This Week in Google 767 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff's here, paris is here, I'm here. There is, of course, absolutely nothing to talk about, but we're going to vamp for a whole two and a half hours. Maybe some of the things we'll talk about the heat death of the internet, what is going on at Tesla, the TikTok lawsuit they're trying to stay alive and a few fun TikTok things to remind us of the creativity there. And maybe one of the reasons the internet is so bad is because the AIs are taking over. Plus, what went wrong at BuzzFeed it's all coming up next on TWIG Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twig.
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 767. Recorded Wednesday, may 8th 2024. Never hug an Elmo. It's time for Twig this week in Google, the show we talk about the latest news from the Googleverse with Paris Martineau, superstar reporter from the information Hi Paris. Hi Paris looks a little different today because she's on her Mac camera, which actually looks pretty fine.
0:01:20 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it looks pretty fine as someone who hasn't used their Mac camera this entire show. But as for that, you know, I blame Apple.
0:01:28 - Leo Laporte
We see your monsteric. Clearly, it's true. What did you do so?
0:01:33 - Paris Martineau
large, I can't go onto that side of the office. I upgraded my Mac OS and apparently that just ruined everything in my life. Ruined everything in my life, but I will say I upgraded it so that I could try out a new ai powered transcription service that's local to your device and uses whisper. Oh yeah, open ai.
0:01:53 - Leo Laporte
I use that pick the week, so I won't say more I know what you're talking about, though I've been using it for some time it's really amazing.
yeah, uh, paris also has a hot new story in the information, which we'll talk about in a moment. But first it's time to say hello to everybody's favorite emeritus, the Leonard Tao Professor Emeritus for Generalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Hello, jeff Jarvis, hello hello. Hello boss, hello, hello. Next week is Google IO and hello boss, hello hello. Next week is Google IO and we will be flip-flopping shows. So we will be doing this Week in Google on Tuesday, 10 am Pacific, to cover the Google IO conference. Jeff and I will be there. Paris cannot, alas, because Tuesday is her big ski ball tournament or something.
0:02:45 - Paris Martineau
Something like that. You know, Tuesday at 1 pm Eastern, that's definitely the time people play ski ball. It's the hot time for ski ball. No, no, it's practice.
0:02:54 - Leo Laporte
Practice is very important too, it's true. So we'll miss Paris next week, but we'll get somebody in to join me and Jeff. So we'll cover Google IO and make that the this Week in Google, and that's normally the MacBreak Weekly time slot. So we'll move MacBreak Weekly to Wednesday at this time, so it'll be flip-flopped, if that makes sense to everybody.
0:03:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Who says running a podcast empire is easy? Oh, my.
0:03:16 - YouTube
God it's not.
0:03:17 - Leo Laporte
It's such a challenge, complicated. Do you notice? My? These are not my vinylized record glasses. These are new pair of these are meta glasses and actually they're not. They're clear.
0:03:30 - Paris Martineau
In fact I should just pop the lenses out. I was going to say they've got the Ray-Ban logo on the lens. I know it's really annoying.
0:03:35 - Leo Laporte
I can't peel that off?
0:03:37 - Paris Martineau
Do all Ray-Bans do?
0:03:38 - Leo Laporte
that it's kind of annoying.
0:03:40 - Paris Martineau
Wait, you can't peel it off that would drive me insane.
0:03:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to pop the lenses out, because they're just clear lenses, because I didn't get my prescription.
0:03:50 - Jeff Jarvis
That's going to look even dorkier, is it?
0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is You're saying glasses without lenses.
0:03:56 - Paris Martineau
Leo yeah that's dork. When the kids back in the day would go to the 3D movies and they'd pop the lenses out so they could look like nerds.
0:04:06 - Leo Laporte
Really, I didn't know about that. All of the guts of this are not. The lenses do nothing, Unlike the new Brilliant glasses which I'm getting sometimes in the Brilliant Labs glasses which have a heads-up display. These are just nothing lenses. All of the guts of the Meta glasses are in the sides here. That's where the batteries and the compute is and there are cameras on either temple. Can you see those? If I shoot a movie by tapping and holding this, you see that light comes on.
0:04:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, a light goes on, yeah, so there's like a tally light. It looks like you're getting a transmission from a spaceship.
0:04:41 - Paris Martineau
So are you recording something right now?
0:04:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm recording a movie right now. Wow, it's huge. Yeah, well, I don't know if it's huge, and then I can take a picture, either by tapping that or going hey, meta, take a picture, because you know that's what you want to do whenever you take a photo. You can tap this, but I can also. It's now got Meta's AI attached to it, so, and I've been playing with it. I went to the bathroom and I said hey, Meadow, what am I looking at? And it said a urinal with a stainless steel handle.
0:05:10 - Paris Martineau
It could have been worse, could have been a lot worse. Hey Meadow send a photo of this to my doctor.
0:05:19 - Leo Laporte
I looked at the studio here. I'll do it again. Hey Meadow, what am I looking at?
0:05:28 - YouTube
It takes a little while. Why doesn't it.
0:05:33 - Leo Laporte
It's not doing anything. Hey Meta, it's making a funny sound.
0:05:39 - Paris Martineau
Do you think it's camera shy?
0:05:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, hey Meta, hey Meta, what am I looking at? Oh, just thinking You're looking at a studio set up with multiple screens. Oh, I could hear it.
0:05:58 - YouTube
You can kind of hear it?
0:05:59 - Leo Laporte
right, yeah, these are speakers. They're actually speakers are good, benito Gonzalez, our technical director and producer, listened to them. It sounded good. Right, benito, yeah?
0:06:07 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean it sounded like there were speakers outside.
0:06:10 - Paris Martineau
Are you?
0:06:10 - Leo Laporte
playing music now, leo, you know what's great.
0:06:14 - YouTube
Put the microphone closer to your head.
0:06:16 - Leo Laporte
I can now listen to my books while we're doing the show, and you'll never know.
0:06:19 - Paris Martineau
That's great. Finally, you can multitask like Jeff. Hey.
0:06:22 - Jeff Jarvis
You can multitask like Jeff. Hey, hey, you can hear that right.
0:06:26 - Paris Martineau
We're going to get taken down from YouTube again.
0:06:31 - Leo Laporte
I know I don't know it was Mike Elgin loves these. He was singing his praises. I thought for the price I could have paid and didn't for the Vision Pro. I could get like every little AI doohickey out there.
0:06:45 - Jeff Jarvis
So I did. What do these run now?
0:06:48 - Leo Laporte
I think they're around $300.
0:06:49 - Jeff Jarvis
And do you have to have a monthly?
0:06:50 - Leo Laporte
fee or no? No, you do have to have, which is a disadvantage a meta account.
0:06:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, yeah.
0:06:58 - Paris Martineau
But I happen to have one. I mean, you do have that I made it, I'm glad I did.
0:07:02 - Leo Laporte
Let me just look at the pricing here real quickly. I made it, I'm glad I did. Let me just look at the pricing here real quickly. They're Ray-Bans. So they came to me from La Exotica, which is kind of interesting, and you know, look, they have kind of a variety.
0:07:12 - Paris Martineau
The world's biggest monopoly when it comes to eyewear.
0:07:15 - Leo Laporte
So these are the Wayfarers. They're $300 without prescription and I imagine a prescription adds something to it, but they have a lot of styles. I don't know. I think it's. You know, this is obviously not an end game product, this is a transitional product, but I think it's kind of interesting here. I'll show you the pictures. You pair it with your smartphone app MetaView and you can see. Let's see some pictures here. Here's the studio. Oh, there's a video. So it's a pretty wide angle. I took a video earlier of Jeff. Let me see. Oh, there's Benito at his board. Oh, hi, benito. Oh yeah, you've never met Benito. There he is.
0:07:58 - Paris Martineau
Wow, Can you zoom in? I've never seen Benito. Hi Benito.
0:08:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think this is Benito.
0:08:06 - Leo Laporte
I guessed. Isn't it funny how you imagine.
0:08:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Hair was a little longer.
0:08:08 - Paris Martineau
That's what I was thinking I also did imagine kind of shaggy hair for some reason.
0:08:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I did too. He's a rocker.
0:08:16 - Paris Martineau
You give that vibe, that's it. That's why I used to have long hair.
0:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Here's walking through the set and what's interesting is it does say there's Jeff just right before the show I was reading. It does say it looks like a TV studio set up for streaming. That's the picture I just took. That's my view. For $300 it's kind of a thing of interest I wouldn't recommend it.
0:08:48 - Paris Martineau
Can you put your prescriptions in it?
0:08:49 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Mine no, because I have very strong prescription. They declined.
0:08:54 - Paris Martineau
What's your prescription, Leo?
0:08:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Bad. You know prescriptions, I don't know, I just always find it funny.
0:09:02 - Paris Martineau
It would be meaningful. I have medium bad eyesight. Oh, you don't. I've got like a negative four, negative five situation. Yeah, yeah, but I was wondering if you were like in the negative tens.
0:09:12 - Leo Laporte
That's blind, blind. No, no, no, no, no. My contacts are minus four and a half in the left, minus five and a half in the right, but the glasses prescription, I think, is minus six or six and a half and they wouldn't go quite that high. I could have got the contact. In fact, that's what I do with Brilliant Labs. I got a little bit of a weaker prescription, but I'm wearing these with my contacts and clear lenses, which is why I'm really tempted to just pop them out.
0:09:39 - Paris Martineau
They look cute. It's a good you know shape to your face.
0:09:41 - Leo Laporte
I feel like they're too small. I was going to give them to Micah because he's got a small head. Because I have such a big head, I think mine should be.
0:09:47 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I will say I'm going to have to go. I'm tempted by this, but I will have to go try them on in person because I have a very big head too. Most commercial hats do not fit me.
0:09:56 - PC
Same here, Same here Wow a big head podcast A big head show heads my, uh, my hat size is seven and a half.
0:10:03 - Leo Laporte
What's yours? I didn't even know there were hat sizes oh, yeah, yeah, seven or three quarters, oh, even bigger than me wow, I was.
0:10:11 - Jeff Jarvis
When I was in college. I really wanted a leather hat, you know like what do you mean?
0:10:17 - Paris Martineau
a leather hat?
0:10:19 - Jeff Jarvis
it was. It was. It was brimmed leather hat you were supposed to wear in college when you were going to hippie, like right uh, and I searched all over and searched all over. I finally got one. I just kind of sat on top like a beanie.
0:10:30 - Paris Martineau
Like a cowboy hat.
0:10:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Or like a no no. It's a hippie hat. It's like.
0:10:34 - Paris Martineau
Google leather hat and just cowboy hats come up.
0:10:37 - Leo Laporte
I have a leather cowboy hat, but I also have a leather top hat and when I was in actually it was funny when I was in high school or college I had a big floppy leather top hat. The leather wasn't stiff enough, oh my gosh. And so it kind of woke a jaw down over the.
0:10:53 - Jeff Jarvis
it wasn't good, it wasn't a good look, mine was more like an Australian hat.
0:10:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there you go. That's the picture, paris, right there.
0:11:02 - Paris Martineau
That's what I'm assuming you're wearing.
0:11:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, do, right there, she put it up. That's what I'm assuming you're wearing. Yeah, um, do I have? Uh, I might have a leather one, john, I might have the leather one in the office. I don't know how. Somehow I got into collecting hats. I had a hat collection when I was a kid little kid like five because my grandma kept bringing me back hats from her travels and then, of course, lost all of them, but they wouldn't fit. They would have looked like this. And then, because we we started doing um the uh on iOS today, we started wearing caps. At the end of it, we call it the app cap. Our pick of the week was the app cap and we'd wear funny hats, and so I ended up with a collection. This is the hat, though I think, jeff, that you were looking for.
0:11:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh, very steep, Okay can you keep this on the whole podcast these are buffalo nickel.
0:11:47 - Leo Laporte
This would be really good.
0:11:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh my lord and it goes with the glasses, I think the glass is exactly what I was gonna say yeah yeah hey meta what am?
0:11:57 - YouTube
I looking at I don't know why anyway. So turn, turn it, turn it on, on paris. Let's see what it says.
0:12:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Why does it play that every time? I don't know why. So turn it on Paris and see what it says. She is.
0:12:11 - Leo Laporte
Okay, did it say anything about her? Yeah, because what did it say? When I looked at you, jeff, it said just, you were preparing to do it.
0:12:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I was making a presentation. I was, in fact looking down like this hey, okay now.
0:12:19 - Leo Laporte
So what you do is you have to really look at it. Hey, meta, what am I looking at? This is such a funny tableau that is so boring.
0:12:43 - Benito Gonzalez
Hey Meta, what am I looking at? You are looking at a person sitting in front of a camera. With what?
0:12:49 - Leo Laporte
appears to be a home office or living room behind them.
0:12:51 - Paris Martineau
That's pretty good. That is true, meta.
0:12:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you is that good?
0:12:54 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I knew you were in front of a camera, that it wasn't you'd have to be a special kind of idiot, though, to be looking at something and not know what it was and ask your glasses, and your glasses tell you and you go, oh, thanks well you gotta really.
0:13:08 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I've heard that it's quite useful for, like, identifying flowers.
0:13:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, or things like that I'll wear it around and and figure all right, wait a second.
0:13:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Can you turn the plant? Turn again and ask it if it knows what plant is in that screen.
0:13:24 - Benito Gonzalez
It didn't know what kind of dog Lily was.
0:13:26 - YouTube
Yeah, hey, meta, what kind of plant is that?
0:13:40 - Jeff Jarvis
This is great radio.
0:13:46 - Paris Martineau
That really does it for me.
0:13:49 - Leo Laporte
Hey, Meta, what kind of plant was that? Yeah, it's just. Wow, RAP. It's Apothos, it said it, it gave it the species.
0:14:02 - Paris Martineau
It's not Apothos, but it's Monasteria.
0:14:05 - Leo Laporte
It gave a species in Latin and everything and in Scarlett.
0:14:08 - Paris Martineau
Johansson's voice. That's cool, nice. Good job, metta.
0:14:13 - Leo Laporte
I finally got her. Well, bad job.
0:14:14 - Paris Martineau
Metta.
0:14:16 - Leo Laporte
You know, kevin Rose, when he was on the Twitter a couple weeks ago, said he always thanks AI. Afterwards he says you never know he's very polite. I Thanks AI.
0:14:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Afterwards, he says you never know he's very polite I know, I thought you're kidding right, and he said no, he was serious. I read an essay recently that said that that's exactly the wrong thing, that we should be doing, because then we humanize it, we anthropomorphize it.
0:14:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we should not do it. So this week in the information the story Paris has been working on all week long came out with an AI illustration of it. Looks like Jonah Peretti eating very hot.
0:14:49 - Paris Martineau
That's not AI baby. A human artist paid a salary made that. And it's Jonah Peretti eating hot wings.
0:14:56 - Leo Laporte
Wow, well, I should have known. The fingers are perfect. The subject it's been painful. What Jonah Peretti says went wrong at BuzzFeed. He was the guy who you know really was all in on journalism and created BuzzFeed and he said this is the subheading by Paris Martineau and Sahil Patel. Buzzfeed CEO once proclaimed a consolidation was the best way for digital media companies to fight back against the big tech platforms. In an interview, though, he discusses how BuzzFeed's biggest deal blew up in his face, in its face. So you, you know, we now know, because you couldn't tell us, but you were talking to Jonah right before the show a couple of weeks ago.
0:15:41 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the other week on a Wednesdaynesday morning, which is normally my work from home day, I went into our office in flat iron in manhattan and me and my colleague, our media reporter, uh, sehil patel, met with jonah for a hour hour and a half on the record conversation, and this came kind of the tail end of we'd been doing reporting over the past couple of weeks into the story of kind of what went wrong with buzzfeed. And I was originally drawn to this because buzzfeed was such a like. It was the beacon of this supposedly new area era for media. It was going to like be the next big thing and it rushed to go public in 2021, even though maybe its finances weren't totally set yet. It tried to go public in 2021, even though maybe its finances weren't totally set yet.
It tried to go public as a SPAC, which is like a special purpose acquisition company, ostensibly a faster way to go public.
Which Trump media recently used to go public it was really hot during the pandemic to go public via SPAC All the kids were doing it to go public. It was really hot during the pandemic to go public via SPAC all the kids were doing it. Uh, and Jonah the CEO had long been kind of known as this media savant. He was the envy of like a lot of mainstream media publishers. For like decades BuzzFeed was thought of as this kind of total digital darling, and one of the most recent proclamations he made about the state of the industry that had people all up in arms and falling over themselves is he was like consolidation is key. The only way that media companies are going to survive in the era of Facebook and Google and all these tech ad giants is by combining and merging and getting bigger, and he really tried to do that.
He bought HuffPost HuffPost he and then kind of delayed their going public to buy this media company Complex, which has Hot Ones, which is kind of why we have Jonah Freddie eating Hot Wings in the lead image there. But it ended up being basically a disaster. Buzzfeed has been public for the last two and a half years and for most of that time they've been a penny stock. They only recently got up out of the pennies on Monday because they did a reverse stock split which you know just makes your stock higher than a dollar so that you don't get delisted from the NASDAQ. So we kind of dug in to figure out how did this all go so wrong?
0:18:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's a really good story. It's really really well done and, I think, is so timely because we're trying to figure out what's happening with all the media and we thought BuzzFeed was the answer. Buzzfeed was the future. And the irony to me I said this in a comment under the story is that I think that Jonah showed the way away from a destination strategy and now he's going to a destination strategy and Jonah showed, I think, how to get past the notion of mass media. And then he thought the only way to compete with the platforms was to try to be as big as them, which was quixotic or foolhardy. And he did the same thing that big old media did, like newspaper chains. He, he bought too much, got bad debt, uh and uh is vulnerable for it now yeah, and I think it's particularly interesting because I mean buzzfeed originally it's uh.
0:18:59 - Paris Martineau
what set it apart was how they made money was through kind of like native advertising, where, instead of, you know, having like banner ads or normal programmatic stuff, they would have a team like pitch brands directly and then kind of incorporate the ads in to their content. You'd have like a sponsored quiz or a sponsored article or whatnot. Um, but over the last couple of years they've had to move away from that entirely and part of what led to the impetus for the story was BuzzFeed had acquired Complex Media because they were like oh they do all this fun extra stuff that's not programmatic. They have really kind of pricey branded videos. They have sponsored hot ones, chicken fingers or whatever. They're like this would be great and they buy that, try to incorporate it.
It goes terribly and essentially they decided well, within 18 months, this isn't going well, so we're going to sell most of it for a third of what we paid for. And now we're just going to go all in on programmatic ads, which is just like display ads and banner ads, which is kind of the lowest common denominator of advertising, which is quite sad really, because I mean it just means you have to chase scale at all costs, which isn't really viable in this day and age.
0:20:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Which is what Ben Smith wrote about in his book Traffic, and I always thought that BuzzFeed and Vice were the. Everybody thought it was the vanguard of the future of media. They were the last gasp of old mass media, and you know it's sad. Jonah really is an innovator. He is creative. He did come up with a new model, but the problem was there was, as they say in the Valley, no barrier to entry. It's the same thing that happened at Aboutcom. Aboutcom invented something new and then content farms came in, ruined it. Google had to change its algorithm and it hurt everybody, including aboutcom. Buzzfeed invented this new idea. We make our crap vertical. We can make your crap vertical and we get our audience. We don't sell space or time or audience. We're going to be off there, right. And then what happened? Others came in and copied it and Facebook had to diminish all of them, including Buzzfeed, and so it's. It's a shame, really, because he was trying to do new things. Did you sense, paris, that there was regret?
