This Week in Google 786 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 - Paris Martineau
It's time for Twig. This week in Google, we are down a Leo Laporte and up a Molly White. This week. Jeff Jarvis is here, and so am I, paris Martineau Coming up on the show. We talk about how the kids are doing online, trump's new cryptocurrency effort, strawberry, and what's up with Flappy Bird? It's all coming up. Next, on Twig what's up with Flappy Bird?
0:00:25 - Leo Laporte
It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love.
0:00:31 - Benito Gonzalez
From people you trust.
0:00:38 - Paris Martineau
This is Twig. This is this Week in Google, episode 786, recorded September 18th 2024. Now, that's a wiki foot. It's time for Twig, this week in Google, the show where we talk about a lot of things, and sometimes Google Leo continues to be out and I, paris Martineau, am your hostess with the mostest this week. You know who's also here. You may know him as the former director of the Tao Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Craig Craig Newmont Park School of Journalism at CUNY. It's Jeff Jarvis.
0:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey Paris, Hi boss, Welcome back Vacation.
0:01:20 - Paris Martineau
Hi, thank you, Did you wear?
0:01:22 - Jeff Jarvis
your sunscreen.
0:01:23 - Paris Martineau
I did wear sunscreen. I didn't get burnt once, which is actually incredible because I'm very pale. I did get a lot of bug bites and I did pet a lot of Croatian cats and for that at least the latter part I'm thankful. Also joining us is the magnificent Molly White, hey.
0:01:41 - Molly White
Molly.
0:01:42 - Paris Martineau
Great to have you back. Thanks for having me. Molly is best known for her research and coverage of cryptocurrency. She also runs the website Web3, is going just great and is a prolific Wikipedia editor. It's great to have you. Great to be back and, I guess, to kick off the show, we were thinking about playing an AI-generated podcast that Jeff has figured out how to make using Notebook LM, but the podcasting gods have stymied us. They will not allow it to happen this week.
0:02:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually, it's because it's going to replace us and Benito is worried about that, and he's performed a job action by refusing to play the audio. He's acting as if he can't, but I know what's really going on. He's trying to protect his job and his future, and I don't blame him.
0:02:29 - Benito Gonzalez
Next week. I promise Next week.
0:02:32 - Paris Martineau
The fourth box that's going to pop up here is Scabby.
0:02:34 - Benito Gonzalez
The Rat is going to be joining the podcast.
0:02:40 - Paris Martineau
Instead, I guess let's kick off with talking about Google briefly. Wow, horrifying crazy on this show. Just today, google won, surprisingly, a fight to scrap a 1.7 billion EU antitrust fund fine over ads. Antitrust fund fine over ads. Today, google convinced the European Union court to overturn this huge fine that had been levied against it over Google's advertising practices. The victory comes after Google lost a separate antitrust case in Europe and the US. It's kind of interesting.
This is like one of the many things going on right now with Google in the antitrust world. In this particular case, the European Commission applied this fine back in 2019 after they found that Google had used its search engine dominance to kind of impose like restrictive contracts that had blocked rivals from selling search ads on websites that Google doesn't own, which is kind of a relatively small market. And on Wednesday, the general court of the EU upheld that most of those findings in the original court case were fair, but that the commission had wrongly assessed some of the contractual causes it deemed unfair and basically threw it out, which is a small victory for Google. I don't know, jeff, what do you think about this?
0:04:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm confused too. So Google stopped these activities in 2016. So I think it was all just slap on the wrist afterwards, so I guess it was well, we're not, yeah, you're not supposed to do that, we're not doing it and you're not charging us for it.
0:04:22 - Paris Martineau
So next, as Kamala Harris was saying, next question doing it and you're not charging us for it so next, as common, how many millions of dollars do you think people have spent on legal fees for this? It's ridiculous, or I guess millions of euros because it's europe it really is.
0:04:35 - Jeff Jarvis
one story that I put in below is that I didn't know this is that the two um champions of uh antitrust in europe uh are Vestager and Breton. Oh wow, yeah, Vestager is huge, exactly, and so they're both stepping down, and Breton has been tough on Musk and such, so that all together, I don't know whether this bodes. Anything about European anti-technology regulation and legislation, we'll see.
0:05:10 - Paris Martineau
Did the article that you're mentioning say as to why they're stepping down or just simply retiring?
0:05:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I think they're just tired. I mean, yeah, aren't we all it's been crazy Slaying dragons is not an easy thing to do.
0:05:27 - Paris Martineau
It's also interesting. I think just before we hopped on to record this show, reuters reported I didn't even have time to put it in the rundown that Google for a different EU antitrust thing that's going on Google had offered to sell part of its ad tech business to kind of quash the lawsuit, and this is notable because Google, to my knowledge, hasn't offered to sell any part of its business before. But that wasn't enough. They didn't take the deal, jeez.
0:05:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Because I'm thinking at some point I'm curious what you both think At some point. The break up, uh, hymnal uh, companies will resist that, but there is an argument that companies can get more value out of their stock, and I haven't seen any any talk of investors saying, yeah, actually I'd like to own a few googles, um, but it'd be interesting if they did sell off part of the ad business. I would think that would be a good step. I wonder which part.
0:06:27 - Paris Martineau
I think so. This is from an article by Reuters. It says Google took a major step this year to end an EU antitrust investigation with an offer to sell its advertising marketplace, adx, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient. It is part of Google's lucrative advertising business. It was attracting regulatory scrutiny last year following a complaint from the European Publishers Council, the European Commission subsequently charged Google with favoring its own advertising services. This is opening its fourth case against Google. Opening its fourth case against Google. Google has never before offered to sell an asset in an antitrust case.
According to three lawyers involved in antitrust cases, says Reuters, publishers rejected Google's proposal because they want it to divest more than just addicts to address conflicts of interest due to its presence in almost all levels of the ad tech supply chain. The people said they said that the EU's antitrust officer was aware of this offer. It's interesting, jeff, because to your point, I kind of felt the same thing at first, like yeah, maybe investors would want to own like four Googles and three Amazons. But I need to look it up. But I believe the Wall Street Journal's heard on the street column recently which is kind of like a financial analyst column had something on this just this week. That said, markets are actually reacting negatively to the idea of Google being broken up, which again seems a little obvious.
0:07:56 - Jeff Jarvis
But kind of interesting. I don't know if it's to be broken up or just walking through a lot of glass.
0:08:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
0:08:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I think Google's going to go through a lot of glass. Yeah, I think Google's gonna go through a lot of hell coming up, and I mean AdEx is an important part of the business. The Google AdEx change and to offer to give that up I think is a fairly big deal, but it's interesting. Paris, I don't know how. I've been trying to think of historical cases here where a company preempts antitrust action by settling the first, saying okay, we'll split ourselves up in this way, which is what they try to do here. So that's to me what Google's saying is okay, we're starting to negotiate.
0:08:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and it's interesting they're starting to negotiate in this way. I mean, I wonder if we'll ever see a world where, like, a meta decides like, okay, I'll give up WhatsApp, but not Instagram, or something like that. I mean, I think they obviously closed the door on that when they, in 2018 or whatever, decided to integrate them all to one another so that they kind of cannot be broken up.
0:09:04 - Jeff Jarvis
but it's interesting yeah um so there's big google news actually this week big google news.
0:09:12 - Paris Martineau
who would have guessed talking about it on this week in google?
Um, the other thing that caught my attention uh, given my kind of new beat focus, which uh molly for, I've recently kind of pivoted towards covering online child safety and all these various different bills and legislative efforts to kind of rein in various tech companies relating to kids and on, I believe yesterday Instagram announced that it was going to be doing a bunch of different changes.
Instagram announced that it was going to be doing a bunch of different changes around teenage accounts and basically what this was is a thinly veiled, direct response to all of the crazy lawsuits and legislative pressure that Meta and all these other social media companies have been facing over the last year and a half from concerned parents and advocates of online child safety. Some of this, as we've talked about before, is kind of a moral panic, but at a certain point it gets to a volume where a company like Meta can't really ignore it, especially when we're starting to see legislation like COSA move through the Senate and into the House. So yesterday Instagram announced that basically they're rolling out these things called teen accounts. As we all know, it's something like huh.
0:10:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Sounds like you know. Here's your kid's record player, enjoy it.
0:10:40 - Paris Martineau
Here's your baby record player.
0:10:43 - Molly White
Instagram for mom. It's got really big buttons on it. Yeah, it's in baby record player. Yeah, instagram for mom. It's got really big buttons on it, yeah.
0:10:47 - Jeff Jarvis
It's in orange and pink, yeah.
0:10:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the teen Instagram account will stick to the side of a building so that you can take Instagram reels. Basically, what this is supposed to do is, right now, instagram says, oh, we don't have any users that are 13 under. We all know that's kind of untrue Kids lie and put their age as adults on there as well. However, instagram does say, yeah, we've got child users, 13 and older for sure. And right now, what this new change is going to do is users that are 13 to 17 are going to automatically have their accounts put in this teen account bucket. That means their accounts won't be public-facing. Instead, they'll be set to private. They will.
Also, if they're 16 and under, they will have a bunch of extra restrictions. You know, in your Instagram Reels Expl, explore feed you won't see as much content from people you don't follow. You won't be able to get DM requests from strangers. A lot of these are kind of direct responses. Yeah, I mean a lot of these are direct responses from concerns parents and legislators have had, which is that I've got a 14-year-old that gets you know 12 messages a day from pedophiles or whatever. But there's also a, I think, kind of funny a part of these. This new update was teen accounts will no longer have notifications from 10 pm to like 7 am or something like that and this is specifically Is that configurable, huh?
0:12:29 - Molly White
Or is that configurable? Or is that when Facebook thinks teens should be sleeping?
0:12:34 - Paris Martineau
I think that that's when Facebook thinks teens should be sleeping.
0:12:38 - Benito Gonzalez
But you know what I?
0:12:38 - Paris Martineau
think this is. I thought this was interesting because so I did a story a couple months ago about this new trend in social media litigation and it is really in vogue right now and it's both parents and states, attorneys general and everybody is trying to come after companies like Meta and whatnot, saying like, oh, you're addicting kids and they're using this kind of innovative framing for product liability stuff. But one of the suits that um is particularly graphic deals with a I feel like she was maybe like 12 or something a young child who had an instagram account, who their parent claims like she got addicted to it and spent all night, every night, up awake, could never, never sleep, was always checking Instagram and they were kind of targeting, I guess, the notifications as well as the algorithmic feed, and I thought it was a bit silly when I read it. But it is interesting that litigation like that is resulting in policy changes in companies like this companies like this.
0:13:50 - Molly White
Yeah, to some extent I mean a lot of it, I think has really sort of concerning implications around. You know, like, how are they doing this age verification, you know? Is it teens continuing to self-identify? And in that case, are they just going to start self-identifying as 18 instead of 16? You know, which seems like the kind of likely outcome there, or are we going to start seeing actual age verification software deployed, which then has very concerning ramifications?
As far as online privacy and the ability to anonymously, you know, exist online? A lot of it, I think, really does fall into the moral panic end of things, where people are saying you know, this is just the latest thing, that is, you know, twisting our children. It's no longer Dungeons and Dragons and rock music, it's Instagram and TikTok. And to some extent, I always wonder when I see lawsuits like the one that you just explained, where a child is staying up all night scrolling Instagram. It's interesting that the parents decided that that was an Instagram problem versus a parenting problem that needed to be addressed an Instagram problem versus a parenting problem that needed to be addressed.
0:15:11 - Jeff Jarvis
If I may ask, since I'm Gramps here, how old were each of you when you came on to what we would now think of in any broad definition of social media?
0:15:17 - Paris Martineau
I don't know exactly.
0:15:19 - Molly White
I was in high school, I think, when I joined Facebook. Um, I'm trying to think yeah. Beyond that, I feel like I was in late middle school or something when I joined Facebook.
0:15:33 - Jeff Jarvis
So, looking back, do you think that was a fine thing? Do you think that, gee, who would let me do this? Did your parents freak? Did you love it and rely on it? Did you find it boring? I'm just curious if you can remember back, because it's easier for you two than me. What did you think about social media in your youth?
0:15:52 - Paris Martineau
Well, I do think it's interesting because our generation is probably like the last chopper out of NOM with regards to social media use. In a way, like I used, I remember using Facebook, but it was like the Facebook where you were posting to your Facebook profile or you'd go over to your friend's wall and post there. It wasn't. I was using a browser on my laptop or a desktop computer largely to access social media, which, in my day, was like mostly like tumblr or maybe facebook on the browser, and I remember in high school getting a twitter account, but again, that was really mostly on the computer.
0:16:34 - Benito Gonzalez
I do think that there's probably a smartphone. That was all pre smartphone. So yeah, more or less, or at least it was certainly pre-adolescence having smartphones if nothing else, oh yeah.
0:16:47 - Molly White
Yeah, I mean, when I was around that age, my parents did prohibit me to some extent from having like MySpace accounts, which were, you know, that was sort of the precursor at that point and those. I think there were a lot more sort of those like safety concerns that you might be talking to strangers.
0:17:09 - Paris Martineau
as a 12-year-old, I was be talking to strangers as a 12-year-old I was definitely talking to strangers as a 12-year-old? Yeah, so was I, but I was on IRC, yeah.
