This Week in Google 788 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this week in Google, jeff Jarvis is here. Paris is on assignment so we brought in not one, but two people Paris' friend Ed Zittrin, the foul-mouthed but very funny and very smart Ed Zittrin, and from PC Magazine, emily Drybulbis. Lots to talk about Sam Altman. Ed says it's all a crock. They just raised a huge amount of money. We'll talk about that Social media, where Taylor Lawrence is going and why she's going wrong, and a whole lot more all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love.
0:00:39 - Emily Dreibelbis
From people you trust.
0:00:58 - Leo Laporte
This is Twig. This is Twig this week in Google, a show. We cover all the week's news everything but Google. Although I am informed that we have a professionally produced Google changelog this week from ScooterX. He produced it using Notebook LM as a podcast. That'll be interesting. Paris Martineau has on assignment in South Brooklyn. She's afraid of me, you think I'm kidding on this. She literally is in South Brooklyn on assignment for the information, but she's provided us with two very qualified replacements. You heard one of them Ed Zitron, the profane Ed Zitron.
0:01:40 - Ed Zitron
Profane Jesus Christ there you go.
0:01:43 - Speaker 6
From betterofflinecom.
0:01:45 - Ed Zitron
Every day I am punished.
0:01:50 - Leo Laporte
It is always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for joining us. Emily Drybulbous is also here now working for PC Magazine. Always working for PC Magazine.
0:02:00 - Emily Dreibelbis
Always working for PC Magazine, currently grumpy because I just sat through 20 minutes of Zoom waterboarding.
0:02:07 - Leo Laporte
I did torture you, but there was a memo that's new. There was a memo that said it's not torture. So there, all right. Thank you for being here, emily, thank you.
0:02:17 - Emily Dreibelbis
I love being here. I'm not grumpy, yay.
0:02:20 - Leo Laporte
She's at Electric Humans Electric underscore humans. She's at Electric Humans electric underscore humans. Also with us, jeff Jarvis professor formerly professor still professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Everyone loves that sound, everybody loves it. We love it. Craig Newmark especially loves it. Ed, he tunes in just to hear his name sung. Sure, he does how you doing Craig Love the list.
0:02:52 - Emily Dreibelbis
I've actually spoken to Craig Newmark. He's surprisingly available.
0:02:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, he's on the show, frequently talking about pigeons.
0:03:00 - Speaker 6
He's a wonderful, wonderful guy.
0:03:02 - Jeff Jarvis
He loves his pigeons, and he is a proud nerd.
0:03:05 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, I mean that makes me happy If he wasn't. It'd actually be really funny if he was a huge jock, yeah.
0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, we kind of what's up, bro, he's just like a. Chicago Bears jersey I kind of expect tech founders to be nerds, and far too often they are in fact bros.
0:03:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, they're just business people pretending to be engineers. Well, he's the original craig newmark kind of started it and now the finance bros have taken over tech so now, that's where we are, but he's, he's the og uh, I was thinking about brickland is a nerd of the old dan brick.
0:03:41 - Leo Laporte
Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc.
0:03:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah right.
0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
Those are real nerds. Sam Altman, not a technical guy, Not really huh.
0:03:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Of the worst variety. He raises money.
0:03:57 - Ed Zitron
He's a con artist.
0:03:58 - Jeff Jarvis
He's a slithery, slimy finance bro A damp finance guru Emily and Edward Trudden outdo each other each other.
0:04:07 - Ed Zitron
No, no, no, I'm. Why is he damp?
0:04:10 - Leo Laporte
he looks damp is it because he?
0:04:12 - Ed Zitron
spends time in the swamp. No, no, no. This is not. This is not that technical, it's just that I think most people can be divided into damp or dry. I would say I'm on the damp side. Sam altman, damp brandon, famous baseball player, damp as hell. So is damp good? No, no, no. This isn't a qualitative assessment. This is just one's dryness or dampness. It's just a measure of moisture. Yeah, exactly, it's nothing personal, but Sam Altman has a dampness to him and I think David Roth from Defector said it really well.
0:04:50 - Leo Laporte
He always looks like he just sat in something. Can I ask you, would you? I mean, you don't know me that well, ed, but would you say I am damp or dry? I think you're on the dry side. Yeah, jeff's definitely dry. Yes, 100, 100 dry like, like a good gin, yes, exactly like dry isn't bad so you have public today uh, they closed, uh, their latest financing round. Uh, valuing themselves at some vast number. What was it? 159?
0:05:16 - Speaker 6
159 billion dollars, which is sorry.
0:05:18 - Leo Laporte
Yes which is what double what they were, yep, not so long ago but?
0:05:23 - Ed Zitron
but their previous valuations were extremely wanky. They were like 10 billion dollars of cloud credits is used as a way of valuing this company, right, it's the dumbest thing I've seen. And this is this. Like I went for a very uh, vague title. I mean, I'm joking, of course, because open ai is a bad business this is ed's latest post.
0:05:44 - Leo Laporte
It where's your ed at, and I've got some great emails about it 32 minute read, so we won't read it open ai is a bad business, that's me. Yeah, uh, you say they're gonna lose anywhere four to five billion dollars this year, which does sound like a kind of a not so good business well, they're going to lose five billion dollars.
0:06:05 - Ed Zitron
That's, uh, that's. That's from the new york times reported. Everything I say I try not to estimate too much and I try to like link very heavily to people. There's over 100 links in that piece. Now they're gonna lose five billion dollars, and they're gonna, and that's after making 3.7 billion dollars in revenue.
0:06:21 - Leo Laporte
So their costs are just astoundingly bad and on top of it, their business fundamentals are pretty bad too let me channel the somewhat damp sam altman and say well, you got to spend a lot of money, but the upside is great for ai what is the upside?
0:06:38 - Ed Zitron
because the upside is uh agi.
0:06:42 - Leo Laporte
the upside is a world changing technology that's bigger than the iPhone, the PC and the internet all rolled into one.
0:06:50 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, you mean, if a frog had wings it wouldn't fall on its ass.
0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, does that wings yet? Yeah, exactly, we could invest $7 trillion to give it wings, that's the thing.
0:07:01 - Ed Zitron
It's like I know you're being glib here, but that is really the point it's there are no signs this thing is going to wake up one day. And on top of that, the actual business fundamentals are terrible 3.7 billion dollars. But only a billion dollars of that is people licensing, not like connecting to the api. Their smallest revenue stream is the most important one. The generative ai market, in my opinion, is much smaller than people realize. If the biggest player in town and they make a billion dollars and microsoft makes another billion dollars licensing their models, if this is how big it is, this market is small and there may not be in major product market. What's the rest of the revenue? 2.7 billion, and that's from selling subscriptions to chat, gb plus what do you care?
0:07:47 - Leo Laporte
because the people putting in this six billion dollars to give them 157 billion dollar valuation are all themselves millionaires who are just looking for a better return than the dow jones industrial average.
0:08:00 - Ed Zitron
Well, they're not going to get one because they're going to lose money here. So what? I care, because I care about the tech industry and I don't like seeing assholes win and I don't like watching a narrative get built that's completely and utterly false.
0:08:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's a big bet and you know what?
0:08:15 - Ed Zitron
There was a similar big bet with Uber which turns out to be not such a good business, completely different business model.
0:08:19 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, just totally different. Yeah, I understand. A yeah, I understand A different business model, but the idea is, the upside is so good that it's worth risking our billions of dollars because we got a lot of money. What upside, leo? What is the upside? Well, there is an upside the upside is AGI.
0:08:34 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, this is interesting because we were talking about, like Craig Newmark, and now, today and back then, when all these tech companies were starting, it was like, wow, they're all losing money. Why is everyone investing in them? So I feel, like tech companies, losing money is not new, but I'm totally open to what you're saying is new here.
0:08:50 - Ed Zitron
But also, what's new about this is this resembles nothing else. It loses more money. This is like if Uber you got like 0.00001 miles per gallon Probably add some more zeros. This is like if your car crashed every time you took an uber and you had to buy a new car every single ride. Like this is how bad the unit economics are and their major form of revenue 2.7 out of 3.7 billion dollars is subscriptions to a product that has no differentiation.
0:09:18 - Jeff Jarvis
That's right, you can get for free at meta ai. Exactly free all over and there isn't a proven market, and there isn't a proven market.
0:09:27 - Ed Zitron
There isn't a product market. It's not a solution to anything.
0:09:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well developers are a really big market for these products?
0:09:31 - Ed Zitron
No, they're not, no, no, no, they're actually really not, they're. Out of 3.7 billion, 1 billion is developers, that's all that, they pay a lot for expensive plans Let me suggest this? Well, which plan? Let me suggest this.
0:09:50 - Leo Laporte
None of this investment is on today's business, any more than the investment in Uber was on today's Uber. It is all about the potential upside. These are not unsophisticated investors. One hopes they're not. You know I'm sorry. Softbank Right they invested in Wire, know I'm sorry.
0:10:05 - Ed Zitron
SoftBank Right. Okay, they invested in Wirecard. I agree.
0:10:09 - Leo Laporte
Son, son is an idiot, but that doesn't matter, because he has the money it's his money to invest. It's not like he's going to go say, oh, instead of that, I'd like to save the world.
0:10:18 - Speaker 6
Why don't you ask?
0:10:19 - Leo Laporte
me about it then Well, no, what I'm saying is in con. Yes, it may be a bad business today, but I understand what they're. What they're saying is hey, what if it's not? What if there is something? So really, the only argument here is is ai ever gonna pay off? And you say it's not, but we don't know right, that isn't what I'm talking about at all.
0:10:38 - Ed Zitron
I'm talking about the fact that the business doesn't work. Emily to your point, developers are not actually paying that much. They they are.
0:10:45 - Leo Laporte
No the business doesn't work today. Developers make up 23%.
0:10:48 - Ed Zitron
Okay, but where does it change?
0:10:49 - Leo Laporte
It changes if AI really works and you get AGI, and then it changes everything.
0:10:55 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, businesses are going to buy it, not the developers themselves, businesses who?
0:10:58 - Ed Zitron
have developers Okay, their business revenue is they have 900,000 business customers. Sorry, I don't mean to talk over you. That's pretty good.
0:11:05 - Emily Dreibelbis
That's pretty good. 900,000 business customers. Wait, wait, wait. In two years.
0:11:09 - Ed Zitron
You're saying internal models, Because you're mixing up things now. No, I'm not Okay. Which one are you talking about then?
0:11:17 - Emily Dreibelbis
Open AI's products include models that businesses can use to build their own services.
0:11:22 - Ed Zitron
Okay, excellent. So you're talking about the API cloud compute side. For instance Microsoft's Copilot right Copilot's a completely different thing to what I'm talking about.
0:11:32 - Leo Laporte
Copilot is OpenAI.
0:11:34 - Ed Zitron
Okay, copilot is ChatGPT. There is also over here Microsoft's selling API access to OpenAI's models. That is a separate business. That's the $1 billion. Then there is ChatGPT Plus Enterprise and Teams. That is another business, and the point I'm making is a billion dollars for the most relevant company, the company that's had thousands of pieces of earned media that is on every single conversation, that 23% of their revenue is people integrating this. That is a piss poor number.
0:12:08 - Leo Laporte
Do you think Sam Altman is a con man?
0:12:10 - Ed Zitron
I do. I think he's a carnival barker. I think he is seeking to accumulate money and power. I think he is a deceptive man. I think he is a terrible businessman too. He has been fired from three different companies, including OpenAI, and he has some extremely creepy shit he did with his sister.
0:12:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
I agree with you, ed. I actually I have a Google Doc with all the reasons why Sam Altman is terrible and it includes everything you're saying. I just think it's interesting to pick apart why they did invest and just actually try to figure it out. Things they could look at could be percent growth Maybe it's not total money now or total customers now, but the rate of growth, other things and signals they look at to figure out what's going on here.
0:12:51 - Leo Laporte
I think you're right. I think that that's the reason Rich people decide to throw their money away.
0:12:55 - Ed Zitron
Because it's goddamn stupid Leo and the money could go literally anywhere else.
0:12:59 - Speaker 6
I can give you a reason that I would not invest in Ebony IFRU.
0:13:02 - Emily Dreibelbis
So Sam Altman has.
I would not invest in that so, but it's theirs to throw away, has effectively convinced them that if they give him money then he can train these models to perform better. So it's literally, I mean, classic investment. You want to throw like lighter fluid on, you want bigger flames, and so he's convinced them to do all these training, all this training. Why is that concerning? Because all that training is incredibly environmentally intensive. So all these billions of dollars are going to just burning fossil fuels because data centers basically don't run on renewable energy for the majority.
0:13:35 - Leo Laporte
So all that money you're seeing in this article is going to go to killing the planet. We're bringing back Three Mile Island to pay for Microsoft's AI, exactly.
0:13:43 - Speaker 6
Yes it's insane.
0:13:45 - Emily Dreibelbis
So that is one reason for an emotional reaction, because we're having lots of emotional reactions here, so that's one reason where one thing could be coming from.
0:13:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I ask a question? Sure, so I'm not sure what they're buying equity in right now, since it's a for-profit under a not-for-profit.
Some of what came from Microsoft was in-kind compute and promotion and such. Most of Don't yet know what the cap table is going to look like. We don't know what the governance is going to look like. Is Altman going to try to have a two-tier or three-tier stock structure where he's going to get more voting power than the 7% of actual equity that he's being rumored to be given? How is the conversion going to be made from not-for-profit to for-profit? And so what are they investing in under what terms? At this valuation? I can't figure that part out at all.
0:14:36 - Ed Zitron
I can actually tell you. I can tell you so. They're investing in something called a profit participation unit, which is a slice of future profits in a company that loses $5 billion or more a year. In the event that they don't, after the deal, they have two years from the deal closing. At that point, their pp, their ppus, will turn into uh sounds, by the way, a little dirty, but go ahead, it does. But it's very funny to say nine billion. It's a nine percent interest loan.
0:15:03 - Jeff Jarvis
It will become after that it's a convertible loan, do you think?
0:15:07 - Ed Zitron
uh sam unclear whether that accrues interest across two years, or whether it starts accrued.
0:15:13 - Leo Laporte
I think sam allman is an sbf level fraudster or an elizabeth holmes level fraudster I think he is massively overstating the capabilities of generative ai.
0:15:23 - Ed Zitron
It's a bit like elizabeth holmes said with a drop we could make a business people invested in, in, in. Uh, massively overstating the capabilities of generative AI. Kind of like Elizabeth Holmes said with a drop, we could make a business.
0:15:28 - Leo Laporte
People invested in Theranos because they thought, well, if this works, it's going to be engaging and they could kind of show a shit.
0:15:35 - Ed Zitron
Proof of concept.
Yeah, and she was lying and I will be clear, leo, since we last met, I'm actually kind of on your side when it comes to the smaller, more focused language models. I I'm actually kind of on your side when it comes to the smaller, more focused language models. I believe in the focused model story way more. Now, having read into it, I believe that generative AI has some uses. I do not think large language models like Anthropic or OpenAI or anything that Microsoft's putting a hat on, are a lasting product and I actually believe that a lot of this stuff is going to go away in a few years because it is not sustainable. We have earnings coming up in a couple weeks.
0:16:07 - Leo Laporte
You think the markets are going to look at all this and go, wow, sounds sensible to me they just well, if you're right, there's going to be a massive crash because nvidia and so many other companies with the word ai in the uh in the brand uh, if, if ai turns out to be nothing are gonna ai is something in all kinds of ways.
0:16:27 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, exactly, ai is frustration.
0:16:29 - Jeff Jarvis
They've put it into everything, translation, all this other stuff. It's the flim-flam of the guy you walked on the beach with Leo who said the generative AI was going to be everything and change the world. It's AGI. That is the worst flim-flam BS of all I was actually thinking this week.
0:16:48 - Emily Dreibelbis
I had a complete different thought trajectory this week, where I was realizing how many people are using LLMs and how much of a future they have. That's what I've been thinking about this week. So if you think about how many people have integrated them into their days, how many young people in high school, middle school, elementary school are already using them on a day-to-day basis, how many people?
0:17:10 - Speaker 6
is that.
0:17:12 - Emily Dreibelbis
They have had a lot of user growth and they released the numbers, because they didn't report released users' numbers for a while and they just did. Of course they're getting investment but, yeah, more and more people are using it in all types of fields.
0:17:24 - Ed Zitron
The problem is, if that's 350 million free users, that is not sustainable. I'm not saying it's not being used by people, but if the majority of people using this are using it kind of in the free version, that's not going to work long term and I don't think.
0:17:43 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, it could do advertisements I mean there's lots of business models out there
0:17:47 - Ed Zitron
but I think the technology has two podcastings are pretty bad business as well yes, that's why almost nobody makes any money off of it, and those that do are usually making it from different business lines other than podcasting so does that mean we should just uh outlaw podcasting and get rid of it, or why? Would I mean podcasting?
0:18:04 - Leo Laporte
whether somebody makes money on it or not doesn't seem to me the only uh criterion now I have to say, emily, you made an excellent painting in your garage.
0:18:13 - Ed Zitron
Leo, they just made an excellent six and a half billion dollars into it you made an excellent point yes, let's.
0:18:20 - Leo Laporte
Let's give her some credit. No, no. In fact, blind whiz in our chat room pointed out google has said they're not going to hit their 2030 goals energy goals because of training being so expensive.
0:18:33 - Emily Dreibelbis
Microsoft as well. They're not going to make it. And Microsoft was already saying years ago how much water we're using in our data centers is not sustainable.
0:18:41 - Leo Laporte
So that's a real cost that all of us suffer, as opposed to the billionaires who are throwing their money after a technology that may or may not.
0:18:48 - Ed Zitron
So if this stuff falls apart, it's going to hit the market.
0:18:52 - Leo Laporte
Right and, as I said, this could be a massive crash in a year or two.
0:18:55 - Ed Zitron
And I don't think it will be next. I think that the horizon moves out with this funding to like a few quarters on, but it's kind of inevitable, if they can't work out this problem, that they've never been able to work out, the unsustainability of it, the massive energy demands. These aren't fixable problems within the next year and they are. They're saying they're going to make 11.6 billion dollars next year. That's more than 300 increased revenue for products that are becoming increasingly commoditized. With a fallow cloud compute business like the sign of the cloud side, the cloud business side, the model integration side, only being a billion dollars heavily suggests that there is a kind of not that much either integration or use of generative ai products and nobody's.
0:19:42 - Leo Laporte
I have to say the whole model we're all stipulating. You're correct that it's a bad business. Nobody's saying it's not a bad business. Okay. We agree. You don't have to argue that point so vividly.
0:19:52 - Ed Zitron
I'm excited about this. This thing is 8,000 words and I took like a day and a half to write it.
0:19:57 - Leo Laporte
No, and you're right. You made the point quite eloquently. Why?
0:20:02 - Emily Dreibelbis
OpenAI, getting all this investment instead of Claude, which a lot of people think is better.
0:20:08 - Leo Laporte
Sam Altman is a good money raiser, flynn Flam.
0:20:10 - Emily Dreibelbis
You're completely right. Yeah.
0:20:13 - Leo Laporte
Why did Mira Marotti leave? She of course in fact a number of founders at OpenAI, either Yasutsuki or they've all left.