0:21:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, I think he said he feels very frustrated with the way things turns out, turned out. He spoke at length. I think a bit of this is reflected in the story that he had this idea, I guess, to switch gears a little bit. One thing we asked him about was there was this period of hype for digital media where it seemed like the sky was the limit, Valuations were sky high, and we're like do you? And of course, that bubble has popped and now it's quite the opposite.
And we asked him do you feel at all responsible for overhyping that? And he's like well, I originally thought that the Internet was going to take a similar, we're going to see something similar to what happened with the advent of cable that you were going to, you know, with the cable industry. You had cable distributors that suddenly were in need of content to sell ads against. So they went to cable channels and news publishing channels and struck deals with them to create quality content to run their ads against. And he was like I assumed that that was the future we were going to with the internet and these tech platforms, that these companies sure would be all right with user generated content, but they would ultimately want high quality, publisher generated content to have their ads against, and he's like and that didn't end up being the world that we lived in. I think the quote he had said was like if that had like borne out, the hype would have been justified.
0:22:54 - Leo Laporte
But it didn't, and so it wasn't it's kind of sad actually it is kind of sad yeah yeah, and here I am sitting in a top hat, so let me take that off well, you're like, no, you're like, you're the mortician oh, as long as I'm not the monopoly man, I'm okay, yeah well, if you get your uh brilliant labs monocle, you would be the one oh, I have it in the other room, I could wear it.
Um, yeah, I mean so is there going to be a second act for Jonah or a third act? He founded Huffington Post. Let's not forget about the pivot to video. Well, now he owns.
0:23:32 - Paris Martineau
Huffington Post. His current idea for a third act is like through generative AI, he thinks that BuzzFeed's future is as a tech company. Essentially and here I'll read this, I like it His plan to reverse the company's fortunes involve returning BuzzFeed to its irreverent made-for-the-internet roots through a major bet on generative artificial intelligence. A longtime personal obsession of his is a Tamagotchi-themed chatbot that allows users to raise their own Nepo baby called Nepogotchi, a custom emoji generator and a tool that generates images of celebrities in the style of the character. Shrek Peretti says he's an avid AI user in his personal and professional lives. He used the tech recently to settle an argument with his kids about whether a football player's arms were too long or too short. So weird.
I do want to play this nepogachi game. I mean it's fun, it's like a little chat bot, but I guess it makes sense. I guess from the perspective of they're still chasing scale and it's a programmatic ads based business so they want to increase the amount of page views their content gets, because then they can sell more and more ads and I mean on that part it does seem like it's working. He said publicly and he discussed this in our interview that like the AI generated content and I guess I'll put that in air quotes right now does get dramatically more views than BuzzFeed's human generated content, and I think that the reason why I put that in air quotes a little bit is it's somewhat different than what I originally thought of when I heard him describe our AI generated content Like this Nepogachi chatbot.
It looks like a Tamagotchi, it's got art design on it. They had a team go through and think of potential names and stuff for it. They built like a little chatbot and so there was human intervention and ingenuity in it, but it's ultimately powered by kind of a chat gpt like thing.
0:25:30 - Leo Laporte
so it's a little bit different than a purely ai generated article, though they have those two I have to say, if I mean I just went to buzzfeedcom and this is the trashiest website on the internet, I mean this is the national well, that means no, leo.
0:25:46 - Jeff Jarvis
That story is true.
0:25:47 - Speaker 6
It was broken by the new york times rfk jr had a worm in his head but that is exactly what he said.
0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
I understand but if you keep reading, it's all it's the world we live in now it's pretty trashy. Oh, so you think it's just reflecting our lives? I don't know well, I'm just saying that story does. Yeah, no, I wasn't just talking about that story.
0:26:05 - Paris Martineau
It's interesting, though, because one thing that came up a bit in the reporting process is I was talking to Jonah and some of the other executives that we spoke to about like this idea that it does seem like BuzzFeed in a way is returning to its early days, like there was. You know, buzzfeed started, as I guess you could call it, trashy, or more just like internet ephemera content. Then it rose to prominence and got clout through the publication and expansion of BuzzFeed News, but BuzzFeed News was always I mean, while it had the prestige it never made money. For BuzzFeed Towards the end of its life it was losing like five to $10 million a year, and they weren't really ever able to sell ads against it because advertisers don't want to sell ads against news.
0:26:53 - Leo Laporte
So then am I right to say the lesson he learned was to go back to the trashy, because that's what makes money?
0:26:59 - Paris Martineau
It seems like it yeah. I mean. But that's, I feel like, part of the problem of being a public company, you know, is you can't just mess around anymore. You suddenly have to create shareholder value.
0:27:12 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not just public, though I'd say Paris is that back in the days, when he had nothing but investors, they were pressing him pretty heavily too. Yeah. I think he took too much investment because everybody thought it was going to grow too big, because that was the time. I mean, when was when was buzzfeed founded?
0:27:28 - Paris Martineau
2006 and, famously, in 2013, jonah turned down a offer from bob eicher of disney to buy buzzfeed for half a billion dollars. There's this fantastic scene in ben smith's book traffic where he describes because ben smith at the time was editor-in-chief of buzzfeed news and he came with jonah and, I believe, like z frank, their head of digital, and john steinberg, their president, to this meeting and they go back to their hotel room in la afterwards and the president of buzzfeed is all like, oh my gosh, guys, we got to take this deal. And they all sit in the balcony and smoke a bunch of weed and talk about it and jonah's like no, I think that we can do better.
I think that this will they all kind of thought it was going to be their facebook moment where they're like we turned down an offer to be purchased and then only got so much bigger, but you know the the tides changed dramatically, it's quite sad.
0:28:27 - Leo Laporte
I don't feel bad for him. I kind of feel bad for us, because this is what the internet's turning into. Is the moral here that there is no money in quality content, I mean? I?
0:28:40 - Paris Martineau
think it's hard to make money from quality content. I guess Huffington Post, or HuffPo as it's now called, is profitable, and has been since they merged into BuzzFeed, although, you know, I mean they've been able to make it profitable because they added a voices and opinion kind of section and something about culture and lifestyle which is easier to sell ads against, because they didn't want advertisers didn't want to be against the news, but they couldn't really do that with BuzzFeed News.
0:29:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, I think that the web is getting junked up and junked up and junked up and it's going to be junked up a lot faster and worse with generative AI, ai, and so I think what ends up happening is there's probably a next generation of companies that become quality and people go to them for quality and there's new business opportunities to be had there, because it's going to be awful. And, dare I say it, going back to Gutenberg, it's what happened with print, that at some point there was a demand for the institutions of editing and publishing to assure quality, and those institutions are not adequate to what we have today, and I think that there are business opportunities around quality, but it's going to take time and it's probably going to take the ruination of the web as we know it.
0:29:57 - Leo Laporte
I guess you could say this is what happened to television. I vividly remember how you know, newton Minow's V wasteland with Gilligan's Island, my mother, the car, you know crap sitcoms, and then somehow we recovered and there's quality TV. There's still crappy TV, but there's quality TV too.
0:30:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know what the crappy is crappier and the quality was more quality.
0:30:23 - Leo Laporte
You don't lose money pandering to the tastes of the bass audience, though right, that's really the lesson you want to make money, you want to scale, you've got to pander.
0:30:36 - Paris Martineau
Yes, can we just have a brief aside for my Mother? The Car, a TV show I just Googled and learned is exactly as it sounds.
0:30:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to suggest this. I was going to suggest this. I was going to suggest you do this, Leo.
0:30:48 - Leo Laporte
I didn't realize you would not have recognized the reference. Oh yeah, it aired in 1965, Leo.
0:30:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Time to play a little. My Mother, the Car for Paris, alright, here we go. It's Dad, and Dad Reminisce. Oh, I love this Get a load of the dress, the hairdo, actually let me pick.
0:31:13 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if I could find something. This is the premiere episode. Well, I guess you know, maybe we should do this.
0:31:19 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a setup, because that's where he buys the mother, yeah, it's Jerry Van Dyke.
0:31:21 - Leo Laporte
Right, yeah, it's Jerry.
0:31:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Van Dyke. Right yeah, dick Van Dyke's brother.
0:31:24 - Leo Laporte
Dick Van Dyke's lesser talented brother.
0:31:26 - Jeff Jarvis
He's kind of like the Jim Leach of the 60s.
0:31:29 - Benito Gonzalez
He's looking for cars to buy and then he comes across a fixer-upper.
0:31:31 - Leo Laporte
Benito, I don't know. This is 1965.
0:31:35 - Benito Gonzalez
It's still network television.
0:31:38 - Leo Laporte
He's looking at a fixer-upper. Don't play the audio. How about that? No, play the audio because it's going to talk to him.
0:31:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you fast forward to some point where he's he's talking to his car.
0:31:49 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I believe that this is quite lovely.
0:31:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, yeah. Go back with the guy with the mustache. You've got to have the guy with the mustache.
0:31:54 - Leo Laporte
A rich driver, right A rich driver.
0:31:58 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a very unusual car Captain.
0:32:01 - PC
Well, as we were saying before, the car so rudely interrupted us.
0:32:05 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I always am amazed when I see old TV, how obviously this is like a set on a soundstage. They make no attempt at realism at all. Well of course not.
0:32:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Try Lassie. Lassie was on a soundstage and you think it's in the great outdoors and it's this tiny little room covered with covered with dirt. It's kind of amazing. Wow is the car. Who was?
0:32:33 - Paris Martineau
she knows who lassie was, I know anyway, the car is his mother, reincarnated, reincarnated yes, yes that's the premise that's great, but what I just know that that you the pitch for that show had to come from somebody doing a lot of coke and they were like reincarnated.
0:32:51 - Leo Laporte
They were doing the wacky weed.
0:32:54 - Speaker 6
All right, all right, all right. Who was the car? Sorry for getting the car. You look at.
0:32:59 - Leo Laporte
Southern. I was talking, like on a serious subject, about how media ends up serving the lowest common denominator and that's how you succeed in media and I guess that's why we just showed it. That's why we struggle right. That's why Twit struggles is we don't want to pander. I don't do listicles, I don't do. You won't believe what happened next. I don't do listicles.
0:33:28 - Paris Martineau
You won't believe what happened next. I will say. Something that warmed my heart a little bit this week was I just put this link in the Discord. It's a piece from Neiman Lab. The headline is this year's Pulitzer Prizes were a coming out party for online media. Hold on.
0:33:42 - Leo Laporte
Hold the thought. We've got to take a break. Hold the thought Pulitzer Prizes coming up. See, this is class. This network, this network is all about brains and substance and talent and you won't believe what happens next. Stay here, it will blow your mind. And yes, kim Kardashian is part of it. Okay, I have to. I did. I have to say I did watch the Met Gala red carpet a couple of days ago.
0:34:12 - Paris Martineau
No, I didn't either.
0:34:13 - Leo Laporte
I could see that pop culture has completely passed me by at this point.
0:34:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's not pop culture. Well, it's a combination of pop culture and ridiculous show-off rich culture.
0:34:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, isn't that what happens?
0:34:24 - Paris Martineau
Well, I'd argue that that is also pop culture and ridiculous show-off rich culture. Well, isn't that what happens?
0:34:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'd argue that that is also pop culture. You're right, you're right. That's what happens.
0:34:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I'd say that that is the definition of pop culture actually I worked at Condé Nast when it wasn't pop culture.
0:34:34 - Paris Martineau
That was the point.
0:34:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, the rich people realize that you can't be haute couture, you have to be pop culture, because that's where the money is, that's where the people are right. You gotta have kendall jenner on the runway or you know you're. It doesn't matter, nobody wants to see. You know, doris duke in a in a floral gown. There's no market for that, you know, and I think anna winter is smart enough to know that and that's why she's got Zendaya instead.
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0:37:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it seems like there's never been more Pulitzer Prizes won by online native outlets. There were 12 online native outlets honored in the Pulitzers this year versus eight newspapers. See, they're dying, I mean the newspapers are dying. It's, I think, just very interesting. It shows, at the very least, that online media is rising to prominence.
0:37:59 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, pulitzer announced a podcast two weeks ago, so they're right, pulitzer's on it. That's great. They're on it.
0:38:05 - Paris Martineau
they're on the online outlets include uh propublico, which got two finalists. These are all the finalists invisible institute, alabama reflector city bureau, the honolulu city civil beat, kff health news, lookout santa cruz, mississippi, today stat, which is great, the Marshall Project, great Texas Tribune, usg Audio, which I don't know. It was heartening to me to see the rise of local news in some ways.
0:38:34 - Jeff Jarvis
It is. And if you look at Santa Cruz, that's run by Ken Docter. Ken is an analyst of the newspaper industry from years standing. He writes something called Newsonomics, and then he decided to say, okay, smartass, do it yourself. He went into Santa Cruz. His avowed mission is to kill the Alden Global Media News Group paper in Santa Cruz, and he just announced this week.
0:38:56 - Leo Laporte
The Santa Cruz Sentinel. He's going to kill it, he's going to kill it.
0:39:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it going to?
0:39:01 - Leo Laporte
die Because that's the worst newspaper ever. It's Alden. Is it going to die Because that's the worst newspaper?
0:39:04 - Jeff Jarvis
ever. And he's going to go into a town he just announced in Oregon.
now, and he raises money to do this, and he has an association of about a half dozen sites that are doing the same thing. My argument of late has been that the health of newspapers is no longer the barometer of the health of news in America. At the local level, it's certainly true they're owned by hedge funds, most of them and at the national level, I wrote a post this week saying that I've given up on the New York Times. I've had it. So it's these new things that are going to be the future of journalism.
0:39:35 - Leo Laporte
So this is really so. I went to high school in Santa Cruz, so I know the Santa Cruz local paper very well. This is a tiny little digital only outlet six reporters, one photographer, one assignment editor and a copy editor, and this is what they won the pulitzer for. Is this timeline of the atmospheric rivers that struck santa cruz a couple of years ago now? Uh, january, december 2022 through january 2023, 2023. Great images, an actual timeline with links. This is something that a print paper can't do. I think this is incredible. This is what we need.
I mean we're losing local newspapers.
0:40:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Every small town paper is struggling and the ones that are alive are not alive, they're crap in California. So I wrote my paper about the california journalism preservation act. Um and uh. In it I saw that 18 of the top 25 california papers by circulation are owned by hedge funds. Now, oh man and, and they're in northern california. Media news group in northern california, since it's owned up there, has consolidated 12 titles into two. So so they're all less local.
0:40:46 - Leo Laporte
People might say, oh well, you know, that's not important. It's national reporting, national news. It matters. It's not the city council meetings, the school board meetings, the pressing local issues. We have a local paper in Petaluma, the Argus Courier, which I'm sure is owned by a private equity firm, but at least, but we get it.
0:41:08 - Paris Martineau
We subscribe every week because it's it's where you're going to find out what's going on locally and you're not going to see that anywhere. Is that your favorite local?
0:41:12 - Leo Laporte
paper. What's the only local paper we have?
0:41:14 - Paris Martineau
the argus courier jeff, do you have a favorite local news org outside of njcom?
0:41:20 - Jeff Jarvis
or is it njcom? Oh, I, jenna. Comes one, and then there's patch.
0:41:23 - Leo Laporte
There's the pedal on the patch.
0:41:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this Patch. There's a lot. I mean. I think City Bureau, which got a Pulitzer, is brilliant because they teach citizens to cover their own communities and compensate them for that. Outlier Media in Detroit is great. Outlook Santa Cruz is great. Outlook Santa Cruz is great. I look at the members here in New Jersey of the Center for Cooperative Media and I helped start the New Jersey News Commons now has 400 members here in New Jersey. Inn has 400 members. Lion of Local News has 400 members. These are all new startups. In Canada there's a company called Village Media, run by a guy named Jeff Elgy, who is profitable in 29 markets in Canada and he's going to come into the US. I hope it's possible to be profitable.
The newspapers did exactly what Jonah did they consolidated, they took on debt, they became vulnerable to the hedge funds. They're being cut to the marrow. All they buy anymore is lobbying to get crap legislation. There's a new bill that just went through a committee in the California Senate that's worse than the last one I wrote about. They want to do a tax. They want to do a tax on get this. It's a tax on collecting data, data or information. Information is knowledge. They want to tax that as if it is a presumed barter. I give you my data and you give me free content, so I'm going to tax that, but I'm only going to tax a certain number of companies that do that Guess which ones. And it's awful legislation because it comes from the lobbyists for the hedge funds. Sorry, got me started.
0:43:05 - Leo Laporte
So this is our local paper the Petal you know I think this is a pretty good paper the Argus Courier, if you didn't, and we subscribe I'm not logged in right now, but we do subscribe to this and the Santa Rosa paper, which is the big city up north, and these are stories that I think are pretty important. The library's slated for a makeover uh, the city is shutting a bar because bouncers beat up somebody uh, you know the petaluma city schools art show this this is actually called by sonoma media, media investment.
It used to be a new york times company, um, but I think they sold it and actually they've done a good job of really covering. Now we're a town of 60 000. I guess that's not tiny, right, right, uh, so maybe medium yeah, maybe it needs to have a town of a certain size, but I'm really grateful that we have this. I I really for a while thought it was at the end of the line for small town newspapers I'll shout out my favorite local uh outlet.
0:44:06 - Paris Martineau
I mean, there's so many great ones in new york city, but the one I've really been uh appreciative of lately is hellgate um. The website is hellgate nyc and it's named after the hellgate bridge um it is micro, that is a micro target.
I mean it's a recent publication, it's's all of New York City related kind of news culture. It's got a staff of seven. It's worker owned and started by like kind of longtime city journalists, subscriber funded. They also take donations and they just do some of the most like fun and interesting work. They also do like really quite good journalism.
0:44:43 - Leo Laporte
So maybe there is some hope, at least there is In, at least there is In a local level.
0:44:47 - Paris Martineau
I suppose, while we're on the subject of the Pulitzers, I'll crib again from my picks this week. Something that I found really interesting is this. I have the link in line 157. This was the first year in over a decade that tech journalism was awarded a public Pulitzer prize, and in this case it was to the staff of Reuters for what the Pulitzer is described as an eyeopening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk's automobile and aerospace businesses.
Stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his company's practices in Europe and the US.
0:45:31 - Leo Laporte
And have him deliver great links, great downloads. That's like Elon is a gift to journalism, to tech journalism. Right, Because, you can't stop reading it. I don't know if every story will get that kind of attention, and I know our friend Barry Weiss. What's her name?
0:45:50 - Paris Martineau
Not Barry Weiss, I was going to say our friend Barry Weiss no.
0:45:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I can't remember her last name but she wrote a book about. We've had her on the show about technology journalism and kind of the death of technology journalism. Yeah, I just thought it was interesting. I'm sorry, Nerit Weiss Blatt Blatt, who we've had on the show. Yeah, I apologize for putting it. You can see why I said Nerit Barry Weiss, though I mean you can see where that came from. I'm just saying.
0:46:23 - Paris Martineau
It's true, there is a Weiss and a b in there. It's close anyway.
0:46:28 - Leo Laporte
She wrote tech lash about the death of technology reporting. This is okay, so we cheered you up. So there's good, that's good. There's some local stuff happening. There's the information for god's sake, information. And then there's advon get, get ready. The ai Advan, get ready. The AI-powered content monster infecting the media industry. This is from Futurism. Came out today, they say. Remember that AI company behind Sports Illustrated's fake writers. We did some digging and it's got some tendrils into some other surprisingly prominent publications.