0:17:17 - Molly White
I was on Amigo. It was not good, but, yeah, you know, at the time when I first joined Facebook in high school, it was still the Facebook where you were just friends with your real life friends. It wasn't, you know, every person on earth or strangers trying to add you as a friend. And you're right, it was still the era where people asked if you were online. You know, which I feel like people don't do anymore because everyone's always online. You know, you don't ask hey, are you on anymore?
So there, was that disconnecting from it?
0:17:47 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you're never typing BRB because you are always there AFK, yeah. No. I mean, I think that your point, molly, is a really good one. This whole online child safety boom, in terms of like legislation or even these corporate responses, is it is in many ways, or most ways a classic moral panic. However, it, unlike you, know the moral.
0:18:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you, thank you I got a bad feeling about this exactly.
0:18:23 - Paris Martineau
Exactly I do. It's a classic moral panic, but it's not. I mean, it is taken off at a level I feel like we haven't seen in a while. You know, you didn't see this with D and D, you didn't see this with people freaking out of the crossword back in the day. It is resulting in real legislation on a state and federal level, regardless of whether it's tethered to reality, which is interesting.
0:18:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Which is also part of the. I think the meta action here is that there have been threats in various jurisdictions to forbid people under 18 from having any social media, which is ridiculous, and I think actually in the US would not succeed in the Supreme Court, but in Australia it could, and so I think this is preemptive as well. Say okay, okay, uncle, we'll do something.
0:19:14 - Molly White
Yeah, and I think there is some historical precedent for it. I mean the sort of think of the children. Moral panics do go back a really long time and maybe a good example that would be more comparable in terms of scale is the violent video games panic around sort of the Columbine era, which did, in, you know, ultimately result in some bills at least getting to Congress, if not through Congress. That seems like maybe one of the more recent examples that's perhaps more relevant than Dungeons and Dragons. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it just comes down to sort of new scary technology and also the urge to blame something else for really difficult problems in society.
You know, I think it's really hard to solve the problem of teen mental health, for example. Or you know, teenagers, you know, developing eating disorders or whatever the particular area of concern may be, and it's really easy to just say, oh look, instagram's showing my kids skinny models. If they would just stop doing that, everything would be fine. When I think in reality it's quite a lot more difficult than that and in some cases I think reducing children's access to social media can have the opposite effects in a lot of cases where sometimes that's where kids are going for support or to get information that they can't get access to, you know, because of a protective family, or you know where they're living has. You know school systems that are not doing the kinds of education that children maybe need, and so you know it's worrisome, I think, to see some of those trends towards preventing children from using social media or from using it in specific ways. Um, you know that that concerns me a lot.
0:21:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I feel like it's kind of a perfect storm of this, like moral panic won't you think of the children that you just described? Plus, just like general anti-tech animus, like everyone everywhere is mad at tech companies and social media platforms for something and are trying to find something to sink their teeth in, and the kind of Venn diagram of these two issues has really taken off, it seems.
0:21:39 - Molly White
And I think the sort of third circle in the Venn diagram of moral panics around. You know transgender rights and you know they're turning our kids trans, like you hear people say. You know as well as access to you know we see like book banning around LGBTQ content or content that has to do with racial diversity, and so I think there is this sort of third arm to it as well, where you know, in a world where people are trying to control children and the types of content that children are able to be exposed to, that's more effective if they don't have access to. You know the wide range of information and material that's available on these platforms.
0:22:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I would be remiss if I didn't plug my book because I just got the heart back.
0:22:32 - Paris Martineau
It's covered.
0:22:33 - Jeff Jarvis
There it is, thank you, which I do go back. I think you're right, molly. It goes to violent video games. There were hearings galore about that. Also, television, the Surgeon General, just television, the Surgeon General, just as now the Surgeon General is crying panic. The Surgeon General was involved and assigned to do things on television and radio before that, and Nickelodeons before that. We've gone through this a million times and we never have any sense of media, never have a sense of history about this, because they want this is a good story for them, them. I do think there's one aspect of this.
0:23:09 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, jeff, what were you saying?
0:23:11 - Jeff Jarvis
which australia uh is looking. It's, it's low, it's. I think line 112 is looking to set a a statutory age limit between the ages of 14 and 16, where you just can't use it at all can't use social media at all. That's what they're thinking about.
0:23:27 - Paris Martineau
And I think part of the interesting thing about that is this opens up all of these questions of how are any of these platforms going to determine how old anyone is, especially if you're talking about like a 14 or 15 year old? They don't have an ID. First of all, I'd hope that you're not having to put your ID in to access Facebook to begin with, but how are these companies going to go about doing this? In the case of these new Instagram teen accounts, meta is hoping to tackle this with AI, which doesn't sit right with me either. This is from a Wall Street Journal article about it.
Earlier next year in the US, meta plans to use its adult classifier AI model to determine which Instagram account holders are really teens. Oh, what could go wrong? What could go wrong? The company has already used the model to prevent teens from accessing adult features on Facebook dating. Adam Masseri was talking to the journal about this and said it's. Ai models that predict age aren't perfect, but it's trained on an account's interactions with other users and content, among other signals, to determine whether a person's birth date is false.
Which I think is even more concerning, because I mean, mean then one, I assume what's probably going to happen, because kids are smart is they will figure out how to give off signals that they're 35, maybe posting about taxes or something, but it's just, it seems like a slippery slope, Walt.
0:25:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Mossberg, who is 77 years old, keeps talking on Facebook about what a swifty he is. What if he gets kicked off?
0:25:08 - Molly White
Meanwhile, when I was like 13 years old editing Wikipedia, I had many people think that I was like a 60-year-old man.
So I feel like there's a lot of problems there. I've also seen proposals for age I forget what the word is. There's like age verification and age something else. That's like the fuzzier version of it and I've seen proposals for that that involve using facial recognition to try to take a picture of you and determine from that picture if you're above or below the age threshold. And, of course, that suffers from all of the massive issues around facial recognition technology, where it's incredibly inaccurate, especially when you're trying to target really small age ranges, like the difference between a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old is often not that basically different.
0:25:58 - Jeff Jarvis
And it has racial issues Plus the racial bias, gender bias.
0:26:03 - Molly White
It's just like really not good. And so there are a lot of platforms that are sort of promising to do this sort of less quote-unquote, invasive version of these age verification processes and then kick you over to a more um you know, official one where you'd have to submit proof of your age if they can't verify you in the first way or if there's an error.
0:26:30 - Paris Martineau
And yeah, it's just like I don't think I want facebook to have my facial scans or my identification necessarily it's also like I don't want some company out there generally to have a record of my identity paired with the sites and apps I'm trying to access.
I went to a conference a couple weeks ago about kind of these various issues like child online safety legislation, as well as like online sexual exploitation, and of course, what ended up happening is much of the conference was about moral panic over children having access to pornography online, kel Horor and one big thing.
I went in to go sit on an age verification panel and I was expecting it to talk more about practical solutions relating to, you know, the sort of issues we just talked about, and instead it was all about um. It was all about porn verification services and they went into detail about how the state of louisiana is doing this, because I believe they're one of the states that has a ban on being able to access porn websites unless you're of a certain age, and in that case they have a third party um service or app provider that if you want to access a porn site, you have to go in, upload your ID, they give you a string and then you have to put that string in the porn website, and it's like I don't. Nobody wants any of that.
0:27:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeez. Well, the UK is going to do the same thing. The online safety I can see a story here popping up Paris, because I think, if you look at what's happening there, it's not just protecting children, it's that anyone who wants porn, as in Louisiana, will have to do it. And the privacy violations this is going to violate privacy legislation all over the creation.
0:28:24 - Molly White
Yeah, and now you have this huge database of every person who has access to porn website, and if we know one thing about databases of personal information, it's that they leak like crazy, and so I feel like it's just a matter of time before there's the first scandal around that, too. Absolutely.
0:28:41 - Paris Martineau
Absolutely. Among all this, a House panel advanced the Kids Online Safety Act today, getting it one step closer to maybe coming up to a vote in the House, which is a bit concerning. This is a bill that has had a lot of pushback from online privacy experts and, you know, concerned people on the internet generally, but that has made it through the senate already and moved to the house because of concern from these advocacy groups and, you know, general moral panic. It's got bipartisan support going into the house too, which is, uh, a bit concerning.
0:29:25 - Jeff Jarvis
And what you were saying before, molly. Where it's really damaging is the right is going to use this to go after trans rights. Right and that's going to be a fight.
0:29:34 - Molly White
And anything else really that they decide. That is unacceptable. You know, abortion information, even access to information about racial justice or climate change or whatever it is. I mean, you can really weaponize a bill like this to target content relating to anything you want and you know, with the right makeup in the FTC or you know whichever enforcer, it could be a really major issue. I think and it's one of those things that you know it has this really benign name. Who doesn't want kids to be safe online? But then when you actually look at the details of the bill, you realize that this is really something quite different.
0:30:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
0:30:19 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah.
0:30:20 - Paris Martineau
I guess, while we're on the subject, there was this article in the Wall Street Journal this week that I thought was kind of interesting. There have been all these different bills going in states around the nation to ban smartphone uses in schools, and I feel like it's fairly uncontroversial. Up to a level, I can understand why you wouldn't have a kid want to have a kid looking at their smartphone, you know, in the middle of their US history exam or whatever. However, there's now been kind of a bit of a movement on that, where parents are trying to ban children from accessing all screens in schools, including their Chromebooks that they use to access textbooks, or iPads that they use for in-school assignments, and I thought this was just honestly so interesting.
0:31:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I'm screaming. I haven't seen it until you put it in the rundown. I'm screaming about this.
0:31:09 - Paris Martineau
It's baffling.
0:31:11 - Jeff Jarvis
This is Luddite, this is just ridiculous.
0:31:13 - Paris Martineau
Quite literally. Parents told the Wall Street Journal reporter that teachers and principals say a lot of classroom instruction consists of interactive games and can't be turned into worksheets. Not all schools purchase physical textbooks anymore. Many only offer them as ebooks. Um, shocking still, five parents told this reporter they've switched their kid to private or charter schools which still use a pen and paper.
0:31:37 - Molly White
As a result, it is something green demonization, you know sorry it's just such a like when you look, when you think about that and the sort of obvious ramifications of that you end up with. Like now you educating younger people is teaching them how to be responsible technology users and how to you know vet information that they're accessing to. You know use technology in a way that is productive and helpful to them and potentially even you know, part of a future career. And so now we're saying, okay, kids can't have smartphones, they can't have Chromebooks in their schools, they can't use social media. Now we're just going to end up with a bunch of people who are sort of unleashed on the Internet at age 18 without any real understanding of how things work or how to navigate those waters, when it's, at this point, a crucial life skill.
0:32:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the amishization of American education right.
As if that somehow is preferable and beneficial. It's just ridiculous. This is going to sound like it's really off target, but I've been just freaked about the Lebanon story and the pagers and you have this weird thing happening there now where all kinds of things are exploding. It's awful, it's terroristic, to my view, because of the panic that's going on now legitimate panic, but what it means is people are not using any technology. They were using their pagers and then they were told no use walkie talkies. And then walkie-talkies exploded and, um, my wife just told me that, uh, solar panels exploded and so solar panels exploded. That's what she said. I hadn't seen the story, she was just telling me maybe, maybe it was something on twitter, but, um, other technologies are exploding. So you really get to a weird thing going on here of technology, puritanism or Luddism or Amishism or something for very, very different causes, but technology just suddenly is going to be made to look dangerous in all kinds of ways.
0:34:05 - Paris Martineau
God, what a nightmare. Some of the videos coming out of that are just haunting.
0:34:11 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a technology story for sure too. It's geez how they managed to do it and trigger it and everything else. But yeah, so we're going into an interesting time and I come out at just the right time to write a book about why the internet is a good thing, why technology is okay.
0:34:30 - Benito Gonzalez
No, boss in this book.
0:34:33 - Molly White
At least we have deeper versions and not just e-books.
0:34:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but these things are converging against technology as the bugaboo of society.
0:34:45 - Paris Martineau
All right, we'll get back to this in a minute. Let's throw to our good old friend Leo for a bit of an ad break.
0:34:52 - Leo Laporte
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0:36:27 - Paris Martineau
Google. Now back to the show. All right, we are back. Molly, I wanted to ask you a bit. Tell us about what happened this week with Trump's rolling out of his new cryptocurrency business, a subject that I chose for my mental health to stay far away from until just this moment.
0:36:49 - Jeff Jarvis
You listen so we don't have to Molly.
0:36:52 - Molly White
Yeah, I'm sorry to ruin your blissful ignorance, I suppose, yeah. So Trump and his family you know Donald, but also the younger Trumps have decided to embrace a crypto project that is ostensibly a decentralized finance project. The details on it are somewhat scant as far as what the project will actually do. It sounds like it will be some sort of crypto borrowing and lending platform crypto borrowing and lending platform but they have certainly been promoting it very heavily on Twitter and in the news and elsewhere. Some of the most interesting things about it are the people behind the project, which stems from an earlier crypto project that was called Doe Finance, which I covered on Web3, is going just great because it was hacked for about $2 million.
