but as good science fiction does, raises a lot of interesting questions and ideas and one of them is the future of journalism. It's kind of interesting. Anyway, sorry. Everybody's saying how terrible that book sounds. I should not have mentioned the end of the world part of it. If you're not a member of Club Twit though, you can't participate, so please join Club Twit.

(01:28:59):
That's just one of many things do inside the Club Twit Discord. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get the access to the Discord, you get the Twist plus feed and you get shows that we don't put out in public, like the Untitled Linux Show and Home Theater Geeks and hands on Windows and hands on Mac and so much more. If you're not yet a member of the club, can I invite you to join twit tv slash club twit? Seven bucks a month. There's a family plan, there's corporate plans and it helps us an awful lot going forward. We do not like the current climate for journalism and we realized a couple of years ago we were going to have to go our own way and I think the club is the way we're doing it. So thank you in advance. We really appreciate your help and I think we have a lot of great things planned for this year, but we need you to join the club to do it. Let's see. Alright, we are now in your territory. Kids. What are we going to talk about?

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:04):
There's lots of stuff. There's lots of stuff.

Paris Martineau (01:30:07):
Lots of stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:30:09):
Ring is going to, I think I thought I did this last week. I maybe I did it in Twit. Ring is going to stop letting police request videos from security cameras. They make the ring doorbells. They were a longtime advertiser before Amazon bought them and they were getting a lot of criticism because they had a way for law enforcement to request video from the doorbell. The homeowner would've to agree, but the issue wasn't so much the homeowner but the neighbors because the homeowner has a video camera pointed at the street and all the neighbors and police were asking for it.

(01:30:47):
Excuse me, ring has announced or they announced this week that the company is shutting down that feature. If law enforcement wants it, they'll have to subpoena it unless it's an emergency. That does happen. There's a murder happening across the street or we got a SWAT call, we want to see what's going on across the street. Can we ask the person for the video? And I think if you think about it, that's probably pretty useful for police. Police were able to send private email requests for footage previously, so now they'll have to get a warrant or a subpoena to do that. Good. Right? Or not. Yeah, it's good.

Paris Martineau (01:31:27):
Yeah, definitely good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:28):
Yep. Let's see here.

Paris Martineau (01:31:34):
I think it's interesting story. Sorry, continue. No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:38):
You go. No, no, no. I

Paris Martineau (01:31:39):
Was, oh, I was saying I think it's interesting that Elon Musk had his $55 million Tesla pay package struck down by a judge. Yes, that's a good one. Recently in court

Leo Laporte (01:31:50):
The shareholders had sued, right? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:53):
He hates all of Delaware now.

Leo Laporte (01:31:56):
Delaware says,

Paris Martineau (01:31:57):
Yeah, I mean a Tesla named Richard Tota sued. It's interesting because most of Elon Musk's biggest shareholders and certainly the Tesla board are such big Musk fan boys. They were like, yeah, 55 billion sounds great. You can totally have that. But when you're a public company, that means even if 99% of the shareholders love you and will give you anything you want, no matter what you do, if 1% are like, actually I think that's unfair. You can sue for it and the judge can look into

Leo Laporte (01:32:35):
It. Remember, it was the same court, the Delaware Court of Chancery that made Elon by Twitter. He hates Delaware. He's going to

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:44):
Buy

Leo Laporte (01:32:45):
Delaware. That cost him 44 billion. And now the court is saying, yeah, and by the way, you can't keep that money that they gave you 55 billion. The process. This is Chancellor, it's the court of Chancery. So the judges are called chancellors. Kathleen McCormick writing. In her opinion, the process leading the approval of Musk's compensation plan was deeply flawed. Citing Musk's extensive ties with board members. Yeah. His pals who negotiated the most recent paid deal with shareholders approved, by the way, in 20 18, 55 $0.8 billion, which is

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:24):
Ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (01:33:25):
Yeah. He doesn't take his salary. The court's right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:29):
Well, but he also wants to double his equity stake in Tesla or else I'm taking my toys

Leo Laporte (01:33:34):
Elsewhere. Yeah. He's the 13% owner of Tesla shares. He wants more control. He says, if I don't have enough control, if I don't have 25% of the company, I'm going to do all of our AI research outside of Tesla and they won't get the benefit of it. Musk tweeted, never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware. By the way, we are an LLC incorporated in the state of Delaware.

Paris Martineau (01:33:59):
Most companies are incorporated in the state of Delaware. It's famously very forgiving for companies and also private.

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
I don't know why I did it way back in 2005 when I filed California. We're in California, we still have to pay California corporate taxes and stuff. It doesn't get you off the hook for that, but Kevin Rose told me, no, you should always file in Delaware. So I figured if anybody knows Kevin Rose knows. I think the theory at the time was, if you're going to be acquired by a company or venture capitalists are going to invest in you, they prefer it. It's easier for them. There's less paperwork.

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:39):
I'm a New Jersey LC

Leo Laporte (01:34:40):
Myself. Are you? Nice fancy

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:44):
Buzz Machine. LLC

Leo Laporte (01:34:48):
Tesla board can appeal the decision to the Delaware Supreme Court with actual judges or they can negotiate a new compensation. Musk will not lose any Tesla shares he already owns under the compensation package.

Paris Martineau (01:35:06):
I am trying to find this. I do not think I made it up, but I remember reading at the time that, I mean part of the explanation for why they ended up voiding it is the judge was like, we think the board of directors and everyone who approved this is too close to Elon and not acting in the best interests of the company or the shareholders. And I believe there was an aside where it's like one of the lawyers involved or the directors cried when he was talking about how much he loved Elon Musk.

Leo Laporte (01:35:34):
Oh my lord. Probably the smoking gun or the crying director as they say now.

Paris Martineau (01:35:40):
Yeah, the crying director. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:43):
Wow. Geez. They're kind of cronies. And what the court said is they never asked the question, do we have to pay him that much to keep him? I mean, obviously you have to compensate CEOs enough if they're that valuable to keep 'em there. Elon's not going to leave Tesla. Maybe he is. Who knows? Maybe he'd run. Maybe

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:01):
It'd be better for Tesla if he

Leo Laporte (01:36:02):
Did. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:36:03):
Well, I mean, would it be better for his five other companies that he's also CEO of? Maybe. I

Leo Laporte (01:36:08):
Don't know. I don't understand how any of that works. What else do you want to talk about? The information's creator Summit?

Paris Martineau (01:36:17):
Yeah, we're like, we did last year doing a Creator economy summit led by our phenomenal Creator Economy reporter. Kay Raf. It is a fantastic event. It's going to be on Tuesday, April 2nd. We'll have, I think we still have not published the name of the speakers, but it's always phenomenal. I think last year we had the Emilio family there. It ends up being just a really, I've been to a lot of, I don't know, news events and many of them suck and are kind of just like facile. But the thing I really like about the informations events is not only do we have our reporting team usually leading the panels as well as our editors, we have an incredible events team that puts a lot of thought into what are going to be some of the most interesting and insightful topics. And this one is going to be fantastic. It's in LA in April.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:21):
So what amused me, I put this in the rundown, amused me. It's had a Ritz, I would think that a creator Summit would be at a Red Roof Inn.

