This Week in Google 789 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 Twink this week in Google. Paris Martineau's here Yay, she's back. Jeff Jarvis is here also. We'll talk about two big court decisions going against Google one for the App Store and, well one, it's the DOJ saying I think we're going to break Google up. We'll see what happens with that. We'll also talk about the states more than a dozen of them suing TikTok. And is Peter Todd really Satoshi Nakamoto? I have some thoughts. All that coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love.
0:00:37 - Paris Martineau
From people you trust.
0:00:40 - Leo Laporte
This is Twig. This is Twig this week in Google, episode 789, recorded Wednesday, october 9th 2024. Mauritius Compliance. It's time for Twig this week in Google, a show where we talk about the latest news from the Googleverse, which covers pretty much everything out there in the Internet cloud. Paris Martineau is back, Hallelujah From the informationcom. She writes for the weekend section talking about, apparently, children's flag football. So that's good, that'll be exciting.
0:01:20 - Paris Martineau
You know only the important topics.
0:01:21 - Leo Laporte
She's covering issues.
0:01:24 - Paris Martineau
Online child safety.
0:01:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, issues with the youths and online and all that. That's a good subject, isn't it, boy? These days, that it is great, we missed you. Uh, your friend, ed is a character and a half I love that I've introduced ed into the universe oh my god, he just can come on through twitter.
0:01:43 - Paris Martineau
I I feel like, yeah, he tweeted his way into my heart and yours.
0:01:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, your nihilistic heart.
0:01:51 - Leo Laporte
That's Jeff.
0:01:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Jarvis.
0:01:53 - Leo Laporte
Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the City University of New York, Well, we should say at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Emeritus and Jeff has now created a kiosk in his office.
0:02:10 - Paris Martineau
Well, the web we weave is officially out. Get your copy now.
0:02:14 - Leo Laporte
Buy the whole set, he did a TikTok where he opened the boxes. It's hysterical. Is that your first TikTok? No, I did it before. It was cute, it was really cute.
0:02:25 - Paris Martineau
Do a lot of dances on there.
0:02:27 - Leo Laporte
So I have all the books I do, but the latest is this the Web. We Weave Soon to be a New York Times bestseller why we must reclaim the Internet from moguls, misanthropes and moral panic.
0:02:40 - Paris Martineau
I got my first review and it's a panic, moral panic, you say.
0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Who first review? And it's a panic. You say who panned you? Oh, some old bitty. Some old bitty bad feeling about this. Hey, I didn't realize we still had that. I thought we left it.
0:02:53 - Paris Martineau
We apparently have 20 of them, I think we oh yeah, you didn't know that we have versions we have a bunch of versions of that.
0:03:00 - Benito Gonzalez
Yes, it's just I don't have a hot key for it, so so it's hard to hit on time.
0:03:04 - Leo Laporte
You've got to bring it up. Yeah, all I have is John Slonina going. Hey, that's the only thing I brought. Anyway, you don't deserve bad reviews, although I would imagine the people who don't like it are the people who are lobbying for the shutdown of social media. That's what it is. Yes, yes, uh. This week, the uh, what is it? 13 states attorney general decided that, uh, they're gonna go after social media and shut her down well, tiktok before and tiktok's on the way out anyway, so you're wasting your breath they said it's like.
It's like cigarettes. It's like nicotine and cigarettes. This social media, it's not causing cancer. You nitwits? No, You're nitwits.
0:03:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Moral entrepreneurs yeah.
0:03:55 - Paris Martineau
It was 13 states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday, arguing that the company deliberately designed the app to be addictive to children and that it has misrepresented the effectiveness of its content moderation efforts to consumers in courts around the U S lately, which is they're trying to basically sidestep, uh, section two, 30 protections, by using the principles of product liability to get these companies on negligent design or uh, essentially just you know, knowing that something in their product could harm consumers in some way and continuing to do it anyway.
0:04:44 - Leo Laporte
Section two, 30, protects them against being sued for either moderating or not moderating the content. They can't be held liable for something other people post or that they take down because it's bad. So specifically what these?
0:04:59 - Paris Martineau
suits are doing is they're targeting the TikTok algorithm in different parts of the TikTok platform. They're targeting the TikTok algorithm in different parts of the TikTok platform, saying that you know the way that age gating was implemented, the process by which they determine like are you under 13 or not, that it was designed in a defective way that could have harmful impacts, or that you know the algorithm could have harmful impacts on mental health of young users and they knew that and continued to make those choices anyway.
0:05:27 - Leo Laporte
Let me channel Ed Zittrain from last week's show. Social media is killing children. The algorithm is like nicotine. That's not a very good Ed Zittrain, but you get the idea. People very, very much feel that and, by the way, that's what you're arguing against. Very much in the web we weave, jeff, yeah.
0:05:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm trying to actually find. The Supreme Court up until now has again and again thrown down this argument. I can't find that in my own book Should have an index thrown down the idea that it does have an index.
I know it does, but I can't thrown down the idea that it does have an index. I know it does, but I can't find it right now. Uh, it's thrown on the idea that, um, censoring for children is okay because it's for children right. It's always fundamentally insulting for children. Now, interestingly, this week, I just, if I may, do just a little tiny detour.
0:06:23 - Leo Laporte
We'll come back to it no, no, detour ray, because we're this is going to be a fast-moving, fast-paced episode with many, many stories oh okay, unlike last week when we did two yes, um, so sorry, I'll get rid of this.
0:06:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I gotta laugh at your kiosk.
0:06:37 - Leo Laporte
That is the funniest thing ever, by the way. I I hope that, uh, glenn fleishman never sees that you're using his books to prop up the web. We, that's how you keep it. That's how you keep it stable. Is that's the? Uh? That the type shift happens.
0:06:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Book that glenn knows that it's right here because I'm using it for research for the okay so that's not really a uh a show kiosk that's my is covered with books.
0:07:04 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I love stacks of printer paper.
0:07:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Book cart, then we have more books over here. I am working.
0:07:12 - Paris Martineau
That's a proper desk. That is really impressive, your camera is never going to be back in the right spot. No, it's not.
0:07:22 - Jeff Jarvis
We can't even see you.
0:07:24 - Paris Martineau
Goodbye, Jeff.
0:07:27 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute, just in sympathy. I'm just gonna lower my uh, my shot.
0:07:32 - Speaker 2
let's all sit a little lower now he's high oh, we're gonna make up your mind mr jarvis, so last week, I think, we I've fallen and I can't get up.
0:07:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know it's really hard to adjust from here. Oh God, how do I do it?
0:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Okay, the show's fallen apart already in the first seven minutes. That's impressive.
0:08:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Where was I when I was so rudely digressing myself?
0:08:07 - Leo Laporte
we were talking about the fact that there are bad people out there who think that social media is addictive, and you talk about that in the web we weave and there are constitutional issues.
0:08:16 - Jeff Jarvis
so, uh, one of the one of the ai bills that gavin newsom, the governor of california, signed in the last month or so was a last week and joined because it was against deep fakes being promoted in social media and a guy did a deep fake of Kamala Harris doing something and he sued because he said it was a violation of his first amendment rights to take it down. And the court agreed with him so far. So the first amendment comes. It's more than section two, 30. The first amendment comes into play again and again and again.
0:08:47 - Paris Martineau
Well, I'll play devil's advocate here for a minute, because I've been talking to a lot of people.
0:08:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Who do you think you?
0:08:51 - Paris Martineau
are Ed Zitron. I know I can't do a British accent, Otherwise I would. But, for instance, let's take the SAFE for Kids Act. Safe stands for something I'm not remembering, which is something that passed in New York recently. One of the provisions in that is that accounts for children should by default have an algorithmic recommendation engine turned off and should instead display content from people like on Instagram the kid follows chronologically. That's ostensibly because they think, oh, a problem a lot of kids have is, you know, regulating their time. One of the things that makes it worse is if you have a recommendation algorithm that keeps serving them really interesting content. I don't think that that's that bad.
0:09:35 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. That's just saying social media is too much fun, it's too interesting, so please make it boring, and then we don't have to worry about it being addictive.
0:09:46 - Jeff Jarvis
The algorithm often.
0:09:49 - Leo Laporte
I mean, we like alcohol and cigarettes. I set up my Facebook because somebody told me oh, you know you can't. Because I kept saying, oh, I want the, I want just the friend feed, the chronological feed. I set it up. It was the most horribly boring list of stuff. One guy posted half of it. It's not good. So what's wrong with a company saying look, we want to give people what they want to see.
0:10:14 - Paris Martineau
It's not for everybody, it's just for I'm forgetting the exact age range, but let's say like under 16-year-olds or under 13-year-olds if they're using a product, I don't think that that's that bad of a policy to say by default, you have one feed. If you have parental permission you can change to the normal one, that's fine. But on very specific kid accounts, to have by default kind of increased operation standards I don't think television teletubbies is far too entertaining.
0:10:44 - Leo Laporte
We need to have it be droning teachers telling them about stuff they need to know. I mean, I don't mind them banning sugar cereal ads in children's tv programming and it would be okay to say no.
0:11:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Advertising the algorithm is not, is not bad. It is a choice of ranking. And ranking is made for many reasons and I quote from a book just out the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, who not only killed congestion Former governor?
0:11:13 - Leo Laporte
No, she's still the governor. Oh, I was wishful thinking. Oh yeah, I'm thinking of Eric Adams. Oh, no, he's still mayor.
0:11:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, we hope that he's former though guess who may become our next mayor. But anyway, she said do you understand how an algorithm works? It follows you. It preys on you? No, it doesn't. That's just classic moral panic, crap yeah.
0:11:35 - Leo Laporte
No, and I know you're doing a little bit of devil's advocate, but that's my job, that's Leo's job. But no, and I have said that myself, that the algorithm is the problem You've lasted it in the past, but you're coming to learn. Well, I just realized that all an algorithm is is trying to make the content more interesting.
0:11:53 - Paris Martineau
Well, that's a bit of an extrapolation. Really, what it's doing is optimizing for maximized engagement. It's optimizing for how long will it keep this user on this website?
0:12:05 - Jeff Jarvis
And I do think that there's somewhat of an argument Is a proxy for satisfaction, isn't that yes?
0:12:10 - Paris Martineau
But when you're talking about like a you know minor child, I think that there could be something to maybe having a different type of account for someone like under 16 or under 13 years old. That perhaps doesn't optimize for that.
0:12:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, I won't disagree with having a different account for a young person, but the algorithm is irrelevant to that. I think you got taken in by a cupcake, ms Martineau. What?
0:12:39 - Leo Laporte
I must have missed that discussion Before the show.
0:12:45 - Jeff Jarvis
And so then, what are the criteria? What is it that you want to do with the account? Okay, but the algorithm is just ranking, making ranking decisions. That's all it's doing is say and, and, as leo said, it's often getting rid of the bad stuff, the boring stuff, the combative stuff.
0:13:01 - Leo Laporte
It depends on how it's written, algorithm it's like saying do example, we should make candy taste bad if children are going to eat it.
0:13:08 - Paris Martineau
Well, you were just talking about how you'd be in support of no like high sugar ads being shown to kids. I feel like it's kind of a similar vein of regulation. I mean, let's take, for example, this new york lie I just mentioned. I believe the provisions in it are, you know, some level of, like, minor kid accounts should by default have chronological feeds instead of having algorithmic as the default. You can switch it if you want. And the other one is notifications for, I believe, like under 13 year olds should be by default muted from 10 pm to 6 am, I don't think those are those.
0:13:45 - Leo Laporte
I don't think that's honestly shouldn't that be the parents job? Why does the government have to decide when your kids are getting notifications?
0:13:52 - Paris Martineau
I mean, why does the government decide anything? Why does the government regulate the?
0:13:56 - Benito Gonzalez
airline industry.
0:13:58 - Paris Martineau
Why does the government decide whether we can advertise stuff to kids?