Very shortly after it was launched Whoops Whoopsie-daisy, and some of the people behind the project are sort of odd characters themselves. One of them ran a pickup artist advice website which is like Lovely yeah for those who are lucky enough not to know what pickup artist uh advice website, which is like lovely yeah, for those who are lucky enough not to know what pickup artistry is. It's basically like how to make women love you uh, you know how to scam those weak females?
yeah, exactly by using tricks of the mind in cell meets crypto perfect yeah, it's a great crossover right there, uh, so very sort of odd group of people behind it beyond just the Trumps. And then you know they've been promoting it. They had this live stream on Twitter a couple nights ago. That was this interview between a crypto bro. He was like I'm a proud crypto bro and I was like you're so brave. But you know, this like crypto guy who is very starstruck to be around Trump and made the interview kind of unpleasant to listen to, I think because of it. He was just sort of like a gape at the Trump presence and you know, ostensibly they were supposed to launch the crypto project. Most of the talk was just about the recent attempt on Trump's life and then the subsequent man with the gun in the bushes at the golf course and sort of recounting the stories there. But they did eventually get around to talking about crypto very broadly. Trump didn't really go into any details about the project.
0:39:26 - Paris Martineau
He just talked about how his kids convinced him to like cryptocurrency Trump famously said on the live stream crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it, which is a resounding show of support.
0:39:41 - Molly White
Right. Yeah, he's had other comments like that that make me think maybe he's really not the crypto fan that a lot of the crypto world wants him to be. He, when he was doing the Bitcoin 2024 conference, he signed off with have fun with your crypto and all the other things you're playing with, which.
0:39:59 - Paris Martineau
OK, actually I love that, I love that.
0:40:01 - Molly White
Yeah, that was actually a very good. That was a very good line.
0:40:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I think he bragged that that. Uh, that baron has three wallets oh yeah, wallets, he says.
0:40:12 - Paris Martineau
Uh, trump said he's got four wallets or something.
0:40:16 - Molly White
He knows this stuff inside out yeah, the 18 year old baron has been described as the d5 visionary behind the project, which I think should be cause for concern.
0:40:29 - Paris Martineau
Um, especially given that, like third week at nyu, he could be a defy visionary over there.
0:40:35 - Molly White
Yeah well, and there have also been all these rumors that baron was tied to various other trump themed projects, although a lot of those rumors are coming out of people like Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro.
So, not the most reliable narrator, but the whole thing is really just kind of a mess. I think the Trumps have been trying to play it up with a lot of talking points that really feel like a flashback to about four years ago, when people were still really starry-eyed about the potential for blockchains to fix the financial system and democratize finance and all of this stuff They've talked about. Apparently, the Trumps are now concerned about equitable access to financial services, which is kind of a new development.
But without any real reflection on the shortcomings of crypto to actually provide the types of financial services that some people truly do have trouble accessing. The Trump family was talking about how this would provide access to credit for those who have challenges getting credit which, yeah, like definitely no predatory credit schemes out there that this could be joining.
But beyond that, when you look at loans in the crypto world, people tend to forget that they are what's called over-collateralized loans, which means that you have to have more assets than you're borrowing in order to take out the loan.
0:42:03 - Jeff Jarvis
So if you have like Hold on that for a second, is that because that's just because crypto bros don't trust anybody, or Exactly, why is that? Oh, okay.
0:42:11 - Molly White
Yeah, if you're anonymously borrowing something, then unless you put up more, unless you put more at risk than you're borrowing, you would just run away with the money.
0:42:21 - Jeff Jarvis
So how do you collateralize if you're anonymous?
0:42:25 - Molly White
You basically put up Bitcoin or some assets that you have. You put those, you lock those up as collateral for the loan and then you borrow less of some other asset. It's primarily used by people who have, say, a whole bunch of Bitcoin that they don't want to sell. They just want to have access to, like US dollar, liquidity and then they'll return it and they don't have to take the gains on their crypto or whatever it might be, but money.
0:42:51 - Paris Martineau
Bitcoin is the future. Why would they need petty cash? Yeah, that's a great question.
0:43:08 - Molly White
It's just the slow real world that isn't accepting Bitcoin for the purchases they want to make, I suppose. But yeah, so, like when you look at loans, in that sense, that's really not the type of credit that people who have trouble accessing credit need, right, it's not that they need to have liquidity because they have all of these assets that they can't liquidate. It's that they don't have the assets and they need to take a loan to go to college or buy a house or whatever it is, and so this project really doesn't offer that to people. But that's really how it's being sold by the Trump family at this point, which is really a great start, I think, for this project.
0:43:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Do they have a brand for it?
0:43:40 - Molly White
Yeah, it's called World Liberty Financial. The worst thing is that it hasn't really launched yet. There isn't really a product that you can use. But about two weeks ago, two of the Trump family Twitter accounts were hacked to promote a website that was supposedly this project. It had a domain that was similar to the product name. It had a fake token that was not associated with the Trump family in any way. They tweeted out this advertisement for it and a whole bunch of people bought the token. I think at least $1.8 million lost to this scam. But right now, because there is no product and there is no real website for World Liberty Financial, as of yesterday at least, I haven't checked recently, but if you Google World Liberty Financial because you read it in a headline in the New York Times or you saw the Twitter space or something, one of the first page results is this scam website, and so there is like there's nothing there yet, except for a scam.
And you know I'm very concerned that a bunch of people are just buying this token that's showing up in Google because they want to get in on the Trump project, because it was so poorly planned and there is no web presence really at this stage.
0:44:58 - Jeff Jarvis
So two questions. First, did he push the Trump NFTs and playing cards?
0:45:06 - Molly White
Yeah, he's been pushing those heavily, just in general. But uh he, yeah. He directly cited the nft project as something that convinced him that crypto was worthwhile, probably because he profited millions of dollars from it so.
0:45:20 - Jeff Jarvis
So here's here. That leads to my next question, which is um, how old do you imagine that this could be grift that Trump can take money off the top of this and make money from it?
0:45:35 - Molly White
Well, I mean, there are a lot of ways, but they get a substantial number of the tokens that are associated with this project or will be associated with this project they haven't launched yet are allocated to insiders, and so there's a potential profit to be made there.
Um, as far as the borrowing and lending process, there's typically fees that go to the operators of the protocol. In that case, um, or you know, they sort of skim off the top there. And then, as far as other potential problems, I mean, we've seen projects like this get hacked and exploited repeatedly. We know that this project stems from the same code base that was hacked very shortly after its launch and not in like a clever way and like, oh you know, north Korea's best hackers found an exploit in this project that no one could have thought of. It was like very simple rookie mistake type of exploit. So I think there is the concern as well that you know, people who are holding collateral on this platform while they do whatever it is that they want to do with the loan that they've taken out, could lose access to that if there is a big hack or some sort of theft looks like we got a website now too is that the real website.
Is this the scam website? That might be the scam website. What's the url?
0:47:03 - Benito Gonzalez
it's a liberty.
0:47:05 - Molly White
Worldlibertyfinanceorg yep, I think that's the scam. Benito, you got got I got got is it promoting a solana token? I can't really see this. He already bought the token trade uh wl yep, that's the website 200 grand wow yeah, geez benito yeah, but, like, as you can see on that website, like, like, it looks relatively official.
It's using the same branding that the Trump family has been throwing around. So, yeah, like I said, I think there are probably a lot of people who are probably falling for this scam website because, again, they have not responsibly launched this project in a way that would avoid the type of very predictable things that happen in the crypto world day in and day out.
0:48:01 - Jeff Jarvis
So, molly, how long have you been covering crypto now?
0:48:05 - Molly White
Oh man, three years, something like that.
0:48:10 - Paris Martineau
It was like a lifetime. How long have you been covering crypto now?
0:48:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh man, three years, something like that Feels like a lifetime. Yeah, feels like it too. So well, I guess one question is is there a point at which you say I think I'm going to go cover restaurants? But the second question is have you seen, it's just not in the news as much as it used to be, it's just not around and it's more of a laughing stock. And what's the cultural?
0:48:36 - Molly White
zeitgeist around Cryptoland. Yeah well, I guess to the first question. I'm still not sick of it. I like covering it. I find it to be a useful sort of microcosm of a lot of the issues that exist in the tech world, and so it fascinates me from that point as well as just sort of the types of things that happen in the crypto world are so often stranger than fiction and you don't get that everywhere, I would say, and so that keeps me entertained pretty well. So that keeps me entertained pretty well. But yeah, as far as the sort of zeitgeist in the crypto world, it's funny because you're right that you don't hear about crypto very much. It tends to be the butt of the joke a lot of the time. But I think a lot of people in the crypto world genuinely do not know that Really At this point.
Yes, world genuinely do not know that um, there has been, yes, yes, cognitive dissonance powers they have so there has been a lot of crypto attention circling around the election this year and many people in the crypto world have actually very much convinced themselves that crypto is a major election issue, that people care so much about crypto that they will be supporting pro-crypto candidates and folks who are sort of adopting friendlier stances towards the crypto industry, and when you tell them that people don't actually feel that positively about crypto, it's like kind of a shock, I think, to a lot of them.
They genuinely believe that this is like a major voter issue in the upcoming election. They've commissioned all these polls to try to convince other people of that, including potential candidates for office, which they've had some success with, I think. But the polls themselves are incredibly misleading and when you actually dig into the data, it often proves the opposite of the points that they're trying to make. But crypto has sort of enveloped itself in this weird bubble where they are still the center of the universe. I think to a lot of those people.
0:50:47 - Jeff Jarvis
So I just pulled up, I just Googled crypto polls. I see a gray scale. They hired Harris and Harris does all kinds of crap stuff. Right, I think all polls are bad. I think all polls are to be ignored. So I don't like polls.
0:51:00 - Paris Martineau
You think we shouldn't ask anyone anything ever?
0:51:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I think, because it reveals more about us than about them. So Harris does this crap for hire. Nearly one in three American voters say that spot Bitcoin ETF approval has made them more interested in investing in Bitcoin or crypto. What?
0:51:17 - Molly White
What Right? Like normal, people read these things and they go. Are you kidding me? Like they know, their friends are not talking their year off about Bitcoin ETFs. Yeah, no, and I've written about.
I wrote about the Grayscale poll. I wrote about a recent poll that the Paradigm Crypto Venture Capital firm did about democratic voters supposedly embracing embracing crypto. When you dig into them, the polls are designed in such a way to encourage responses that are so vague that they can be twisted in these poll summaries to suggest a strong support for crypto. So they'll ask people things like have you ever held cryptocurrency? And then they will take that group of people and describe them as crypto holders, even though they don't ask how many of those people sold their crypto or lost their crypto or had their crypto taken from them. Then they'll ask questions around are you concerned about inflation or do you care about financial privacy? Or the paradigm poll even had one that was like do you worry about the government having access to your financial information if you were to seek reproductive care, or something like that?
And so they ask these very open-ended questions that don't even mention crypto. And then they say, look, all of these people care so much about financial privacy. Crypto is such a big voter issue in the upcoming election, even though they never ask do you think that crypto is a viable path forward for financial privacy or anything like that? They also, you know the recent paradigm poll said something about how Congress people are following the will of their constituents by embracing crypto. And then you look at the numbers and, like 75% of respondents don't think crypto is a positive thing. And so you're like, wait, which constituents are we talking about? Because it sounds like they're going against their constituents if they're embracing crypto. But there's just a lot of this like massaging of numbers and really misleading um summarization that goes into it.
Interesting and then of course the numbers get, get repeated by congress people because people love numbers and they just sort of accept them as hard truth, even if they're really faulty what, whatever, like the.
0:53:45 - Paris Martineau
what's the end game of crypto advocates right now? Because there was a time when it was like cryptocurrency is going to replace fiat, cryptocurrency will be how you pay for everything, but now, obviously, the way people use crypto and make money off crypto is just like speculative gambling or as a kind of a stock, a pseudo stock. What is their end game?
0:54:08 - Molly White
Well, there are still people who believe that that crypto will become the future of currency.
It's always been a fairly fringe belief and I think it's growing even more fringe, but I think there are a lot of people in the crypto industry who just want to see crypto embraced into the traditional financial system and sort of foisted upon people in ways that they haven't been able to, which I think is why they've been so heavily involved in these elections is they're really trying to get friendly legislation passed.
They feel like they can't do the types of things that they want to do. They can't offer the products they want to offer because of an SEC the Securities and Exchange Commission that has cracked down on some of the more blatant unregistered securities offerings that are happening in the crypto world, and so they see buying Congress people and sort of stacking Congress with crypto friendly candidates as the path forward to legitimize the types of crypto industry companies that are operating in the United States. I don't think that most spokespeople at Coinbase would say that crypto is going to be the next US dollar it's going to replace the US dollar, but they do think that crypto has a major place in the financial system and they want to make sure that that happens. However they can.
0:55:36 - Paris Martineau
Well, one area where crypto is clearly exerting quite a bit of influence is the realm of Flappy Bird.
You know, people who had phones 10 years ago might recall the Flappy Bird craze and, as you may know, if you played Flappy Bird for a while, you could play it for a bit. It was quite hot and then the creator took it down because he was worried about people being too addicted. Well, last week there was a sudden announcement that Flappy Bird is back. It's going to have a bunch of new characters and game modes. However, it seems that this new version of Flappy Bird this is what Ars Technica writes has been wrestled from its creator by Crypto Bros. By Crypto Bros, the creator of Flappy Bird tweeted no, I'm not related with their game. I didn't sell anything. I don't support crypto. Molly, have you been following this at all? I have been. Do you know how it ended up in the hands of the Crypto Bros?