0:20:22 - Jeff Jarvis
The information had kind of a catalog of all the reasons in there and they're different. Right it's internal politics, it's compensation. I'm sure they're getting other offers outside.
0:20:31 - Leo Laporte
That's also so much speculation, because none of these people really are talking right.
0:20:35 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, Mira left, right before the switch to profit for profit companies happening, which is really telling, because she was about to make so much money. Wow I heard from a friend who is getting recruited by OpenAI right now for a position. She's been talking in San Francisco like should I accept this position? And she got lunch with a VC and that woman told her that once OpenAI goes to for-profit, some employees have only been there for a couple of years could get as much as $2 million in equity.
0:21:05 - Speaker 6
So if you've only been there for a couple of years, could get as much as 2 million in equity.
0:21:07 - Emily Dreibelbis
So if you've only been there for 2 million two, years you're getting 2 million. What would be getting many millions of dollars.
0:21:13 - Taylor Lorenz
And she still chose to leave before that.
0:21:16 - Leo Laporte
And so I think now she was the temporary CEO. She's also the secondary sale.
0:21:23 - Ed Zitron
There was a secondary sale that happened. She could have cashed.
0:21:27 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if she did, but she could have some there is some speculation that her timing, her leaving, was timed with the release of these new quote reasoning uh ais like strawberry, the uh four, what is it?
0:21:40 - Speaker 6
401 just oh one, just oh one just oh one.
0:21:44 - Ed Zitron
Apparently there was a story where Miro was hit. Well, no, she said they rushed it out. She was kind of the person who sits between Sam Altman demanding money for the money throne and the developers being like I don't wanna. Sorry, what was that?
0:21:59 - Emily Dreibelbis
No, she was obviously miserable. I mean, she left for personal reasons before she was about to make millions of dollars. She hated it.
0:22:09 - Jeff Jarvis
But there are stories that VCs are lining up at her kitchen door to back.
0:22:14 - Ed Zitron
Whatever she wants to do. She's going to raise a billion or like a hundred million at a billion or something.
0:22:20 - Jeff Jarvis
You're absolutely right, emily. It's a courageous thing to do, probably because you're going into an unknown. But I want to complain about something else related to this. So Microsoft put out its new stuff, and I think it's based on JetGPT, and they said that it knew, knew, knew, knew. Deeper thinking. It doesn't think, ergo it can't do deeper thinking. This is more the flim-flam crap.
0:22:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, this is deeper thinking this is more of the flimflam crap. No, this is the again.
0:22:47 - Speaker 6
This is, oh one, the reasoning it's not and the idea is, if you give it more time to think, it can do better math.
0:22:53 - Leo Laporte
It can, it's not thinking it's anthropomorphic, all right, fine, you know I. I think it's a mistake to spend a lot of energy arguing semantics that's the sales pitch. That's the flimflam I understand, but who cares if he's a flimflam?
0:23:05 - Ed Zitron
man. They also found that there was a study that came out that said that the time, the amount of thinking I know, sorry, jeff uh, the amount of time it takes to reason, processing, processing sure whatever it is, kind of tapers off, it has diminishing returns and then eventually turns into nonsense.
0:23:22 - Leo Laporte
So it is why do so many smart people, though I mean I don't I'm. This is a legit question. I'm not trying to defend it why do so many smart people think that there is something here and it's worth spending time on and that this could change the world? I mean, there's definitely a lot of very much smarter people than me who are, who are devoting their lives to this, not just at open ai, but everywhere I think they're bored.
0:23:46 - Emily Dreibelbis
They don't see other transformative technologies. They're like oh this is it?
0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
good point, I think, yeah, you don't want to make the next iphone, because who the hell cares?
0:23:54 - Jeff Jarvis
and crypto didn't go anywhere, and blockchain didn't go anywhere, and he's back on vr didn't go anywhere, and so is it wishful thinking?
0:24:05 - Ed Zitron
it's wishful thinking don't know what it is is. There's no other hyper growth markets.
0:24:10 - Speaker 6
There's no real right place to put money, so that's why it's the same thing with the vcs.
0:24:15 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, yeah it's exactly the same thing, because where else is this money going to go? The reason that they're all jumping on this, other than the fact that big tech has no ideas anymore, uh, and they just each other, is because where else is this going? What else could you? What's?
0:24:29 - Leo Laporte
the next growth thing. You almost could have predicted that, as we approached the climactic decades of climate change, people would start turning to magical thinking, and, and, and, and you know fairy tale deus ex machina, solutions, because the otherwise the future is so bleak that it's it's not worth going on. It's the option, it's the alternative to despair.
0:25:01 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, I actually think you're right, especially with tech, because if you really think about it, put off generative ai. What is that? There are cool things that people could be working in in climate tech, in batteries. Really. What about the?
0:25:14 - Leo Laporte
next doesn't have to be chips. It could be the next thing.
0:25:17 - Jeff Jarvis
We've always moved on, speaks our language, leo, but also are you a software we invented the steam engine.
0:25:22 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we got everything out of it. We could. Now, what's the next technology?
0:25:26 - Ed Zitron
But we have millions of software developers, and what are they going to do?
0:25:31 - Emily Dreibelbis
That's interesting because they're saying that chat, gpt and all this technology is going to basically make software development a non-career. I think that's BS personally. I think there's something to that, for sure oh yeah, A good part of it. A good part of it. Yeah, could be a much higher ticket, higher or salary. Like you're just going to not pay them as much. They're going to have fewer functionalities. You're going to need to do less creative thinking.
0:25:55 - Ed Zitron
It's going to be an easier job. I would buy that. They would be hiring less senior engineers who could use these tools but know enough about code. I think that there will be a horrifying crisis that follows, because you'll have a bunch of code written by people who don't really understand, code created by large language models that inject errors into them, kind of like github copilot does. But I actually do buy. I buy that.
0:26:20 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if it's a profitable business, but that is a use case I honestly think there's going to be more demand, more need for code than ever before, that the world is software defined.
0:26:31 - Jeff Jarvis
If your kids were going to college now, would you say go and do computer science or not?
0:26:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Understanding technology has nothing but an upside right now.
0:26:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Friends.
0:26:44 - Leo Laporte
I would agree.
0:26:45 - Emily Dreibelbis
I still think so, but I do feel like, as I always feel, it's important to be well-rounded and to know how to think and know how to pivot yourself. I would not encourage my kids to just become code monkeys ever, because that's exactly what AI is just going to do.
0:27:03 - Leo Laporte
So why aren't people going into biotech, for instance, or some other?
0:27:07 - Jeff Jarvis
new field. It's harder, it's a lot harder.
0:27:09 - Ed Zitron
A lot harder doesn't pay as well.
0:27:13 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so now we've found another downside Besides the impact on climate. Another downside is it might be drawing the best and the brightest minds into a dead end because it's sizzly and fancy and where they should be happening for decades, but more valuable management consultancy's entire business model. You come out of harvard or penn or whatever, yeah
0:27:35 - Ed Zitron
it's the mckinsey. It's a mckinsey dead zone and also the most excited one. Sign that this is a bubble is the company's most excited about it. Are like accenture. When you see accenture show that's bad sign is you're like's most excited about it. Are like accenture when you see accenture show that's bad sign is you're like I don't know, like, like that's how I feel about softbank. It's like, um, oh, I don't want them at the party.
0:27:55 - Leo Laporte
That you needed half a billion from them by the way, softbank for a long time owned pc magazine and zd. In fact, I worked for soft bank and sun sun uh, who was spoken of with reverence when he owned zd how was his track record over the full fullness of time?
0:28:15 - Ed Zitron
he's got money still yeah, they had alibaba, which was a good one, but then the last three years they've lost, and they've lost like 30 billion dollars.
0:28:25 - Leo Laporte
It's like he lost money before. Remember he was the one who put all that money into WeWork Exactly we work lost money on Uber.
0:28:33 - Ed Zitron
Uber lost money on Uber. This is this. This is the dirty little secret of VC.
0:28:38 - Leo Laporte
You only need one or two massive hits to fund the 30 or 40 crap investment.
0:28:43 - Ed Zitron
Not if all of the crap ones are really big.
0:28:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, if they get bigger and bigger, yeah.
0:28:48 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, and the problem is with, I don't know, inflation evaluations or whatever, but you can't. Well, this round was a minimum of a quarter billion, which is why I also Apple pulling out of this round is the worst sign of all, isn't that telling?
0:29:01 - Speaker 6
What do you think that means?
0:29:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I think the price was too high.
0:29:05 - Ed Zitron
I don't think it was the price. I think because you sign the NDA and you see the company and they probably went hmm.
0:29:13 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the same thing. I'm saying the price was too high.
0:29:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, but ChatGPT is going to be baked into Apple Intelligence, so they're not above it and they rely on it. Right, but they have faith in the product comes along I actually think it's not.
0:29:30 - Leo Laporte
It's more complicated than that. Chat gpt and google's gemini are what happens if apple's own ai can't handle your query or they think it might be profitable to exit out, and they even warn you. They're saying, if you're going to chat GPT, you should be aware your data is exfiltrated. You might get the wrong answer. Apple has its own models and is trying to build Apple intelligence on its own models, not and on device too, opening eyes models. On device. I like the idea of on device models.
Not just on device, by the way I like the idea of on-device models Not just on-device, by the way. They're creating data centers that are sealed, hermetically sealed data centers running by Apple on Apple architectures, so that it doesn't get exfiltrated.
0:30:13 - Taylor Lorenz
I think they don't like open AI.
0:30:15 - Leo Laporte
They're very nervous about open AI and the fact that they didn't invest in open AI is extremely telling.
0:30:20 - Emily Dreibelbis
I don't think there is open AI in their intelligence. I think all the on-device stuff and the data center stuff is mostly a PR move, because it's such a small portion of the AI functionalities in Apple intelligence. It's like image generation. It's not the writing tools, it's not all these sophisticated things, no, it's just image generation, a couple isolated things that are processed on-device. And what's processed on-device can go out to that private cloud compute network.
0:30:47 - Ed Zitron
So you don't really know what's powered Writing and refining text is on the device.
0:30:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and translation on the Chromebooks. Now translation is going to be on device.
0:30:56 - Ed Zitron
Summarization prioritizing and summarizing notifications Really yeah, that's all on device Writing and refining text. That's what the Chromebook is doing too.
0:31:04 - Emily Dreibelbis
Oh, because it's refining text that you already put.
0:31:06 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, yeah, yeah but new stuff.
0:31:09 - Emily Dreibelbis
where would it?
0:31:11 - Ed Zitron
I'm actually kind of finding out, because I thought that that was on device. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
0:31:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
They're very unclear.
0:31:18 - Ed Zitron
I think that's probably deliberate too Right and that's what's interesting.
0:31:22 - Emily Dreibelbis
it's like what, what are they doing?
0:31:24 - Ed Zitron
it's marketing, I think they're trying to make it they're trying to make people think, oh, apple's in ai too. But if during the wwdc thing, though you'll notice, right at the end it was like an hour and a half long and they spent two minutes in open ai didn't name samuel and then said and then we'll be bringing a bunch of other models too, yeah, yeah, which is just like my editor, our editor-in-chief, asked me to write something about apple intelligence after wwdc and I was like what the heck is there to write what?
0:31:54 - Taylor Lorenz
is it like the private compute thing.
0:31:57 - Emily Dreibelbis
I just published a piece, like two weeks ago, after the globe time event, and it was titled uh, iphone 16 makes us question apple's intelligence because, like nothing makes sense oh yeah, I bought it because I'm a little pig, um, but I got it and I'm like this is the same yeah, well, apple so apple says apple says in their white paper, we train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web crawler, applebot.
0:32:28 - Leo Laporte
In other words, they are creating their own models. They call it Apple's AX Learn Framework and that is what they are primarily using. The other stuff is kind of I think it's a backstop, so that if people really want, uh, what chat gpt can do or what gemini can do or if they find out that one of them doesn't work well and they they're gonna.
0:32:54 - Jeff Jarvis
They gotta hedge their bets because apple is really focused on their own models.
0:32:57 - Ed Zitron
I'll be honest, but that's also just built on transformer right yeah, they just added open ai so that the the little oinking people in wall street could be happy it's yeah, it's just marketing maybe, but I think the fact that they didn't invest in open ai is kind of almost them saying yeah maybe that's yeah they. They saw something and went. There's no point of being in it. Maybe they also saw the. This deal is rigged for microsoft.
0:33:22 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft owns all of the ip and the research apple says we used a combination of data parallelism, tensor parallelism, sequence parallelism and fully share sharded data, parallel fsdp to scale training wait, sharded sharded, yeah, apple sharded now yeah, I'll just leave that. They we have developed two novel algorithms in post-training. I believe that I mean certainly they can afford it and they can hire the people to do it and they have that.
0:33:52 - Emily Dreibelbis
They're trying to do this in-house, yes 100, but they're super behind you wrote a great piece about the commoditization of ai models, which I read and enjoyed, and why should apple be able to build anything different than anybody else if they're all using the same data?
0:34:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, there's five key papers that are widely known. Everybody's read them, and that's the basis for a lot of what we're seeing.
0:34:15 - Jeff Jarvis
MIT just came out with a new kind of the first non-transformer model. Interesting Just this week, yeah. Emily to your point about on on device or not, and and in their cloud. Uh, there was a story about about altman's. You know seven trillion dollar world flowing waterfall of ai compute. But I don't know if you saw this, leo, just just to piss you off. The tsmc people uh, were dismissing him, thought the idea was so absurd. They started calling mr altman a were dismissing him. Thought the idea was so absurd.
0:34:47 - Ed Zitron
They started calling mr altman a podcasting bro. I saw that I didn't see. You know how bad it is. Like tsmc companies, like in chips, they don't give a rat's ass about all of the fluff. Tsmc can to some extent print money. So if they met with sam altman and he just waffled on, they probably looked at him and said, well, I mean, they called him a podcast bro, which is such a good insult as well, because he's terrible on the mic.
0:35:08 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I don't really even understand. It's too complimentary. Oh no, it's not.
0:35:13 - Ed Zitron
It's great as well, because it's just too positive but also they just looked at him and went what would a white guy do?
0:35:20 - Leo Laporte
I think we podcasters are a pretty damp bunch of people. That's what I think.
0:35:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
He's like a dark web podcaster.
0:35:29 - Leo Laporte
Is it Ted Gioia, the honest broker? I want to talk when we come back from our break about his piece. Are we now living in a parasite culture? In the new consumer economy, you get consumed. And he has a theory, by the the way, about why ai is of such great interest to these big companies like google, microsoft and so on. But we will take a break before we get to that. What a fun panel. Ed's interest great to have you. Ed is in the world of pr, so you can see everything he says is basically suspect. Betterofflinecom is his website.
0:36:07 - Emily Dreibelbis
I just love seeing how bad he's getting, I need to mute myself. I'm giggling.
0:36:14 - Leo Laporte
Emily, am I wrong that we consider PR? The dark side.
0:36:18 - Ed Zitron
It's the damp side. The damp side, I like that. The other day I referred to Edelman as the habsburgs of pr. Perfect, perfect, that's right complimentary.
0:36:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
What are these?
0:36:31 - Ed Zitron
these insults are not going far enough I can't say what I actually think, because he isn't quick enough you remind me of maria teresa.
0:36:38 - Leo Laporte
Okay, uh, emily dry bulbous is also here from pc magazine so great to have you both. And of course, jeff jarvis uh, paris is on assignment for the information. Apparently there's something big. Emily Drybulbous is also here from PC Magazine so great to have you both. And of course, jeff Jarvis, paris, is on assignment for the information, apparently there's something big going on in South Brooklyn.
I think it must be a new coffee shop opening. She's getting some interesting assignments. She'll be back next week and I'm hoping. I'm waiting, and we haven't heard from him yet that my son's going to call in just to plug his cookbook. A free ad. This is what you get when your father is a podcast bro for his new cookbook. It came out yesterday. I finally got my copy. It's been so long. It was delivered to the wrong address. I had to go to the studio to get it. Salt Hank a five napkin situation. Well, I hope get to talk to him in just a little bit.
Our show today, brought to you by Experts Exchange. Well, if you don't like AI, if you like human intelligence, you will love Experts Exchange a network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals who can give you industry insights and advice from people who are actually using your tech stack. Right, they know this stuff. Talk to people who know, instead of paying for expensive enterprise level tech support or going to those other sites where you get the snark. I've heard this question before. Why would you ever want to do that? Or you shouldn't do what you want to do? Do what I want you to do. This is Experts Exchange the tech community for people tired of the AI sellout. In fact, experts Exchange says they're ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. I have to acknowledge it it is the best kind of intelligence.
Experts Exchange gives you access to professionals in every field of computing. We're talking coding, microsoft Azure, devops, aws. I can go on and on. And, unlike other places, there's no snark. Duplicate questions are encouraged. There are no dumb questions, because their contributors are tech enthusiasts who actually get off on answering your question. They understand that the real benefit, the real reward for developing an expertise in an area is paying it forward, is sharing your expertise with others who also want to learn, and they love doing it. It also helps that they get good karma points and there's even CPE credits available to them. One member said I've never had GPT stop and ask me a question before, but that happens at Expert Exchange all the time.
Experts Exchange is proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. If it's not human, it's not a community. Right? You're going to love it. Their expert directory full of experts to help you find what you need, including many people who listen to our shows, like Rodney Barnhart, good friend of the show. He listens to Security Now and other Twitch shows. He's a VMware V expert. Edward Von Biljon, who is a Microsoft MVP and an ethical hacker. Here's a guy who really knows his stuff. There are Cisco design professionals. You can even get management advice. There are executive IT directors there and more Other platforms.
This is really important. We just learned last week that LinkedIn was going to sell everything you post there for AI training. So many platforms do this Reddit $60 million from Google so that they can scrape it right. Other platforms betray their contributors by selling their content to train AI models. I want to tell you this At Experts Exchange, your privacy is not for sale. They stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide and this is the unequivocal statement. They have never and will never sell your data, your content, your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train LLMs. Moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in their threads.
It's by people, for people. It's experts exchange. Experts deserve a place where they can share their expertise, their knowledge, their secret, hard-earned, secret info without worrying about some corporation stealing it. To increase shareholder value and humanity deserves a safe place, a haven from AI Experts Exchange. They are so confident that you will appreciate the community there that you'll get value from it. They're offering you now 90 days free, no credit card required. 90 days free. Ask all the questions you want e-ecom slash twit 90 days free. Don't even give them a credit card. I think you're going to like this e-ecom slash twit. We thank Experts Exchange so much for supporting the show and we thank you for supporting the show, by the way, because when they say, oh, they heard it on Twig, oh, e-ecom On, we go with. What a prickly little panel we got here today. I'll tell you.
0:41:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Emily, are you okay If you talk about that piece? Jesus, what a pile up. Oh, you just read it did you?
0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't like thinking about Parasite. I don't know who this guy is. Is he a jerk? Let me tell you first.
