This Week in Google 763 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this week at Google. Paris Martineau's here, jeff Jarvis is here. Oh, we're going to do some reminiscing, poor Paris. We're going to talk about the good old days of ISDN lines and CompuServe. Do you remember your CompuServe number? The Internet Archive just backed up an entire Caribbean island. We'll tell you that story and all the big announcements for Google about their new Gemini AI, all that and more coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love From people you trust.

This is Twig. This is Twig this week in Google with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau, Episode 763. Recorded Wednesday, April 10th 2024. All the meat was shaken. It's time for Twig this week in Google or General, the show where we cover the latest stuff from Google or General. Paris Martineau is here from the information. Hello, Paris, Good to see you.

0:01:05 - Paris Martineau
Hello in General. Ha Paris, Good to see you. Hello in general.

0:01:06 - Leo Laporte
Ha, ha, ha, happy day.

0:01:11 - Paris Martineau
I was about to say Leo, are you okay, Are you?

0:01:14 - Leo Laporte
broken. Yesterday was Confederate Surrender Day. I don't know what today is. I have to check. Today is Eid al-Fitr. It is the National Siblings Day, but that's pretty much. It A holiday recognized in some parts of the United States and Canada. On April 10th is Brothers and Sisters Day in Europe. On May 31st.

0:01:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh, you know what it also is?

0:01:43 - Leo Laporte
What is it?

0:01:43 - Paris Martineau
Wednesday.

0:01:45 - Leo Laporte
Happy Wednesday. Wednesday it's also uh. Uefa champions league quarterfinals uh forget that it's uh, the release of what jennifer did and unlocked a jail experiment on netflix. And uh, the uh second season actually the first and second season of Hapless arrive on Peacock. You know I pay money for this. I should really use this. Wait, who do you pay for this? I pay a lot of money for this. It's fairly expensive. Forecast F-O-R-E-K-A-S-T. The calendar of the internet. Oh my.

0:02:24 - AI
You didn't know, I paid for this, you paid me for this this. Wait a minute, let me see what the pricing is google what happened today?

0:02:29 - Paris Martineau
yeah, exactly, I googled april 10th what happened today, and they told me that, uh, today was the day the titanic set sail oh 1912, and I paid zero dollars for that that's actually.

0:02:41 - Leo Laporte
why is that not on my forecast? Now I want my money back $100 a year.

0:02:46 - Speaker 6
That was in the past, Leo.

0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's the past Forecast.

0:02:49 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you can't forecast the past.

0:02:51 - Leo Laporte
No, they have stuff that happened way back when, but it's not on. But here's the thing this is crowdsourced, so I can go in now and put that in the Masters Par 3 contest.

0:03:04 - Paris Martineau
So for $100 and um put that in the masters par three. So for a hundred dollars a year.

0:03:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you should do it yourself doing it this for me is valuable because I can say things like it's national pet day tomorrow and who, and that's valuable to you yeah, I don't know why I pay for this. Uh, friday don't tell mom the babysitter's dead reboot. Uh, let's see national grilled cheese sandwich day on friday um I don't know it's 1971.

0:03:36 - Paris Martineau
On april 10th uh, the china hosted the us table tennis team for a week-long visit so.

0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
So what do you enter on this day? Is that what you enter on this day?

0:03:48 - Paris Martineau
I just Googled April 10th. What happened today? It?

0:03:53 - Jeff Jarvis
is and.

0:03:54 - Paris Martineau
I meant to type what happened, but I just put happened with an E at the end.

0:03:58 - Jeff Jarvis
It is International World Baton Twirling Day.

0:04:01 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I got it.

0:04:02 - Paris Martineau
Tell me Paris, tell me Paris that you were a baton twirler in high school. I was not. I'm not coordinated enough for that.

0:04:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I would drop it immediately. National hug your dog day. It is international safety pin day.

0:04:18 - Leo Laporte
So, forecast is woefully behind. I do know, though, that on Sunday will be the 100th Billy Joel Madison Square Garden concert. Oh.

0:04:31 - Paris Martineau
Oh nice. That's a lot I saw him at Madison Square Garden. I think you've mentioned that before it was lovely Big fan.

0:04:39 - Leo Laporte
Neither Jeff nor I have seen him, because we're too old for Billy Joel Speaking of Madison Square Garden my D&D live have seen him because we're too old for garden.

0:04:47 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, my, uh, the dnd live show I've mentioned on this show a couple times, dimension 20 just sold out madison square garden. Omg, it's crazy now I guess mostly. It was their pre-sale today and I I was like I want to see it, so I got. I opened up Ticketmaster 20 minutes before. I made sure I was in the queue, I entered my code. I was 4,700th in line getting there 20 minutes early.

0:05:18 - Leo Laporte
This isn't even until next year.

0:05:21 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, there were thousands and thousands of people lining up to get tickets today. Who are they? This is a group of comedians formerly from College Humor, now under this new banner called Dropout. They've become really popular using Dungeons Dragons as a vehicle for storytelling and they announced their first ever us kind of live show at madison square garden of all they're doing a podcast.

0:05:52 - Leo Laporte
I mean now I really feel bad because I've been saying, oh, podcast is suffering, podcast is dying. They're doing their podcast at madison square garden. Clearly is a question of haves and have-nots. Some of us are not doing as well as others. That's impressive. Do you think it's bots? Buying those tickets scalping them.

0:06:14 - Paris Martineau
I don't think so honestly, because I know quite a few people who were waiting for this. The community for this show is also insane. It's Dungeons Dragons, so they sit around the table playing a game. They also have very elaborate sets with like little miniatures, and it's really quite well talked about over the last couple of years They've started doing sales of they'll auction off their miniatures and stuff like that and they give the proceeds to charity or use them to fund and people go ham for these sales.

Like a sprinkle a couple years ago sold for two grand. So I think that people are probably out and about going frothing at the mouth for this that's probably why it's bots, though.

0:06:56 - Speaker 6
Right, because it's so popular that, like scalpers know incidentally, patrick delahunty points out, it's not.

0:07:03 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the two big dungeons and dragons podcasts out there.

0:07:07 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, this is not even the biggest, it's not even the biggest Critical Role is arguably even bigger on Twitch. It's way bigger yeah.

0:07:13 - Speaker 6
And this is partly why Wizards wanted to clamp down on content from D&D because they wanted to cash in on some of that.

0:07:21 - Leo Laporte
That's right.

0:07:22 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they're using copyrighted materials for their campaigns, right well, technically, the campaigns themselves, like the stories, are all uh, you know self-generated written yeah, written by the dungeon master and their teams, but they are using rules, yeah they have the book.

0:07:41 - Leo Laporte
It says you know, yeah, a seventh level mage can't cast freeze against a 12th level orc without having the gauntlet of doom, that kind of thing.

0:07:54 - Paris Martineau
That kind of thing.

0:07:54 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I just made that up, but it might be true.

0:07:57 - Paris Martineau
You don't know, it isn't.

0:07:59 - Leo Laporte
So I might as well go.

0:08:02 - Jeff Jarvis
If I went to this, I might as well be watching a comedy show in Finnish. I wouldn't understand a single.

0:08:06 - Paris Martineau
It is it's like finnish um, you'd probably actually understand most of the jokes because it's like it's like they're performing a show live, but they, you know, like if you go to an improv show and you see someone doing like long form heralds or improvs, they're just improvising with no rules. The beauty of this is they use the rules of D&D to kind of throw a random element of chance into how they're playing the game. So you, frankly, probably understand most of it.

0:08:38 - Leo Laporte
That sets it. I'm retiring at the end of the month. I just can't.

0:08:42 - Paris Martineau
This is what did it in. Some comedians having success.

0:08:45 - Jeff Jarvis
You did it Paris, you did it to them, rip. I hope you're happy now.

0:08:49 - Leo Laporte
RIP, so we have a lot of Google news.

0:08:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Hello.

0:08:55 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, I'm sorry, we've got to introduce this strange man who's on the show with him.

0:09:00 - Leo Laporte
We didn't play the. Craig theme last week. My god, who are you? I?

0:09:04 - Jeff Jarvis
don't care about me, but I just care about the craig theme ladies and gentlemen, I give you did play the craig theme.

0:09:09 - Leo Laporte
It was after you left at the end, though, after you left, we played it, but I give you now, ladies and gentlemen, the leonard tau professor for journalistic enterprise at the craig, newmark graduate school of journalism, city university of new york, newmark Graduate School of Journalism. City University of.

0:09:27 - Jeff Jarvis
New.

0:09:27 - Leo Laporte
York.

0:09:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Emeritus. Everything is in its place. Thank you, that's all. No, now go on.

0:09:34 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if Craig, would Craig get mad? Does he call you and say you didn't play my song?

0:09:38 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, but he does what. He will make references to the show. He watches the show. Oh good, hi Craig.

0:09:45 - Paris Martineau
Hi Craig, hi Craig, hi Craig.

0:09:46 - Jeff Jarvis
And his pigeons. Craig, we want to get you up in the circle again, so remind me and we'll arrange that.

0:09:52 - Leo Laporte
Google had a big event yesterday the annual Cloud Computing Conference in Las Vegas and swamped my news timeline with Google News. I don't even know where to begin. I really don News. I don't even know where to begin I really don't.

I'm overwhelmed by it. They showed off Gemini and showed how it can be used to do marketing campaigns and advertisements, how to ward off cybersecurity threats, how it can literally make podcasts that I hope to God, nobody would want to listen to short videos. They announced a new chip they said it's better than the NVIDIA chip for AI workloads and to control associated rising costs. They announced that Gemini will now be grounded, which doesn't mean they have to stay home after curfew.

0:10:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Or that they're wiring it to the flagpole.

0:10:47 - Leo Laporte
No, neither does it mean that it means that they can be tied to reliable sources of information, which gee you would think that would be one of the first things they would have thought of.

They also are, and we don't know yet, but apparently they may charge for this rolling out Google Search, ai in Google Search and vice versa, google Search in AI, which is actually. I already have that in some of the search tools I use, not those models like ChatGPT that were kind of set in stone on March 1999 or whatever, but a number of the models I use. You can say, oh yeah, use the Internet too, and that actually makes a big difference.

0:11:32 - Jeff Jarvis
They did a big deal with WPP, which is putting it, integrating it, into its advertising stuff, so it will be new jingles coming your way from the machine soon.

0:11:42 - Leo Laporte
Actually I was very impressed by Sora and its ability to make pretty good music. A couple of our regulars in our club, particularly Chocolate Milk Minisip, not his real name- I don't know. That could be on the certificate. It's a great name.

0:12:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Mini is a family middle name, yeah, oh yeah, chocolate Milk is his great name. Minnie is a family middle name, oh yeah.

0:12:06 - Leo Laporte
Chocolate Milk is his first name. Minnie Sepp is his second name. He made some really cool songs. You want to hear some of them. This is one he's proposing perhaps as our and I guess we could use this right, this isn't copyrighted as our new Google theme. This is Gregorian synth wave and I think you'll really enjoy the music, the lyrics of this. Here we go. This is kind of a synth meets Gregorian chance kind of thing. This could be our new theme. Think about it, just consider it.

0:12:42 - Jeff Jarvis
This is pretty good Gregorian about it.

0:12:44 - Paris Martineau
I like how long it is. We have to do less work. I actually love this. Is this the greatest thing? This is from. I said love this. I think this should be our new theme.

0:13:07 - Leo Laporte
This is from I said, soro, it's Suno.

0:13:12 - Paris Martineau
Lorem Ipsum is also a great podcast name.

0:13:16 - Leo Laporte
Lorem Ipsum. Those are the lyrics. It's the text that printers and people are laying out stuff to put in.

0:13:22 - Jeff Jarvis
We call it Greek type. I've got a pseudo example that is a whole family Hold on, I got more Wait can you put this link in the chat?

0:13:33 - Paris Martineau
I want to listen to this later. This is from.

0:13:34 - Leo Laporte
Suno yeah, I will. While I'm doing that, listen to this Beware of the Frenchmen and their baguettes.

0:13:43 - AI
I'm always saying that, walking down the street, baguettes in hand. Oh yeah, with their charm and their accent, they sure know how to.

0:13:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I clicked away from it.

0:13:56 - Paris Martineau
I clicked away from it. You don't know what they know. Oh, wait a minute.

0:13:59 - Leo Laporte
Let me go back to it because I was pasting it in. I was just getting into it, I was pasting it in and I know it was good. This is the first time I've heard AI music actually sound musical. I've got to find that again and finish it. I totally apologize. Once again beware of Frenchmen and their baguettes.

0:14:21 - AI
Frenchmen walking down the street, baguettes in hand? Oh yeah, with their charm and their accent, they sure know how to command. But don't be fooled by their croissants and their fancy cafes. They might just break your heart and send you on your way. Oh no.

0:14:55 - Leo Laporte
This is generated by artificial intelligence.

0:14:57 - Speaker 6
I hate this. I hate this, by the way.

0:14:59 - Leo Laporte
Why do you hate it, Benito?

0:15:01 - Speaker 6
Because it sounds real. It's too good, don't you? Isn't that why you hate it? No, there's no art there. There's no art there because that's a computer. Here is Cat Acoustic Chillwave Remix. It sounds real, it's too good, don't you? Isn't that why you ain't going to line 140, leo? There's no art there because that's a computer.

0:15:07 - Leo Laporte
Here is Cat Acoustic Chillwave Remix.

0:15:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Benito, you were replaced in all ways.

0:15:22 - Leo Laporte
No wait a minute. Wait a minute, though, Benito. You're going to like the drop. Wait till it gets to the drop.

0:15:38 - Paris Martineau
Okay, this is great. This is exactly all of the songs I sing to Gizmo. I don't need you anymore. I'm leaving. Bye, no Bye. Benito AI will run the podcast now.

0:15:48 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty impressive, right Am.

0:15:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I wrong, Benito. Your minimum wage is now 20 bucks.

0:15:54 - Speaker 6
A Taco Bell it's impressive in that it sounds like real music.

0:15:57 - Paris Martineau
It sounds like it's not obviously the Beatles my question is though is what is going on behind the scenes here, because I remember there was I don't know some sort of. This was obviously before the big gen AI boom, but a couple of years ago there was a AI-based keyboard that wrote all these really funny scripts. It went super viral and then what?

we learned behind the scenes is that people were kind of guiding it, which is fine. I think it's a good use for it. But I'm curious on this as to what the human involvement was in generating these lyrics, and like choosing specific songs uh, I'll have to ask you a favor.

0:16:32 - Leo Laporte
Any sip, all right. What do you got now?

0:16:34 - Jeff Jarvis
jeff 141 is when jason howell found this. You did this.

0:16:38 - Leo Laporte
Apparently you already did this on your ai show earlier today.

0:16:41 - Jeff Jarvis
It's so good.

0:16:42 - Leo Laporte
Yes uh, this is suno music, so I guess you were already playing with it. Uh, jason was, so he found the one on jason's a musician. So yeah, so he knows suno version three. Now did jason say what the prompt was for this? No, there's no steps. Solo acoustic. Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI instrumental.

0:17:15 - Speaker 6
Like I don't need my computer singing the blues. You know what I mean. That's for people.

0:17:20 - Leo Laporte
Can computers have the blues is the question.

0:17:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, is this? Cultural appropriation is the other question well, it's all appropriation.

0:17:28 - Leo Laporte
That's the key to the whole thing. Yeah, it all is it's appropriating the work of other musicians uh, that was wowie, I thought s-u-n-ocom. Here's one. Uh called spaghetti. This could be the theme to curb your enthusiasm.

0:17:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, Leo.

0:17:49 - AI
Salted boiling water Until I'm dead. Take away Reserving some pasta water. Just kill it. Keep all the boil over medium heat, add chopped onion and cook until translucent. Then add minced garlic and cook for another minute.

0:18:04 - Leo Laporte
This is an actual recipe.

0:18:13 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, I want a song called about Cacio e Pepe.

0:18:17 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I'm sure we can. Can you type it in there? Sure, you can make it right now.

0:18:21 - Leo Laporte
Italian, that could be our theme song what style Renaissance.

0:18:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Sure, what the heck what is renaissance? Italian renaissance music that's not how you spell it's close, there we go.

0:18:40 - Leo Laporte
A style canto about making cacio e pepe, or should I say the recipe itself? Well, let's see.

0:18:51 - Jeff Jarvis
With the recipe?

0:18:52 - Leo Laporte
yes, Using the recipe as lyrics.

0:18:57 - Jeff Jarvis
It'll be shorts.

0:18:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's pretty easy. Let's see. Oh, I have to create an account. Well, that's all right. I have a Google account. I don't mind everybody having that account Continue. Okay, well, that was easy. Let's see here. Create that sucker. I wonder how fast it is. I have 50 credits, but I don't know how many credit Couldn't generate. That Song contained artist named PayBit. Oh no, okay, what does Cacio e Pepe mean in English?

0:19:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Cheese and pepper.

0:19:35 - Leo Laporte
Cheese and pepper Spaghetti. Oh, pasta, yeah, that's better. Alright, let's see if, pepe, they don't want to use the word paper now it's just gonna say now it's gonna say cheese cheese cheese and pepper cheese cheese, cheese and pepper.

0:19:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Shake the pepper.

0:19:56 - AI
Shake the pepper grate the cheese, grate the cheese.

0:20:00 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, that's pretty much got you a pepe in a nutshell, yeah so why do you know? It's actually generating uh three songs, including fromaggio e pepe. A taste of italia. Let's play it, let's play it, did pepe anyway, yeah, yeah it's an opera. I may never go to Spotify again, kind of mind-boggling.

0:21:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, that's obviously a little effort, that was pretty good, okay, okay, let's, let's write a theme song for the show.

0:21:12 - Leo Laporte
Should we make a theme song? Well, maybe we'll save that for an exercise for later, but I think this could be. Uh, now, are these copyrighted? Can I just use them as a theme song for a podcast? So did I say? Did I not say six months ago, in fact, after your walk? If you would, after my walk, if you would just make a clip of that so we could play it again and again. Things are gonna get weird very quickly that look. A year ago we played computer synthesized music and it was awful, right crap. It was worse than awful.

0:21:44 - Paris Martineau
This is a lot better, faster, right, it is I would like to say a challenge out there, maybe for someone on the twit staff, maybe for just a listener. I'd really like it if we had a video. It was a compilation of all of leo's wildest, starting with his description of the walk and, you know, ending some maybe with that I think I had a dream in the middle at one point. Remember about you did have a dream.

0:22:11 - Leo Laporte
We should give them weapons, and there was a whole yeah, my epiphany. Yeah, that's right, that's been long and coming and it's been a rich, rich treat. Uh, who does suno is that? Uh, it's not google. This is the thing I get very excited about. Is that, as hard as the big boys work and all this stuff, it's such a great opportunity for everybody I just downloaded. I've been looking for an AI that can take my documents and absorb them and answer my questions about that, and I found finally an open source one it's called Dot that supports with oh. Oh you like the dot.

0:22:56 - Paris Martineau
Is this by it's Alex?

0:22:59 - Leo Laporte
Pinnell Alex Pinnell. There's a commercial dot. So he does have a problem because there is a, but this is using something called RAG, which is a way of language models ingesting your own content. I'm trying to remember what.