0:14:02 - Leo Laporte
Like I don't know the government, I don't know if government, I don't, if, uh, yeah, I'm gonna. I don't know if I can codify it, but there is definitely stuff that it's an appropriate thing for the government to do and stuff that's appropriate for the parent to do, I guess something that I recently tell companies is you have to give better parental controls to the parents, like there should be a switch that says no notifications at night, and the parents should be made aware of that.
But the presumption really is oh, parents aren't going to care, they're not going to do anything, so we have to, and it bothers me a little bit and it's a red herring.
0:14:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Show me, show me the research that says that the algorithm does this to children. That's what I couldn't find and and the you know it's. The algorithm has now been demonized, which is like demonizing math.
0:14:50 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I agree, I think, like even that Hochul quote you just did, it's ridiculous the way that something as simple as an algorithm has been demonized. But I do think that there is something like to your question of like, oh, it should be the parents' responsibility. I agree, I was talking to kind of a big supporter of this recently, of these sort of regulations recently, and I posed that question to her asking like well, shouldn't an example of she has three kids? At one point she downloaded one of those software services I think Bark is the name of one of them where essentially it's like spyware for your phone, where it sits in the back and monitors every social media app, every texting thing, anything you have on there, and you can set certain triggers and it'll alert you for all of it. And she did like whatever the basic bare minimum was, and she was like I was receiving 500 to a thousand alerts a day. She was like it was incredible. She's like I'm really privileged I was able to deal with that.
But most people who do not who you know maybe work two jobs probably can't. And right now these social media companies don't seem to have parental settings in place to make it easy for parents. Facebook only recently, or Met meta only recently. Came out, this with instagram, uh the other thing, the other thing I think is no, I agree.
The other thing I think is notable that she brought up that I hadn't thought about is she's like for a lot of parents. She knows they don't allow their kids to have any access to personal devices like phones or computers. But that doesn't work because nowadays if you have a kid in elementary school, they're going to be sent home with an iPad school-issued, or a computer starting in middle school A.
Chromebook and you might say I think the gasp is somewhat warranted. But also it's incredibly difficult to then police your child's social media use if they have a computer 24-7.
0:16:45 - Leo Laporte
If the kids are being given, given computers from the schools, it's it's incumbent on the schools to do the right thing and make sure those those are not introducing stuff into the house. I don't. I think whoever provides the object should be responsible for making sure the object does no harm what about this example?
just explain to me how this is different from let's take the sugar out of candy if it's sold to people under 13, because he's clearly bad for them. It causes tooth decay. It's uh, we're learning more and more. The sugar is actually a poison. Uh, we should. We should put take sugar out of candy, I mean, but only for people under who tour under age I don't disagree that that could be an argument.
0:17:28 - Paris Martineau
I don't think we should for any. I don't have any strong personal beliefs on either of these subjects. I think the difference is that it has become the social media issue has become such a big issue for parents in recent years that they're mobilizing on it.
0:17:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Meanwhile, sugar isn't something that's incited like mobilization, and more entrepreneurs are exploiting this and making more fear and not using research. The problem in so much of this? I mean for a lot of kids who feel very lonely and very depressed. There's a lot of research that I write about in the book which says that it makes them feel better. They know that they're not alone in the world. It's a way that they have friends. Ed last week was talking about how he it was very sad really about how he had no friends none at all. And the internet, time and time again, is a place where kids can see that they're not alone, that they find other people who sympathize with them. That is an important human connection that's being cut off because of a fear of a screen or an algorithm. It's pure moral panic.
0:18:30 - Leo Laporte
There's also the argument that this is gonna be a different one.
Houston we have a problem it's also the case that focusing on this distracts from real solutions, like make sure you fund mental health experts in every school, that you fund mental health centers, that you pay attention to what's going on for kids. There's a lot of things we could do that we don't do. It's very easy to blame, just say, well, it's big tech, we can fix it. Let's just ban them and then we'll be all fine, and I think that that's really a shortcut that unfortunately leaves behind real solutions. So there's also that.
Anyway, it's a good conversation, yes, I guess we'll let the courts decide because the courts are so smart that they should be able to figure this out.
0:19:23 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, obviously they're so smart, I mean, and I think it's a good conversation to have, because I fall on both sides of the spectrum, depending on what the day is- yeah, me too. I think, I can see benefits in both sides, and I think it's going to be kind of interesting to see how this shakes out.
0:19:38 - Leo Laporte
I was a laissez-faire parent Even when my kids were. I mean, now they're 30 and 32. So that's, you know, they're older than you, paris, so they, you know, obviously didn't have access to the same social media you do, or kids today have. But there was even. And then, oh, should they play video games? Should you limit that to too much? You'd limit screen time, et cetera, et cetera. And I was pretty laissez faire. I figured, well, we'll let them figure it out and we would have discussions like if you see something online that upsets you, please come to us and talk about it. We're never going to yell at you for seeing it, we want to talk about it and that kind of thing. They survived. So my inclination is laissez-faire, but I'll tell you. The other thing is, I think parents should have whatever tools they need to keep their kids safe. It's up to the parent and that's why I'm not crazy about government getting involved. I think government could mandate the tools. That's fine, yeah.
0:20:35 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I do think that there is something to the argument, though that I mean. Let's take, for example, these new teen accounts that Meta just rolled out, for Instagram Is that a good solution.
A week or two ago, but I don't know whether that's a good solution, but they had features in there that when I saw it I was like what? You didn't have this beforehand. To where you know, if you're a child who's told Meta I'm 13, now your account by default doesn't let any stranger that wants to talk, like connect with you and message you. You know, I think. And now there are stronger supports for a parent wants to have parental controls on that kid's account. They can't, and I think those are both good things and they only have come because meta has been bullied for years, like months and months and years, by angry parents and threatened with serious legislation and regulation by state and federal lawmakers yeah, remember when the senate committee made mark zuckerberg stand up and apologize to the parents in the in the gallery and now he says he's done, apologizing.
0:21:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That also probably backfires because, rather than having a cooperative discussion about this, it became so combative and he just says, oh, screw it.
0:21:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe that's really what we need is this sense that we are all coming from a point of goodwill and that we're trying to find a solution that's best for our kids.
0:22:07 - Paris Martineau
I agree, but I would also say I mean something that struck me when I was reading. It was a couple weeks ago. The Department of Justice sued TikTok for various violations of COPA, the Children Online Privacy and Protection Act, and a different agreement, and it detailed in it went into great detail in the complaint of the lawsuit all the various ways in which TikTok had been deficient in stopping children under the age of 13 from making accounts as adults. And one of the things that they mentioned was that TikTok has, I guess, some form on their website where, if you're a parent and you're like my eight-year-old has a TikTok account and I want it to be deleted, tiktok's system for responding to those requests was so deficient that the vast, vast, vast majority of requests from parents went nowhere. Even if parents did everything correctly, filled out all the forms, tiktok would ignore it and in some ways built a system specifically to keep those accounts around and active for the kids when parents wanted to get them taken down.
0:23:14 - Leo Laporte
That should definitely be fixed, although all that's doing means is that TikTok is operating at the same level as our government does.
0:23:21 - Paris Martineau
I mean yeah. So I think that that's probably why things have gotten so heated.
0:23:26 - Leo Laporte
I have to say my I. I really it hurts me a little bit to think of banning tiktok because of my son, who so one of the things we've been talking about benito said this a couple of weeks ago and it really sunk in with me if you're going to start a new project a podcast or youtube video or whatever you need to put it somewhere where there's an algorithm, where there's a discovery engine, because discovery is impossible in a world where there are millions of creators. You need to put it somewhere where an algorithm can promote you on TikTok and paid attention to what the algorithm promoted and what it didn't promote, and worked hard to make sure that his videos appealed to the algorithm, presuming that the algorithm was doing what it did because, it
appealed to people, right, it's watching likes and so forth, and he's been able to build a pretty darn good career out of it. I'm holding up his cookbook, as I'm talking about that, which is available in bookstores everywhere five salt napkin of salt napkin, salt hank a five napkin situation by henry laporte. Uh, buy it at bookstores everywhere, but uh, that is, I think, 100 owed to the marriage of TikTok's algorithm and his ability to create stuff that fit the algorithm. Without that, he's just one of 1,000 or 100,000 TikTok chefs or YouTube chefs. Yep, that's why I feel a certain loyalty to TikTok. And if they're doing stuff wrong.
they need to work on it. Obviously Parents should be able to say to TikTok hey, this is a kid, block his account. Whatever that needs to be fixed. Obviously I'm not against that. Let's take a little break. There's lots of news, let's take a little break.
0:25:20 - Jeff Jarvis
We'll take that too.
0:25:21 - Leo Laporte
yes, Because we now know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. And a little break. Yes, because we now know who satoshi nakamoto is, and the answer may amaze you. You don't I'm gonna argue for this one, but I'll tell you. We'll talk about it in just a second.
0:25:33 - Paris Martineau
Also, if you've got, the arguments for him being satoshi is that they share the same pizza top favorite pizza topping. Be patient, put that out, there Be patient.
0:25:43 - Leo Laporte
We'll get to that. Also, the io domain is going to disappear in all likelihood. What are you going to do then? Googleio All of that and more, coming up in just a little bit on this week. In Google, paris Martineau is back. We're so glad to see her and, by the way, coordinating the Monstera sweater and glasses. Thank you, and the green lighting behind you. Very nicely done. Very nicely done. Are your parents in the wake of the hurricane?
0:26:18 - Paris Martineau
They are thankfully not in the part of.
0:26:20 - Leo Laporte
Florida that's going to be hit by the hurricane. Our deepest thoughts and good wishes to the people in North Carolina and Florida and the areas affected by. First, helene, and now what's his name?
0:26:35 - Paris Martineau
Milton.
0:26:36 - Leo Laporte
Milton.
0:26:38 - Paris Martineau
It truly looks like it's going to be devastating. I mean, the Tampa Bay area hasn't been directly hit by a hurricane in 100 years.
0:26:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's been rough, spared time and time, and time again, and it's time.
0:26:50 - Leo Laporte
It looks like it's come did you see the amazing animation? The weather channel did uh about storm surges.
0:26:57 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, it was really good that was.
0:26:59 - Leo Laporte
That was a really good example of you know. Normally I don't like this kind of um, uh, show off, show off the effects, but let me just I I probably get taken down for this, I don't care, it's so good. Uh, just show a little bit of it. The anchor, uh is I'm not playing the audio, maybe that'll help is is, you know, standing in a street with a car and the storm is coming and he's describing what a storm surge would look like and he says well, here's a three foot storm surge. This is very six feet. This is very effective in really showing what people who are deciding to so-called ride it out are going to face with a nine, that's nine feet uh, you have very little chance of survival and and we're talking some areas, not just that.
0:27:52 - Jeff Jarvis
You're on the second floor, the house goes down yeah, the whole thing's gone and they're even showing all the stuff that's floating in that water yeah, that's the other problem, of course.
0:28:02 - Leo Laporte
So I really uh, I thought that was a really good example of using cgi uh, very effectively and for information. Good job, weather channel. Please don't take us down. Uh, all right, we'll come back with more in just a bit. You're watching this week in google, brought to you today by us cloud. I had a great conversation with these guys. I I have to admit I hadn't heard of them. They are the number, but I should have. They're the number one. Number one Microsoft unified support replacement.
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US Cloud. We're so glad to welcome them to this Week in Google and to the whole Twit Network. I think this is the first time we've talked about them. Uh, really, really great company offering an amazing service. All right back we come to twig, and this was. I forced myself to stay up late last night watching electric money, which is a new hbo documentary from the same guy who did the q anon documentary and, I think, quite credibly unmasked q. Did you watch the?
0:32:50 - Paris Martineau
yeah, yeah I mean, I think he quite credibly unmasked q, because the q, the q, the q kid the important part of unmasking q was going back through old 4chan forum posts and 8chan forum posts, and I think that he and his team are an expert at that kind of digital research.