0:41:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me tell you first. Let me tell you first. Okay, because? Because you first look at his bio. Oh, he's a jazz critic and a music historian. But wait, after graduating, uh, as an advisor to five fortune 500 companies working for bcg and mckinsey. Um, he worked on sandhill road. Oh, he's a vc, known as the guy with the piano in his office. So from that he's a jazzy vc. He's now going to criticize all of business because he's cashed out. Go ahead, leo who is this?
0:42:14 - Ed Zitron
do we have a link?
0:42:15 - Leo Laporte
to this. Yeah, the honest broker. I think it's on uh, is it substack or medium? I can't tell the uh ted g-i-o-i-a. Gioioia, or Gioia.
0:42:24 - Ed Zitron
Oh, this guy. I get sent his shit every so often and you'll read it and it's present at the beginning, and then you'll see it slightly get weird. And then there's a paywall.
0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
There is a weirdness in this. I'm not going to read the weird part. It's having to do with ticks and LaGuardia, but he does make I think of a valid point which is.
0:42:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I heard that. I heard that it's the very. I mean, before you begin, it's see what my antenna go up when it's the variation of well, if you don't pay, then you're the product. This is what it kind of is which drives me. That's what it sounds like.
0:43:00 - Leo Laporte
He says just take a look at the dominant digital platforms and consider how little they actually create. What does Facebook actually create? Almost nothing. It relies on three billion users to create content Ugh, their word, not mine Then monetizes those people and their unpaid labor. I don't disagree with that. What does Google actually create? Look how it destroys newspapers while doing zero journalism itself.
0:43:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Bite me, Ed is rubbing off on you.
0:43:26 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, look how it destroys newspapers while doing zero journalism itself.
0:43:29 - Jeff Jarvis
bite me the head is rubbing off on you, jeff. I just want to say this is this is I know it's everybody okay, this is the sanctimoniousness of content pissed off. Our content is so valuable, how dare anyone touching it? All right, it's a fortune. How about this one? What does spotify?
0:43:44 - Leo Laporte
create one person, a single. Okay, he says spotify's ceo is now richer than any musician in the history of the world. My jazz is so valuable. Well, daniel eck makes more money than taylor swift, because this one's right, though, like the spotify example's right yeah it is. They are a parasite, parasite, but he's what does tiktok create?
0:44:07 - Ed Zitron
nothing now I have to say an insight. This is like a decade old. I understand.
0:44:12 - Leo Laporte
I agree but, here's the insight. No, wait a minute. This is the. This is merely the foundation.
0:44:17 - Emily Dreibelbis
It better be good leo yeah, where are you going, yeah?
0:44:20 - Ed Zitron
come on, leo, go ahead, go there it's not me, it's ted.
0:44:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah yeah, but I think I think you're gonna make it out. He said here's the problem the movie parasite Come on.
0:44:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Leo Go there. It's not me, it's Ted.
0:44:27 - Ed Zitron
But I think he makes a good point. Are you going to make it out?
0:44:28 - Speaker 6
Here's the problem.
0:44:29 - Ed Zitron
The movie Parasite, kill me.
0:44:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he does have it Well. Parasite, it's a little too on the nose.
0:44:34 - Ed Zitron
It's a fantastic movie. That means nothing related to this.
0:44:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, they lived in the basement. They were kind of parasites, right, oh my god, they would get up in the middle of the night and go raid the refrigerator. That's a literal parasite. But the suggestion is, the rich people are the parasites on the cyst. Oh my god, leo. Well, it is reversed. Anyway, these big companies and we've said this many times you're right, this is not a great insight.
Twitter is just a platform. The content comes from its users and to the degree that twitter monetizes that, they're monetizing your, your work. Uh, I think it's really true of youtube. Sure, there are people make a lot of money on youtube. Youtube definitely trumpets those people, but the vast majority of people on youtube sweat blood to create content for which they make no money. Who makes the money? Google, tiktok is exactly the same. My son has 2.5 million followers on tiktok. How does he make money? He has to do cookbooks, sell products, because he never got dollar one from tiktok, so that, but that's not a, that's not one dollar. No, he never made any money from tiktok. Nothing, well, we'll ask him, but nothing significant, no, the way in.
0:45:49 - Speaker 6
Ted Rice's. Even well-paid influencers typically make money.
0:45:54 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yes, is this the point of the blog post? No, Hang in there.
0:45:59 - Leo Laporte
I'm still feeling a little old, can you get to it? The point is, they're running out of content and that's why they love AI.
0:46:11 - Ed Zitron
I run this newsletter in goddamn March.
0:46:14 - Emily Dreibelbis
Oh God, Ed is already.
0:46:17 - Leo Laporte
Forget Ted Joya. Tell us, ed, why do these platforms love AI?
0:46:24 - Ed Zitron
They love it because they can just flood the zone with. They can keep people on the system and have them add more stuff. The more stuff there is, the more convoluted it gets. But the more time you spend on the platform, are we watching the internet. Die was the piece when I wrote this goddamn point. But because ted giardia flipping. I like ted giardia well. I think it's a little bit of a. Let me just read a minute. Let me just read one more.
0:46:44 - Taylor Lorenz
A couple more paragraphs.
0:46:45 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it's no coincidence that these parasitic platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand they are killing their hosts when the host dies. Ai generated content can replace human creativity or, to be blunt about it, the host will die because of AI generated content. And then the web billionaires won't even need to toss those few shekels at artists. It's every parasite stream. The host can die, but the leech still lives on that's nonsense.
0:47:14 - Ed Zitron
That's, I'm sorry, no, if they think they're going to fill their social networks with ai. That is a dumb ass's opinion, written by a dumb ass and published by a dumb ass.
0:47:23 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, that's just such a stupid one that's the kind apparently I am also a dumbass no, no, no, no, you're actually trying to look at this in an intellectual way.
0:47:31 - Ed Zitron
No, I realize, I finally realized my christo what my job is, by the way.
0:47:36 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it came to me yesterday. My job is merely to throw chum into the water and then sit back and let you guys get all frothy just like a media person, just like an algorithm you're the algorithm I'm gonna talk about chumming leo go ahead, circle, circle. I threw the chum in, but emily had a middle ground.
0:48:02 - Emily Dreibelbis
She was saying oh well, right now. I've written about recently that YouTube and all these platforms are creating AI creator tools. So if you make YouTube videos, you can have more AI to create fake backgrounds to augment your videos. So right now, the goal is not to just flood YouTube TikTok, blah, blah blah with pure AI content, although a lot of the algorithmically most successful stuff flood YouTube TikTok, blah, blah blah with like pure AI content.
0:48:25 - Leo Laporte
Although a lot of the algorithmically most successful stuff on YouTube is AI generated garbage right.
0:48:33 - Ed Zitron
Which is the point I made in Are we Watching the Internet Die, a piece which I wrote months and months ago, march 11th. It's eating itself like Ouroboros it is, it is creating. What happens is AI generated content becomes popular on the app, on the algorithm, thus perpetuating more AI generated content. At that point it's no longer about what's popular. What's popular is decided by the algorithm. But if AI generated stuff used by these AI powered tools which have a general. Corey Doctorow made a really good point about the small podcast. He said AI generation is more conservative. It kind of turns everything to the median.
0:49:10 - Leo Laporte
It's mediocre, yeah.
0:49:11 - Ed Zitron
Yeah and everyone's making the same thing with the same tools, removing backgrounds in the same way, so they create more content, which you point, emily but at this point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy Stuff made for the algorithm by ai, tools that were built to make the algorithm happy. It's horrifying and bad. It isn't power. Well, I mean, the parasite side is the stuff he said at the beginning which is not trenchant insight. It's just god. I hate people that do this. I spend too long writing my blogs, but at least I goddamn research stuff. He's just there going hmm, what if it's this? Yeah, well, and then I get sent his crap by my book editor, which I don't want to see.
0:49:52 - Leo Laporte
You know, Ed, if you really thought about it, this would be a great book title.
0:49:57 - Ed Zitron
I already have a book coming. Oh, do you? What's your book about? It's called why Everything Stopped Working. Okay, perfect title.
0:50:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, it's called why Everything Stopped Working.
0:50:04 - Ed Zitron
Okay, you're the perfect, perfect, yeah, yeah, it's Penguin. Random House Twenty twenty six.
0:50:08 - Emily Dreibelbis
I'm going to buy it. I'll write about it One day. Twenty six.
0:50:11 - Leo Laporte
Thank God. Oh, you haven't written word, one have you.
0:50:14 - Ed Zitron
Well, I mean, we just signed the contract, I just, I just made the deal, man, come on.
0:50:26 - Leo Laporte
And also congratulations, congratulations. He's not wrong and, by the way, you would agree with this, benito. Benito Gonzalez has always chimed in on Suno. We've used Suno to make music.
0:50:32 - Taylor Lorenz
He says Suno.
0:50:33 - Leo Laporte
Ed Giardia says Suno has digested essentially all music files available on the web to create a technology that replaces human musicians. Corey's right, the music is mediocre. And, benito, I think your point was it was quite well taken. We make music because we like to make the music.
0:50:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it's the craft of it all. Yeah exactly.
0:50:53 - Ed Zitron
It's the process Like it's like. It's how I feel about AI generated writing. When you write it, and even with like AI generated research, it's the process of doing something makes you better at it by writing and getting feedback, but also just the process of forming thoughts and putting them onto a page. You become a better writer.
0:51:12 - Leo Laporte
That is what people come to you to read, yes, but ed the way I become a better writer is by ingesting all your writing exactly, but it's a very that's a very silicon valley way looking at the world.
0:51:23 - Ed Zitron
It's like well, right, they just read a lot of words, right, remembered them all, and then put them down in another way, right, yeah, that's how artwork is. Art is just like I saw everything and then I can paint anything, even though it all kind of has the same kind of dead-eyed thing. I will say Grok is the funniest image generator. You can go on to grok and you can say please generate me an image with a lot of copyright violations and it'll have shrek garfield, mickey mouse, donald duck.
0:51:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm amazed that elon has not been sued by nintendo yet. Grok is the, by the way I pay.
0:52:00 - Ed Zitron
I pay for twitter, but I donate everything to the trevor project. Okay, so you don't?
0:52:06 - Emily Dreibelbis
like Sam Altman, but you're plugging.
0:52:08 - Ed Zitron
Elon Musk's school. That's why I'm sending it to the Trevor Project. I feel like Elon walked so.
0:52:13 - Emily Dreibelbis
Altman could run. Yes, there you go, I like it I think that they're very different monsters.
0:52:18 - Ed Zitron
Elon Musk is like a horrifying bug creature, sexist, racist, arsehole. Sam Altman is like a mckinsey machine. Yeah, he's like a mckinsey and damp bog beast, and he just kind of damp bog beast. But he's a puffy vest made damp altman, there we go, damp altman.
0:52:38 - Jeff Jarvis
So the problem, leo, with this piece to me is and I'm sorry I'll plug my current book, the Gutenberg Parenthesis is that this idea of content and the content is where all the value resides is an industrial ego of our industry, and I just don't think that it's as valuable as we think. And the problem with AI, in the end, is that it will commodify all content because it'll make a whole bunch of crap and it's not a problem. The value doesn't lie there, emily. When you write something, it's about telling me information that is valuable to me. Your writing is very good, but the fact that now 100 people will go and rewrite you just to get their own clicks is what's killing the web, as Ed has said, and that's because it's content-oriented and the business model behind it is all content-oriented. It's the attention economy.
0:53:31 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I mean, if I could write a book, one thing I might write it about would be just, I think the way to combat all this is just making sure we have really compelling experiences. Offline. We still have good taste in content. You want to see images that make you feel something. You want to read something that makes you feel something. We want to have cultural experiences. We need to just keep doing all those things and not just sit at home on our computers and our phones regurgitating and consuming AI-generated content, because if people like it, they'll keep doing it and spend their whole day looking at that stuff, which is what these companies want. So as long as people have interests outside of this crap, we should be fine.
0:54:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they have lives and they have needs and I argue in journalism we've got to worry about understanding their lived experiences and bringing the value to their lives and their communities.
0:54:24 - Leo Laporte
Do you think there's going to be a backlash that we're going to? The pendulum will swing the other way.
0:54:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I'm thinking we should hope for that. I think we should make that happen. We should get people out of their house. We should get people off their phone into events with their neighbors, to the park, family events. They should be pursuing hobbies. You know, hobbies what a thing.
0:54:51 - Ed Zitron
You know things that don't involve screens. I think the being on the computer is fun, and if people enjoy being on the computer, that's great. I think that you were right that people need more hobbies, but there need to be new ways to meet people, because right now we don't have those like we are. We are in a time when meeting people and making friends has never been harder is that a cry for help?
0:55:11 - Emily Dreibelbis
because they're everyone, everyone's on their computer at home.
0:55:14 - Ed Zitron
No, no, genuinely seriously, like, yeah, I have. I have always had trouble making friends. I've always felt kind of strange in the world, I've always felt kind of lonely and I've made a lot of my friends, a lot of my relationships online and it's like I don't think the people, I think that people vastly overestimate oh sorry, underestimate how difficult it is to make friends these days and I think that, emily, you're right, people should go and that, but there is very little infrastructure to actually make that happen.
0:55:50 - Speaker 6
And I think that people.
0:55:51 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's interesting, but you're not really making friends online per se, but they can't come to your house and help you mount furniture. What do you mean? Oh, not just online relationships. You just meet them there and then you meet up in person exactly got it all right. That's fine. Just, everyone has a different style, right some people will do that some people will.
I've played a lot of intramural sports in my adult life. I've made friends there. You get a drink after the game, stuff like that, or volunteering or people who go to religious types of events, I don't know. It just depends on who you are and what you like.
0:56:31 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, it's just not that easy, though it's really not.
0:56:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Ed. I'm going to argue that it's easier than when Leo and I were young. You know you think that, oh well, we can just go down the corner and meet somebody. Especially if you're a little weird, it's real hard to find people who are like you. And you look back in the early days of dating there was much stigma to using things like New York Review of Books or personals, but there was a huge amount of that because it was kind of the only way people could meet. I have a friend who went to live early in the internet days, went to live in Japan, and when she came back she was just shocked that every one of her friends was using online dating. This was new to her because she was gone for seven years and it just happened in that time. And there are mechanisms. Mean I, leo and I are friends because we met online how did we meet?
0:57:29 - Ed Zitron
well, how did you two meet?
0:57:32 - Jeff Jarvis
well, actually, no, actually I knew of you because son jake had me buy your books, ah, but then you called me because, and then I said google, what do you guess?
0:57:42 - Leo Laporte
we want to do a. You had written a book called what would google do and I thought, well, if the guy had written a book called what Would Google Do? And I thought, well, if the guy's written a book with the name.
0:57:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Google in the title. He must be an expert. There's riches here. There's value. So, Ed, I'm agreeing with you it's hard, but I'm not necessarily suggesting that it's harder now than it was before the Internet as before the internet.
0:58:09 - Leo Laporte
You may actually have kind of focused on one of the biggest issues in the modern world today, which is lack of community.
And there are people who will say, well, that's what happens when you become a godless, hedonistic society, when you abandon your churches. I don't know if that's true, but it is certainly the case that community is a very powerful. I know this because I just saw a Lululemon ad, all about community and it's very powerful, very important and, by the way, it was a great ad. Until I saw that it was for Lululemon, I went kind of Well, not to get too serious.
0:58:45 - Jeff Jarvis
but Hannah Arendt would argue that when people become yes isolated from their communities because of hate and fear, and such they become lonely, not in the sense of the Surgeon General saying people aren't getting dates, but in a much more profound way. Kind of an anomie, and then they become vulnerable to the siren call of a cult, an authoritarian fascist.
0:59:09 - Leo Laporte
That's when we want a strong man to come in and save us. So it's really about?
0:59:13 - Jeff Jarvis
in what will Google do I write about? The contrary is how do you have a pluralistic society? And a sociologist named Kornhauser says that when you end up in that position where you have no connections, there's nothing to compete with the draw of the elite, of the fascist versus? If you have many connections across various things, which is what Emily listed then you have competing views.
0:59:36 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. We need to have competing parts of our attention. It can't just be all we do is sit at home and we scroll through AI-generated content on our phone. We have to have something compelling outside of this technology to balance it, because the internet should still be useful. I don't want AI to ruin it, but it's just going to be a garbage life and a garbage internet experience if all we bring to it is just eyeballs on AI-generated content, like you can't.
1:00:03 - Leo Laporte
Ironically, what does bring people together is tragedy. Somebody in our, in our discord, fitty Fiddick VN is talking about North Carolina and hurricane Helene and the community that forms around these kinds of tragedies really shows the best of us. It's when we really do show that we still have that instinct. We still have that ability to to bond together, to drop our differences and to help one another. It's too bad. It requires tragedy to do that but it doesn't just require me.
1:00:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll give you an example from this week. So, because of this show, joe Esposito, who's in our discord, who's wonderful, who makes mocking pictures of me, but that's okay, I forgive him. Um, I was on his podcast for oh, he has a podcast. Oh, that's a podcast and I was on it and, and, and it's as if we were friends already because we have you, leo, in common.
1:00:57 - Leo Laporte
The parasocial relationship is real, is genuine, it is it's very real.
1:01:02 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, I've made a lot of friends that way, but but ed's still right that if I mean I also have I'm married and I have a family and you know, so that I have a structure around me that I didn't have for a lot of years, and it's hard to build those kinds of relationships of mutual support.
1:01:20 - Leo Laporte
Is technology one of the things that's causing distancing?
1:01:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I would argue it's the opposite.
1:01:28 - Ed Zitron
I think that it's not technology, that's, I think it's religious, I think it's like the death of religion and walkable cities and communities in general. Yeah, you could say cars have ruined, cars have. Like urban expansion has, I mean it's.
1:01:44 - Leo Laporte
We all live at a driving distance from one another, which makes us inaccessible to each other without a car.
1:01:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, Well, I think that it is correlated a lot with technology, like a lot of the metrics that seem to have or at least the way people have studied it have correlated more time online with loneliness, suicide reporting, unhappiness. That seems to be like just a correlation where maybe some of this stuff cities and cars is kind of a bigger trend, but there does seem to be an effect of technology specifically.
1:02:15 - Ed Zitron
I agree, though I am like this is a weird case, we'll say. I realize I am the anecdote rather than the rule, but I have had the opposite experience moments of, like deep depression. I've had some like mental health difficulties. I've found being online has severely, has like changed my life and helped me, especially because, like I didn't make friends growing up, I couldn't do it, I I don't know, I didn't get really diagnosed with anything, they I was just a strange, large child and and now I'm a slightly smaller, much stranger adult, but I'm proud of who I am. But I've also found most of my support system through being online. That being said, I also got online in a really weird time. I got on with like compu serve a beautiful gold pcma I a card made a lot of friends through everquestest.
1:03:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me ask you a question, and I mean this seriously. No sure you have high standards. You don't suffer idiots at all easily.
1:03:16 - Leo Laporte
Or podcast hosts for that matter. No, this is your start on a flawed assumption.
1:03:22 - Ed Zitron
I was not like that growing up.
1:03:24 - Leo Laporte
Really, really. Yeah, you became a sour, bitter adult. Adult, I'm not bitter at all part of becoming an adult.