0:23:15 - Jeff Jarvis
RAG stands for it. Does this locally, here, right.

0:23:17 - Leo Laporte
Retrieval, augmented Generation. It has the Mistral model, which is a very good open source model to begin with. It has it built in you, which is a very good open source model to begin with. It has it built in you. Download this, it's free, it's available for Windows and Mac, so it already has that model. And then you choose a folder and it says what do you want me to know? So I chose my notes folder because it's all in Markdown, it can read PDFs and DocX and XLSls spreadsheets. So I chose my lisp folder. It took a while. It has to chew on all of this, but there didn't seem to be a limit on the number of documents and it and it works but it's all running locally it's all running locally what do you have to install it on?

uh, it's mac windows. They have two versions of windows one that's cpu bound, but if you have a good gpu it's better to do that. It supports the gpu using cuda um. The mac mac os is only for apple silicon um, and it's free. It's open source and I'm a big believer in open source for this because you don't want the big companies to dominate, right? Uh, but I do appreciate the contributions big document companies have made. Um, yeah, this will this you can open it on. I'd be curious what you, if you try this, jeff?

0:24:33 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, it won't work on your chromebook, I'm sorry to say no, no, no way, but it'd be interesting if I were running linux.

0:24:38 - Leo Laporte
So eventually, but yeah but it'd be interesting to see if you could uh, for instance, put all of your research for your books, all the books and everything in there, and then query it. I think it'd be very useful. This is like lambda lm, the google tool, but it's open source, and that's what to me is very exciting is that it doesn't require because, uh, there are open source. What does require a lot of compute is building the large language models right, but there are a number of them. Lama from Meta is open, available to use. Gemma from Google, yep, mistral, mistral this one uses Mistral, which, by all accounts, is a good one.

0:25:15 - AI
Yes, so is.

0:25:17 - Leo Laporte
Who does Mistral come from? Do we know?

0:25:19 - Jeff Jarvis
France, somewhere in France.

0:25:21 - Leo Laporte
That's the Mistral, is the wind that?

0:25:23 - Jeff Jarvis
drove Van Gogh crazy. That's why it's not Mistral, it's Mistral Ah okay, I wonder if Mistral is going to have problems because of the recent laws passed in France.

0:25:36 - Leo Laporte
Ah, that's an interesting question Frontier Performance, open and Portable Technology which law Models?

0:25:44 - Paris Martineau
Regulating AI. I'm forgetting what the name of it was. Which law Regulating AI? I'm forgetting what the name of it was. Yeah, it's a copy, that's the whole EU, isn't it?

0:25:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but I don't think there's a lot of restrictions.

0:25:51 - Paris Martineau
Mistral is one of the. I mean they have restrictions for LLMs.

0:25:56 - Jeff Jarvis
They were going to restrict open source. That was one thing that was being discussed and they didn't, thank goodness because that's the future it would have been stupid as hell.

0:26:06 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, you can use Mistral Chat on the web if you want, but it's more interesting to download the model and then use it. So they call it their chat, Le Chat Noir, the black cat, Mistral M-I-S-T-R-A-L. Dot A-I. I think we're in a very interesting paradigm shift. For want of a decent phrase.

0:26:34 - Jeff Jarvis
So when I worked for Delphi way back in the days, you had to put $5 in the jar if you used the word paradigm.

0:26:40 - Leo Laporte
I think that's expired. Now, though, I think you're allowed to use it again. All right, I hope, I hope so All right though I think you're allowed to use it again.

All right, I hope I hope so. All right, let's take a little break because I want to talk about Aruba. Jamaica girl, I want to make you Our show today, brought to you by this week in Google, brought to you by Delete Me. This is a product I am very happy with because we use it. This is a product I am very happy with because we use it. We use it because our dear CEO and my wife, lisa, is like everybody else.

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0:29:37 - Paris Martineau
forgot Aruba.

0:29:40 - Leo Laporte
Aruba, jamaica Girl, I want to make you. Wired Magazine has an article I think this is really interesting about the internet archive and the Aruba collection. They have backed up an entire Caribbean island. They are the official custodian of the entire nation's history. This is the first time they've done this. Aruba is small enough that they were able to digitize and store the complete national library, national archives, the archaeology museum, the university of aruba 107 101 000 items so far, 40 000 documents, 60 000 images, seven 3d objects well, the reason, the reason that Norway is able to create its own Norwegian LLM, as I learned from Sven Sturme Taulo, is that all the news and all the library is already digitized.

Yeah, In fact, to get Aruba into the Internet Archive, they had to get everybody to cooperate, right, the libraries and museums. Everybody had to say okay. The project is funded wholly by the Internet Archive, which I think is great. Good going Brewster Kahle, I donate monthly. According to WIRED, the Aruba project was set in motion in 2018 after Stacy Argondizo, who is an Aruba lover and a digital archivist. She's not an Arubian. I wonder if that's right Aruban.

0:31:15 - Paris Martineau
She's not Aruban sandwich. She's not Aruban, but she loves.

0:31:18 - Leo Laporte
Aruba and she works at the Internet Archive. So she thought, could we back up Aruba?

0:31:28 - Paris Martineau
Could we back up Aruba? Could we back up Aruba Could?

0:31:30 - Leo Laporte
we back up, and they did. She reached out to an information specialist at Aruba's National Library and they've slowly gotten it all up there. We ran into a lot of roadblocks before we stumbled on the Internet Archive. Archival work can be labor and resource intensive. It's not easy to turn stacks of dusty tomes and fragile decades-old newspapers into easily searchable files. The budget, though you would think this would be expensive he says it's shoestring it didn't cost all that much. Aruba did have its own scanning equipment so they could use that. Internet Archive provided the software to organize it, including algorithms to decipher handwritten documents from hundreds of years ago.

A lot of colonial history on Aruba, so I think this is the first time Internet Archive has done this for an entire country. It did preserve about 90% of Bali's literature back in 2011. Gosh, god bless the Internet Archive.

0:32:36 - Paris Martineau
Truly what a great organization.

0:32:40 - Leo Laporte
And for historians. You know this is a treasure trove.

0:32:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's really good anyway, I want to give a plug to my friends at um common crawl as well, because they're trying to preserve same thing right, similarly, you know it's.

0:32:56 - Leo Laporte
They just do text, not images, and they do it so that it's usable as data I think there's generally now recognition that we have been putting everything online, but it's ephemeral because servers go down, hard drives fail and so forth. So it's great to get it digitized, but the next step is to archive it in a way that it will survive.

0:33:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It's also missing tremendous perspectives and communities that haven't had the chance to be online enough, haven't had the power to publish all these years. We need to be asking what more we need to add to the web, not walk up behind walls. If I were one of the AI companies, I would give a bucket load of money to Wikipedia and say, go mad. Oh yes, what all can you do? How all can you increase the diversity of information that we have? Yeah and same with Brewster Kahle, what all can you? And Common Crawl all of them, they're preserving the commons for us.

0:33:56 - Leo Laporte
It's such a small, tiny amount of the federal budget to support this. It would not be billions, it would be hundreds of millions?

0:34:05 - Paris Martineau
Maybe Craig Newmark, but how are we going to afford 300 extra warheads, leo? Oh yeah. Give money to things like preserving things online.

0:34:15 - AI
Yeah.

0:34:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, online is evil, don't you know, paris? We have to get rid of it.

0:34:19 - Paris Martineau
It's true, we have to turn it off.

0:34:20 - Jeff Jarvis
It's ruined mankind, hasn't it?

0:34:22 - Paris Martineau
That's true. We've got to turn the internet off. It's the only way.

0:34:30 - Leo Laporte
My daughter told me of a new way to get better sleep and she sent me a TikTok.

0:34:39 - Paris Martineau
Have you ever heard of the drunken monkey exercise.

0:34:42 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, it sounds like what happens to me every night.

0:34:46 - Leo Laporte
There's no liquor involved. Um, I don't know, I'm getting the tiktok in early, all right and now I'm sleeping better every single night he's going to demonstrate the drunken monkey here.

0:34:56 - Speaker 6
Put it easy get extra blood flow to your extremities, so that come on dance once you're sleeping so watch this. Here's how you do it you take a wide stance right before bed and you go back and forth with your hips like this and you loosen your hips up and your hips float to your legs that's why you're not

sleeping well, and then? You do that with your hands your full shoulder and your full back. So it looks like this. So this is slow. I know it looks silly, and so this is slow. Okay, I know it looks silly and you do this for a minute.

0:35:28 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say, Leo, we've got to get one of these for you. And seriously, after one minute you're going to feel it in your shoulders and your hips.

0:35:35 - Speaker 6
It hurts, but you'll sleep better, I promise.

0:35:38 - Leo Laporte
My daughter does this every night. Just thought we'd have the TikTok video early this week. Yay, Jessica Rosenworcel I just love saying that name. She says a number of things. First of all, we're bringing back net neutrality, which was dissolved under the Trump era FCC.

0:36:03 - Jeff Jarvis
That's good news, but there's bad news to follow here.

0:36:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh, really yeah Okay dissolved under the trump era fcc that's good news, but there's bad news to follow here oh really yeah, okay, she also rejects calls to impose universal service fees on broadband. Do you think that's bad?

0:36:14 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, because it? Because right now people's uh subsidies, poor people's subsidies for the internet, which is yeah is disappearing, is going down. I'm willing to pay taxes for that. I'm willing to pay taxes so that others can enjoy the bounty that we have from the Internet that I have. Yeah, I'm appalled. We paid all these years to have 911 service, which we should have. That was a tax on the phone. I think it's perfectly legitimate that we all pay it.

0:36:41 - Leo Laporte
It's complicated because, remember the whole thing of net neutrality is the internet, a telecommunications service and, uh, the telecommunications services, the phone companies, pay into this fund for universal access. You see it on your phone bill every month on your phone bill, do?

0:36:59 - Speaker 6
you have a phone bill.

0:37:01 - Leo Laporte
If you had one, you'd see it on. You remember the days when you have the universal yes, I do.

0:37:05 - Jeff Jarvis
You want to make fun of me again? Yes, I do have a phone bill.

0:37:08 - Leo Laporte
So April 25th, the FCC is going to try to figure out if they can get out of this net neutrality ban and bring it back. But the key on doing this is to make sure that broadband is. We covered this when it happened four years ago that broadband is not a common carrier, in order to make this happen. Wait a minute. No, I'm sorry, I got the other way around that.

They are so confusing in order to find broadband as a telecommunications service, then they would face common carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act, see. Stacey explained this and I slept through her explanation and I wish I hadn't now. I wish I'd paid attention Last time. Industry trade groups said no, no, no, you don't have the authority to classify us as a telecommunications service. They were that way under Obama. They were Title II. Under Trump it was changed. The question is can you bring it back? Here's a question, though We've had four years since the repeal of net neutrality. Has it gone downhill? Has it been the disaster that we were worried about?

0:38:29 - Paris Martineau
disaster, no, but I don't know what's happened to prices I was about to say I feel like I don't know enough about uh we need some, we need some research on this, yes or no?

0:38:38 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I mean, I'm in principle, I'm absolutely supporting that neutrality. Uh, the fear is, of course, if you don't have net neutrality, that incumbents will make deals, like T-Mobile make a deal, so that Cox or Time Max that's their name I can't remember their name. That HBO, oh no, no, that Max wouldn't have. I can't remember their name. That HBO, oh no, no, that Max wouldn't have to pay.

0:39:09 - Paris Martineau
It is.

0:39:09 - Leo Laporte
Max.

I know, I know it's driving me crazy.

They can't make their mind up, but anyway that Max wouldn't have to pay.

If you watch Max on your T-Mobile account, you wouldn't have to pay fees, and that's kind of a violation of net neutrality, because it's T-Mobile giving Macs a leg up over some new service that might be better, but wouldn't have that advantage. Customers like that. It's called zero rating, but it's one of the many tricks that big companies use to preserve their incumbency, to keep competition down, and it's one of the things net neutrality would ban. It's hard, though, because customers say but wait a minute, I like zero rating, I don't want to have to pay for max bandwidth, right? Fcc's notice of proposed rulemaking, which is pending a commission vote on the 25th, will seek public comment so it's not going to happen right away on how this might affect Title II regulation and net neutrality rules. Net neutrality rules prohibit blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, zero rating, that kind of thing, so we shall watch with interest, but I do think that it's appropriate and I want somebody to do the research to see what has it been, what have been the consequences in the last four years, absent net neutrality protections.

0:40:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, and how quiet have they? Maybe they haven't gone full net non-neutrality because they're fearing to come back. Look how good we've been, how could you think we'd do anything else?

0:40:44 - Speaker 6
And also from experience. This tells me that, like I lived in the Philippines for a while and in the Philippines there's no net neutrality, no net neutrality, and what I can tell you about how the internet is there is that the internet is Facebook to everybody over there.

0:40:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's it. There you go. In fact, that was the plan for Facebook's internet for developing nations, remember, is that certain players would get to ride on this Facebook Internet but others would not, and of course, that just makes the big players win and makes it much harder to compete. Fcc has also implemented this now nutrition's label. As of today, all ISPs with more than 100,000 subscribers will have to use a label, a broadband consumer label with broadband facts. They did not want this to happen. Oops, I just translated into Spanish for some reason.

0:41:36 - Paris Martineau
Can you read it in Spanish for us please?

0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
No Internet. The banda Anca Ecticas does. Designed to provide ear broadband and nutrition labels, is much easier. Designed to provide clear, easy to understand and accurate information about the cost and performance of high-speed internet. If you zoom in on this you can see it has price, monthly price, it says. Is this an introductory rate? The?

0:42:09 - Jeff Jarvis
time? If it is, is how long it will last? Good, okay price after the introductory rate how long your newspapers do the same thing and magazines?

0:42:15 - Leo Laporte
too, I wish how long your contract will be, what the additional charges and fees are. This is really good, and and there will be a glossary published for consumers so they can understand what these things, you know what they mean. Let me open up the label here so you can see it. Oh, there you have it. Much bigger, nice. So here's a sample one for Acme Wired, which is the one I think Roadrunner uses. Oh, no, that's Wiley Coyote's preferred.

It's their quote signature gigabit plan and you get to see all of the additional fees and what they're charging you for and the bundles. This is great. Oh, and what the speeds will be for reels.

0:43:03 - Speaker 6
Oh, that's important. Asymmetrical fiber what?

0:43:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what? Yeah, 1,200 megabits down, 1.2 gigs down, but 200 megs up. I would take that, but this is just a made-up. There is no Acme wired, so don't worry. Is Internet access expensive in the Philippines?

0:43:23 - Speaker 6
No, it's not, because it's subsidized by Google and Facebook.

0:43:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh right, Do you see ads?

0:43:30 - Speaker 6
No, but their websites load way faster than everything else.

0:43:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there you go, so you have some experience of what a lot of net travel is.

0:43:37 - Speaker 6
Oh yeah, I know what the internet looks like without net travel, and it's bad Good, thank you.

0:43:42 - Leo Laporte
There you go. You heard it from Benito, there you go. So Good, thank you. There you go. You heard it from Benito, there you go. So we'll watch April 25th. Now that may that. So that's the problem with this. The universal broadband fees. I guess Imposing universal charges, service charges on broadband, would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills well, just as the phone companies did, and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. Worsen Morsel says we conclude that forbearing from imposing a new universal service contribution requirements on broadband Internet access service is in the public interest. For one thing, we agree with commenters who warn that suddenly and unnecessarily imposing new fees on broadband could pose major upheaval, and it is what is actually a stable and equitable contribution system. Rather than risk this upheaval, says the FCC, we believe it's in the public interest to proceed cautiously and incrementally. You can't disagree with that, right? No, I don't, I think. I think it's clear though Congress has to fund subsidies for broadband, and that's what's missing Absolutely.

Yeah, it shouldn't be something your household income should not correspond to your ability to access the internet. Yes, absolutely.

0:45:05 - Paris Martineau
How much do you guys pay for your internet in your various places? I weirdly have a very cheap deal. I paid like I think it's because I think it is probably because I bundle it with verizon um my phone bill, but I paid 20 bucks a month what?

0:45:18 - Leo Laporte
for like 300 up down do you have the verizon residential wireless? I have fios oh, it's because you're an apartment building probably and they it is yeah do they require that you pay for it? You probably don't have a choice require that I pay for well, you couldn't have another internet service provider. Let's put it that way uh, no, I, I could you my building was originally.

0:45:43 - Paris Martineau
I live in like a small brownstone. My building was originally wired for Spectrum. Oh, okay.

But I'm a Verizon Fios diehard, so I, specifically, whenever I move places in New York, I don't move unless I can get Fios or a comparable service because Spectrum is awful here. Yes, and so I had them. It said my building was wired for Fios, but that turned out to be wrong, because a man had to climb out my window, down the fire escape into the backyard and run cables up and down through my neighbor's yards to get in my building.

0:46:14 - Jeff Jarvis
God bless that man. God bless him. It worked. God bless him. Did your neighbor switch to Fios as a result?

0:46:19 - Paris Martineau
My landlord my landlady has lived downstairs from me and they did. Yeah, they were like like man, that guy's been out there for a while.

0:46:27 - Jeff Jarvis
our internet sucks, we'll switch so I paid uh 307 last month oh my god, just for internet. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's for everything. That's for the yes, I still have linear tv. That's for a lot of boxes. That's for high speed internet, higher speed gig internet. That's for, yes, an old phone line, although not pots, and that's that's it.

0:46:52 - Paris Martineau
That's for hbo I guess if I include my phone, I paid a hundred dollars last month wow, yeah I.

0:47:00 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what my cost is for the I was about to say you probably have 25 internet internet connections in your home.

0:47:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think it's complicated.

0:47:09 - Leo Laporte
Let's put it that way it's complicated.

0:47:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, did you have a T1 to the home in early days?

0:47:16 - Leo Laporte
I had ISDN, which was the first high-speed internet you could get. It was dual-bonded, 128 kilobit lines or no, it was dual 64 kilobit for a total of 128,000 bits per second, and I felt like man, I'm living in the future boy Macho. Oh this is exciting.

It was early too. You really had to phone company, really didn't know what you were asking for. You had to find that one person in the closet who said, oh yeah, I'm the ISDN guy. And they had to find that one person in the closet who said, oh yeah, I'm the ISDN guy and they had to get a CSU DSU unit. You had all this Very complicated Then. I think I don't think I skipped T1 because Comcast in Petaluma did at-home early. We were one of the test communities. Fremont was the first.

Remember at-home it was actually a separate company.

0:48:06 - Paris Martineau
What do you mean? Comcast At Home? What's the difference?

0:48:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, it was the first cable internet service, basically.

0:48:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh. Was that a site at home?

0:48:15 - Leo Laporte
No, this predates that it was Milo. What was his name? Anyway, it wasn't owned by. Comcast. They started in Fremont and the idea is we could use this cable coax to provide high-speed internet service, and I think Petaluma was an early test. Comcast ended up buying at home, and so it ended up coming from the cable company.

In fact, comcast was pretty forward-thinking. They put a fiber ring around the entire Bay Area so that they could have fiber to the cable head ends. It was still cable, but they added a lot of capacity. Milo Medin, milo Medin, the great Milo Medin yeah, I remember Milo very well and I was very happy to have that, so I skipped T1. I went right to at at home. What is he's now at google?