0:33:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm not sure if the same is true with satoshi nakamoto so that's the the electric money is about, or money electric, I guess, is the name is about bitcoin. It's you know I'm watching it before they even start going into. Well, who is Satoshi Nakamoto and thinking this is very, very positive about Bitcoin? Doesn't really mention a lot of the consequences of Bitcoin. Instead, kind of sells Bitcoin. Instead, kind of sells Bitcoin. Colin Hoback, the filmmaker, though I think really intended all along to be unmask, the creator of Bitcoin, who has been mysterious since 2012. He's dropped off the Internet, disappeared. He wrote the paper that was the you know the Bitcoin is based on. He created what they call the Genesis block, the first block in the blockchain, and is thought to have a million one million Bitcoins in his wallet.
0:34:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Hang on right there for a second, if I may, yeah.
0:34:22 - Benito Gonzalez
Like.
0:34:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Alexander Hamilton creates a US Treasury and doesn't keep a million dollars for himself for doing so. Right, there seems to be. Granted, whoever this is, hasn't cashed any any of it in. But it really gives me a bad taste to think that someone creates a currency but does so to that tremendous personal advantage.
0:34:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah good point, like it would might be a pyramid scheme, right, maybe? Yeah, I mean they don't debate that. I mean they don't go into it either, but I agree with you. I mean, there are definitely things about Bitcoin that are uh.
0:35:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought when it started, I thought, oh, this is cool and blockchain is really cool technology, and I kind of went along with it. And, of course, the, the, the, the, the culture of the crypto bros is enough to turn you off on anything, but it really is an interference with economic systems in a way that isn't regulated really, and it's disturbing. So, the one hand, why do I care who Satoshi is? But the other hand, I guess maybe we should.
0:35:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, if he has, what would make him a 60 billionaire now and potentially a trillionaire down the road worth of Bitcoin? Now, of course, if he were to cash even a significant any significant part of that in, it would probably undermine Bitcoin entirely right, and the confidence in it, which undermine bitcoin entirely right, and the and the confidence in it, which might explain why he hasn't. There's some people have also thought that he might be dead right, that that or maybe it's not one person, maybe it's a couple of people leo, I've got it.
0:36:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I've got. You've talked about your drive with your bitcoin on it, yeah, and how you can't open it up. Yeah, I think that's just been a confession that you there's a million bitcoin on my drive. Yeah, you keep doing this podcast thing and you complain about the business being down as a cover it is interesting.
0:36:20 - Leo Laporte
They point out in the documentary there is a way to burn bitcoin publicly in such a way that everybody would know you no longer have access to it. Uh, and that has not happened. The person he actually, I think and this is maybe just me, I think he in effect said two people are satoshi nakamoto, the two people that, but the person that he, by the way, both of them deny it as, by the way, as one would if one were satoshi nakamoto, who knows what the united States government or any other government might do to you and kidnapping you, or not to mention terrorists who would want your Bitcoin, and on and on and on. So I don't blame whoever it is for being anonymous and for denying it and for denying it. He, I think. Now you see, you watched all the way to the end, because at the end of the documentary there is this I think has become the Colin Hoback trademark. He gets the two guys together in like a deserted factory in Slovenia, because Peter Todd, who he thinks is Satoshi nakamoto, is a caver he likes to a torontonian. He was very. If he is satoshi nakamoto, he would have written bitcoin's seminal paper at the age of 22.
The biggest piece of evidence is very flimsy, which is that Satoshi on the on the forums before Nakamoto disappeared. Satoshi posted on the Bitcoin forum uh, before it was, even before Bitcoin was even the paper came out kind of at some. He was thinking out loud and all of a sudden this guy, peter Todd, who's never been around he's only made one other post basically finishes the sentence in a way that shows a deep technical understanding of what the issues are, and then both satoshi nakamoto and peter todd disappear. Colin hoback's theory is this that peter todd is satoshi was posting a satoshi accidentally logged back in using another account, posted and then went oh shoot.
0:38:38 - Paris Martineau
Both disappeared and then never deleted it.
0:38:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, never deleted it. And Todd says, well, why didn't I delete it? And I think you could make a credible case that deleting it would just nothing ever is deleted from the Internet, right.
0:38:57 - Paris Martineau
So that deleting it would just nothing. Ever is deleted from the internet, right? So that deleting it would just call attention to it. I don't know that the forum posts are that, uh, indicative of it being the same person the the message. I'll read the satoshi message here and then I'll read the peter todd reply. There would need to be some changes in the bitcoin coin miner side also to make the possibility to accept a double spend into the transaction pool, but only strictly if the inputs and outputs match and the transaction fee is higher. And then he, you know as one other sentence about the transaction fee. And then Peter Todd responds of course, to be specific, the inputs and outputs can't match exactly if the second transaction has a transaction fee. I don't think that that is some secret forbidden knowledge.
No, it's not A transaction fee would make something not match.
0:39:40 - Leo Laporte
I will add one more piece to this. What they're talking about is a pay for fee piece that was not included in the original paper, but Peter Todd later wrote and added to the bitcoin the ability to pay extra to get a faster transaction. So peter todd did, in fact, implement that piece of bitcoin later. I? To me, the thing you're right. It's flimsy, to say the least. To me, the thing you're right, it's flimsy, to say the least. I'm watching it, though, and he's getting real squirrely and I'm kind of thinking he looks damn guilty. I mean, he reacted exactly as you would expect somebody who was pretending not to be Satoshi Nakamoto would act.
Now, the other person standing next to him was Adam Back, who is the chief executive of a Bitcoin development company called Blockstream, the only other person mentioned by name in the Bitcoin paper, the only person who is thought to know who Nakamoto is. In fact, he's been holding on to email and email exchange between him and Satoshi Nakamoto for years, saying well, it's not my mind to reveal. I think, personally, it's not just Peter Todd. I think it's Peter Todd plus Adam Beck, who had written something called Hashcoin a few years earlier, which was kind of an early Bitcoin, an early cryptocurrency. I honestly think that the most credible answer is that this kid, peter Todd, who is a genius who is also, by the way, nobody in the Bitcoin community wants him to be Satoshi Nakamoto. He's pretty widely disliked, I think it's him and Adam back.
How crypto boyish is he? Yeah, but he's not, though, as a Bitcoin bro, which is interesting. He's not the you know and he doesn doesn't. I don't think he ever cashed in a lot of bitcoin or anything. Uh, I think he and adam back did it together. They had the. They certainly had the means, the, the technical ability to do it. Uh, todd hoback did catch todd lying about his skills in c++. Todd says on camera I don't know c++, but in fact wrote an his skills in C++. Todd says on camera I don't know C++, but in fact wrote an entire system in C++ some years earlier. I think they got him. Now, what does it matter? Probably not at all, but it's fascinating and it's exactly the kind of person the Bitcoin community would not like. It's not. He's no magical, brilliant dark knight created a world-changing cryptocurrency. He was just some annoying kid who was really skilled. I don't know. I like it. I, I'm going with it. Peter todd and I'm going with adam back was right there and did part of paris. Your, your best argument against his pizza.
0:42:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Adam Beck was right there and did part of it, and Paris, your best argument against his pizza.
0:42:34 - Paris Martineau
Well, I think that one of the arguments in the documentary was based on the Satoshi account saying that its favorite pizza topping is pineapple and jalapeno and that that also peter todd's favorite pizza topping that's not new mark, craig newmark likes, I mean, I think that's as critical as not said pineapple jalapeno is not completely normal.
0:43:00 - Leo Laporte
That's not a very common, I mean I?
0:43:03 - Paris Martineau
I don't think that. I think that it's probably pretty likely that someone who was maybe involved in the early days of bitcoin, then, when confronted in a warehouse with an entire camera crew and a director accusing you in hours-long interviews of being satoshi nakamono, that you're going to get defensive and act weird. I also think I mean, I don't know any of the stuff about the c plus plus, but I could think of conceivable explanations to why someone would say they don't know a programming language.
0:43:32 - Leo Laporte
Perhaps they were referring to you know, not knowing it that well, or they don't really think no, he did it as part of a denial, saying I couldn't have written I don't know anything about c++ I mean honestly, this is exactly what you would say if you were satoshi nakamoto he started contributing to code in 2012,.
Right at the beginning, I honestly feel like well, look, we've seen a lot of specious announcements, including Newsweek's appalling announcement that they discovered Satoshi Nakamoto as a cover story, which, to my knowledge, they never retracted, did they ever? It was completely wrong, so it could be just another one of these. Uh, who is cullen hoback? I mean, is it enough to say well, I found out who q was? I don't know if that's enough.
0:44:24 - Paris Martineau
I, I, it just rang quite true to me I mean, I think you just need more for it to be like a smoking gun right I don't much care and and does it matter is the, it's the bottom line.
0:44:40 - Leo Laporte
I mean, honestly, he has peter todd, for whatever you think of him has perfectly good reasons not to be it outed and and I respect that.
0:44:50 - Jeff Jarvis
What does he do for a?
0:44:51 - Leo Laporte
living. He is on X. He says he is a crypto-chromancer and web pie developer.
0:45:03 - Benito Gonzalez
This is Benito so like. Why this does matter is because that if this person is Satoshi Nakamoto, then they essentially have control of the Bitcoin market.
0:45:12 - Leo Laporte
More than that, they have control of a world economy.
0:45:14 - Benito Gonzalez
Exactly so, like that's what makes it important.
0:45:17 - Leo Laporte
He says Peter Todd said in a post and they talk about this in the documentary that he did a very hard thing. He burned a bunch of Bitcoin. But there's no way to prove that because he didn't do it in a way that was provable. And so I mean I've burned my Bitcoin by forgetting my password. You can lose your Bitcoin very easily. Steve Gibson did it by throwing his heart, erasing his hard drive. I mean that's easy to do, but there's no provable. That's not provable. There is a provable way to do it and he did not choose to do that. That raises some big issues. If he controls a million bitcoin, he could collapse bitcoin. He and there are a number of nations is very active uh, not just el salvador, but a number of other nations that want to use bitcoin as their currency. Uh, yeah, I think you're right, benito, there is, there is some, but what are you going to do? You can't. If you can't prove it and if you could, let's say you could prove it and it really is him then what then?
0:46:17 - Paris Martineau
then what I mean? I think also, the question is like, if he or someone else is satoshi, what are they going to do with that? Like you can't start moving bitcoin out of your account, otherwise the whole market's going to catch on fire and people are going to freak out because satoshi hasn't been active in years, right, um, I don't know, I guess maybe as a national security ask said okay, now that you say that actually I will bring up.
There was um a time, about a year ago, where for weeks every reporter at the information was getting these emails, signal messages, calls to our personal phone, linkedin DMs, twitter DMs from some guy being like I've figured out who Satoshi Nakamoto is. You've got to listen to us, and none of us really replied.
And then afterwards he would call and email again and be like I figured it out. It's elon musk and his proof was very similar to yours in the sense, like both elon and satoshi used two spaces after a period, satoshi posted in a time zone that was similar to where Elon was. During some of those months, both Satoshi and Elon have used the words bloody in messages and things like that and that's what this documentary sounds like to me is. It is more wishful thinking of a loon.
0:47:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going with it's Peter Todd and Adam Beck, but again, I don't know what you do with it. You can't prove. But again, I don't know what you do with it. You can't prove it. So I don't know what you do with it. It's a very interesting topic. Peter. If you're listening, come on the show and tell us why. It's complete nonsense. His denial was not that credible. All right, let's see. Yeah, let's take another break. And then I do want to talk about dot io. This is this this could be a little bit of an issue and it kind of it shows a little bit of a weakness in the whole domain name system thing every system has weaknesses, every okay thank you.
We're all human. Professor jeff jarvis, ladies and gentlemen, we need him. He's the resident intellectual here. Of course, paris martineau is the resident young person, a genius here and nihilist and nihilist, self-described nihilist. I never knew that until jeff told me you were nihilist.
0:48:50 - Paris Martineau
We've talked about that on this show, perhaps like three or four different episodes.
0:48:55 - Leo Laporte
Leo, maybe I didn't believe it. I knew you liked Nietzsche. I didn't know that you were a nihilist.