0:56:43 - Molly White
Yeah, so the creator of Flappy Bird held the trademark for Flappy Bird. So the creator of Flappy Bird held the trademark for Flappy Bird, but the crypto company that decided they wanted to create this game was able to convince the courts, basically, that this trademark was inactive, and so they were able to basically re-register it because it was no longer in active use. The reason that the creator mentioned something about no, I didn't sell anything is because a lot of people were speculating that he had sold the trademark to this company and then they had gone and created this game. Does not seem like that's the case. It doesn't seem like the original creator has been compensated at all for the project, and they've certainly been very strongly implying that he's behind it, that this is a relaunch of the original game versus a clone of the original game. They mentioned working with the predecessor of the game at some point.
0:57:48 - Paris Martineau
Um, there's some speculation that well technically they worked with him because they had the lawsuit well, I think it actually has to do with the fact that there were.
0:57:57 - Molly White
So this is old history, but around the time flappy bird came out, there were allegations that the flappy bird creator had actually ripped off a different game, um, and has sort of had actually ripped off a different game and has sort of created a clone of a different game, and it sounds like they might be working with the creators of that game, and so that's sort of, I think, what they mean when they say working with the predecessor. But of course everyone thinks that no one knows that. Everyone thinks they're talking about this other guy who seems very unhappy to be associated with this project at all the flappy bird foundation said in its announcement that it's committed to preserving the flappy bird ip and expanding the legacy of flappy bird.
0:58:42 - Paris Martineau
The organization this is for mars technica social media promises the game is 100% free to play and always will be, while linking to a playable version on Telegram of all places.
0:58:54 - Molly White
Yeah, it's taking advantage of a recent craze with Telegram, which are these games that are built on the Telegram blockchain and it's the mechanic through which you play them is it's called tap to earn and it's it's very sort of cookie clicker-esque, speaking of sort of old games, where you literally just like mash the screen and it gives you points. Um, and so I think that was kind of a natural segue into flappy, where you just tap the screen to make your bird go up and down.
And so they realized like right, exactly, yes, and so you know that's where this is coming from, but I think it's really just the next step in the long legacy of blockchain games being incredibly unfun to play. You just have to mash. You know there's one. The big game that really kicked a lot of this off was called Hamster Combat and you just like you literally just like mash the screen. There is very little in terms of actual gameplay, but people were getting really sucked into it.
1:00:04 - Paris Martineau
Michael Roberts, who's listed in the press release as the chief creative behind flappy bird's return, is also head of studio for a group called 1208 productions. Um. The main crypto related project, writes aris technica on the 1208 production site is a set of nfts based around the Deez Nuts brand. The website for that project also lists Roberts, aka Papa Nut, as a partner of the DogePound NFT project. Truly cursed.
1:00:39 - Molly White
I did not know. There was a Deez Nuts brand.
1:00:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, exactly.
1:00:46 - Paris Martineau
There's always another brand, unfortunately, oh.
1:00:49 - Molly White
God, I made the mistake of Googling that. They're literally just like anthropomorphic testicles. No, it's nothing even somewhat creative.
1:01:01 - Paris Martineau
It's exactly what you'd expect, men, men, I suppose. Moving on to a different kind of potential, scam.
Thank you. The former CEO of MoviePass pled guilty this week to securities fraud conspiracy, taking a plea deal. If you recall, moviepass was the business where you could pay $9.95 a month to get unlimited access to movies. The chief executive pleaded guilty to securities fraud in which he admitted faults, conspiring to inflate the price of MoviePass's stock by lying about the fact that its business could be profitable. Basically, which surprise surprise. This just stood out to me because I think MoviePass is a great example of how utterly, I guess, twisted in the head investors can get when it comes to assessing businesses' viability. When you say the right words, there's no world in which someone should look at something like MoviePass and be like yeah, that's going to work at scale.
1:02:12 - Molly White
The math there works. Yeah. Well, you thought you were getting away from the crypto and Web3 thing with this story, but there was actually. I do have a MoviePass entry and Web3 is going just great. From February 2022 2022 when they announced that MoviePass was going to be back and you could earn cryptocurrency by watching ads while they tracked your eyeballs.
1:02:36 - Jeff Jarvis
So they certainly tried to give that a go as well.
1:02:41 - Molly White
Yeah, yeah.
1:02:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Is there a crypto angle to the Fyre Festival? There has to be.
1:02:48 - Molly White
I mean, there have been projects that have been very strongly compared to the Fyre Festival. I'm not sure if the Fyre Festival themselves had a crypto angle.
1:02:59 - Paris Martineau
Isn't the Fyre Festival coming back?
1:03:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Supposedly. That's why I asked. It's like saying that MoviePass will come back. It's like saying the Fyre Festival will come back. That's why I asked.
1:03:07 - Paris Martineau
It's like saying that Booby Pass will come back. It's like saying the Fyre Festival will come back. I've been joking that the information should send me to Fyre Fest 2.0.
1:03:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I think so To do some on-the-ground coverage.
1:03:14 - Paris Martineau
I could do a live stream in for Twit.
1:03:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Take a lot of peanut butter with you, so you have something to eat.
1:03:22 - Molly White
I will. I'll take a bunch of rations. I bet you could sell them online I could.
1:03:27 - Paris Martineau
That could be the future of currency.
1:03:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Have your own raft you go in on. Yeah.
1:03:32 - Molly White
I do think, though, that the guy the Fyre Fest guy after he got out of jail did try to get into a metaverse project or something like that, so he's certainly interested.
1:03:45 - Paris Martineau
That makes sense, I have a question for you.
1:03:46 - Jeff Jarvis
You're a piece of poly like that, so he's certainly interested. I've got another question for you, sbf. Does the crypto world say, oh, he got robbed, he got railroaded? Or do they say, oh, who, sb, who?
1:03:59 - Molly White
Yeah, no, he is not beloved among the cryptocurrency world. They think he ruined crypto's reputation. A lot of them lost money because of him, either because they had money on FTX or they lost it in related collapses. So he is not a hero in the crypto world by any stretch.
1:04:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Thanks.
1:04:22 - Paris Martineau
What's that? I hear? It's the dulcet tones of Leo Laporte calling for another ad break. We'll see you shortly.
1:04:29 - Leo Laporte
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1:07:49 - Paris Martineau
The New York times had an interesting story this week on the mushrooming security apparatus around Elon Musk. That I thought was very interesting. Us around Elon Musk. That I thought was very interesting. And to give you guys a warning, I say we talk about this and then I want to throw to a story that maybe you think is interesting, jeff or Molly, if there's anything you want to talk about as well.
But so this story specifically goes into how, as Elon Musk has become the gargantuan figure that looms large in all of our lives today, both negative and positive Threats to his personal safety have also increased. The Times writes His security team now operates like a mini secret service and he is guarded more like a head of state than a business executive. Guarded more like a head of state than a business executive. Musk, who was once flanked by two bodyguards, now travels with as many as 20 security professionals who show up to research escape routes or clear a room before he enters. They carry guns and have medical professionals in tow.
For Mr Musk, who has been codenamed Voyager by his security team, the threats to his safety of lead must become more fearful and his lifestyle more isolated. He is rarely without bodyguards, even when he went to the bathroom at X, according to a 2023 lawsuit filed by former employees over severance pay. It is kind of interesting. This article goes into a lot of interesting details about just how isolated his life has become, which I think probably informs a bit of the state of mind we see day to day. This is a quote from actually even kind of long ago, almost like a decade ago. It began Like bodyguards often ran errands for musk and paid his expenses to minimize the time he spent in public. They washed his car, picked up his dry cleaning, once tipped a bartender 80 in london for keeping the bar open after hours. They also brought sombreros and fireworks for a 2015 new year's eve celebration for musk um he has no friends he has no friends.
well, actually, jeff, he might have some friends. Many people trying to reach Mr Musk were innocuous documents and recordings of phone calls obtained by the Time Show. One woman left a two-minute voicemail several years ago at one of Musk's companies, referring to him as quote Daddy Musk and claiming they had spoken telepathically for the last year. Quote I can't wait for you to propose to me in outer space on our station, she said. And worst of all, the growing security has limited Musk's movements At Burning man, the annual outdoor Nevada art and music festival. He mostly stays close to his camp.
1:10:37 - Molly White
I feel like that's how you know Burning man has really gone. Corporate is if Elon Musk is there.
1:10:45 - Paris Martineau
If Elon Musk is there and he can't leave his camp with his 20 bodyguards because he feels too freaked out, then you know that Burning man has truly died.
1:10:56 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the modern Howard Hughes. He said this week that he thinks now people can be on Mars in four years and somebody on the socials said you go, elon. And somebody else said he's probably dependent upon certain substances and doesn't want to be gone that long.
1:11:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean the journal has reported about his drug use it's going to be. I mean, I suppose if you can get a rocket to Mars, you could probably load it with all the things you'd need for a long period of time.
1:11:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
1:11:27 - Paris Martineau
I think he should give it a shot, for sure.
1:11:29 - Molly White
I do think he should give it a shot, I think it could be fun. We should really be firing more billionaires into space, if you ask me.
1:11:36 - Paris Martineau
I do think so. So the guy who did the air quote?
1:11:39 - Jeff Jarvis
spacewalk is from my town.
1:11:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh, which one is this? You know, just last week the what's it called. So many billionaires are going to space, jeff. I stopped paying attention after, like the first five, didn't blow up.
1:11:52 - Molly White
Aren't some billionaires trying to go in a submarine again too?
1:11:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
1:11:56 - Molly White
I think I saw something about that yeah.
1:11:59 - Paris Martineau
With who?
1:12:04 - Molly White
Is it the James Cameron submarine? Or is it another, less reasonable one, tin Can? I don't know?
1:12:06 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, I've been fascinated by watching the Ocean Gate investigation that is unfurling. They've got that photo of the submersible shell cracked open on the seafloor. It's quite haunting Oof. Yeah, that was a hell of a week we all just sat there wondering.
It really is the sort of news experience I don't think we get much anymore where it's like 24-7 coverage of something that's actually happening and we're all kind of interested in it, because I feel like normally when we have that happen nowadays it's just kind of depressing, it's like war or something, but you knew, you knew, they were dead well, yeah, but they, but the coast guard was reporting like hearing a knocking sound and like oh yeah, I remember that cnn had an oxygen countdown clock.
1:12:57 - Molly White
It was exciting yeah, it reminds me of when the first big boat got stuck in the canal, where it was like everyone was sort of united by following this incident. That generally didn't have that much in the way of like actual repercussions. I mean it screwed up supply chains and things like that, but it wasn't, like you know, war and death or anything like that. It was kind of nice.
1:13:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we need more neutral, good world events.
1:13:32 - Molly White
Well, if they start firing people into space, that could be good.
1:13:36 - Paris Martineau
Listen I remember watching when they did the Jeff Bezos rocket launch the first one I was sat on my couch watching it with his cowboy hat. We had pre-writes for if it went well, if it went terribly, and I was finger on the button for both of them.
1:13:58 - Molly White
That's one where you don't want to press the wrong button on that one.
1:14:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, so you had a hold for Release Obit for them.
1:14:07 - Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, we had a you have a hold for Release Obit for every famous person, but we definitely had one. If something goes wrong in space, we can have a something's gone wrong in space briefing.
1:14:20 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the new Silicon Valley status symbol. Are you important enough for the information to have an obit ready for you?
1:14:27 - Paris Martineau
That's a great question.
1:14:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
1:14:29 - Paris Martineau
That's a great. You know that could be the new subscription tier.
1:14:33 - Jeff Jarvis
But Jason thinks he has one. I'm hoping he doesn't, because I hope he loses.
1:14:37 - Paris Martineau
No comment.
1:14:40 - Molly White
All right, Jeff. I hope I never reach that stage personally.
1:14:44 - Benito Gonzalez
If there's ever a pre-written obit for me.
1:14:46 - Molly White
I think I need to move into the woods.
1:14:49 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, no one needs to know. If I die, I should just rot into the forest floor, ideally. Well, you see.
1:14:56 - Jeff Jarvis
I always thought that the one fringe benefit you get from having worked in journalism is that you get an obit in the place where you worked, but I'm out living the newspapers where I worked.
1:15:05 - Paris Martineau
You don't think NJcom was going to have a glorious little obit for you? I?
1:15:09 - Jeff Jarvis
doubt it. No, they charge you for it now.
1:15:11 - Paris Martineau
That's pretty sad.
1:15:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the San Francisco Examiner is not what it used to be.
1:15:14 - Paris Martineau
Molly Jeff is the creator of NJcom, new Jersey's foremost website, quite a legacy.
1:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis
People blame you for that, yeah.
1:15:25 - Paris Martineau
People blame you for that. Oh yeah.
1:15:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah, they get pissed.
1:15:29 - Paris Martineau
They get pissed that New Jersey has a website now.
1:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis
They don't like the website.
1:15:34 - Paris Martineau
That's fair.
1:15:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
1:15:37 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, what do you want to talk about?
1:15:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Give me a story. Well, we could go actual tech news, like OpenAI and Strawberry, or we could go wacky stuff. What do you want?
1:15:47 - Paris Martineau
You know what my choice will be. You've got to make a decision, all right.
1:15:50 - Jeff Jarvis
So I want to mention this before we go too far. I think it's worth noting that Craig Newmark has pledged $100 billion line 125, to boost US cybersecurity.