0:49:08 - Jeff Jarvis
he's now google. Yeah. Vp of wireless services yeah google.

0:49:11 - Leo Laporte
So he's like, I would guess, probably the uh fiber, google fiber, uh guy vice president for access services. Uh, yep, I remember those good old days. Did you have t1 jeff? No, I was not. That, I think, did what do we?

0:49:28 - AI
what do we uh?

0:49:29 - Leo Laporte
what do we start with? Uh, at the cottage we had cable, right, john, yeah, and then uh, and then we had a t. We had a isdn line for the radio show. You had to get an isdn line. In fact, the radio show used at isdn until fairly recently, about eight years ago, they said all right, that's it. We're not paying for isdn, phone companies don't want to do isdn, so we're just going to use the public internet and cause. I'm called comrex, but it worked. Worked just as well as isdn. It's a hell of a lot cheaper.

0:50:01 - Paris Martineau
I'm sorry, what is isdn? Oh integrated services. Young lady, I'm assuming you're going to say you have to carve something on a big slate with a chisel Semaphore.

0:50:13 - Leo Laporte
It goes back believe it or not. Actually the story of ISDN is kind of intriguing. It goes back to the ambition in the early days from the phone company. They wanted to do movies over your phone line what a movie on my phone.

0:50:31 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, can I consume it like over your phone line over your phone line.

0:50:36 - Leo Laporte
Uh no, yeah you would. You would have a splitter, I guess I don't know um bell labs came up with it in the 80s over pots, over plain old telephones and servers, over twisted pair Copper line yeah, copper line Integrated services digital network and they thought it would be a business. But they were wrong. So eventually it became data, just data, and that's how I used it. But yeah, originally they wanted to do what? Do they call it? Something over dial tone?

0:51:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Mov, something over dial tone, movies over dial tone, something like that. They had a name for it, but I don't. As far as I know, nobody ever did it. So when, when david eisenberg wrote the dawn of the stupid network in 1998, when he was telling at&t to stop trying to create smart networks and it's going to be a stupid network, where was that in the progression of ISDN and T1 and all that, was that fairly late in that process?

0:51:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think so, because according to Wikipedia, it was 1980 at Bell Labs that they began work on ISDN and it was 1988 when the standard entered the Red Book. So ISDN was around quite a while before then Eventually did replace T1. T1 was a terrible system. I mean 1.44 megabits per second. It was not fast. The latency was amazing.

0:52:00 - Speaker 6
I had the T1 connection in an apartment building.

0:52:02 - Leo Laporte
Did you?

0:52:02 - Speaker 6
In like 1998 or something, yeah, and it was so fast, like in terms of latency, like I could play video games, all that yeah, it was 1.544 megabits per second.

0:52:14 - Leo Laporte
Um, yeah, but of course, in hindsight, one and a half megabits is one one hundredths of what you're getting. At late you are at, you know you're probably getting even more than that. So that's really been a big change is the widespread availability of relatively high-speed internet.

0:52:32 - Speaker 6
You also didn't need that much speed back then.

0:52:34 - Leo Laporte
Right.

0:52:34 - Speaker 6
You were downloading MP3.

0:52:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, no, no yeah, exactly exactly when I got an ISDN line 128 kilobits, I was blown away, you know.

0:52:42 - Speaker 6
Master was flying.

0:52:43 - Leo Laporte
An entire linux distro in four days.

0:52:47 - Jeff Jarvis
It's incredible so can we come I? Spent a long time on 300 baud.

0:52:52 - Speaker 6
Yeah, so I lived on bbs, running on 56k but like the, the modem where you put the phone handle on top of the thing itself.

0:52:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh my god, yeah, I okay, as long as we're talking old times. When I first got on CompuServe Poor Paris, that's how you would get on CompuServe, you dial the phone number on your phone and you hear. And then you had suction cups and you put the phone in these two suction cups. It's called an acoustic coupler because the data was being sent by those screeches on the phone lines.

0:53:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I used to whistle into it to try to see what I could make it do. There was a whole hacking community called Freaking.

0:53:30 - Speaker 6
Oh, you were trying to hack it.

0:53:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, freaking yeah there were freaks, yeah so Leo. 71435,1134.

0:53:39 - Leo Laporte
7135,3136. Sorry 75109,3135. It came back to me. Do you know what we're doing?

0:53:49 - Paris Martineau
Is this what it's like when I'm trying to explain?

0:53:51 - Leo Laporte
words like raised to you. Do you know what that is? I don't. I have no idea. 735109,315.

0:53:58 - Jeff Jarvis
71435,1134. Benito, do you know what that is?

0:54:01 - Speaker 6
No, it sounds like CompuServe, though it is CompuServe.

0:54:03 - Leo Laporte
Do you know what that is? No, it sounds like CompuServe, though it is CompuServe.

0:54:04 - Speaker 6
Bingo Give that man a funny hat.

0:54:06 - Leo Laporte
That was our user ID. You didn't have a name.

You had a number. Scooter X remembers his 71340, 356. The comma is the giveaway. Yeah, was it CompuServe? That was started by H&R Block? No, that was the by h&r block. No, that was the source, wasn't it? That was the source. So h&r block, which is the tax company then and is the tax company these days, had all these computers to do your taxes, but after april 15th they didn't get used so much. So they thought what can we do to use those computers the rest of the year? And they decided to create an online service with this Prodigy was Sears.

Oh no, who was prodigy? Who was prodigy?

0:54:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm trying to remember it was weird that the companies early on who thought they were going to be. Yeah, sears, I think it was Okay.

0:55:06 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it was Teletext right.

0:55:07 - Paris Martineau
I thought Sears was famously against the internet and that's what led them to get overtaken by Amazon and whatnot. The roots of Prodigy.

0:55:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Prodigy began when CBS and AT&T formed a joint venture. Video text Fairlawn, New Jersey, where my wife used to live Video. Text right Sears joint venture video fair lawn, new Jersey, where my wife used to live. Uh video texts right.

0:55:27 - Leo Laporte
Uh, here's a sold at a joint venture. Yep With.

0:55:30 - Jeff Jarvis
IBM and. Ibm and Sears. Yeah, mm, mm. When I came to advanced publications in a 94, the newspaper industry was still debating whether to put everything up on prodigy or AOL or um, this new thing, this web thing, so Prodigy Paris was graphical, compuserve Genie the Source, all of these were just text.

0:55:59 - Leo Laporte
What is?

0:55:59 - Paris Martineau
CompuServe. Are we talking about a messaging system? Is it like bullet points? No, it had news stocks a lot of discussion boards.

0:56:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, before the internet it was.

0:56:10 - Jeff Jarvis
CompuServe, but it was all alpha-demerit menu-based, so you got a menu menu number five for sports and then baseball and what would show up there like you click number five for sports, and it would be text describing, or or or, a lot of discussion boards.

0:56:28 - Leo Laporte
Okay, this is uh, this is, this is. Uh, let's use net news groups.

0:56:33 - Paris Martineau
Let me see if I can find compus that was going to say I know that's AOL, I know AOL, yeah, yeah.

0:56:39 - Leo Laporte
This predates all of those, so when I was at Delphi. Delphi was another good one.

0:56:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, there's, we were the first one to provide consumer access to the internet, but only, you know, textual, uh with, uh, uh with um gopher and and ftp and all that. And and then, when murdoch bought it, uh, we had to have a gui, because everybody had a gui, a graphical user interface a graphical user interface.

0:57:08 - Leo Laporte
This is a good, well had it. This is compu serve 2000, which is their GUI-based version of CompuServe.

0:57:15 - Paris Martineau
I love the artistry on that video just there. That was good Look at that.

0:57:20 - Leo Laporte
Look at that. That's a beautiful thing there Because, remember, we also didn't have very high-res screens. We didn't have a lot of colors, no.

0:57:29 - Jeff Jarvis
So this stuff really couldn't look that good.

0:57:30 - Leo Laporte
Monochrome screens? Yeah.

0:57:32 - Paris Martineau
I mean, this looks great.

0:57:36 - Leo Laporte
This does look that monochrome screens.

0:57:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, this looks great. This windows, this is windows uh 98, so this is see it paul ryan condoleezza rice cnn camera woman assaulted. Those are the hot searches, the hot stories, kids.

0:57:45 - Leo Laporte
Here's the first internet commercial from youtube. You ready?

0:57:51 - Speaker 2
october 89 oh, this goes hard. If you own a computer, here's how to get the most out of it without buying lots of expensive software. Get ready to write down a phone number and watch this. Compuserve combines the power of your computer with the convenience of your telephone to bring you hundreds of online services, hundreds. Hundreds. And the AP newswire. It helps this is incredible graphic design make airline reservations and shop in the electronic mall.

0:58:23 - Speaker 6
It connects you with this was extremely hard to do back then and offers games that hit you against opponents around the country.

0:58:30 - Speaker 2
You get all this and more, and it's as simple as making a local phone call to get online with compuServe and over a half million people throughout North America. See your local computer store or call 1-800-522-4477.

0:58:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Look at the box they're going to send you. They're going to send you a whole damn box. First they send you the brochure, then they send you the box, so Paris.

0:58:51 - Leo Laporte
the other thing about this that blows people's minds is we were charged by the minute.

0:58:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it was so expensive internet use.

0:58:59 - Paris Martineau
Oh yes, and so so, and all of them.

0:59:02 - Jeff Jarvis
And so, uh, I remember when at&t world net broke that and decided to go to flat 1995, a month price age, that's what made the internet explode. Yeah, because no longer was there a ticket. Jeffrey, are you still on that?

0:59:16 - Leo Laporte
Internet thing, the clock was ticking.

0:59:17 - Jeff Jarvis
It cost us a fortune, oh yeah.

0:59:20 - Paris Martineau
How much did it cost? I'm trying to look it up, right now.

0:59:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I had a huge bill because I started playing a game called Colossal Cave, which was a text-based adventure. Right, right, I spent hours on CompuServe until I got the bill. Then, fortunately, my friend who worked at Atari said he could use his account, and so CompuServe costs $6 per hour at 300 baht, $12 per hour at 1,200 baht $0.13 per minute to access the service during the day and $0.10 per minute at night.

0:59:50 - Paris Martineau
Because again?

0:59:51 - Leo Laporte
this was surplus computer time that these big companies were. It was cheaper, you know. If you use it at night, well, we don't really need it that much. So just what a different world we lived in. Let's take a break because we now have commercials. We're going to come back to the present and the present. We have commercials, but we're going to do some actual news stories. We don't have to travel down memory lane.

1:00:19 - Paris Martineau
But Jeff and I wanted to tell the youngster a little bit about our child.

1:00:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Now I'm calculating how much 13 cents per minute would be in this show would cost. Are you also doing it with inflation? And, yeah, that's, that's what I did.

1:00:27 - Leo Laporte
1200 bits per second. You know the screen isn't going. It took a long time Right, so you're in a hurry and it's not moving fast.

1:00:37 - Paris Martineau
Okay, it's the same buying power as 40 cents a minute.

1:00:40 - Leo Laporte
No, which is Still expensive yeah $24 an hour. What yeah, that's more than minimum wage.

1:00:48 - Paris Martineau
That's crazy.

1:00:50 - Leo Laporte
You couldn't work at McDonald's and get online.

1:00:52 - Paris Martineau
If it cost me to be 24, if it was $24 an hour for me to be on the internet when I was a child. I would be. My family would be ruined.

1:01:01 - Jeff Jarvis
My Osborne one in 1981 cost me $1,700. Calculate that with inflation.

1:01:09 - Paris Martineau
It cost you what $1,700 in 1981.

1:01:12 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a big deal because it was the first computer you could buy under $2,000.

1:01:13 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it was the first computer you could buy on it $2,000. I mean, it was a full computer.

1:01:18 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a great deal. Yeah, CPM and my printer my printer, cause I I couldn't do a dot matrix cause editors would hate it, so I bought an impact printer neck that cost me $2,300.

1:01:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, apple laser, right laser in 1981 is the same as $6,100. Yeah, and when we say $7 a month to join club twit, you see what a deal.

1:01:45 - Paris Martineau
you see what a deal that is charging you by the minute, and this is a three hour podcast club twit, patrick Dillahunty says cost less than a penny a minute.

1:01:55 - Leo Laporte
Think about that, think about that think about that our show today brought to you by. We are no longer sending. In fact, in the old days when you sent email, you could only send from compu serve to compu serve or from mci mail to mci mail, from genie to genie. You couldn't send from compu serve to aol. They were separate systems. We've come a long way and email has gotten a lot better, but there are still people who are doing the old gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail thing.

You need fast mail, the leader in email privacy for more than 20 years, the only email service I've used for more than a decade. It really makes email better. I've said for a long time if you care about email, why aren't you paying a few bucks a month to get the best? Fastmail is as little as $3 a month and you get so much privacy. To begin with, they don't sell your name. They don't sell your information. There are no ads. In fact, with FastMail's email clients you can even hide the ads in the emails, which I like. I love FastMail. Their quick settings on their web-based email lets you choose new themes, switch between light and dark mode, change text size, generate masked email addresses, auto save context, set default reminders all of that without leaving your mailbox, and they have apps for iOS and Android, which are so good. That's all I use. I don't use the built-in apps anymore. I use FastMail's apps.

You can add or buy a domain with FastMail. Now, this is really important because if you are a business, you want your email domain not to be somebody else's business but your business name. You can go to FastMail. You can buy your business name as a domain. They'll set up all the records for you. It also does all of the important authentication that now is required by a lot of email providers DKIM and SPF and DMARC all of those things that make your mail go through to the big internet service providers. They set that up for you for free.

You pay for email with your privacy at Fastmail. Your data stays yours. You get better productivity features, oh, and you get support from real people. And it's as little as $3 a month. Very easy to move over. You can keep your old account, have the mail forwarded. You can fetch it with Fastmail or you can just download all the old email and import it into your inbox on Fastmail. Fastmail has incredible spam filters that you control if you want. They actually support a scripting language called SIV that I use to do very sophisticated email filtering, forwarding and spam control and, of course, no ads.

Fastmail works great. If you use Bitwarden or 1Password Bitwarden, our sponsor or 1Password Fastmail will automatically generate masked email addresses unique to each account. They go into your inbox but it's an additional layer of security that really works. I can go on and on. I better stop now. But let me tell you, fastmail is the better email service. It's the only one I use. And if you ask around, if you ask your really sophisticated friends, what do you use? They use Fastmail too. Trust me, try it now free for 30 days.

Fastmailcom slash twit F-A-S-T-M-A-I-L. Fastmailcom slash twit. Trust me, I've been around for a while, as you now know. Fastmail is the best. It is the email service you should be using. Fastmailcom slash twit. Uh, yeah, I have. In fact, I was just looking the other day. I have more than 20 email domains at fast. I put all my domains at fast mail. So whenever, when I have a website, the email from the you know you go to the website. You get the website. That's not handled by fast mail, but the email is. So if you email something to my website, it goes into my fast mail inbox, things like that. Just fantastic.

1:05:41 - Speaker 5
All right, let's see oh, you know what I've been dominating the conversation.

1:05:46 - Leo Laporte
What do you guys want to talk about?

1:05:48 - Paris Martineau
I have a very dumb question that we can do for a minute while jeff thinks of something we should actually talk about, which is uh, are you guys inbox zero sort of people? No, how many unread emails are on your phone right now open it up we can see who has the most because I might have the most. Yeah, uh, 26 307 27, 750, I'm just gonna bow out of this conversation right now.

1:06:17 - Leo Laporte
Because you know my inbox isn't the most important thing, but I probably. I don't know, I probably have a ton of them.

1:06:25 - Paris Martineau
Mine definitely isn't the most important thing.

1:06:29 - Leo Laporte
No, I have scripts that are moving mail around as it comes in it does all sorts of stuff.

1:06:34 - Paris Martineau
You don't even look at an email, it just goes somewhere, it does a, it comes in, it does all sorts of stuff.

1:06:36 - Leo Laporte
You don't even look at an email, it just goes somewhere. It does a lot of it. It does. That's exactly right. If there's a line in the email that says unsubscribe, I just put it in mailing lists and I never see it again. That's smart. I have a lot of filtering going on. That's one of the things I love about that civ language that Fastmail has. And so inbox no, I have a travel box, I have a VIP box. One thing I do. That's, I think, useful. If you're in my contact list, which you guys are, you automatically go to the important inbox. In fact, there's Jeff's email saying my CGPA analysis paper. What's that all about, Jeff?

1:07:18 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the California Journalism Preservation Act. I was commissioned by the California Chamber of Commerce to write a paper about it and I went deep into it. It's legislation that tries to get Google and Meta to pay per link that they link to news organizations, though you'd think that would be the opposite way around.

1:07:39 - Leo Laporte
That doesn't seem like something you would support right.

1:07:42 - Jeff Jarvis
I do not support it. I was against it Link text.

The Leichtenschutzrecht it goes back to the history of the Leichtenschutzrecht and it goes to the history of the antecedents here. Then it goes through the faults with the bill, of which there are many. Then I look and I was fascinated by this the history of news and copyright. News was not protected by copyright until 1909. I look at the history of consolidation in California media. The same day in 1962, chandler and Hearst each killed a paper so they could kill competition. Wow, collusion, they got away with it. I looked at the history of how inhospitable the newspaper industry has been to every new technology and competitor and then I propose a bunch of alternative solutions to this Medium says it's a 79-minute read.

1:08:32 - Leo Laporte
Wow.

1:08:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you publish it on?

1:08:34 - Leo Laporte
Medium.

1:08:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I did put it all on medium, but that's kind of ridiculous way to read it. I just put it there. Uh, neiman lab did an excerpt today of two of the sections, uh, but the whole thing is up on a pdf, so very impressive, very scholarly summary of a lot of footnotes how people have, and you know what I think.

1:08:52 - Leo Laporte
on the surface, if you're a legislator and you're not thinking hard about this, you you might say well, yeah, we've got to preserve journalism, and why shouldn't the companies that are benefiting nowadays from journalism be helping to support that?

1:09:06 - Jeff Jarvis
And you make a very good case. This is literally written by lobbyists for the newspaper and magazine industries. It serves the big old papers and california 18 of the top 25 newspapers are owned by hedge funds. Now, wow I don't see that's depressing that's depressing.

1:09:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that is grim yeah, in effect they're already dead. They're just dead papers walking oh, yeah, and so you know, if you're trying to support them, that's a noble cause, but you're not. They're already gone. You're supporting the hedge funds that are picking on the bones.

1:09:39 - Jeff Jarvis
This legislation cuts off anybody who doesn't already earn $100,000 a year. So you look at something like Afro LA, which got $15,000 last year, a wonderful woman who's working herself to the bone trying to support this and do work, uh, lots of, because it only pays for links, which is, of course, ironic. Uh, that you would think the link to the paper would be a gift to the paper, but instead they're trying to say no, you must pay us for this. Well, a lot of black newspapers and latino newspapers in the state still depend upon paper and so they wouldn't benefit us. It's terrible legislation, just just terrible. It made it through the assembly. It's going to the Senate. Illinois has a similar version. I testified before the Illinois Senate and hope that I put one stake in the heart of it there. And then there's a federal version of this called the JCPA the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, and so thank you for this chance to. But if you're all into this field, there's a lot of stuff in there, and actually the history stuff is actually fun.