From uh red con uh from red con 5 in our club twit. This is an older article, but it's from the guardian. Is america suffering a social recession most? Uh? This is from anton sabalo writing americans report having less sex, fewer friends and a loss of trust in each other and society. This is from polling. Of course. The decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair and poor health more generally. In august of 2022, the cdc announced us life expectancy who had fallen to where it was 20, 30 years earlier, whereas life expectancy in europe is has rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers.
1:04:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
I think a lot of that is from opioids, yeah actually it is I was wondering if that number might have gone up from actually diagnosing people as well.
1:04:26 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, maybe we weren't aware of these issues and a willingness to actually seek mental health services that people did not have 30 years ago.
But I think that there are a number of different factors and I do believe the internet could make it worse. If you have self-image issues, instagram can be like that. There isn't really a ton of compelling science behind it. There's a lot of warring, different academic disciplines on this, but I think what we're all saying are all parts of the same problem. I don't think it's any one thing. I don't think the internet on its own is making people lonelier, but a lack of community in real life means that people who are online and lonely might go into horrifying things like ngtow young men who are disenfranchised with the world instead of I don't know like seeing that the world can be unfair and taking a fair view at it. They'll find an andrew tate.
They'll find an easy comfortable pre-packaged thing built to allure them. That is where social media can be extremely damaging. But social media in and of itself is, here's, just a conveyance of a problem, a book from 25 years ago, uh, robert d putnam, a political scientist.
1:05:39 - Leo Laporte
The study was called bowling alone the collapse and revival of american community. Uh, it documents the decline of sociability in the us since the 50s by tracing the dwindling number of americans frequenting religious and civic organizations, volunteer work, sports clubs, hobbyist groups and so on. American community is on the decline, which led to the founding of Meetup.
1:06:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, it inspired, it, yeah, but I'm still going to.
1:06:07 - Leo Laporte
Did Meetup change everything? No, but it was a good idea.
1:06:11 - Jeff Jarvis
If you have a, pug man, you can find pugsers. And the great story that Clay Shirky told about Meetup is that when Scott Heiferman started it, they had to put a schedule out because they wanted to try to get people on the schedule. But then, when enough people came to enough meetups, they could just open it up as a platform, and the number one trending meetup was witches. Good, because witches couldn't find witches.
It's hard to find other, uh, I have magic for that other wiccans only if you do it together if you get the spell. But I've been trying to ask a question, but but I didn't know. Didn't the internet open up the universe of people you could find that you would like and respect More than gee? I happen to live in one neighborhood or I happen to be in one building, and this is who I got.
1:06:56 - Ed Zitron
I'm going to say something very depressing. I did not have friends up until the age of like 17. Wow, the people at my high school were horrible. I despise all of them to this day and I remember all their names.
1:07:12 - AI
Now you understand where I'm coming from. Was this in the US, Ed?
1:07:18 - Ed Zitron
What I'm saying is I made friends, or maybe I'm actually kind of agreeing with you. I would have made friends on my street if it was safe to walk outside and make friends. It was not a safe neighborhood. Um, there was no intramural activity I went to. There was only school, and school was the only place for me to socialize. I'm not religious, never have been. Why would I believe in god? And it's thus. Where was I meant to go? I was a fat child, I wasn't sporty, I didn't really have hobbies, I was too busy being depressed, so I stayed at home for a bit.
1:07:55 - Leo Laporte
I'm starting to really feel bad for you.
1:07:57 - Ed Zitron
Don't Like me. Having these conversations means that someone listening might feel better about themselves.
1:08:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Absolutely Amen. And what changed it?
1:08:07 - Ed Zitron
for you Going to Penn State. I went to Penn State when I was in college for an exchange year and it allowed me to break the cycle. And then I moved to America because I was just unhappy in my environment in England.
1:08:20 - Leo Laporte
The problem really is the UK.
1:08:23 - Ed Zitron
Honestly, you can blame England for a hell of a lot of things. I think that's a great place to start.
1:08:28 - Jeff Jarvis
But the accent works.
1:08:29 - Ed Zitron
Accent's brilliant. The rest is like the social stuff it's usually a good move for someone with an.
1:08:34 - Emily Dreibelbis
English accent. To move to the US. You grew up in.
1:08:37 - Leo Laporte
Margaret Thatcher's England, which was not a good move, john.
1:08:39 - Ed Zitron
Major more than anything. But yes, thatcher, burned in hell with Reagan.
1:08:43 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a fascinating story that I saw in Die Zeit a week ago that in the two states in Germany that went to the far right part of the AFD, women or young women move out. They just leave because they have their acts together and they don't stay around. And then that leaves the young men behind who are losers in that sense and feel like that, become vulnerable to the cybernical of these guys. And then there was a column in the New York Times or the Washington Post either today or yesterday that was trying to argue that not all men, not all young men, are misogynistic. But it was really a reverse argument. What it was saying was well, it looks worse because the women really have their act together and they're acting differently and the young men aren't, and so it makes them. It pitches the kind of statistics and again, it's not men's fault for men acting the way they do.
1:09:40 - Ed Zitron
It's just women.
1:09:42 - Jeff Jarvis
We do the best we can. That's the incel.
1:09:44 - Ed Zitron
We do the best our testosterone brains allow least manly thing in the world, just being like. Well, women are too good. That's why I suck.
1:09:53 - Leo Laporte
Jesus Christ. One thing I have learned in my advanced state is that each gender has its own issues.
1:09:59 - Taylor Lorenz
Oh God yeah.
1:10:02 - Ed Zitron
We as humans have issues and genders are subjected to things we're going to take a break.
1:10:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
but do we have a consensus here that something's gone wrong in our society? I do too. I'm just not In some cases. I'm not. It's hard in your case, ed. If you had just grown up 100 years earlier, you may have also blossomed as an adult, not necessarily because of the internet. So it's just, your story is so worthwhile and valuable, it's just hard. I don't think we've quite nailed it.
1:10:36 - Ed Zitron
It's an anecdote, though I recognize mine is not the typical experience.
1:10:40 - Leo Laporte
It's maybe more typical than you think. Far from alone, yeah.
1:10:45 - Emily Dreibelbis
I do think the internet is not just a mirror for society's problems. I do think the internet is not just a mirror for society's problems. I do think it creates new problems. I think algorithmic-driven feeds create their own problems, which is a certain field of thought. There's people who think platforms are innocent. This is a whole Section 230 debate if you know about that.
1:11:02 - Ed Zitron
I literally just had this with MIT economist on my podcast about 230. I know exactly what you mean.
1:11:07 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yes, exactly. So I'm in the camp that I think the algorithm does produce its own unique effect and it's not just kind of guilt-free, totally agree. I believe that technology is creating unique and new problems.
1:11:20 - Jeff Jarvis
But would you also agree that the internet creates opportunities that otherwise didn't exist?
1:11:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
Of course, but I just find that so frustrating. It's just, you don't know the percentage of good to bad, and so you're just saying, well, let's just keep perpetuating all this bad on the chance that the good stuff keeps going.
1:11:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Same argument made for television. Made for novels.
1:11:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
Exactly, it's very complex. Yes, yeah and. But it doesn't undermine the problem. The fact that there are problems means they should still be solved not that, but it doesn't undermine the problem.
1:11:50 - Leo Laporte
The fact that there are problems means they should still be solved, not that we should just let them go, but I think what? Jeff's saying is not solved by Technology, is not? Yeah, not blame the internet as a way of solving it. That's not necessarily going to be productive, but there are ways to improve the internet.
1:11:59 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yes, there are ways to improve it. You could blame.
1:12:01 - Leo Laporte
TV, the fact that people go home and spend four hours sitting in front of a screen alone, as much as you can blame anything else.
1:12:11 - Speaker 6
Yeah but there are ways to improve it.
1:12:13 - Ed Zitron
The television doesn't randomly change the channel to keep you watching the television. It doesn't need to.
1:12:18 - Leo Laporte
It is a self-perpetuating machine. Ratings mean it's going to get closer and closer to what will keep you stuck. It doesn't make any sense.
1:12:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
They put regulation on television, For example. You can't just watch.
1:12:29 - Taylor Lorenz
There's no regulation no.
1:12:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yes you can't just watch you don't just watch hardcore porn on average news channels In.
1:12:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Germany, you can.
1:12:36 - Emily Dreibelbis
In Germany you can probably, but there are things they don't show on TV. It's not just like we just let these technologies just free-for-all.
1:12:52 - Leo Laporte
We put some shape around it, we figure out how to improve society with them. You don't just be like oh well, there's very little regulation on television.
1:12:56 - Ed Zitron
I think the regular the only thing that that regulates television is societal, mores more so it's just a different thing entirely. I'm not sure what. No one watches tv. I'm just saying no one has a tv like.
1:13:04 - Emily Dreibelbis
No one pays for tv, no one watches, watches. Tv. You don't have a TV algorithm. Yeah, it's algorithms, specifically.
1:13:10 - Leo Laporte
Okay, 50 years ago, before there were computers for you to sit and watch six hours a day, there was a television set which, I can tell you, people sat and watched six hours a day and had, I think, much of the same effect of alienating you from your society.
1:13:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, extremism rates are much higher. They're higher like extremism today, because the algorithm is making people going in rabbit holes.
1:13:33 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a big mistake to blame the algorithm for extremism.
1:13:38 - Speaker 6
And, I think, the risk of doing that is you're going to miss what's really going on. I completely disagree with that.
1:13:44 - Taylor Lorenz
The research in my upcoming book out next week.
1:13:47 - Jeff Jarvis
The Web we we weave really argues with that. Creating niche communities specifically for niche extremist groups who were perfectly normal beforehand and everything was okay.
1:13:59 - Ed Zitron
They just couldn't find each other quite as easily.
1:14:02 - Emily Dreibelbis
So they've studied on YouTube that people who begin a certain subject on YouTube by the end have a more extreme viewpoint of it, because once you start getting one suggested video, it takes you down down down.
1:14:12 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a lot of contrary research that actually shows that people don't go to those extreme videos through YouTube's algorithm, but instead through outside links, through places like Breitbart. That's how most of the stuff is found. It's in a much larger ecosystem.
1:14:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
The weird ad on YouTube from Breitbart, or what do you mean?
1:14:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, there's links from extremist sites and they use YouTube as their library. Youtube is not getting people to those bad places Outside is getting them there, and YouTube is the solution.
1:14:39 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, youtube has extreme content on it and people are just going down video rabbit holes.
1:14:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Millions of young girls and thousands of young boys are novelized into idiocy. Our magazine warned in 1880 novel readers are like opium smokers the more they have of it, the more they want it, and the publishers delighted at this. You go on corrupting public understanding and making fortunes out of this corruption.
1:15:03 - Ed Zitron
We've been here socrates who was like oh, we can't teach people to read, or I forget this bloody point. It doesn't make sense in this example. If the algorithm is showing a bunch of right-wing wank on twitter, more people are seeing right-wing extremism, which by and by and large will. If someone is already leaning right. If someone is lonely and disenfranchised and looking for someone to blame, they will start blaming minorities.
1:15:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's look at the underlying cause of why they're lonely and disenfranchised how about we look at the goddamn algorithm?
1:15:35 - Ed Zitron
how about we actually hold these companies responsible? What, who?
1:15:38 - Speaker 6
do you?
1:15:38 - Ed Zitron
disagree. But just why like?
1:15:42 - Jeff Jarvis
why because of free because of freedom of expression. Section 230 is our first amendment for online and all the voices who were not heard in mainstream mass media, run by people who look like me, old white men all these years, now have their voice, and it is certain parts of society that want to shut them up now and they use this regulation and this panic and this moral panic to do so. That's why.
1:16:05 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, everyone agrees Section 230 is very imperfect on both sides of the aisle, oh there's fighting words oh boy, here we go.
1:16:13 - Leo Laporte
Everyone does not agree that.
1:16:15 - Emily Dreibelbis
There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who think it needs a lot of work?
1:16:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, because they both want to go after tech companies and think they're evil. Wait, are you saying that people want to go?
1:16:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
after white guys with regulating the Internet. Emily, I want to be very clear about this. I want to be very clear about this.
1:16:32 - Leo Laporte
Without Section 230, about half of the things I do with Twit we couldn't do. We couldn't have a chat room, we couldn't have a Twit social Mastodon instance, we couldn't have the Discord. There's so many things we couldn't do because of liability issues.
1:16:46 - Jeff Jarvis
It is really important.
1:16:47 - Leo Laporte
Section 230 does not just protect big companies that don't deserve protection.
1:16:52 - Ed Zitron
She's not talking about repealing it, though.
1:16:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Well any change to it is very risky because the liability issue for small companies, Because it stands with legislation and it's worked very well.
1:17:03 - Emily Dreibelbis
You think it's likely that something founded in the very, very, very early days of the Internet can still meaningfully regulate the Internet.
1:17:10 - Leo Laporte
This country still runs in a constitution that's written almost 300 years ago.
1:17:13 - Emily Dreibelbis
And it runs in a peaceful manner. Serious flaws with it.
1:17:18 - Ed Zitron
The Constitution is regularly used. You want to open it up.
1:17:20 - Jeff Jarvis
You open up the Constitution to our current politics. See what happens.
1:17:24 - Ed Zitron
I mean our current politics, so we just never change it.
1:17:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I don't get it. You guys just don't believe in evolving.
1:17:29 - Leo Laporte
It's a mistake to think that there is a universal agreement. The section 230 is flawed. It is not universal. It's not, and I will fight to the death to not change 230 one bit. It is vital to the kind of expression we do here at twit, and I don't think we're a big company trying to take advantage of people, so it's very easy for the right and the left to say, well, look at big tech, we need to do something about them. That's not what this is about. Section 230 protects little guys and it's really important and publishers too.
1:17:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Publishers are complaining about it. They're protecting. All right, we're gonna take a little break and come back with more.
1:18:05 - Leo Laporte
I will continue the chumming in just a moment but we got a great panel.
1:18:09 - Taylor Lorenz
We got a fiery panel here.
1:18:11 - Leo Laporte
And Emily, I'm proud of you. My wife said Emily's holding her own in this sausage fest. It is a bit of a sausage fest. I apologize, Emily.
1:18:21 - Emily Dreibelbis
Dreibold is here from PC Magazine.
1:18:24 - Leo Laporte
It's great to have you, Emily. Yeah, she's going to come in here and slap me upside the head any minute now.
1:18:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
I'm not afraid of the sausages in my midst.
1:18:31 - Ed Zitron
Good, good, good Sausages in my midst is a really good book.
1:18:35 - Emily Dreibelbis
title it's very accurate for the male-dominated industries in which I've worked.
1:18:43 - Leo Laporte
It's like Jane Goodall, but it's not gorillas, it's sausages in the mist.
1:18:47 - Emily Dreibelbis
I'm learning how to tame them and socialize them so they can.
1:18:51 - Leo Laporte
Socialize the sausage For science.
Socialize the sausage for science. Ed Zitron is also here. His company is betterofflinecom, and that kind of says it all, doesn't it? He also has a fantastic newsletter and podcast, as you might have figured out because he's a podcast, bro. Yeah, jeff, as am I. Jeff Jarvis also here, professor emeritus from the city university of New York, author of so many great books.
The new one is when, soon, next week. Next week, the Gutenberg parenthesis is the site Gutenberg parenthesiscom. The new book is the web Weave why we must reclaim the Internet from moguls, misanthropes and moral panic. And it is exactly what we're talking about right here, our show today, brought to you by the good folks at Spit Warden. Oh, now I look, we can put aside our differences because there's something we all agree on Internet security needs to be better than a post-it note on the side of your screen. You need a password manager. You need a way to create and remember long, strong, non-memorable passwords.
Bitwarden's the best because it's open source. It offers a very cost-effective solution that can dramatically increase your chances of staying safe online, now more than ever. We've got Prime Day coming up in a week. Then it's the holidays, it's Black Friday, cyber Monday. That means the bad guys will be out in force during all this online shopping, trying to confuse you with phishing sites that look exactly like your favorite store. And this is why Bitwarden has expanded they just announced this the inline autofill capabilities within their browser extension. Not just passwords now it includes cards, identities, pass keys, and the thing about this is when you use Bitwarden to fill in a web form whether it's payment details or contact info or addresses or whatever it makes sure that the site you're on is the site you think you're on, that it is not a impersonator, it is not targeting you, it is not a phishing site. That protects you more than almost anything. Now, if you're a business, you're going to love Bitwarden too. You get unparalleled SSO integration and flexibility so you can quickly and easily safeguard all your business logins, including your single sign-on security policies. This is all built in. They're fully compatible with SAML 2 and OIDC, and Bitwarden ensures smooth integration with whatever solution you're using.
And let me tell you, I know all of you because you're smart. You're all using a password manager, but I know also all of you certainly all of us have friends and family who don't, who won't, who say no, no, I'm just going to use the dog's name and my mother's maiden name and my birthday. Who could ever guess that those people need to know about Bitwarden? And if they say, well, I'm not going to pay for a password manager, tell them. Bitwarden is open source, free forever. To individuals. That means unlimited passwords, every platform Windows, mac, linux, ios, android. That means pass keys. It even means hardware keys all free forever because it's open source. And if you're in business, join some of the largest organizations in the world who trust Bitwarden to protect their online information Because it's open source.
Bitwarden can be inspected by anyone. You can go right to the GitHub and look at the code. They are regularly audited by third-party experts. This is the way to do it. Switching to Bitwarden is easy. It'll only take a minute or two. They support importing from most password management solutions and if your brother-in-law is still using his dog's name and his mother's maiden name, it's very easy for him to start using Bitwarden Replace. They help you replace all those bad passwords with good passwords and be protected. What are you waiting for? It's time. Get started with Bitwarden's free trial of a Teams or Enterprise plan for your business, or get started for free, across all devices, forever, as an individual user.
This is the password manager I use. It's the one I recommend. I've used it for years. Steve Gibson switched to it a couple of years ago. We're very happy Bitwarden users. Bitwardencom slash twit. That's bitwardencom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in google. It's getting hot in here. Paris martineau has the day off, but uh, we've replaced her with a couple of thermal blankets. It feels like ed zitron is here he's only a little damp Emily Drybulbous and, of course, jeff Jarvis. What about Taylor Lawrence? She's been on the show.
1:23:35 - Emily Dreibelbis
This is an interesting one, isn't it an interesting story?
1:23:41 - Leo Laporte
As you know, she was at the Washington Post Before that, the New York Times. She's leaving the Washington Post to start her own newsletter which will be called User Mag. She says it will cover the creator economy, covering who has power on the Internet and how that power has been yielded. She's going to continue hosting her podcast Power User Huh you said yielded or wielded Yielded. I don't know what I said. I've lost control of my mouth. Who has power on the internet and how that power is being wielded there.
1:24:23 - Jeff Jarvis
We go Wielded. Okay, american accent who you just?
1:24:28 - Ed Zitron
said the same to me, wielded Okay, american accents. Who Can you say?
1:24:29 - Jeff Jarvis
it to me.
1:24:32 - Leo Laporte
I want to be able to publish whatever I want, whenever I want, and I want to get the upside of breaking news. Now I'm going to leave this to Jeff because I don't want to wade into this, meyer, but there may be another reason she left the Washington Post.