1:16:01 - Paris Martineau
That's great Friend of the show, Craig.
1:16:03 - Jeff Jarvis
He's a friend of the show. We should mention that. All right. Here's the weird one Elizabeth McCafferty was offered 6,000 pounds for images of her bare feet when they appeared on a fetish website without her consent.
1:16:18 - Benito Gonzalez
What.
1:16:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Line 129.
1:16:20 - Molly White
Wait what do you mean? She was offered. Was this like a settlement?
1:16:27 - Jeff Jarvis
No, they wanted more To take it down, was it like?
1:16:31 - Paris Martineau
a ransom.
1:16:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I guess she's an actress. I don't even know that. Oh, she's a journalist. She's a journalist yes, so she ended up finding herself on WikiFeet. Don't look that up either, molly.
1:16:46 - Molly White
I am unfortunately already very familiar.
1:16:49 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we know WikiFeet, you do, of course, oh, oh. Here I'll read from the uh article she wrote even my own feet, uh, elizabeth mcafferty writes have made it to the kink website wiki feet, a platform where anyone even remotely in the public eye has pictures of their feet ranked. The platform gets close to 20 million views per month and is run by volunteers in the foot fetish community in 2017.
1:17:17 - Jeff Jarvis
It's selfless In 2017,.
1:17:21 - Paris Martineau
I was flooded with panic after finding that for years, images of my feet had been taken off my social media and put into a rating scale within the WikiFeet website. Did I ever write about my experience with this Hold?
1:17:35 - Jeff Jarvis
on, oh, no, oh, do tell Paris.
1:17:41 - Paris Martineau
Did I write about it? I'm trying to think. I don't know if I did. I definitely wrote it in a cover letter for the outline. One time I was working on a story about I don't know something internet culture related, and then I got someone started liking a bunch of my Instagram posts like 10 in a row, kind of creep behavior and so I looked at it and it was a account that was, I guess, like a foot fetish account, but the last 20 photos on it were all cropped photos of my feet from my Instagram posts or my younger sister's feet from her Instagram posts, and so I think I was procrastinating doing on some other deadline. So I was like this should be a reporting experience. So I reached out to the guy. I was like, hey, why the F? Do you have photos of my feet and my sister's feet on this? And he was like, oh, I thought they were attractive. It'll hold back and forth.
1:18:43 - Molly White
He was like you know I'm just a humble foot fetishist collecting photos that I think are interesting.
1:18:47 - Paris Martineau
I have to say that is true commitment to journalism, reaching out to this guy that really is, you know, and then we talked a bit and he was like, yeah, you know, I kind of I was like walk me through how you got to me and my sister and he had some actually involved answer. I feel like I did either report on this If not. I just put a lot of effort into writing about this for a cover letter, for the outline, as an example of internet culture, kind of guerrilla journalism. But yeah, the feet guys are everywhere, is my takeaway.
1:19:16 - Molly White
I actually, so I've been aware of WikiFeet for quite some time. Most Wikimedians end up knowing about it somehow, and I am very cautious about posting photos and making sure that my feet are not visible, because you can never be too careful. Wow, I didn't know that would go.
1:19:37 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't appear to be on wiki feet, molly. Wow, I didn't know where that would go.
1:19:43 - Paris Martineau
You don't appear to be on WikiFeet, molly, I am so happy to hear that. There's a different Molly White, but it's Molly Payton White who appears to be a model.
1:19:51 - Molly White
Is it the fitness influencer?
1:19:53 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
1:19:54 - Benito Gonzalez
I would assume yeah, well, good for her.
1:19:57 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, maybe you're on WikiFeet. Are there any photos of your feet on the internet?
1:20:01 - Jeff Jarvis
No, there's no. My thighs have not seen sunlight since 1970.
1:20:06 - Molly White
You have to be careful.
1:20:10 - Paris Martineau
It's easy to accidentally take a picture of your feet when you're trying to take a picture. Just imagine you're wearing sandals and someone posts a photo of you full body wearing jeans.
1:20:17 - Molly White
That's a WikiFeet, or I feel like if I'm taking a photo of my dog sitting right next to me. It's easy to get your feet in the photo you got to move your feet and make sure they.
1:20:29 - Jeff Jarvis
This is what the world has done to us.
1:20:32 - Benito Gonzalez
Jesus yeah.
1:20:33 - Paris Martineau
No, this is a constant online joke where people will post, you know, a cute photo of them in a friend group and someone's wearing, uh, sandals, and so they put an emoji over the feet and say no free feet pics. Yeah, so I assume this woman got paid for her feet pics, which?
1:20:50 - Benito Gonzalez
well she got offered.
1:20:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, did she take the money? That's what I forgot six thousand pounds.
1:20:54 - Paris Martineau
Listen, that's for feet pics. That's probably better than she's getting paid for four articles.
1:21:00 - Molly White
Yeah, that's pretty compelling, I have to say well, I think.
1:21:07 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you think?
1:21:08 - Paris Martineau
about this, as someone did you know of wiki feed before this no, I did not.
1:21:12 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not surprised.
1:21:14 - Benito Gonzalez
The internet being the internet, I mean people find their water level that's kind of a male privilege thing, because I I know about wiki feed only because a lot of women I know have told me about it, because they're also the same as you guys like very cautious about putting feet on the internet.
1:21:31 - Molly White
Yes, it's like. The two things I'm careful about is like not taking photos of like physically identifiable surroundings that someone could like geolocate me, like that guy on TikTok, and then not posting pictures of my feet.
1:21:46 - Paris Martineau
Yes, this is something I think about often, where I'm like oh man, there's a grocery store near me that, like little fruit cups they sell, have a really funny advertising slogan on them for the local grocery shop and I want to post it so I could make a really good joke on it, but I can't because it's a grocery store near me and I know that really local, yeah, if I ever want to define somebody.
1:22:07 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the sort of thing that I would use to help figure out what neighborhood they live in, so I can't post that on the internet yeah, for a long time I wouldn't say what town I was in, but then it just got out there enough that I was just in Jersey. That's all it's like being in Brooklyn. It's big enough.
1:22:23 - Paris Martineau
It's true.
1:22:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow.
1:22:26 - Paris Martineau
I didn't think that that's what you were going to pick when you said a weird word.
1:22:28 - Jeff Jarvis
What did you think I was going to pick?
1:22:30 - Paris Martineau
I don't know Something else. I think you're going to talk about the feral 25-year-olds making Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok. Which they are doing, and it's weird that they'd be called feral Do you have an understanding of how that word's being used in this context, Jeff. I think it's self-described they're kind of I feel like it's an internet description Goblin mode yeah, it's Wild West.
1:22:59 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the new Wild West, jeff, does the phrase goblin mode? Yeah, it's wild west. It's the new wild west, um one of the.
1:23:02 - Paris Martineau
Does the phrase goblin mode mean anything to you? No it's kind of like feral or wild west, honestly, but it's a bit more debased okay, all right.
1:23:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I feel so old, I feel so left out, so pathetic. Um the, the person who used to be the governor of new jersey's social person, went to the white house. I don't know whether she's one of them or not, I couldn't quite tell. They do do a great job. But what's fascinating about this is tiktok's about to get banned. Uh, in the in the appeal that they had this week.
1:23:35 - Paris Martineau
It did not go well for tiktok at all yes, I mean, I feel like that's kind of assumed. I assume that it's not going to go well for them. They will get banned, they'll appeal it, try and get an injunction, and then this will be appealed up to the Supreme Court and then we'll eventually have to deal with whether or not TikTok is banned in like two years.
1:24:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder whether there's enough, whether kamala harris finds enough benefit if she wins. Knock wood. Um. Sorry political statement, but I'm gonna make it. Um and tick tock had benefit. Does that change the political reality around tick tock I mean both campaigns are using it.
1:24:21 - Molly White
I feel like they're both benefiting from it, but whether or not that's enough to override the other moral panic that's happening around China is a different question.
1:24:33 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think it's also a question of like yes, both campaigns are using it. Kamala Harris' case the Harris campaign is seeing a lot of traction on TikTok, but the sort of users that are sharing these posts, many of them, are under 18, and the ones that aren't are like 18 to 30. And those people don't really vote. So I guess the question is like would this be a useful tool in motivating people who typically don't turn out to turn out? And that remains to be seen.
1:25:07 - Molly White
I mean it certainly seems like a good strategy to try to convince those people to come out and vote. You know, if you have a captive audience who likes your memes, you know it might be easier to convince them to come vote for you.
1:25:23 - Jeff Jarvis
So I still want TikTok to stick around. My fear is that it will go through. It'll get bought by somebody bad like Musk, like Mnuchin, who's talked about buying it, and we end up with a second Musk.
1:25:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that would be unfortunate, it would be.
1:25:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I saw this week too. I didn't put a story in. Mark Cuban said that he would be unfortunate it would be. I saw this week too. I didn't put a story in. Mark Cuban said that he would buy Twitter in a flash.
1:25:49 - Molly White
Well, I think he said if he had enough money for it, which he doesn't. So it wasn't really a serious offer. It's pretty cheap now. It might be bargain ban at this point, yeah.
1:25:59 - Jeff Jarvis
And I think he could probably get some funders for it. I can't believe it, but I would welcome Mark Cuban as my new master.
1:26:08 - Molly White
Yeah, I mean. I feel like we're at this stage where we need to stop deciding which billionaire we want controlling the social networks and instead, maybe try something different. There are certainly less awful billionaires, but perhaps there is a better way.
1:26:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, here's the really sad story. Along that line On this show, Leo has talked up for a long, long time about the wonders of the Fediverse and the wonders of Mastodon and how we should support them and how wonderful they are. I don't know if you saw that Mozilla, which was doing a really good job of a principled presence on Mastodon, just announced they're going to shut it down.
1:26:44 - Molly White
Yeah, they're shutting down their Mastodon instance, which is Wait who is A?
1:26:48 - Paris Martineau
shame.
1:26:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Mozilla.
1:26:49 - Molly White
Oh.
1:26:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Which is really sad. But given the antitrust case, with Google probably taking money out of Mozilla, they're going to have to cut whatever they have so unintended consequences.
1:27:03 - Molly White
Yeah it didn't strike me as a choice that was because the Fediverse is losing momentum or anything like that. It seems like perhaps there are external factors at play there, because there's certainly a lot of interest in the Fediverse from large platform. I mean threads and meta have been investing in metaverse projects. We've seen news outlets like the Verge getting involved and so it definitely.
1:27:27 - Jeff Jarvis
There's also a change of administration at Mozilla.
1:27:33 - Molly White
Yeah, so I don't see it as at least necessarily a bad sign for the metaverse. But yeah, it is disappointing to see it go out that way.
1:27:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I have a couple couple pages in the book, quoting them, praising them for the principles that they came about, how to do speech there, and that they were going to moderate. And we're going to tell you we're moderating and this is how we're doing it and I think it was a really good model and then boop gone.
1:27:56 - Molly White
The dangers of writing about such a quickly changing medium as the web.
1:28:04 - Paris Martineau
True, true, molly, do you use an iPhone or an Android? I use an Android.
1:28:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm the only iPhone user here.
1:28:15 - Paris Martineau
Benito do you use an iPhone or an Android.
1:28:17 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm on iPhone, yeah.
1:28:19 - Paris Martineau
Did you update?
1:28:20 - Benito Gonzalez
to the latest iOS. I don't know. If my phone did it for me, then yes, but I don't know.
1:28:27 - Paris Martineau
I did thinking other people would, because I wanted to use. Basically, apple rolled out a new iOS upgrade and, in my opinion, the only real notable thing about it is that it added a bunch of. In my opinion, the only real notable thing about it is that it added a bunch of interesting messaging capabilities. I assume that Android has this, just because I assume that everything new we get in the iPhone, android already has. But it's stuff like you can italicize words in your text or react to a text with an emoji.
But, of course, after I updated I realized that you cannot receive. I cannot send that to people until they've updated to iOS.
1:29:05 - Molly White
Yeah, so it's never going to be useful for me, well and you get a weird cross platform issues too, like where if you're texting with someone on an who's using an Apple device and they edit their text message, you just get a text, a new text message, that says like so-and-so has edited their text message to say this, and it's like this, really clunky, weird, not interoperable. Yeah, exactly, or you know, reactions show up weird as well.
1:29:32 - Paris Martineau
But it's also interesting because I mean this update again didn't fix like the green bubble, like problem. Right, apple had said that they were going to um work for compatibility. How hard is that to fix every bubble of the same color technically it's not hard.
It's just a big selling point for apple. Frankly, the reason why I mean I hear this when I talk to, like teenage or younger users the reason why people want iphones from a young age, is they don't want to be a green bubble. Uh, this was even part of, I think, their advertising campaign for a bit, but due to eu regulations and different stuff like that, apple's being forced to change, but they haven't done it yet I've, because I've always used an Android.
1:30:20 - Molly White
I just like don't even think of this as a thing that anyone notices. Like my bubbles are all the same color, so I don't really care. But it is very funny that that is sort of a status symbol type of thing but I wonder to what? Extent people are using, like how many do young people text or do they use other messengers?
1:30:40 - Benito Gonzalez
I oh good question.
1:30:42 - Paris Martineau
I think that is actually a good question. I think a lot of people use other I'm so happy hearing you ask about young people.