1:10:40 - Leo Laporte
This is in Jeff's Medium column. It's called Wither News, the California Journalism Protection Act. This is not the way to save news, and actually you write an article about it as. Or is this the whole thing?

1:10:55 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the whole thing. I just put it there, yeah, because it's kind of weird, but medium, let me do it.

1:10:58 - Leo Laporte
So I thought okay if you want to read it, they should be able to read the pdf.

1:11:02 - Paris Martineau
If you go to the pdf is mentioned three times. I controlled f my favorite.

1:11:10 - Jeff Jarvis
So the very first footnote, I defined link tax and that was much fun to do. I liked writing that footnote nice.

1:11:16 - Paris Martineau
Do you want to read out your definition of link?

1:11:18 - Jeff Jarvis
tax. Read a part of it. Let's see here.

1:11:20 - Leo Laporte
Hold on one second, oh shoot if you wish, I could do it in a german accent. Would that make you happy?

1:11:27 - Jeff Jarvis
so legislation requiring platforms to pay news corporations is variously and colloquially called an ancillary copyright, link tax, snipp snippet tax, google tax or neighboring right. The laws differ in detail. I'll skip forward my favorite. Where is this? Here I used a phrase that I oh, where is it? Where is it? Oh, pedantry requires notice that, in California's case, oh, oh, I like that.

I'm proud of that and, of course, every state legislature in california, being the literate, intelligent readers that they are, will love that turn of a phrase and and immediately vote properly cjpa does not create a tax insofar as the funds demanded of the platforms will be paid directly to publishers, not through the state, insofar as the funds demanded of the platform is what you pay directly to publishers, not through the state, but anyway that is pedantic.

1:12:18 - Leo Laporte
So this is in effect a brief against the California Journalist Protection Act.

1:12:23 - Jeff Jarvis
So the full disclosure is I was commissioned to do this by the foundation that is associated with the California Chamber of Commerce. They did, in fact, have no input on the content or my conclusions. They were great to work out.

1:12:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad you did this why?

1:12:44 - Jeff Jarvis
where did inbox zero come?

1:12:45 - Paris Martineau
from this was some product um anal retentive jerks.

1:12:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That's where it came from people who have too little control over uh aspects of their day-to-day lives so they want to exert it over their inbox and derive pleasure from it.

1:12:55 - Speaker 6
I'm inbox zero and I take offense.

1:12:57 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and how much control do you have over your day-to-day life?

1:13:01 - Speaker 6
Because you let go of it too long ago and you cannot clean it up anymore, and that's the only reason you're not inbox zero.

1:13:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, you could declare email amnesty in which you say okay, I'm throwing everything out. If you sent me an email I haven't responded, consider your email deleted. Start over. People do that too. That's part of inbox. Zero is an email. Uh, what is it called? It's called an email, not amnesty there's email bankruptcy day yeah, email forgiveness day. When's that? That's not my forecast when is that email?

1:13:34 - Paris Martineau
debt forgiveness day, april 30th oh it's coming up. It started by reply all rip um. If there's an email response that you wanted to send, but you've been too anxious to send, you can send it on april 30th. Oh no, without any apologies or explanations oh, that's different, lapsed, that's.

1:13:55 - Leo Laporte
That's forgiveness for your email. It's forgiveness for your email debt yeah.

1:14:01 - Speaker 6
That's the time. You don't have to say sorry for the late reply.

1:14:03 - Paris Martineau
Yes, you just add a link to this page or use the provided email template.

1:14:09 - Leo Laporte
Dig out the email you've been avoiding. Write a reply, ignoring the amount of time that's lapsed. Add a link to this page. Is email debtforgivenessme, uh, and they even have a template for it.

1:14:24 - Paris Martineau
And then send and enjoy your anxiety free if the template just says please forgive me, that's it. That's the only thing that is there please.

1:14:33 - Leo Laporte
Please forgive me, but I'm saying Okay so let's ask this I have so much.

1:14:37 - Jeff Jarvis
What's your favorite prevaricating lie that you used to excuse yourself.

1:14:43 - Leo Laporte
It went into my spam folder, Paris. What do you use? The obvious choice, Sorry.

1:14:48 - Paris Martineau
I missed this. Oh, that's good, I didn't miss it. I saw it and I've been thinking about it ever since I just put miss it, I saw it and I've been thinking about it ever since.

I just put it off. I had to use that. Today, a great local theater production that I love reached out because I guess I had a duplicate purchase of a zine they're putting out and they were like oh, do you mean to purchase two or did you want one? I saw it immediately. It was like, oh yeah, I should reply to this. Didn't I replied today when they reminded me I didn't reply? Sorry, I missed. This is honest. I said sorry, I missed this, that's honest.

1:15:19 - Leo Laporte
You're not even.

1:15:20 - Jeff Jarvis
you're just apologizing and saying so tell me whether I should open up this email Message from the Los Angeles Police Department. New message from Sergeant Jennifer Quinn via LAPD message e-portal. Click here to read message.

1:15:33 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I'll tell you. You're probably going to be arrested.

1:15:35 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you why you should read that there is a very high probability that's a scam or phony. But I did get an email like that from I think it was the Pasadena Police Department and it was to inform me, as they are legally bound to do, that one of their inmates had issued a death threat against me and they just said you know, we just want to let you know, they emailed you. They have to, they're required to. They have to notify you?

1:15:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't they email it as an email? Why do they do this fake? And it's from.

1:16:04 - Leo Laporte
ApertureCVOcom. Okay that's the giveaway the wrong email address. Although it's easy to spoof an email address, I don't know why they do that. I don't know why they're too stupid to do it. Yeah, no. So sometimes you do get email from other jurisdictions.

1:16:26 - Jeff Jarvis
We got one that looked like an absolute scam called Florida Treasure Hunt.

1:16:28 - Paris Martineau
Oh no, that's real. That's real. We just got a check for lost money.

1:16:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, my father had a thousand bucks coming to him that's a bank account they couldn't track him down, or a debt that was no uncollectible, or that kind of thing. Yep, I just got email from myself saying I no longer use this as my email address.

Oh, I've had email from yourself yeah, oh, I changed the calendar appointment. Apparently it says this is the email I send out. If you try to email my Gmail I don't use this anymore Please ask me for my new address. If you're sending this email to anyone other than Leo Laporte of Petaluma, california, you may have an incorrect address. If, for example, you have inadvertently added a space in your address book, for instance gerald spacelaporte at gmailcom, this will come incorrectly to me at laporte at gmailcom. Replace the space with a period to fix the error. I get a lot of email in French intended for first name spacelaporte at gmailcom.

1:17:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that's nice of me. Who's the New York Times tech columnist? I'm suddenly forgetting his name.

1:17:36 - Paris Martineau
Kevin Roos Kevin.

1:17:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Roos. No, not Kevin, it was another one. There's many. Ezra Klein not a tech columnist just wrote a column that he's leaving Gmail and he sounds like your old co-host on Twit. I have a better email. I get no spam, oh. Dvorak dvorak.

1:17:56 - Paris Martineau
It's one of those horrible things where is it like supercomputer or whatever that you get? No, you get challenged.

1:18:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Everybody who sends email to him has.

1:18:02 - Paris Martineau
Oh god ezra stop no, no, no no stop.

1:18:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he wrote happy 20th anniversary gmail. I'm sorry I'm leaving you. Yeah, well, goodbye, ezra. I'm sorry, I'm not going to send you any more email. Um, so where does he drive to hay?

1:18:18 - Paris Martineau
oh, he's using, hay okay?

1:18:20 - Leo Laporte
oh, I know I'm. You know I have a connection to hay actually. Oh, one of my first employees, uh, dale dane golden, that's right uh, he's there no, no, he owned. Hey, heycom, oh, you're kidding me. And he always said this is my retirement.

He said I get many offers he said I get many offers for the domain but I'm not going to sell it. And just a couple of years ago, dav David Hanna-Meyer Hansen and Jason Freed the people who do Basecamp, who run Hay announced that they were going to start this new email service and that they had acquired Hay for a not inconsiderable sum. They didn't mention Dane, but I know who got it and I'm so happy that Dane cashed in how much do you think he got for Hay?

I hope it was a million dollars. I hope it was a million dollars.

1:19:17 - Paris Martineau
I hope it was a million dollars it should be.

1:19:19 - Leo Laporte
I mean, they really wanted. You know this is 37 Signals. They were planning a very, you know, big launch for this. This is the one that they got in a battle with Apple over, because Apple wouldn't let them put it in the App Store. Dhh is put it in the app store. Dhh is, you know, justly famous in the tech world for having invented ruby on rails but has turned into kind of a jerk. That's. This often happens when you get very wealthy, so I I wouldn't use hay just for that reason.

1:19:46 - Paris Martineau
I tried hay when it came out I tried, hay, when it came out as well, it didn't stick for me, yeah, fast mail, just use fast mail.

1:19:53 - Leo Laporte
Hay's a hundred dollars a year. If you want to use it to custom domain name, it's $12 per user per month. You know, Fastmail is a lot cheaper and a lot better, but Haye does have this. Does Haye do this challenge response thing?

1:20:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that's what it says. Maybe I'm being unfair to it, but I just got growly, yeah.

1:20:11 - Leo Laporte
He says oh, just growly, yeah, this is all he says oh, I used to use gmail, but now I'm above. He says the first time anyone sends you a message, it goes into what's called the screener and you have to white. See, there's too much work, I don't even want to do this. You have to whitelist or blackball the sender. If you blackball the center, you never see him again. It has another feature. I love a clean screen for replying to email so you can think and compose what that's just called expanding the email draft screen I don't want to have to go through my mail at all, let alone say keep this guy, don't keep this.

I just don't want to even look at it no, exactly my filters say if he's in your contact list, you know him. Put that in the important folder. That's good enough.

1:20:53 - Paris Martineau
Everybody else I'd pay a hundred dollars a year for someone to just police me and be like hey, don't look at that every time I try to open up hey, stop it.

1:21:02 - Leo Laporte
I would pay a hundred dollars a year for somebody not to let me look at instagram, especially in the middle of the night.

1:21:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's me, but with twittercom yeah, twitter's's hard it has.

1:21:15 - Leo Laporte
I know that.

1:21:16 - Paris Martineau
I could download something that would tell me how many times a day on my laptop I open up Twitter dot com. But I refuse to know that answer. It's too sad, and how?

1:21:26 - Speaker 6
many times have.

1:21:26 - Leo Laporte
I opened up Twitter dot com during the show and you don't want to. You don't want to, right, you don't want to do it.

1:21:30 - Paris Martineau
It's not good, it's not bringing me any joy it doesn't.

1:21:34 - Leo Laporte
It brings no one joy, although it did bring me a blue check. Oh, you're back. I'm back, baby. Now I want to be very clear.

1:21:43 - Paris Martineau
I did not pay for this but 2 500 of your followers did, and that's why you have a blue check yeah, I got rid of my blue check how do you get rid of yours? You can. You can turn it back. You can hide it you can hide it.

1:21:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, we're going to wow. I didn't get given a blue check.

1:21:59 - Paris Martineau
I'm too got too small of a following with my 17 000 followers. They're all too cool they have to be paid followers to count towards that 2500 yeah, you have to have a lot of 2500 followers who are paying for Twitter, right?

1:22:14 - Leo Laporte
I have actually Twitter Premium Plus. I have so many paid followers.

1:22:22 - Jeff Jarvis
You go to Settings and Privacy.

1:22:24 - Leo Laporte
Okay, okay, hold on Slow down and then you go to Settings. I can't even figure out how to get to Settings. Oh, here we go. Privacy and Safety yeah, now what Learn more about?

1:22:38 - Jeff Jarvis
privacy.

1:22:42 - Leo Laporte
That's all right. I don't mind having a blue check, because it's very clear.

1:22:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I got rid of it.

1:22:46 - Leo Laporte
On my profile it says I don't post here. Follow me on Mastodon.

1:22:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Go away. But when you do get rid of rid of it, it says well, uh, other things you do may let people know that you're the eight buck schmuck and pay like you don't write long posts but it's not an eight buck schmuck thing anymore, not anymore. No they've given it. Well, now the schmucks who pay for it are even schmuckier yeah, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about twitter.

1:23:12 - Leo Laporte
It does have a gravitational pull, doesn't it it?

1:23:17 - Paris Martineau
really does.

1:23:17 - Leo Laporte
It pulls you in even though you don't want to Do you post oh.

1:23:20 - Jeff Jarvis
I got it. I got it, I post you do.

1:23:22 - Leo Laporte
You go to premium, that's all right. I'm not going to do it, go ahead, say it. Let's tell your listeners. Tell your listeners.

1:23:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah. Then there's one that says premium, and then you go to verification and then you go to blue checkmark and then it says hide your blue checkmark, which I've turned on, which is, of course, a double negative and it says using some premium features could still reveal that you have an active subscription.

Well, that makes sense Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. Yeah, so I think they took away editing from me because I briefly could edit again, and now I can't again because I think I hide your blue check mark check mark will be hidden on your profile.

1:24:04 - Leo Laporte
That's funny that they have to do that. I think this. In a way, I see this as elon waving the white flag, or the blue flag, as it were, saying you know what? Um, this was a mistake to try to make everybody pay for their blue check. Blue checks add an important content to twitter. They make twitter what it is we want.

1:24:23 - Paris Martineau
Well, frankly, I think part of it is. I mean, actually I don't know if this is what elon thought, because I'm not sure if he's making wise business decisions or not. But one thing I've noticed as a result of blue checks being, up until now, exclusively dweebs who decided to pay for it to look popular is that the replies to every tweet that I actually want to read interesting replies to, are just garbage for the first 20 replies because blue checks get put on top. So I just scroll, scroll, scroll until I get to the no checks, and then there are the funny what he replies.

1:24:56 - Leo Laporte
I came to twittercom to see you have more energy than I do, I just I don't look at replies, you just don't use twitter. That's really that's there's nothing good ever came of using twitter, and I don't even mean in the elon musk era I mean ever that the fights we would get into, the, the outrage, the regret. Have you ever regretted a tweet? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Everybody.

1:25:23 - Speaker 6
But Leo, so many people got work from Twitter.

1:25:27 - Paris Martineau
I would say every job I've ever had is from Twitter. Really. As a journalist yes, in one way or another.

Really as a journalist? Yes, in one way or another. I mean, I guess my first job was from Connections. I made it an internship but then, after I got laid off at the outline, I got five job offers from making a good viral. I've been laid off tweet and a bunch of people reach out to me from that laid off tweet and a bunch of people reach out to me from that. Then, when I got laid off from Wired, I got eventually two job offers from making another good viral I've been laid off tweet one of which was the information.

1:26:03 - Leo Laporte
So your recommendation to everyone is use your Twitter account to announce that you've been laid off, and do it in a clever way.

1:26:12 - Paris Martineau
Clever way or a way. I mean I don't know if it would work that much, that well now, because the journalism industry is a hot garbage fire, um, and everyone's being laid off but. I think that you know, at the time it was easier to leverage that into potential job offers. I don't know, though I still feel compelled to post. I need to be back on Blue Sky some more.

1:26:35 - Speaker 6
I like Blue Sky as well. Twitter was also the main marketing wing for any independent artist. Have you gotten jobs, benito, through Twitter? Not jobs, but that's where I would pitch any of my own personal projects and stuff like that, and that's where I would get traffic from that.

1:26:50 - Leo Laporte
I certainly did in the early days. I got twitter in 2006 and uh used it a lot uh in the early days, but I also got in a lot of trouble there. I got in twitter feuds with a number of people, including devorak um, and I just I kind of regret that was not hard to do no, it's very.

That's the thing. Twitter, it's easy to get in a fight on Twitter. It promotes that kind of thing, right, all right. Moving on Any other Twitter news, I got some TikTok news. Oh yeah, there was something in here.

1:27:29 - Jeff Jarvis
We had some Twitter news. We had some musky news. What was it? So Twitter's clumsy pivot to Xcom is a gift to phishers? I didn't understand this, but I figured you could in a second my 87.

1:27:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to guess it has to do with domain squatting and domains that sound like xcom. Let's see. On April 9th, Twitter began automatically modifying the links that mentioned twittercom to readxcom. Oh, that's terrible.

1:28:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, so explain why.

1:28:06 - Leo Laporte
But over the 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links. So if you wrote a link that is FEDETwittercom, twitter reforms that to FEDEXcom as in.

FedEx and suddenly that link looks real. At least 60 domain names have been registered, according to Krebs, over the past two days for domains that end in Twittercom, although he says research so far shows a majority of those registered have been done so defensively to keep people. I probably let me think Is there anything? Is there an X? Are you Paris X, martin? No, no, are you a twit X? I think we're all right. I think we're all right, pretty good.

But for instance, if you're Carfax, you might want to register C-A-R-F-A. Twittercom so that somebody doesn't accidentally click Carfax and get to a bad site. Okay now, so he posted this April 10th. Brian Krebs did, he says, update. It appears Twitter has realized the problem and corrected it, so they don't do it anymore. But boy, that just shows you how powerful a platform can be with just a little simple change. And people are so good about gaming the internet. Other Elon stories he has announced that they will unveil their robo-taxi August 8th, this completely coincidentally coinciding to the sudden plummeting drop in tesla's market price on the stock market. I think uh, the price, by the way, the shares did go up. That's when he announced the robo taxi. He has been literally promising this since 2016, actually 2015. I've got a question for you guys.

1:30:15 - Paris Martineau
If you saw an email that included the word delve, what would you think?

1:30:23 - Leo Laporte
Are you going to start this delve thing now? Okay, what do you?

1:30:28 - Paris Martineau
guys think of this. Oh, mr, I'm not on Twitter. You know the delve thing.

1:30:32 - Leo Laporte
I only peripherally know about the delve thing jeff, do you use the word delve?

1:30:38 - Paris Martineau
do you think it's suspicious to use the word delve?

1:30:40 - Jeff Jarvis
no, don't not for me, because I'm I'm a language snob.

1:30:43 - Paris Martineau
I love I'm always talking about how I delve into stuff. What, what are the.

1:30:48 - Leo Laporte
What are the seven dwarves do when they dig in on mine? They, they delve.

1:30:52 - Paris Martineau
They delve deep.

1:30:54 - Leo Laporte
So why did what happened?

1:30:55 - Paris Martineau
Disagrees. Paul Graham a couple days ago tweeted someone sent me a cold email proposing a novel project. Then I noticed it used the word delve and everybody in the replies is like oh, delve is a classic sign that someone's using chat GP. No real person uses the word delve and I am just baffled by this. I never thought that normal words could be co-opted into some sign of roboticism paul graham does the phrase pedantry would require?

1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
yeah, it sounds like a chat. Gpt wrote that. Actually I didn't want to say anything but, uh, paul graham did put the graph up that shows that the papers would delve in the title or abstract suddenly went rose precipitously in 2022, coinciding with the advent of chat, gpt. Um, I mean, it's still only 0.793 percent of papers. I don't know if that's statistically yeah, I don't know.