1:24:46 - Jeff Jarvis
There was an Instagram that she had that used the meme and it was a meme and so she was at the white house.
1:24:55 - Leo Laporte
She was at that social create the creators summit that the president did. She did as everybody we know did did a selfie with herself and the president in the background. Now I haven't seen the post I have. Did you see the?
1:25:08 - Jeff Jarvis
original post. Yeah, yeah, and it's because it was screenshot immediately.
1:25:13 - Speaker 6
So what was it?
1:25:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It said a war criminal and Satirize Right. But that was the meme and it was around and it was to a few friends. So among the friends she was extending a joke. This some person I presume was not a great friend. It got out, it got into right-wing media. You can imagine everything that happened then. So the Post said we're going to investigate. We never really heard what was going on it. You know it wasn't a case where they said off with your head immediately, but Taylor has also been after having left the time. She's been very critical of the times from the post, which they don't like very much either of them, and so she is her own person. I respect her immensely.
I subscribed she's been on this show because I think that she covers the internet not as a technology but as a human venture and understands empathetically, especially with young people, people I have a little problem with her because she often makes herself the story I agree on that and also I felt like I consider taylor a friend.
1:26:17 - Ed Zitron
But tell her this to her face. I think it's extremely goddamn rude the way she put her leaving thing. I think it's insulting to the people at the washington post. I think it's insulting to people at new york times, people that have helped her, helped her grow her career. I think immediately just biting your people at the Washington Post. I think it's insulting to people at the New York Times, people that have helped her, helped her grow her career. I think immediately just biting your thumb at the mainstream media while describing in detail literally what the Washington Post tech desk, which is one of the best in the industry, does every single day, and then acting as if it's unique, is just insulting to her former colleagues.
1:26:45 - Jeff Jarvis
And then they kicked her in the rear end on the way out with a snarky story that brought up all this stuff again.
1:26:51 - Ed Zitron
And that isn't her colleagues, that wasn't the tech desk.
1:26:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It was somebody at the Post.
1:26:55 - Ed Zitron
Sure, but she didn't even know.
1:26:58 - Leo Laporte
So the Post sent it to New York Times.
1:26:59 - Ed Zitron
Oh yeah, the way that they've made this a media story is bullshit.
1:27:02 - Speaker 6
For Taylor Pardon my French it like making this, like the david falcon thing thing on npr, was just nonsense.
1:27:10 - Jeff Jarvis
This isn't exactly, and so she's also a media post and, I'm hoping, post officials criticism.
1:27:13 - Leo Laporte
The post officials statement was they sent this to the times. We are grateful for the work taylor has produced at the washington post. She has resigned to pursue an end a career in independent journalism and we wish her the best. She did not get fired according to this, and I don't think you can lie about that right now, by the way, I've been trying to go to her site and it's blocked as a malware site.
1:27:37 - Ed Zitron
So damn damn that sucks I'm sorry if it happened to my blog, I would. I would start my car in the garage. Sadly, sadly, it's an electric car.
1:27:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I start my car in the garage.
1:27:49 - Speaker 6
Usermagco War power.
1:27:55 - Leo Laporte
I get malware and phishing. This site is blocked because it is a known security threat. Okay, that's bad. That sucks for her. Maybe that's a typo, but this is the link directly from the New York Times. Maybe they're doing this.
1:28:06 - Ed Zitron
Oh, it might be the forwarding like crap they put on top of everything. I don't know.
1:28:11 - Speaker 6
Emily.
1:28:13 - Jeff Jarvis
No.
1:28:13 - Leo Laporte
I typed it in by hand. Emily was trying to speak Go ahead, emily.
1:28:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
You're so sweet, jeff. Thank you Well, more power to her. I think anyone who goes independent after having, you know, some serious institutional giants supporting you until now, that's a huge leap. So good for her. On that, I wish she had just embraced that instead of saying she's going to be like an antidote to the Washington Post.
I think she can just do something different and not have to trample on where she came from, and for that reason it felt more of like a rage effort. That's never good. You shouldn't start something just because you want to, like make fun of somebody else. It didn't feel right.
1:28:56 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a very mature thing to say, Emily, and you're right to that extent. However, in the chum structure here, I can't wait for Taylor to also be a media critic. I spent two hours recording a podcast yesterday with David Fulkenflik which is not out yet and it was uncomfortable because I'm criticizing the New York Times and the Washington Post and big old media and he's extremely defensive of it when I'm trying to press him to be in a position, as a media writer, to look at what's happening right now with the huge wave of anger at these institutions the New York Times and the Washington Post and he's just defending them instead, which is bothering me. And he did go after.
1:29:38 - Ed Zitron
Taylor, I think in a very unfair way.
1:29:39 - Jeff Jarvis
No reason he was used by the right wing. He had to be sophisticated enough to know that and I frankly dread when this podcast is going to come out, because it's going to be edited down to nothing. And he filibustered a lot because he put a radio guy in front of a microphone and they never stop Right, leo. And so, yeah, taylor is her own character. I think that I've seen other cases like this, where she started as a blogger and then they try to say oh, you're cool, come into the institution, and she never fully, completely fit in the institution because she saw the internet her way, wanted to cover it her way and got in trouble with the institution that way, because of her social media, she covers social media, she's a creature of that social media, and then she gets in trouble for being what she covers.
1:30:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
No, she never fit, no yeah, but it's fine she doesn't need to fit the institution, like she can just be not right for that role. And there can still. The washington post can still exist, like it's fine there's no reason that both can't coexist like right the washington post is badly broken.
1:30:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Why does she have to be fixed? I'm hoping to hear her voice about what it is. What is she fixing?
1:30:48 - Ed Zitron
She's describing literally what everyone else says ever whenever they leave a major media outlet every single time. Maybe that tells us something in that. It says there's a big opportunity in claiming that you are the expert, while the legacy media isn't.
1:31:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I spent 50 years in this career. That's how I fit all that in Never a great start to a poem and I now worry that I have. I now worry and this is going to be like your confession earlier. I now worry that I have wasted my professional life in this field that is utterly right now, broken Legacy media, incumbent media. I have lost great faith in.
1:31:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, what would you like to see change?
1:31:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I do it. I started a program in engagement journalism and 10 years of that set out graduates who are really changing news in ways. But the school that I just quit I quit because they screwed up the program and my colleague who ran that program that I started is now elsewhere and I'm going to help her run it elsewhere. But we went through that because that institution wanted to know oh no, you can't be mean to the New York Times, you can't criticize the New York Times. And so I see this happening all around and I think the New York Times right now is severely broken, which disappoints me tremendously because I did depend upon it. I did think it was wonderful, and I don't know what they're doing in the face of fascism. And I did think it was wonderful and I don't know what they're doing in the face of fascism. And I think that's what Taylor also sees and I think she should be bloody well free to talk about that and to bring that perspective from the inside outside.
1:32:17 - Leo Laporte
Let me play a bit of her video I can't get to her website.
1:32:22 - Ed Zitron
Like 100, like apples and oranges. Sorry, man Like yeah.
1:32:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Leo, so she goes start like a couple breaks in like a couple minutes and yeah okay, not my background in independent journalism this is handy that emily can see your screen, not gamers there we go.
1:32:39 - Leo Laporte
She has no creators dominate online coverage. Let's start with that. Here we go don't.
1:32:44 - Taylor Lorenz
There's a reason that some of the biggest internet culture stories today from crypto scams to bad behavior, from YouTube's biggest stars to thoughtful cultural commentary about online niches comes from content creators, not the traditional media, and I don't think that's a failure or reflection on the many brilliant and amazing journalists still working in the traditional world. Literally every tech reporter I've worked with has been so amazing and brilliant and there are so many talented internet culture, reporters who have been laid off because the business model of legacy media is so fundamentally broken.
There's also a lot of really amazing editors at certain places that get it.
That's positive to office, where memes fuel the stock market, where the boundaries between mainstream culture and internet culture are so deeply intertwined that it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
The internet isn't just another beat. It's a living, breathing ecosystem that transforms rapidly and unpredictably. The pace, the culture, the very nature of how information spreads online is so fundamentally different than anything that ever came before it, and legacy media in its current form is simply not built to cover this world. These institutions were designed for a different era, where news was slower, more centralized, where a few gatekeepers could control the narrative, where reporters certainly didn't have direct access to their audiences in the same way and where institutional power prevailed. But the internet has blown all of that up and, as the landscape has evolved, it has become clear to me that the legacy media is no longer the right primary environment for the type of work that I want to do. I've always operated in this weird liminal space where I've been labeled a content creator, an influencer, as much as a journalist, and the truth is that I'm both. I've always been both.
1:34:27 - Leo Laporte
But that's always been my problem. By the way, the legacy media is not set up for people like me In today's media environment.
1:34:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
these silly distinctions between who's a real, but she's going to fight this with a sub-stack, yeah.
1:34:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Like she already had Barry Weiss is worth.
1:34:40 - Ed Zitron
God knows now.
1:34:47 - Taylor Lorenz
Barry Weiss, you really, and I can't stand her.
1:34:49 - Ed Zitron
And do you think Barry Weiss has done any of this?
1:34:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I can't stand Barry Weiss, I shouldn't have even brought it up.
1:34:55 - Emily Dreibelbis
It kind of feels like she just didn't get the time. She wanted to be the star reporter or something at the Washington Post. She writes on niche topics. She should work for Vice.
1:35:05 - Ed Zitron
She's also correct on a lot of the stuff she's, or she should do what she's doing right now, or just do what she's doing and that's fine.
1:35:11 - Emily Dreibelbis
Why does she?
1:35:11 - Leo Laporte
have to just leave it. She's right that the media that she worked for isn't really designed to cover the stuff the way she wanted to cover it.
1:35:20 - Speaker 6
She's absolutely right.
1:35:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, why?
1:35:22 - Jeff Jarvis
not, oh God. This is what I lived through, where I watched the new york times just dismiss we're talking about taylor lorenz at washington post.
1:35:32 - Ed Zitron
I'll give you some before ed I'm aware new york times.
1:35:36 - Jeff Jarvis
She kind of couldn't survive there. The whole story about chugi I think she had because they they thought the new york times thought blogs are awful and terrible. And I got into public arguments with the then editor of the new york times. I can show you the whole thing. And then they suddenly said, oh no, these are cool, and they had somebody starting blogs. They started blogs, they brought people like taylor and then they said, oh no, we don't like this that's not how taylor got hired at the new york times at all.
1:35:58 - Ed Zitron
Jeff, what you're talking about. She never had a blog she was at the atlantic before she was at new york times.
1:36:04 - Leo Laporte
But I think the problem is that the stuff? That she covers mainstream media considers ephemera and to some degree, compared to the stuff that they like to cover the Congress and the White House and stuff, it is ephemeral. I think it needs to be covered. I think that she's right.
1:36:25 - Speaker 6
The place to cover. It is not in Washington Post or New York Times or the.
1:36:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Atlantic. But why not you? She can write it. She wrote her book. It's culture book was very good society. That's a snobby way to look at the internet. That is a huge force in.
1:36:34 - Leo Laporte
I just think it goes too fast for these things and the other. There's another, bigger problem. That's what's wrong which is which is the economics of mainstream media, are that there has to be a big corporation that owns it. That's behind it. If it's not jeff bezos or the salzburgers, it's comcast. And that's a problem because those big corporations have a huge conflict of interest and I would I thankfully substack is invested in by trustee star wars maybe she made a bad choice on platform bar and Barry Weiss.
1:37:08 - Speaker 6
And you know what she?
1:37:09 - Leo Laporte
posted this on YouTube. You could probably make the same case that YouTube isn't the best place to be either. Far worse on Substack. It's hard to say where if you want to reach a large audience. I mean, we just do our own thing and we post it everywhere and we're not dependent on anybody.
1:37:27 - Speaker 6
I think I just take.
1:37:28 - Ed Zitron
Go ahead.
1:37:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, I just take issue with this term mainstream media which has just become this buzzword in the past like 5, 10 years, particularly with people like Elon Musk or other right-wing people just using that to get a platform and say I'm right, I'm better than all of this.
And it's just suspect to me and it's not specific enough. So, like I work for PCMag, I don't think that's been around for 40 years, but I don't think anyone considers it like mainstream media, like if you're talking about the Washington Post, you're talking about the Washington Post or you're talking about New York Times. Just mainstream media is like just disparaging, I would say just journalism in general.
1:38:08 - Jeff Jarvis
And I don journalism in general and I don't, I don't like that, I don't think that's useful. I talk about incumbent media, that is to say legacy but it's still.
1:38:11 - Ed Zitron
It's still the same thing, though it's not useful.
1:38:14 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a buzzword and it's also something that I consider inherently manipulative also this is a personal thing it's also not mainstream because it doesn't include a whole bunch of our society that are not represented in these media outlets. So mainstream itself is a wishful by those media outlets.
1:38:31 - Ed Zitron
But also there's a very big thing, and this is just a personal one. If I did a big launch of a new property and I got a bunch of media attention, everyone was talking about you, know what I would have done? Published a goddamn blog.
1:38:43 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, lead by example.
1:38:46 - Ed Zitron
That is actually upsetting to me because you know what, and again as a mate. But you know what? This is just? Oh, you got all the attention. We didn't even put something out there. Legacy media is publishing all day they are.
They have more barriers to publishing than you do. Why Where's the blog? And that's the thing If you want to do. If she ends up just doing more influencer blonky made thing fun with donkey, like the washington post had, or influencers just doing things with the government what change is being made in the coverage? What is being done differently? Because I agree with emily, the whole, like I'm against the legacy media thing is just kind of thin and, quite frankly, if she doesn't do anything different, she's just part of the legacy media, is just kind of thin and, quite frankly, if she doesn't do anything different, then she's just part of the legacy media. She just kind of grew out of it.
1:39:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's the classic argument Like I, I'm the only one who can save the media or something, and that's always, always suspect what would you recommend they won't tell you what would be the path that you would recommend to her Also make a living Pub.
1:39:48 - Jeff Jarvis
What would be the path that you would recommend to her Also make a living Published.
1:39:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
She's not going to make she could make $130,000 per year at New York Times. She's not going to make that on her sub stack.
1:39:57 - Leo Laporte
People may warn that on a sub stack. That might be one of the reasons she's on sub stack.
1:40:01 - Taylor Lorenz
Good for her, then they probably offered her a packet of money.
1:40:04 - Leo Laporte
I would guess they didn't't. They would have announced it um like I don't think they announce every. They always do.
1:40:10 - Ed Zitron
No, they do they do joint pr stuff. Um, I don't like how they run things, I don't like who they give money to, but that's how it works there. Here's the thing she could do and this is not me being an asshole publish stuff. That's how you actually build a business.
1:40:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
She will, she will, she will.
1:40:29 - Jeff Jarvis
She said one to three times a week.
1:40:31 - Speaker 6
Like that's what you have to do.
1:40:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, she has videos and do podcasts.
1:40:36 - Ed Zitron
I think the people that I work with I heart radio and cool zone media. I know it's funny saying I heart radio is like they're the most legacy media. But what they've got going on with cool zone media, with like behind the bastards 16 on with cool zone media with like behind the bastards 16th minute uh, weird little guys. And better offline is that they give you a fairly long lead time to build an audience. That's actually how these mainstream media companies should be doing it. They should effectively be doing lost leading operations for years to build up an audience for each person so that they don't lose people to substack they hate that, though.
1:41:03 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you why they hate that because those people then become a brand and do leave anyway.
1:41:08 - Ed Zitron
Unless, of course, you make the conditions for them. So it's good enough to stay they always do.
1:41:14 - Jeff Jarvis
That's rare, and who gets those?
1:41:16 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, because Robert Evans famously left Cool Zone Media after Behind the Bastards became one of the top 20 podcasts in the world. I remember that happening when it didn't Like. Here's the thing, Leo you can't just unilaterally assume that things will never change just because they don't confirm your biases, don't? I know that sometimes you have to accept that there are different ways of doing things.
1:41:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm just telling you, ed, from deep experience the reason these companies don't want to build up a big byline, a powerful byline, is because they invest all that money and then that byline whether itline, whether it's Taylor or whoever you were talking about, who I've never heard of goes out and does their own thing.
1:41:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I sat in those meetings in Condé Nast.
1:41:55 - Ed Zitron
I never invest in our writers, then Great stuff.
1:41:58 - Leo Laporte
Jesus Christ, man that's why they don't do it.
1:42:01 - Ed Zitron
They don't do it because it's a thing Are you saying they should or they shouldn't? Because maybe that's's you're saying they should.
1:42:05 - Leo Laporte
And I'm telling you why they don't.
1:42:07 - Ed Zitron
They don't okay, there's a lot of things they should do, but okay then okay, I don't, it's it hurts his bit.
1:42:13 - Leo Laporte
Us we've done. We've we've invested lots of money into young talent, who's then gone off and said, well, I'd like money if you actually in hundreds of thousands of dollars, which for us is a significant amount of money?
1:42:23 - Ed Zitron
did they provide you value when you were giving them that money? No Well, I don't want to. I mean, I don't have any rank. I don't want to, I don't for a service Hold on.
1:42:32 - Leo Laporte
I wish I had that microphone button they had at the debate last night.
1:42:37 - Ed Zitron
We had a lovely guy who.
1:42:39 - Leo Laporte
I still I still deeply respect and love. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a very, very successful podcast. Halfway, you know, it was building, we were starting to make money on it. He decided I want to take this to YouTube and we let him, because I'm a nice guy and I'm not going to say no. But he did not do as well. But that's not the point. The point is that was sunk, that money was sunk. It's gone and this is what every media outlet considers. You build up a byline. The real risk is that person leaves and it's hard to keep them. I don't know what you have to offer them to keep them.
1:43:14 - Emily Dreibelbis
I think that's the same as any business, though. You invest in your talent, you train people. Sometimes, let's say that you're training an engineer at Facebook. You teach them everything you know. You invest huge amounts of money in their salary and their training. Then they go get a job at Apple or they found their own company. Here's the big difference On media.
1:43:31 - Leo Laporte
You're doing it in public and everybody knows. If you promote a byline, if you promote a name, everybody knows that name and suddenly you are a commodity. It's a lot different if you're an engineer, by the way. This is why, for years, the video game companies wouldn't let people put bylines in their video games.
1:43:47 - Jeff Jarvis
The video game companies wouldn't let people put bylines on their video games. They were terrified. Yeah, newspapers and magazines did not have bylines for many years time. I was at time inc when byline started there now is that a good idea?
1:43:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I'm just saying I'm only responding to your statement, ed, that they should do this, because I'll tell you why they don't. Yeah, maybe they should do it. I'm not saying they should.
1:44:04 - Ed Zitron
Okay, cool then we actually agree, like I know why they don't, and I agree with that logic and that's exactly why they don't.
1:44:10 - Leo Laporte
The problem is the that's what makes them mainstream media is this kind of if also if you're a vision of what exactly what they did with taylor.
1:44:20 - Ed Zitron
It's exactly what they did with taylor. They gave her to, they helped her do media like they. They gave her these and she does. By the way, taylor's great with me. She goes out and she gets it on her own. But guess what? They also took advantage of her, her presence. They built, they took advantage of the byline. Just as she did oh yeah, like then, that's kind of it. I just wonder what she can't. Yeah, it's mutual.