0:47:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I read most of it, but he don't read all of it. You don't have.
0:47:07 - Leo Laporte
But you know, gonzalez are a producer.
0:47:10 - Benito Gonzalez
Uh wait, would you summarize? That's a long article.
0:47:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Now I'm getting ads for leather hats in my version.
0:47:17 - Leo Laporte
No, are you really? That's awesome. I looked up leather hats to show it. It really works. It really works, okay, um so, uh. So, gannett. It started with Gannett when some product reviews getting published on the website of USA Today with bylines that didn't seem to correspond to real people. Plus the articles were stilted and formulaic, so the writers union there accused them of being shoddy. Ai Gannett blamed the articles on Advan A-D-V-O-N. Advan did those Sports Illustrated articles, by the way, kind of very creatively, with not only fictional names but fictional biographies and pictures of the AI.
0:48:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It was also fictional diversity, which is really offensive. We don't have any black people, but we'll make them up. This is from the Futurism article.
0:48:09 - Paris Martineau
What we found should alarm anyone who cares is from the Futurism article. Yes. What we found should alarm anyone who cares about a trustworthy and ethical media industry. Right Basically, advan engages what Google calls site reputation abuse. It strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews, often for surprisingly prominent publications, intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like best ab roller or leather hats. Jeff.
0:48:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
0:48:36 - Paris Martineau
The idea seems to be that these visitors will be fooled into thinking the recommendations were made by the publication's actual journalists and click one of the article's affiliate links, kicking back a little money if they make a purchase.
0:48:47 - Leo Laporte
This is Upworthy all over again.
0:48:49 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what we talked about I talked to well Upworthy, had a decent motive. I talked to somebody who was in charge of content I won't say which one, one of the yucky companies. He's since left and he said when I started talking about AI, he said you don't understand, jeff, we're in a war over reviews. Well, a review of all things should be a human being making a judgment, should be a human being making a judgment, but what happens is because of this affiliate revenue. This Advan story starts with somebody who was hired for pennies to write this crap and then suddenly his job changed. He was told no, no, no, now you're going to edit these stories. The stories were obviously made by AI and you should write down all your corrections. So then they use the corrections to train the AI. And then he was out of a business, out of a job, and it's been used by these. These are the guys who wrote the Sports Illustrated stories. They wrote the cadet stories. I think they were. You know what's a better analogy? Leo is tabula yeah.
It's nuclear tabula.
0:49:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, which sounds really awful. Um, this is, uh, good reporting, by the way, from futurism. Yes, they got a training video from an insider at advon. Um, a whistleblower, in effect, an advon. In it, an advon manager shares her screen showing a content management system posted on the company's website, advoncommercecom. In the video, the manager uses the CMS to open and edit a list of product recommendations titled Best Yoga Mats, coincidentally or not, byline by one of the fake Sports Illustrated writers, damon Ward.
The article's source, according to the field in the CMS, is AI. There's Damon Ward. Here's the picture of Damon Ward. The article's source, according to the field in the CMS, is AI. There's Damon Ward. Here's the picture of Damon Ward. By the way, that picture was offered for sale on a site that generates AI-generated headshots, where he is described as, quote joyful, black, young adult male with short black hair and brown eyes. Oh wow, they're so cheap. They reuse the same fake writers. You'd think they would generate a new fake writer anyway. Um, this was for yoga journal. A spokesperson for yoga journal, owner, outside incorporated, the portfolio of which also includes the acclaimed magazine outside, confirmed to us futur Futurism that Advan had previously published content for several of its titles, including Yoga Journal Backpacker and Clean Eating, but it ended up terminating the relationship in 2023 due to the poor quality of Advan's work. It wasn't the ethical issue at all, it was the quality, that's all.
0:51:28 - Benito Gonzalez
That was also a running theme in this article, that a lot of these companies dumped Advan because the work was all terrible.
0:51:34 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't good, but if it were good which it will be, by the way, any minute now, ai is just getting better and better at this stuff. It sounds like they wouldn't have dumped it. Oh well, if it was good quality, we'd use it.
0:51:49 - Benito Gonzalez
The article goes further and there's a whole cover-up thing going on also with all the articles like oh yeah, all the all the old um ai the fake ai. Authors names got changed to the to the ceo's wife and mother's name, whoa throwing your family to the wolves.
0:52:08 - Leo Laporte
uh, mcclatchy said. Oh, we ended our relationship with Advan and they deleted hundreds of pieces from all 20 of its newspapers, including the Sacramento Bee and the Miami Herald. Now this is really upsetting to me. An earlier archive version of the Advan site bragged that its publishing clients included PC Magazine, mashable, ask Men, those are all Ziff Davis Hearst's Good Housekeeping. Remember the Good Housekeeping? Seal of approval the seal of approval. Remember that.
IAC's Dot Dash Meredith Publications. Jeff, I'm sorry. People, parents, food and wine in style. Real simple travel plus leisure, better homes and gardens and southern living um also this is where we're headed kids advon also has a relationship with the parent company futurism. It's all disclosed in the article, though in fact we learned while reporting this is the futurism that's funny advon even has business ties to futurism's parent company, recurrent ventures. Although it's never had any involvement with futurism, it's they tried to.
0:53:17 - Jeff Jarvis
They tried to hang that ever tried to hang that over the heads of the reporters anyway, you get the, you get, I mean it's.
0:53:24 - Leo Laporte
It goes on and on and on. This is who's ruining the web?
0:53:27 - Jeff Jarvis
good, job by maggie dupre. Uh, in futurism.
0:53:28 - Leo Laporte
Uh, she's a human as far Good job by Maggie and Harrison Dupre in Futurism. She's a human, as far as we can tell, and not the wife of the CEO.
0:53:36 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, if that was AI generated, then I think I have hope.
0:53:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah actually, that'd be a good sign, blowing the lid off of AI.
0:53:45 - Jeff Jarvis
By the way, as we complain about Google search getting worse, it's not fully Google's fault or whoever got blamed on in last week's show. It's because the web is just getting filled with more and more crap.
0:53:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it just reflects the crap.
0:53:57 - Paris Martineau
Well, I will also say, though have you guys noticed there have been a number of, I feel like, reports in the last week or two about smaller publishers, or even medium to large-sized publishers, seeing a dramatic decrease in SEO and search traffic after Google's rolled out its latest round of updates, I think to ranking, and I believe this has something to do with what they were talking about in the Futurism article. What is it? Reputation I just read this. I forgot what it was called, but essentially like manipulating your reputation scores on Google. Um, there, I just put a couple of links to this effect in the rundown. That line 56,. Um, hello our house, fresh, I guess. Uh, like prominent small review site saw its traffic go down 91%.
0:54:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh story, yeah, we talked about that a couple of weeks ago. When that came out, they were, they were really upset and they were just.
0:54:56 - Paris Martineau
That was just the tip of the iceberg that that futurism has done and it's just the tip of the iceberg, because if you go down to uh line 58, a, um, a reporter and uh seo person had pulled together a list of declines in SEO visibility for major publishers between September and April, and it's wild.
0:55:20 - Leo Laporte
Okay. So I saw this tweet and she says gee, notice anything? Totally obvious, or is it just me? And for the life of me, I didn't. So please explain what is totally obvious, because she never does. Is it that these are big name sites?
0:55:34 - Paris Martineau
It's just that sites from what I thought it was, from the large names to small, are all experiencing dramatic decreases.
0:55:43 - Leo Laporte
Oprah Daily down 68.8%. Collider 87% drop.
0:55:49 - Paris Martineau
New York Magazine 75%.
0:55:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this is also, I think, what Facebook's doing. They're just saying the news industry is being. We don't depend upon the news industry. Let's see what happens to our usage if we cut it down.
0:56:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but this is like completely across the board. What is going on? That these that this is google seo visibility, the greatest percentage. What is it they even mean google seo visibility?
0:56:19 - Paris Martineau
that is specifically like the top 10 search results or whatever that come up when you search for something.
0:56:24 - Leo Laporte
It's not like the top visitors or google news. It's not the number of visitors.
0:56:29 - Jeff Jarvis
So no, no, no, no, it's they have. They can only do this by testing against something that you know, and so it's. It's a questionable ranking, because they're guessing what people are searching for computer world down 75 percent.
0:56:40 - Leo Laporte
Turner classic movies down 90 percent. Bob vila down 85 percent. Um, well, so, but well. But I guess I just wonder what this means. Gq down 70 percent. What does it mean? I don't understand really.
0:56:55 - Paris Martineau
I don't understand what the measure is fully either sure entirely what the cause is here, and I don't think anyone outside of google probably knows that, but I do think that the thing about this that interests me was that small or medium or changes from within a company as gargantuan as google that is making changes all the time, can have dramatic and pronounced effects on an entire ecosystem of sites and companies and there's really just nothing you can do about it. This is's kind of like well, we're not really sure why this has gone down, but we've got to somehow figure it out.
0:57:34 - Leo Laporte
I have another theory, which is that for a long time, you know, I'm kind of notorious for being down on SEO. In fact, I probably stupidly spoke at an SEO conference in which I said you guys are a terrible business, stop being such scammers. I wonder if this is somewhat of a reflection on just kind of the failure of the SEO industry.
0:58:01 - Jeff Jarvis
They're selling snake oil Right and we complain about Google Search being bad. Well, everybody's trying to manipulate Google Search, so Google Search is getting back at that manipulation.
0:58:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah they're just turning off whatever little tricks these guys had figured out. I don't know if it's really an organic drop in uh in hits, or it's just that they're not getting the seo they thought they were getting by paying these snake oil salesmen.
0:58:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Google's chasing seo loopholes right well, it goes back to it's off Paris's story again. The preamble to all of that was once again about com, and the New York Times bought it out com because they had the wizard of SEO. They wanted to learn SEO. They then set him up to do his own SEO consultancy. I went to the first SEO conference and it was a small floor in a hotel. It filled all of Javits Center with all these BS companies.
Right, and it was because of Aboutcom that we recognize what questions are being asked and so we'll write the answers so that next time they ask the question we'll get the click instead of Wikipedia. Not a bad strategy, not a bad thing. They wrote good stuff, but then the content farms came in. They hired people, like the earlier versions of Advan, to write horrible stuff for pennies to try to get their piece of it. That is what led to Panda, the first major update of the search algorithm at Google, to downgrade all the content farm stuff and with it aboutcom. So aboutcom fell and fell and fell and fell to. The New York Times waited too long to sell it and it is now dot dash.
0:59:40 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of interesting to read this thread, by the way, because it was created by an SEO person right From data generated by an SEO agency. So their take on it is oh look what Google's doing to our clients, right? My take on it is that SEO is snake oil and the mistake these clients made was chasing Google traction by doing trickso, tricks you're generating sites specifically for search terms, things like that and that google caught on and is punishing them for that. So I guess how you interpret this tweet is really depends a lot on your point of view.
1:00:25 - Paris Martineau
My point of view is the web is being filled with crap and google's doing its best to make its search results better I agree with you in principle, leo, but I'll also play devil's advocate here for a minute, because I feel like some of these people probably would say, no, we're not doing it to game the system. We're doing this because it's the only way for us to participate in this system for a while. The only way to get your articles or web page visited at all or to come up and search results if someone's looking for your content, is to play the long, crappy seo game, and that means you know could be adding all the different things in there that's what I like is saying what if you need to do the tricks because everyone else is using them?
1:01:04 - Jeff Jarvis
well. So I've watched, I've been at events with publisher, news publishers and matt cuts or at his day, or Danny Sullivan now, and they all say tell us the secret, we have this valuable news, we should rise up. And both of them would roll their eyes and say, no, we're going to constantly try to get around those games. Just have good content, just serve people well and we'll try to figure that out, but that's what House Fresh says it is doing.
1:01:33 - Leo Laporte
They do real reviews, they're not chasing links, they don't generate fake reviews and they have lost 91% of their Google traffic since the March core update. And so that's the real question is you know what's going on here? Is it that sites were generating crap content and Google noticed and deranked them? Or, and maybe it was just that you know, house Fresh got caught in that. That, you know, even though they were generating good content Like aboutcom and like BuzzFeed.
1:02:05 - Jeff Jarvis
To a great extent, yeah Same thing happened to BuzzFeed.
1:02:09 - Leo Laporte
The bottom line for me as a user I don't really care, but the bottom line for me as a user is A Google search results are worse than ever and B the web itself is worse than ever, and I don't know who the culprit is, but it's pretty sad.
1:02:24 - Jeff Jarvis
And it's going to get worse with AI, and that's the prognosis.
1:02:32 - Paris Martineau
The patient is dead and it looks like he's getting worse, so I think we got a problem.
1:02:36 - Leo Laporte
The patient is dead and the doctor says he's going to get deader.
1:02:42 - Jeff Jarvis
He's going to be even deader. Okay, so Meanwhile, my TV is on to the side, which I do. I keep Twitter going, I keep the TV going.
1:02:50 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, how have we been doing this for so long, and I'm annoyed that you were watching.
1:02:52 - Jeff Jarvis
TV. It's just on, it's on all day.
1:02:54 - Leo Laporte
It's on all day, that's what happens when you get past 60. As you get older, you just have a need for constant noise in the background, I think.
1:03:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, this is how I go to sleep too. You have the TV on. Now we have RFK Jr.
1:03:09 - Paris Martineau
Now we have RFK Jr and his worm is on MSNBC. Okay, do you guys believe the worm is real? I know this is not what this podcast is supposed to be about, but I think there's no way he really had a worm in his head.
1:03:19 - Jeff Jarvis
He's crazy. But you know what? Paris, I looked it up and if you go to my Twitter feed.
1:03:22 - Leo Laporte
I put up the picture. It's an old story, isn't it?
1:03:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It's an old story, I put up the picture. Yeah, divorce. He was trying to say that he had no memory.
1:03:28 - Paris Martineau
So if you go to my Twitter, feed, because the worms ate my memory Christ.
1:03:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Go down my Twitter feed to the Guardian story. You will see a picture of the Honest to God, the kind of worm. It's a pork larva.
1:03:38 - Paris Martineau
I'm sorry. No, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to look for a photo of a worm.
1:03:43 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a picture. No, no, keep going. That's a joke Keep going down. It's trichinosis, it's trichinosis, that is, a pork larva that ate his brain.
1:03:53 - Leo Laporte
It's trichinosis Right, we were always told.
1:03:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know. I don't know.
1:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Cook your pork because of trichinosis.
1:04:02 - Paris Martineau
I don't need to see the worm's face, guys. I don't need to think about the fact that that's in there, you know what's interesting?
1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
It looks just like the face of the new Boston.
1:04:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Dynamics robot. All right, do you remember? Did you see the series? Unfortunately, it got canceled. Brain Dead no, oh, it was brilliant. It was about aliens invading the brains of politicians in Washington.
1:04:27 - Paris Martineau
It should never have been canceled.
1:04:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It was so true.
1:04:31 - Paris Martineau
That's also the plot of Baldur's Gate 3.
1:04:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, don't tell me. Oh, that's right, it's in your head.
1:04:38 - Paris Martineau
That's not a spoiler, Leo.
1:04:39 - Leo Laporte
That is like minute five You're going around trying to get the thing out of your head. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:04:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
1:04:43 - Leo Laporte
So is it. In fact, are you RFK Jr in the game?
1:04:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah in the game. Yeah, asking for a friend that's a reveal halfway through.
1:04:57 - YouTube
So you know I'm sorry. I guess I should take a break here.
1:04:58 - Leo Laporte
I don't know yeah, let's take a break. We get time. Wise, we should. We should take a break. We got. We got lots more to talk about. This is a fascinating conversation with paris mart Martineau of the Information, jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism. Folks who can imagine he teaches journalism? What fool could he be? And so that's why we sometimes get caught up in this stuff. And Paris Martineau does journalism. She is a journalist and I am just sitting on the sidelines with my popcorn watching it.
All this Week in Google is brought to you by Yahoo Finance. You know, I have to say there is a tool that I use when I need to look at. Well, you know, the Apple stock results just came out last week. In fact, quite a few stock results came out last week. We were very interested to see what was going on, and sometimes seeing that graph is the best way to see what's going on. And whenever I'm doing that you may not notice, but I go to yahoo finance. That is and maybe I'm, I don't know I've always. It's what I've always used. But I love yahoo finance because it gives you the information you need, whether you're an investor or a journalist. If you just want to know what's going on these graphs and you've I'm seen me show these graphs before. They're so useful. This is the one-day graph. Here's a one-year. Look at this. The stock price jump just a couple of days ago, may 2nd, after Apple announced. I don't know what they announced. They didn't announce the iPads. Know what they announced? They didn't announce the iPads. Anyway, when we're covering these companies, we're not trying to give you stock tips, but the information rich presentation of Yahoo Finance really is great.
So, when it comes to your financial future, you probably think, oh, I've done everything right. I've saved, I've researched, I've invested all I can. Good on you. But now you need to take those investments to the next level by using what every financial grade has used for the last 25 years Yahoo Finance. I include myself.
Whether you're a seasoned investor or just looking for extra guidance, yahoo Finance provides all the tools and data you need in one place. Right there, we're looking at the front page, today's front page, which, by the way, if you're an investor, it's pretty good news. Whether you're a seasoned investor or looking for extra guidance, it's all there A holistic view of the financial news cycle, breaking news, original editorial perspectives, analyst ratings and more. Sure you, you could do what I have done, which is, by the way, link my brokerage accounts to Yahoo Finance, so when I go there, I get a unified view of my net worth my wealth, if you will, although it doesn't look like it including your 401k and other investments. A comprehensive perspective distinguishes great investors and Yahoo Finance ensures you have the insight to examine your wealth in its entirety. And when the stock market goes up and down, it's really nice to get some reassurance from Yahoo Finance. With a community of over 90 million users every month, the real strength of Yahoo Finance is helping you on your way to financial success.
For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor yahoo financecom. It is still the number one financial destination. I never stopped using it. Yahoo financecom I thank you so much for supporting this week in google. Yahoo, financecom, yahoo do these still do?
1:08:30 - Paris Martineau
I was about to do that, Leo.
1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if they still do that Yahoo. They should bring it back. They should. It's awesome, it's awesome.
1:08:41 - Jeff Jarvis
It's amazing, though. Yahoo has gone through all kinds of various owners and morphs. Yahoo Finance was, early on, the best financial service on the web, yep, and it has managed to maintain that leadership through all that buffeting.
1:08:58 - Leo Laporte
It is pretty amazing if you do things right yeah, it's because I think it's not alone, it's the other, like tvcom, they still are like the number one visited pages. These, these, um, the verticals, I guess they call them that. Yahoo did not. The overall yahoo is certainly yahoo search, right, but but the verticals really have held their value, um, I guess. Yeah, I wonder if it's a completely different division or what. I don't. I don't know how it, how it works I don't know if it got sold. Yeah, maybe not Ask your glasses, ask your glasses.
1:09:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Who owns.
1:09:33 - YouTube
Yahoo finance.
1:09:36 - Leo Laporte
I'd have to put them on to do that. All right, all right, all right, we're going to give the this is probably Meta's Lama AI, I would guess right there. Open source AI. Hey Meta, who owns yahoo finance, you can listen in yahoo finance is owned by yahoo inc wow, thanks meta softball for you there, meta hey, meta, who owns?