1:32:03 - Speaker 6
It's a pretty small point though, like if a lot of people use the word, then chat gpt will use the word, right right, oh, that's a good point.

1:32:10 - Leo Laporte
Where did it learn that word? There is, by the way, a company called delve. I guess he didn't fund it. That's why I know this, by the way, a company called Delve. I guess he didn't fund it. That's why I know this, by the way, because I am a Paul Graham stan.

1:32:20 - Paris Martineau
Oh, you're a Graham head.

1:32:22 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't agree with everything he says, but a lot of his writing is great. Lately he's been a little weird. But everybody's been red pills, so you're anti-Delve. No, but I understand what he's looking for. If you search for the phrase, uh, what is it as? What is it as an artificial?

1:32:42 - Paris Martineau
intelligence, uh, or as a lot, no, as a large language model, language model if you search for that in amazon reviews, you will suddenly realize or, or academic papers. The people are being very lazy about including chat gpt but I do think it's kind of interesting the way that our reaction to the adoption of chat gpt is causing paranoia around well, yeah completely normal words like I mean even looking into the replies of this.

Uh, you're learning a lot about me in this episode, which is that I spend a lot of time reading replies to stuff. Uh, you have, like some of these tweets that have like a thousand plus likes, say other suspicious, supposedly suspicious, chat, gpt words like safeguard, robust, demystify in this digital world. See also foster, embark, empower, empower, harness, unlock, unleash and crucial All of these are words I use regularly.

1:33:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, am I a robot. It's just a signal right, it wouldn't be conclusive, but it's a signal and it's something to pay attention to.

He shouldn't, If you use paradigm you get built, but this is a really good example of why Twitter is a pain in the ass, because he said it as if it's a hard and fast rule. I'm sure it isn't. Well, it's very him, yeah, but it's also how people write on twitter, because it stimulates. You know, all this agita which isn't people interpret as engagement. But I think this is the problem with twitter all that engagement is just hot air. It's very annoying. You've wasted a lot of time, paris, on this subject. Cromulent, we should just all be using cromulent.

Cromulent's a very good word that I don't believe. Chatgpt has discovered. Yet I think you're safe. We use big words on this show frequently. Yeah, like delve. Yeah, we do.

1:34:34 - Paris Martineau
And Gutenberg yeah Like delve. Yeah we do and. Gutenberg yeah, it's a huge word Pedantry, pedantry.

1:34:39 - Leo Laporte
Pedantry. Honestly, if somebody put Gutenberg in their proposal to my venture capital fund, I would refuse them out of hand as well, hey, mm-hmm. I just think Twitter has always to some degree, and especially now, played upon our worst impulses as humans that this isn't the place we should be spending time.

1:35:05 - Jeff Jarvis
It depends on who you're talking to. It's not like there's one Twitter. I have people on Twitter I quite like still.

1:35:13 - Leo Laporte
Do you ever go to the For you tab, or are you always? I'm off on the for you tab.

1:35:18 - Paris Martineau
Unfortunately, even though I hate it, I'm just addicted. I don't know. I tweeted the other day uh, path of totality would be a beautiful name for a baby girl, and I'm really proud of that one. How was your guys's eclipse experience? I'm sorry, we need to talk about news.

1:35:35 - Leo Laporte
Eclipse experience. I had a wonderful eclipse experience watching CNN.

1:35:40 - Paris Martineau
You didn't even go outside for the eclipse.

1:35:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, I did, but we weren't getting much of it.

1:35:44 - Jeff Jarvis
You got much more of it. You got like 10%.

1:35:46 - Leo Laporte
But what I did? I poked a little hole in a shoebox and I put it on my head and I watched this little, tiny little light with a crescent out of it for about a second and they said nice eclipse. And I went back in. You couldn't see anything. It was too bright because it was such a small sliver of it, so you had to use some other way.

1:36:06 - Paris Martineau
I was at the office, which is in Flatiron, and we all, our entire building, went up on the roof which none of us knew we had access to.

1:36:15 - Leo Laporte
I guess we technically don't. Are you in the flat iron building? Not in the flat iron building but kind of like a flat iron district okay yeah, um, and it was gorgeous up there and we everybody, hung out. Did you get totality where you were in the city?

1:36:28 - Paris Martineau
no, no, no I wish I had gone to the totality. People said it was phenomenal.

1:36:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I was looking down. I was at a meeting at the Canadian Consulate about the future of journalism. Oh. Of course you were yeah, and so we all looked down on the street and it was fun to see the people down on the street all looking up. Yeah, it reminded me of that great Life magazine picture of the 3D. Life magazine picture of the 3D. Before we got on the air, I told Paris my favorite eclipse tweet. Do you want to say it, Paris BuzzFeed.

1:37:06 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that was an earthquake tweet. I'm sorry, earthquake tweet Other you know there was an earthquake in New York Other thing Other. You know, there was an earthquake in New York and Jeff's favorite earthquake tweet was a BuzzFeed. Former BuzzFeed news reporter, Julia Reinstein, as well as one other colleague, had said oh, if BuzzFeed news was still around today, I would have been on the phone interviewing the man who had his vasectomy interrupted by the New York City earthquake right now.

1:37:38 - Jeff Jarvis
And I do think that that is an important look into what we're missing. So I'm 12 miles away from the epicenter. We really felt it. Did you feel it? Oh, very much felt it, oh yeah.

1:37:46 - Paris Martineau
I've realized. The earthquakes in New York City have made me realize that I think I'm an idiot or I'm just like unobservant, because I didn't notice either of them at all.

1:37:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Idiot or I'm just like unobservant because I didn't notice either of them at all.

1:37:57 - Paris Martineau
I was walking around something about the grocery store with the first one while listening to a podcast, so I didn't notice it whatsoever.

1:38:02 - Jeff Jarvis
During the aftershock I was at home, also listening to a podcast so after it happened in the grocery store, did people like look at you strange because you're not noticing, or were they running out?

1:38:11 - Paris Martineau
no, then I walked into the line and everybody was kind of chatting around it and so I was like oh, and I opened my phone and had like 25 texts about the earthquake. So I was like, did you guys feel an? Earthquake and some guy in a butcher's like uh, uh, costume or apron. What came out? And he was like, yeah, I ran up from the back because all the meat was shaking wow yeah, what's the biggest?

1:38:36 - Leo Laporte
earthquake you've been through, leo. Uh, oh gosh, this is you. You've been in california in earthquakes, haven't you, jeff?

1:38:43 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, the biggest one. I forget how big it was, but were you here in 89? I was on, uh, no no I left in 81. Okay, um, I was on a muni bus when it was on, so you never got to notice you wouldn, you wouldn't notice on a bus. Yeah, Every pothole has a Richter scale to it.

1:38:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're kind of blasé about earthquakes. We haven't had a bad one since 89, so we really probably do, and I hate to say it, but so is Manhattan.

1:39:10 - Paris Martineau
Not Brooklyn, though we're good.

1:39:12 - Leo Laporte
Oh really.

1:39:13 - Jeff Jarvis
You're not on the fault the river will stop it yeah, the river will stop it, sure, yeah, yeah, that's how it works, right by the way, I wanted, if you have access to your twitter, I think I think lisa must have put up a picture of a uh eclipse party that she was invited to oh, really, uh.

1:39:29 - Leo Laporte
Lisa lisa de la porte, my wife you mean lisa?

1:39:33 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, yes, yes, it abused me.

1:39:35 - Leo Laporte
Her pinned tweet right now this is it, the earthquake party I think so it looks like those.

1:39:41 - Jeff Jarvis
All look like twit fans. What is?

1:39:44 - Speaker 6
we're gonna stream live from the report house oh, yeah, probably shutterstock that's where uh?

1:39:50 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah yeah, okay but that's not my image of twit fans yeah all women?

1:39:58 - Paris Martineau
yeah for one thing. No, there's two guys.

1:40:00 - Leo Laporte
There's three guys. It's equal, it's three and three. Well, well, still laughable. Yeah, actually it looks like ai, because that popcorn is definitely look at that popcorn yeah, yeah, I think it's ai probably you think so yeah definitely zoom in on that popcorn. She's been, she's been using ai lately, oh yeah look at the guy, oh yeah you're right face zoom in on it.

1:40:21 - Speaker 5
Oh jesus, now that's a twit fan that's terrible oh, don't be mean now also whose arm is that I'm a twit fan there's just a random arm sticking up there.

1:40:36 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's his, it's definitely not hers.

1:40:38 - Speaker 6
What's the girl in the blue dress holding?

1:40:40 - Leo Laporte
uh, nothing it, it ends look at the left hand it ends yeah oh, in fact, all the beer bottles are distorted, oh my god, this is the truth though about ai stuff. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny very well, right no, it doesn't, it's on the surface it looks good, it looks real, but uh, then you don't you know, you don't really pay attention, these releases, friends.

Yeah uh, yeah, I don't use twitter, uh, but some people I know do, including you two. Uh, let's see. Oh, I was gonna say the robo-taxi, but the moment has passed. San Francisco Jazz Remember Amazon, did we talk about this last week has abandoned. Just Walk Out, it turns out that it was 1,000 people in the Philippines or somewhere who were looking at every single purchase to make sure it was correct.

1:41:33 - Speaker 6
India.

1:41:34 - Leo Laporte
India. Sorry, benito, I didn't mean to smirch the philippines answers your phone calls.

The philippines are the phone calls and the indians are the examining the photos. Okay, well, the giants, the san francisco baseball giants, have decided just walk in is their new thing. The san francisco chronicles headline have a. Theants have a new, unnerving way to skip the security line at Oracle Park. You use the Giants app, you give it your selfie and then you can just walk right in. It's called the Go Ahead Entry Program and as you walk up to the gates you'll see it'll get. See that big eye that al 2000i will take your picture and then put a big green thing that says go ahead, you've got three tickets, enjoy the game. Let's walk right in. They don't say what they're going to do with the face recognition information that they have. This is something a pilot program Major League Baseball's trying. Four other stadiums are also going to use that. So Amazon abandons just walk in, but the Giants and other baseball teams just walk in, just walk in.

1:42:48 - Jeff Jarvis
So would you register your face with that?

1:42:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know, when you come in, I would not. I feel like you know they take your picture now when you come into the country, right, right they've done that for a long time.

1:42:58 - Paris Martineau
I always I mean, I don't know, this is a silly point to quibble over, because I do, um, global entry, so they definitely have my face scan and everything. When I, when I go in to do my passport thing, they don't even ask me for a passport, they just take a photo of my face and pull up my information and it's great, isn't it?

1:43:17 - Speaker 2
Still, I mean it's great, isn't it wonderful? It is great.

1:43:19 - Paris Martineau
I do enjoy that part, but still, whenever I go to like a domestic flight and Delta wants to use facial recognition to let me go through, I opt out every time?

1:43:28 - Leo Laporte
Do you Do? They give you a. What do? They do.

1:43:32 - Paris Martineau
The first time I did it. Yes, they gave me. It was on a flight to France like five years ago and they wouldn't let me opt out. I almost got like removed from the airport and then I eventually complied and did it so that I could go to France. But since then I haven't had any issues opting out.

1:43:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they've been clearly informed that they cannot do that you can do the same at customs can say no. No, I don't want you to take your picture, but I don't want to find out what the border patrol does if you don't let them take your picture.

They also say, they that they destroy it as soon as they've made the match with your passport. Uh, that they, they don't keep the pictures. I don't believe it though, when I, when people say we don't keep the pictures, you know, I I mean, I guess the government doesn't lie, but I guess the government's never told lie, they've never been duplicitous, they've never done anything in torward with our data, oh no of course not they protect the rights of all americans right, that's their job.

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1:46:38 - Paris Martineau
I've got a story I want to talk about.

1:46:39 - Leo Laporte
Yes, man the chat.

1:46:41 - Paris Martineau
If you are around Washington Square Park and you walk into a small Japanese fried chicken shop called Santan Chicken, you might see, you know, a kiosk touchscreen and there's a cashier there to take your order. But it's not like a normal cashier which would be there in the human flesh and meat spate. It's a cashier on Zoom, a woman from the Philippines who has been hired to be the virtual cashier of this small chicken shop.

1:47:12 - Leo Laporte
This story from 404 Media jules roscoe wow wow, so is there nobody there?

1:47:20 - Paris Martineau
I think that there's someone back there making the chicken, I assume, but I love this photo of the woman on the zoom screen who looks incredibly bored hey, but she has a ZoomZoom chicken background there.

1:47:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that's kind of cool. I mean, it's a little basic, but have you been to this shop?

1:47:42 - Paris Martineau
I haven't. This is a new. I mean, this wasn't here when I went to college at NYU, but I thought it was quite interesting that they have a NYU. Nyu student told uh 404 media that one time when she was there there was both an in-person and a zoom cashier well they were.

1:48:02 - Leo Laporte
Training is also very interesting probably oh, wait a minute. Look at this. They, even on the in the picture here on on the x from brett goldstein, have the meeting id and the passcode for the Zoom call. If you get disconnected, you can get back in so you can get your soda pop. Well, good for her. I hope they're paying her. Well, I doubt it. It could easily be an AI, though. Right, that's the next step.

1:48:33 - Paris Martineau
It could easily be an AI though. Right, I mean, that's the next step. Oh, she said that the cashiers work through. This is a manager at the chicken shop from 444 Media. The manager said that the cashiers work through a different company based in the Philippines, which has a 12-hour time difference to New York and usually changes shifts around 3 pm. The cashier confirmed that she was in the Philippines, where she said that it was 1 am oh wow, but you know, maybe she wants to work late at night, you know?

1:49:02 - Speaker 6
well, actually that's a very big industry in the philippines of uh you know, call centers and stuff like that. So like half of the working age population lives on american time zone oh, that's interesting.

1:49:11 - Leo Laporte
Interesting when you go back there is it like bustling at 2 in the morning as they get off.

1:49:15 - Speaker 6
Very much so yeah, how interesting.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
Wow. Now I presume that the pay is lower in the Philippines. Let me ask you, benito, I mean, obviously it's a lot lower, but is it sufficient if you're living in the Philippines, or are they getting taken advantage of do?

1:49:32 - Speaker 6
you think. Well, it really depends, because it sounds like these people are working for a company, a local company, and not being paid by the American company. The American company outsources this contract to a company in the Philippines, who then hires them.

1:49:44 - Leo Laporte
Right.

1:49:44 - Speaker 6
So I'm guessing they're not getting paid very much.

1:49:47 - Leo Laporte
And they take the job because there's nothing else they can do.

1:49:50 - Speaker 6
Mostly yeah, and we speak very good English in the Philippines.

1:49:53 - Leo Laporte
Right, yeah, I mean, if you go on a cruise, it's the dirty little secret of almost all cruise lines that it's staffed by Filipinos and Asians of other stripes where they can pay them a lot less. But they're willing to do the job and the job is tough. They work 12-hour days, sometimes without a day off, seven days a week, and they often have to sign long contracts three, four, six months of seven-day work weeks.

1:50:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I have to recommend a piece to you. It's Gary Steingart who I've met. Who's just really wonderful.

1:50:25 - Leo Laporte
I've read it. It was hysterical.

1:50:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, have you read this, Paris? No. It's like crying myself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship ever by gary steinberg.

1:50:34 - Leo Laporte
I saw it is really, you know, gary, because I I was. I really enjoyed reading it. Um, he decided he was, I guess, forced to go on the inaugural voyage of the largest and most appallingly disgusting cruise ship in the world, the Icon of the Seas. I actually took Lisa and her son on its predecessor, the Anthem of the Seas, and, to my deep regret, I understand why he cried himself to sleep Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas.

1:51:10 - Jeff Jarvis
It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies. Like Istanbul had been designed by idiots, it's vibrant.

Oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks. The only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage. By the time he did it, uh, it was out of decent rooms at a decent price. So he had to get a suite at nineteen thousand dollars. But the suite had no windows. It didn't face in.

1:51:54 - Leo Laporte
It didn't face in, it faced out. I mean, it didn't face out, it faced in. It faced the central park, because in the middle of this behemoth is a park, and rooms face into this. So here you are at this, in the ocean. At least, the beauty of a cruise, from my point of view, is you are on the ocean, but in this case your view is not of the ocean but of of people shopping I guess, yeah, if you're on the biggest cruise ship in the world, a lot of the rooms are going to be on the inside of the cruise ship wild, this is there so one of the characters

1:52:27 - Jeff Jarvis
he talks about the philippines. One of the characters, one of the people who has to work. There is a character who uh, at deck 15 by the wash wash man buffet mr washy washy or, according to his name tag, neil burt of the philippines. He is dressed as a taco. On other occasions I've seen him dressed as a burger. Mr washy washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant, english washy washy, wash your hands, washy washy they a lot of these ships because norovirus is a real problem on them.

1:52:59 - Leo Laporte
Uh, force you to wash before you eat and uh sinks outside the yeah, but he's probably got one of the better jobs on the ship. At least all he has to do is stand around and dance and sing think about what that costume smells like, though. Well, she's got to have a clean costume. People love it. I'm not going to knock it if you love it, but it was a very funny piece and, by the way, in the spirit of an earlier piece, a very famous piece by David Foster David.

1:53:31 - Paris Martineau
Foster.

1:53:31 - Leo Laporte
Wallace, your favorite.

1:53:33 - Paris Martineau
A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.

1:53:35 - Jeff Jarvis
You know it, but it's really in the spirit of Mark Twain in his first book. Oh really.

1:53:40 - Leo Laporte
What was his first book?

1:53:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, he went.

1:53:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, something abroad, right.

1:53:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, save me chat room save me. You're surely the innocent sabra, yeah yeah I use this website called google.

1:54:00 - Paris Martineau
I don't know if you guys have heard it.

1:54:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It's actually you search for. I was not.

1:54:03 - Paris Martineau
It's a good mark twain first book yeah, oh, thank you.

1:54:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, very good. Yeah, um, it's very good book. You know, it's easy to put down that kind of thing. If if people enjoy it all, more power to them absolutely.

1:54:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh. Well, the funny thing about the story, too, is the people who make a life of it, and you know like I'm a frequent flyer on united. They're frequent cruisers and they get um certain privileges oh yeah, we get good stuff.

1:54:30 - Leo Laporte
Frequent cruisers. Yeah yeah, here's from Conde Nast. There was an article about a guy who lives on a cruise ship.

1:54:41 - Paris Martineau
Fresh injection of ketamine? Yeah, really.

1:54:44 - Leo Laporte
Frequent cruiser. I would live on a cruise ship, honestly, if I had the money. Oh, it's nice, it's pleasant, it's a good life. They make your bed for you, they feed you.

1:54:56 - Paris Martineau
Wasn't there a lot of issues with the cruise ship that a bunch of people bought?

1:55:00 - Jeff Jarvis
They did. That was supposed to sail forever. Yes, and it hasn't sailed yet it was supposed to sail for a full year or something.

1:55:05 - Leo Laporte
It has yet to sail.

1:55:06 - Jeff Jarvis
And then the ship wasn't up to snuff.

1:55:08 - Leo Laporte
Right, right. I almost hesitate to even mention this, but the House and the Senate are actually, according to the Washington Post, nearing a deal on a landmark online privacy bill. How is that possible, I know?