1:44:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, if you're andrew ross sorkin and you run dealbook and you're on cnbc and you run conferences, god knows how much on CNBC? And you run conferences, God knows how much, and they keep them in because he builds a franchise there and he has the freedom to do it. If you're a columnist at the New York times or the Washington post, you've got a pretty nice gig.
1:44:58 - Ed Zitron
It'd be as racist as possible and they won't do anything. Like you can. You can say that people people aren't human Like you can call for shooting protesters. It's great. Being at the New York Times is brilliant these days, so pissed off about those opinion columnists, by the way, Like the worst of journalists, I agree.
1:45:17 - Leo Laporte
Let me ask you, jeff, because you see the inside operations, is it kind of that they want the opinion columnists to stimulate exactly that response? I'm actually really curious about this. That's the point of it.
1:45:29 - Jeff Jarvis
they want people to be pissed off. So I um, to an extent, yes, but let me. Let me give me a second here for a little nuance on this, a rare moment of nuance. When I complain about the new york times, the ocean post, people on twitter and the socials say they're in the tank for trump. I say that's too simple, or they? They just want to get people angry. Same thing that's said about Facebook or about Twitter or anyplace else. I say that's too simplistic. I think something more nuanced and different is going on.
My theory about the times goes in a few ways. One is about the death of mass media. I'll spare you that today. You can read my book. The other one, jay Rosen at New York University, wrote in 2017 that he noted the moment when the majority support of the Times shifted from advertising to subscription, and he said this is going to cause a change in the relationship of the newsroom to the public. And he was very right and very prescient, as he tends to be. But it happened in a paradoxical way. Is that when AG Salzberger, the sixth generation publisher of the Times, says that he values independence above everything else? My theory is that what he's trying to prove when he pisses off the audience is that he's independence of them. You don't own us, and that's kind of a newsroom ethos. It's been true of journalists for years. We're independent.
If the business ever asks you to do anything, you go out of your way.
1:46:51 - Leo Laporte
That's fascinating. I do the same thing with Lisa. I don't do anything to cultivate an audience if I can help it.
1:46:58 - Ed Zitron
To be fair, I do the same thing with my newsletter. I'm just like you, little kid.
1:47:04 - Jeff Jarvis
That's beneath me. I think that the Times, in a time of dying media, I mean the Times, god bless it, it's winner-take-all. The three top brands in news in the US New York Times, washington Post and Wall Street Journal take 63% of all online news revenue.
1:47:17 - Emily Dreibelbis
Which is sad. They own it. It's winner-take-most. Yes, that's not a good metric.
1:47:20 - Jeff Jarvis
What's all the rest?
1:47:22 - Emily Dreibelbis
I mean there should be more local papers. The New York Times should be for New York.
1:47:26 - Jeff Jarvis
And the New York Times isn't New York anymore. A and B. It competes with every metro paper in the country, because every metro paper in the country, almost with some exceptions, is owned by hedge funds. Now who've cut it to the marrow? We're all crap. That's been the case for years. When I used to edit the Sunday San Francisco Examiner Chronicle in San Francisco, I'd go.
Sunday. I forgot about the Examiner. Yeah, remember that I'd go to have brunch on Sunday morning because, hey, it was not that long ago and I would carry with me the Sunday New York Times and people would say where did you get that? The Chronicle sucks. And I'm thinking I just spent all last night putting it out.
1:48:00 - Taylor Lorenz
Thank you very much so.
1:48:03 - Jeff Jarvis
It's been ever thus to an extent. But the Times competes with all those local papers.
1:48:07 - Leo Laporte
I used to get both the Chronicle Examiner and New York Times when I lived in San Francisco.
1:48:13 - Jeff Jarvis
So I think that there's something going on, didn't?
1:48:14 - Leo Laporte
the Internet solve this by creating a huge variety of voices. I mean, do we care that there's only three national newspapers?
1:48:24 - Jeff Jarvis
In terms of survival yeah. In terms of making money and being able to support the actual journalism yes only so many people, in other words you can't have a local newspaper, that's internet only you can't san francisco
1:48:36 - Emily Dreibelbis
standard oh yeah, there's tons of them yeah, there's tons of them yeah so hasn't that solved the problem?
1:48:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, you're talking about problem, it helps, but this is my main question do I still care about the big old legacy media or?
1:48:48 - Leo Laporte
do I care?
1:48:49 - Speaker 6
only about the new ones, I care mainly now about the new ones.
1:48:52 - Emily Dreibelbis
I think you should care about the content that speaks to you. It should be evolving.
1:48:57 - Leo Laporte
And you shouldn't care where it comes from, though, right.
1:49:00 - Emily Dreibelbis
That's my favorite plot prop. There's a level of trust that comes with having an institution behind you. Sorry.
1:49:05 - Leo Laporte
I think, emily though I think that's exactly the point is that we no longer trust the New York times.
1:49:11 - Jeff Jarvis
These reasons. That's the problem, and or we know. I think we still do.
1:49:15 - Emily Dreibelbis
I think plenty of people do, I do, I do yeah.
1:49:18 - Ed Zitron
Sure, of course, like here's the thing, the New York times gets all of this stuff. That open AI story that came out. That was really the foundation of my piece. I just put out 87-page post, my 978.
1:49:31 - AI
32 minutes. That's all. It's just 32 small minutes. Is it worth that?
1:49:36 - Ed Zitron
Aaron Griffith and Mike Isaac of the Times, two of the hardest working reporters out there and they have the resources from the Times to get it done. But also, being at the Times, they will get read more but also people will actually trust it. People will be better informed. There is a necessity to have trusted outlets.
1:49:52 - Leo Laporte
That's what people always tell me is pay no attention to the op-ed pages at the Journal and the Times, because the reporters there are quality and have high integrity.
1:50:02 - Ed Zitron
Jeff Horwitz at the Wall Street Journal. He has done some of the most incredible stuff about Facebook and Wells is well over there. I forget. I like Berber Gin in Tom Doughton doing some of the best enterprise stuff. I mean Kashmir Hill Forbes, I think she was at. She was at Gizmodo as well.
1:50:15 - Emily Dreibelbis
She's probably the best writer on Facebook People are not just solo operations, to like what you get at an institution. You get editors, people who can make sure that what you're putting out is correct, that it's written well. It's a higher quality structure with people who are experienced.
And you know, taylor is relatively young and like having more experienced, older people around her could help her, you know, guide her in the right way. So there is, you know, use or maybe a time and a place for institution, and maybe there's a time and a place for her to be on her own for a little bit.
1:50:49 - Jeff Jarvis
If I may go back to my, to my prop here, this is the all the newspapers in America in 1900.
1:50:55 - Leo Laporte
In New York there were and, by the way, the print in that is probably so small. You need a magnifying glass, yeah.
1:51:01 - Emily Dreibelbis
That's a cool book. That was a very cool book.
1:51:09 - Jeff Jarvis
And book, and so what happened, I think, in part two, was that when television came along and killed the second and third papers in towns, people felt trapped.
When I was starting the online sites for advance, for Cunningham Astor, their newspapers, and I did a focus group in Cleveland, the people in Cleveland, the new houses, had bought the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then the other paper died, and that happened 30 years before and they were still bitter that they were stuck with one paper. They didn't have a choice, and so their anger came out in a way that I think is also happening with the New York Times is people feel trapped by it because they don't have that many choices. And I read the Guardian, I read the FT, I read the Journal, which pisses me off constantly. I read Politico, which pisses me off as much, but I also try to read Teen Vogue, I read the 19th, I read the Griot. I read other places as well. I read weird German papers trying to find some more voice out there. But that's a lot of work and people aren't going to do that.
1:52:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think you're unusual in this respect. I'm weird.
1:52:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm freaky, I was freaky as Ed. Is a low-information electorate a problem? I don't think the problem is information. This is my weird theory. It goes back to Hannah Arant before. I think it's about belonging. I think it's about deep societal issues. I think it's about Ed talking about loneliness, too, and lack of community issues. I think it's about ed talking about loneliness too, and I think that that's how do you imagine a journalism built around belonging?
1:52:32 - Leo Laporte
I don't what often happens is you find a community and that community has a belief, and so you participate in that belief but you didn't have just one size fits all.
1:52:41 - Jeff Jarvis
You had, you know, in 1900 there was a newspaper for finnish sailors cared about what Finnish sailors did right and it had value to them. And when I worked at the Daily News, the Daily News had one set of readers in Queens and the New York Post had a different set of readers before it was completely garbage. And the New York Times had a different set of readers and the Queens Chronicle had a different set of readers, and so on. And you go back in the days when you had the brooklyn eagle and other things people had. It wasn't an echo chamber, it was that you had something that you felt.
1:53:12 - Leo Laporte
But I'm gonna I'm gonna bet that there is a finnish fisherman's blog out there. That is a wonderful gathering place for finish that's the hope I had.
1:53:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I give you something?
1:53:23 - Ed Zitron
personal here. So my newsletter is about that 44 000 subscribers, when at 300, I've been writing the same crap the whole time and I've made it very personal. I've like, if it bleeds, it leads Talk about my depression, anxiety, loneliness, throughout these things, even in some of the more rigorous analysis things, because who gives a crap? Like I talk about what I want, no one pays me for this and people love it. And we have like a growing because who gives a crap? Like I talk about what I want, no one pays me for this and people love it. And we have like a growing Reddit for Better Offline.
I talk about my own stuff. I get mad at manga on Better Offline sometimes and I have my email address on there and anyone listening I think Jujutsu Kaisen complete mess at the end. Anyway, people really respond to this and I think what it is is. And the one thing I will say that legacy media has messed up is they drain the personality from writers with house style and I feel like that's why the op-ed columns are so aggressive. That's why because there they're allowed to have personality. So you have this amorphous New York Times style where it's just same with Washbow to an extent, but they open it up, Like Jeff Fowler over there, is allowed to have a lot of fun. I love that and Shira Vida as well.
1:54:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
A lot of people don't want personality in reporting. They want facts. They don't want your opinion.
1:54:37 - Ed Zitron
There's more character to it. I think is what I'm saying.
1:54:42 - Emily Dreibelbis
I think it's a very slippery slope.
1:54:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me tell you a funny story about the Times. When the Times wanted to get into local blogging and it's the journalism school that was right next door we said, well, let's go together and we started a blog in one neighborhood in Brooklyn and the Times, of course, had to devote two or three people to this and we said, well, we're going to go and get all the people in Brooklyn to write for this and talk about their lives and talk about their lives and talk about their events and all that. The Times insisted on trying to edit them all into Timesese. They couldn't understand that there was a value in their voices and their experience and their perspective, because that's all they do and it is what they do of value, and they do add that to the writer's value. So they were incapable and in the end they said, well, this is too expensive. Well, it wouldn't be if you didn't try to edit everybody.
1:55:26 - Leo Laporte
This is why people love Studs Terkel.
1:55:31 - Jeff Jarvis
We need to get back to the days of like I don't have any idea who Studs Terkel is. Either of you ever heard of Studs Terkel. Is that like a baseball?
1:55:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
player. No, but I kind of wish my name was Studs Terkel.
1:55:41 - Leo Laporte
Read his book Working you can find it at your local library. Kids, it's a great book where the voices of the people are presented. He did oral histories.
1:55:51 - Ed Zitron
One thing I will say is I do think for industries Emily, I think you're right there can be a slippery slope when it gets into that. So you have opinion writers with verticals. You cover AI and EVs, right, Someone like. Also, your work has character and opinion in it, Like that's great. I think legacy media needs those columns. I choose a random one like Eric Benderoff. Remember Eric? Whatever happened to Eric Benderoff? I think he was a tech columnist.
1:56:19 - Emily Dreibelbis
I do both. I do news and then if I have an opinion, that's categorized separately on the site.
1:56:26 - Ed Zitron
Do we need more of?
1:56:27 - Emily Dreibelbis
that. There is a clear distinction. If I have an opinion, that's categorized separately on the site. Do we need more of that? Yeah, there is a clear distinction. If I'm writing about the news, I'm writing about the news and the numbers and what happened in the series sequence of events that I'm aware of. If I'm putting my opinion on how the iPhone 16 launch was dumb, that's separate.
1:56:40 - Jeff Jarvis
And I want to hear that from you. I want to know exactly how you have and you will.
1:56:45 - Emily Dreibelbis
I'll let you know, but you need to have straight up news so you can read my opinion and see if you agree with it, because you also have the information. So you need both has failed on it.
1:57:04 - Ed Zitron
They've done the reporting real well and I think the tech industry has this problem across the board. They're really good at the reporting. Some of the best tech reporting in the world is happening right now. Some of the best finance reporting within tech is happening right now, and there is bugger all analysis and mastheads like the Times and the Journal could be doing really incredible work analyzing this stuff, saying the kind of things I'm saying.
I refuse to believe I'm the only person thinking this way. I know I'm not. I'm not unique and there should be more of it, and there definitely should be in the legacy media and I don't know if they don't want to. There's probably not a fun. It's not like, oh, they're trying to do something, it's just they don't want to. They want to keep the objectivity, which doesn't exist, and I just feel like what emily does is exactly it needs to be like reporting and analysis opinion from the same person trying to digest it. Who knows if I agree with them or not. But god damn, give me something. Tell me a little bit about what to think about what I'm seeing. Help me digest it, more than just a few facts lined up, and I think this is where the time's kind of fails.
1:58:09 - Emily Dreibelbis
The post, again, has done much better with this I think people think the times has become too opinionated, so that is why people don't like it well, I thought it was very interesting and I think a little unnecessary that they supported kamala harris like why, why do we have newspapers like supporting political candidates?
1:58:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I that's part of their culture and tradition. Yeah, that's part of it.
1:58:32 - Ed Zitron
I don't really like that to oh, I don't disagree, I just like they've done it for a while, like to every every newspaper I've ever read has endorsements in election season.
1:58:44 - Speaker 6
Maybe I'm just paying attention.
1:58:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm just paying attention this time I they always do and I pay attention to that it goes way back.
1:58:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
In fact, in the old days I didn't like it.
1:58:52 - Jeff Jarvis
They were party related. The New York Tribune was a Republican paper and the transparency was all there. Everybody knew that that was their perspective. Horace Greeley fought against slavery. He also fought against alcohol and against, uh, slavery. He also fought against alcohol, uh, and everybody knew that was his stand and that's how he did it. Um, uh, the thing about the new york times is because it's no longer a new york paper, it's just said it's not going to endorse local candidates anymore, which means it's not going to help you with that position. Look at the mayor we have in new york. Um, we need help, um, so, but yeah, I think it's. I think it's an outmoded need. It's a tradition that's been going on forever. But with so much opinion out now, you don't really need them to say we think this.
1:59:36 - Emily Dreibelbis
Okay, well, maybe that's why I didn't like it. I was like it's weird, there's another way to look at this.
1:59:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I would say so in the Springfield Cats Eating Cats and Dogs horrible. Libel Jamelel bowie, who's a brilliant columnist. I think so many times he's like.
1:59:53 - Ed Zitron
He's an example of what everyone he's, so he's. So he brings his contact.
1:59:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Credible poster too so, yeah, and his, his tiktoks are amazing. So in tiktok he brought the history and explanation and he explained that as blood libel and as the roots there. Now that is the kind of context and history that I think people need. But you don't see that because that seems too out of bounds in the New York Times. And so the New York. So I had this discussion with Folk and Flick just yesterday where, well, the Wall Street Journal sent someone to Springfield and they fact-checked and they found out that the cat was actually in the basement and wasn't eaten and they stopped at sorry, put your hands over the ears of the cat. So they stopped at the idea, we fact-checked.
2:00:38 - Speaker 6
So now, our job is done.
2:00:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, if you ever think that Ed is a difficult guy.
2:00:46 - Leo Laporte
just look at that. Somebody likes Ed. Somebody likes him yeah.
2:00:50 - Jeff Jarvis
What's the name? Ed, this is. Howl, Howl yes like Howl's Moving Castle. Howl's Moving Castle. You have no reference. I have no idea. You don't know that it sounds very British.
2:01:04 - Emily Dreibelbis
No, it's an animated, it is actually based on a Welsh book. Isn't it? Studio Ghibli? It is, yeah, it's super famous. So it's some sort of weird Howl like, do you? Just stop consuming media.
2:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Ginsberg's poem Howl.
2:01:19 - Emily Dreibelbis
This is a really interesting discussion, because we do have just different generations, and so it's cool.
2:01:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Imagine poor Paris.
2:01:28 - Leo Laporte
here, she, she, she calls it the show show she does with her grandpa Actually dad's. Or my two days. She says dads, but she's being kind. Yeah Well, that's a perfect example is that newspapers endorse candidates. It's like right.
2:01:45 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't know that. That's all they do.
2:01:47 - Leo Laporte
That it's like right right like why you don't know that that's all they do, that's their, that's one of their biggest roles, um, but I want, did scooter x do a podcast change log?
2:01:57 - Jeff Jarvis
it did I have it so you have it?
2:01:59 - Leo Laporte
yeah, all right, let's take a break when we come back it's a new kind of change log.
2:02:04 - Speaker 6
It's Square X's podcast changelog.
2:02:09 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this Week in Google a very unusual version featuring.
2:02:12 - Speaker 6
Howl the.
2:02:13 - Leo Laporte
Cat Ed Zittrain from Better Offlinecom, which is coincidentally online, ms Emily Dry Bulbous, who is putting up with his sausage fest beautifully, pcmagcom and, of course, jeff Jarvis.
2:02:33 - Taylor Lorenz
Everybody knows.
2:02:36 - Leo Laporte
The studs turkle of New Jersey. Thank you for watching. We appreciate it. We want to encourage those of you who watch and enjoy the show a slim and growing, shrinking number. The show a slim and growing shrinking number. But nevertheless, if you do enjoy the show, I want you to make sure you check out club twit, because it's a way you can support this kind of content. God knows, no one else wants to support it. Uh, just go to twittv slash club twit seven dollarsa month you get ad-free versions of all the shows. Uh, you get a access to the discord. You get a whole lot more. Uh, and I think mostly you get the good feeling to know that you are helping us stay online doing the things that we do best. So thank you. And we have a new referral plan. Thank you, patrick, for reminding me. Twittv slash club twit slash referral if you're already a member, tell a friend when they join. You'll get an extra month free.
2:03:30 - Taylor Lorenz
Yay.
2:03:31 - Leo Laporte
Dot TV. Slash Club Twit slash referral. We do have some special events coming up. In Club Twit we're going to do Stacy's Book Club. Stacy Higginbotham, you know, does return for the book club. That'll be coming October 25th. Looking forward to that. The book is really good. It's called Service Model and I'm loving it, read by the author. So it's not yet on our schedule but we have decided.
On October 25th, the week before coffee time, we're going to do a reprise of our coffee show that I did this time featuring a connoisseur of coffee. Beans who actually has a company called beans with a Z sends out coffee from remarkable roasters all over the world twice a month, so that's kind of cool. We'll talk about the bean and Micah's crafting corner October 16th. Lots of things going on. If you're not a member, please join twit. Lots of things going on. If you're not a member, please join twittv.