1:10:07 - YouTube
Yahoo Inc. Yeah, it's thinking.
1:10:14 - Paris Martineau
It's had enough. You've asked it one hard question already.
1:10:17 - Leo Laporte
It is Apollo, so I guess it's owned by Apollo when Verizon is a statistic. Private equity, yeah, private equity, yeah, but they have a good sense not to mess with it. All right, we did the heat death of the internet, or no, did we not do that? This was such a good piece. This is another doomsday internet doomsday story, are we? Done with those oh fun.
This one's from australia. Takahi, uh, actually new zealand. I said australia, I'm apologize, takahi is, uh takhiorgnz. And they write you want to order from a local restaurant but you need to download a third-party delivery app. Even though you plan to pick it up yourself, the prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app, the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly. It says the number's no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention their website has the wrong number. The woman behind the counter says yeah, we have to contact the company that designed the site for changes. It's going to cost us. Most people order through the app anyway, so screw it. You watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube, but first you have to sit through an ad, then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself, then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends it queues up a new trailer with a new ad at the start of it.
The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There's no origin, the photos on the page look weird, the hands are disfigured, there's no image credit, and on and on and on. This is gregory bennett. He is a writer and filmmaker from wellington, uh, new zealand, and you know it's. I think we've all seen this. You buy a microwave and you get ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress, you get ads for mattresses.
1:12:08 - Paris Martineau
Right, uh, he says the internet a billionaire got mad, bought your favorite social media site and ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the magazine site you liked and to read on your lunch break and shut it down completely. A third billionaire did what they do best bought the app used for networking and sold it for parts. Getting a little too close to home there, man yeah, a little bit.
1:12:31 - Leo Laporte
I mean he's not saying anything. We don't all experience and know and I you know I like these stories because I feel like I'm an old man shouting at the clouds and I just like to know there's other old men shouting at the clouds as well.
1:12:44 - Paris Martineau
I'm not alone I think you're gonna have to put the hat back on if you want to do the full shout. But yeah, you people have ruined the internet my monocle is the monocle, but it would be better, I think I do think it would be significantly better with the monocle, one of the one of the mustaches I.
1:13:08 - Leo Laporte
I have a whole package of mustaches called Mustache Party, so I could just that would indeed be a party.
It would be a party. So what is going? What the hell? Speaking of Elon, I invoked his name. What the hell's going on at Tesla? Could this be the end of Elon? This is from Ars Technica, one of many articles about this, jonathan Gitlin. What's happening at Tesla? Can things be turned around, or is this just the beginning of the end? Now it started with laying off the entire supercharger team and now we kind of think we know what happened from various insiders. The woman who ran the team kind of fought back, I guess, against Elon, and Elon's response was not just to fire her but fire the entire team. And apparently that's kind of how elon works these days. In fact, he even warned, he put out, he warned, he said if you don't go along, you and your entire team will be fired what was he demanded at twitter?
um kind of coding, he wanted oh yeah, extra hardcore, something like that. Hardcore, yeah, hardcore. The executive responsible for overseeing the supercharger, codini wanted oh yeah, extra hardcore, something like that, hardcore, yeah. The executive responsible for overseeing the supercharger network, which one you might argue was really one of the main drivers to Tesla's success, and all of her 500 odd staff were fired. The man in charge of developing 500? 500. Yep, this is like Vlad the Impaler. This is like Scorched Earth. Oh, I can see a video of them searching my drawers. So the back drawer on the right, john Back top drawer on the right what else interesting are you finding folks the?
monocle is in the drawer on the left, Burke you're looking.
1:15:05 - Paris Martineau
If you find any other funny things, guys, please bring them Okay.
1:15:14 - Leo Laporte
He's got two people going through my drawers and not that I didn't enjoy it, but maybe not.
You're not the former president there we go I'm gonna get a hat too gone too is the man in charge of developing new vehicles. Um, nothing has calmed down since this is, uh, this again Jonathan Gitlin, writing in Ars Technica. Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait. I just now I scrolled up and I lost where I am. I spoke with industry experts to see if they're any less confused than I am of the whole situation. See if they're any less confused than I am of the whole situation. Tyson Jominy, vp of Data and Analytics at JD Power.
The recent strategic and organizational changes at Tesla are at once shocking but unsurprising. One could trace a straight line from earlier pivots to what's going on now. However, it remains difficult to predict where Tesla will disrupt itself. Questioning every cost and breaking things to see what happens is a core Tesla attribute instilled by Mr Musk. To wit, tesla is the automaker without a PR team. The philosophy is cut until something breaks, just like a Twitter, and then add back investment where the cracks emerge. He also interviews our friend Sam. He'll be on Ask the Tech Guys on Sunday and I will ask Sam directly. It's bizarre, and if I were a Tesla owner or about to buy a Tesla, I'd be a little nervous.
1:16:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm nervous on behalf of all electric car owners.
1:16:44 - Leo Laporte
You are now a Nathan's hot dog, oh.
1:16:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I want that. Oh, I want that.
1:16:50 - Paris Martineau
Gotta go to the hot dog contest.
1:16:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Jolly good well, did you see the huge uh, hot dog art that's in times square right now, paris?
1:16:58 - Paris Martineau
oh, I did not what is the hot dog? Is it a big hot dog?
1:17:02 - Leo Laporte
yes, it is what else would hot dog art be?
1:17:06 - Paris Martineau
um hot dog in the city the monocle is really good, leo well the only problem with monocles is they don't stay in.
1:17:15 - Leo Laporte
You have to really clench your eye socket. Oh, I love this show. Yeah, well, it gets weird. I don't, you know. Anyway, we don't know if anybody really knows what's going on with tesla, but it just doesn't seem healthful, right.
1:17:32 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think this is part of what happens when you have a company that is ruled by one person and completely capitulates to their wins. The mind that I always joke when I'm talking to my friends about this concept called CEO brain worms, which is not the RFK version of brain worms. This was back in a time where that could be a purely intellectual exercise instead of having face to face with reality. But I think that there's something about being having a large amount of power for a long period of time to where people increasingly will less frequently say no to you because they want to be closer to that power. It makes you go a little crazy and I think that when you're the ceo of whatever it is five companies or something like musk is and you have complete control over it, it's probably going to amplify that effect. Yes, and I am saying all of this while wearing a Nathan's hot dog hat that is sliding off my head because it is too big.
1:18:36 - Jeff Jarvis
There's nothing at all odd about that. And Paris, paris, I have found the next activity for you and your buddies. If you go to the New York Times story I just put in the Discord Great great I see you scroll down until you see three friendly young women. I see you scroll down to see three friendly young women. I see you being mustered to your hot dog.
1:18:53 - Paris Martineau
Oh fantastic, oh, it's so big, it's huge.
1:18:57 - Leo Laporte
I guess I now have to show this. Oh, that would be quite good.
1:19:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, a 65-foot hot dog, Leo. Okay, wait a minute.
1:19:04 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I do think I could be mustered. New York.
1:19:07 - Jeff Jarvis
New York If you can't make it there you can make it anywhere.
1:19:14 - Leo Laporte
Wow, is that the mason's parade? What is that? What's the deal with it?
1:19:18 - Paris Martineau
it's, it's an art thing, it's just a hot dog so go to the story.
1:19:22 - Jeff Jarvis
If you scroll down, you're going to see mustard, ketchup and pickles. I think. I think that paris should play mustard.
1:19:30 - Paris Martineau
I really appreciate that and I'll take it. Jeff, how can you?
1:19:33 - Leo Laporte
not love the New York Times when they do stories like this.
1:19:36 - Jeff Jarvis
This one's good. I praise them.
1:19:38 - Paris Martineau
Also, I just really enjoy the caption on this New York Times article that is we're all sauce girls, says Abby Inman, parentheses mustard, who came with, nora Alice Denmink, parentheses pickle, and Rose Carver, parentheses ketchup.
1:19:55 - Leo Laporte
What is?
1:19:58 - Paris Martineau
So who put the hot dog in Times Square and why? Well?
1:20:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Joel Oppen, the very, extremely pregnant woman and her husband her mate.
1:20:06 - Leo Laporte
She is rather pregnant. Scroll the other way. She's nine months pregnant and proudly so I might add, months pregnant, wow, and she got out a hot dog. And proudly so I might add oh, yes, and then he looks a lot like Dr Demento. I don't know what's going on in this picture. New York.
1:20:22 - Jeff Jarvis
You know I love the photographer.
1:20:23 - Leo Laporte
It's art. The photographer really captured this somehow. Yeah. They really did In some magical way.
1:20:31 - Paris Martineau
I think my mustache is um, sorry to say, have seen better days I was going to say they looked like kind of uh worms you were trying to press your where did your monocle go uh, I have it.
1:20:43 - Leo Laporte
I just you know, you can't put in a mustache and wear a monocle at the same time, because you got to scrunch your face. Yeah wear a monocle at the same time because you got to scrunch your face.
1:20:55 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, this is uh the good thing about a monocle, though say something surprising. Uh, jeff is actually a robot in disguise. What it's a that is. It's a useful reaction.
1:21:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, by the way. That's why that monocle has a clip. You're supposed to attach it to your clothes, which I forgot to do, so now it's on the floor, and these are just pathetic.
1:21:21 - Jeff Jarvis
These are just, it's just toilet paper.
1:21:25 - Leo Laporte
I think we need to have a new mustache party. Oh yes.
1:21:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, did you keep scrolling to see the ketchup earrings? Oh no, oh yes, Keep scrolling.
1:21:38 - Paris Martineau
Oh, they're little hinds and a hot dog hair clip.
1:21:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Huh, only in New York. That's huge, actually. Only in New York.
1:21:46 - Paris Martineau
And the caption says don't fret, Her other earring was mustard.
1:21:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's really good. And there's, and it's somehow associated with wrestling oh, that's very fun uh, they call this a hot dog adjacent wrestling match. A perfect fit, fit for choke hole. That's her name, her camp sensibilities. We feel understood said queen. She's in pink. It's just bizarre.
1:22:17 - Jeff Jarvis
New York. New York Is this oh, very nice. You don't get this in Petaluma.
1:22:24 - Paris Martineau
A set director came with a friend named Blythe, the director of a performing arts center. He loved the show, even as a seasoning minority. In parentheses, I'm ketchup, only A hard thing to say.
1:22:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I wouldn't admit that in public, that's for sure.
1:22:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Alright, so here's the poll. I think it should be a law. The only thing that should go on a hot dog is mustard. Period Finished.
1:22:46 - Paris Martineau
What, what about? Like sauerkraut Relish? Okay, alright, had finished. What, what about?
1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
like sauerkraut relish. All right, mustard, not, just not. What about some crispy onions? Okay, all right, now we're talking chili.
1:22:57 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's kind of heavy for a hot dog by the way I respect your right. Can I just?
1:23:01 - Leo Laporte
point out that the author of this uh incredibly hard-hitting story on the hot dog antics in in times square is uh melena ryzik. She uh won a pulitzer prize in 2018 for for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
1:23:20 - Paris Martineau
So oh, was that the me too probably.
1:23:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the mighty have fallen. She is now.
1:23:28 - Jeff Jarvis
She deserves a break.
1:23:29 - Leo Laporte
I mean she deserves to cover the hot dog I can just see you know a perry white like editor saying melina, I've got a story for you to follow up on your great sexual harassment a 65 foot hot dog in times square it'd be three stories high if it were up and down by the way, this will be at duffy square every if now through june 13th, if you want to go, if you're in the manhattan area.
1:23:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's two blocks from my former school. Wait and go at noon you.
1:24:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh wait, no, you're not coming till september. You can't, you're gonna miss it. Leo it sad.
1:24:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because the confetti cannon shoots it daily at noon. So you really? Oh God, it comes out of the end of the hot dog. That's really good, that's rude, how rude, all right, it's pretty good.
1:24:25 - Paris Martineau
I mean, where else would it come out of?
1:24:27 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they call that Duffy Square, but it's really Times Square, right? I mean, where else would it come out of? Oh, they call that Duffy Square, but it's really Times Square, right, that's Times. Square yeah.
1:24:38 - Jeff Jarvis
The original one, times Square, has been cut down to the bone because all it is is the world's biggest billboard, and so they're rebuilding it. Now that's where the ball falls.
1:24:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the world's largest hot dog sculpture and it shoots confetti every day at noon.
1:24:53 - Jeff Jarvis
And then some poor New York worker has to get rid of all the confetti.
1:24:58 - Paris Martineau
Alright, want to try hey it's probably better than wrestling the knockoff Elmos that hang out in Times Square or whatever else they normally do Every time we get guests.
1:25:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I say never hug an elbow. No, they're sweaty and the fur comes off. Oh, it's no. There's animals in the fur. No, they're no.
1:25:20 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's not what you want.
1:25:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Why is it?
1:25:21 - Paris Martineau
white? Is that the adhesive? Oh, I'm really happy that we've got the mustache on.
1:25:26 - YouTube
I say, shall we take a break now or go on let's pause, because this mustache is starting to fall off. This is not a good look. What. Oh God, oh no.
1:25:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Did they do the commercial with the hat on or not?
1:25:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's not a commercial, it's just a pause. Oh, okay, it's one of those, just one of those little pauses that refreshes. You're watching this Week in General, and I mean it this Week in General, this.
1:26:01 - Paris Martineau
Week in Goofy Stashes Goofy.
1:26:03 - Leo Laporte
Stashes on Twit, with Paris Martineau of the Information and Jeff Jarvis uh, professor emeritus. We got to get Craig Newmark on, Although I think at this point he might wonder if it's probably no, he.
1:26:19 - Jeff Jarvis
I asked him. He said. He said don't come on, we're just going to ask him. I saw him last week. He he gave the welcoming at my event from the elect. I asked him if he wanted to drive up with me if I come, and he said no, he'll be at the event. No, he wasn't at the event I held last week. Oh, I see, paris, were you there when Craig gave his welcome?
1:26:39 - Paris Martineau
No, I was a little late. He did follow me on Twitter this week. Oh Say hi, craig Hi. Craig.
1:26:48 - Leo Laporte
He's doubting his judgment at this point? How? About if I try one of these. These are the top ten manliest mustaches. Oh, this one, I don't know. Is this manly or it's just a Fu Manchu?
1:27:05 - Paris Martineau
Does it even stick on your face?
1:27:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, I wanted to test it with the public one, remove the adhesive. Oh, too late, these are in better shape.
1:27:17 - Paris Martineau
All right. Oh, that's pretty good. It's not bad.
1:27:22 - Leo Laporte
I feel like, uh, I should say number one son I know Burke very thoughtfully brought in a staple gun to help me attach the mustache.
1:27:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That seems like a bad idea. What have you done to him lately? Yeah no kidding.
1:27:41 - Leo Laporte
This is the email Tesla is sending to suppliers after firing the head of supercharging and all 500 of her employees. By the way, there were superchargers in New York city that were being planned that are now on the back burner, canceled projects that would roll out in the entire country of australia that's the.
1:28:02 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the bad news here. It's if you don't want to buy a tesla, but at least we're going to have a national network of chargers. And they were supposed to open it up and nope this is uh, this is jameson down writing in electric.
1:28:14 - Leo Laporte
Here's the email to all concerned. You may be aware there's been a recent adjustment with the supercharger organization, which is present presently undergoing a sudden and sudden and thorough restructuring. John, what do they call that in SpaceX when a rocket blows up, rudd? It's called Rudd Rapid unscheduled demolition Disassembly. I think that's actually what this was a rapid, unscheduled disassembly. If you've already received this email, please disregard it. So all right. Part one they got a problem with their mailing list.
We're attempting to connect. We're attempting underscore, attempting to connect with our suppliers and contractors. Apparently, the person who had the Rolodex is gone. As part of this process, we are in the midst of establishing new leadership roles, prioritizing projects and streamlining our payment procedures. Due to the transitional nature of this phase, we are asking for your patience with our response time. I understand that this period of change may be challenging and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid. However, I wish to express my sincere appreciation for your understanding and support as we navigate again through this transition. At this time, please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction projects and planned pre-construction walks. If currently working on an active supercharging construction site. Please continue Hold on working on any active supercharging construction site. Please continue hold on working on any new material orders. If waiting on delayed payment, please contact us for a status update.
1:30:01 - Paris Martineau
This does not sound good to have to send this out yeah, I mean, I think it goes to show just how unexpected and seemingly out of the blue this decision to fire the entire supercharger team was.
1:30:17 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, it feels like Elon ordered the person running the team to do something. I actually read some leak about it, but I have to find that about what he wanted. He wanted her to do something. She said no. He just. I get the feeling he just stands there and says you're all fired, Get out. That's very Elon, right, You're all fired, Get out. Unbelievable. I would if honestly, seriously, if I were buying a Tesla, in the process of buying a Tesla or thinking about it, I would have to reconsider at this point. I didn't want to buy one. Oh, Leo, Leo, I would have long since reconsidered.
1:30:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, I did, I did.
1:30:59 - Leo Laporte
I bought one Tesla and never again. Hey, here's some good news, though. If you are an EV owner or anybody that uses lithium ion batteries. There is a new battery in town from a company called Natron Energy. It is a sodium battery, does not use lithium, and in fact, the good news about this, of course, is sodium salt is easily and widely available, unlike lithium. You don't have to you know, strip mine to get salt. Sodium is 500 to 1000 times more abundant than lithium and you don't have to extract it from the earth. Natron says its sodium ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials, including aluminum, iron and manganese, all, if available, through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. And the cobalt and nickel, of course, in your lithium-ion batteries are really difficult to get without harming people.
Sodium-ion batteries offer a unique alternative to lithium-ion higher power, faster recharge, longer life cycle and a completely safe and stable chemistry. You don't have the fire problem that you have with lithium ion. Now there is a negative. There has to be. There's a downside of this. They're not as battery dense as lithium or power dense as lithium ion or a power dense as lithium ion. The sodium ion batteries are 70 watt hours per kilogram, which is less than half, maybe even much less than half, what lithium ion can do. But they are coming up with new formulations that might improve Batteries charge and discharge 10 times faster than lithium ion, and the estimated life cycle, instead of 5 000 uh charge recharge cycles is 50 000 so this is very good news, and it is now, and this is not uh oh, in the lab they've discovered this.
They're making them atrons. Plans call for the ho, the Holland facility, to crank production up to 600 megawatts annually at full tilt. They will be building others.
1:33:16 - Jeff Jarvis
So this is, do they say what they think the first use is for them.
1:33:20 - Leo Laporte
This is actually one of them, let me see so. They officially commenced production of their rapid charging longging long-life lithium-free sodium batteries this week. But what are they used for?
1:33:39 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm going to assume it's low-powered stuff first, right?
1:33:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, because it's unclear on how big the batteries would have to be to move a vehicle right, but you could charge them 10 times faster, which would be really big. Anyway, something to watch. There's not a lot of detail. This is an article from New Atlas. You can read from CC Weiss Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production.
1:34:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Good news. See, we had all this bad news. See, there's some good news. Now we have good news.
1:34:11 - Leo Laporte
You will see, we had all this bad say there's some good news now. We have good news, yeah they're targeting industrial backup power applications, so uninterruptible power supplies oh, because they have to be building sites first, right, yeah so this is a blue rack 250 battery cab cabinet which goes from kilowatts to multi-megawatts. Wow. Cool. That's really cool.
1:34:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I wonder what this would be for, like your home and your.