1:55:26 - Paris Martineau
And will it pass A good online?

1:55:28 - Jeff Jarvis
privacy bill or a bad online privacy bill that story doesn't say much about it, but there's some more details down at line 89.

1:55:36 - Leo Laporte
The thing I noticed, even in that article from the Washington Post, is it supersedes all state bills.

1:55:43 - Jeff Jarvis
State that's the key.

1:55:44 - Leo Laporte
And we have quite a few, I think, pretty good state privacy bills, including the CCPA here in California, including the CCPA here in California. And, if you ask me, the whole idea about this federal law is to get rid of the things that companies don't like about the state laws. Of course companies don't like a hodgepodge of regulations, right.

1:56:07 - Jeff Jarvis
No, nobody does, because then it just messes up. Right Europe did the same thing with the Digital Services Act and so on. They wanted a uniformity across the continent Makes it easier to operate. You think we could do that in one country, but we can't.

1:56:21 - Leo Laporte
Maria Cantwell and McMorris Rogers proposing it left and right on the aisle. It would cover minors. Data minimization but not the the age restrictions, which I think are a real problem with the cosa uh bills oh, it's awful, awful civil rights protections.

1:56:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Opt out for ai. I'm not sure that that just sounds like that's just of the minute. Let's we gotta throw ai into this. Yeah, what do we do? Let them opt out. Okay, also the.

1:56:57 - Leo Laporte
FTC's proposed rulemaking on commercial surveillance and data security would be terminated by this bill. So I think this is one where you really want to look very carefully.

1:57:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It's private right of action, which means people can sue, but they're going to limit that.

1:57:14 - Paris Martineau
The enforcement they can sue for what?

1:57:16 - Jeff Jarvis
privacy violations.

1:57:18 - Leo Laporte
The enforcement is private citizens suing.

1:57:24 - Jeff Jarvis
There's no two-year delay before lawsuits can be filed, as there was. Plaintiffs do not have to first give the FTC, their state AG, an opportunity to be the ones to bring the case. The right to cure can last for 30 days, not 45. So, yeah, this is actually worse.

1:57:40 - Leo Laporte
Here's a story, I think from you paris instagram made more money than youtube in early 2022. This came out of discovery in the ftc's antitrust lawsuit and in fact generated 30 percent of meta's revenue in early 2022. Instant I'm not I think I'm not surprised I spend so much money on instagram ads yeah, I'm not surprised either.

1:58:05 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't spend any money on instagram ads ever. I mean, I don't spend any money on ads typically you don't buy seaweed sweaters and bamboo underwear.

1:58:15 - Leo Laporte
And what no, if I?

1:58:17 - Paris Martineau
see an ad. I will make a conscious note of it. I will not click on it and then I will wait on a later date, a different device in a private browsing window, and look at myself. I don't want, I don't, I don't know. I don't like the idea of the advertiser knowing that it worked. I know that this is illogical, but it's how I feel.

1:58:41 - Leo Laporte
If you're going to buy it, buy it through Insta. At least give them the credit.

1:58:46 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. I don't know.

1:58:51 - Leo Laporte
If you walk through my house it is full of stuff we bought on Instagram. What have you bought recently from Instagram?

1:58:54 - Paris Martineau
You know what, Leo? It could be a good exercise. You can open up your phone and see your most recently clicked ads. Can open up your phone and see your most recently clicked ads.

1:59:05 - Leo Laporte
Can you really, yes, you can. Where uh let?

1:59:06 - Paris Martineau
me. Is it in instagram or is it a? It is in instagram.

1:59:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I can't wait, I could tell you all the stuff I bought recently and then you could just search ad activity.

1:59:13 - Paris Martineau
I believe is what it is yeah, recent ad activity.

1:59:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm so excited. Recent activity. It's in the settings, is it in the profile and it will show you recently.

1:59:24 - Paris Martineau
So if you, just if you go to settings, there's a search bar at the top and search ad activity. I mean, by the time I typed ad A, it popped up.

1:59:36 - Leo Laporte
Okay, okay, I'm just. This is exciting for me because I know it's probably going to be worse than I. Even recent ad activity and then go.

1:59:46 - Paris Martineau
It says recently clicked story ads.

1:59:48 - Jeff Jarvis
This is what we love about leo he's willing to humiliate himself uh, explore a journey cruises.

1:59:55 - Paris Martineau
Okay, oh, there's only one instagram story ad that you've clicked on up there. That's very funny.

2:00:02 - Leo Laporte
Twillery, twillery, what is Twillery?

2:00:04 - Paris Martineau
What is that?

2:00:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's shirts. None of these have I purchased yet, so here's. Oh, this is private flights to LA. No one gets soldered by.

2:00:16 - Paris Martineau
So these are just all of the ads you've seen. I clicked these, or are these ads I've seen? No, no, these are ads you've seen yeah, not that I clicked perfect travel shoes.

2:00:26 - Leo Laporte
Here's some more shirts. Here's a disgusting frozen coffee pod. I know I didn't click on that. Well, actually I might have. Oh, I did buy this. This is the sprouting company seed sprouters, soouters, so I did buy that.

2:00:41 - Paris Martineau
What does protein mix mean for the seed sprout?

2:00:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh it's just their little green things. So you have the Seed Sprouter. See, oh, you should get this. This would be just right for your Brooklyn apartment. So you have the Seed Sprouter and in four or five days you're going to get little microgreens. And then you get subscription bags of microgreens.

2:00:59 - Paris Martineau
Oh you are such a schmuck.

2:01:01 - Leo Laporte
Why couldn't I just buy microgreens? Oh, because they don't stay fresh. You don't want to buy microgreens in the store. They're too old. You want freshly grown microgreens. Right now I'm doing the salad mix. Last week it was the broccoli mix. I haven't tried the protein mix, so actually that was a good Instagram purchase.

2:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you subscribe to it? Oh, hell, yeah, I don't know who cares, it's just money, I can't take it with me.

2:01:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is my new toothbrush. This is the electric toothbrush. You?

2:01:26 - Paris Martineau
can repair. This is like the $150 toothbrush you got right?

2:01:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, but all electric toothbrushes are expensive. This one's the one you should get next time, because it's connected, right? No, it's not connected.

2:01:37 - Paris Martineau
It's got Bluetooth right.

2:01:38 - Leo Laporte
No, no, that's the thing I like about it.

2:01:41 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what you paid more for an hour. It's not to be connected. It's $116. It's repairable.

2:01:45 - Leo Laporte
It's an aluminum body that can be repaired. So it's got a screw and you can send it back to them, and the heads are recyclable. They're made out of cornstarch, so that was good here's my here's my seaweed sweater. This is what got me is harvesting did you really get a seaweed?

2:02:05 - Paris Martineau
yeah?

2:02:06 - Leo Laporte
it's a nice sweater. I like it. It's using uh does it smell like seaweed. No, no, no, it's a fiber made out of the smells like leo it smells like me now. Yeah, no, it's very good, it makes it's it's sea cell. It's a well-known, not? Oh, I love these shoes, the birchberry shoes, with room for your toes.

2:02:22 - Paris Martineau
I got two pairs of those with room for your toes do you have? Are you having issues with your toes not fitting in shoes?

2:02:29 - Jeff Jarvis
well, no, there are no tie shoelaces leo there's no tie.

2:02:33 - Paris Martineau
Are you a toddler?

2:02:38 - Leo Laporte
I was at the dentist the other day. He said said nice shoes, baby. He was mocking me, I don't know. The binge watch for more intimacy, omg yes, this is weird. I didn't do that one. I didn't do that one. Oh, I did do this one, to my great regret. This is pork from Spain. Do not order pork from Spain. The Wagyu of pork yeah, it's the same. It's the same as pork you'd get locally. It tastes exactly. I thought, oh, I love Spanish, jamon jamon ibérico.

It's just expensive because they ship it from Spain. It's fine, it's okay. I'm actually right now in my sous vide. I've got some spare ribs that have been Okay. Here's a little tip. Right now in my sous vide, I've got some spare ribs that have been Okay. Here's a little tip. If you get ribs and you say, oh, I want some ribs tonight for dinner, no, you can't do that. They go in the sous vide 36 hours before you can eat them. So I have some ribs that have been in the sous vide since day before yesterday. We're going to have those tonight. Those are going to be good and those are from Spain. We'll see if they're good. I don't know. Are they from this company? Yeah, campo grande. Yep, see, all right, he's in spain, he's eating pork. Um, that was, that was. I didn't. Oh, I did get this this. You saw this. This is the thermometer that measures the temperature.

2:03:56 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we did, and it works it's good, I like it I'm glad I bought it. Is it really game changing? Yeah?

2:04:01 - Leo Laporte
sort of Well, no, not really, but it does measure all the different temperatures, so you know, and it goes beep when it's the right temperature. That's nice. So I bought a few of these. Yeah, I don't know what this is. It's the binge watch for more intimacy. So these aren't things I know popular package for couples.

2:04:20 - Paris Martineau
They could be, I think because I think it's stuff I saw ads.

2:04:24 - Leo Laporte
It's stuff that you watched for like more than a second oh, is it like mine are all things like that too, they're just like, uh, you paused on it, but you didn't necessarily click it yeah well, thank you, meta, for at least telling me, but that is a fraction of what lisa got me knives from instagram for christmas uh.

2:04:43 - Paris Martineau
I'm wearing underwear from instagram made out of bamboo uh so how much of that 30 revenue was all you leah probably consider a considerable amount of all the ad platforms, I shouldn't say this ours works the best.

2:05:00 - Leo Laporte
Next best instagram ads are very effective, except for this one here who goes to the site independently of instagram because she doesn't want them to get any credit there, I will say I've been called out by looking at my own.

2:05:15 - Paris Martineau
There are a couple of instagram story ads. I've clicked, I haven't. I don't know if I've bought anything.

2:05:19 - Jeff Jarvis
I always open it on a separate tab and whatnot but look at it this way if it's, if it's pay-per-click, then you're costing, that's true, yeah, the advertiser.

2:05:30 - Leo Laporte
You're saving them money by not doing that but they will never know that you came to them through instagram yeah, that's what they probably do. Now for, though, is to know because everybody wants to know what my ads work. Nobody wants to buy ads that they don't know that they worked and that's the sad truth. And that's why podcasting is suffering, because we can't tell you yeah, you can't, we don't know, we don't know.

2:05:52 - Jeff Jarvis
The truth is neither can any other medium really tell you yeah, it's all.

2:05:56 - Leo Laporte
They act like they can right podcast.

2:05:57 - Paris Martineau
It's all yes and it's just a cycle, again and again, of a new medium being like we could tell you, we could tell you more information, you should spend your money here. And then, a couple of years later, they're like oh wait, no, this influencers or this new website, they can really tell you.

2:06:13 - Leo Laporte
I know you put this link in Jeff because it's named musky Elon Musk's self-inflicted wounds and other highlights from a newly released deposition.

2:06:28 - Jeff Jarvis
This is from a quartz. He's being serious versions of the story.

2:06:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he's being sued by a california man targeted by a conspiracy theory that elon boosted on twitter. He amplified claims that a 22-year-old Jewish man from California was an undercover agent in a neo-Nazi group. He was not, in fact, but Elon of course, didn't fact-check it and tweeted looks like one is a college student and others may be an Antifa member, but none is nonetheless a probable false flag situation because Elon, like all billionaires, is brilliant and knows more than the rest of us. Throughout the deposition, musk acknowledged the impact his ex-habits have on his company. Testifying, he is quote guilty of many self-inflicted wounds. I hope Elon's not getting depressed. Maybe the ketamine has worn off. If I were him, I might be a little depressed. He spent 44.

2:07:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it.

2:07:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, yeah, he told advertisers to go F themselves. During an interview with the New York Times he says but certainly I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial, but by what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public. I care only about my public, my fans, even to my own detriment. He, he role played as his toddler. He, uh, he confessed that he used a burner account. Uh, that was supposedly x's, his uh, his two-year-old son, uh. In one of the posts he says I will finally turn three on may 4th match, which is, of course, x's actual uh birthday. So what I've done, that that's not.

2:08:24 - Speaker 6
No, there are other tweets from that account, though that are not.

2:08:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they're not so nice. Oh yeah. Because I have. I mean, I had a dog account. I had an account for Ozzy, my dog, and I would tweet Ozzy's thoughts.

2:08:34 - Speaker 6
No, he tweeted bad stuff about his mom and stuff like that.

2:08:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God he used x's fake account to go after grimes to go after, yeah, yeah not lords. I don't think he's yeah yeah grimes um. That's not so great.

2:08:51 - Paris Martineau
That's not so great um did you see the uh deposition transcripts between musk and the lawyer representing the man who's suing him?

no, tell us I posted a little screenshot of it in the chat. I'll give a dramatic reading. This is between elon musk and the opposing guy's lawyer. Um, and so the the lawyer says Mr Musk to Musk, you're aware that Ben Brody is someone who sued you? Right, and he goes. I think you're the one suing and he goes. Actually, mr Musk, I'm an attorney. Do you? Do you know that? I'm an attorney representing Mr Brody and Musk goes? Yes, but many times I found that the actual plaintiff is the attorney and he goes. Okay, but that's just an assumption you're making, right, like you don't know anything about Ben Brody. Musk goes I don't and the lawyer goes. Ok, you understand that Ben Brody has filed a lawsuit against you. Musk goes, I. In my opinion, you're the one filing the lawsuit and the lawyer goes.

Ok, you understand, let's try to make this easier and they go back and forth, and back and forth.

2:10:05 - Leo Laporte
This is again and I am, it's. I don't know what happens to these people. It's like the idea that I'm a sovereign citizen and I don't have to pay taxes yeah, they get in their head and it's then they become adamant about it.

2:10:17 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, brody's not suing me, it's lawyers you're suing, it's your projection, it's his buddy, peter teal and gawker magazine, right, I mean, it's, it's. Yeah, it wasn't hulk gawker.

2:10:29 - Leo Laporte
It was peter teal who financed it right underneath it lawyers do not is not in accordance with the lawyer's creed. Says the attorney to just start making random statements about the alleged frivolity of a case to another lawyer in a deposition? You know that's not proper. You know that.

2:10:46 - Paris Martineau
And this is Elon's lawyer, Alex Biroff.

2:10:48 - Leo Laporte
Do you give these? Lectures at all your depositions. I do and you can watch them Wow.

2:10:57 - Paris Martineau
This whole transcript is really gold.

2:10:58 - Jeff Jarvis
It's full of a bunch of bangers Elon tried to keep it out of public vision. Well, of course it's embarrassing.

2:11:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I actually feel a little bad for Elon. Oh, you do this again.

2:11:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Tell me more.

2:11:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, he's a human like you and me. We don't know if we were put in his position worth billions of dollars know if we were put in his position, worth billions of dollars.

2:11:26 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I suppose if we were born into a family that was incredibly wealthy due to emerald mines and other such exploits, we might be warped in ways that we couldn't currently process sure, and I don't think elon was always warped, but I think you know it's tough to be in uh the public eye and have nobody tell you anything wrong.

2:11:50 - Leo Laporte
It just, even if you aren't a narcissist to begin with, it turns you into a malignant narcissist. Uh, it causes mental health issues and I, you know, I just feel bad for him. He would have done much better had he been a normal human that wasn't wealthy and I'm sorry, he's promoting nazi crap.

2:12:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't, I agree. I agree what he's doing is terrible, but uh, he's demented.

2:12:12 - Leo Laporte
Can we just say he's demented?

2:12:13 - Jeff Jarvis
well, but but that became as an excuse.

2:12:16 - Leo Laporte
No, he's making choices demented choices, but he's demented, I just I feel bad for somebody who's got these demented beliefs and nobody's telling them otherwise. And he's.

2:12:28 - Jeff Jarvis
You know he's been, you know he's he can read the stories about himself, when people say they're demented and he doesn't do anything.

2:12:34 - Leo Laporte
So he can find plenty of people who will tell him these jeff if you were demented, I would also make apologies and excuses for you too. It's true, try to, is he?

2:12:43 - Jeff Jarvis
trying to say that I'm demented. Is that? No, you're not saying that.

2:12:46 - Paris Martineau
This is all a dream, jeff. You've been asleep for 40 years. We're trying to reach you. We're trying to get through wake up podcast called brigadoon uh, more whip van winkle in a very other yeah in a very leo like.

Uh aside, I had a dinner a couple weeks ago with an unnamed ai executive and the only I was not radicalized by it the only interesting detail or that I'll reveal on this was that he had been invited this last summer to a dinner that, when he showed up, elon musk and grimes, as well as one of their kids. For some reason I want to think the kid's name is megatron, but I might be making that up, it's something like that one of their kids with the silly name was there and you know they had some normal conversation, whatever, and then, as they were leaving, the guy was like oh bye, and they were getting into a car. So he was like drive safe. And Elon turns back to him and he's like I don't need to, and then shuts the car door and I think that's pretty funny.

2:13:54 - Jeff Jarvis
That's funny. That's funny. I think you know what I think happened Paris. I think it was the same person who walked on the beach with Leo and, as a part of the conspiracy, He'll be asking you to lunch soon.

2:14:07 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, you're next, that's true, yeah, you're next? And if Jeff suddenly starts saying all the wonderful things AI is going to do, we'll know, we'll know if he writes a long piece in Medium.

2:14:17 - Paris Martineau
We'll know, we'll know.

2:14:17 - Leo Laporte
This has been a long piece of media. We'll know, we'll know.

2:14:19 - Paris Martineau
This has been a long con to influence the most influential podcast around this week in Google.

2:14:29 - Leo Laporte
Yes, a little break, while I beg you to give us money, not for me, I'm not asking for myself. I won't see any of this. I'm not asking for Lisa. I'm asking for people like Benito, who only make $2.25 an hour. I would like to see Benito go on. Go to college.

2:14:45 - Jeff Jarvis
He could be at Taco Bell, but he sacrifices $20 an hour. He sacrifices to be here at $2.25 an hour.

2:14:53 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what you pay you, benito, but I think we give you a living salary, right, sure, okay.

2:14:59 - Speaker 6
God.

2:15:00 - Paris Martineau
Leo, we're going to a't. We can't be doing this the point is we.

2:15:09 - Leo Laporte
We employ a large number of people, we this is kind of crazy, because a podcast really shouldn't be done in a studio with lights and cameras and staff and editors and studio technicians and and this was crazy to do it this way and I admit it it's totally my fault. I came from old media. I kind of recreated what I knew and for many years it worked. It was okay.

2:15:30 - Jeff Jarvis
But the time Yet you actually created it at a much smaller scale than what you came from At the time. It was an amazing decrease. Well, it felt like, I mean we you know tech TVs amazing decrease.