Leo Laporte (01:37:30):
We owe the cost of the tickets from 350 to $1,000. But you do get

Paris Martineau (01:37:35):
Yes, that will

Leo Laporte (01:37:37):
Make you do get a discount on a room at the Ritz. So there's that.

Paris Martineau (01:37:43):
I was going to say, if I end up going, I'll not be staying at the Ritz. I know that for certain. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:37:48):
Really? Putting on the Ritz. Putting on the Ritz. Wow. I am jealous of Will Arnett, Jason Bass Bateman and Sean Hayes. You know who they are. Does that ring a bell? Podcasters? Well, yes. Famous

Paris Martineau (01:38:04):
Podcast.

Leo Laporte (01:38:05):
Jason

Paris Martineau (01:38:05):
Bateman, their competition.

Leo Laporte (01:38:06):
Leo, kind of famous Will Arnett, kind of famous Sean Hayes, kind of famous. They do the Smart Less podcast, which they just sold to SiriusXM for three years for $100 million.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:23):
Amazing.

Paris Martineau (01:38:23):
Dr. Evil Place.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:24):
I hadn't heard of this podcast

Paris Martineau (01:38:26):
Myself, nor do I.

Leo Laporte (01:38:27):
Well, you're in the minority. It's a very highly rated, lots of people listen to it. Podcast. It's interesting that SiriusXM, which has a podcast network, even though there's a satellite radio network, sees a future in podcasting. I'm very glad. Frankly, the funny thing is Howard Stern

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:48):
Has been making fun of podcasts for years and now he can't because it's

Leo Laporte (01:38:52):
His part of the company. Parent company. Amazon was the publisher of it. They paid well. They got paid a lot of money by Amazon. Amazon, 60 to $80 million over three years to distribute it. But they were outbid Amazon. It was a Wondery podcast actually is the original thing. I think one thing that is probably the case is that podcasts hosted by celebrities continue to do well. Right. These are comedians because advertisers are stupid. And they're comedians podcast.

Paris Martineau (01:39:22):
Yeah. Advert. It's,

Leo Laporte (01:39:24):
They're funny.

Paris Martineau (01:39:26):
I mean, I think it's largely about, yeah, how are you going to convince advertisers to pay money to be on the show? And if you can say, these are our hosts. You're halfway there

Benito (01:39:37):
To get advertisers. But's part of the good show. That's because they're comedians.

Leo Laporte (01:39:41):
Yeah. Have you listened to it? Benito Smart List? I have not, no. Alright, I have an assignment for you, Jeff. I want you to listen to Smartlist this week and do a book report.

Paris Martineau (01:39:53):
When did I get the homework? Jeff? Looks like he's been shot.

Leo Laporte (01:39:59):
I'm retired.

Paris Martineau (01:40:00):
I was going to say, because you're unemployed, Jeff. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:40:02):
It's true. It's a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue.

Paris Martineau (01:40:14):
That's the worst word. That's the description I hear before I have a stroke. It's

Leo Laporte (01:40:18):
Even worse. Look at their website. Maybe they could take some of that a hundred million dollars and make a decent website out of it. Oh boy. And this doesn't even scroll. It's like this is it. It's just like, but there's merch. Leo, there's merch, there's no, alright,

Paris Martineau (01:40:35):
Let's see the merch.

Leo Laporte (01:40:36):
I could tell you there's no money in merch. Oh, wait a minute. Look at their guest. Look at the guest. Penelope Cruz, mark Ruffalo, Mike Lia, Selena Gomez, Sena Gomez, Adam Driver, Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Paris Martineau (01:40:49):
Santa

Leo Laporte (01:40:50):
Santa

Paris Martineau (01:40:53):
Pop going.

Leo Laporte (01:40:54):
Emma Stone. No wonder, no wonder do we do

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:57):
A video or just audio?

Leo Laporte (01:40:59):
I don't know. Let's watch. I think it's video

Paris Martineau (01:41:01):
As

Leo Laporte (01:41:01):
Well. Is it? No, it looks like it's just audio.

Paris Martineau (01:41:04):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:41:07):
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:08):
Don't hit the snooze. This mom, we got Penelope Cruise. Listen,

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
Your camera's tilted a little down and I'm noticing your legs. You're wearing some shorts today. Why thank you, by the way, first of all, lemme just say, by the way, that's the state of the art in podcasting today.

Paris Martineau (01:41:26):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
Wow. Okay. We're

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:29):
We're funny too.

Leo Laporte (01:41:30):
No, we're not. But you don't

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:31):
Get the laugh track going.

Leo Laporte (01:41:32):
We prove it to you. Maybe we should just run that laugh track maybe. That'd help. So here's your smart list. Lemme get Penelope Cruz. Can you get Penelope Cruz on the horn? Could

Paris Martineau (01:41:40):
You tell Penelope she can come out from back? We thought we'd hold off on her, but she can come out if she wants.

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:46):
I'd go for Emma Stone myself.

Paris Martineau (01:41:48):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
Okay. Here's the Smartless merch. You got your T-shirts. You got your mugs.

Paris Martineau (01:41:55):
This looks like an AI generated brand. I'm sure that is steeply meaningful for

Leo Laporte (01:42:01):
Someone. Their tagline is, BA bye. Oh, you know, I'm not mocking it. I'm just insanely jealous. That's all a hundred million. But I mean, that's how much they got from Amazon almost for the last three years. And the funny thing is they don't even need the money. They're doing it from their mansions in Beverly Hills. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Share the wealth. It's always rich. People get ring with share. Right. The rich get richer. Podcasters go out of business. No, I'm just kidding. I don't care. HP's, CEO said the quiet part out loud. He said, people who buy printers are investments and the investment doesn't pay off if they go to a third party for their ink. So they're practically like pirates. CEO. Enrique Lauras talking with CNBC about the lawsuit over HP's software updates that block third party inch cartridges. He says, I think it's important for us to protect our intellectual property.

(01:43:14):
There's a lot of IP we built in the ink of the print heads, in the print heads itself in the printers. What we're doing is when we identify cartridges that are violating our intellectual property rights, we stop the printer from working. So then Squa working off, got the knees. So Squawk box host says, so their ripoffs are counterfeit and you're going to break the printer as a result, in many cases says, Lord, it could be. It can create all sorts of issues from the printers. Stop working because the inks have not been designed to work in our printers to even creating security issues. We have seen you can embed a virus in the cartridge through the cartridge to the printer from the printer to the network so it could create many more problems. It would be a show.