0:49:00 - Paris Martineau
I mean I would say I'm a soft nihilist in the sense that, like everything is meaningless, but that means we have to derive our own meaning from it.
0:49:08 - Benito Gonzalez
Optimistic nihilism is an actual philosophy, yeah.
0:49:12 - Leo Laporte
Okay, optimistic nihilism is an actual philosophy, yeah, okay, good, I would say optimistic nihilist, yeah, you kind of. Actually, that's kind of my philosophy, which is everything is meaningless and everything means something so a person?
0:49:22 - Paris Martineau
yeah, if you want it to mean something it's up to you.
0:49:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, um, and I'm just the dunderhead in the middle, I'm the bologna in the genius sandwich, our show today, brought to you by and Benito's the mayonnaise, benito's the mustard.
I was going to say the mustard, yeah, the show today. Well, mustard on one side, bananas on the other side. Oh, I just invented a new topping bananas. I might have to make that Our show today brought to you by 1Password. I'm have to make that our show today brought to you by one password. I'm going to make that tonight and I'll let you know how it comes out. One password is a great, by the way, company who has a new product called extended access management that solves a really, I think, fundamental problem in business.
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0:52:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I have to go because I've just invented bananas and I have to go make some bananas right now. I don't think Hank is going to approve. I think Hank would going to approve. I don't think he's going to allow you to do this, I think Hank would, it'll be bad for his reputation now, if his father it could be a vegan mayonnaise alternative.
0:53:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, my mayonnaise, I guess you could. So my mayonnaise. I don't ever buy mayonnaise anymore. I make it. It's easy With an immersion blender. Uh, all you have to do, it's it's. Uh, you put two I use the serious eats recipe. Two eggs you put the whole egg in. You don't need water, just the egg. Two eggs you put a tablespoon of dijon mustard in there, some salt, some lemon and then, uh, oil I use avocado oil. You want to use kind of an oil, doesn't have a lot of flavor. Now you whip it together and you got mayonnaise. That's mayonnaise, that's basically man.
0:53:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it keep in the refrigerator? Yeah, and it's fresh and delicious.
0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
You know, don't make more than you're going to need in a week or two. Oh okay, it's not a giant jar at.
0:53:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Hellman's. It doesn't have anything else in it. It could stay for years.
0:53:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, because there's other stuff in it. But this is really good. It's delicious and you can put garlic in it, but you could also put a mushed up banana in there and you'd have bananas.
0:53:57 - Paris Martineau
That's true.
0:53:59 - Leo Laporte
I think you could do that A peanut butter and banana sandwich.
0:54:05 - Paris Martineau
I will say sometimes people substitute bananas for eggs in recipes for vegan stuff. So you could replace the egg with a banana, and that could be bananas and somehow uh inspired those bananas.
0:54:21 - Benito Gonzalez
What he says have you had banana ketchup?
0:54:24 - Jeff Jarvis
no, no, never heard of that a filipino thing, yeah, banana ketchup is delicious see and I'm thinking for the holidays.
0:54:33 - Leo Laporte
You could put a little pumpkin spice in and then you have pumpkin spice bananas wow now you know where salt hank gets his genius. No, he would never ever make anything like that. I don't think.
0:54:52 - Paris Martineau
You should just text him Bananas Question mark.
0:54:55 - Leo Laporte
One word I'm going to do that right now.
0:54:58 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, do it right now I would actually love his opinion on banana ketchup. Okay.
0:55:04 - Paris Martineau
I like just suggesting you strange things to text your son. One word.
0:55:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Villa Manila banana ketchup.
0:55:10 - Leo Laporte
He says why is it always on Wednesday? I get weird texts from you.
0:55:20 - Benito Gonzalez
It's not a weird thing in the Philippines. It's like normal Banana ketchup is on the table in restaurants.
0:55:24 - Leo Laporte
It makes perfect sense. It's a tropical ketchup, so I just texted him one word Bananas. We'll see what happens. Question mark. Do you put a question mark?
0:55:32 - Jeff Jarvis
No, oh, exclamation point yes.
0:55:39 - Leo Laporte
There's no question, my friend.
0:55:41 - Paris Martineau
How did you spell bananas?
0:55:44 - Leo Laporte
I guessed B-A-N-A-N-A-I-S-E.
0:55:48 - Paris Martineau
All right.
0:55:49 - Leo Laporte
Right.
0:55:50 - Paris Martineau
Sure. So what does io stand for? Do you know a trivia question indian ocean, ocean. Very good, I know it's been in the news recently.
0:56:02 - Speaker 2
Oh yeah so it's the country code domain, except for the show yeah, I, I knew once, but I I didn't remember.
0:56:12 - Leo Laporte
So it's the country code domain for the chagos islands, which is the british indian ocean territory, disputed territory for a long time. Mauritius said that's ours. The british government said it's ours and took it. In 1814 the french ceded control of the chagos islands and the island country of Mauritius to the British. When the British took over, the islands remained a dependency of Mauritius. In 1965, the UK gave sovereignty to Mauritius but said we're going to keep the Chagos Islands and make it the British Indian Ocean territory. That's in 1965. Indian ocean territory that's in 1965. In fact, and this is horrible the uk forcibly removed the indigenous people, the chagossian people, so the us could build a military, the us, us could builda military base on the island. They displaced 1500 people. It might sound a little familiar to you, benito, colonialism, colonialism. Eventually the chagos islands were given the dot io country code. That was in 1997. By who else? The?
0:57:22 - Jeff Jarvis
you know, iana even though they were still. They were a british protectorate, but they were independent enough to have their own country code right.
0:57:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's not unusual, right canada is part of the commonwealth, but it has its own anyway. The british government granted rights to sell io domains to the internet computer bureau. The icb. Country's government receives revenue for any sites that register with their country code domain. For, for instance, nguila, which has the country code AI, nice, one right Expect to make $25 to $30 million from websites registered with the ai domain.
Yet Tuvalu is tv. I have a tv domain. Twittv is our domain right. Unfortunately, the British government collected some of the revenue and didn't give it to the Chagossian people. In 2020, they submitted a claim to gain ownership of what they said was a $50 million property. This is from the Verge, but the UK has now finalized an agreement giving the Chagos Islands back to the Mauritians, to Mauritius A move, by the way, that Chagossians said the government didn't even consult them on Ending the British Indian Ocean Territory. It's all Mauritius now, and here's the problem. It also potentially ends the IO domain. The io domain.
0:58:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Why does it end it can't? Isn't it still to keep?
0:58:54 - Leo Laporte
going. The uh internet assigned numbers authority, the successor to I can iana, has a process for retiring old country code domains within five years. This was after dot su, which was the soviet union's domain, kind of lingered even though the soviet union had gone on uh. In fact it was used, apparently according to the verge, by cyber criminals. So I'm shocked. No, every domain is used by cyber criminals especially what associated with soviet union, soviet union goods.
Uh. Since then, ayana has also had to recover the yugoslavian domainyu, although it went on for a few years after the country was broken up.
0:59:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Um but if chogos was part of the british empire, couldn't it just as easily be part of mauritius, but independent enough to and still?
0:59:46 - Benito Gonzalez
have a dot io yeah, human beings can decide these things yeah, can we just decide to make it not a country thing and just make it a regular domain?
0:59:55 - Leo Laporte
the fact that google uses it for google io. Anyway, emma roth, who did a very, very good piece on this, explaining it all in the verge, writes for now it's still too early to tell what will become of the dot io domain, whether we'll go through a similar transitional period, like thy white, like likeyu, or if iano will let the chagossians keep it because they say we want it. We don't want the brits to have it, we want the, the money. The verge reached out to identity digital, the domain registrar that previously obtained rights to sell io domains, and iana for information about io's future, but we haven't heard back okay, Okay.
1:00:32 - Benito Gonzalez
So there it is. It's the money.
1:00:34 - Leo Laporte
It's the money, because the Chagossians say wait a minute, we make just like. By the way, tuvalu is sinking. Tuvalu will, in the next few decades, disappear under the ocean. There goes your domain too, Well, but the Tuvalans would very much like to move to another island and keep tv.
1:00:52 - Jeff Jarvis
As Tuvalans.
1:00:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because it's a lot of money. I don't know. There are a lot of io people who use io out there, including my bookmarking service, raindropio. It's a big deal to change a domain.
1:01:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, especially a really popular one yeah, okay.
1:01:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's that story. What do you guys?
1:01:18 - Paris Martineau
do you have any dot io domains?
1:01:21 - Leo Laporte
leo, I do, yes, I think I do.
1:01:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Which one? Yes, how many domains do you?
1:01:26 - Paris Martineau
I was about to say how much do you spend a year on?
1:01:28 - Jeff Jarvis
domains hundreds of dollars didn't you clean them out somewhat?
1:01:32 - Benito Gonzalez
No, why would I do that? None of them are worth anything None of them are worth a thing.
1:01:38 - Leo Laporte
I still have tunictimecom and fancypantscom. We've talked about this before.
1:01:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, yes, yes, yeah, that's right. I had S widget spelled out Swidget.
1:01:52 - Paris Martineau
No, no, you don't have fancypantscom we've talked about this.
1:01:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right, I gave. So it's true, some of them have lapsed. Uh, normally I have auto that went to your wife your ex-wife. I gave it that. She got it in the divorce settlement fancy pants I should write to her. Hey, hon, do you think you still want fancy pants and tunic time? Let me see. I'm just going to log into Hover here and see what's happening. I feel like I have a io.
1:02:26 - Paris Martineau
I simply wish I could own hairis B-A-Ris. It's never going to happen. Why?
1:02:30 - Leo Laporte
not. I-s is Iceland.
1:02:34 - Paris Martineau
You should be able know it was, uh, bought. It was registered by someone else in 2007. Dope can't find a way to purchase it and I'm sure if I did it would be like a million dollars.
1:02:43 - Leo Laporte
Hey, if you're out there, owner of paris, please give it to me for a reasonable price I was miffed because, uh, I wanted leocom, which would be a fantastic domain right or a leoanything. The royal bank of canada's mascot is a lion named leo. So they owned leocom for the longest darn time and then they let it lapse and I didn't notice in some domain squatter. Yes, I have laporteio.
1:03:12 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, laportemy son got jarvis it's registered to that's really good, I gotta update the address.
1:03:22 - Leo Laporte
It's registered to the twit cottage um. I've had this since 2016 and it will not expire till 2025, so I should really think about it now. Should I keep it? Do the bagosians need it? What was their names for the chagosians? Do they need it? Do they need the money? Instead of them yeah, I have so many silly domain names I probably probably should get Leo dot LOL for $3,000.
Yeah, no see, not worth it. I do have, uh, I think I have an LOL domain. I have, uh, a dot fund domain. So I don't know if I have a dot. Nope, no, lols, how. How many domains do you have? Paris? You have a lot, probably. Yeah, how many?
1:04:11 - Paris Martineau
domains. Do you have paris? You have a lot probably.
1:04:12 - Speaker 2
Yeah, not really, I just have paris martineaucom and parisnyc oh, I like paris right. That's kind of an interesting juxtaposition right of two big cities, one after the other, both encapsulating your spirit.
1:04:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, what do you use it for?
1:04:29 - Paris Martineau
anything um, I just use it for my blue sky handle, and it also redirects to my website.
1:04:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so you do have a website. Yeah, Parisnyc man.
1:04:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, pretty good. Oh, that's the best. I finally just this week started using JeffJarviscom. What were you using before. Well, the GoodMachineParenthesiscom. I forgot that. I owned it, my old employers, Advance. Somebody sat on it and tried to screw me, and so the lawyers for Advance went and got it and I forgot it. They paid for it for years. They finally said Jeff, can you take this off our hands?
1:05:07 - Leo Laporte
We don't want it. We got it. We don't want it. Speaking of sitting on things, I know we. Last week we talked about our Ouala bottles, paris. Yes, just a little tip. I sat on the lid, oh wow, and the springs went boing. But it turns out Amazon sells a fake third party. Yeah, that does look fake. Look at the colors. Compatible lid for only $ dollars. Well, I was gonna buy a whole new one, but you know the can's still good, so I just bought the new lid. Anyway, just a little tip. It's not.