2:15:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, it felt like I mean, we, you know tech tvs had two control rooms each that cost multi-million dollars to build. I thought if I could do this for a 10 000 or 50 000, I'm way ahead of the game. What I didn't understand was it really was a bad idea because it was just podcasting, but nevertheless, I think we've built something pretty good and we have mostly what we have is a wonderful team, people behind the camera, but also people in front of the camera, like Paris and Jeff, all of our contributors, and I want to keep doing this, but the truth is it's getting harder and harder because advertising is dwindling. You might say, well, leo, you had three ads on the show, yeah, but we're those ads are paying half what they paid, uh, even in 12 months, and it's going down from that. We are in a position, frankly, at the current rate of revenue, to continue for more than about eight more months. It all really comes down to whether our audience wants us to do it, and that means you, if you like what you hear, if you listen to this show, if you listen to more than one show, and if you can afford $7, if you can't, I understand, but if you can, we would really appreciate it if you listen more than one show and if you can afford seven bucks. If you can't, I understand, but if you can, we would really appreciate it. If you join club twitch seven bucks a month we try to give you some reason to join ad free versions of all the shows because we don't need to show you ads or track you or anything like that if you're giving us seven bucks a month. We also give you video from all the shows that you only hear audio of, like hands on windows, hands on mac, the, the Untitled Linux Show, home Theater Geeks, we do a lot of good shows. We give you the Discord, which is a great place to hang out, not just during shows but all week long. All of that for seven bucks a month, and I should add the good feeling that knows that you're supporting a kind of journalism that I think we need, journalism that helps you understand tech, that helps kind of explain tech keeps you company, of course, and entertains you, but also comes to you with, I think, a deep understanding of what's going on in the world and what it's going to mean for you If you're not a member of Club Twit.

May I ask you please, twittv slash club twit. And if you want to give more, you can, we did I have give more you can. Uh, we did. I have to tell you, uh, discontinue the annual plan, which was the same price. It was just you pay once every 12 months and there's a very simple reason for that. Uh, I don't know if we'll be here in 12 months, so, uh, we just didn't. I didn't feel right. Every time somebody bought a 12-month subscription, I was feeling like, oh, now we got to go another year and I don't know if we can't. I honestly don't know if we can't so that that took that's really great. That's the truth took the rug out.

I don't want people to uh, in 12 months, if we do go away, say, oh, you should have, you should have warned us. This is the warning I'm just telling you. Uh, I I'd like to keep going. I want to keep benito and John and everybody employed. I want to keep doing what we're doing and I really, really want to keep telling it as it is. I think there's a mission for us, with Steve Gibson and Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell and you guys and the MacBreak Weekly team and Micah Sargent. I think what we're doing here is important, but we have to have your help to keep doing it. That's just the bottom line. Twittv, slash, fliptwit. I hate saying that, I hate doing it, but I think you need to know. I don't want anybody to come to me in a year and say, hey, what happened? It's tough times. Anyway, don't feel depressed. I didn't mean to depress you, don't feel depressed.

2:18:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I didn't mean to depress you.

2:19:01 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we are. It would be the end of an era. I like what we're doing. I would like to make it to 20.

2:19:06 - Leo Laporte
It'll be 20 years, you know. By the way, april 17th is the 19th anniversary of the network, and it is I take a lot of responsibility, because I did build something that was probably, in hindsight, more expensive than it should have been.

It made sense at the time and we, you know, to be frank, uh, we made a lot of money over a lot of revenue over the years. Advertising was very good for many years, instagram, we built a giant studio and, uh, you know, we did a lot of good things and, fortunately, uh, thanks to lisa, we lisa and I have saved enough money that we could retire. So don't worry about us, we're not gonna suffer. But I do worry a lot about all of our, our team members, you all you're all talented, good people. You'll find work. Benito, there's a chicken place in uh washington square in new york city that's looking for and you can work from home in petaluma, that's me that's me, which, by the way, is the chicken capital of the country.

Oh, butter and eggs day is coming up on saturday, why don't you all come out? Ironically I'm flying to mom's. I'm gonna miss butter and eggs day. I will be in providence rhode island for the next week quite sad I know

a bad timing. I feel really bad, so I will do this show from mom's house. Next week we are doing we had an open studio on sunday. It was wonderful, was so nice to see all of you. Uh, lisa says I thought maybe we could do more of these. She says this is the last open studio we will ever do, probably in all likelihood, and that will be on the 21st, a week from Sunday. I don't know if the A number of people bailed at the last minute, so get on the waiting list and we'll let you know 24 hours ahead of time. If you can come. We'd love to see you in studio on the 21st. That's club members only right now, although I think we're probably going to open it up to the public. And if you come for Butter and Eggs Day, spend the night in beautiful Petaluma and come to the open studio the next day. And I thought we might do some more later this summer. Lisa says yeah, we're not going to do that, this studio.

I mean the next step, honestly, will be to shut down the studio and do the shows from home, and we'll do that before we shut completely. Of course, that's in all likelihood what's going to happen this year. So sorry about the bad news. Can I cheer you up? Anything exciting a brief correction uh, it's not megatron musk the musk baby, it's techno mechanist musk jesus I apologize for spreading you know I'll forgive elon for everything else but saddling little innocent children with those names not nice weird not great weird, unfortunate.

Yeah, uh, let's see anything else. Oh, I forgot the changelog. Here's the google changelog. You already did it, I think? No, it feels like I did, but it wasn't official, uh. Five workspace announcements from google cloud next, which I can't open jeff, oh, it's my fault, that's why what are you doing? Are you messing with the uh?

2:22:30 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, I did, I did, I screwed up. Well, just google five workspace announcements hold on, oh shoot and you're not even a link, Jeff. I know it's not, I screwed up. I screwed up. Here we go. Okay, I'll put it in the Discord.

2:22:48 - Leo Laporte
I found it. It's too late. I already found it. Get a peek at the new features coming to Docs Sheets Meat and More. Okay, docs Sheets Meat and more. I wonder if that meat was shaken.

2:23:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Sounds like a butcher shop.

2:23:03 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't sound right. Create and share videos at work with Google Vids.

2:23:13 - Jeff Jarvis
So this is kind of a replacement for yeah, I think it's AI and kind of a replacement for PowerPoint, which ruined all thought this could make it worse.

2:23:22 - Leo Laporte
So instead of even and people have already started using ChatGPT and other things for creating PowerPoints. But this is basically the idea you create a slideshow and the AI suggests scenes from stock videos, images and background music. It can help you land your message with the right voiceover. Oh, I want to see this so bad. Choose from one of our preset voiceovers or use your own. It's your video writing, production and editing assistant all in one. It's funny because Google has taken a lot of heat for the quality of Gemini the quality of Gemini, mainly because of the effort to tune out the bias in society, but it isn't.

2:24:09 - Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, why isn't Google fixing societal ills?

2:24:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's true, but no, it doesn't feel like it's that good, like it's not as good as chat. Chat GPT-4 is like the. It puts so many guardrails on One of the reasons.

2:24:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Chat.

2:24:22 - Leo Laporte
Chat gbt4 is like the, by the way, so many guardrails on one of the reasons chat gbt4 is so good you probably saw this is that they wrote a program called whisper, a program we use for transcription. They wrote this program so that they could steal the text of youtube videos and ingested like a billion of them and ingested into oh open ai's chat llm. This is against google's own terms of service, do they?

2:24:52 - Paris Martineau
mean like the descriptions for youtube videos.

2:24:54 - Leo Laporte
The transcript of the video okay, those are really poorly.

2:24:59 - Paris Martineau
I no, no, they wrote I don't like watching videos.

2:25:01 - Leo Laporte
They wrote their own tool to do it. They did, you're right. They didn't use google's transcripts. They wrote whisper ai, which is a very good I use it, a very good transcription tool in chat gpt. And so they didn't even use google's own tool and they just sucked up a billion videos against google's terms of service and without the permission of the creators. I mean, I'm sure some of our videos were in there. I don't really care, but that was one of the reasons that ChatGPT4 is so good. So that's kind of funny. You can automatically translate captions in more languages and meet. This is all from the cloud event yesterday More Meet and chat features. You know it's so funny. I was looking through my messaging apps earlier today on Windows Weekly and I found Meet and chat. I thought what are those? That's the replacement for Hangouts. You might remember that no one uses. Do you use it, jeff? Does any company you work with use it? Use Meet.

2:26:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah or chat. Yeah, yeah, some chat, no, no. I I. I make a living complaining about people who use teams oh, teams is just I have literally never used.

2:26:12 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I hate once, and not once in my life is it?

2:26:15 - Leo Laporte
was it so much? Worse than zoom, or is he just zoomed out?

2:26:18 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, 10 times worse. It has to open the app. It delays, then the camera doesn't go on. It's just a mess. I did this uh nordic ai and media conference this morning and it was on teams and I had to, ungraciously, start by growling about it because I had the teams.

2:26:32 - Leo Laporte
Is microsoft's uh version of zoom awful, it's just all I come to think of it, we do use meat for all of our in-house meetings because we're a Google workspace company Not for much longer. Probably Protect sensitive files with new AI security add-on. Add-on that lets. It teams automatically identify, classify and protect sensitive files company-wide in Google Drive, Now available for $10 per user per month. Oh, a lot of these are not free, I should mention.

2:27:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this is. You know we're with Porat. This is like Leo asking for members to join Google's in the same boat now.

2:27:12 - Leo Laporte
I don't think Google's in the same exact boat I hope not. Better organize information with new Sheets and Docs features Sheets is getting new table features to format and organize data in a sleek, updated design, I guess using AI, right, and you can use Gemini, gemini I keep calling it Gemini, gemini, gemini Cricket, gemini Cricket, gemini Cricket. You can use Gemini Although that would be a good name for an AI Gemini Cricket. You can use Gemini Cricket.

2:27:42 - Paris Martineau
You can use Gemini, although that would be a good name for an AI, gemini Cricket, gemini Cricket you would talk to it. I'm sure Disney would have no issues with that.

2:27:48 - Leo Laporte
You can create images as well. You know what? For all I know, lisa used Gemini to create that image for her tweet, since we have it Easily send messages with new.

2:28:07 - Jeff Jarvis
We better hurry, we're only through five of them easily send messages with new gmail features. Um, like what kind of messages, leo? Isn't that? Isn't that? What you do in g is send messages.

2:28:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:28:19 - Paris Martineau
This seems to suggest that you can just kind of type moderate gobbledygook in an email and then Gmail will polish it up into a professional draft.

2:28:33 - Leo Laporte
Here's an example I write Project Lumina sync. Tony mentioned you Still working on Project Lumina. Would love to sync In town for lunch next week if available. Let me know.

2:28:46 - Paris Martineau
LMK.

2:28:48 - Leo Laporte
Putting on the reads and then the Polish draft. Hi there.

2:28:54 - Paris Martineau
Can you do a Polish accent, Leo, please For the Polish draft.

2:28:57 - Leo Laporte
It's in English Hi there. Tony mentioned you still working on project lumina. I would love to sync up with you about it. I'm in town next week. If you're available, let me know if that works for you best and and then you could elaborate it, shorten or formalize it. Actually I I have some sympathy for busy executives. This actually is kind of useful. Yeah, kind of useful I don't know.

2:29:21 - Paris Martineau
There's something incredibly, I think intimate and charming when you get an email back from a very important person and it's written like a caveman, where it's like yes heard we'll call later yeah, steve martin I don't think we should give that up.

2:29:39 - Leo Laporte
Steve Martin told me, all the young comics these days embrace autocorrect, so when it makes a hash out of their messages, they don't fix it, they just send it. So he gets all these random, unintelligible messages like that Sync working on Lumina still lunch.

2:30:00 - Jeff Jarvis
And that's what did you think of the Steve Martin I?

2:30:04 - Leo Laporte
loved it.

2:30:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I loved it. Have you seen it yet? Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.

2:30:08 - Leo Laporte
So, as most of you know because I can't stop bragging about it I know Steve, not super well, but we've had meals together and stuff and he is every bit the gentleman, the intellectual, but also gentle and unaffacing. He's not the superstar and they really captured that, I think, very well in the documentary.

2:30:30 - Jeff Jarvis
There was also a story about him because of the series, and his wife sounds wonderful too. Yeah, Anne's great.

2:30:36 - Paris Martineau
His wife, who he met because she was a New Yorker fact-checker.

2:30:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Fact-checker.

2:30:41 - Paris Martineau
yes, facter, fact checking on an article about him. I know all of this because I hadn't seen it, but after my dad watched it he called me. He was like there was a big father daughter theme and I wanted to call you.

2:30:52 - Leo Laporte
Well, I've had dinner with anne as well. Uh, several times and uh, she's great. She's exactly what you would expect of a new york new yorker fact checker.

She's intellectual, she's smart. They're a really interesting couple. I have also met their child. I love it. He has, to my knowledge, never said her name in public. In the documentary they cover her up with a drawing. He's really protective of her. He's been very good in his whole life, actually, at avoiding controversy uh yes, at preserving his own, protecting his own privacy and his family's privacy. He's done a very good job of it. So I really admire that. I admire him a lot, and not because he's a celebrity or one of the most successful comics of all time, because he's a really great man.

2:31:36 - Jeff Jarvis
He's a really you would love him, jeff, you really oh, I have no, I have no doubt, I have no doubt. And how he reinvented himself multiple times and worked toward a goal is just amazing in the show.

2:31:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he was very lonely.

He talks about being in Paris all by himself going to a movie. He was you know this was. He was already the most successful comic of all time, he had made many movies, but he was lonely and sad and he didn't have any friends. And he went to see, all by himself, a movie in Paris and on the screen I can't remember the movie. But one of the actors says, yeah, I want to be the next Steve Martin. And Steve says I'm sitting there thinking, no, you don't, no, you don't, oh.

2:32:19 - Jeff Jarvis
the relationship with his father is just poignant.

2:32:21 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that sad. It's so poignant. His father could never give him praise.

2:32:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, look who's joined the show Love, the documentary she heard we were talking about parental relationships, oh.

2:32:32 - Leo Laporte
Gizmo, Hello Gizmo.

2:32:34 - Paris Martineau
Hi Giz. Hi Giz she's a sweetie, gizmo, do you want to say something? Nope, gizmo, do you want to say?

2:32:38 - Leo Laporte
something. Nope, we are, by the way, speaking of Instagram. We're looking at one of those cat litters where they rotate it, the cat gets in.

2:32:48 - Paris Martineau
I thought you said there were going to be an advertiser on the show that you're going to be rolling in the automatic cat rollers.

2:32:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right. What happened to that? I think there's some concern that our cat is too large to get in. I don't know. I in. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Fitbit app is rolling out redesigned sleep stats. Thank you, whoever put these in.

2:33:10 - Paris Martineau
Suddenly they have appeared more scooter x and I put them thank you put them in the discord and I put them in the rundown, bless you too.

2:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Fitbit is rolling out redesigned sleep stats. I don't use Fitbit. What more do you need to know?

2:33:27 - Paris Martineau
I love that. It tells you how hard you snore.

2:33:30 - Leo Laporte
That's actually very useful because, as you know, sleep apnea is a real health concern.

2:33:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I just called. I'm going to try to get a travel CPAP machine. It costs $800. Health concern I just called. I'm going to try to get a a travel uh cpap machine which costs 800.

2:33:44 - Leo Laporte
That's messed up, not covered by insurance google's nest secure is shutting down today because you didn't join the club. You've got options besides ADT with Google security system. Officially dead, god, another killed by Google, so Google's pushing people to ADT.

2:34:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I was about to install all this stuff. You're kidding.

2:34:12 - Leo Laporte
No, unbelievable. Oh jeez, you know what? Why would anybody buy another Google product?

2:34:21 - AI
Yeah.

2:34:22 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what my son Jake keeps on yelling at me about. He doesn't trust them for anything.

2:34:26 - Leo Laporte
So I did not know this, but Google is an investor, a substantial investor, according to the Virgin ADT.

2:34:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I think they got stock for having set business their way.

2:34:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah well, they're going to move you to ADT using your system. I don't know if it uses the hardware, it looks.

2:34:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I had ADT out, and it's just, they overcomplicate everything.

2:34:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:34:47 - Jeff Jarvis
No way.

2:34:48 - Leo Laporte
It is not a straight Nest Secure swap. It's different. So if you have, it's just frustrating. If you have the Google Nest Secure system, you're going to be. You're moving today, so you have to replace the hardware. It sounds like it requires more than just like, yeah, turn on ADT. Let me see.

When it announced it was killing Nest Secure, google offered its users a free ADT self-setup system worth $485 or $200 credit in the Google Store. That free system offer is valid until May 7th, so if you haven't done it, do it. The ADT self-setup system was launched in March 2023. It has the option of professional monitoring through ADT or you can monitor it yourself. It integrates with most Nest hardware, including the Nest battery doorbell, the Nest Hub and the Nest cams, and works with Google Home. But it's far from a straight Nest secure swap and its integration with Google Home is largely the same as other third-party security systems with Google Home is largely the same as other third-party security systems. So there's a long and, I think, good article that seems on the verge about not only what it would involve to switch to ADT, but what the other options are, including Arlo's home security system, which seems very similar. Adobe has a system.

2:36:19 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you recommend? Do you recommend a system?

2:36:20 - Leo Laporte
I don't know we have a local alarm company. The guy comes in and goes around. This is Jennifer Patterson Toohey. She's, of course, a regular on Tech News Weekly. Good job on that piece, Jennifer. Google is bringing AI-powered editing tools like Magic Editor to all Google Photos users for free. This is good. We have a picture I took of Lisa when we were in Mexico and it looks like she's got horns. There's a sculpture behind her, that's coming out of her head.

Can you get rid of that? And I said Google can Haven't done it yet. There's, of course, soak in Photoshop and many other tools, but the Magic Editor in Google can do it. It'll start rolling out on May 15th and it's not going to roll out all at once. It'll take a little while, so keep your eye appealed in your Google Photos. It sounds like it's free. They're not going to charge you. They did charge you with the Google One account earlier, but now it looks like all of this is free and, jeff, you'll be able to do it on your Chromebook.

2:37:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yay, yeah, Probably not with my account though?

2:37:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, probably not. I wonder if I have Magic Editor. Yet I would love to try it on that picture of Lisa. Actually, let me see if I do. First let me find the picture. There it is. It was kind of unfelicitous. It really. Are horns coming out of her head? No, she's a bunny, she looks like she's a bunny a bunny or a cockroach. Let me see if I have.

2:38:18 - Jeff Jarvis
If I have, this is antenna, I come out. It really does look like it looks like you took a selfie.

2:38:23 - Paris Martineau
How did you not notice it?

2:38:25 - Leo Laporte
I missed it somehow. I somehow missed it. Let's see, I don't know if I have. I have a lot of features I see for editing, but I don't know if.

2:38:38 - Paris Martineau
Oh, there it is. Maybe it's that pencil over there.

2:38:40 - Leo Laporte
Is it the pencil Top right Pen highlighter? But I don't know if, oh, maybe it's that pencil over there. Is it the pencil right pen?

2:38:42 - Paris Martineau
highlighter no, highlight no no, yeah, you could draw horns on your head with the pen. You know what this to make us make us match and that could be good yeah, oh, too bad.

2:38:53 - Leo Laporte
I really would love to have uh see to show it. You see, I pay for google one, so these are you see it has a little google one logo on some of the uh, some of the features hdr just in case you forget let's turn up the hdr, let's make it pop. Oh, look at that. Oh, now she's really looking like a cockroach. Uh, portrait light, what is that?

that was behind her it was a sculpture sky oh, I see okay oh look, you can have luminous, radiant ember oh, look at that airy afterglow or stormy I like afterglow you like afterglow I think it looks nice all right, these are fun. All right, uh, let's see what else.