Paris Martineau (01:44:02):
I want to be printing a virus.

Leo Laporte (01:44:04):
Yeah. I don't want to be printing a virus.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:08):
I just curse. I refuse to get hp. I can never hook them up. So I have a brother. I have a

Paris Martineau (01:44:13):
Brother. You have a brother. I have a cannon.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:17):
My brother broke. So I got another brother and I realized after your

Paris Martineau (01:44:22):
Brother, your brother and you. Yes. It's another popular podcast.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:26):
Exactly. It has no USBI couldn't figure out how to mail scans to me. Get a scans out of it. The instructions are mind bending and there's no way to figure that out. I finally, it's the app. I can get something to scan to my phone and then email from the phone to me. I hate all these companies. I hate them. Why hasn't there been a great Kickstarter for an honestly good open source printer? I

Paris Martineau (01:44:51):
Ask. Well, I think it's because printers cost more money to make than they sell them for. And how they make money is the ink. So people probably don't want to buy a thousand dollars. I don't know how much I bought my printers Canon color image class duplex printer. It be cheaper.

Leo Laporte (01:45:08):
It's great. Buy a new printer just for the cartridges. Just throw out the printer and keep the cartridges. Laura's finally said, our long-term objective at HP is to make printing a subscription. Screw

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:21):
You hp

Leo Laporte (01:45:22):
Don't buy HP printers. That's all I can say. Yeah. Oh, this made me so mad and it's, you know what? In all the coverage that I've seen, everywhere of Apple's nerd helmet, the Vision Pro, which I am skeptical now. You're a young person, I'm sure. Paris, you're excited about the future of computing?

Paris Martineau (01:45:44):
Yeah, I guess.

Leo Laporte (01:45:45):
Okay.

Paris Martineau (01:45:46):
Yeah. I'm sure it's going to be

Leo Laporte (01:45:49):
Exciting. Yeah. You're not going to buy one, but maybe Jessica or Sam will buy one.

Paris Martineau (01:45:56):
Buy

Leo Laporte (01:45:56):
What? A vision Pro headset. You didn't even know what we were talking about. You had no idea what we were talking about, did you? No. You thought we were talking about critters

Paris Martineau (01:46:05):
Thought you, all I heard was you're excited about the future of computing. I would

Leo Laporte (01:46:09):
Never A nerd helmet. Yes. The

Paris Martineau (01:46:11):
Vision Pro is not the future of computing. Leo. Although I assume you already have ordered one,

Leo Laporte (01:46:16):
Right? No, no, no. Well, technically, I guess because we bought one for Micah, not me, and Lisa says he has to return it. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. So actually Friday we're going to have the unboxing, but already the people who on YouTube with the big audiences, here's some more Schaden Freud or no, what's the opposite of Schaden? Freud depressive

Paris Martineau (01:46:41):
Sadness. Jealousy.

Leo Laporte (01:46:42):
Jealousy,

Paris Martineau (01:46:43):
Depressive sadness.

Leo Laporte (01:46:45):
The people who are big celebrities on YouTube have already had Marquez Brownley put out two videos already after six days with it. An unboxing video, which got more than I think the last I looked, three or 4 million views. And in four hours, his review, which came out this morning already had 2 million views. And I think he's well beyond that, which means he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising on those videos. So the people are making money on these. Not Apple, I'm sure losing money on it, but the people are making money on it. Are the YouTube celebrities? I don't make any money on our unboxing of our, well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:23):
Micah can continue a tradition that I started many years ago with the iPad and do a re boxing

Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
Video. Yeah. Yeah. I think we'll do a boxing actually, given that Apple has spent billions on this and really is positioning it as the future of computing. They're calling it spatial computing and really hoping this will take off. The reviews have been less than warm.

Paris Martineau (01:47:46):
God, did you see the videos of what video chatting in? This looks

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
Like it's nightmare. It looks awful. Yeah. Joanna Stern at Wall Street Journal had a video chat with Marquez Brownley, Brian Tong and I, Justine, and it was creepy as heck. But this is in all this coverage, hours and hours of coverage. Nobody's mentioned this, and I'm actually really pleased that this web developer@toski.me has mentioned this. So you need a little history on this. Since time immemorial, ever since we had a mouse and check boxes, square boxes are for checks. Right? You check them, that means you have multiple choices. You check them and then the round boxes, we call them radio buttons. Our one choice right? There can only be, and when you click a radio button, the other one Unicks check multiple choice. Right? Right. Correct. If either goes back to the nineties, here's a Turbo Pascal dialogue box from 1992 where the radio buttons are parenthesis and the check boxes are square. This is from time immemorial. Well get ready because, and it used to be Apple was really the promoter of this kind of consistency in ui. The Vision Pro does not follow this convention. Let me scroll down to the bottom. Show you the Vision Pro. This is the vision os the check boxes around. They're not radio buttons. It

Paris Martineau (01:49:34):
Looks so wrong. It looks like a Twitter verified signal.

Leo Laporte (01:49:39):
It doesn't look right, does it? Looks

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:41):
Like somebody screwed

Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
Up

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:43):
And did the impossible.

Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
Yeah. So RIP the Square checkbox because the future of computing apparently is This is confusing. Yeah, it's a little disappointing. God,

Paris Martineau (01:49:54):
I love this. Thank you. Tosky me. Yeah. This is the journalism we need.

Leo Laporte (01:49:59):
This is the kind of Yes. Yes. I appreciate

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:04):
It. Maybe that was, I forget where I found that. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:50:07):
Really? I think, I don't know. I think I shared it originally, but maybe not. It's Nikki, NIKI. Toski. T-O-N-S-K-I. He's you're trying to take credit for our half the run. I know. I don't know why it's not in my half.

Paris Martineau (01:50:22):
This is down here in the kids' zone. I

Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
Know. I know. It's at the kids' table, but I put it, yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:27):
That's our Shirley Temple while you're drinking the wine.

Leo Laporte (01:50:32):
Sure.

Paris Martineau (01:50:32):
You kept asking for them to put liquor. Found that story in this part of the Excel sheet, but they didn't let us see.

Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
Look. Look. Here it is right here. Oh, you know what? I didn't put it. I put it for Mac Break Weekly. Not for Twig.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:44):
Oh yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:50:45):
Other shows.

Leo Laporte (01:50:47):
I put it for the other show, but I put it for Twig.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:51):
We get stuck.

Paris Martineau (01:50:52):
The other shows that you love so much.

Leo Laporte (01:50:55):
That's just an oversight. That's all. I think it's interesting. Nobody's going to talk about this. Maybe I'll talk about it on Mac Break weekly too.

Paris Martineau (01:51:05):
I mean, that is interesting though, I think speaks to the strange place that Apple is today. The apple of yesteryear would never in a million years allowed something to ship with a design oversight like this. Jobs would've said no.