It's not who says this show isn't useful, it wasn't a prime deal or anything wire cutter you can do so I feel so bad for people who work at sites like the wire cutter, uh the verge, because they're going crazy right now, because prime days right the the second one of the year yeah, I never find anything I want in prime days.
1:06:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Never, never, never, never. Do you, paris? Are you barely a?
1:06:06 - Paris Martineau
holler. No, I'm not, it's barely a holler I had to do I had to do the Prime Day gift guides for New York Magazine one year and it was a nightmare.
1:06:18 - Leo Laporte
Right now, what?
1:06:19 - Paris Martineau
all those writers are doing is combing through an endlessly long Excel spreadsheet and looking at meager deals and trying to find a way to get readers excited about it, because it pays for their salary.
1:06:31 - Leo Laporte
Exactly Yep.
1:06:32 - Paris Martineau
I remember one day we thought we weren't going to make our prime day targets and then four people bought like a five grand TV using our affiliate link. And there we were. Yep.
1:06:44 - Leo Laporte
Yes, you got to keep doing it. Whose site I was trying to remember? Some site said maybe it was wire cutter. Here are the 4,393 good deals in the 28,972 Amazon Prime deals. It made me go oh my god, that hurts. That hurts that. Whoever had to do that?
1:07:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I was just searching for that story and I don't see it here anywhere anyway so I just put up a little news about open ai from the ft which?
1:07:15 - Leo Laporte
well, there's a big story about open ai actually from the information from a few minutes ago oh, but okay, let's do that then I'll do mine what's so?
1:07:25 - Paris Martineau
what's the story? Uh, opening, I burned OpenAI, burned $340 million in the first half of 2024. That's okay.
1:07:35 - Leo Laporte
They got $167 billion their total losses between 2023 and 2028 are going to be $44 billion, so that means they have a four-year runway.
1:07:48 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they don't know, I think, when they're going to be profitable, or they're not going to be profitable for a very long time, I believe, um but according to my story it won't matter why not, because now the latest gambit from altman is that he wants to structure open ai.
1:08:08 - Jeff Jarvis
as we know, he wants to structure as a for-profitprofit company and the not-for-profit, but he wants to structure it as a public benefit company.
1:08:15 - Paris Martineau
Oh boy.
1:08:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's better than…. It's just a trick to fend off….
1:08:20 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's not really real.
1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
I know a lot of public… I thought that you had to. I don't know be a public benefit or something.
1:08:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, what does?
1:08:30 - Jeff Jarvis
that mean yeah, you make some fakey we're really good.
1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
It's not quite non-profit, but you're not allowed to get rich right.
1:08:41 - Jeff Jarvis
No, you can get as rich as you want, but the thing is that what it does is it protects you from raiders coming and saying you're not making enough profit. Oh, so what he's protecting here is his lack of profitability. Going forward by doing this to hide behind a public benefit, because sam is um, I wouldn't trust him so my stories were actually about ai.
1:09:07 - Leo Laporte
Also, jeffrey hinton wins a nobel prize in physics. Hinton, of course, is the uh godfather of ai one of many, but he was the guy who came up with neural networks many, many years ago.
1:09:24 - Jeff Jarvis
He's also one of the signatories of the letter which I think is why they gave it to him. I think that, oh, you think bells have become more and more political and I think it's an opportunity for them to um give him attention interest. Wall street journal did immediately. The wall street journal said and he's screaming about danger, right, wall street journal loves to do that you know who else won a Nobel Prize?
1:09:52 - Leo Laporte
Demis Hassibis.
1:09:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Which really says that Google has really become, or at least was, a key basic research the New Bell Labs.
1:10:05 - Leo Laporte
He, of course, was the founder of Deep Mind Mind.
1:10:11 - Jeff Jarvis
You lost your mind for a minute.
1:10:13 - Leo Laporte
That was that was not it. I knew the deep throat was wrong. It was the founder very wrong very wrong. Founder of deep mind. His nobel prize is in chemistry, so hinton won. And for physics, because there isn't a nobel prize for ai not yet.
Uh, but hasibis won because they came up with a pro. You know, deep mind came up with a protein folding that has been used to I I thought I don't know. No effect, but apparently some effect in medicine. So, uh, david baker university of washington, john jumper, google deep mind. And David Baker University of Washington, john Jumper, google DeepMind and Demis Haseebis of DeepMind, haseebis and Jumper developed a powerful computational tool this is from the Washington Post that gave researchers the long-sought ability to predict how proteins twist and fold to create complex 3D structures that can block viruses, build muscle or degrade plastic viruses. Build muscle or degrade plastic.
Um, and protein folding is. You know this? Remember the, the, the whole thing where you were uh getting your computers idle time and you were donating it to a project and one of them was folding at home? Remember that where you would get all the computers in the world with their idle cycles trying to fold proteins. Well, that's gone away because AI does it easily and quickly. You don't need all those computers. So I'm curious, they got the Nobel Prize, but has AlphaF fold generated? I mean, is there a medicine or something I could point to that says it's, it's working? I?
1:11:58 - Jeff Jarvis
mean, I know it's making define working, it's. It's. It was a problem that people undertook this project for a reason right well that they could and and and we got there, thanks for this okay. So see, it's no, it's a good thing yeah it's not all generative ai that's a good.
1:12:18 - Leo Laporte
Okay, there you go. That's a good point. It isn't. This stuff is not generative ai. I mean, I don't know what to me it is. It's all anything that generates something with AI. It's generative AI. So I have a call this morning with the.
1:12:33 - Jeff Jarvis
World Economic Forum at Davos. Oh, and they, because I'm a member of some kind of AI thing, the AI governance thing. So anyway, they said that it's also diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive and adaptive AI.
1:12:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh, those are the categories. I'm not sure you'll find all of those. I think a lot of times we think of generative ai as chat bots, basically right chat gpt making um swimming hippos when the nobel committee called jeffrey hinton he said he is quote worried oh, jesus that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that might eventually take control. But then they said but but knowing that, would you? Would you do it all over again? He said, oh yeah the whiny oppenheimer.
1:13:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I'd do it again I am.
1:13:27 - Leo Laporte
I am created chatbot.
1:13:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Annoyer of worlds.
1:13:36 - Leo Laporte
Very good. Hopfield echoed his co-laureate's concerns in a video call yesterday afternoon at Princeton University. The worry I have is not quite not a I quite directly, but but ai combined with information flow around the globe no one's worried about like bad people with ai. That's like I think that's kind of what I'm worried about is like that, that that maybe deep fakes, I don't know. Uh, hopfield is 91, hinton is 76. Uh, that's usually the case. You don't win a nobel prize to your dennis is very young, isn't he?
1:14:17 - Jeff Jarvis
he's pretty young, yeah yeah, yeah.
1:14:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm just saying is there's still hope? Jeff, that's all I'm just trying to get.
1:14:24 - Paris Martineau
You could get your 4 am phone call I just want a macarthur by the way.
1:14:30 - Leo Laporte
That's what that play that I really liked, that the Washington Post hated. I saw you sneaking in a bad review last week, so we were talking about McLean, which I thought was a great movie. It's the Robert. Downey Broadway debut play, not movie play that I saw.
1:14:47 - Paris Martineau
I mean it's a movie. In some ways he's moving.
1:14:49 - Leo Laporte
He's moving and there's a lot of special effects on the stage. It's actually the staging and the Post did like the staging, but they hated the play itself. I don't know, did the Times hate it? Did the New Yorker?
1:15:02 - Paris Martineau
hate, it.
1:15:03 - Leo Laporte
I haven't seen a review yet.
1:15:05 - Paris Martineau
We should talk about Megalopolis, which I saw, and I don't know if I hate it or not. It was a movie, an experience, a ride of a lifetime. I spent the whole time thinking of Adam Driver as Leo, because he famously voiced an early version of either Driver's character or, you said, maybe the narrator.
1:15:25 - Leo Laporte
I thought it might be the narrator. It was one of those. I walked down the rainy streets. I thought he was a detective, but maybe it was Adam. Maybe he was an architect.
1:15:35 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that does seem like something that Adam Driver would say in this. It was a bizarre film. I really enjoyed it. There were parts of it that I was like, oh wow, but you enjoy a lot of weird stuff. I love the weird movie. This is fun and there are parts that I was like this is terrible, like one of the first things that Adam Driver's character, the plot of this, is.
1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
It's set in New Rome, which is like New York City butudson yards mixed with that meme of the utopia city that you see which is an insult? Um, is it like a? Like the atlas shrugged a little bit? I mean, when I say it was an architect, it's like I.
1:16:24 - Paris Martineau
It's like anne rand mixed with hudson yards mixed with. That's just hilarious, caesar.
1:16:33 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, it's not great I want to see it just because of the spectacle. By the way, you're lucky you saw it, because there's some, some thought that they will not be sent to streaming, that this is it. You see it in the theater. You don't see it at all.
1:16:45 - Paris Martineau
I also saw an immersive screening where, midway through, oh yeah, you told consider it a spoiler, because this is 30 seconds of the movie.
Okay, it does not have a satellite crashes into new york city. Then archival footage of 9-11 is played, which I've since learned was shot when they were filming, because they've been filming this movie for so goddamn long that they have never before seen footage of 9-11 oh my god. Then there is a scene of adam driver as the architect in a very tiny box on screen at a press conference. Then the house lights go up in the theater and a man walks out in front of the movie theater with a mic, takes notes and then asks Adam Driver on screen a question. Adam Driver responds and then he goes away and the lights go back down.
1:17:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's so immersive. Oh my God, Reality is bending. I know that's kind of like going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and seeing some guy dressed as Frankenfurter.
1:17:50 - Jeff Jarvis
But that person is now going to say that he was at a coppola production, right?
1:17:54 - Leo Laporte
well, like me, I was in a car, like you, so you, this is good, did you? We did this before the show. So megalopolis coppola has been working on this for 40 years. Yeah, and I mentioned that 30 years ago I was called into Zoetrope. I auditioned for a role in some unknown radio thing that Coppola was doing at Zoetrope and read a part for a couple of nights with other actors in Zoetrope. I later figured out that we were recording some sort of pre-visualization for a movie that Francis was working on, but the movie never came out and the.
1:18:34 - Jeff Jarvis
The other and it that says you're Adam Driver is that you were supposed to sound like Bob Woodward. I got fired how he sounds, and Bob Woodward sounds like Adam Driver.
1:18:44 - Leo Laporte
Francis grew increasingly agitated. He kept saying do it more like Bob Woodward.
1:18:49 - Paris Martineau
And I had no idea what bob woodward sounded like, so I didn't know what this direction meant, so I just tried different accents, the strangest voice acting and just general acting choices I've ever seen in this film there is one where it's a normal scene between adam driver and what will become his love interest and he's talking in a normal way and then he goes. So go back to the club, that is. That is fully how he delivers the love. I can totally see adam driver doing that.
1:19:22 - Speaker 2
He does that little vocal tick, but um I have to see it, because you have to see it, and I also heard from coppola when he was talking.
1:19:29 - Paris Martineau
when someone was asking him in an interview recently what led you to come back to Megalopolis all these years later, he said some years ago he had filmed a food tour TV show episode with Anthony Bourdain. I assumed Italy, where else would he go? But he was watching himself on it and he was like, oh, I look so fat. I hate the way I look. So he signed up for like an exercise camp and during the whole exercise thing he was like what should I listen to? Might as well listen to the old audio recordings I made for the visualizations of megalopolis.
1:20:01 - Leo Laporte
so I was thinking I was like he's listening to leo I wonder if he left my part in and then had father guido sarducci do the rest frankly, given the way that this movie turned out, that would make sense.
1:20:13 - Paris Martineau
It is the most disjointed, confusing experience. There was a whole subplot where aubrey plaza is a character named wow platinum. That is kind of like sexy jim cramer. She hosts a financial morning talk news show called the money bunny oh god, which is the money honey?