1:30:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm so happy. What do the youths do? These youths, I do think, use other messengers.
1:30:52 - Paris Martineau
I don't think they're out there texting, which is interesting.
1:30:55 - Molly White
Yeah, that's always sort of been my impression too, and like even I use text with like a couple of people, but I feel like most of my messaging these days happens on Signal, and so what's happening on, you know, with text messages is sort of a foreign world to me to some extent.
1:31:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean. Part of the issue is that right now, if you're an iPhone user and you're putting a group chat with Android users users, it defaults the messaging for everybody, uh, to sms. Um, this is part of the reason why, like um, photos going between iphones and androids are messed up and there's just a bunch of issues with it and apple. Um, this is from the washington post. They say, like, what changed the ios 18 is that Apple has stitched its messages app with a global update to SMS, known as RCS. Now, while now you see text message in your chat box, while you're messaging with Android friends, with iOS 18, you'll see RCS most of the time.
That shows everyone in your chat, has some, but not all, the capabilities of purely internet-based chat apps like WhatsApp, and Washington Post says that I guess with this new update, their tests showed that RCS did a better job exchanging messages that include photos and GIFs and videos, which is huge, and they say what's still not so good is there's still some limits to RCS. The Google Message apps, for instance, for Android phones, is based on RCS2, and it does let you schedule messages to anyone, no matter the device. In most cases, your message might not go out if your phone is turned off and disconnected from internet services. But that's a fair trade. Apple won't let you schedule messages in the new thing to people who don't have Apple devices, which I think is just petty.
1:32:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Snobs, they're snobs.
1:32:57 - Paris Martineau
The biggest problem is that Apple didn't fix the security and privacy compromises anytime. Your chat involved at least one Android user, which is dumb as well.
1:33:09 - Molly White
I tried to do some quick research into whether youth's text it sounds like it's kind of a mix but that a lot of them use instagram, dms and discord and snapchat I was supposed to say snapchat is also big around. Still, the youths love snapchat I remember snapchat was big when I was in. I don't know if it was might have been college. It would have been college because I don't think I had a smartphone until college, but I thought it had sort of died. But maybe it's just I outgrew it.
1:33:46 - Paris Martineau
It's really big as, yeah, a messing up. It's also for a lot of young people. I mean, yeah, just the default way they communicate. This became a really big issue when Snap, I think a year or so ago, had introduced this feature. It was something called like the Snap solar system or something like that, where essentially it was a screen that would show a solar system of your friends and connections. And this was a problem for kids because you know, if you think, if I think Jeff is my best friend and I see in my solar system that jeff's planet is the closest to me and I look at jeff's and he has 20 people who are close to him and I'm not even on there, then you feel like a loser and it became my spaces top friends list all over again but it's automated time is a flat circle.
1:34:36 - Molly White
Yeah, that's true it's yeah, you can't do the thing where, like if your friend pisses you off, you like passive, aggressively remove them from your top friends list, not that you've ever done that Really?
1:34:47 - Paris Martineau
Oh, never, never, yeah, yeah. But everything goes back to itself. Speaking of Discord, uh, discord is launched and is launching end-to-end encrypted voice and video chats, which I guess is useful for all those teens who are out there using Discord, does it?
1:35:05 - Molly White
have end-to-end encrypted text chats.
1:35:11 - Paris Martineau
It says Discord audio and video calls inside the platform will now be end-to-end encrypted.
1:35:19 - Molly White
It sounds like not text chats, though. I'm just reading through the article.
1:35:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it sounds like voice video voice channels. Yeah, I don't think it's text. Private messages, on the other hand, will not be end-to-end encrypted, and he says safety is entwined to their product and policies. While audio and video will be end-to-end encrypted, messages on Discord will continue to follow our content moderation approach.
1:35:42 - Molly White
Yeah, it seems like the low-hanging fruit would be the text messages.
1:35:46 - Paris Martineau
I think it's because Discord is in the crosshairs of regulators for a lot of different issues, in part relating to content moderation. They've come under scrutiny, I guess, from like sexual exploitation ending groups around facilitating sex traffic.
1:36:06 - Molly White
Yeah, I feel like encrypting video is kind of it's definitely not good.
1:36:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to encrypt, oh, I think it's good, but it's not good for that.
1:36:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah but that's not going to solve that.
1:36:16 - Molly White
Yeah, the way that this article says that the quote from this article is no-transcript.
1:36:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Molly is the more cynical view that if the bad guys all encrypt photos and videos, then nothing we can do about it. We don't know, I know nothing, but then why not do text messages too, because all they're in trouble for is images. Is that right though.
1:37:11 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
1:37:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I think pretty much. If you're talking about child porn and stuff like that, then it's going to be images that get you in trouble. So the really cynical view is they'll just keep the cops off their back that way.
1:37:23 - Molly White
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the conversation, though, is about grooming and sort of the types of conversations that lead up to photos. But yeah, perhaps that is interesting.
1:37:36 - Paris Martineau
I wonder, why Huh.
1:37:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, now you can share photos of your feet in security.
1:37:43 - Paris Martineau
Finally, yeah, finally, a place for my feet. Jeff, what's going on with AI?
1:37:51 - Jeff Jarvis
All right. Well, there's a lot you don't say. Strawberry came out, which is OI or O1.
1:37:58 - Paris Martineau
I've been having strawberries for years.
1:38:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, gives me rashes, but that's all right, and we really can't play with it much. Yet what's interesting about it is that OpenAI insists that this is about reasoning, that it can reason, and, oh my God, it's closer to AGI, which is BS. I don't believe any of that crap. What it does is simply, as far as I can understand it, take a problem and parse it into pieces, and it takes longer and it takes a lot more computer power to do that. But in doing so, they say it can solve these complex problems and it shows you supposedly it shows you the steps it takes, but it doesn't actually show you the steps it takes. There's another AI that interprets what's behind the scenes and presents that to you, and folks are trying to hack behind that and find the actual steps that it takes and they're being sent.
Cease and desist, stop this, or we're going to take away your account emails Because OpenAI doesn't want people to see this. They're arguing it's about safety or competition or whatever, but I think that we would start to learn more about what's going on. If they had more transparency about how things operate. I think that would be a not bad thing, but it's not real transparency, it's open-eye bullshit. What amuses me about it is that you have the yin-yang and moral panic going on where, the one hand, oh my God, they can do more, they can do biological weapons and that kind of stuff, and then you have other people are saying all that's just marketing, shush, there's nothing going on here, uh. So I you know it's right now it's a fair amount of smoke and we'll see how real it is when people can actually use it. A great measure it's released. It's not going to be released for free. For a while. They'll do a light version. That's the strawberry news interesting.
1:39:43 - Paris Martineau
I have questions which I will ask after this ad break this episode.
1:39:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh hi, oh hi. I thought I'd stop by because I think you need help, better help, haha, get it. See what I did there. Better help our sponsor for this portion of this week in Google. What is something you would love to learn? Gardening, a new language? I want to learn carpentry. Or maybe how to finally beat your best friend in bowling. You know everybody's got different goals, right? As an adult, do you make time to learn new things as often as you like, or did you completely lose that in childhood? You know you just most of us, we got our head. Kids are always learning, they're always growing, but as adults, you know life gets in the way. That's why I'm a big believer in therapy. You see, it's not just people sometimes say, oh, I don't need therapy, I'm fine. Therapy isn't about fixing you. Therapy is about helping you have the best possible life. It can help you reconnect with your sense of wonder, because your back to school era can come at any age I am such a big believer.
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1:42:34 - Paris Martineau
I'll be back next week go so my question, with the strawberry and what you just said, is how are people trying to figure out what's going on behind the scenes?
1:42:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not exactly sure how they're hacking it, but they're they're. They're asking it to do things and they're getting told to stop by OpenAI.
1:42:54 - Paris Martineau
I like that.
1:42:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's see here what was it? Line 84, the information.
1:43:03 - Paris Martineau
I've heard of that.
1:43:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Reports why OpenAI is hiding its reasoning model's thoughts. So the blog post they announced that it uses an internal chain of thought and there's an example here, by the way, I should give you, which is what was called the Tom Cruise problem that if you asked ChatGPT before who is Tom Cruise's mother, it would say Mary Lee Pfeiffer. But if you turned around and said who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son, it got befuddled and smoke came out of its ears. It didn't know what to do. Now it can answer that so clearly it's near human intelligence right.
1:43:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's what we needed Exactly.
1:43:49 - Molly White
We couldn't just consult a reference work for this information, I guess?
1:43:55 - Jeff Jarvis
No, we need to ruin the environment to answer that question a million times.
So the O01, letter O1 model shows a model generated summary of the chain of thought. That's what they call chain of thought and, by the way, anthropomorphization. It doesn't think, which implies that its thoughts are rewritten by a different model altogether before the customer sees them. Openai said it decided to keep the raw chain of thought hidden, primarily because that would allow its employees, and only its employees, to read the mind of the model, to understand how it operates. Openai said it didn't want the model's unfiltered thinking to be shown because it might contain unsafe thoughts, and that the company wants to monitor the model to make sure it's not being treacherous, such as manipulating the customer Like oh, it's so powerful, we got to make sure we're all the ones getting back from this. I hate when my models are treacherous, like oh it's so powerful.
1:44:49 - Paris Martineau
We got to make sure we're all the ones getting back from this. I hate when my models are treacherous.
1:44:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, exactly, openai didn't hide the fact that another factor in its decision was a competitive advantage, and the ever-nice information said that that's understandable.
1:45:05 - Molly White
I think that does seem like it's probably the real reason, though.
1:45:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but I think it's also PR. It's not that Google's going to figure out how to do this. Google knows how to do this. I'm sure it's more of oh, this is how it operates. Oh, that looks stupid. Oh, that's how it does things, and I think that smart reporters would come in and learn more. So where was it here?
1:45:37 - Paris Martineau
Some developers have said they are annoyed by the hidden chain of thought because they could get billed for something they can't see. Openai charges developers based on how many tokens, words or parts of words. The model processes and spit out in the form of answers. That's kind of interesting it is. You can't see the bill of sale.
1:45:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, you don't know what it's doing. You know, is the cab driver going on the LIE to get to Kennedy when they should go on the south? Whatever, you know.
1:46:05 - Paris Martineau
Well, your cab driver is probably going to take a really long route so that you don't have to go over a bridge, jeff, that's true, that's true.
1:46:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's Strawberry Other AI news. I think thisinformation particularly out of AI. However, at the same time, he expressed some concern about the big AI bill that is awaiting his signature. Yeah, that we're not sure he's going to sign that. I hope he doesn't sign. Personally, that would make model makers responsible for everything anybody ever figures out how to do with these machines, which I think is foolishness. But it's another moral panic about AI.
1:47:04 - Benito Gonzalez
No, no, no, no, no, no, no no no, no, that's a new one.
1:47:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I didn't see that one before.
1:47:10 - Paris Martineau
Where did that one come from?
1:47:12 - Benito Gonzalez
There's a bunch of them I like that I like.
1:47:14 - Molly White
yeah, I like that you've had to create multiple versions of this.
1:47:20 - Paris Martineau
That Molly is also a photo of Jeff from when he was one of the 100 most eligible bachelors in San Francisco. Oh my God.
1:47:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Very important. It was later.
1:47:30 - Benito Gonzalez
I was grown up by then I was married by then.
1:47:33 - Jeff Jarvis
That was from the launch of Entertainment Weekly.
1:47:35 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, wait, do you have more?
1:47:41 - Molly White
I'm getting too old for this s*** Very good, that's a strong one.
1:47:49 - Paris Martineau
That's a really good one. Why have we not been bursting this out? Yeah, geez, wow. Give credit where credit's due.
1:47:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Who has made those Benito?
1:48:01 - Benito Gonzalez
Probably Anthony. I think Anthony.
1:48:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I think Anthony did. Yeah, I think so. Wow. So the AI bill is driving a wedge through Silicon Valley. Some are for it, some are against it. We'll see what happens, but that's now hanging there.
1:48:16 - Paris Martineau
It is interesting because it seemed like Newsom was definitely going to sign it before, and now it's a bit up in the air?
1:48:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No, not so sure I don't think. I think he was giving mixed signals. Very Newsom of him, yes, and thenome of him, yes. And then there's this. If we want to panic about something, Larry Ellison declares that Oracle is your all-in-one AI mass surveillance tool and that society is going to be a lot better because Larry's going to look over everything you do.
1:48:49 - Molly White
Finally, didn't he just move up in the billionaire rankings?
1:48:52 - Paris Martineau
I feel like I saw a headline about that dc did bezos yeah, really he's number two now no, you're kidding me yeah, I saw this because people were tweeting. What does oracle do? What does oracle do? Yeah, Oracle do yeah. Nobody knows.
1:49:09 - Molly White
No one knows Well this. They sell AI now Hooray, Of course they all sell AI now.
1:49:16 - Paris Martineau
He's the retail planeteer AI is hot and databases are not, he said, making oracles part of the puzzle seemingly less sexy but no less important, at least according to the man himself, Jesus.
1:49:32 - Jeff Jarvis
He's so awful.
1:49:34 - Paris Martineau
That's rough Well you know it's a lovely company up there in the top three billionaires.
1:49:40 - Jeff Jarvis
And the way he's putting it is that he's going to supervise the police. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times. If there's a problem, AI will report that problem to the appropriate person. Yeah, sure, Citizens will be on their behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting. Ellison said he's saying he's going to police the police.