1:34:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we have Tesla power walls in our house right now. They're basically, I think, recycled lithium-ion batteries from old Tesla vehicles. But they're great because if the power goes out, there's a brief hesitation and then it stays on running off battery. How long, well you know, it depends on how much you use and how many batteries you have. We have two which powers the house for enough time, if we shut most things down, to get to the daytime when the sunlight will recharge them. Oh, I see. Yeah, the idea is to kind of continuously operate with the help of the sun.
1:35:10 - Jeff Jarvis
The idea is to kind of continuously operate with the help of the sun, so TikTok has decided.
1:35:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you got breaking news.
1:35:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Go ahead, go for it. Breaking news for news here. I just saw this from the wrap that there's going to be a sequel to the Office about a dying newspaper dying newspaper, but they, I believe, the major plot point is that the newspaper is dying.
1:35:37 - Speaker 6
So they bring in a team of volunteer reporters to fill the gaps so it's kind of an oops all scab situation, I guess there has to be a private equity angle here.
1:35:44 - Paris Martineau
There has to be, there's gotta be right please.
1:35:47 - Jeff Jarvis
An evil, an evil hedge fund person who's never seen. I love that.
1:35:52 - Leo Laporte
I think that's fantastic. Sorry, I just wanted to give you that little update. Great story. We knew this would happen, but it has happened. Now TikTok has filed lawsuit against the US government over the forced sale or ban of the company. They're challenging it on First Amendment rights as well. They should. Tuesday, tiktok sued. This is from the New York Times. Tiktok sued the federal government over a new law that would force, stoking a battle over national security and free speech that is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. Tiktok said the law violated the First Amendment by effectively removing an app that millions of Americans use to share their views and communicate freely. It argues that a divestiture is not possible, especially within the 270-day timeline, pointing to difficulties like Beijing's refusal to sell a key feature of the algorithm that powers TikTok in the US.
1:36:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Which only enhances, however, the argument that Beijing is in charge.
1:36:53 - Leo Laporte
This is in the 67-page petition. They say for the first time in history, congress has enacted a law that subjects a single named speech platform to a permanent nationwide ban and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide. And they say there's no question the act will force a shutdown of tiktok january 19th 2025 so I went to the new york times deal book for an important analysis and explanation.
1:37:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, question and answer. Do legal experts think t think TikTok has a chance at winning? Answer it can go either way.
1:37:34 - Leo Laporte
Wow, Thanks for the deep insightful analysis. That was really helpful. The suit was filed in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Yeah, the First Amendment argument's interesting, of course. We've talked about this before and the expectation from experts that the government would not fight the first amendment argument but would instead refer to national security, and historically, apparently, the supreme court has always allowed the government to act, uh, in this in the interest one would hope there should be required to have some evidence. Yeah, that would be an interesting question, right.
1:38:12 - Jeff Jarvis
The problem is it's going to be a bunch of pardon me moral panic about oh my God, they're twisting the brains of teenagers.
1:38:21 - Leo Laporte
One expert at the Times talked to a visiting scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard.
1:38:29 - Jeff Jarvis
This one I never heard of.
1:38:32 - Leo Laporte
Wow Said that Project Texas is likely to play a key role. This is TikTok's plan to have all of the data of United States customers stored in the United States by Oracle, and he says that TikTok will attempt to persuade the judge that there's a, there's a viable alternative. Let's do this, you know. Um, which seems interesting. National security concerns about TikTok are speculative, says the times, and fall short of what's required to justify violating first amendment rights. At least that's what the lawsuit says.
1:39:08 - Paris Martineau
So this is very interesting something I thought was interesting this week is uh, I think today even Luis Matsaki is um wrote a piece for the Atlantic about uh, a part of this I guess whole argument that I hadn't heard of is that lawmakers are arguing that the Chinese Internet is better for kids than American.
1:39:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's good.
1:39:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's get that on there. Oh, that's where we're headed.
1:39:34 - Paris Martineau
It begins with. Over the past week, I've spent several hours scrolling through Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, also owned by ByteDance. Both apps are governed by a central algorithm which recommends videos. Here's what I saw one morning, in the order it was fed to me a video of an influencer wearing glittery thigh high stockings posing for a photo shoot, a live stream broadcast of a girl who appeared to be using editing software to make her breast breasts look comically enormous, a clip from a samurai themed video game. And a day in the life vlog.
1:40:03 - Leo Laporte
Sounds much better for kids to me.
1:40:05 - Paris Martineau
I mean. In other words, she says it largely mirrored what can be found on the American version of TikTok, Although notably she didn't see many political videos or criticism of the Chinese government. What is readily apparent, she writes, is that Douyin is not the sanitized utopia that some commentators have described. This is from Senator Ted Cruz. He wrote in China tick tock is a comparable product that promotes educational videos on math and science to kids. In America they're promoting videos on eating Tide pods.
1:40:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh, ted, ted, Ted, ted, ted, ted, ted Sigh. By the way, congratulations to Louise Mitsakis, who's been on our shows many times. We love Louise and she's a freelancer Writing for the Atlantic. I think is pretty good. That's a pretty good place to be.
1:40:53 - Paris Martineau
Fantastic. Good piece too yeah she's been writing for Wired too.
1:40:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, just a bunch of great work. She's got her own newsletter. Yep, oh, uh, oh, we should give a plug to her newsletter. What's?
1:41:13 - Paris Martineau
the name of it.
1:41:13 - Leo Laporte
Let me look it up it's good, it's real good, get it. I subscribed to it. Uh, you may also like oh yeah, that's a great name. Oh yeah, you may also like isn't that tabula's motto?
1:41:17 - Paris Martineau
I think it is basically yeah I famously was a box for uh, hallow Halloween one year and not that many people got it. I got it.
1:41:27 - Leo Laporte
So they call that. When you get to the bottom of a website, you're reading the article you want and then you're bombarded with. You won't believe what they looked like in high school and what they look like today. Articles that is called a chum box because you're chumming is what you do to attract sharks, right. Called a chum box because you're chumming is what you do to attract sharks, right? You throw out dead fish, heads and stuff trying to get the sharks to congregate or whatever I'll see if I can find.
If that's funny, you may also like. You went as in a. You may also like I did.
1:41:56 - Paris Martineau
I had I made custom little uh ads and articles. I thought they were very funny actually, Right.
1:42:04 - Leo Laporte
Ah, you know. So Apple had a little event you might have heard yesterday, announcing new iPads. What you may have missed in all of the attention Apple got on the new iPads is that Google announced the new Pixel 8a yesterday. Now this is a perfect example.
1:42:21 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a perfect example Now this is a perfect example.
1:42:23 - Leo Laporte
He missed it. This is a perfect example. Oh, by the way, before we go on, we've got to show a lovely picture of you as a chum box. Holy moly.
1:42:32 - Paris Martineau
It did not win the Office Halloween costume, unfortunately.
1:42:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow, Look how many things have happened since I.
1:42:40 - Paris Martineau
That's a good costume A whole chum box Were there special headlines yeah, I wrote. Uh, you know you won't believe what the teletubby sun baby looks like. Now leading doctor reveals number one reason you're going to hell. Old man got ripped fast by doing this one weird trick daily. And it's a photo of a shoe in a pot new law in brooklyn, new york. You won't believe this. And it's a skeleton behind bars and also 50 images of things you had no idea existed whoa.
1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
And it's a photo of muffins you won't believe what the teletubby sun baby looks like now and top gut doctor. I beg all americans to throw out this vegetable. It looks like some sort of carved avocado, I don't know it looks like an avocado with the face yeah, do throw that out if you find it for sure. Oh, paris, you're just not appreciated by your contemporaries. That's why you have to hang out with your, with your grandparents with yeah, my grandparents here, you guys get me, we get you man uh sorry, where were we?
1:43:49 - Paris Martineau
were we talking about this?
1:43:50 - Leo Laporte
poor pixel 8. Now we are so easily. Nobody cares. Apparently nobody cares about the pixel 8. They announced it the same day as apple announced new ipads. Nobody covered it. Uh, this is the pixel 8a. They do this every year they release the flagship phone and then six months later they released a low-priced version of it and actually this looks really good. In fact, according to Google, it's an unbeatable value $499. These usually are the phones I recommend for people who haven't yet purchased an Android phone but want one, or a Pixel phone but want one. It is very much like the Pixel 8. It's got the Tensor G3 chip, a lot of AI features, like Gemini, you know, and they're pretty the cameras. Usually you sacrifice a little bit, but it has a lot of those AI features. You could choose the best shot and you can erase stuff magic eraser. It's got night sight, photo, unblur and they, they and they like to mention this, as does apple. It's got real tone to accurately represent everyone's skin tone and photos and videos.
First, and you can photoshop your face into it, I guess yeah, uh, no, that's the best shot, so you take a shot it means that you take your face from a different photo and you Photoshop it, so you have the best face for everybody.
1:45:09 - Paris Martineau
I don't know if that counts, though I think it's a fake photo.
1:45:14 - Leo Laporte
He says the woman wearing a foam, nathan's hot dog.
1:45:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, this is a real Nathan's hot dog.
1:45:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, I think I think this year'slloween you have to go as a hot dog, you, you again how do we relate that to the internet?
1:45:30 - Leo Laporte
I'm trying to talk about. What was that? Well, it's a meme.
1:45:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris is the hot dog meme which took me forever to figure out what it was.
1:45:36 - Leo Laporte
People just don't care nobody cares.
1:45:39 - Paris Martineau
You'd also like? One year I went as a what I could say the scariest thing ever. It was a paywall. Oh my God.
1:45:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that's brilliant. Here's the hot dog beep.
1:45:51 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, leo. We're going to talk about the phone. Tell us things you like about it or don't like about it.
1:45:57 - Leo Laporte
It does beg the question what the hell's wrong with Google? They knew, we've known that Apple was going to have an event on May 7th for at least a week and they still did it.
1:46:06 - Paris Martineau
I mean, Okay, wait, while we're talking about tech, are we going to talk about the iPad Pro ad.
1:46:16 - Leo Laporte
Which one do you want to talk about?
1:46:17 - Paris Martineau
Oh, do you guys not know about this? All right, I'll put the link in the chat.
1:46:21 - Leo Laporte
The one where it compares it to an ipod nano. That's the only one.
1:46:23 - Paris Martineau
I know it this is the first time I feel like in years an ad is having like major backlash that it's back.
Outrage says variety it is a ipad pro ad that, I guess, is supposed to show how much stuff is fit into the flat ip, but really what it is is a giant hydraulic press crushing everything you know and love about the world. It crushes a piano, it crushes every other form of art, it crushes a cool game kiosk and it all crushes them to smithereens. And then out pops a really thin iPad and it's like you don't need any of that more. You got iPad.
1:47:00 - Leo Laporte
So, because everyone hates it, micah sergeant and I were covering the event. They showed this at the event as the prelude to announcing the ipad. It was a. You know, there is a tiktok hydraulic press tiktok where you press all sorts of things, and obviously they were doing a takeoff on that to show how thin it is. Actor hugh grant commented on x, which the destruction of the human experience courtesy of Silicon Valley. And, just to be clear, he wasn't talking about X, he was talking about this iPad ad. Justine Bateman said truly, what is wrong with you? In response to Tim Cook's post this is just Twitter nonsense. Like iPads, but don't know why anyone. I like iPads, but says producer, director and writer Asif Kapadia, but I don't know why anyone thought this ad was a good idea. Really, really, there are so many things you could be outraged by in this world. Oh, plenty, more every day. Why that?
1:48:03 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I just thought it was kind of interesting that so many people were getting mad over an Apple ad Like when is the last time an. Apple or big tech advertisement incited any strong emotion in anyone.
1:48:16 - Leo Laporte
Here is a Reza60 Safari. Hey, apple, I fixed it for you. Sound on, he put the iPad in there. He reverses the ad and it ran it backwards. Oh, everything's better now. Really, do people find that I mean what really? This is what offends you in the world.
1:48:34 - Paris Martineau
I think it speaks to more just that. It is a time when people are experiencing increasing anxiety over the dominance of tech in our everyday life. It is a time when the rise of generative AI has made a whole a bunch of different creative classes worried about the fact that they will be crushed by tech giants.
And then you have a tech company that literally has an ad that is crushing creative symbols. It is a hydraulic press that crushes pianos and other artistic things. That's what the ad is and people were like it's a little too on the nose and actually you know, in a way, I think running it backwards is.
1:49:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, my glasses are.
1:49:18 - Paris Martineau
Your meta glasses are.
1:49:20 - Leo Laporte
Shut up. Running it backwards actually is more what Apple wants to say. I think, right, like, here's all of this great experience and stuff in this iPad instead of we crushed your world and made a product out of it, so all right, I will get.
1:49:40 - Paris Martineau
I love that you're just hitting. Why are you hitting yourself, Leo?
1:49:42 - Leo Laporte
It won't stop, it won't stop. I love that you're just hitting yourself. Why are you hitting yourself, leo? It won't stop. It won't stop. Okay, it stopped. Yeah, I didn't know, people were so upset about that.
1:49:59 - Jeff Jarvis
How interesting.
1:50:00 - Leo Laporte
The hat was on backwards the whole time. No, not the whole time, just most recently. Okay, I wasn't upset by this. Were you upset by it, john Benito? When you saw it, I actually didn't see it. Oh, all right, are you upset now?
1:50:12 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean, I see why people are upset. That's messed up, but like you know, it's an ad. All ads suck right.
1:50:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah yeah, they see. I mean all ads suck. They see it as a assault on humanity. I guess I think people just see it as being a little too on the nose for what is happening right now.
1:50:32 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I, what we? When mike and I were watching it yesterday, I was kind of like what the hell? Because it was, it was messy, but I understood what they were playing off of the tiktok channel, where the hydraulic press crushes things right I know that channel, I love that channel.
And then there's a wonderful, fun noise there's a wonderful and, by the way, this is why tiktok's so great. There's a wonderful remix channel of that where what's her name, the great dancer, plays the object being crushed by the hydraulic press and dances it's being crushed. Have you seen press and dances? It's being crushed. Have you seen that? No, it's wonderful. But this is this is what irritates me, that that idiot, ted Cruz, it's just. It just irritates me. There's a lot of idiots on this. There's so much creativity, um, on Tik TOK and so much really interesting stuff and they has have yet to produce any evidence that it is anything that terrible that they said it was all right. Here's a let's do some hydraulic pressing. How about that? That'll make me feel much.
1:51:36 - Jeff Jarvis
It's just like david letterman used to throw things off room.
1:51:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the same thing here. It is crushing candy. I'm pretty sure this was a youtube channel a long time ago. It probably was. It's pretty good, probably. Yeah, it's the same thing here it is crushing candy. I'm pretty sure this was a YouTube channel a long time ago. Yeah, it probably was. It's pretty good, probably was. Yeah, it's great. You see all sorts of stuff being crushed. Let me see if I can find the dancer, though, because she's so funny. Yeah, this is.
1:52:01 - Paris Martineau
I mean searching hydraulic press on a uh, on tiktok is smac, no, no, smac.
1:52:08 - Leo Laporte
Watch this is an example hydraulic press crushing candies, and she dances I think that's great right, right, that's pretty good she does, she's a wonderful dancer and she becomes the thing that's being crushed.
1:52:33 - Benito Gonzalez
I guess you have to see it.
1:52:35 - Leo Laporte
Like this is creativity, and that's the other thing. That's really cool about TikTok is how you have one channel and then the remixes of it that other people do.
1:52:44 - Jeff Jarvis
It is the first. It is the true internet medium, the first one because it enables collaboration. No other medium before has been so collaborative as TikTok.
1:52:55 - Benito Gonzalez
I wouldn't call it collaboration, I would call this remixing.
1:52:58 - Paris Martineau
I'd say it's the same principle as the reblog or retweet, but I think it is a video riff on that which is fun. I say it's the same principle as the reblog or retweet, but I think it is a video riff on that, which is fun.
1:53:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's video Because you're creating art together. I think it's, but you know, I think it's collaboration A retweet is also art.
1:53:12 - Benito Gonzalez
The hydraulic press video. Guys didn't talk to the lady, like they didn't talk about it. Doesn't matter, no, but that's. Collabs on TikTok are like that and the same thing happens to my son's sandwich videos?
1:53:30 - Leo Laporte
people do you know takes and riffs on that and you know, uh, a chef reaction is two people agreeing to work together. So it's not like no, no, no, it's not a collab it's just, that's that you know what it is that's copyright.
1:53:36 - Jeff Jarvis
It's challenge response yes, okay, how about?
1:53:40 - Leo Laporte
that, yeah, call and response, call and response, and that's a classic tradition. Collaboration in the arts, did you see?
1:53:48 - Paris Martineau
salt hank should get uh someone to dance out his videos. I think that could be kind of fun. They could pretend to be like a piece of chicken being sauteed or something did you see their nail?
1:54:01 - Leo Laporte
I, I wasn't going to show this. I I watched this this morning and I thought it was amusing, but now, um, I'm kind of interested in let me see if I can find it. I want a man finance, trust fund, six.
1:54:16 - Paris Martineau
Oh, six, five, six five blue eyes.
1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
Right, you know what I'm talking about yes, I'm looking for a man.
1:54:22 - Paris Martineau
It's a woman who the TikTok, I can react it for you, I can reenact it. She says did I just make the song of the summer? And she goes I'm looking for a man in finance. Blue eyes Trust fund, six five, something to lay that. I'm looking for a man in finance. You could just look, you could just search that phrase.
1:54:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to find it, because what happened is same thing. Call and response.
1:54:49 - Benito Gonzalez
Here's the original. It's incredibly annoying.
1:54:58 - Leo Laporte
But what she? In a way, this is a collab, because she's asking for somebody to remix it yeah, oh, yeah Right. And then of course people did and there's some kind of amazing. This is beautiful Again.
1:55:19 - Jeff Jarvis
I just want to celebrate how cool TikTok is We've got to start a campaign to save TikTok. Yeah, we love TikTok.
1:55:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here's Honey Bee. Now, benito, you could do this, you could? Would this be a creative act for you, to take that simple vocal track and make something out of it? It'd be kind of fun, right? I mean, that's what remixing is. It's remix. Yeah. There's quite a few of these, by the way, there are quite a few. Here he is, trust fund Six five.
1:55:57 - Paris Martineau
Blue eyes Finance Six five Blue eyes.
1:56:02 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking for a man. I don't know if he's volunteering or what, but you can see how much there is of this.
1:56:09 - Paris Martineau
It's kind of incredible. I'm looking for a man in finance the Trust Fund. Six, five Blue Eyes Making Random Internet People Famous Part 5.
1:56:17 - PC
I'm looking for a man in finance Six Five. Blue Eyes Finance Trust Fund Six Five.
1:56:21 - YouTube
Blue Eyes. I'm looking for a man, looking for a man. Looking for a man, looking for a man.
1:56:30 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm looking for a man in finance. Six five blue eyes. That's pretty good.
1:56:34 - Leo Laporte
That's ten steps of vision.
1:56:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Benito, is it the sea shanty collaboration? That's the same thing yeah. But it is collaboration. I'm trying to fight with Benito here. That's collaboration.
1:56:44 - Benito Gonzalez
I like call and response I am going to go with call and response, because it's both. I always felt that collaboration is two people working together on one thing. Collaborating, that's two people working together on one thing. They're doing it in a remote way. I think we're arguing semantics here.