Slash club twit and I'm going to do some other things we're working on. We did a Chris Marquardt segment which is available to Club Twit members on the TwitPlus feed. He's a photo review. We're going to do that every month. I'm going to get Dick DiBartolo on and Johnny Jett and some of our other regulars to say hi. Meanwhile, it is now time. Are you going to explain it first? Should I? Yeah, I think you should. So Notebook LM is a very cool thing from Google. We actually had one of the creators on the show, a few months ago, the editorial director Stephen Johnson.
Stephen Johnson. The idea is it's something called retrieval, augmented generation. You provide the documents and then it does a summary or lets you ask questions, that kind of thing. In this case, a new feature of notebook LM is it will create a two voice podcast out of the materials you give it. Scooter X, who is a long time club member he's in our discord. He was a mod for our IRC for many years and has always provided us with Many additional changelog links More than we can, ever More than we can get to has made his own Google changelog using notebook LM. So, because I hate Doing the Google changelog, I am going to at least this time give it a shot. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for scooter x's google changelog, the Google Change Log. Can't wait to hear this.
2:06:08 - AI
Well, google fans, are you ready for another deep dive this week?
2:06:12 - Leo Laporte
it's all things Google this is not ScooterX, by the way. This is an AI voice.
2:06:18 - Emily Dreibelbis
I don't think I've seen this many updates and announcements in such a short time frame ever.
2:06:23 - AI
Same here, and they cover so much ground too. We're talking everything from AI-powered email features to self-driving taxis.
2:06:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
It really highlights how Google is present in so many different aspects of our lives.
2:06:34 - Leo Laporte
All right, enough enough, let's get to the change log. That's a great point.
2:06:37 - AI
And I think it's the perfect place to start our deep dive Every notebook podcast is like this Takes so long. Gmail podcasts like this take so long. What can you tell us about these new Okay, so this is 10 minutes long.
2:06:48 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, no.
2:06:49 - Emily Dreibelbis
Everyone's saying this is such a cool tech but it really is tweaked.
2:06:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think it's only cool for people who don't want to read or in some other way ingest information that for some reason they've got podcast brain and the only way they can understand something is if they have two hosts jib-jabbing about it. Thank God those people exist because I'd have no way to make a living otherwise. But Scooter X says it took about three minutes to build it. Tell you what? We could just put it in the show notes and leave it as an exercise for the listener.
2:07:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Do me a favor, benito, can you just skip forward to any random point, just to see if Once they start actually saying.
2:07:27 - Speaker 6
I don't have a scrubbing tool.
2:07:29 - Leo Laporte
Jeez, you are behind. We didn't give you a scrubbing tool.
2:07:34 - Taylor Lorenz
Not in.
2:07:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Ecamm. It doesn't exist, or I haven't found it yet.
2:07:37 - Leo Laporte
I might have a Where's the link? Is it in the show notes?
2:07:43 - Taylor Lorenz
No, I got it straight from Scooter.
2:07:45 - Jeff Jarvis
X. He sent it to me.
2:07:46 - Leo Laporte
Did you put it in the rundown anywhere?
2:07:48 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I can't. It's an audio file, because I can scrub it. That's okay. It's okay, all right. I just feel bad at Scooter X.
2:07:55 - Leo Laporte
We're going to set up a static elastic in our Discord. We're going to set up a go fund me for a scrubbing tool for uh, for benito, and soon he will have his own scrubbing tool. Uh, okay, I was hoping for 10 minutes of rest, but I guess I'll have to get back to work now. What do you want to talk about, guys? Anything, uh?
2:08:22 - Jeff Jarvis
we've done no stories.
2:08:24 - Leo Laporte
Fidelity has cut the value of twitter, its investment twitter by 79 percent. Remember elon paid 44 billion dollars for fidelity, which was one of the big investors. They put almost 20 billion into it through their blue chip fund. Have marked it down now to $9.4 billion. Does it even matter? Elon is almost a trillionaire, wow.
2:08:51 - Jeff Jarvis
What's wrong with the world. I think that's why.
2:08:56 - Emily Dreibelbis
Sam Altman wants more money. He wants to beat Musk.
2:08:59 - Ed Zitron
I think that we can destroy these guys with a really simple bit of legislation. You should not be able to leverage stock options. If you weren't allowed to leverage stock options, Elon Musk and Sam Orman would not have anywhere near as much money. You should not be able to do that.
2:09:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
You could also make being a billionaire illegal.
2:09:20 - Ed Zitron
I agree.
2:09:21 - Emily Dreibelbis
You could just take the money over a billion and literally everyone would be fine.
2:09:26 - Ed Zitron
I also agree with that.
2:09:28 - Jeff Jarvis
What about carried interest. How would you fix that?
2:09:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
If it keeps growing, you just take it. Thank you. Tax the sucker?
2:09:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, it's problematic for employees who get stock options as part of their compensation package, because then they own, they owe taxes on something that they haven't yet realized.
2:09:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's, that's that's for unrealized gains. That's different. Carried interest is the venture capitalist. Oh yeah. I don't care about them. I think, I think unrealized gains is wrong, because stock can go up and down or go up and down. I think it's a bad plan.
2:10:03 - Leo Laporte
That's a grab by governments. Okay, that was fun.
2:10:11 - Emily Dreibelbis
What other topics do we have?
2:10:12 - Leo Laporte
Okay, here's one, the governor of California has decided to veto the AI safety bill. He's an evil man. Really, it's really interesting the different points of view on this. Um, he said I don't think he's wrong that it would be bad for california's economy because it it, and I think maybe there's something to be said also for the notion that what is ai safety and how do you assure it, and are we really trying to do something?
2:10:45 - Ed Zitron
that's not even what they're doing with it, it's. I don't think he should have vetoed it just because that that doesn't seem to really be particularly democratic in my view, and also it's very clear who's welcome to the united states, where the veto is a, but at the same time, the actual harms of ai right now are not any of the things they're freaking out like you should have this legislation. You should make it so that and they did actually agree with this one, training data they did the training data bill.
2:11:10 - Leo Laporte
So now, that's appropriate this bill is really based on sci-fi.
2:11:16 - Ed Zitron
Uh, dangers you know, they say well, you gotta have a kill switch in case robocop goes crazy. This is what open ai wants you to believe.
2:11:23 - Leo Laporte
They want you to be like oh, we're going to create the special robot that comes and steals your chest, beating right like newsome described the bill as well intentioned, but noted its requirements amounted to stringent regulations that could burden the state's growing and leading artificial intelligence companies. Oh no, uh, he was lobbied hard by uh a lot. Scott weiner is the California senator from the Bay Area who proposed this.
2:11:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
Weiner adding him to the sauce, said Weiner.
2:11:55 - Leo Laporte
But even even I mean a lot of people lobbied hard against this. Elon Musk thought it was a good idea, which to me seems like enough reason to veto it. But who were some of the people that were hitting hard on Gavin Newsom to veto it?
2:12:12 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, I read the opinion it was a multi-page letter from Anthropix CEO that he supported it as well, and the one phrase in that that stuck with me is he said it would be a feasible burden, the different types of testing that they would have to do and the transparency requirements for just the data and how the system works. Because basically, I think what this legislation would do would kind of hold accountable all the testing that OpenAI says they're doing or Google says they're doing, and Anthropic basically came out and said, yeah, we are doing that, so if you want to enforce it, we're fine with it, and so that with me yeah the people who supported this bill, like anthropic, were people who are big on ai safety.
2:12:52 - Leo Laporte
These are the jeffrey hinnons of the world, all people who who are kind of living in that sci-fi fantasy world, what's?
2:12:59 - Speaker 6
the word. You can say the word, the word.
2:13:00 - Leo Laporte
You can say the word Toscreal Thank you, which just communicates nothing to anybody. It's worse than Studs Terkel Google it, people Google he by the way signed a bunch of other anti-AI bills.
2:13:15 - Jeff Jarvis
He did. The others were good. This is false comfort. If you think that, well, we can make AI safe, you cannot anticipate every bad thing that every bad actor would do with it henceforth, and so it's a lie. You put companies in positions where they have to lie to say, well, yeah, it's safe and yeah, I can go to jail, but actually, who knows what some bozo is going to come along and have it do, and so it's that. It's part of the knee. Jerk reflects in a technology development.
2:13:44 - Leo Laporte
I actually like this thing that Newsom said. He says, okay, we cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public. But he said we must settle for a solution that is not informed by an empirical trajectory analysis of AI systems and capabilities informed by an empirical trajectory analysis of AI systems and capabilities. Basically agreeing with you, ed, that people are saying, well, because it's this, it's going to be this in five years, it's going to be this in five years. He says he will work with the legislature on kind of something a little more sensible during the next session.
2:14:18 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I mean, it's just a little fishy to me that he another. What he said before the empirical trajectory thing was that he didn't think the bill should be targeting AI companies over a certain size, and I do think it's interesting that all those companies were lobbying him to not approve it. Right, and also there is some credibility to the size thing, because if you have more money, more data centers, you are creating more powerful technology. So I don't know, I think the fact that he said there's a problem and that he had all this influence he's also trying to run for president someday.
2:14:47 - Leo Laporte
Probably there's just a lot of like personal motivations and I just we there's a longstanding tradition early on in the internet not to regulate it prematurely, like before we really understand it. Maybe we should be careful about regulating it. I think that that is not a bad kind of this is this is masnick.
2:15:04 - Ed Zitron
Thankfully, that approach has led to no harms well, we didn't know what.
2:15:10 - Leo Laporte
We didn't know what we were gonna, so we didn't think about it.
2:15:13 - Ed Zitron
Well, yeah, maybe we should think about it.
2:15:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm not saying we shouldn't think about it, but I think it's hard to know what is already regulating it?
2:15:19 - Emily Dreibelbis
yeah, you're fine, but their bill is a lot better their law is a lot better, so what?
2:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis
does.
2:15:23 - Speaker 6
Masnick say Jeff.
2:15:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Masnick says, my key takeaway from watching the debate over 1047 and other AI bills play out over the last few months is that a lot of people feel that, one, social media is bad, and two, they missed the chance to regulate it when they should have. And three, they don't want want to do that with AI. And therefore, four, they want to overreact and aggressively regulate AI. That's exactly what we were just saying. Perfect math, too. It's just perfect.
But, what do you guys think was overregulating? Specifically about the bill? I think that trying to imagine that at the model level as opposed to the intermediary application level or at the user level, which is critical. If a user comes in and asks to make child porn, who should be responsible for that? The model maker or the user?
2:16:08 - Emily Dreibelbis
Ah, the Section 230 man. Yes, I see.
2:16:13 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's the same thing. Watch out, I'm going to go into Gutenberg. Same thing happened with print. When print started, they beheaded and behanded and burned the technologists, the printers. Then they went after the publishers and the booksellers and finally they said no, no, the author is responsible. And Foucault says that was the birth of the author as we know it now, when responsibility came in. So now the reflex is the same. They say, well, we've got to make these AI models safe and we've got to make them guarantee they're safe, and then we're okay.
2:16:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
But they can't honestly say they're safe, what they define safe, by the way, it's all this emotional thing. This is very similar to some of the provisions in the EU bill. So the EU bill does require companies to expose how their model works. I think they even have to show a regulated. You pass the eu act like criteria, so it is a lot of similarities, but you said they didn't have this.
2:17:07 - Leo Laporte
I feel like the eu is increasingly anti-tech, especially big tech from america, oh yeah oh, and I think it's going to harm them in the long run. It's going to hold them back. Just as you know, their kind of reluctance to to invest capital has held them back in the VC space. That's why they don't have their own Google.
Yeah, I think that this is not necessarily a model for how we should operate in the United States. Let me read on, because Mike says some more things. He says we're living in an age of and this is to the conversation we've been having all day today. We're living in an age of a raging tech moral panic, mostly because other shit is going horribly wrong on a societal level, but no one wants to do the hard work of actually fixing that, because that's hard and people are used to those problems. But tech is new and therefore if we just blame the tech and regulate the tech, surely we'll be doing something good. It's not serious lawmaking, it's performative nonsense from unserious people.
2:18:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I agree with that.
2:18:11 - Emily Dreibelbis
That was his best line.
2:18:14 - Speaker 6
Mike's a very good writer and I think he's very smart.
2:18:16 - Leo Laporte
He's often really smart about this stuff. I don't think we've lost anything by losing that bill.
2:18:23 - Emily Dreibelbis
Let's put it that way well, newsom said he's going to pass another bill, so I don't he won't.
2:18:29 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, I just I don't trust him to you're right.
2:18:32 - Leo Laporte
He's probably getting a lot of money for campaigning from these big companies. There's a lot of lobbying he's thinking long term.
2:18:39 - Emily Dreibelbis
I mean he's probably not. I can. I can give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not purely evil, but certainly every politician has really serious personal motivations, and whether or not that benefits the public depends on the situation. So we might not really know what would have happened if he passed this.
2:18:54 - Jeff Jarvis
He very cleverly signed those other bills. So he said I'm regulating AI. Look at all.
I signed Exactly, it was brilliantly done, it was very cleverly done and he waited and he listened to lots of people. But the real problem, too, is this nomenclature of safety in the Doomers and Anthropic and Teal and Musk and all those is they've corrupted the word that Emily talked about before. It's not about the labor that goes into it. It's not about the labor that's going to be lost. It's not about the bias. It's about going to Mars and not destroying mankind before we do. It's BS of the highest order. It's the worst sales stuff that goes on and you know what I?
just saw an FT headline because I cheat and look at headlines sometimes in the show. Openai asks investors not to back rival startups such as Musk's XAI.
2:19:49 - Ed Zitron
The thing is, this is actually where the mainstream media has failed. This is one which I will point at and say the failure is theirs. The AI conversation has been actively irresponsible. The way the generative AI has been discussed, the unashamed hype that has been built, and really publications like cnbc and actually mainstream tv are actually really to blame here. I think people like marcus brownlee doing the abc show. I think that the multiple different publications that have just blindly accepted this technology that is based on theft, destroying the environment and burning capital without really actually having a good output that really matters. There is no good thing to point at and there's a lot of people just saying, well, yeah, they're burning this money and they destroy the environment and they're going to keep destroying the environment Meanwhile, kevin Roos writes his BS about, about chat, gpt, falling in love with him and all that crap, and he knows better he knows I give.
I give him some credit because he returned to his crypto story and he basically returned to his crypto story and when chris dixon was on, he gave him the business. Really, absolutely yeah, he laid into him casey newton, a coward, a massive coward, a corporate shill mark zuckerberg shill, I don't care. Come at me casey. Um he, he made kevin roos back off when kevin roos was cooking. He was cooking chris dixon on the new york times podcast. He was holding his feet to the fire for the first time someone did it in case newton's like oh no, we couldn't, what?
2:21:28 - Jeff Jarvis
was the basis of the of the uh, was it just? You're selling bs with.
2:21:31 - Ed Zitron
It was his. No, he was saying hey look, you say that andreessen horace doesn't have tokens, they don't hold tokens, but here you do. And he was pointing out real specific stuff and it just sucks. It sucks. The harm of these things is so obvious way more obvious with crypto, with ai. It's just too many people have carried water for these companies. Yeah, it's disgusting all right.
2:21:54 - Leo Laporte
Meanwhile, I have a scrubbing tool, so let's listen to a little more of scooter x's google changelog, can. Can you not hear it? What's going on?
2:22:07 - AI
I don't know it's not coming through here Google is trying to improve the experience for Chrome Ace users.
2:22:11 - Emily Dreibelbis
Totally, which makes you wonder what could they possibly be cooking up next?
2:22:16 - AI
It does. This week has been a whirlwind of Google updates. But I think one thing's for sure they're committed to being innovative, that's for sure.
2:22:24 - Emily Dreibelbis
I agree, and they're always striving to improve their platforms too which is throw up.
2:22:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sorry, I can't, I can't, can't listen, we're so hoping you could replace jesus christ.
2:22:34 - Leo Laporte
So I was really hoping I could do the changelog with this guy, but no I think this notebook ll thing was a good like kind of shock value.
2:22:42 - Emily Dreibelbis
Like almost the first time you use chatats, gpt, it was like, wow, I can spit out all that. This had the same effect, which was cool. But then the hype it burned bright and it burned out.
2:22:52 - Leo Laporte
As does most frankly.
2:22:53 - Jeff Jarvis
AI stuff. It's a color trick.
2:22:55 - Leo Laporte
It's a color trick.
2:22:56 - Jeff Jarvis
I put my entire manuscript in it, and I've been in it twice. The first time it was actually pretty good. It actually was not only a decent summary, but it also was interestingly structured. Then I put the same manuscript in again and it was awful.
2:23:12 - Leo Laporte
It thought it was a bunch of articles. It's just a random stochastic, Right exactly.
2:23:16 - Jeff Jarvis
It doesn't think, or think deeply.
2:23:18 - Leo Laporte
This one? How about this one? What do you think of this one, jeff? All right, we're going to take a little break and wrap it up with your picks of the week. You're watching or listening to this week in google. What a panel, wow, a lot of fun. Ed zittrain is here. Uh, his newsletter and podcast are at better offlinecom, and his manga commentary. So jiu-jitsu kaizen very unfair, jiu-j Kaizen, very unfair. I don't know what I just said, but they're going to be mad at you. Yeah, whatever it is, he's also got Otani's balls behind him and I think that's pretty impressive. He knew Otani was going to be a big deal.
2:23:57 - Emily Dreibelbis
I know who Otani is. That's a new thing for me.
2:24:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's exciting, emily Drybulbis knows who Otani is. That's a new thing for me. Yeah, it's exciting, emily Drybulbis knows who Otani is. She's at PCMagcom. You must have a baseball lover in your family.
2:24:08 - Emily Dreibelbis
No, I just came across the reporting in the Athletic, which was a good acquisition by the New York Times.
2:24:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It was, wasn't it Speaking of? So you pay for the full package at the New York Times.
2:24:18 - Emily Dreibelbis
I do, I do.
2:24:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow.
2:24:19 - Leo Laporte
I didn't even know there were different packages.
2:24:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's shrinkflation at the New York Times. They had sports they took it away. They had food they took it away. They had games they took it away. And they charge you for all of that.
2:24:33 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, because all I really want is food and games.
2:24:35 - Leo Laporte
So I have all access. I have all access. Is that everything? Does that include everything? All access? Knowing you, you probably do pay for it too much. Yeah, it says $6 every four weeks. That seems like a reasonable amount of money to pay for quality, independent journalism.
2:24:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you got some kind of deal there.
2:24:52 - Leo Laporte
I must be grandfathered.
2:24:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you're. Yeah, you're retired.
2:24:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I got news games, cooking, audio, wire cutter, the athletic, I got, the whole freaking thing, man, I got it all. You freaking thing, man, I got it all New York Times stack. You have home delivery too. That's for my mom. I get the Sunday Times sent to her at her old age home. I don't know if she even knows what it is. It's just a pile of newspaper.
2:25:17 - Emily Dreibelbis
I don't think I pay for the cooking stuff, which is it might be separate.
2:25:21 - Leo Laporte
I love the cooking stuff. They have an all-in package for everything. I must be all-in.
2:25:28 - Speaker 6
I like their Middle East coverage.
2:25:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's good.