1:50:01 - Benito Gonzalez
He's the one who's going to police the police.
1:50:02 - Paris Martineau
He's going to be the robo cop. Finally. Oh my God, the police will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on. Allison told analysts he described police body cameras that were constantly on, with no ability for officers to disable the field feed. To oracle, even requesting privacy for a bathroom break or a meal only meant sections of recording would require a subpoena to view, not that the video feed was ever stopped. Ai would be trained to monitor officer feed. Take this Larry Record this.
1:50:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Larry.
1:50:40 - Paris Martineau
Oracle will have a recording of every urinal that an NYPD officer visits, that is for certain, and a few bushes too. The. Oracle will have a lot of Candy Crush recordings, yeah.
1:50:55 - Jeff Jarvis
A lot of donuts, a lot of donuts.
1:50:58 - Paris Martineau
Oh, he puts it very plainly. There are so many opportunities to exploit AI, he says.
1:51:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Isn't this disgusting.
1:51:05 - Paris Martineau
Among other things.
1:51:08 - Molly White
Yeah, that's rough. They don't usually say it that right explicitly.
1:51:12 - Benito Gonzalez
They're just like saying it out loud now yeah, yeah he does?
1:51:17 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, he was like no one pays attention to me anyway, so drones could be used to pursue police suspects instead of relying on patrol vehicle chases. And it's sad literally just doing robocatellite imagery of farms can be analyzed by AI to forecast crop yield and suggest ways to improve field conditions. I don't know for marijuana.
1:51:38 - Molly White
Why do they need AI for drones? Why is AI the thing keeping them from deploying drones to chase suspects? That seems unrelated.
1:51:54 - Jeff Jarvis
You can have lots of drones out there.
1:51:56 - Molly White
That are monitored by the AI and deploy the cops to them, maybe yeah. Speaking of Tom Cruise, it just seems like a totally non-sex killer.
1:52:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
1:52:04 - Paris Martineau
Anything to get that stock to go up. He's got to unseat Musk next.
1:52:07 - Molly White
I was going to say he's got to get up that list for sure.
1:52:11 - Jeff Jarvis
He'll buy Twitter.
1:52:13 - Molly White
Oh boy.
1:52:19 - Paris Martineau
Next on the chopping block is can AI really replace Salesforce and Workday?
1:52:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, I know people and luckily I never had to do it, it was just being implemented at CUNY Friends of mine in education hate workday. It is the bane of their existence. Everything they do has to go through workday. Every little they have to get a pencil, They've got to go through workday and fill out forms and do all kinds of crap. They despise it.
1:52:46 - Paris Martineau
Well, maybe they could have a chat bot now instead. Won't that be fun?
1:52:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, maybe they could have a chat bot now instead. Won't that be fun? Well, so Salesforce just put out its first agents, and I remember when I went to a World Economic Forum event on AI, the Salesforce executive of some sort was there saying that, basically, agents is the next level of trust. You're not going to release something to go do your work for you unless you really can trust that the output is okay. Well, now Salesforce is going to release agents doing things.
1:53:17 - Paris Martineau
I truly don't understand it.
1:53:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't either.
1:53:22 - Paris Martineau
What a strange world. Apparently, this was the hot topic at the Informations AI Summit the other week. My colleague is right for topic at the Informations AI Summit the other week. My colleagues write for our AI newsletter. They said some enterprise software professionals think it's inevitable that app building will become a relatively simple affair. Those of you who follow Snowflake, which sells large databases that companies use to store their data, may know it's publicly pushing the narrative that its customers will be able to build many kinds of apps, starting with business analytics, thanks to conversational AI. A bunch of startups are already trying to sell CRM and HR apps built with OpenAI's tech or OpenWaite, also known as open source LLMs, for a small fraction of the cost of incumbent apps. No word yet on whether any of them have become popular or if any of them work quite well, yeah, well, there's that too.
1:54:16 - Molly White
As a software engineer, I have to say I feel very comfortable in the future of my field in that we will inevitably be called in to fix what these things, the terror that they unleash.
1:54:32 - Paris Martineau
And this is something that I feel like is a really popular talking point too. When I was on vacation last week, my parents were trying to talk to me about like work stuff, and I was like, oh God, I don't want to talk about tech, but the one thing my dad, a total layman on this spread up. He's like, oh, AI, chat to you, but he's going to replace every software engineer. I mean, why do you think that that is the narrative that people move towards and why do you think that it's so misguided?
1:54:59 - Molly White
Well, I mean, I think that there would be a lot of money in replacing software engineers, you know it's a relatively highly paid field and people would love to not have to pay anyone if they were able.
I think you know and there's always been sort of this feeling, I think, among a lot of executives that they wish that they could build some app or create some software, but they're not able to because of the cost and the time and the investment that it would take.
So people have all these ideas that they think would be brilliant if they could, you know, have an AI to create them, but I think it is misguided in terms of actually.
You know, if you've used the tools that you know claim to help software engineers or even claim to replace software engineers, they're not great and they require expertise to use. You have to be able to tell what is functional code and what is some crazy stack overflow answer that just got sucked into the model and it has been spit out in front of you. You know I've used them and they are helpful in some ways, but mostly they're helpful in terms of, like, speeding up that sort of boilerplate code that you always have to write, and not in terms of actually doing the thinking for you. The thinking is the hard part and that's you know what you pay software engineers to do and software architects and you know very experienced people to do. The boilerplate code is the easy part and it's not, you know. It certainly might speed up an engineer to some extent, but my feeling that you know is that it will not replace one, certainly not with the technology that has been deployed today.
1:56:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, Well, when you lose your job, as you will, you can all go work for Mr Beast and make videos. Thank God, oh, thank God, mr Beast put up his 36-page guide to how to work for Mr Beast.
1:57:12 - Paris Martineau
I saw so many people tweeting about this and every screenshot I saw was the dumbest business advice I've ever read. And every single person was like this is brilliant, this is the future of business. And I was like this guy is writing that people shouldn't get promotions because we're all the family here Like that's not the world's most genius business advice.
1:57:39 - Jeff Jarvis
All he cares about is making as many videos as possible. Before you get mad, recall the story about James solving a problem in 30 minutes. A team of five couldn't do it in a week. In that that example, does it really matter how many hours they worked? Obviously we want grinders that put in the hours and love you guys to death. Uh, that do. But at the end of the day, you will be judged on the results, not ours. We are a results-based company. Get the s done and move the goal post.
1:58:05 - Paris Martineau
Oh, jesus christ he's recently released a lunch uh lunchables competitor, uh, so you know big things for that business what's it?
1:58:19 - Jeff Jarvis
what's it?
1:58:19 - Paris Martineau
what's it? I don't know, sure, yeah uh, it's got more electrolytes, which means, uh, more salt. Um, that's what lunchables has always suffered from. It's called Lunchables. And he's partnering, I believe, with either Logan or Jake Paul I'm not sure which to do it. So you know it's going to be a great business.
1:58:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I spent basically five years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube.
1:58:48 - Molly White
That's a really great way now to get revenge, yeah.
1:58:51 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, so he studied virality and not actually how to make good content. See, there's a big difference there of making like a good show and making something that goes viral. There's two very different things.
1:59:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep, but he's rich and we're not.
1:59:05 - Paris Martineau
It's true, but at what cost? At every, at the cost of everything. All right, let's do the Google Change Log. Ooh, is there one? I threw some stuff in here the Google Change Log. There's always a lot of really interesting stuff going on with Google. Case in point, google Photos will now let you flip your photos and videos horizontally. Wow, that's a huge update, folks.
1:59:41 - Molly White
But I have actually run into this problem in the past and I am delighted that they have fixed this, because it's just such a weird thing to not be able to do. Wait, you couldn't do this. Yeah, like you can. You can rotate, but you can't flip, you can't like mirror a photo, um. And I looked up one time how to do that on my android phone and it was like oh, you have to download an app.
2:00:07 - Paris Martineau
I was Well good news for you because it's coming soon. This is very good news, if not already available, says 9to5Google. Similarly, google Chrome is getting one tap notification to unsubscribe, starting on Pixel. Unsubscribe what Updating safety check in Chrome for Android and desktop, with a big focus on getting rid of unwanted website notifications through features like one tap subscribe. What does this mean?
2:00:40 - Molly White
I think this would require you to actually have enabled web notifications in the first place. Has anyone?
2:00:48 - Paris Martineau
in the history of the world said yes when a random website asked if they can give you notifications. I have never Similarly. Safety flag will automatically revoke the notification permissions from sites that Google Safe Browsing finds to be deceiving users into granting the permission, and it will flag Chrome extensions that may post security risks to you. All right, Google. Flag Chrome extensions that may post security risks to you. All right, Google. Google Shorts to integrate via Google's AI video model Cool YouTube Shorts, not Google Shorts or.
2:01:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Google YouTube Shorts. I was thinking that was a new fashion.
2:01:21 - Paris Martineau
What is Google Shorts? Listen to that Google like. Imagine Google branded shorts like five inch short shorts could be kind of fun. It's like those hats with a spinner on the top that they put in place. Yeah, this was a main attraction of YouTube's Made on YouTube event Wednesday morning. It was AI. The company announced that it's integrating Google's DeepMind AI video generation model, vio, into YouTube shorts, letting creators generate high quality backgrounds as well as six secondsecond clips. Do either of you guys watch YouTube Shorts?
2:01:54 - Benito Gonzalez
No.
2:01:55 - Paris Martineau
I don't, but I kind of assume it's because I don't watch YouTube.
2:02:00 - Molly White
That may be a factor for me too.
2:02:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you watch Facebook Stories?
2:02:04 - Paris Martineau
No.
2:02:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't either.
2:02:06 - Paris Martineau
I only use Facebook for Facebook Marketplace or groups that are a little venture-focused.
2:02:11 - Molly White
I watch Instagram Reels, which I feel like is the same sort of idea Do you watch? Tiktok, usually only because I run into them on other platforms. I've tried to get into TikTok and it has not worked. Do you have the app on your?
2:02:27 - Paris Martineau
phone. I do.
2:02:29 - Molly White
Okay, I've even posted TikToks myself.
2:02:31 - Paris Martineau
I've never posted a TikTok. I have the app on your phone, okay, okay, there's a strange even posted tiktoks myself. I've well, I've never posted a tiktok. I have the app on my phone. But I like to watch tiktoks occasionally, but I have, like there's a strange thing. I've noticed among like the 30 something brooklyn crowd I hang out with that there's like a group of people that are like I'll never download the tiktok app, I only watch my short-form content on Reels. And I'm like it's the same thing, you fool Half the time.
2:02:54 - Molly White
it has the TikTok logo on it because they've just cross-posted it. I feel like the only reason or not the only reason, but one of the major reasons I don't use TikTok is because I just get it elsewhere and I don't have to use two apps.
2:03:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I love TikTok yeah.
2:03:09 - Molly White
TikTok's great.
2:03:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I shouldn't say this, but it's the new reading a book in the bathroom. I think that's not what I thought you were going
2:03:18 - Molly White
to say I think the issue I've run into is just that you do have to put a little bit of upfront effort into training the algorithm to give you things that you want to see.
2:03:29 - Jeff Jarvis
And avoiding certain things you don't want to see.
2:03:31 - Molly White
Yeah, and I have not yet been able to devote that time to it, and so I just get a lot of really weird and not interesting stuff, whereas the Instagram algorithm sort of has me figured out, and so I just go over there.
2:03:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, jeff, what sort of TikTok videos do you watch? Yeah, Jeff, what sort of TikTok videos do you watch? What sort of content would you normally passively get from TikTok?
2:03:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, so mine is pretty high grade here. Jamel Bowie Carefully curated. Jamel Bowie of the New York Times does great, great Explainers. Oops, sorry You're watching TikToks now I am. Oh no, how did I get Chris Eliza no TikTok Betrayed. I get Tim Walz and Kamala Harris I get a lot of cat videos.
I get a lot of people who are trying to speak German because I once looked at that, now I get it. There's a lot of people who are trying to speak German because I, like, once looked at that and so now I get it. So there's a really nice young woman who lives in Germany who says funny things about that. I get political things, I get music. I get a lot of music. There's a wonderful woman who's the head of organ music. She's 25 years old at Cambridge University. She's amazing and she's done albums because she's been on TikTok. And there's three teenagers and a family in South Africa who do phenomenal music, who've been on America's Got Talent Cats, dogs.
2:05:07 - Paris Martineau
You've got the whole spectrum there.
2:05:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That's good's good tim waltz backstage um some travel stuff. Yeah, nice, it's nice. The cat distribution system is very big for me.
2:05:21 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was about to say the cat distribution system is a lot of what I get on tiktok, which is the word for when someone is out about in their life and then stumble upon a cat, and they describe that as the cat distribution system and it's not their cat distributed to them. Yes, yeah yeah, it's happened to me really I got, I got you did really foster parent I, I have to admit I spent.
2:05:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I got all engaged because I couldn't wait to get to the end of it and still haven't. The guy has a car that absolutely smells and stinks and he can't figure out where the smell is from. So I've watched like eight videos now of him trying to tear apart.
2:05:59 - Paris Martineau
That's entirely engaged in bait, j Jeff, you okay.
2:06:02 - Leo Laporte
You are getting you're getting got.