2:39:35 - Paris Martineau
But yeah, I don't see these kind of fundamentally disagree with this feature in Google, though I think the pictures should be what the pictures are.

2:39:45 - Leo Laporte
Even if you have antennas coming out of your head.

2:39:47 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's like a fun little memory of that time. You took a photo with your wife and it looked like she had antennas coming out of her head.

2:39:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'll keep that, but we'll probably try to make one without it. I did get her to move over. I'm not a complete idiot. I got her to move over. I said I'm not a complete idiot.

2:40:04 - AI
I got her to move over the next one, but now she's unhappy.

2:40:07 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't the same you having the antennas behind your head yeah, that would have been fair. That would have been fair. Uh, maybe I can do it on my, uh, my pixel probably probably does use the ai on the pixel and there and that, and what you just heard is the Google Change Loan. I think we can wrap this up. We're going on and on and on. We probably should go home, but first let's get some pics of the week, starting with Paris's Taskmaster.

2:40:38 - Paris Martineau
I've been really getting into Taskmaster lately and so I thought I'd just give it a pick. I subscribed. They now have a streaming service called Taskmaster Super Max Plus, I think, is the name of it and it's just fantastic. So tell us what this is. It's a.

UK-based panel show where essentially the gimmick is you've got like five different comedians. They're all on stage. You've got a guy this guy, greg davies, who's the task master. He plays kind of a uh, incredibly strict and punitive persona and then his assistant, uh little alex horn, who's also the creator of the show.

Um oh, I didn't know that oh yeah, he's the creator of the show. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh yeah, he's the creator of the show and writer of all the tasks, and so it's part kind of a live panel show. But then they cut to. You have these five comedians and they're taken out to do different tasks. It could be something as simple as like get this coconut as far away from here as possible. You have 20 minutes and all of them are filmed doing this task totally separately and you're assigned points based on how well you do it. But the tasks sometimes get more or less complicated and there's often a little ambiguity in how they're worded to allow for, like, lateral thinking or creative things.

It is one of, I think, the funniest shows I've seen. It is just an absolute delight. There is I'm trying to think of good examples. There was one where I think the task was make as big of a mess as possible and so you have, you know, three contestants they have usually five who are shown, like you know, trashing the studio that they're in, throwing garbage all over, and then they go to like the fourth person, and she reads the task and is like OK, I got this, and immediately calls her sister and says I've got really terrible news for you. Last week when I was out with your husband, I saw his phone and he's cheating on you, oh geez. And proceeds to make a big mess in her family and personal life and she won't ask. You know, she made as big of a mess as possible.

And it's just little moments like that where you get to see incredible comedic minds interpret something really creatively that I've really been enjoying.

2:43:02 - Leo Laporte
I love this I mean, it's one of those shows where you just have belly laughs but I have to also say I haven't watched it a lot because it raises my anxiety level. You know they open these instructions and I get nervous for them.

2:43:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, because a lot of them are timed as well.

2:43:19 - Leo Laporte
And a lot of them don't do well, yeah, but I mean it's over the test but when they go back to the studio and then talk about it, that's very funny and I love that, but but I guess I think this is the case with all competition shows for me they kind of raise some sort of problem. I have, uh, with competition because I hate people being made fools of in a way no, but that but they're all.

2:43:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I participants, I mean, I think that's the thing is, they're all willing participants.

2:43:43 - Paris Martineau
They're all being paid. They're all usually paid comedians.

2:43:47 - Leo Laporte
It's an opportunity for them to be wild.

2:43:50 - Paris Martineau
It's one of the biggest shows in the UK. It's huge.

2:43:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Through what mechanism do you watch?

2:43:55 - Paris Martineau
You can actually watch every episode free on YouTube. Just go to Taskmaster on YouTube. They post the current season, I think is two episodes in, and they'll post it like a day or two after it airs. But I subscribed recently because I don't pay for YouTube premium, so I wanted to watch it without ads. But it's great, it's all on YouTube.

2:44:17 - Leo Laporte
My other pick of the week, sorry, continue. This is what the young people these days do. They don't watch broadcast television. They pay a subscription fee to watch something out of britain, which is true that's, that's what all the young people are doing.

2:44:31 - Paris Martineau
Um, my other pick the week is less of a pick, more of the experience I would have shared. I, for the second year in a row, did a high school career day at. Ps 47, the American Sign Language Secondary School in Manhattan.

I originally did this because my friend, paul, is a teacher there, a science teacher, and so last year me and some friends signed up. It was very funny, though, because I get there and then kind of have this all sorted by rooms and who is the only other person in the journalism room but my colleague at the information, abe brown, who also happened to know a teacher there. So this year, abe and I were like we're gonna do it again and, uh, we kind of had a routine down. You talk to the kids, we do like four or five rounds, but as part of it, we always like to open by asking kids what do you think journalism is and where do you get your news from, if anywhere?

2:45:30 - AI
and this year.

2:45:30 - Paris Martineau
Actually, a lot of them had good answers for where what they think journalism is. They were like reporting on current events or, uh, you know, an unbiased perspective on things happening, which was good. One of them said journalism is getting paid to instigate, which I thought was a very funny response. And almost all of them get their news from TikTok. One person said YouTube. Two people said cable news, one of whom was like my mom puts it on.

The other person's like no, I put it on, which I thought was weird, and one person said the ap, which I thought was good.

Um the ap wow yeah, of all the tiktok uh users. I was asking them. I was like, okay, so who do you, do you follow anybody for news? And no one could really give me a specific answer, except for one young lady who said, and I quote do you remember in SpongeBob there is a newscaster who's a fish? That's who I get my news from on TikTok. It's someone who uses the SpongeBob fish newscaster to deliver news, and I thought that was really beautiful. Wow.

2:46:47 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I just think it's so cool that they got to see you.

2:46:53 - Paris Martineau
I also think it's very funny that these high schoolers only experience two years in a row with working journalists. Are the information?

2:47:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, there you go.

2:47:04 - Paris Martineau
There we go. That's the real journalist in the world.

2:47:06 - Leo Laporte
That's my report from the teens, the information is the new New York Times, the New York Times of the 21st century. That's what it is.

2:47:12 - Speaker 2
That's true Might as well. Just face up to it. You are now a superstar.

2:47:19 - Leo Laporte
We already did Jeff's pick. I'm sorry to say it was pretty much. It was that music player I've I feel bad oh, very cool very neat do you know that was from? Jason, do you know the uh economist, uh parito creator of the parito principle, vilfredo pareto?

2:47:39 - Jeff Jarvis
you know him nope well, did he write the spaghetti song? Maybe?

2:47:44 - Leo Laporte
you might want to get to know him because if you play mario kart, he could just be your road to victory. This is a crazy site called mario meets pareto and it turns out in Mario Kart 8, choosing your kart and its attributes can make a massive difference in your ability to win. Did you know this? Spinito? It is. It is not just, should not just be random, should you favor?

2:48:12 - Paris Martineau
no, because they each have different like it's like speed or acceleration or maneuverability or whatever exactly, in fact.

2:48:18 - Leo Laporte
Here's the various drivers and their speed characteristics. You shouldn't just automatically choose bowser or wario. No, no, it's much more complicated than that, because you know you could choose body, tire, glider, speed, acceleration, and and, and really see the trade-offs one after the other. Yeah, this matrix has gotten a lot more complicated from the original. This is a, this is eight, right? Yeah, I think in the original one you really see the trade-offs, one after the other.

2:48:40 - Speaker 6
Yeah, this matrix has gotten a lot more complicated from the original.

2:48:42 - Leo Laporte
This is a this is eight, right? Yeah, I think in the original one you could choose wario. Uh, given your play style and skills, you may put more weight on one statistic over the other. Here we go, and you can have a slider and figure out who is your best driver, what's your best body, what's your best tire. Uh, this is a a really useful tool for anybody money balling mario kart?

2:49:08 - Paris Martineau
money balling, mario, I mean people out there are money balling mario kart. Oh I'm sure they are.

2:49:14 - Leo Laporte
uh, there's some data points, this, uh, this he's using something called the pareto frontier concept, which uh allows you to balance, uh the various parameters to optimize for, uh, exactly, uh, the best ride. So I don't know, this is just kind of cuckoo and crazy and fun Uh, but if you are a Mario Kart rac racer, he has to show me uh himself kicking ass in mario kart before you believe it.

Yeah, I mean he may not even play, for all we know, he doesn't even play mario kart, right, but I think it's fun to have all the sliders yeah, this could be stolen.

2:49:52 - Paris Martineau
Mario valor, it's from myer myerowitzio, myerowitzio.

2:50:00 - Leo Laporte
But I think, if you just Google Mario meets Pareto, you'll probably find what you're looking for. Do you want to play a few more songs From Suno?

2:50:12 - Paris Martineau
I do.

2:50:14 - Leo Laporte
I think we should wrap it up with Jeff's Pick of the week, sunocom. So let's create something.

2:50:22 - Paris Martineau
Maybe something about Mario Kart.

2:50:26 - Leo Laporte
Okay, yeah, we should maybe combine some of the leitmotifs that appeared in this show. I think the server is a little jammed. Jiggling meat, jiggling meat Call screening in the Philippines, but it's going to take a while. Look at that, it's spinning.

2:50:42 - Speaker 6
Everybody's going there. Tell us to tell you about ISDN lines.

2:50:46 - Leo Laporte
ISDN lines. Do you remember CompuServe? We've got to make a song. We definitely have to make a song yeah. But I don't think it's going to be tonight. Look at that spin yeah. It is not loading. Wow. Apparently it's been discovered. Oh wait a minute, here we go. Okay, let's see. So what's the stuffers? What's the style Classic?

2:51:09 - Paris Martineau
rock Anthem Sure yeah Fun.

2:51:11 - Leo Laporte
About ISDN Shaking meat, mario Kart CompuServe. What else was in the show today? Elon Musk and anything else we can add. Say again AI Music alright, and it's not instrumental. We want lyrics, so we are now generating you can edit this. Speed it up in post, all right, and it's not instrumental. We want lyrics, so we are now generating. You can edit this. Speed it up in post, so we don't. Here you go. Let's see, I don't think there's much of the big classic rock is from the 80s. Yeah.

2:52:27 - Paris Martineau
This doesn't have anything to do with the words.

2:52:28 - Leo Laporte
No, it has nothing to do with any of those Okay, but we maybe may need to be a little more specific.

2:52:32 - Paris Martineau
Maybe put the words about yeah, about Just like go back and then put the word about there.

2:52:37 - Leo Laporte
Shaking meat what else? Isdn lines.

2:52:44 - Paris Martineau
Shaking meat while playing Mario Kart. Okay, that's good, maybe make it simple.

2:52:49 - Jeff Jarvis
On an ISDN line.

2:52:50 - Leo Laporte
Okay, while playing Mario Kart.

2:52:55 - Paris Martineau
And looking at Instagram ads 300 baud on Instagram ads.

2:53:04 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's try that Brand new song in the classic rock genre. It's a Wednesday afternoon, 53 degrees in the city. A good afternoon to you, leo Laporte, here playing the hits on sunofm, coming at you right now, a anthem we like to call shake it up okay, this one's got lyrics it does. Yeah, look at the lyrics. I'm a rebel with a controller in my hand, shaking meat like a rock and roll band playing mario kart at 300 baud. Instagram ads got me feeling so flawed. I think it's the theme of this show.

It absolutely is come on, we want to hear this got my joystick moving in a high-speed chase, but these ads be popping up all over the place. We'll, we'll, we'll, trim it. Trim out. Yeah, a high-speed chase, but these ads be popping up all over the place. We'll trim it.

2:54:06 - AI
Wow.

2:54:08 - Leo Laporte
It's just too popular.

2:54:12 - Paris Martineau
That's the problem.

2:54:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to make this one public because everybody ought to hear, and I'll do the Formaggio e Pepe as well, make that public, the classic Baroque.

2:54:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, you can make it public. Oh, that's cool.

2:54:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay. Now let's try Shake it Up. Classic Rock Anthem. I'm a rapper with a controller in my hand.

2:54:36 - AI
Oh, it's pop, shaking me like a rock and roll band. Playing Mario Kart at 300 bar it's pop, so fud fud up all over the place, trying to focus, trying to steer but these distractions got me shedding a tear.

2:55:05 - Speaker 6
Damn, is this depressing you, uh, benito this is amazing what pop music sounds like now yeah, this is exactly how they make pop music and I mean we've been trained over the years to accept auto tunes and all that stuff. So yeah. And poorly programmed drums, and all that.

2:55:23 - Leo Laporte
Do you think you can do like Bjork? Definitely not let's do some Bork.

2:55:29 - Paris Martineau
Didn't they say that you couldn't have artist names in there?

2:55:32 - Leo Laporte
No, no, I think it was Pepe that it didn't like.

2:55:35 - Paris Martineau
Oh.

2:55:35 - Leo Laporte
Because of Pepe the Frog, you know. Oh. Duh.

2:55:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you know. Oh yeah, they didn't want any political content. Let me go back here.

2:55:52 - Leo Laporte
I wanted to. It does sound like a song that would be playing in an uber. It's totally.

2:55:54 - Speaker 6
It's totally modern pop music sad to say, just as disposable as modern pop music yeah, exactly as disposable.

2:55:59 - Leo Laporte
yeah, sad to say, just as disposable as modern pop music. Yeah, exactly as disposable, Still pretty good for an AI right.

2:56:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Pretty good, Pretty good yeah, pretty impressive Pretty good, pretty impressive. Pretty pretty good.

2:56:18 - AI
Where dreams are born. We gather round the kitchen From dusk till dawn. With flour and eggs. We create a mound, kneading and rolling With passion. Profound, there's a chorus.

2:56:51 - Jeff Jarvis
They all have chef's hats on.

2:56:54 - Paris Martineau
They're removing them and putting them back on somberly but it's the simple magic that steals the show.

2:57:04 - AI
the back on somberly, wow these are truly incredible the heart of Rome, where artisans of pasta find their home. I set the stage with flour, eggs and water to create a dish that's beyond all borders. All the cheese all the pepper mixed together in perfect measure with every strand of pasta that we twirl. I love it.

2:57:54 - Leo Laporte
I think these are really amazing.

2:57:56 - Paris Martineau
Really amazing. They're really good.

2:57:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've used up all my credits, though I might have to subside.

2:58:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's really amazing in that it sounds like it was for a good cause.

2:58:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, it didn't like the style of Bjork. It said you can't use a name.

2:58:08 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say when it said Pepe, it was like the artist Pepe, it wasn't doing it because of Pepe the Frog.

2:58:23 - Speaker 6
So what's a style? A weirdo style. Anarcho christian rock, progressive metal, york. Oh you can't do bork, yeah you like progressive metal, jazz fusion oh that sounds boring.

2:58:28 - Leo Laporte
I like progressive metal. Let's do that progressive jam band. We want umphreys oh yeah, we can get use break beat electro, says burke well first.

2:58:41 - Speaker 6
We're gonna play.

2:58:42 - Paris Martineau
Really wants it first we're gonna play one of all the horns mechanical carnage.

2:58:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, scott's good, I love scott. Here's, uh, here's mechanical carnage. Okay, I think you're right, burke. The lyrics on this were Dystopian realm where violence and chaos unite. Shaking meat, burning rubber, let the mayhem ignite. Mario Kart at 300 baud pixels zapping through the night, Instagram ads flicker. We rise in the face of the flight With anger, With anger. Yeah. Well, break beat electro. Oh, I've used up my credits. You used your credits. Yeah, I've wasted them in mechanical carnage. That's not progressive metal, that's metallica, that's just straight metal.

2:59:52 - Paris Martineau
that's straight metal burke is melting down in the chat that you didn't use, you didn't get to break.

2:59:58 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna pay for it I'll do it right now, real quickly. Let's see Basic plan 50 credits a day. Well, that's enough. I just used up my credits Active. Okay, do I have more credits? Now I do. I got more credits just by clicking that button, so let me go back and we're going to get your breakbeat electro, burke.

Oh, we have to wait for our other generations to finish. I have many generations going. I have definitely used up my credits here. All right, let's let everybody go. I know, burke, you don't ask for much and I will do that for you. Is that your favorite genre? Breakbeat electro? Yeah, you could do it, you know, sunocom. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thanks to Paris Martineau, theinformationcom, she's working hard on a secret story, but you can give her tips at Paris Martineau. Actually no at Martineau. Martine martin, oh, one on signal, just no at martin, oh, just martin oh one on signal, or at paris martin, oh on the twitter or everywhere else.

And jeff jarvis is the town night professor for journalistic integrity. Author of oh, there it is the, the galley galley web, we, we. Moral panic is on the cover it is drink with alliteration wow www oh, I get it I gotta read it and give you your log roll. I will work on that tonight thank you um. He is also the author of the gutenberg parenthesis and magazine you're, you're become. You know, I credit this show with your prolific authorizations.

3:01:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you need to stick around so I can promote the next damn book, please.

3:01:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I will. We're going to stick around just so you can promote the book Simon Schuster or whatever should fund this show. That's what should happen.

3:01:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Basic books.

3:01:57 - Leo Laporte
I keep basic books. I keep waiting for somebody, some big corporate entity or I don't know, lorene Powell Jobs to come along and say you know, twit's a good thing. Here's $50 million. Just keep going, and then we would just keep going and we wouldn't have to be begging you all the time. I hate the begging. Jeff Jarvis is a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark journalism school at the City University of New York, and he is, of course, not going to be here next week because he's on his way to Perugia, italia.

3:02:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Where.

3:02:36 - Leo Laporte
I can eat when you can eat Cacio e Pepe. Do we know who's going to be sitting in yet? We've asked Stacy, but we've also asked a few other people. Glenn Fleischman.

3:02:49 - Speaker 6
We don't know yet. We don't know yet.

3:02:51 - Leo Laporte
We haven't heard back, but we will have probably one or two people to sit in for you, Jeff.

3:02:56 - Jeff Jarvis
You'll probably have to have two to replace me.

3:02:58 - Leo Laporte
Yes, we found the cards. They were in my office. Ladies and gentlemen, he is the director formerly is currently but soon to be formally, formerly the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism newmark hey craig an encore. You know we could name this the craig newmark foundation for podcasting excellence do you think craig would sponsor the show? We could do it.

3:03:30 - Paris Martineau
Craig, you want to hear this every wednesday, just you know we have a lot of takes that you'll love to have your name on we play your song all the time, craig, all the time?

3:03:43 - Leo Laporte
no, I don't want to. I'm not going to beg anybody personally, but uh, but just just, you can join the club, craig. It's only seven bucks. Twittv slash club twit. We will be back next wednesday.

3:03:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll be doing it from mom's house. Pigeon members, yeah, get some pigeons.

3:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Mom has pigeons, uh. But we will be here Wednesday afternoon 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, that is 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it live on YouTube. Youtubecom. Slash twit. Download the shows after the fact on twittv. Slash twig Subscribe on your favorite podcast player. That's probably the best idea. That way you get it automatically. I thank all our club members for your great support.

3:04:24 - AI
Thanks to all of you for listening. We'll see you right here next time on this Week in Google.