1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's exactly what we're arguing. Yes, exactly what we're arguing, I am proposing that we call it call and response, which is a great tradition in African music and an African church. And it is sort of both, because when you do the call and response, the preacher who does the call is expecting the parishioners to respond, and back and forth, and back and forth. But it is also a remix. So there, all right, and I'm looking for a man in finance. There's also the guy who plays piano to Howling Dogs.
1:57:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I like this one.
1:57:30 - Speaker 2
I'm looking for a man in finance Trust Fund Six-five Blue Eyes Finance Trust Fund Six-five Blue.
1:57:35 - Paris Martineau
Eyes. I'm looking for a man, looking for a man.
1:57:47 - Leo Laporte
Looking for a man, Looking for this.
1:57:49 - Jeff Jarvis
we're going to lose in 259 days ladies and gentlemen, did you see that Sarah Cooper is in Unfrosted?
1:57:57 - Paris Martineau
Oh, don't even mention this to me, the Pop-Tart movie.
1:58:03 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you better tell us who is sarah cooper.
1:58:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Sarah cooper was the woman who lip-synced donald trump in those brilliant, brilliant videos I'm wondering what one or two of your most favored bible uh verses are I wouldn't want to get into it because to me that's very personal.
1:58:18 - PC
You know, when I talk about the bible it's very personal, so I don't want to get into verses I don't want to get into it.
1:58:24 - YouTube
It means a lot to you that you think about or cite.
1:58:26 - PC
The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics.
1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
So if you're not watching the video, you're missing her really amazing lip-syncing of that. So now she has made her big breakthrough in the Pop-Tart movie.
1:58:43 - Paris Martineau
Yes, unfrosted and you seem like I may be wrong, paris, you're less than enthusiastic about the pop-tarts movie yeah, I don't have any strong opinions about it or knowledge of it, but the words pop-tarts movie to me inspire contempt oh, oh yeah, I mean it's.
1:59:03 - Benito Gonzalez
It's this wave of movies about marketers. It's like what?
1:59:06 - Leo Laporte
It started well. We had the I don't really know we had the Beanie Baby movie, we had Tetris, we had Blackberry.
1:59:14 - Benito Gonzalez
Blackberry was the only one where they were actually kind of honest about what happened, because that was the inventor's air.
1:59:19 - Leo Laporte
What was the air? It was about Nike. Yeah, you're right, there is a kind of trend here.
1:59:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It's also kind of an answer to Barbie.
1:59:25 - Benito Gonzalez
It's all about marketers patting themselves on the back and then marketing their movie Well, but this is a mockery of all of them.
1:59:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but they're all a mockery. The movies.
1:59:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I watched the first half of the movie. It's not that good, but it's individual jokes. It's made for trailers individual jokes.
1:59:45 - Benito Gonzalez
It's made for trailers.
1:59:45 - YouTube
Seinfeld and melissa mccarthy is all you need to know, I believe we have split the atom of breakfast.
1:59:48 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I'm done yeah, here I've got a palate cleanser for us, which I just put in the chat, which is from my favorite medium, uh dropout, which I think would, uh, I think could be a good palette changer, palette cleanser for us.
2:00:05 - Leo Laporte
What is Dropout?
2:00:07 - Paris Martineau
It's that streaming service by the former college humor people that now makes a bunch of money.
2:00:12 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you love Dropout.
2:00:14 - Paris Martineau
But this is.
2:00:15 - Leo Laporte
I put a.
2:00:16 - Paris Martineau
TikTok.
2:00:17 - Leo Laporte
The Game Changer.
2:00:19 - Paris Martineau
No, it's called Game Changer. It is kind of a prompt it is a game show Game Changer.
2:00:23 - Leo Laporte
It is a kind of a prompt it is a game show, game Changer show. Here we go.
2:00:29 - YouTube
But it's Donald Trump.
2:00:33 - Paris Martineau
So the prompt is Sauron, but it's Donald Trump.
2:00:38 - PC
Tiny little freaks. Okay, they don't wear shoes, they're smoking crack. Perhaps they live in holes in the ground people, hey, you see a round door with a knob in the middle. Where does it go to this end? How does the knob in the middle of the door open the door? Yeah, all right, folks, we're going to have a beer.
2:00:54 - Jeff Jarvis
This is Pop-Tarts to be pure.
2:00:56 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, and now it's time for Scooter X's Google Change Log, the.
2:01:06 - YouTube
Google Change Log.
2:01:08 - Leo Laporte
We're naming it for you Scooter. Scooter X, the Google YouTube's AI-powered jump-ahead feature is now rolling out widely to premium users. Woo-hoo.
2:01:23 - Jeff Jarvis
It uses AI. They can jump right forward to our discussion of Pop-Tarts Right. It lets you jump to the good parts.
2:01:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because it's not based on what it's saying. It's based on what most viewers typically skip to, which seems like a weak signal as far as I'm concerned yeah, it combines user data and ai to predict what you would like to watch. Should we try it? We should try it with one of our shows, actually actually, I'll leave that as an exercise a while ago, so you could has enough data.
2:02:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I'll leave that as an exercise. Go to one a while ago, so you can, it has enough data.
2:02:05 - Leo Laporte
I'll leave that as an exercise.
2:02:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, is that homework?
2:02:11 - Leo Laporte
What's it saying to you? It's talking to me, okay, okay, no. Glasses, okay, google, no, okay. We've just had a little glimpse into the AI-powered world of the future.
It's irritating, I'm not sure I really want all those AI-powered things on my body. Wow, just focus, will you focus? Meta, google is changing which is ironic for me to say that, but changing how you set up 2FA. You no longer need to enter your phone number to enable two-factor authentication, and that's a good thing. That's the right way to go. You can add a second. You don't have to enter your phone number. You don't have to. You can, you can and you can use a hardware key or a pass key or the Google authenticator, but you don't have to give them the phone number first, which is good, although I will make a case, if you have a Google account, for providing those secondary ways to reach you, like a different email address or a different phone number, because that makes account recovery a lot easier. If you don't have that, it's very difficult to recover a lost Google account. Google Chrome now has a Geminiini, gemini, gemini, gemini ai shortcut. I will pronounce you can't demonstrate it.
2:03:31 - Jeff Jarvis
However, because you don't have chrome, you snob you I am using firefox right if you say at um at at gemini or a. At Gemini.
2:03:42 - Leo Laporte
Okay.
2:03:44 - Paris Martineau
Oh my God, it comes up.
2:03:47 - Leo Laporte
She's doing it right now.
2:03:52 - Jeff Jarvis
What should I ask, gemini? Who is Leo Laporte? Okay, oh, it's too easy Too easy.
2:03:59 - Paris Martineau
I'm saying who is Leo Laporte and what are his vibes? Oh, it didn't help. It just brought me to chat with Gemini. All right, how do I? I agree? I've got to agree to terms of services. I can't, I don't. I need to read all of this before I agree.
2:04:19 - Leo Laporte
Actually I can't do it. Anyway, well, that's fine. This is just a soupçon of things.
2:04:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo Laporte is a big name in tech media, though he recently retired from his radio show. Yeah, that's accurate.
2:04:33 - Paris Martineau
It described your vibes as. As for vibes, it depends on who you ask. Some might say enthusiastic and passionate. His love for tech shines through, making him a fun guide to the latest gadget and trends. Authoritative figure, however, others might see him as opinionated. He's not afraid to share his views, which sometimes come off as strong Old school. Having started in traditional media. His approach might feel less fresh compared to some younger tech influencers who said that Gemini said that Gem. Younger tech influencers who said that gemini said gemini.
2:05:08 - Leo Laporte
Gemini said that that's the first time I've been dissed by an ai and I don't like it. Wow, sue, leo, sue, that's really interesting. That's I mean, like most people, that's one of the things I'll test an ai with, and usually it's all the same kind of anodyne stuff.
2:05:23 - Paris Martineau
Well, have you been asking about your vibes?
2:05:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that was how I got it.
2:05:27 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I said who is Leo Laporte and what are his vibes.
2:05:32 - Leo Laporte
Vibes. Even the very act of asking about vibes kind of tilts it in the direction of he's too old for you.
2:05:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I asked the same question and I didn't get that.
2:05:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's no AI does that.
2:05:46 - Jeff Jarvis
It was random.
2:05:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's random. Retired but still active. That's worse. I take walks every day and, of course, I eat my raisin bran. Google TV's magic button is finally here.
2:06:03 - Paris Martineau
Congratulations, but not with Google. Google, wait, I'm sorry, a brief aside. Below it it says search related topics who is leo laporte? And then what happened to leo laporte? Stop it, sorry, continue, lisa asked me that every day.
2:06:22 - Leo Laporte
What happened to the man I married?
2:06:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Who is Paris Martineau? They're not going to know.
2:06:30 - Leo Laporte
Get a vibe check on Paris Martineau and what are her vibes?
2:06:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, Are her vibes?
2:06:39 - Leo Laporte
Hey Metta, Give me a vibe check on Leo Laporte. Okay, okay, thank you, meta Affable Avuncular. Sometimes they say Google TV, you don't care about the magic button. Okay, it's officially.
2:07:08 - YouTube
What does?
2:07:08 - Leo Laporte
it do? It's remappable, I don't know.
2:07:12 - Paris Martineau
It doesn't say it's magic.
2:07:15 - Leo Laporte
It was previously leaked. It's debuting now in Walmart. And the latest Google TV box. I actually have to say I love the Google TV. I actually have to say I love the Google TV. I think it's a very nice, inexpensive device to add 4K streaming to any TV for a very low price. Apparently, you can create a shortcut when you press the star button to either open a favorite TV app or form an action. It's a shortcut button, so that's nice and you can have it. You know it gives you a page of apps you can choose from and so forth. So look for that. If you won't, I guess if you have a current Google TV, it won't magically appear, but in the future. Number of search results dropped. Oh, we did this. One. Number of Google drops, or did we? Number of search results dropped? Google search results page no, this is huh. Google has removed the number of results found.
2:08:07 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, remember, I used to see that I used to say 5 billion 467 million 325 uh search results. Now it doesn't do that anymore because it's meaningless okay.
2:08:17 - Paris Martineau
It's meaningful to me whenever I am writing something and I need to try and remember and I'm trying to determine whether or not the phrase I have in my head is a real phrase that human people say or something I've made up, and then I search it in quotes and see how many times it's been used online and you know, if it's like over a hundred thousand, then I feel like I'm okay.
2:08:35 - Leo Laporte
So the trick is to click the button that says tools in it. They will then be available for you there.
2:08:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, wait. Paris. Wouldn't you want it to be? Don't you want to break the cliche? No, no, no.
2:08:51 - Paris Martineau
I'm just saying, if it's like something that I'm thinking of, that I think is a real idiom, but it turns out is not. I want to make sure I'm getting the idiom right if I'm sometimes oh.
2:08:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I see I see, I remember getting into a fight with an editor of people when I said it was a case of the pot calling the kettle metal and he was insisting on changing it to black and I said no, that's the point. You see, I took the cliche and I changed it and we fought and fought, and fought and fought and I won and I ended up in a book of quotations Simpsons book of quotations oh, that's so fun.
2:09:23 - Paris Martineau
And fought and I won, and I ended up in a book of quotations. Simpsons book of quotations.
2:09:27 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's so fun. Let me get the card, and I'm going to add that to the card here. Hold on a second. I ended up in a book of Simpsons quotations so I searched for what is Leo Laporte doing now on Google, right, but it doesn't show the number of results unless you click tools right here and then it says about 2.2 million results. You know why they didn't do that. I bet you that saves them a lot of CPU cycles and energy and water and all that stuff. That's got to be another query that they're just eliminating.
2:10:01 - Jeff Jarvis
That would be my guess. I also have been Simpsons quotations for saying that john lennon's widow when singing sounded like an eagle being goosed that's a good line.
2:10:13 - Leo Laporte
Wait, how did this end up in?
2:10:15 - Paris Martineau
oh, simpsons contemporary. For some reason, I thought you're talking about the show the simpsons I. I was like how?
2:10:25 - Speaker 6
I didn't know there was just a book of notable quotes.
2:10:28 - Paris Martineau
That's fun yeah.
2:10:31 - Leo Laporte
Bartlett, you know, died, so somebody else had to take over. That's Simpson, that is, unless you can come up with something else. Scooter X.
2:10:43 - Jeff Jarvis
That was my list, so you can blame me.
2:10:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, good job, thank you.
2:10:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Scooter X always has more.
2:10:47 - Leo Laporte
Scooter X has just given up, apparently, on the changelog. So that's your Google changelog.
2:10:53 - Paris Martineau
Let's not throw Shane around Shade around Scooter X.
2:10:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh, scooter X is fed up.
2:10:59 - Paris Martineau
He's done, he's done's done, done done says I pasted a lot oh, I was gonna say I think he pasted like 40 or something in there.
2:11:08 - Leo Laporte
He definitely did I'm sorry, I see I besmirched his reputation it's too late.
2:11:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Now it's over. I played it on display.
2:11:15 - Leo Laporte
There is no change you can do. I'm tempted to go back and look nope, find my device can locate pixelate for a few hours after it powers off. That's a good one. Oh, that's cool. That's a good one. Uh, let's see, we did that. Google search, google app on android add share button for search results.
You know, that's actually a nice thing, you could share your search results. You could say see, the pot calling the the metal black is good, or whatever. Okay, anyway, google adds new payment methods list on Android. Matter 1.3 adds support for more appliances and EV chargers. This is really a remarkable array of things that you have found us.
2:11:58 - Paris Martineau
Oh, there's a huge one here. Files by Google renames favorites to starred. That's big, that's big.
2:12:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Google bans advertisers. I think they renamed things to hide it from Ruth Porat.
2:12:14 - Leo Laporte
Google bans advertisers from promoting deep fake porn services, as they should. Google message notifications. This is interesting. Apk teardown shows that Google's working on showing the names that belong to unknown numbers in your message notifications. Oh. I don't know how they would do that, but that's interesting that is interesting, so there's a few extra freebies thanks to Scooter.
2:12:42 - Jeff Jarvis
X. I think we need the drums again, otherwise the universe is not. Yeah, can you do that?
2:12:46 - Leo Laporte
Do you have the means, apparently not.
2:12:49 - Benito Gonzalez
To do what? Bum, bum, bum, bum, go play it again, yeah.
2:12:53 - Paris Martineau
Yes.
2:12:55 - Leo Laporte
And that's the Google changelog. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, you don't want to start it again. We're not, we're not crazy.
You're want to start it again, then we're not. We're not crazy, let's uh. You're watching uh this week in google with the paris martineau jeff jarvis. Thank you so much for being here, thanks especially to our club members who make the show possible. Uh, without them I don't know where we would be. To be honest with you, we have a big shortfall coming up in the next quarter, but thank you to the club members for making uh, making up the difference if you're not yet. Thank you to the club members for making up the difference If you're not yet a member of the club. Really, the real reason to join is not for all the benefits things like the Discord, where we have a lot of fun all around the clock not for the ad-free versions of the shows or the special video versions of shows that you only hear in audio. It is, I guess, arguably because you want to support the network, but really, I think the real reason to join the club is the community. Here we have an amazing community of listeners, smart people who have lots to say, want to talk, and if you're looking for a nice community to join, a wonderful community, inspiring community to join, I would highly recommend the Club.
Twit All you have to do is pay seven bucks a month for entry. There's family plans and corporate plans. Go to twittv, slash club twit to learn more. I love facebook. That's why I'm suing. Meta says ethan suckerman. I'm guessing you put this one in Jeff.
2:14:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it is. Ethan was MIT, um, and now he's at university of Massachusetts and, um, he found a kind of uh, masnick had a really long explanation of this, but he found kind of a typo in section two, 30. Um, it's a section that's not the 26 words that basically says that we can use outside apps middleware. They're crediting Francis Fukuyama with inventing the title middleware for this I don't think he did but so that we can have our own feeds and do our own things. The thing I don't understand Leo maybe you've followed the story is that the thing he wants to do is something that says unfollow all on Facebook. I don't understand how that gives you control of what you have if you're not following anybody.
2:15:10 - Leo Laporte
Well, it doesn't do anything if you're not following anybody, but what it does do, it lets you reset your account if you are following people. I mean, that's a big thing, you know, I, when I in my recent, I mean I'm back on Facebook. But back in the way back when. It would have been nice, you know, when I'm following thousands, literally, of people on Facebook, to just unfollow all and start over.
2:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not sure I would sue over that I mean that's, he wants to set a precedent, saying that we could then, you know, have our own algorithms and our own things, which is fine, but I'm not, yeah, I'm not actually what he's, yeah, what he's really.
2:15:44 - Leo Laporte
What he's suing about is the fact that there was an extension that did this, which Facebook blocked Right, and that Facebook should be more open about these kinds of extensions. I think Facebook has a good argument, which is there is a massive security issue here and privacy issue here, yeah, if you allow these extensions to do what they want, and I think it seems completely reasonable for Facebook to control its platform. Furthermore, it's well within their rights. So, while I understand his motive, I don't see this going anywhere, frankly. Thank you, I needed an explanation.
No, I would have loved that back in the day because I wanted to start over. There's no really good way to start over.
2:16:25 - Jeff Jarvis
What you really want is Facebook to provide that feature for you.
2:16:28 - Leo Laporte
That would be the best, but I don't think that's his point. I think his point is Facebook should have an open platform that we could write these extensions for would be better. What else?
2:16:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Pick some more on here that you like. Jack Dorsey has left the blue sky board and is now saying stay on. X Jack, oh boy Jack.
2:16:47 - Paris Martineau
It's also. I mean, it doesn't seem like he was ever that involved with blue sky.
2:16:52 - Jeff Jarvis
No, he wasn't. He wasn't and let's not forget there's an important part here is that he ended up keeping like a billion dollars of his Twitter stock oh boy, not requiring Elon to buy it from him, thus giving Elon what amounts to a gift in his air quotes investment now in X.
2:17:14 - Leo Laporte
So that's okay, so let me I don't pretend to know what Dorsey's motivations are, or how he's thinking. No one does yeah.
But maybe it is the case that, as many of us thought after Elon took over Twitter, that it was doomed and that he was driving into the ground and it was going to fall apart. But we also mourned that and many of us, I think, thought that we needed something like Twitter. I hate to say it, but Blue Sky ain't doing it. Four million users compared to the how many is it? 800 million users on Twitter.
2:17:45 - Jeff Jarvis
That's enough for me. I got good conversations there.
2:17:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, even Threads has more than 100 million users. So 4 million is pretty small. Mastodon is actually probably around the same size. I think maybe Jack says okay, I get it, we need Twitter and nothing's going to take its place. I thought maybe we could. Okay, I get it, we need Twitter and nothing's going to take its place. I thought maybe we could do that with Blue Sky and maybe he's also saying and Blue Sky's doing, just fine, they don't need me anymore. But I really do want to kind of try to keep Twitter alive. I'm just. I mean, I'm not sure that's his motivation.
I'm just arguing that that's perhaps yeah, I don't know a reasonable point of view. Let's don't, wouldn't you? I mean, you're still using it. A lot of people still use it.
2:18:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't understand why, um this is people that I care about, communities that care, so you want to save it right yeah, yeah, I just can't abandon it it's an addiction an addiction.
2:18:43 - Leo Laporte
So all of these people who are still using it. You're doing the same thing, jack Dorsey is You're trying to save it, you're trying to keep it alive. Good point.
2:18:52 - YouTube
All right.