1:20:35 - Leo Laporte
reference. Oh, I get it. So he borrowed or raised money like a hundred twenty million sold one of his vineyards he sold a vineyard for twenty million dollars he leveraged.
1:20:47 - Paris Martineau
I think his vineyard is collateral, this vineyard by the way, is just north of me.
1:20:51 - Leo Laporte
The couple is going to be owned by somebody else pretty soon.
1:20:55 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a triggering question for me.
1:20:57 - Leo Laporte
So it's opening weekend. It earned $4 million.
1:21:02 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, it's not going to make money. It was not. I will probably see it again. But I'm also crazy. I wouldn't say I found it a decent movie watching experience, but it wasn't pleasurable. I was listening to pop culture happy hour talk about this and they were trying to decide whether it was a failure or a fiasco, because a failure is just a failure that is not fun at all, but a fiasco's got some pizzazz. There's something about it. It fails and this is definitely a fiasco in kind of a fun way.
1:21:31 - Leo Laporte
One of the funniest this American Life episodes ever is called Fiasco, and if you haven't listened to it, it is a series of fiascos and it's what made this American Life?
1:21:42 - Jeff Jarvis
How long is it?
1:21:43 - Paris Martineau
Paris, two hours and 18 minutes.
1:21:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I thought it might have been a four hour.
1:21:52 - Leo Laporte
So I may be wrong. If it might have made more sense. I see that it is now up for pre-sale on uh, amazon and itunes and the various streaming sites, so I would say it's definitely a movie I'd recommend seeing in theaters, if you could.
1:22:01 - Paris Martineau
I guess I don't know whether the theaters would be packed. I saw it in a packed giant imax theaters and people were just uproarious.
1:22:08 - Leo Laporte
It was sold out it was fun to see that, with a lot of the immersive one with the guy, so everybody was there to see the guy.
1:22:16 - Paris Martineau
But people were laughing their butts off during it because there are some really strange choices in there. At one point a character is talking about a baby. She's about to have to someone and she's like if it's a girl, we'll name her Sunny Hope. If it's a boy, francis, it's like stuff like that one after another. Jeff, you were asking a question before.
1:22:41 - Jeff Jarvis
It's triggering for me to ask this, but now I'm curious what was the 9-11 footage like?
1:22:50 - Paris Martineau
I feel like it was just kind of a short, like they had like three panel shots that were kind of interspersed throughout the film, One of which I believe was like perhaps like the aftermath of 9-11. Like it wasn't, you know, plane crashing into the towers, anything like that, but it was footage that I recognized as, huh, that's 9-11. And then afterwards I heard that it was never before seen footage from the day because they were filming in downtown manhattan when that happened.
1:23:18 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I am. I am looking at the 6 30 show tonight at our local theater and looks like I can have the theater all to myself.
1:23:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I think I'll go, maybe watch it at home he was gonna be rushing off to make sure he gets in um, yeah, I think I'll go, should I get tickets I seem sad to see it like I'm the only person in the freaking theater I would go if you could go.
1:23:45 - Paris Martineau
I mean, honestly, if you're there by yourself, then just like know that it's good to laugh. I think that it's kind of a very funny movie to me. Um, but god, it's weird. It's such a weird movie. There's a whole deep fake subplot.
1:24:01 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I feel like I would like this movie to be honest with you. That's what?
1:24:06 - Paris Martineau
yeah, no, it's like a mix between like there are parts of the movie that I'm like, oh, this could have been good, but it, like it doesn't make sense there's. It switches between at one point, adam driver does the full shakespeare to be and not to be monologue at another point a guy does a boner joke. It's, it's bizarre, it's bizarre.
1:24:23 - Leo Laporte
But I'm trying to get out of writing a few pages of script. I think I have this old shakespeare stuff I could use. That's very funny.
1:24:30 - Paris Martineau
Funny because it's kind of set in modern times. So then all the people watching are like, what's this guy doing In normal English? And they're like, ah, just let him cook To be or not to be?
1:24:40 - Leo Laporte
that's the question.
1:24:42 - Paris Martineau
Basically.
1:24:43 - Benito Gonzalez
It just sounds like he was working on it for too long he left too much in he didn't know how to cut stuff out.
1:24:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I sat next to him once in San Francisco. It was when Apocalypse Now was coming out. I was one of the few people who liked it. I loved it.
1:24:57 - Leo Laporte
It's the greatest I love. Apocalypse, Now you know in hindsight you're right At the time it was panned. In hindsight it's got to be the greatest war movie.
1:25:05 - Paris Martineau
It's not as good as Apocalypse Now, but it is interesting. I think it's the most interesting movie I've seen.
1:25:12 - Leo Laporte
I've seen he's made some terrible movies. There's no doubt about that, but I have huge respect for Francis.
1:25:18 - Paris Martineau
The opening of it is a direct nod to Hudsucker Proxy, which is one of my favorite movies, so I liked that.
1:25:23 - Leo Laporte
So you're a movie fan, a nihilist, an optimistic nihilist and a movie fan.
1:25:28 - Paris Martineau
It's true, an optimistic nihilist and a movie fan walk into a bar, so the truth is, I really liked going to the movies for the popcorn.
1:25:35 - Jeff Jarvis
True, and when the pandemic seems to die down. It's not died down, it's still there. Folks, I know that. But I thought you know I haven't had that popcorn in four years and I went to the local theater where they have the incredibly crazy popcorn. It's terrible. A, b, a little tiny one, $8. Well, that's their profit.
1:25:55 - Leo Laporte
I know, but jeez, I'll make you. Next time you're out here I'll make you some good movie style popcorn. I make good popcorn.
1:26:03 - Paris Martineau
Nice.
1:26:03 - Leo Laporte
I do I have a whole I have actually official popcorn equipment, Of course you do. I have a pot that's exclusively for making popcorn.
1:26:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you make it in your pizza oven? You don't have a pizza oven anymore.
1:26:15 - Leo Laporte
No, I don't. I don't make it in the pizza oven, I make it on the stovetop, but it's a Whirly Pop. Now I use the official Whirly Pops for a while, but they fall apart. I got myself a really nice stainless steel, glass Metal Gear Whirly Pop that does muah. I use amish country popcorn. It's very, very good. And then I put the salt in the whirly pop so that and I use ghee, not butter, not oil, but ghee to pop the popcorn, and then, of course, melted butter on top, if you really want to go crazy. But another thing you could do is put the salt in with some sugar and do the whirly pop and then you got bananas in this, or put bananas, bananas top with you got yourself bananas.
1:27:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a. It's a thing you know. There was a lot of google news this week.
1:27:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's take a break and then come back and actually do some stuff. I just want to.
1:27:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I just want to say for the record, we did no news news last week.
1:27:13 - Leo Laporte
We're doing no news.
1:27:14 - Paris Martineau
last week it was an oops all arguments. Oh yeah, it was, there was no news, we hit like two headlines.
1:27:23 - Leo Laporte
We started to play Scooter X's notebook LM changelog and it was so awful we had to stop.
1:27:31 - Jeff Jarvis
We got into a fight about Taylor Lorenz.
1:27:34 - Leo Laporte
By the way I still can't go to her site. It says it's malware. I don't know why, but I have my weird my, uh, my. You know our, our security software is blocking it weird.
Um, yeah, that's kind of all we did. Anyway, let's not think about the past. Let's be optimistic nihilists. Shall we more to come with this Week in Google? Jeff Jarvis, paris Martineau and your host, adam Driver? Our show today, brought to you by Veeam V-E-A-M.
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1:30:09 - Paris Martineau
One day.
1:30:12 - Leo Laporte
One of the things we talked about last week ed zitrin would not talk about it is the kerfuffle between automatic and wordpress and wordpress engine. And of course uh, that was last week was the day and the reason he couldn't talk about is he represents automatic oh I thought he was just like too boring.
I don't want to talk about that. No, maybe His lips were crazy glued Like same word. We had somebody on the show Sunday who used to work for Automatic has a lot of respect, I think, for Matt Mullenweg, as I do, but it's a complicated story. Great piece from jeffrey zeldman. I have a lot. I'll tell you what I have a lot of respect for zeldman. He is one of the guys behind, uh, so many web standards that we use. He's one of the old school guys. He works at automatic. He have decided to stay there, uh, or decided to take a job there after. Should you, should you give, if I may, the background here of what he was, what everybody? He decided to stay there or decided to take a job there after.
1:31:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Should you give, if I may, the background here of what everybody was offered?
1:31:22 - Leo Laporte
It was six months or $30,000, whichever is larger.
1:31:26 - Jeff Jarvis
To do? What To leave?
To leave because people were disagreeing with what Matt had. This is background. I think it matters. Matt had come out with his jihad against the other company, wp Engine, and some disagreed with him and his tone and Matt said, okay, and it wasn't. It was, I think. I think it was a uniquely Matt thing to do to say I don't want to have you feel like you're working in a company where you're going to disagree, so I'm going to make a very generous offer Anybody who wants to leave can leave and get six-month salary.
1:31:56 - Paris Martineau
Did that include six-month health insurance?
1:31:59 - Leo Laporte
Yes, in fact, that's why Zellman said I really thought about this, because he has creditors.
1:32:05 - Jeff Jarvis
He hired somewhere else.
1:32:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. He said six-month salary in advance would have wiped the slate clean on medical debts and financial obligations incurred by the closing of my publishing businesses and my conference.
1:32:18 - Jeff Jarvis
So 159 people took the offer. A lot of people, 8.4% of the company. Wow.
The other 91.6% gave up $126 million of potential severance to stay. 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US by division it affected our ecosystem were in the us um. By division it affected our ecosystem wordpress areas the most 79.2 percent of those who took it were in our ecosystem business, compared with 18.2 percent from cosmos. Our apps like pocketcasts yeah, 18 people made over 200 000 k a year. One person started two days before the deadline. Wow, four people then took it and changed their minds Okay. So that's the background here of what Zeldman faces and I get again.
1:33:03 - Leo Laporte
I say I really respect Zeldman. He is a legend and had been around forever. He says even as I made myself think about what six months salary and a lump sum could do to help my family and call my creditors, I knew in my soul, soul there was no way I'd leave this company. I respect the courage and conviction of my departed colleagues. I already missed them. I feel the departure is a personal loss. My grief is real. The sadness is like a cold fog on a dark, wet night. But I stayed because I believe in the work automatic is doing. I believe in the open web and owning your content.
I've devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause and when I choose to move in-house, when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me automatic. Now he refers to a post by the guy who created Drupal, Dries Boutart, called Solving the Maker-Taker Problem. And, Dries, you know Drupal, which is what we use as our content management system, is definitely a competitor with WordPress. But Dries says I'm not going to take a position on the WordPress thing, but it's important to understand that every open source project has people who contribute to it and people who take from it, and it's as if and Zellman says it this way he says it's as if you would go to dinner with Paris and Jeff and I go to dinner every week for years and I always pay and nobody else offers to pay. At some point you got to say something about it, uh, so he wait can you summarize the core of the debate again for me.
1:34:46 - Paris Martineau
What is? What are people upset about?
1:34:50 - Leo Laporte
I actually I don't know. I mean, I do kind of know. So remember that Matt Mullenweg wrote WordPress in the beginning and it became very, very widely used. He gives it away at WordPressorg. You can download it, you can install it yourself. He also started a company, wordpresscom. It's called Automatic and that is a managed version of wordpress, so you pay somebody to run your website and keep it up to date and all that stuff. Um, 43 of the web now uses wordpress.
1:35:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Amazing, it's a huge enterprise and by its openness it defeated uh movable type.
1:35:36 - Leo Laporte
That's right because it was open and because it's free as an open source project. But there's something interesting. There is that oh, hello gizmo are you? Interested in this open source maker take your problem. Do you ever pay?
1:35:47 - Paris Martineau
for dinner. Gizmo, do you? Gizmo never pays for dinner. She believes in saving her capital.
1:35:53 - Leo Laporte
Her cat-pital.