Leo Laporte (01:51:21):
Somebody should have said no. Here is the Vegas loop offering at full capacity part of this weekend in tunnel

Paris Martineau (01:51:29):
Series. Yes. This is my submission for this week in tunnels. I was

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:32):
Hoping to see a traffic jam where they all stopped in the tunnel. Paris

Paris Martineau (01:51:37):
Little listen. I'm sure that that would happen. But this is a video of a Tesla fanboy, very earnestly saying, wow, the Las Vegas lip tunnel at full capacity. And for those listening, it is about 1, 2, 3. Teslas have now entered the tunnel. It is going slow, but it's full capacity

Leo Laporte (01:52:00):
Baby. And each one has a driver. These are not autonomous. So the full capacity

Paris Martineau (01:52:05):
Is four passengers, driver and two other passengers. Driver

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
Two passengers. Oh geez.

Paris Martineau (01:52:08):
Or three total. Three total people in the collar.

Leo Laporte (01:52:10):
And it doesn't go very far. Although apparently Vegas has agreed to have the boring company bore more holes underneath the rest of Las Vegas for this incredible, he invented. There seems to be a name for something. When you have a tunnel underground and you have people transported underground like, I dunno, it's kind of, it's it's under sub sidewalk. We could call it the

Paris Martineau (01:52:34):
You mean it's a hyperloop Leo? There's clearly a name for that. Hyperloop. It's the Hyperloop. It's the sub walk. That's what they're doing. They're hyper looping.

Leo Laporte (01:52:40):
He invented the sub walk. All right. Let's do a Google change log because I want to go home. Benita apparently does not want me to go home.

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:52):
He thought we hadn't done AI yet. Google changed.

Leo Laporte (01:52:55):
Oh, there's AI too. Well, this is going to merge the two. Are you ready? From Google Research, Lumiere, a space time diffusion model for video generation. So this lets you write a text prompt and generate video. Let's see. This is a golden retriever puppy running in the park, autumn beautiful leaves in the ground and it actually works. Here's a chocolate syrup pouring a vanilla ice cream here.

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:27):
Jason said when he explained this to me, that whereas oftentimes in video, it loses the track of things. This keeps better track.

Leo Laporte (01:53:35):
Well, I don't know if this was

Paris Martineau (01:53:36):
Really what? There's a horrifying video of Mona Lisa. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:53:40):
Yawning. This is how she reacts when people throw soup at her. She's not happy.

Paris Martineau (01:53:47):
It does look like she's in

Leo Laporte (01:53:48):
Pain.

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:48):
Yeah, it does.

Leo Laporte (01:53:49):
Here's the girl with a pearl earring, winking and smiling. It's kind of wild. A man smiling and waving that her Isaac Newton. Wow.

Paris Martineau (01:54:01):
He's got the same face as the Mona Lisa.

Leo Laporte (01:54:06):
She's not looking good, but she's been around for a few years. Panda. Anyway, this is a new, I presume, Gemini power to video, to text diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse, and coherent motion. Hard to do motion. Is that what Jason said here is?

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:27):
Well, I saw a Gary Marcus post that I put up about an image that the way he explains it is that AI is good at knowing what pixel goods to what pixel or a word goes to what word, but holding onto a notion through even one image or through a video is much harder. So that's supposedly what makes this better, because it holds onto that logic.

Leo Laporte (01:54:52):
Briefly, about five years ago, there was a fashion, a trend called the Cinemagraph. Remember?

Paris Martineau (01:54:58):
Oh yeah. I'm still subscribed to r slash

Leo Laporte (01:55:02):
So people take a still image and they animate part of it. And you can use this lumiere to do this as well, but actually much better than the old. I mean this really look at the butterfly. It actually makes it look like the butterfly's alive.

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:14):
Or I could go to sleep with that.

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
Yeah, if they could do the sounds too. You

Paris Martineau (01:55:18):
Just have to add a woman laughing in the background

Leo Laporte (01:55:21):
It has in painting, so you can expand it. You could take the source. So this is a real video of a woman walking in the daisies in a dress, and you could change your outfit. Here's an owl. You could put a crown on it or, so this is very cool. This is a research project. Lumiere video.github.io comes from Google, and you can also see it if you search for Lumiere on YouTube. Google has significantly reduced the Capcha free tier. I can only hope that means we'll see fewer recaps. This is just the most nightmarish thing. It is no longer, I didn't know this, but they had a free recapture service, which is probably why you saw it everywhere, but they're going to charge you a little bit more. It's not going to be as good a deal, which I think stop using it sites. Yeah. It's terrible, terrible.

Benito (01:56:18):
AI can do it already. Computers can already read those. So whatcha

Leo Laporte (01:56:22):
Are you doing? It was never effective. In fact, it turns out the robots are better at these recaptures than humans are. I find 'em very difficult.

Benito (01:56:32):
So how are these companies still alive? How

Leo Laporte (01:56:35):
Is this?

Paris Martineau (01:56:35):
Who does the captions? Bri, you have to slide the puzzle piece. I hate

Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
That one. Oh, I hate that. And that's the tiktoks uses that one, right? I hate that. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:56:43):
There's also some really strange off-putting one that Twitter now uses. I don't know how to describe it, but it's jarring if you ever, I get a lot of caps because the way I browse the internet is insane, and every website I go to thinks I'm a machine doing a bad job. So I just have, I don't know. I will do very specific Google searches for when I'm researching something, and then I'll open 30 to 50 tabs at once and then go through all of them and I multiple times a day, get some little popup that says, the way you're browsing looks like a computer. Please answer me these riddle three. And

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
I do, I hate that every time in Paris's active imagination recapture as an accent. Oh, it's, it's the guy guarding the bridge in the Monty Python. It's

Paris Martineau (01:57:33):
The stinks. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly who I was picturing in my head. That's

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
What I thought. My facial imagination. That's what I thought. Yes, vividly. No doubt. I only intellectually saw it. I imagined. I

Paris Martineau (01:57:45):
Know. You only intellectually understand the concept of Monty Python of Life Puzzle master. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:51):
Honestly, frankly, the whole thing's intellectual pursuit for me. I don't understand how you guys actually live. Google

Paris Martineau (01:57:58):
Has not many people do.

Leo Laporte (01:57:59):
No, it's a mystery. Certainly to me. Google has, do either of you use Google's password manager and Chrome as your password manager? Yes. You do? Yes. Okay.

Paris Martineau (01:58:10):
Not willingly.