2:18:53 - Leo Laporte
So you can't really. I mean, I don't think you should save it, I think it's full of horrible stuff. But there you go. Elon does have a plan for ai news. Inside of x, an ai bot will summarize news and commentary. By the way, you bought back in the day you bought the program that did that, jonathan abrams wonderful, uh, what was it called? I've forgotten. Now I blanked it out because I miss it so much.
2:19:27 - Paris Martineau
Nuzzle, nuzzle, thank you. Twitter bought it.
2:19:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Was that out of your own memory or Google's? Paris?
2:19:33 - Paris Martineau
No, that's out of my own memory.
2:19:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That's out of her own hot dog brain Love Nuzzle, but we all loved Nuzzle, right.
2:19:41 - Leo Laporte
It was fantastic, but Twitter pre-Elon, by the way, Jack Dorsey bought it and really didn't incorporate the features.
2:19:50 - Paris Martineau
I mean, they shut it down.
2:19:52 - Leo Laporte
Basically.
2:19:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it was in blue, it was part of blue they added a news tab.
2:19:55 - Paris Martineau
Then it was part of Twitter blue.
2:19:56 - Leo Laporte
But it wasn't as good. And now? So I guess what Elon's saying is we need something like this, but it'll be AI instead, which I don't know It'll also be Elon's horrible opinions stuck in there.
2:20:07 - Jeff Jarvis
It'll be awful. Yeah, and you want to save this for some reason. Relationships Leo.
2:20:14 - Paris Martineau
He's got like 70 billion followers or something on there.
2:20:18 - Leo Laporte
Look, no, you don't have more than I do. I have more than half a million, and I don't want to save it, but I don't like people. So that's the difference, right there. Yeah, that's true. What else? Anything else, before we wrap up, that you really want to get? In here there's a lot of AI stuff, but you pretty much cover this every week right before this show with Jason Howell right On. Ai.
2:20:47 - YouTube
Inside. I do a lot of it, yeah. Yeah. So if you really, I mean we'll do.
2:20:51 - Leo Laporte
AI, but if you really want to follow.
2:20:52 - Paris Martineau
AI closely, AI Inside. Wait, Jeff, what is the forgotten war on beepers?
2:20:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's. Pestmas Archive is a wonderful. Louis Anslow is a wonderful Twitter feed where, to my very heart, he puts in all kinds of old moral panics, old headlines and things and he dredges them up to show us that we're not alone. So here he is reminding us that 30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones, there was a moral panic about young people and beepers that it would expose them to drug dealers, and there was a moral panic about beepers and drug use.
2:21:37 - Paris Martineau
Beepers high-tech devices for narcotics dealers on the go.
2:21:42 - Jeff Jarvis
And the schools are silencing them because they're dangerous. We need to ban them for teenagers, because teenagers always mess up everything.
2:21:51 - Benito Gonzalez
What did they?
2:21:51 - Jeff Jarvis
say, were the ills that it would connect you to. It was stranger danger, right. Somebody would connect with you and that alone was. They would send you a message and there's heroin on the corner of 5th and Elm. Let me leave class and get there.
2:22:11 - Paris Martineau
How can? We expect students to say no to drugs when we allow them to wear the most dominant symbol of the drug trade on their belts, says.
2:22:20 - Benito Gonzalez
James.
2:22:20 - Paris Martineau
Fleming of Dade Public Schools.
2:22:23 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, we can't let them use cash either, because drug dealers love cash.
2:22:27 - Paris Martineau
Right. Every drug dealer that's ever existed has drank this illicit substance called water. We need to ban it.
2:22:36 - Jeff Jarvis
But then Big Beeper fights back. Teens make the case for patriots. Oh, it was my son, my, my son, bigger than you think I had to carry as a reporter.
2:22:51 - Benito Gonzalez
I remember. I'm just thinking like, how long was big beeper?
2:22:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I think 10, 15 years. Oh yeah, that's right.
2:23:01 - Benito Gonzalez
Doctors for a while.
2:23:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Doctors had beepers, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, that's right, doctors, all for a while. Doctors had beepers, yeah, yeah, I think. Um, uh, when I worked for for robert maxwell, who was the robber baron who bought the new york daily news uh, british, uh, literally robber baron, and I had the old huge brick motorola phone and you had to carry beepers and phones at all times because he would want to get you at any moment of the day or night and you had to leave them on at all times, forgot one time he tried to call me and I was in the tunnel lincoln tunnel and he couldn't get me and oh, he was pissed because the beeper didn't reach there yeah, I just forgot.
2:23:35 - Benito Gonzalez
Like my sister is a doctor and she had a beeper up until like two years ago.
2:23:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, it's amazing, they didn't want the phones. Well, I think also in hospitals they.
2:23:45 - Leo Laporte
Cell phones don't work, so hospitals people service. But they used to be the case oh, it's not anymore.
2:23:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Cell phones, oh no, okay, oh no, I I don't know how these things work. You know, can we take hats off?
2:23:56 - Leo Laporte
it's time for hats off no, my hat was getting, my head was getting hot. Three, everybody hats off. I've committed oh okay, you're committed.
2:24:06 - Benito Gonzalez
No I peer pressured.
2:24:08 - Speaker 6
If you wear that around New York, my hat is frankly too big for this hat.
2:24:12 - Paris Martineau
It keeps sliding off.
2:24:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Your head is too big for us.
2:24:15 - Paris Martineau
She said she had a big head, but good lord. It came to pass, you know.
2:24:22 - Leo Laporte
All right. Hey, I want to mention that tomorrow we are club members, we are doing a little watch party at lilliport household. I just realized I've got a lot of work to do tonight because I have to prepare the brisket, because I've committed I'm so sorry, I committed to this to make a brisket, which means 12 hours before the watch party tomorrow night. I have to get the brisket in the smoker, which means I have to prepare it tonight, so I have to run home and prepare the brisket. We will be watching Fritz Lang's Immortal Metropolis, made in 1927. It's a silent movie about the future, with robots and mind melds.
2:25:02 - Jeff Jarvis
So you think that will not get you taken down from YouTube.
2:25:04 - Leo Laporte
It should be public domain. In fact, we believe it's public domain. I think there's a music.
2:25:09 - Paris Martineau
You'll find out. Well, I think it is.
2:25:13 - Leo Laporte
Question is does YouTube? I'm trusting my staff, I don't know. Anyway, that should be a lot of fun. We're going to have a bunch of the uh. We'll have a bunch of the Twit staff come over for a little dinner and we'll stream the party and you can watch along if you are in the club, we'll have a stage open and join us. What time are we doing that? I forgot now 7? 5. 5 pm tomorrow. It means I have to put the brisket in around about 3 pm 3 am.
2:25:39 - Paris Martineau
I didn't know you were a brisket boy, Leo. Next time him to this. I didn't know you were a brisket boy, leo, next time we have ed zitron on, we got to talk about brisket. He's a huge brisket boy, to the point where he would always post I actually feel very personally bad about this. He would always post photos of his brisket whenever he was cooking it, marinating it, and then afterwards and one time, you know, sometimes brisket can look a little weird and once time months ago he posted a close-up shot of this brisket that looked frankly foul and I responded because me and ed have a kind of fun relationship.
I responded on blue sky, ed, what the f is that? And he immediately took it down and has never posted a photo oh, you killed poor ed's brisket I told him I was like I was just joking, but no, he's been shamed into never speaking about brisket publicly, so we do have to remedy that oh golly, I had no idea.
2:26:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, next week uh, just a little program note we were going to have ed on. Uh, this week he had to change. We were going to then have him on next week. We realized we're doing Google IO, so we're flip-flopping shows. If you like to watch Twig Live, we're going to do it Tuesday. Jeff and I will cover Google IO 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern time next Tuesday, and the MacBreak Weekly will be in this time slot. So don't be disoriented. If you tune in to MacBreak Weekly here, and if you do want to watch us live, we'll be covering the Google IO talk. We'll make fun of Apple here, yeah.
2:27:09 - YouTube
I mean both Apple and.
2:27:10 - Leo Laporte
Google have developer conferences in the next, you know, google's next week and Apple's in about a month, at which they will no doubt talk a lot about their AI strategy. They are both, you know, really, I think, desperate to keep up with the joneses.
2:27:27 - Jeff Jarvis
The joneses being sam altman's open ai and microsoft. So this I also think, leo, I talked about this with with jason uh on ai inside, I think that meta is the big spoiler here. Yeah, well, I was the one wearing the medical glasses yeah llama yeah yeah and uh, and it's hard to compete with free. It's the consumer end and then otherwise it's open source.
2:27:50 - Leo Laporte
John just handed me his beeper. Does this work? Oh that, okay, this is the. This is the one where I press the button for emergencies. It will beep you no matter where you are. He says we haven't worn them in five years wait what sort of emergencies would they be necessary for?
2:28:09 - Paris Martineau
like a breaking podcast emergency.
2:28:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, the last time I pressed it and now I know why there was so little response the last time I pushed it, there was water coming from the ceiling. Now I'm in the middle of a show and of course there's. It's not a mission critical thing. We could stop and I could say hey, there's water a lot of electricity, but I thought maybe I'll push the button and engineering will come running in and fix whatever it was.
Uh, what did happen is I got up and I said there's water coming from the ceiling, and burke came in and pulled away the thing and a waterfall came out. We had to cover everything in the studio. We didn't lose we never lost any equipment because of that but it turned out that there was a. The condensation from the air conditioning was gathering in a puddle that wasn't being drained appropriately. Anyway, that's one example. Another one is yes, you're right, poco's reminding me when I went to the bathroom without my key. Hasn't happened since then.
Anyway, thank you says leo, that was a blatant misuse of the button anyway, I do have that button, but now that I know that it is not being monitored, I will not be so anxious to push it. I was a little disappointed to see this. Ai voiced audiobooks on audible 40 000 now on audible. Oh man, uh, but that's but we. We even talked about this. They're pretty good. This is uh for authors who can't afford a human but.
2:29:41 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's the thing it's not necessarily. It's the publisher, not the author. Publishers pay for this well it depends, there are self-published books. I think published books, yes, it's different yeah, so um, yeah, but you're right I think it's more um, I talked about this with jason also.
I think it's more this this is supply side how to use AI to make the podcast to sell them or the audio books to sell them. I want it on the demand side for the books that aren't on audio books. Now, yes, I can use a Kindle. That's a great use and I can have it read to me, but that's really crappy. Now that it's getting good, I want to use it for the audio books that don't exist as a customer.
2:30:24 - Leo Laporte
Good, I want to use it for the audiobooks that don't exist as a customer. We covered this story last year when amazon announced that self-published authors, when they're making their books available on the kindle store, could use an ai to read it, and I think that's what you're seeing on audible.
2:30:34 - Jeff Jarvis
I would guess 40 000 books 40 000 of them at least but if you look up, they're marked that way. Go to go to audible. What would they call it? What's it? Something voice? Um, I don't know, let me uh, if you search for that, you'll see some pretty yucky titles okay, uh, this is, oh, I see, narrated by virtual voice.
2:30:58 - Leo Laporte
Virtual voice every boss audible has a soft spot.
2:31:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh boy, oh my God, Wait, can we go down to the publisher's? Summary Well see, they even say it's a virtual voice. Every boss has a soft spot. By Danielle May Synopsis synopsis what does it mean when two people meet under unusual circumstance three times in a row?
2:31:30 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's not as good as an actor, of course, but it's not awful. It's a lot better than your kindle virtual voice. I mean this is, this is pretty good, I think, and it gives you it's. I mean, look, that's a romance novel, but it does give you an example of an author, self-published author, who is not going to have a, you know, be able to pay the. It costs $5,000 at least right to get an actor to narrate your audio book.
2:31:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh God, now I'm reading all. I don't know these aren't virtual voices, but I'm just seeing all. They brought up all kinds of weird titles a virgin's heart, a millionaire thug's dream. Death is fiction, fear and illusion how about pucking my baby's daddy? What, what I did? I had to look at that five times.
2:32:18 - Paris Martineau
That's a hockey book, but a brother's best friend. Small town romance is how pucking my Baby's Daddy is described.
2:32:26 - Leo Laporte
Now there is also Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a new translation, and Marcus was not available to do the book, so I think it's good let's see this title is narrated with virtual voice, computer-generated narration for audio books.
2:32:42 - YouTube
I think the voices are good.
2:32:45 - Leo Laporte
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius are good by marcus aurelius. The new translation by mark 45 hours of that and no, maybe not surprise baby for the billionaire.
2:32:54 - Paris Martineau
Bad story how to quit meth.
2:33:00 - Benito Gonzalez
Now second addiction I feel like these are a lot of books probably edition you think there'd be their ai books? I know that I know that amazon's being flooded with ai books right now yeah, yeah, well, you know it.
2:33:14 - Leo Laporte
To audible's credit, it is an amazon company, but to their credit, they're very clearly labeling these anyway as virtual voice, and they even explain that.
2:33:23 - Benito Gonzalez
So I virtual voice, but they don't.
2:33:25 - Leo Laporte
They wouldn't know if the book was written by ai yeah one narrator, ramon de ocampo, responding on twitter about the test, said virtual voices haven't taken all the jobs, but they're trying to. All right, I, I, I don't want to join the uh, join the group of people panicked about job loss because of AI. All technologies cost jobs. I don't know. I mean, that's not a good thing. I have an argument. Photography If you want to get into it. Go ahead, benito Gonzalez. Go ahead, benito, stand off, it's the middle class.
2:34:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Sing me international. We lose the middle class producer.
2:34:03 - Benito Gonzalez
Stand off. It's the middle class. Sing me international. We lose the middle class. Basically, we lose all the people who are trying to learn how to do the thing well by getting a job that teaches you how to do the job. I came into video production right before HD video, so I was lucky. I got in the door while it was still all human. Everything was still pretty much human. There's a job. One person did audio, one person did audio, one person did graphics, one person did the switch, so it was still very much like that. I was lucky. I know that there are no jobs like that anymore and a lot of that is due to automation. And how is anybody going to learn the skills now to actually become good at something if there are none of those jobs?
2:34:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, you don't want to become good at something that a computer can do.
2:34:41 - Benito Gonzalez
Guess would be my answer but you need to get, you need to build those skills have you ever considered, uh, septic tank maintenance?
2:34:49 - Leo Laporte
no, not personally. Plumbing carpentry. There are jobs that the ai are not going to do um, but you know when cameras came out illustrators and engravers lost their jobs, but then then a lot more people got jobs.
2:35:05 - Jeff Jarvis
When the typesetting machine came out, the International Typographical Union said instead of fighting this like it's a loom or a thresher, we're going to demand to take it over. And their jobs went down for a few years and then went way up because publishing exploded as a result of the efficiency, went way up because publishing exploded as a result of the efficiency. And it was only in 1960s when they decided to fight the next technology, cold type. And they killed their union in six New York papers in one strike.
2:35:34 - Benito Gonzalez
AI is not about efficiency. Ai is about replacement. It's not making a person more efficient.
2:35:40 - Paris Martineau
It's about generation. It's about mass generation.
2:35:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's also generating a commodity that is already commodified, which is content. We have to get past the idea that we make content. Content has no value anymore.
2:35:52 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm with you on that one, but you know we're not there yeah, it's a real challenge I don't, I don't know what the answer is.
2:35:58 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, I really don't, but we're too old, it won't matter to us, thank god I don't have to worry about this.
2:36:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, um, let us take a. I do, we'd already do all our breaks. But you know, yeah, we're good. See, I need a human to do this. No way I could answer that question, all right, well then we're gonna get to our picks of the week with paris and jeff, and I thought I'd throw one in. It's an ai pick of the week and it's kind of fun. You need to have a picture of something somewhere. It's called geospyai and apparently it's quite good. Now we can take a picture, select a picture and you have lots of them, leo of a geographic area that is unidentified, right? So I guess I have my Google Photos. Do you have one you might want to use, jeff?
2:36:53 - Paris Martineau
Do you have a photo of the Twit Studios from the outside.
2:36:56 - Leo Laporte
Yes.
2:36:58 - Paris Martineau
Why don't you do that?
2:36:59 - Leo Laporte
You think it'll be smart enough to recognize that I put one in from a well-known a bunker museum in berlin and it told me it was in hamburg. Well, at least it was in germany, right? Well, that's something, yeah, um all right. Well, what about something like like that that could be anywhere in the world, right?
2:37:19 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, it's any.
2:37:20 - Leo Laporte
Any catering place you've ever seen well, maybe let's just take something that's more geographic. Is this where you got married? No, it's just, it's just no it's not where we take a picture of that I don't know. I don't know, it was uh, the, uh. Let's see something that's like distinctive right. How about this? I think that's good.
2:37:38 - Paris Martineau
Put that in there, all right well, and then also do this that could be anywhere.
2:37:40 - Leo Laporte
That's not fair that could in there, all right, and then also do this.
2:37:43 - Jeff Jarvis
That could be anywhere too Well, that's not fair. That could be anywhere, yeah.
2:37:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think both could. All right, let me go back to GeoSpy and upload one of these pictures that I just. Where did I get them? Where did I put them?
2:37:58 - Benito Gonzalez
It's probably in downloads.
2:38:00 - YouTube
Yeah, where downloads?
2:38:01 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, where we're this man runs a tech podcast empire computers work control.
2:38:12 - Benito Gonzalez
J should bring up your downloads control.
2:38:14 - Leo Laporte
J oh, you mean in the uh how is this?
2:38:17 - Jeff Jarvis
with his handy sidekick, benito, he solves all kinds of problems with this new technology.
2:38:24 - Leo Laporte
Can we start the whole show over we should call into the show.
2:38:27 - Paris Martineau
ask the tech guys, it might be kind of helpful.
2:38:28 - Leo Laporte
Can we start the whole thing over again?
2:38:32 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, let's do another three hours. Oh, it doesn't like that file type.
2:38:35 - Leo Laporte
All right, but it's not going to like this file type either, is it?
2:38:43 - Paris Martineau
I'm sure it's really cool. Leo, you know I got a brisket to make here. I'm gonna just get a let's just, you got some meat to brine, I got some it's already.
2:38:51 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a picture of picture of brisket in in the chat. Why don't you give it to the picture of brisket?
2:38:56 - Leo Laporte
no, it's it's got to be a photo of a place somebody in the chat, give him a picture of a place he can't handle that file type either screenshot, whatever you just oh I could do a screenshot of it, couldn't I? That's a good idea yeah, this is fantastic radio, guys, okay give us your pick of the week, paris, and I'll work on this here.
2:39:20 - Paris Martineau
All right, she's filling my pick of the the week is I've been a big proponent of the auto transcription service Trent for a very long time. I think I've talked about it in the show For reasons that are too complicated to get into here. I've been looking for alternatives for our newsroom and one because I've heard Leo talk about Whisper from OpenAI being incredibly accurate. So I was looking into like how could I potentially use whisper and I found this software product called Mac whisper that really interested me specifically because it's by kind of disease like indie developers and basically I mean there's a version of it that's free and easy to use as well as a paid version that costs, like I think, like 40 bucks for the rest of your life and it is fantastic. It is incredibly accurate and I like it because it is like local, like all transcription is done on your device and no data leaves your machine. So it's great for like sensitive audio, which is what I mostly have to transcribe, and I've been playing around with it for the last week or so and I really like it.