1:35:56 - Paris Martineau
Cat-pital, yeah, exactly.
1:35:58 - Jeff Jarvis
So movable type? This is relevant, I think, to where you're going. Movable type tried to disadvantage licensors of its software, which meant that it was put itself in a conflict of interest, but WordPress didn't do that and said anybody can compete anybody can. It's open source. We meet it. Do that and said anybody can compete, anybody can, it's open source. We meet it, it's open source, and thus it won.
1:36:20 - Leo Laporte
However, wp engine was not acting appropriately, according to Matt right, yeah, I mean, they, um, they competed directly with wordpresscom by offering a simple managed WordPress installation, but but uh, and I'm not, I don't, they didn't want to be to the open source yeah, I don't want to misstate matt's uh objections or even take a side in this, but what droice says and I think is right, is that the problem with open source software is you have this he calls it it the maker-taker challenge which you have people who are very generously giving their software away with a kind of unwritten expectation that people who use it, especially companies and this is a big problem who use this software, will contribute back, not necessarily financially could be financially, but also maybe in kind with contributions to the software, that kind of thing.
And there is this imbalance and we know that there's this imbalance between people who make and give away their software people like Linus Torvalds and then big companies that really just use it because they don't have to pay for it and don't contribute back. Dries says addressing the make or take your challenge is essential for the long-term sustainability of open source projects, and I agree. I think Matt maybe lost his head a little bit on this, you know it really became personal for him.
1:37:53 - Paris Martineau
I wonder what flipped the switch for him, because this seems like a very dramatic stance to be taking I know and I feel like I owe, I owe you.
1:38:01 - Leo Laporte
I probably shouldn't have brought this up without being more willing to, uh, have an opinion on it. I'm, I'm, I feel a little bit like an opinion. I feel like I a little like Ed, because I really know and love Matt and I've known him since the beginning and we've had him on the show and he really is a very strong advocate Matt defends open source.
1:38:23 - Jeff Jarvis
He's an advocate, that's why, I tend to trust him. Yeah. It's all right to be biased on something and admit your bias. Yeah, this is now.
1:38:35 - Paris Martineau
I decree to to be known as a challenge in the in the discord.
1:38:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you ever seen this? What the? What challenge the trenton, challenge the trenton's bridge the stupidest slogan for a town anywhere. Do you see it on?
1:38:52 - Paris Martineau
the big bridge the world takes.
1:38:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Just just so bitter, isn't it just like okay, be that way.
1:38:58 - Leo Laporte
World so in mid-september this is from tech crunch mullenweg wrote a blog post calling wp engine quote a cancer to wordpress a little strong yeah he criticized wp engine for disabling the ability for users to see and track the revision history for every post.
This is a feature of WordPress. They disabled it. Mullenweg says that's the core of the user promise of protecting your data. Wp Engine turns it off. Lake, a private equity company, and said they don't contribute sufficiently to the open source project and that WP Engine's use of the WP brand has confused customers into thinking it's part of WordPress, which I think probably some people do. It's not, I think. To somebody who's not paying attention, it's really not clear what. Wordpressorg, wordpresscom, wp engine, automatic, what? Who are they? What are they?
related something like if you gave ten dollars to to wordpress, you'd be, uh, doing a hundred times more than wp engine has given to the open source project yeah that's pretty strong um wp engine of course, sent a cease and desist letter and automatic sent a cease and desist to them and you know, then the battle goes on. Um again. I, my sympathies are with matt. I think he's maybe this is a hot button for him and he's maybe overreacting a little bit. But I also don't blame him because it is a problem. And there you have it Okay, because we wanted to kind of cover it last week but Ed's recusal made it difficult to talk too much.
1:40:49 - Paris Martineau
I bet he left a big. Him being silent leaves a big void in the room.
1:40:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, boy, when you got him throughout the show and then suddenly it really you hear it All right you said there's a lot of Google News Tons of Google. News. Oh my God, I missed all of this. I've just scrolled down.
1:41:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Just to give it a quick digest here. Well, wait a minute.
1:41:14 - Leo Laporte
The most important oneed down Just to give it a quick digest here a judge? Well, wait a minute. The most important one is we're going to break up. Google, says the Department of Justice.
1:41:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, that's what the DOJ says. Well, the DOJ says we have a menu of punishments for Google. Your Honor, take your pick. And so it goes up to breaking up. But that's not the only remedy.
1:41:36 - Paris Martineau
There's other remedies.
1:41:36 - Jeff Jarvis
One is they can't pay anybody for search, which means that, uh, mozilla and apple are are badly hurt. Another is that they uh, by the way, that saves google 40 billion dollars fortune it doesn't hurt. Google makes no sense. Another is that they have to advertise that you have choices in search. Um, that's dumb, that's dumb, uh. Another is to break up, though it doesn't say exactly how, um, and so I have google's response here at line so doj's radical and sweeping proposals risk hurting consumers, businesses and and developers.
1:42:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, of course.
1:42:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Google's going to say that Of course they will. Yes, but not wrong. And you?
1:42:21 - Leo Laporte
know what, With some merit, I mean, it's not like it, isn't? You start knocking at the supports of this house of cards and who knows what's going to happen.
1:42:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And do you end up with five more valuable companies that you know? Because, the thing is, consumers will probably still pick Google Search.
1:42:38 - Leo Laporte
Right, remember the DOJ was going to break up Microsoft and we talked about this earlier on Windows Weekly, and really the upshot of that would have been breaking up Microsoft into two companies. Operating Systems and Office would have been two more valuable companies. Shareholders would have gotten shares in both. Everybody wins. So yeah it's. I would love to see google be forced to give up youtube. I think that's a little much. I think google the fact that google controls all ends of the advertising transaction is clearly problematic what it has hurt us up with an elon musk.
1:43:15 - Jeff Jarvis
What if it ends up with satoshi saying I know what I want to spend my 60 billion on. I'm gonna buy youtube and do crazy things, right? Yeah, it's, you know you be careful of the apple card. That's a good point. You upset good point.
And then the the major papers, the financial times, said this is a gift link. The google breakup reads like an antitrust fan fiction, right, and the new york times said this is going to be really hard to do. Um, and at the same time, I love this. The story comes in here. Uh, a wall street journal story from just the other day said google's grip on search slips as tiktok and ai startup mount challenge. So so it's just like Microsoft.
1:43:55 - Leo Laporte
The timing is it's hard because these things move glacially slowly in the technology industry, and this is.
1:44:01 - Jeff Jarvis
What's clear is Google is going to fight full on. They're going to go through every possible court. This is going to take years upon years upon years.
1:44:09 - Paris Martineau
Well, I mean they have to. It's like a for their shareholders.
1:44:13 - Jeff Jarvis
They have a fiduciary responsibility to but they're going to spend money now. One of the stories I think was the the time story said they're going to spend money now at a current dollar. Uh, and it's worth it, because in the future, by the time anything ever happens, the value of what they spent will have gone down with inflation. So it's also in their physical sense to just fight as long as possible.
1:44:39 - Leo Laporte
So it's funny because Paul Theriot said I really want to know what Jeff Jarvis thinks about this.
1:44:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, paul Theriot, by the way, paul, who I'm bitter at. He was in Berlin for more than a week. I told him like five times on Facebook you have to go to the food floor and he never went. And he ate at the same bloody restaurant nearby like five times, having stupid currywurst every single time, I think he actually loved currywurst.
1:45:08 - Leo Laporte
He talked a lot about it every single time he had currywurst jeez. It's awful okay curryverst is awful, but anyway michael lisa's son is going to germany with his german tutor and his dad in a week. Wow, and he will. They will be going all over germany, including berlin. Would you please text me or send me or email me the name of that place and I will make sure that they go there yeah, kaufhaus does vest, they should go to the film museum yeah, see
this is the problem. Uh, anyway, uli is a native. His tutor, his german tutor, is native and, by the way, michael speaks incredibly fluent german. Uli said he could teach german if he wants kids 21 and for some reason decided he wanted to learn German and quickly outpaced what the school could offer. So he has this native speaker tutor, who's fantastic. So I can't wait because he's going to go to Germany and suddenly the language he's been learning is going to come alive.
1:46:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I went finally. Mein deutsches Leiter ist Erschlecht. I went finally when I was 24 and I said why didn't I pay attention? Yeah, it's a fascinating culture and country and anyway, I forget where I did that to us, didn't I?
1:46:18 - Leo Laporte
no, but do bring us, send me the klaus schaufel kaufhaus disvestens okay, the other story. Oh no, before I do that I forgot, paul thurott wanted to know what does jeff? What should?
1:46:35 - Jeff Jarvis
happen. I think that what this exposes is the inadequacy of antitrust doctrine today and we've talked about this many times Under US. It's about consumer harm. Consumers are not harmed, they are helped in each one of these cases. I do think the one place where Google is vulnerable which is not this case, because this is the search case is in the ad case.
Yeah, it's terrible and I think I disclosed on this show, I got a call from lawyers who I don't know who they could have been for, wanting to see if I wanted to be an expert or if I was qualified to be an expert witness. And as the talk went on, gee, it was about advertising and antitrust and this and that. And I said, well, you might want to know what I said in my new book, the Way we Weave on sale now that it's the one area where Google is most vulnerable in antitrust. And they said, okay, thanks, never mind.
1:47:33 - Leo Laporte
We don't really want you. I agree with you, because they own the entire chain. They buy, they sell, they make the market. But even there.
1:47:39 - Jeff Jarvis
There's an argument that says that the market is more efficient because they're there doing all that, but it is the area where I think they're vulnerable. Search it's ridiculous, it's a red herring. Their shopping, which the Europeans go after, is ridiculous and consumers benefit.
1:47:56 - Paris Martineau
How do you feel about the fact that google lawyers had you pegged as a as an ally of google, because I wrote a book called what would google do I mean? You think it's just as simple as that?
1:48:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm on a podcast this week in google. You must love google, right?
1:48:08 - Paris Martineau
but I assume they probably put some other. You know, yeah, well, I've been, I've said it on the show.
1:48:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I've said on the show often I think that the case in other areas is bs, but in that area I actually agree with the government going investigating.
1:48:22 - Leo Laporte
I think that's the right it's hard to know what to do, though, isn't it? Because it you don't want to upset the apple cart yeah it's really hard to know what the apple cart and they came in and tripped over everyone else's apple cart.
1:48:36 - Benito Gonzalez
So why can't, like we tip their apple cart?
1:48:39 - Paris Martineau
I would also say that your point earlier about consumer harm, I don't know. I think there should be an asterisk there. It's like, yeah, perhaps consumers aren't being harmed under the specific way the us justice system uh, deter defines consumer harm. Currently, some people argue that consumers are being harmed because monopolistic forces deprive them of choices that would otherwise be available if it wasn't such a concentrated market.
1:49:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Would you want a European model where the Ida Trust is more about too big is too big?
1:49:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, or you could say the way Google has manipulated the ad market makes it very difficult for blogs to succeed and for podcasts like ours to succeed, and they are very dominant in advertising Between Google and Facebook. Pretty much all digital advertising something like 80 or 90% of it goes through Google and Facebook. Their dominance means there's no competitive market for advertising. That's not good for us, yeah, so I think advertising is where they're vulnerable.
1:49:43 - Jeff Jarvis
But the search case here, I think, is ridiculous.
1:49:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because in the long run something else is going to come along like TikTok and it's not going to matter anyway, and they're actually ruining their own search frankly.
1:49:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I think that the web AI is ruining the web, which in turn makes search impossible to do.
1:50:05 - Leo Laporte
Go do a search, though, and the first half of the page is nonsense, not AI nonsense. Google provided nonsense, you know.
1:50:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they're also going to add ads into their um yeah, ai answer, and that's going to piss off the publishers who say, well, now you're making money on the stuff that you're training on from us. They're they're not too clever in some cases so isn't this all part of it?
1:50:27 - Benito Gonzalez
like you're saying, like the, the search is not a good like vector of attack, but, like you're saying, their search is getting so bad now but there's no alternative because no one has been able to compete with Google.