Leo Laporte (01:58:12):
Well,

Paris Martineau (01:58:14):
It fills passwords in and I don't want

Leo Laporte (01:58:16):
It to, yeah, I turn it off immediately on all my browsers. I've got

Paris Martineau (01:58:18):
It off, but it goes back on all the time. It's a constant struggle. I feel like Jeff,

Leo Laporte (01:58:24):
I prefer our sponsor Bit warden. However, if you are using CHR as your password manager, maybe you'll like this, Jeff. If you have a pixel, they've pushed this out as part of the feature drop from last week. Google's password manager can look at the accounts you've got passwords for and will let you know which ones support pass keys and give you a chance to turn them on. Oh, that's nice of them. That's cool. Isn't that great? Paul Thoro noticed this and mentioned it in his blog, throt.com. You have to have a Pixel five A with 5G or newer phone or a fold or a tablet, and you have to obviously use the password manager built into Chrome or Android, the Google password manager. When you open the password manager on a supported device, you'll see a new simplify your sign in section that will detail whether any of the accounts it knows about support PA keys.

(01:59:21):
And if so, you can tap 'em and add a PAs key to it, which means you won't have to type the password ever, ever, ever again. Cool. I'm coming around to Keys. The more I use it, the more I like it. And Google has released an EIM transfer tool quietly. They did say they would support this across all devices at Mobile World Congress last year, but they have now, according to Android Police added the feature. It's going to be available on the S 24 during the setup period, which will make it easier. Now, we've had this feature in iPhones. In fact, it's mind boggling. When I got the new iPhone, I didn't have a sim. Normally you'd pop the sim out of the old phone, put it in the new phone and make it your phone. But how do you do it with an eim? Well, apple made it very easy. It says, I see your other phone. You want me to transfer the SIM over? You do. Now, you could do that with the Pixel eight and the Samsung S 24 very handy feature. And that is the Google change. Long.

(02:00:29):
All right. In a moment, our picks of the week segment. One last chance for me to ask you, dear Twig listener, to do our survey, if you haven't done it already, we want to get every show represented in the survey. It ends this month today. So if you haven't taken it TWI tv slash survey 24, it literally just takes a few minutes. Don't worry if you don't have all the options that you'd like or whatever, just give us the best information you can. It helps us know you better. It's the only thing we do at all to find out who you are. And we use that information in aggregate, not as an individual user, but just in general to tell advertisers how many women in the audience, how many men, that kind of thing. twit TV slash survey 24. And I thank you in advance,

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Leo Laporte (02:02:01):
Time for the picks of the week. I'm going to start, I'm going to do one. Ooh, you've got a pick. You grace us with your pick. I shall grace you with my pick. And I don't know how long this is going to last. I just thought it was really cool. It's free right now. It's called Cooked Wiki. Do you keep track of recipes? This is a really handy way to do it. It is free. The website is cooked Wiki, you'll create an account. And the way you add recipes is unique. So let me see. I want a good recipe for fudgy brownies, right? So let me just do a Google search as one does for the, oh here This looks good. Two. Let's try this one. Best fudgy Cocoa Brownies. Okay. Now, often as the case, when you go to a website with a recipe of a too much chocolate, scroll through an infinite scroll of stuff before you get to the actual recipe.

(02:02:53):
But you like it. It looks good, doesn't it? Well watch this. All I do is I add cooked wiki slash the beginning of the Uur L. It gets opened in the Cook Wiki and they import the recipe. They have Beautiful. Isn't that nice? They give you the link to the original. You can change portions, you can do a grocery list, you can annotate it, and I'm going to save it. And now these fudgy brownies are part of my recipe book. It is a really nice and easy way. Now there's one little flaw in this, which kind of bugs me. I pay for the New York Times recipes. I know you do too. Paris, right? Yeah. Yeah. I do really good recipes. Really good stuff.

(02:03:41):
So let's say I say I met the recipe of the day, the Korean style barbecue meatballs. I really want to save this because this, look, I want to cook this tonight. I'm guessing it doesn't because it's technically you're signed in to see that recipe right now. Exactly. So I just put cooked Wiki in front of it. Oh, it's not even doing anything. Lemme try that again. Maybe the New York Times has figured out a way to thwart it. Cooked wiki slash oh oh. We kindly ask you do not use this service to bypass pay walled web pages. As you can see, I am not pay walled. I pay for it, but it won't import it. That is the only flaw unfortunately to this. Because if I could put my New York Times recipes in there, man, this would be golden. You can share your recipes. You categorizes them automatically. You can have a journal. Does the New York Times recipe have a recipe box where you save your recipes there? Yeah. In the app, but it's just in the app, right? And so you can create a shopping list. There's all sorts of interesting things. I guess the shopping list, you have to be a patron, but right now it's completely free for everything. But that, and it does a nice job.

Jeff Jarvis (02:04:50):
It's a old story from the early internet. When we started Epicurious way back when and at Connie Nas, we had all this opportunity of all the gourmet and all po appe tea recipes, but there was no digital form for

Leo Laporte (02:05:03):
Them,

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:04):
And scanning them would not work because of all the odd typography of fractions and all this stuff. So my friend Joan Feeney, who had it Epicurious, went and hired honest to God Monks

Leo Laporte (02:05:19):
Scriptorium.

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:21):
Yes. Yes. It was the ultimate new scriptorium where monks made their living by typing things.

Leo Laporte (02:05:27):
Wow. Typing, not illuminating, not writing in their little script.

Paris Martineau (02:05:32):
I wanted to watch a whole documentary about those monks.

Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
Monks doing the recipes. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:38):
And on the weekends we make beer, I guess. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:05:42):
Let me see. I just went to Epicurious and their recipe of the day is Skillet chicken Parmesan with Yuki. That sounds good. I've added Cooks. Great. Doesn't that look good? I've added Cook stock Wiki to it. Generating. There you go. The recipe makes four portions, but you could scale it up. Isn't

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:58):
That great? That's what's really impressive too, is the calculation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:01):
I mean, I have software that does this. I use paprika and so forth, but this is free and it's a wiki, which I love and you can share. It's a great way to import recipe piece. Just some guy, I guess it literally does not say all love it when

Paris Martineau (02:06:15):
Some guy does

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
That or gal it does not say, but I think it's a really cool idea. More than just a cookbook. It's social. I don't know. This feels

Paris Martineau (02:06:29):
Like a modern version of the old internet.

Leo Laporte (02:06:31):
It is. It's a wiki, right? It's made in Lisbon by Eduardo Gonzalez. So there you go. The Portuguese are the best in the world and they know how to eat

Jeff Jarvis (02:06:44):
A good tip, Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:06:46):
Alright,

Paris Martineau (02:06:46):
Fantastic pick.

Leo Laporte (02:06:47):
When I found that, I thought, oh, I got to tell my friends here. You know what I need is a good cacio peppe recipe. I'll look for that.