2:25:32 - Ed Zitron
You didn't bite on that, one did you?
2:25:35 - Leo Laporte
You know what? I need something because I can't watch cable news anymore. It's like that's. So you watch the all-in podcast? Oh no, I don't listen to their podcast. Did you see the dailies going behind a paywall?
2:25:48 - Ed Zitron
Which the.
2:25:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Barbaro yeah they're putting all the Michael. Barbaro the daily.
2:25:53 - Leo Laporte
I could start doing a daily parody and put it behind a paywall.
2:25:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Meanwhile the Onion is going back on the video Good. I just wish the best for the onion.
2:26:04 - Emily Dreibelbis
I just hope the onion keeps thriving. And they went back to print, which is kind of cool. That's so cool. We just need more humor writing. We all need to lighten up. Read something funny. Thank you.
2:26:15 - Speaker 6
We need to laugh.
2:26:17 - Leo Laporte
Yes, jeff Jarvis is also here, professor Emeritus from the City University of New York and the author of many fine volumes, including his latest, the Web when, where Ever. While we must recline the Internet for moguls, misanthropes and moral, panic and defend Section 230.
2:26:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Basic books.
2:26:36 - Ed Zitron
And it's a good book. Yeah, for basic men that insult doesn't even count. I was just trying to gather that wasn't that much. I don't think you guys are basic at all.
2:26:45 - Leo Laporte
Henry's book is published by Simon Schuster. You got a good pun for that, Mr Ed Zitron Salt Hank, a five-napkin situation, the media word I came up with. I'm not going to say I personally I like the Giardia one. That was good.
2:27:04 - Jeff Jarvis
What's the retail price? Ted Giardia, what? What's the cost for Ted's?
2:27:06 - Leo Laporte
book, I mean Ted's book, ted's book, hank's book, hank's book, I don't know. It's 40% off everywhere, so I don't really know what it costs. Look at this, this is my boy. This is my boy and a brisket.
2:27:22 - Emily Dreibelbis
That's a little cruel to show recipes and gorgeous food photography at the end of a three-hour podcast over dinner time.
2:27:30 - Ed Zitron
Steak tartare. I have to do another podcast immediately following this on the NFL, on the.
2:27:35 - Leo Laporte
NFL. What are you talking about here? He is frying up shrimp. All right, we will take a pause that refreshes and then come back with the final thoughts, our picks of the week, as we continue with this week in Google. All right, you all want to eat dinner, so let's get the hell out of here. Emily, you had a thing this week. You want to talk about technology and moving.
2:28:00 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, so I had an interesting just brush with moving technology. I moved this week and I don't know if you guys moved recently, but there's just so many worst don't you hate moving? It is the absolute worst. I had a very rare good experience with like, if you guys ever use pods, anyone here so that's the thing that they park this, this, like container outside your house.
2:28:21 - Leo Laporte
You throw everything in it and then a truck comes and drives it across the country.
2:28:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, and basically I did something with U-Haul too. It's all very remote, very online, so just you go on podscom, you just put in where you want to go and then they just tell you when they're coming, put the thing down, and then they actually stored our stuff for a couple of months and then delivered it to a location later.
2:28:45 - Leo Laporte
How far did you?
2:28:46 - Emily Dreibelbis
move. I moved from Chicago to New Jersey, oh.
2:28:49 - Jeff Jarvis
New.
2:28:49 - Emily Dreibelbis
Jersey Welcome, yay, thank you.
2:28:53 - Leo Laporte
It is the Garden State. People don't realize that Wonderful here.
2:28:57 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, so that was amazing, just to be able to do that online. This giant container just comes and then they pick it up and then that's it, and then U-Haul. I had this crazy experience where it's almost all remote pickup now for trucks, so they literally just send you to an abandoned parking lot.
2:29:14 - Ed Zitron
Really.
2:29:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
It was just dark out. We were driving down the highway, yeah it was very crazy.
2:29:22 - Leo Laporte
Your truck, Christine, is over there. It was totally like that.
2:29:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, it was very crazy. Your truck, Christine, is over there.
2:29:26 - Ed Zitron
It was totally like that, yeah where the flickering light is.
2:29:28 - Emily Dreibelbis
It was like that. There was just a tiny, sketchy little authorized U-Haul dealer sign and you just turn into this parking lot, wow, and it's like they send you on basically a scavenger hunt in the parking lot. It's like go to this tree, like your lockbox three on the tree, and then you have to type in the code that they give you. Sounds like EV charging, but it worked. It worked and it was actually better than way better than actually going and checking into the U-Haul station and getting a truck, which is so painful.
2:29:58 - Leo Laporte
So I bought a bunch of U-Haul boxes and it says on the box return anything you don't use for a refund, except the u-haul store I bought it from had a big sign that says we don't buy your boxes back classic, the old catch and release the other thing is it had a qr code that says scan this and you'll know exactly where your boxes are and what's in them and all that stuff.
Which means of course you had to download a U-Haul app and then you have to enter everything that's in the box into the app, so I could have written it on the side.
2:30:33 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's a mixed bag, like, yeah, I had a great experience picking up and dropping off my truck to random parking lots, which miraculously worked. But also, at the same time, like when I ordered this service, I said I want to go from point A to point B and they were like yes, we can do that, here's the price. And then the day before they call and they're like oh, actually you're going to have to pick up the truck from a different place, and it's just like well, that's not what I bought, so I don't know how they can just change it. So it's not perfect, but the technology was better for me than actually going in person and dealing with you all, so I thought that was cool.
2:31:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you watched the Seinfeld about the rental car?
2:31:08 - Emily Dreibelbis
No.
2:31:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, look it up, I will.
2:31:10 - Emily Dreibelbis
I will.
2:31:11 - Jeff Jarvis
They say it's reserved means that it's reserved, that I have my car I can't do Seinfeld, you know how to take the reservation, but you don't know how to keep the reservation.
2:31:22 - Leo Laporte
A little Seinfeld memory there. What's the deal with the?
2:31:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
generator by eye. Well, if anyone's listening who's moving? I'm happy to talk to you about moving tips because it's painful.
2:31:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, you're all unpacked. Are all the boxes unpacked?
2:31:37 - Emily Dreibelbis
Nope, we just moved yesterday and then I got the invite to be on this podcast, and here I am.
2:31:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, emily, so you're surrounded by boxes right now. Is that basically this is the one?
2:31:47 - Emily Dreibelbis
yeah, well, this isn't empty. I cleaned out this room and I got the desk set up so I could be here I love the wallpaper. I think it's really cute yeah, although it'd be an easy way to add some background. But yeah, that's why it looks a little empty and weirdly lit congratulations.
2:32:01 - Leo Laporte
Why did you move from Chicago to New Jersey?
2:32:06 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, the PCMag office is in New York City and I'm like right on the train into New York just half an hour, perfect. Yeah, I'm from New Jersey, like technically I've lived all over, but I was born in New Jersey and my parents and family are from this area.
2:32:20 - Leo Laporte
So you're back home.
2:32:22 - Emily Dreibelbis
Pretty much, but it's a little weird after living in Chicago, I lived in Seattle, I lived in LA and it's like such that weird feeling of like coming home and it's just that's been just I didn't think I was going to do this right. I know and I'm like I'm actually sitting in a house that's mine in New Jersey, like how did I get here?
2:32:40 - Ed Zitron
I've actually heard a lot of people from New Jersey said the same thing. You always end up.
2:32:44 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's really sad but it's like California but my work is here, my family is here, so it's just that it is a nice place to live, and I hate that.
2:32:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I know I the same here, Sam.
2:32:57 - Leo Laporte
I wore a Jersey girl Sam, I call him Sam. I've somehow conflated, uh, ed Zit. Jersey girl sam, I call him sam. I've somehow conflated, uh, ed zitron with sam altman. Now, uh, and I wore both stamp in your honor, this nice, uh, manga-like shirt. I don't know what it means that that could be anything can the does the back say anything? Wait a minute, hold on, I'll turn around. Can the does the back say anything? Wait a minute.
2:33:24 - Ed Zitron
Hold on, I'll turn around. Just looks like the same design from. Did you get this in like, where'd you get this? Leo?
2:33:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
this is from like the 90s. It kind of reminds me market. It reminds me of a chinese character like tattoo.
2:33:36 - Ed Zitron
It's that kind of yeah, it looks like like a gambling addict from ari Arizona would own this.
2:33:43 - Emily Dreibelbis
Steven Dart tournament vibes yeah.
2:33:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I had lunch with Leo in New York and it's New York, I know New York well and he's wearing this avocado shirt and people are actually talking to him. Hey, nice shirt, what do you do?
2:33:59 - Leo Laporte
This shirt works too. I think it is something. It's like Yu-Gi-Oh or something. I think it's somebody.
2:34:11 - Ed Zitron
Something. Anyway, ed, did you want to pick yugioh? Huh, that's definitely not yugioh, not yugioh, just gonna say that that's did I want to.
2:34:13 - Leo Laporte
What, though? Did you want to pick anything for the? You know, at the end of the show we do it.
2:34:17 - Ed Zitron
I don't know you can talk about something you're really excited about, or something like that I know like I complain and criticize open ai and all this, but you should read mike eiser, canary aaron griffith's piece on open ai. Just come to your own conclusion with it and then read my piece afterwards, of course you should really. You should really give it a look, because those two have managed to crack something that the information kind of hinted at back in july but they couldn't get, couldn't quite thread the needle. They got a ton done but like those two found something at like the, it's like the perfect kind of reporting, just as the round closed. And I give the tech industry and the tech media quite a bit of shit, but like you got to give credit where it's due.
2:34:58 - Leo Laporte
But link, give me a headline to search for on Google or something like that.
2:35:03 - Ed Zitron
It is open. It is, uh, open. Ai is growing fast and burning through piles of money.
I like it Fantastic headline as well, honestly, open AI should be crapping themselves. Mike Isaac being on the cases, that's. That's not that. He's good, he's very good and he will doggedly chase down stuff in a way. In a way that's a lot of fun to watch and also, yeah, he's gonna that. That if anyone's gonna crack this open, it's him. But also erin's fantastic as well, one of the best, yeah, and we know erin well, she's been on our shows many times.
2:35:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we were two, two very good people yeah nice, all right, that's a good pick if you really want to know what's going on. Jeff jarvis pick of the week.
2:35:45 - Ed Zitron
Howl wait a?
2:35:46 - Leo Laporte
minute. Howl's here. Hello, howl Cats always seem to have the look of kind of why are you doing this to me?
2:35:56 - Emily Dreibelbis
I definitely just heard Ed mutter you're a pretty boy, he is a pretty boy.
2:36:00 - Ed Zitron
Turn on the mic.
2:36:04 - Emily Dreibelbis
We heard that. We heard that it was romantic over there.
2:36:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, mr. Oh, he's going to pause on the fish and everything. Jeff Jarvis.
2:36:14 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, so I'll give you a choice you can have a rant about San Francisco or a wacky keyboard. Wacky keyboard.
2:36:21 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, I guess the wacky keyboard is spoken.
2:36:24 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's line 104. Yeah, google showcased a bizarre double-sided Japanese keyboard that it won't sell. It's a Mirbius strip.
2:36:34 - Leo Laporte
Why did they even talk about it?
2:36:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know but there's a video below Wow, that's crazy looking. It is crazy, though, isn't it?
2:36:41 - Leo Laporte
You got to fast forward through the BS. Let's go through the BS to the ninja, is it like an ergonomic? Oh you could use it as a wreath I don't know why.
2:36:50 - Jeff Jarvis
They just did it Because it's Japanese, so they have so many characters. What do you do and so they decided to invent it as a Mobius strip.
2:36:59 - Emily Dreibelbis
What a keyboard that comes to me. I just put my fingers up and it moves around and finds them.
2:37:04 - Jeff Jarvis
They have one guy there who's playing it like an accordion almost.
2:37:09 - Emily Dreibelbis
I got a cool keyboard from the PCMag office. It feels like a cloud when you use it.
2:37:14 - Ed Zitron
I feel like I'm connected to the Matrix when I use this. I'm so powerful. What kind of keyboard do you use, Ed the Moonlander?
2:37:23 - Leo Laporte
ZSK Okay.
2:37:26 - Jeff Jarvis
The problem with yours, Emily, is you connect it to a PC. No, it will work with anything.
2:37:30 - Speaker 6
I can connect it to anything.
2:37:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, that would be okay.
2:37:33 - Leo Laporte
What kind of keyboard is it?
2:37:35 - Jeff Jarvis
You can't connect it to an old PC.
2:37:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, I thought I would learn more about a different type of computer. Okay, loafree.
2:37:43 - Speaker 6
I thought I would learn more about a different type of computer. Okay, Lo-Free.
2:37:46 - Emily Dreibelbis
Oh, it's very lovely. It's a mini keyboard too.
2:37:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have a mini keyboard as well. This is a Logi from Logitech. It's a little baby. It's also silent, so I can furiously type away while the show is on.
2:38:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I just make a bunch of noise. Nobody made more noise than our previous co-host. She could bang a keyboard.
2:38:07 - Leo Laporte
Stacey was a keyboard banger.
2:38:09 - Jeff Jarvis
She killed him she killed him.
2:38:12 - Leo Laporte
Hey, this was a really interesting fun show and I think I learned quite a bit, so thank you very much. Emily Drybulbous is at PC Magazine. Is there anything specific you cover, or is it everything?
2:38:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I cover electric vehicles and AI just general tech industry as well, but I would say electric vehicles are my specialty. Everyone's writing about AI, so there's just. I take right off what I can chew.
2:38:38 - Leo Laporte
I want you to do an expose. I drive a BMW i5 all EV scratched it really deeply and I was, you know. I figure a car gets scratched, it's no big deal. I'm going to continue to drive it. Lisa says no, no, you got to get it, we'll got to bring it in. We brought it to the auto body shop. They looked at it, said, oh, we can't fix that. I said why not? He said it's an EV. Bmw won't let us touch evs for body work for a scratch. No, you have to bring it to bmw. Oh, that's so wrong. Expose. Huh, I'm just giving you a little.
I'll be your deep saying yeah, there is a somewhat of an explanation, which is it's very easy to break evs, you know, in weird ways with with electricity, but I think they could have made it.
2:39:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Can you take it through a car wash or not? Yeah, Of course you can. So, emily, did you drive an EV from Chicago to Jersey?
2:39:33 - Emily Dreibelbis
No, I flew. Oh, okay, but yeah.
2:39:36 - Leo Laporte
Was it an electric plane?
2:39:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
Not yet, but the first ones are flying out of Chicago, actually through United Space there, yeah, really, yeah, gm gains on Tesla with fresh EV lineup, strong Q3 sales.
2:39:50 - Leo Laporte
Tesla's been struggling a little bit. This is your latest article in the next car publication at PC Magazine. I will read this religiously, that's a. Chevy. That's that new Chevy.
2:40:02 - Emily Dreibelbis
Equinox. That is a nice vehicle yeah, my sister-in-law just bought one, it's really really nice yeah if you want to know about EVs. Follow me. That's why my username is electric. Underscore humans. So it's on TikTok.
2:40:15 - Leo Laporte
It's on Twitter and you like your Volvo XC.
2:40:19 - Ed Zitron
Ed Zittrain yeah, it's a car. It goes backwards forwards. Add Zitron yeah, it's a car that goes backwards forwards. Side to side Doors open mechanical doors. Got clunky buttons on it.
2:40:28 - Emily Dreibelbis
I actually love that because I feel like people think EVs are so much more different than other cars. Exactly.
2:40:34 - Ed Zitron
A normal car, that's exactly what it is.
2:40:36 - Emily Dreibelbis
It just gets you where you need to go. That's the point.
2:40:38 - Ed Zitron
I plug it in at home, it charges Drive around. It has seats and the steering wheel has better acceleration. Nothing weird happens, nothing weird. Screen doesn't turn off at random, like when I had a tesla you will like, uh, the latest christopher mims piece.
2:40:55 - Leo Laporte
Then, uh, touch screens are over. Even apple is bringing back buttons I think tesla is what.
2:41:03 - Emily Dreibelbis
I think that's good when it comes to tesla, because those screens are so hard to use.
2:41:07 - Leo Laporte
You have to tap through like five my son drives my as a model three or no, as a model y, and he says I have no idea how to open the glove compartment there is literally no affordance. To open the glove compartment you have to go into the screens and dig down and find the button.
2:41:25 - Jeff Jarvis
It is so stupid. I saw a story the other day about do you have to? Because after the flooding, do you have to have a plan to be able to get out of the EV? Is it not mechanical? If the electric goes, you can't open the door. Are you trapped inside?
2:41:38 - Ed Zitron
No, you have to strip something off of it, I think.
2:41:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, it depends on the EV. So, almost as far as I know, every EV has an emergency mechanical release for the door. For this very reason, people don't read their car manual, so they don't know it, and unfortunately it's a little late when you're sinking in five feet of water to read you the manual. But there's almost always a manual release. In fact, if you have an EV, it ev be a good idea to kind of look it up. That's true. Yeah, I always carry in every car a hammer let's carry one on me anyway you know what?
2:42:13 - Emily Dreibelbis
works really well is car handles like. I don't think we really needed to innovate on that regular door handle like one of the reasons I bought the i5, the volvo the volvo it's like the volvo, the.
2:42:24 - Leo Laporte
The i5 is a 5 series bmw. They make it with a electric motor, they make it with a gas motor. Same car. So it's got handles, it's got buttons, get all those those work well.
Those are good things I like buttons, I do, I do, I do. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we are now done with this show. I thought it would never end. I'm sure you felt the same. But yes, you can go get dinner. Thank you, emily and Ed and Jeff. Really actually a fun show. Somebody said in one of our chat rooms, if this were the only show I listened to all year, it would be worth my money, I would drink, I would drink hemlock. Thanks Ed, Thanks Emily, my pleasure, Thanks Jeff.
2:43:11 - Speaker 6
Thanks to all of you for watching.
2:43:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you, Scooter X, for your change log. Thanks, crew.
2:43:16 - Leo Laporte
Namaste, thanks to Benito Gonzalez, namaste everyone.
2:43:19 - Emily Dreibelbis
Namaste everybody.
2:43:20 - Leo Laporte
That's what I wish for you, the podcaster in me recognizes the podcaster in you.
2:43:23 - Emily Dreibelbis
Touch your third eye. The killer in me is the killer in you.
2:43:27 - Ed Zitron
Everyone calm Smashing pumpkins. Okay, Tells before swine. We do this. We can Google. Every Wednesday 2 pm.
2:43:34 - Speaker 6
Pacific 5 pm Eastern 2100 UTC.
2:43:36 - Leo Laporte
Watch it live on seven, count them. Seven streams Twitch. Seven streams twitch twit. Which is the discord. Youtube uh x kick, linkedin and facebook seven different ways you can watch live we're on kick. Yes, no one watches it on kick. Every once in a while I'll see a bright green chat 702 people watching live.
Thank you to all of you. Most people don't watch after the fact. You can download shows at the website twittv slash twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated, of course, to it, which makes it easy to share clips. Best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you get it automatically. The minute we're done on a Wednesday afternoon, benito's going to go in and edit out all the swear words and we'll get it out to you a little bit later this time.