It is super accurate and you essentially you download it and you choose what version of the whisper open AI model you want to load in it. So if you have maybe not that much space in your computer or you don't have, you know, that much memory, you could choose a smaller model, or you could choose a model that transcribes in a different language or things like that. I just chose. I chose one of the medium to large models. In English it was like 1.5 gigabytes or something. Took a bit to download, but now whenever I upload my transcripts into it, it's quick. I get a basically completely done transcript in a couple of minutes and it's pretty easy to search. So I'd highly recommend it yes, I've been using it.
2:41:19 - Leo Laporte
I love it. I think is that what we use, uh, for transcripts?
2:41:22 - Benito Gonzalez
I can't remember but it is very, very, we use Podium.
2:41:25 - Leo Laporte
Podium. That's right, but it's which I wouldn't be surprised is using Whisper, because this is an open AI model. Yeah, good choice, mac Whisper. Is it free? Yep.
2:41:38 - Paris Martineau
Is it free? Everything I tried the, except for you don't get access to some of the larger models, um, and like some settings, um, but the free version is basically all you need. And then, if you want to get the probe model, I really like it that you just pay for I think it's 30, 29 or something like that for a lifetime license, no subscription but it's only on mac it is only there is that there are versions for all platforms.
2:42:08 - Leo Laporte
There are versions yeah, it's whisper.
2:42:10 - Paris Martineau
Is the look for underwriting aspect of?
2:42:13 - Leo Laporte
that all right. Here is a picture. What do you think of this picture? Is that sufficiently? That's perfect, perfect right it is, but don't tell. Don't tell uh thing. Whatever it is geospy. I'm going to load this picture. It's going to look at this picture. Let's see if it can figure out using AI where this is. It says Sausalito. The photo was taken from high angle, overlooking a bottom, it gave us it says sunny day it gave us lunch. Wow, it says sunny day. It gave us student latitude. That's pretty impressive.
2:42:48 - Jeff Jarvis
That's good.
2:42:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay, because that was a picture I took that's not from some internet source that it could source it back to, and it even put it on Google Maps and yeah, that's pretty much where it was, and it also found related buildings and locations. Wow, all right, that's crazy, all right, all right, all right. This looks like something criminals would just love. Oh my god, just think of all the uses.
I'm not, I'm never again a mighty nice house to go around yeah, I'm never again posting pictures house, in fact, let's call off this whole watch party thing that was a terrible idea.
2:43:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Ask for the Sopranos, new Jersey house.
2:43:31 - Leo Laporte
Okay.
2:43:34 - Jeff Jarvis
See if it gives you the address. So I need to get an image of that first?
2:43:38 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Because it's image-based. That was pretty impressive. The Sausalito.
2:43:43 - Benito Gonzalez
That was actually quite impressive.
2:43:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, here is the Sopranos house. God, these people live in Tony Soprano's house. They do Wow and they're selling it. Oh, there is the kitchen, what Yep? So they shot it in the house. It wasn't just an exterior Originally, they did built I think they've been built a uh see the problem I have with this. I don't think this is as useful, because we don't know if it's read the times article. You know what I'm saying. Right, it was better that it was a picture that I took that we'd never seen, has never been published anywhere and still could identify it well, go to go to the listing for the house you're selling.
2:44:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Just don't show it to us to see if it gets it right.
2:44:21 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm not gonna good. Try, jeff, nice try what is your pick of the week, my friend all right, all right, uh.
2:44:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So uh, are you familiar with the most boring man in the world?
2:44:33 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I'm on a podcast with him every loaded question, isn't it?
2:44:39 - Leo Laporte
there was a freebie. Uh, I am not. Who is the most? I'm actually curious who is the most boring man in the world?
2:44:46 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, insomniac swear by dull narrators who put them to sleep. So there's a guy who made supposedly the most boring video ever in 1989 explaining how to use microsoft word late last year randy smith got a text from a complete stranger.
2:45:05 - Leo Laporte
She thanked him for putting her to sleep. This is from the wall street journal piece by spencer. Jacob smith was shocked to discover he was a youtube star. The ormond beach, florida retiree was even more surprised about why A tutorial he recorded and sold as a VHS tape In 1989, on how to use Microsoft Word, had resurfaced as quote, the most boring video ever made. All right, well, let's go watch. The most, by the way, got to point out 3.2 million views. By the way, got to point out 3.2 million views. It says the topic may be dry, but Randy Smith is an absolute legend. Let's jump ahead as I pull down this file menu.
2:45:52 - Speaker 2
You will notice that the word hope does not appear. You will also notice that there is no such thing as Command-M for Miracle.
2:45:59 - Benito Gonzalez
If you scroll over the timeline, it will show you the most viewed part of the video.
2:46:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so we can see where people? Oh look, look at this, here's the peak right there.
2:46:09 - Speaker 2
There we go is based on selecting. You've always got to select first and tell the computer this is what I'd like to have you work on. Okay, the next function is called deleting. I want to take something out of my document.
2:46:20 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh my God, you can delete. I want to take something out of my document.
2:46:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, you can delete. Wow, whoa. All I can say is there. But for the grace of God, go I.
2:46:31 - Speaker 2
I have made many, many, many videos just like this. Some of them it says delete Same key.
2:46:33 - Paris Martineau
Are you a little jealous, Liam? I am.
2:46:35 - Speaker 2
If I would like to get rid of the word workshop, I simply select it and hit my backspace key Select backspace Back and hit my backspace key Select backspace.
2:46:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Backspace. You didn't backspace you erased.
2:46:45 - Benito Gonzalez
I thought you said delete.
2:46:46 - Speaker 2
Select the entire document, hit my backspace key and it would all be gone.
2:46:49 - Leo Laporte
I can't believe. This is the most viewed part. Here's another one.
2:46:57 - Speaker 2
This is called that, Escalated Quickly One right there and I'd like one way over there. You'll notice, it put the little arrow in my ruler.
So now if I hit my tab button, it automatically goes over to two, goes to three and goes over to four and a half, and when I backspace it goes back to those same settings. So to set a tab, simply click on the one you want go up into backspace it deletes. I'm confused now you can still move them if you'd like. You can move them over to where you'd like them Now if, for some reason, you don't want those tabs anymore. I wonder who he recorded this for. He sold it as a VHS.
2:47:31 - Leo Laporte
This is like his way of. There's some work he put into this. This you can do easily now, but doing that his head in there and all that, this is a little hard to do.
2:47:41 - Benito Gonzalez
It looks expensive actually For $19.89?
2:47:43 - Speaker 2
Yeah, the next thing I want to do is put a column of numbers and I don't know how many of you have tried it.
2:47:47 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if, all right now, I'm taking a chance. I wonder if the show that I made called Internet.
2:47:59 - Paris Martineau
Oh, my God.
2:48:00 - Leo Laporte
It's still around anywhere. The problem is my name is too easy to find stuff with me.
2:48:05 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, that's terrible.
2:48:06 - Leo Laporte
SEO On YouTube.
2:48:08 - Paris Martineau
Who is it by?
2:48:09 - Leo Laporte
PBS. Let's see if I can find it. Search that no, it's not coming up.
2:48:16 - Benito Gonzalez
Come on, you can't search internet, come on.
2:48:18 - Leo Laporte
I know I put the exclamation mark in there. I know it's around somewhere it might be on. I wonder if it's on archiveorg. It is, I would say, as boring, If not more.
2:48:33 - Paris Martineau
So what year it's not called the Internet Show.
2:48:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, maybe Did you find it. Am I in it, Wait?
2:48:39 - Paris Martineau
no On television. Laporte was the host of Internet. A weekly half-hour show airing on PBS in 215 cities. Yes.
2:48:47 - Jeff Jarvis
What year was it on Leo? Try that. What year was it on Paris?
2:48:54 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't say I think it was 93, maybe 94?
2:49:00 - Paris Martineau
Something like that. Can we hold on a second? I?
2:49:05 - Jeff Jarvis
here we go, here we go. The internet archive has it what's?
2:49:08 - Paris Martineau
it called no the internet shows something different john levine and gina smith.
2:49:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was my friend, gina did that one. That one's a little jazzier. It starts out with them driving in a car. Mine wasn't quite so exciting Well.
2:49:23 - Paris Martineau
No cars involved.
2:49:24 - Leo Laporte
Somebody will know it was so terrible. I'm kind of embarrassed that it even existed and I'm kind of glad that I can't find it, but I guarantee you it was just as boring. Wait, can we talk about these?
2:49:34 - Paris Martineau
photos. Can we talk about these photos I've just posted in the chat that came up Of my book.
2:49:40 - Leo Laporte
Of your books.
2:49:41 - Paris Martineau
They're both quite good.
2:49:46 - Jeff Jarvis
There's 13 of them, paris, they. It doesn't end there, for my son.
2:49:47 - Leo Laporte
There are quite a few of them. I'm gonna buy some of these online uh all, I have the whole uh fact of the week oh yeah if you got any extra leah, send them my way.
2:49:57 - Paris Martineau
I can add them to my old internet book collection. Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot you collected these well, by then I wasn't writing them.
2:50:01 - Leo Laporte
You see that second name, that's the. I forgot. You collected these. Well, by then I wasn't writing them. You see that second name, that's the person who did all the work.
2:50:07 - Paris Martineau
I was just you were just the face I was just the face.
2:50:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you had a ghost. I had an imprint. It was the leoville imprint on pearson, on q books. There were quite a few of them. I wrote the first few, but it was such a grueling, painful and unpleasant process that I never did it again and they would just hire a ghost and I would edit it or something. I would do some things, but not much. It was the SEO of books really and, by the way, to this day, people will come with them and I will sign them. I think the last event we had, somebody had one of my books and I signed it. This is the first one and it's on eBay. Oh, how exciting. No, this is the second one. The 2003 Technology Almanac. That was quite a photo shoot. $22 Paris. You can still grab it, not?
2:50:57 - Paris Martineau
too late, I will.
2:51:00 - Leo Laporte
Michael, why are you selling this? Michael Crow-Taylor, why are you selling it? You know the 2005 Technology Almanac is a lot better deal. It's only $2.
2:51:11 - Benito Gonzalez
Make an offer for it.
2:51:14 - Leo Laporte
When did they shoot those pictures?
2:51:19 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I like the cowboy hat one.
2:51:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I found it, leo. I found it. Where'd you find it? On the internet archive, because you're that old. Hold on.
2:51:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's in the way back machine, I think I found I don't think these. I don't even think this guy on a motorcycle is me try this oh my god, oh, that's it so good and this really looks like that guy, by the way, doesn't it? Don't I look like that guy?
2:51:46 - Paris Martineau
Can we play it?
2:51:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here we go. Oh God, I'm embarrassed. This was the corner, some corner of a soundstage somewhere.
2:51:56 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, I'm guessing, the video is not there anymore.
2:51:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's just an image.
2:51:59 - Paris Martineau
The video is here for me. You've got to click on the link. No, yeah, the one that Jeff posted. It's there.
2:52:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is it. You like that modem sound? I love that, that's great.
2:52:12 - YouTube
Oh yes, that it does. 94. Looking for a good Samaritan. A crisis on the net. What's a parent to?
2:52:28 - Jeff Jarvis
do, oh parents, oh moral panic, early moral panic, don't just get onto the net.
2:52:36 - YouTube
Get into it, Leo. I am going to. I did not write any of this. Indulge a little bit this evening and watch this. That's going to be my plan. Telephones and other information access products Proud to join you in support of public television. Us Robotics the intelligent choice in Wow, USRS.
2:52:58 - Benito Gonzalez
Hello, I'm Leo LaCourte. Oh, the audio's terrible.
2:53:01 - YouTube
It's a VHS on a tour of the World Wide Network of Computers, world Wide. Oh, the audio's terrible. It's a VHS. This would put you to sleep well, I think. What kind of?
2:53:21 - Leo Laporte
computer was that.
2:53:27 - YouTube
Oh, we had interviews.
2:53:27 - Paris Martineau
Were you reading off a teleprompter?
2:53:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, I hate teleprompters. I don't think I even wrote this.
2:53:36 - YouTube
I can't remember if I wrote it or not. The commercial online services have also stepped up their self-policing and they all now offer ways to block adult areas.
2:53:49 - Leo Laporte
If you're on america online, for instance, you can use oh god, I'm getting sleepy just watching this jesus I'm transfixed I would go down uh to albuquerque to tape these will go on for some time to come, but the good Was that the only place that had a computer.
2:54:05 - YouTube
I think so. No, I can't the whole. I'm only dimly. I think I've locked this out.
2:54:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that computer a prop? Yeah, oh yeah, a prop from something.
2:54:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, the whole thing's a prop. Yeah, that thing would have cost. Look at the graphic. Oh oh yes.
2:54:25 - YouTube
Do you like to? Oh, yes, so she's now a 42-year-old craps dealer in Reno.
2:54:30 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm just kidding, I don't know. I don't know who she is. I've never met her.
2:54:39 - YouTube
I'm so embarrassed, Leo. This is great.
2:54:45 - Paris Martineau
Alltheinternetcom.
2:54:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Where does that go? Now? I'm looking.
2:54:51 - YouTube
Oh, great question Can't be reached.
2:54:53 - Leo Laporte
And then I pretend to type on that dummy keyboard $25 to get started on the internet. I think we only did one season. I don't remember doing more than that. Literally I blocked that whole thing out. That was early before I got into MSNBC and all that stuff. That was a long time ago.
2:55:20 - Jeff Jarvis
So what was your day job then? Radio.
2:55:24 - Leo Laporte
So if that was 94,. No, I think what was happening at that point is I was transitioning from radio. I was working for Ziff Davis, I think, helping them do their TV stuff. That was done right before I started working at MSNBC, I think.
2:55:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think Paris has ever seen your virtual character from msnbc oh well, we'll leave that for.
2:55:46 - Leo Laporte
Another day I've got a brisket to to treat. Um, yeah, I did a I actually won an emmy. I won a regional emmy for that. So don't knock it, okay. Um, yeah, it was a dev null. Just search for dev null on the site and you'll have. You'll be regaled with me and soledad o'brien talking about the good old days wait, how do you okay dev and then okay that she's gonna make me do it, isn't she?
2:56:16 - Paris Martineau
it's on youtube oh, we gotta watch this.
2:56:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry we've all seen it. You're the only one who hasn't seen it, sad to say.
2:56:24 - Paris Martineau
Oh, okay, but the reaction the reaction.
2:56:26 - Leo Laporte
Actually, this is pretty funny because this is Soledad talking about me on the site with Scott Rogowski on Running Late.
2:56:38 - Paris Martineau
Pre-career stretches back over 20 years, 30 years. Well anchoring.
2:56:42 - Jeff Jarvis
I was talking about. Oh, yeah, yeah, I think it was your first big break. Oh god, yeah, we're going there okay.
2:56:49 - Leo Laporte
Do you know who this guy is? She's interviewing her. He's from hq trivia. Thank you very good. I'm impressed. He had the shortest, briefest window of fame ever, but he was.
2:57:02 - Paris Martineau
But he was the man.
2:57:03 - Jeff Jarvis
He was the man for 15 minutes absolutely, and I love his suit that was one of the very first anchors on the network on a show called the Sight, and he had a sidekick.
2:57:15 - YouTube
Do you want to tell them who your sidekick was?
2:57:17 - Speaker 3
So they gave me this guy. The show was pre-taped. They gave me this guy whose name was Dev Dev Null, which I guess means like an empty file, essentially.
2:57:28 - Paris Martineau
It's like a programming joke.
2:57:29 - Speaker 3
Appropriate. Ha-ha, get it, dev Null, empty file. Programmers everywhere think that's hysterical. That was kind of why the show got canceled after a little over a year, anyway. So he was a guy, actually a really terrific guy, who covered technology and named Leo Laporte but who wore a motion suit. So I had to stare at a piece of tape on the wall while Leo would basically talk in my ear, and you would see me talking to this virtual character, which I was confident would ruin my career and I would never work again. I had a provision in my contract that if I hated it I could get out of it. Really, yeah.
2:58:06 - Leo Laporte
And she, by the way, she hated it. But you know what she hated even more when Dev Null won an Emmy Award and she had to go with me to the Emmy Awards and watch me accept an Emmy Award for that show Were you dressed as Dev Null.
Yeah, no, you couldn't be. Well, oh, yes, you could. So I was there normally, but Dev Null hosted the local Emmys that year. What, oh no, I didn't know that part. These are all things I've been trying so hard to forget. You want to see me sing with Soledad?
2:58:50 - Speaker 3
Here you go, don't forget to check out our website at thesitemsnbccom or wwwthesitecom. I'm Soledad O'Brien. Good night.
2:59:03 - Leo Laporte
We have this sign.
2:59:15 - Paris Martineau
That's pretty good.
2:59:17 - Leo Laporte
It's my singing debut and, weirdly, the end of my singing career Wow, at the same time. Okay, let's say goodnight everybody, sorry. Sorry we subjected you to that trip down memory lane. Miss Paris Martineau, you're done with your Jonah Peretti piece. That was great. What's next, Paris?
2:59:38 - Paris Martineau
I really enjoyed that. It's a great question. It's a great question, guys, and I've got to figure out the answer oh you, so no.
2:59:44 - Leo Laporte
So how did? What is the process?
2:59:45 - Paris Martineau
now you come up with something I gotta come up with something, you know. I gotta chase down some leads.
2:59:51 - Leo Laporte
I think it'd be a great story to talk about how, in the early days of the internet, there was this guy who wore this wetsuit and talked on tv to soledad o'brien about the internet culture his name was dev.
3:00:06 - Paris Martineau
No purple hair, yes, and uh, a strange blue polka dotted jacket it'd be a marvelous, marvelous I think the information subscribers would really, uh, like that hey, there would be no golem without dev.
3:00:20 - Leo Laporte
No that's true, it was similar technology to Gollum. You're exactly right. I didn't even think of that. I should have auditioned for that. Darn it. What was I thinking?
3:00:29 - Paris Martineau
There would be no Gollum without Dev Null.
3:00:32 - YouTube
There would be no Gollum without Dev Null.
3:00:35 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Paris. I appreciate you putting us up with this old farts here, thanks to Jeff Jar, farts here, thanks to, uh, jeff jarvis. Sir, null to you, young lady. Jeff is the former emeritus director of the townite center for entrepreneurial journalism at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york, new york what happens?
3:00:58 - Paris Martineau
the sun goes down and everything turns orange the funniest thing was that Jeff goes what the hell happened? And clearly starts clicking on something to make himself less yellow and he gets more yellow, Significantly more yellow. Well, you're pretty pink lady. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's not doing. Well, I guess it's nighttime on the East Coast.
3:01:20 - Leo Laporte
The sun has gone down. Have a wonderful week. You guys Remember we are shifting times. Jeff and I will be talking about Google IO on Tuesday, 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. We'll be covering the keynote and then analyzing it. And, benito, we're going to find somebody a third, because Paris, unfortunately, is working she's got a job unfortunately on Tuesday, but we will be back with you in two weeks Paris and of course, at this time you'll hear Mac break weekly. So we're going to swap with a Mac break weekly next week on the network. I thank you for being here. We'll be back. I'll be back on Sunday for ask the tech guys and this week in tech Meanwhile. I hope you have a wonderful week.
You can catch this show on the internet at twittv slash twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it and, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast. If you want to watch us, do it live. It's normally every Wednesday from about two to 5 PM Pacific, that's five to eight Eastern, 2200, 2100 UTC. Uh, the YouTube channel is, of course, youtubecom slash twit. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google. Bye-bye On the Internet.