Paris Martineau (02:06:57):
I'm going to break it down for you here. Cacio and pepe,

Leo Laporte (02:07:04):
The two together at last. It is about, you're right, it's about the simplest pasta dish

Paris Martineau (02:07:09):
You can

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:10):
Make. Paris, Paris. This is a long standing joke on the show, is that one thing that Jeff likes is Trader Joe's frozen Cae pepper, which

Leo Laporte (02:07:21):
Is even easier.

Paris Martineau (02:07:25):
Why? How hard is it to make pasta?

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:29):
Well, for me, pretty hard.

Leo Laporte (02:07:31):
So here it is. You bring water to a boil. You in some pasta, you cook it. It's a

Paris Martineau (02:07:39):
Three step recipe.

Leo Laporte (02:07:41):
It's got pepper and Parmesan. I can screw it up. That's it. Butter pepper and Parmesan up. Believe me, Cacho Pick. All right. Anyway, that's my picture. When

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:50):
I was a young man looking for love, long before I met my wife, the

Paris Martineau (02:07:54):
Most eligible bachelor in San Francisco,

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:56):
It was early, even earlier that in Chicago I was very young and I was having a young lady over for dinner and I got my mother's pumpkin chiffon pie recipe. I knew that would win her heart and stomach. And so I read the recipe my mother had written out for me very patiently and I said, that's the thing about cooking. It makes no sense. One in one quarter seed period. Canned pumpkin aren't cans. Different sizes. I put in one of a quarter cans. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:08:24):
No. Oh

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:26):
No. Then I realized at that moment,

Leo Laporte (02:08:29):
Oh no, the seed is not sand for cans.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:32):
I had to go through major, and this is before Google folks, I had to go through major math calculations to figure out how much pumpkin you take out.

Paris Martineau (02:08:41):
The seeds is not sand for can,

Leo Laporte (02:08:43):
By the way, it's such a funny phrase. It's funny because I just got Bon appetize pumpkin chiffon pie recipe and what does it need? Oh really? One and a quarter cups pumpkin pie from a can. Hey pumpkin. Hey. Hey. Yeah. So at times do not change.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:58):
Maybe they stole that from my mother.

Leo Laporte (02:09:00):
They do not change. I'll tell you what, let's mix it all up. What's your number of the week, Mr. Jarvis?

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:07):
Okay, we're going to do a couple things here because one thing, since we ignored the entirety of ai, I want to mention we did a

Leo Laporte (02:09:14):
Few of those stories anyway.

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:16):
It's fine. Fine.

Paris Martineau (02:09:17):
You want to hear about ai? Watch Jeff's other podcast.

Leo Laporte (02:09:20):
Oh, that's

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:21):
Good. I didn't

Leo Laporte (02:09:22):
Watch Jeff's other podcast. The one he's right for AI and Jason House stole from this network. No, we gave it to you. We said here to grab it.

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:31):
We had a great interview this week. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:33):
What?

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:33):
I'm going to pronounce his last name wrong. I won't even try. The chief Digital and technology officer for stead, the brilliant, really best news company in the world in Norway talking about ai. Anyway, line 73.

Leo Laporte (02:09:49):
Leo, where can we find that podcast though? First before

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:51):
You? AI Inside show. Thank you for

Leo Laporte (02:09:53):
Asking AI Inside Show. Show. Yeah, Jeff and Jason we're working on that in the club. Of course we had to let Jason go and this is why you got to join the club. I hate losing our most talented people, but I'm very pleased that Jason is going to continue.

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:09):
We're very grateful that you allowed us

Paris Martineau (02:10:11):
Real of AI Inside is now AI inside outside

Leo Laporte (02:10:15):
Of club? Yes, it is now outside the club, which actually is good because everybody can now listen to it.

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:20):
Finn er Talo

Leo Laporte (02:10:22):
Finn. Nice. So

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:25):
Anyway, the first useful AI app I've seen in a long time because a lot of it, you just wonder why you're going to get it. Line 73, this app describes your screenshots.

Leo Laporte (02:10:38):
Oh

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:39):
Right. Doesn't that just click with you saying, I need that. I've got hundreds of screenshots. I knew I took a screenshot of it. I'll never find it again. This describes your screenshots. I

Leo Laporte (02:10:51):
Wish I had some screenshots. I could try it. I know, I know. It's called Keep it Shot as a little Play on Keep it short. Right. And it's online@keepitshot.com. See, I really feel like it's these little things that really ai, it's going to be so great.

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:11):
This is the kind of stuff, that's what I'm saying,

Leo Laporte (02:11:12):
This is the kind of stuff, it's great.

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:14):
It's this little stuff, the tasks that it can actually do for you that are actually useful that you otherwise wouldn't do or too much trouble. It's going to be great. So, alright, that was my one. So I'm going to do this week in moral panic. So there was a moral panic about crosswords,

Leo Laporte (02:11:33):
What

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:35):
The Guardian reported 12 years ago from the 1920s everywhere at any hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly pouring over the checkerboard diagrams, cuddling their brains for a four letter word, meaning molted rock or a six letter word, meaning idler the horror. Twice within the past week or so, there have been reports of police magistrates, sternly rationing, addicts to three polls a day with an alternative of 10 days in the workhouse. What?

Leo Laporte (02:12:08):
Come on

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:09):
The picture. Theaters are also complaining that crosswords keep people at home. They get immersed in a problem. But forget all about Gloria Swanson Li and the other stars of the film constellation. So I found this, of course amusing because I collect moral panics and I wish I had this some time to put the book.

Leo Laporte (02:12:28):
This is hysterical. Sneak it in.

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:30):
Isn't it great? That's

Paris Martineau (02:12:30):
So good. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:33):
A girl asked a busy grocer to name the different brands of flower he kept when he had done so expecting a sale. She said she didn't want to buy any, she just thought one of the names might fit into a crossword puzzle she was doing.

Leo Laporte (02:12:44):
Wow. I love crosswords. Isn't this great? I love crosswords. I do 'em all the time.

Paris Martineau (02:12:50):
I will say I did see evidence of this today on the train. I looked around in my morning commute and there were six people playing the crossword. It's taken over our society.

Leo Laporte (02:13:00):
Right.

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:00):
So this leads me to,

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say this is very good for the New York Times I think because the

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:06):
Fact that's where I'm going. Yeah. I have been arguing against Wordle. I think it is awful. People sharing it. I hated it. And it is the ruin. And we have a moral panic about it because people played it 8 billion times billion last

Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
Year with a B billion and it's great.

Paris Martineau (02:13:24):
I think that's fine.

Leo Laporte (02:13:25):
And Lisa and I have a little wordle competition. The other, I'm going to bed, just say Wordle in and I take that as a serious challenge. I got to do it. The only problem with that is we share a single New York Times subscription. So if she does it before me, so it's a threat. I have to do it in incognito mode because she's already solved it. Times is not dumb. I tend to do the crossroads. I have it on my phone. I love having and connections. Have you done connections? I love that. It's so much fun. Yeah, it's great. NYT games app was downloaded 10 million times last year while players made 2.3 billion successful connections, whatever that is. You Oh, oh, wait a minute. I don't do this stuff. I don't. Have you played connections? Paris? No. Paris.