2:06:05 - Molly White
I would definitely fall for that, though, I would fall for it too oh here are two uh cats playing air hockey.
2:06:18 - Benito Gonzalez
I've seen that video.
2:06:18 - Paris Martineau
Those cats are very cute. They're lightly tapping the right. Well, google photos is getting a new ultra hdr editing option. Don't know how that is better than h. This is from Android Authority, who says we've also found evidence to suggest that the HDR effect option will be renamed to Vibrance. What is the HDR effect in Android photos?
2:06:41 - Molly White
It bumps up the saturation and the contrast a little bit Interesting. It honestly is not my favorite look it's. It's got a very recognizable look to it where it yeah like you know it. If you see it kind of, I don't know why we need an ultra version of that.
2:07:01 - Benito Gonzalez
But very 2015.
2:07:02 - Paris Martineau
This is something I noticed it reminds me of instagram filters a lot it's something I noticed when I upgraded to the I guess not newest iPhone, but the iPhone 15 from like my iPhone 10 or whatever. Is that the? I would did it because I wanted to get like the new camera, but they have some auto HDR thing in there that like applies a very slight filter to the photos that I just can't unsee and it's just slightly more contrast and it's odd. It's interesting.
2:07:31 - Molly White
Yeah, that sounds kind of like what. Yeah, it sounds kind of like a similar thing here.
2:07:37 - Paris Martineau
Available under the adjust feature within Google Photos. The new Ultra HDR option seems to one-up the existing HDR effect option. It's unclear what it will do because it's not functional just yet. However, we believe it could let users control the brightness levels of Ultra HDR images at a pixel level. We should know better when the company activates the feature from its end, says Android Authority. Finally says 9to5Google. Google Slides adds multi-monitor support for presentations. This seems like something that should have existed as such. You can now view Google Slides presentations controls on your computer while presenting to an audience using a connected external monitor or projection.
Oh boy, indeed, what an exciting time. This is from TechRadar Chromebook acting weird.
2:08:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Try Google's new Chrome OS sanitize tool, so I added this in here. So the advantage of the Chromebook is because you don't have to worry about updates, upgrades, viruses, anything. It just happens. It's just fine, right. But what this admits is sometimes you can get an extension that's doing weird crap to you. But what this admits is sometimes you can get an extension that's doing weird crap to you. So this is a way it's not really viruses, but it is a new way to clean your machine without having to rebuild it. Rebuilding, by the way, it takes five minutes. It's the easiest thing in the world, you're saying.
2:09:02 - Paris Martineau
I think it's very funny that the feature you're talking about of totally wiping it it's called power wash.
2:09:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Power wash, power Wash, more power, yeah, have you used this feature. No, I haven't yet. I just put it in there, I was interested.
2:09:18 - Paris Martineau
Interesting.
2:09:19 - Jeff Jarvis
I've had a rare occasion where I go to a website and suddenly it's acting weird and some extension got in there and I just don't put extensions in, so they're pretty much worthless anyway.
2:09:30 - Paris Martineau
Well, that's the Google change log. All right, we're going to go to a quick ad and then come back for your guys' picks of the week. All right, jeff, what do you got for me as far as a pick of the week goes?
2:09:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't think. I don't know if we can play this or not. There is going to be an Australian version of the Office.
2:10:00 - Paris Martineau
The Aus-fus Ooh.
2:10:05 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's a trailer, there's no?
2:10:07 - Benito Gonzalez
audio. We'll do no audio. We'll MST3K this thing.
2:10:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, yeah, you can almost see that. Yeah, so you can just tell it's a woman is now the main character.
2:10:18 - Paris Martineau
Wow, women can do everything. Women can be terrible bosses too.
2:10:22 - Benito Gonzalez
Exactly, oh, it's a lot of people from the Taika Waititi friends group. There's a bunch of people from the that. What is that from? Like you know the australia new zealand comedy.
2:10:35 - Paris Martineau
I know a lot of these actors because I've gotten really into watching taskmaster, new zealand and australia, so it's a lot of them, that's fun.
2:10:43 - Jeff Jarvis
What's the one you mentioned, benito?
2:10:45 - Benito Gonzalez
oh, you know taiko at td, his group of friends and creators from New Zealand and Australia, oh, who's? That Some of them are in Taika Waititi, I think.
2:10:53 - Paris Martineau
The director I don't know him. You're hipper than us.
2:10:57 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, he's the guy who directed Thor Ragnarok and like oh what are we doing Shadows?
2:11:02 - Paris Martineau
What are we doing Shadows? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just am bad at people's names, to be honest.
2:11:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, there's only so many people. They're a small country, so there's only so many actors. Right, that's true, they're in everything this has been a problem for Taskmaster New Zealand. They're on season five and they're going to run out of New Zealand comedians quick and then we should mention that the ignomals were held, so the ignomal prize goes to a team who found that mammals can breathe through their anuses.
2:11:29 - Paris Martineau
That's huge.
2:11:30 - Jeff Jarvis
It is it is.
2:11:31 - Molly White
Well-deserved. I saw one about scaring a cat next to a cow and determining that it made the cow produce less milk, as a result it's like they popped a balloon next to a cat, next to a cow, and it impacted the milk production and I was like why did I go into computer science when I could have gone into real science and done stuff?
2:11:55 - Paris Martineau
like this. That's a really great question.
2:12:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's what I have.
2:12:03 - Paris Martineau
Molly, do you have a pick of the week?
2:12:08 - Molly White
I do.
I stumbled across a blog post which I thought was really fascinating in the sort of intersection of technology and textile arts, I guess, which is an overlap I've always been very interested in, was walking through an art gallery and saw this tapestry and recognized it, walking past it somehow, as a Pentium chip.
It's like a computer chip that has been woven into a physical tapestry by a Navajo weaver who presented it as a gift to the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. It was like hand woven. It says in the blog post that it took to do an inch of progress. It took them a full day and if you scroll down they also show a comparison of the tapestry with the actual chip and you can see just how accurate it is, and then below that there's a little diagram that shows each part of the chip. Anyway, it's just such a cool project and the blog post is really cool because it goes into a long history of Navajo workers and the Pentium manufacturing, as well as some of the weaving end of it as well. So that was my pick of the week.
2:13:41 - Paris Martineau
That is so cool. My pick of the week is a book I read on vacation. Week is a book I read on vacation. It is Cue the Sun about the invention of reality TV by the New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum, and I just like devoured this book. It is so well written and fascinating. I ended up I was traveling like with my family and I ended up like reading many passages of it out loud to all of them, many of them who have no interest in reality TV whatsoever but who also found it fascinating Because it one she's just an incredible writer and her prose is fantastic. But two, it really traces kind of the history of this medium of unscripted content from kind of the earliest days of uh, not even camera, but does it go back to oprah?
I mean before that like candid microphone in like the early 1900s, which was kind of like a candid camera, precursor of like live prank, shows that only became possible when the technology for recording equipment got portable, by which it meant instead of being 100 pounds it was then like 20 pounds, so a guy could hide his recording equipment on his body, yeah, instead of having to lug it around with the whole team.
And it is so interesting, you go from that to Survivor, to the Apprentice. It is a really fascinating chronicle of American culture and she specifically focuses on the people involved in production and how production choices shaped this whole aspect of what became American and international identity, and I'd highly recommend it.
2:15:29 - Benito Gonzalez
Because production on reality shows are extremely cheap, that I'd highly recommend it. Yeah, because production on reality shows are extremely cheap. Yeah, I mean because they don't have writers.
2:15:37 - Paris Martineau
They have unpaid cast members, and then most of the cast members can't work for the year after it because of the contracts they've signed. It's I don't know.
But is it also trash Daytime Talk TV, Oprah and and I mean, yes, it specifically goes into how kind of the first, uh, like the proto reality tv were was actually. Um, what are they called? Uh, audience participation shows on the radio in the early 1900s, which is kind of like a proto daytime talk show, where this is something that, like, radio announcers would really look down on, all high cultured mainstream people would stick up their noses at because they're like, oh, they're so popular. But it's really just, you know one radio host talking to a bunch of laymen about their experiences in day-to-day life. Who would want to listen to that? And it turns out, everybody would want to listen to that.
2:16:33 - Jeff Jarvis
It was queen for the day. Queen for a day, Queen for the day.
2:16:35 - Paris Martineau
yes, of course, Did you ever watch the Gong Show?
2:16:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, oh yeah. And so Oprah was high tone and then she opened the door, in my view, to trash TV. She started doing the you know I hate my husband and people screaming at each other and then, when she saw everything that followed and there was a lot she suddenly got religion and she wanted me to appear on her show when she was going to say how virtuous she was. And I wouldn't do it because I think she ruined daytime TV. So I'm not an Oprah fan.
2:17:13 - Paris Martineau
I believe. Also, leo is mentioned once in this book because he appeared on one of these shows. Really, she briefly says like oh, they had technology specialists like Leo Laporte on this in one line and I was like that's my guy, he's following you into vacation online. And I was like that's my guy, he's following you into vacation. I know it's a great read, even if you don't like reality TV at all. It is like an interesting look at this medium and the people and forces that shaped it.
2:17:42 - Benito Gonzalez
So I highly recommend it. What about Cops? Does Cops count as reality TV?
2:17:45 - Paris Martineau
Yes, cops is in it and there's a whole chapter dedicated to it, because that was also a very difficult show to get made at first because it required partnering with the police department and getting kind of ride-along permissions and at first people thought it would be like too crass, no one would want to watch it. But it became such a big… and it turned out to be right watch it.
2:18:07 - Molly White
But it became such a big and it turned out to be right.
2:18:09 - Paris Martineau
It turned out to be such a big hit that then embattled police departments would use it to rehab their reputations, like the LAPD after the Rodney King incident was like we got to get cops over here and it's quite dark. This chapter on Survivor is particularly interesting, in my opinion. Is there a chapter on?
2:18:30 - Jeff Jarvis
survivor is particularly interesting. In my is there a chapter on trump yes, there's an entire chapter on the apprentice.
2:18:35 - Paris Martineau
I think emily nussbaum actually was the one who broke the news of um him saying the n-word in uh recordings um, which came out in this book which we thought was going to ruin his career.
And now the nation shrugs there's, I mean, so many honestly interesting details in the apprentice chapter about all the different people who worked on that show who basically say like yeah, our whole job was to make this guy look like a genius, despite, you know, his kind of unpolished personality, and they're like now we feel like we have to dedicate our lives to telling people what happened on the set, because we elevated him to a status that the people who worked in the show don't believe is accurate I'm so glad I'm not a tv critic anymore, which sounds really snotty, but it would be really hard to keep track of a lot of this crap I mean nussbaum has to have watched like 5 000 hours of tv to have been able to even cut, it wouldn't even count as TV anymore.
2:19:31 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, that's true too.
2:19:32 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's all kind of TV. Tiktoks are TV.
2:19:36 - Jeff Jarvis
So the Emmys came on and off the other day. This is how detached I am from linear television now. I didn't know that Shogun was on.
2:19:46 - Paris Martineau
I didn't know. I wouldn't have known it was on, except for a podcast I listened to. One of the hosts has another podcast where they were talking about Shogun, and I vaguely heard it mentioned then.
2:19:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Molly Benito, did you know it was on?
2:19:59 - Benito Gonzalez
Did I know Shogun was on now? What do you mean?
2:20:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It was on TV at all.
2:20:02 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh yeah, I watched it.
2:20:03 - Jeff Jarvis
That was great. It was a great show. Oh good, you watched it. I heard about it.
2:20:08 - Benito Gonzalez
I watched it on Hulu. It was on Hulu.
2:20:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Well yeah.
2:20:12 - Paris Martineau
Interesting.
2:20:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
2:20:14 - Paris Martineau
All right. Well, let's wrap things up. Thank you all for joining us. We do this Week in Google every Wednesday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us stream on seven different platforms YouTube, twitch X and four other platforms that I'm not going to try and name. Molly White, if folks want to keep up with you and what you're doing, where do they go to do that?
2:20:40 - Molly White
You will find me at mollywhitenet. I run Web3IsGoingJustGreat, which is Web3IsGreatcom, and I write the Citation Needed newsletter, which is citationneedednews, and everything else you can find from those places. So I trust you.
2:20:57 - Paris Martineau
Awesome and Jeff, anything you want to plug.
2:21:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Gutenbergparenthesiscom. You can get discount codes for Gutenberg and Magazine. My two books out now and then as soon as my son Jake gets well from being under the weather he'll do a website and I can get this up. But if you search for the web, we weave from basic books and use the web at 20 code. You can get 20% off If you pre-order.
2:21:23 - Paris Martineau
Awesome, and you can follow me at Paris Martineau on Twitter and send me tips and story ideas at Martineau dot 10 on signal um wait, is it 10 or what?
2:21:37 - Benito Gonzalez
oh my god, zero one. I've had this wrong, okay, oh no I'm wrong I typed it wrong, I'm sorry.
2:21:41 - Paris Martineau
Guys see, we know you better than you do you know me, I don't look at my screen when I'm typing or when I'm talking, so so I wrote it wrong. You could probably don't send tips or story ideas to Martin no 10, send it to Martin no Zero one, some other Martin.
2:22:01 - Molly White
No, out there, there is killing it with those tips All right, thanks for joining us everybody.
2:22:07 - Paris Martineau
Bye, bye, bye.