Paris Martineau (02:14:12):
We've played connections on this

Leo Laporte (02:14:14):
Show. Oh we have? Alright. Shoot. Yes. You mean you don't want to do it right now.

Paris Martineau (02:14:19):
And it was the sounds of Benito and John shouting out the answers from off mic if I recall correctly. You're as we're about to do once

Leo Laporte (02:14:28):
Again sometimes. So frustrating. So there's 16 words here and we have to group them into four groups of four. John, you don't want to do it. I couldn't get it. You couldn't get this one all. Well, choir gl,

Paris Martineau (02:14:41):
I've played this game only once before and it was on the show, so

Leo Laporte (02:14:45):
Oh minute, I'm going to be bad at this. How about Glee, Murth, Murth, mirth, glee, cheer,

Paris Martineau (02:14:50):
Cheer,

Leo Laporte (02:14:51):
Cheer. But then what's festivity? You only get four incorrect guesses. That was correct. That's Merrit.

Paris Martineau (02:15:01):
Oh, there we go. Merriment,

Leo Laporte (02:15:02):
Merriment. Orchestra. Band. Orchestra, band, choir. Choir. One more, I dunno. Oh yeah, no. Uhuh. Could it be

Paris Martineau (02:15:11):
Officiant?

Leo Laporte (02:15:12):
Uhuh. Friar. Fire. Oh, orchestra. Barbecue.

Paris Martineau (02:15:18):
Okay. Caterer, florist. Officiant.

Leo Laporte (02:15:22):
Oh, these are all people at a wedding. Yeah, a wedding. People at a wedding. Very good. I love it. I think you're right. Yes you are. Now we're down to the last two. There's eight words left. Snake barbecue, tar friar, fire liar. Orchestra. How about Friar? Friar, liar and choir. I'm glad I said those out loud. Whoa. They rhyme. Take that ever be tar, barbecue, orchestra and snake. I always get to this point and I go, look, this has to be the match, but what could it be? Tar, barbecue, orchestra stuff. In a pit, in a pit tar pit. Barbecue pit Orchestra pits. Bonita wins. Woo. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the pit. That's how you do connections. It's good for the New York Times, isn't it? It's amazing.

Paris Martineau (02:16:20):
Yeah, it's huge. It's been a big boon to their

Leo Laporte (02:16:23):
Business. It's better than reading the news. That's all I can say. Yep. Paris, give us something. Wonderful.

Paris Martineau (02:16:30):
Listen, I have something wonderful this week. Last weekend I went upstate. I went about a two or three hour drive north of New York City with members of my recreational ski ball team, the bourgeois ski for a little r and r weekend. We rented an Airbnb with a sauna. We had a lovely time. Whoa. Someone suggested casually, they're like, oh, on Saturday I heard there's this, there's like a UFO museum in the nearby town of Pine Bush. We should go check it out. We were all like, oh haha. Yeah, we'll go. I assume it's going to be some room with a couple of plaques. We roll up at the pine bush UFO and Paranormal museum at noon and the dot. Exactly what happens and it is an insane, the photo you're showing me is from the one area you can take photos of, which is their alien abduction scene. But it was a surreal and out of this world experience you might say, here they are. You were there for an hour.

Leo Laporte (02:17:27):
Happy to be abducted here. They are terrified to be abducted. Yes.

Paris Martineau (02:17:33):
They had a whole bed you could hang out on. You got little aliens. You can go shout out to the owner Lance, who gave us a kind of guided tour through the museum. It was way more involved than I thought. We were there for an hour. I would recommend going if anybody's nearby. None of us really believe, I mean none of us. I mean, I don't not believe that there's life outside of humanity in the world, but I wasn't really there for the alien experience.

Leo Laporte (02:18:03):
You do

Paris Martineau (02:18:03):
You Lance leaves. Oh yes. Lance was like, I'm a skeptic, but Lance was absolutely not

Leo Laporte (02:18:09):
Skeptic. Not as skeptic

Paris Martineau (02:18:10):
Lance put together. There were so many animatronics in this museum. Oh, did Was

Leo Laporte (02:18:15):
He build it?

Paris Martineau (02:18:17):
I think so. I mean it used to be Pine bush. What I did learn is that Pine Bush is one of, it's like a hotspot for UFO sightings in the northeast.

Leo Laporte (02:18:28):
They have an annual UFO of we should do this, we should go there.

Paris Martineau (02:18:32):
Which this spa out of. Yeah. Listen, I'm down. I've got a really nice Airbnb BB can stay at and there's a sauna there. You do the show on the road with Lance and local legend Linda Zimmerman, a paranormal expert who apparently had to quote, deal with some shadow people is how it was described. A phrase I think is so funny.

Leo Laporte (02:18:56):
Deal with the shadow people. Wow. Well everybody ought to go to Pine Bush. That sounds wonderful. Honestly.

Paris Martineau (02:19:03):
It was great. I love your speech. Really fun time.

Leo Laporte (02:19:06):
What else did you do on your trip?

Paris Martineau (02:19:09):
We just hung out. Honestly. We were there from Friday to Sunday. We, I dunno, watched RuPaul's Drag Race. We played some card games. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:19:18):
So jealous that you actually have

Paris Martineau (02:19:20):
Friends dinner. Had a lovely time. That's

Leo Laporte (02:19:21):
So nice. I know. Isn't that amazing? I so wonderful. Did you meet these people in college or just picked them up off the

Paris Martineau (02:19:29):
Street? Oh no. I mean I knew of, I met one of them through a media happy hour sort of thing. I used to go to five or six years

Leo Laporte (02:19:39):
Ago. This is live in Brooklyn. You can make That's friends. There's Leo.

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:43):
Leo, you want to hear the saddest thing about my life?

Leo Laporte (02:19:45):
No, you're the

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:46):
Best friend

Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
I have. No, I feel the same way. That's not sad. This whole network

Paris Martineau (02:19:50):
You, you've talked together for three hours every week for how many years? It's more than most friends. It's true in their

Leo Laporte (02:19:58):
Lives. That's why. But we're

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:59):
Virtual people are going to make fun of us for

Leo Laporte (02:20:01):
That. This is why the network exists and it's not just by the way, the people on the shows. It's our community too. I feel very close to many of the people in our discord and stuff. We know their names. In the old days, they used to come by the studio. We're going to bring that back. We'll tell you about that as we coming in the spring. Yeah. Oh, well. At least on Sundays. Lisa has agreed for

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:24):
Club members

Leo Laporte (02:20:25):
Only and for club members only. Yeah. What we're really trying to do is make it going

Paris Martineau (02:20:28):
To be a physical club.

Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
It'll be a real club. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:31):
There's going to be a secret handshake

Leo Laporte (02:20:33):
Folks. Well, there are better

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:35):
Sign up before there

Leo Laporte (02:20:36):
Is. There are official hats, so we'll have to wear the feds. Very good. The pine bush. UFO Museum. Highly reckon. Did you go

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:46):
Out to eat or did you eat in

Paris Martineau (02:20:48):
Paris? We did a little bit of both. First night we cooked a bunch of Trader Joe's frozen pizzas, which was honestly phenomenal. You could have

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:55):
Had catch a Pepe.

Paris Martineau (02:20:56):
We could have. I mean that's what I was thinking when you said it. I was like, man, we're going to have to try the cre pepe next time. We were all like, this is a great idea. Do you drive from three hours from New York City? And then we went out to some local haunts. We went to what was called the Cup and Saucer. Diner. But saucer was UFO saucer. Perfect. Because everything's UFO themed in pine bush.

Leo Laporte (02:21:18):
Do you go next door? Shawan Gunk because there's a

Paris Martineau (02:21:23):
What? Excuse you. Bless you.

Leo Laporte (02:21:26):
Shawan Gunk next door in a beautiful

Paris Martineau (02:21:29):
New York. I actually do know what you're talking about, but I had no idea how to pronounce it.

Leo Laporte (02:21:33):
I don't either. I just made that up. Gunk. Yeah. New York State. It's a trip. It's true.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:41):
Upstate is a lot. Anything north of the Bronx is upstate to,

Paris Martineau (02:21:46):
Right? I mean, that's what I'm saying. It is. Technically, it's upstate. Mentally. It's not really far. It took us two hours to get out of New York City and then one hour to drive where we

Leo Laporte (02:21:56):
Were going. It's not that far. It's up the Hudson. My daughter went to Bard up a Poughkeepsie way, so I've been kind of through the northern part of the Hudson Valley is beautiful. Quite a beautiful area. Thank you Paris. Martin, I'll read her work at the information. If you're not a member, you really need to join the information.com. I've been a member since they started. Very proud member, if you have,

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:19):
I've been a member since Paris came on the show.

Leo Laporte (02:22:21):
Yeah. Thanks guys. Well, I, that's true of everybody watching. If you have a tip for Paris, her signal number is 2 6 7 7 9 7 8 6 5 5. Thank you. Paris, your candle made it all the way through the show. It did.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:38):
It's still flickering. It's got quite

Leo Laporte (02:22:40):
A lot of wax in there. Actually. It's a special two hour, 20 minutes, 20 minute. Oh God. I can't believe you said that. Okay. I don't want to know. Thank you to Jeff Jarvis. He is ladies and gentlemen, the director of the former. What is your title? Ameritus director. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:02):
I'm on leave,

Leo Laporte (02:23:03):
The director of the Town Height Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:10):
Craig Craig,

Leo Laporte (02:23:12):
New at the City University of New York. I saw Craig Don Rush past that. Just gave them another big grant. Did he not?

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:19):
10 million to help them get toward a goal of being tuition free.

Leo Laporte (02:23:24):
Oh my God. That is so great.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:26):
Craig is the most generous friend of journalism

Leo Laporte (02:23:30):
Out there and he said, because he believes in the importance of journalism. What a great contribution. Craig, I don't know if you're listening, but thank you very much. That is,

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:42):
There was a party and I thought, well, I'm already gone and I didn't get an invitation and I found out today that I did and it got buried in my email and I searched for him. Okay,

Leo Laporte (02:23:51):
Well now you know Craig, why he wasn't there. That's 10 million on top of the 20 million he gave him a few years ago. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:57):
And other things he's given us as well. It's quite amazing. The generosity of this one is

Leo Laporte (02:24:01):
Just great. I like the New York Times story saying, Craig Newmark, founder of a website that siphoned 20 billion off of the value of print newspapers according to at least one study gave. They had to get that jab really jabbed him. They jabbed

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:21):
Completely

Leo Laporte (02:24:21):
Wrong. Yeah. No, you can't blame Craig's List for newspapers floundering. You can't blame it. However, for the failure of podcasting in America. So I'll say that right now. We got our eyes on you, Craig. Thank you. Jeff Jarvis. Thank you Paris. Martin, thanks to our wonderful club TWIT members who make this show possible. You could join the club at twit tv slash club twit last day of the survey. Take that survey at twit tv. We do this show every Wednesday, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 utc. If you want to watch us do it live, we stream it live on YouTube. youtube.com/twit. But really, it's a lot easier of course, to watch the show after the fact. We put a copy on the website, TWIT tv slash twig. All the shows are there. Going back to whenever we started it 10 years ago or something, three hours a week for 10 years. That's more than a 1500 hours of you and me chatting to Jeff Jarvis. Wow. That's a lot of talk. Are you sick of me yet? No, seriously. I was joking before. I am actually honored and delighted that we are friends and that's why I keep doing this because every week I'm here with my friends and I love it. That's exactly how I feel. That's exactly how I feel. Yeah. Paris, I would like to think,

Paris Martineau (02:25:44):
I'm so glad to

Leo Laporte (02:25:45):
Be part of this. Guys, we'd like to join your studio team. Paris. You know what? We ought to have coffee sometime in hip. We

Paris Martineau (02:25:50):
Should live close. Whenever you're in the city, let me know. I can journey to Manhattan.

Leo Laporte (02:25:56):
Well, I don't want you to lose cool points. Well, if she bicycles over the Brooklyn Bridge, I guess you get cool points for that. That's true. Get a city bike and you can make up. I lived in the Heights for a few years. Crown Heights. I could never No, no, no. Brooklyn Heights. Okay. And I could never, which is right by the Brooklyn Bridge tells of my bridge phobia. I never got across it. Oh really? It was beautiful Bridge. Bridge world driving, but not walking. I know. It's amazing because you look down Leo, between the wood, you see water.

Paris Martineau (02:26:30):
That's true. I feel like you'd be fine though if you fell off.

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
Mrs. Robling made a little cameo appearance in the Gilded Age a couple of weeks ago. Yes. A little feminist moment where she got credit for building the bridge, but her husband was actually isn't that great. Owed to come back and the fireworks at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge and all that. That was kind of fun. Little piece of history stuck into that pot boiler. If you do not subscribe to the show, you're probably missing episodes. So do go get your favorite podcast client and subscribe to this week in Google. You'll get it automatically as soon as it's available, and that makes it a lot easier to listen to it whenever you have the urge. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back next week. I hope you will too, on this week in Google. Bye-Bye.

(02:27:20):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief VA Astor magazine. And each week I joined with my cohost to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators, and artists. And sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space. Books and tv, and we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this week in space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time

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