1:50:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, there is a disagreement about who's to fault for that, I think.
1:50:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, he thinks the bad searches reflects the bad content.
1:50:48 - Jeff Jarvis
If you want to go after Google, pick your best case, and your best case is advertising, not search. That's what I'm saying. Now, whether you should go after Google is a different question, but I'm just saying that if we buy that, however, I think the other important case is in the App Store, which I think is going to hurt consumers. You saw that.
1:51:08 - Leo Laporte
Yes. So this is the other judge ordered Google to pry open. This is Shiro Ovid writing in the Washington Post it's Android app store to competition on Monday. James Donato large. This is a victory for Epic Games. Remember Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, sued both Google and Apple. They didn't do very well in the Apple case, but it looks like they've got pretty much a complete victory in the Google case. They won a jury verdict last year that said the Play Store was an illegal monopoly. Epic wanted to. The problem for Epic was this 30% VIG that Google and Apple take of sales. Epic wanted to sell in-game goods and products without giving money to Apple or Google. I'm not sure why they lost in the Apple case. I think because there wasn't a jury.
It was a judge and in the Google case it was a jury verdict Donato. So after the jury ruled last year that the store was a monopoly, donato, judge Donato was tasked with mandating changes to the app store to fix the behavior. He says that Google has to allow other apps app stores in the Google Play Store. The judge required Google to remove roadblocks that largely discourage businesses from making Android apps available to download from their websites or, by the way, nobody wants to do that.
Fortnite did it for a while. Oh, you don't have, because Android does not make you do it from the Play Store. There is a security checkbox you can check and then you can go to the Fortnite site and download it from there. If you want Side loading they call that the judge says you've got to take away that checkbox, that roadblock, or allow digital storefronts not controlled by Google so somebody could download an Epic. This is what Epic really wants Download on their Android phone from the Google Play Store, an Epic store where you could buy stuff for Fortnite, buy other games from Epic.
Apple absolutely does not allow this, except they're being required to now in Europe and they're dragging their feet putting up a whole bunch of Roblox, which the EU is not too happy about. I imagine Google will face the same thing. Donato also said app makers can offer people more options to pay for digital purchases like Disney plus streaming or extra lives and candy crush. Google right now requires in-app purchases to go through its own payment system, and that's when they get their 30%. This is a very big deal.
1:53:50 - Jeff Jarvis
This is what it's also about the security of what you can put on your phone. Now, is that worth the 30% VIG or not? That's a debate to have, but it is a service to users that Google and Apple each Well, that's what they say.
1:54:07 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it does provide a lot of security. That's what the argument for them is. For Apple, it is a massive windfall. It is a big part of their revenue. I imagine it is for Google as well. They would like to. Really, the real question is does the maker of your smartphone have the right to control everything on that smartphone?
1:54:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, which is a very Absolutely not.
1:54:38 - Leo Laporte
I would think not you own. It's like saying, oh, if you buy a car from audi, you have to use shell gasoline and no other or like today if they implemented a 30 vig on your mac software, everyone would do it.
1:54:49 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh yeah, that's, it would be an uproar.
1:54:50 - Paris Martineau
Well yeah, it is fascinating to me that we've gotten to this position with smartphones, yet no other platform.
1:55:00 - Leo Laporte
I would submit it's because these companies learned from their desktops and the smartphone came along, remember much later, starting in 2007. And they said we're not going to make the same mistake. There was I think there was very you're right, jeff a legitimate security argument. They said we really gotta smartphones are going to be a security target and we really got to lock them down right that tied with the with the vig, makes it makes their argument less valid.
Oh, we make some money too on it. That's okay, but I do think that, uh, I mean, there's a security issue on desktops as well. I, I mean, that doesn't go away.
1:55:35 - Benito Gonzalez
I can download. It's something that's been there and that we're all prepared for. That's right. We're just used to it and we all know it.
1:55:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Unless you have a Chromebook, which is controlled by Google and means that I have none of these problems.
1:55:44 - Leo Laporte
That's true, that's a good point. So that's the real question and that's what the jury has decided. But is again the question is does the maker of a smartphone have the right to control what's on that smartphone for your benefit? And I agree with you benito, absolutely not so there's a lot of google news.
1:56:10 - Jeff Jarvis
We got to the google news no.
1:56:11 - Leo Laporte
So what's weird is that google now has to do this, but Apple doesn't.
1:56:16 - Jeff Jarvis
That is interesting, that's very weird.
1:56:18 - Leo Laporte
Different jurisdictions, different courts and, most importantly, one was a jury decision and one was a judge's decision, and I think the judge probably is more sophisticated than the jury.
1:56:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know, but does that leave any? We need, we need, we need uh kathy here. Does that leave any cause for in itself for appeal to say that you know equal treatment?
1:56:44 - Leo Laporte
I think epic uh has decided not no, epic and apple both went to the supreme court, but with just smaller issues in the overall case. So I think epic's decided that they're going to live with that one. They're very happy about the what about no?
1:56:55 - Jeff Jarvis
what about google saying we shouldn't be subject to this if apple isn't? Oh, oh, the other way around yeah, is that a basis for appeal?
1:57:03 - Leo Laporte
I don't think so. It's like saying, hey, that cop was driving 80 miles an hour in a 60 mile zone. Why, why can't I like?
1:57:14 - Benito Gonzalez
tough luck, you're out of luck, because you don't have qualified immunity oh, yeah, that I forgot about that neither does google, yeah yeah, uh, wow, very that's.
1:57:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know more and more. I used to uh on these shows, be willing to express ill-formed opinions Hot devil's advocate.
1:57:38 - Jeff Jarvis
You saw that as your role.
1:57:39 - Leo Laporte
And I kind of lost that. I kind of now I don't know, maybe because I'm getting older or cause I'm losing my marbles. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is anymore. Yeah, yeah, that's where it's kind of crazy takes on AI it's yeah, I don't even even even that I've kind of given up on, haven't I? I'm just kind of I should be more like Ed, like certain about everything.
1:58:04 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it seems exhausting to do that. It is I'm exhausted anyway, so I was thinking about this the other day is, like you know, I used to be so into tweeting to posting, always coming up with a hot take on something, always out there looking for content, and it really was good for you know, follower counts and things like that. But that's too, it's too exhausting, I don't have time for that.
1:58:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, do you think maybe we burned out?
1:58:29 - Paris Martineau
on that.
1:58:29 - Leo Laporte
I mean certainly I look at Twitter now and I go. These people are just performing. They're performing. Yeah, I look at Twitter now and I go. These people are just performing.
1:58:33 - Paris Martineau
They're performing. I mean, yeah, it's absolutely all performing and the performance is exhausting.
1:58:37 - Leo Laporte
It's exhausting, it's a lot of work, and to whose?
1:58:42 - Benito Gonzalez
benefit. I see it as the high school cafeteria of the internet. Yeah, we outgrew it.
1:58:50 - Leo Laporte
No, it's definitely just you know a peacock fluffing up its feathers, which can be a beautiful sight. I miss it. You know. You see someone and you're like.
1:58:57 - Paris Martineau
That's a beautiful sight, but also to what end?
1:59:00 - Leo Laporte
yeah, although I have to say I go to blue sky. I see drill trying really hard and it just doesn't work on other places no, I think drill works, no matter where he goes really you like drills? Posts on blue yeah.
1:59:13 - Paris Martineau
I think they're good. Okay, I just like the fact that Blue Sky, when they were coming into existence, hiring their first engineers employees, every single person got a paperback copy of Drill's tweets.
1:59:27 - Leo Laporte
And they reserved.
1:59:28 - Paris Martineau
Drill's handle on Blue Sky. We're so surprised when he tried to sign up that he was like why can't I get my handle? And they were like oh no, we've been saving it for you, mr Drill. Mr Drill, welcome, I'm happy. So.
1:59:42 - Leo Laporte
I have started. Tell me if I'm wrong doing this. I got a new program for iOS called Croissant, which is a cross posting app and has a nice little croissant icon. It doesn't post to Twitter, don't get your hopes up. It's blue sky threads and mastodon. But I've been using it because those are the three places that, at least for promotional posts like buy my son's book, salt hank, a five napkin situation available in bookstores everywhere, and when I post that I want to post it to Mastodon.
2:00:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it only phone, or is there also a web version?
2:00:19 - Leo Laporte
No, no, you have to have an iPhone. I think it's nice. Every time you refresh it it gives you a new prompt, like right now. It says put your words in me. Let me see what it says. The next time that's twee.
2:00:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Hello world, that's just dumb.
2:00:37 - Paris Martineau
No, I like it uh, so much is happening.
2:00:39 - Leo Laporte
It's very 2010 internet yeah, well, I'm a 2010 internet guy. How about this one? Drop some truth, oh jeez, okay, you lost me so it's a very it's playful, you should say truth doesn't exist.
2:00:54 - Paris Martineau
Impartiality is a nonsense.
2:00:58 - Leo Laporte
Okay, Friedrich. Let's see. All right, I am, as I said, I am jaded, bored, and we're almost out of time. So let's, each of you, you got to go see the movie tonight.
2:01:13 - Benito Gonzalez
I got tickets for the mindset all alone. We need to take a one pause.
2:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to do a pause before the uh uh picks of the week. Don't worry, benito, I'm going to take care of your revenue generating opportunities. Um, I don't think I'm going to go see megalopolis in the theater I I think that sounds unbearably sad. I mean, yeah, it would be sad for the only person there, all by myself also.
2:01:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean I only really like seeing movies in the theater if I go to one of the theaters that I that are near me that have good popcorn and have tacos and alcohol and alcohol baby. Actually our theater tried that I would recommend being a little inebriated for megalopolis, it in the suburbs maybe.
2:01:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe you new yorkers do, but kabbalah said to um howard stern about going to the, to the dome in vegas no what no? And so she took um doug uh there as a surprise. Uh, when they were in vegas and she said definitely do not go in there in an altered state Wow, you mean like high. And she said yeah, don't, which is I love, because that's our, my hope future president, saying yeah, I've been there. Wow. Not just that, I inhaled accidentally.
2:02:32 - Leo Laporte
I feel like I want to hear less from our candidates, not more.
2:02:36 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I think can we just vote and get this damn thing over with.
2:02:40 - Leo Laporte
I'm so sick of this. Uh, pick a story, any story, paris uh.
2:02:49 - Paris Martineau
Caroline calloway uh announced that she's not evac. She lives in sarasota at a beachfront property and is not evacuating for the hurricane.
2:03:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Is she doing live?
2:03:01 - Paris Martineau
Who is Caroline?
2:03:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Calloway.
2:03:03 - Paris Martineau
She is a influencer who became famous over the past seven or eight years. I think there was originally some New York magazine article about her is no, she's not the hawk to a girl.
She looks similar. She was, I think, well known for writing uh, that's all you did really long instagram captions and then became known as kind of a prolific scammer. She like did a bunch of low-key and medium scams, one of the most famous of which I don't know if this really counts the scam is she had like an apartment in new york city that she really poorly painted. She painted around a bunch of piles of clothing on her floor and like half painted the basically trashed the apartment, never paid rent on it for like a year or two and then got evicted and now lives in florida.
2:03:48 - Leo Laporte
Um, but she's apparently has a is a fan of wax lips.
2:03:51 - Paris Martineau
Look at that picture yes, is apparently a fan of wax lips. Um, so she announced on twitter and instagram yesterday that she's staying put in sarasota, where hurricane milton is heading, and everyone was like is this a bit what's going on? She did an interview with new york mag where she's like no, I'm just staying and I think I'm gonna be fine. I'm in on the third floor of a building that's rated as hurricane safe, so we'll be all right so somebody tweeted her dying in a hurricane would be the perfect ending to her narrative.
2:04:25 - Leo Laporte
A little dark, a little dark, um. So folks don't stick it out, is it?
2:04:32 - Paris Martineau
too late, though it might be too late right now. It's too late, but, yeah, right now maybe follow the advice of local authorities in tampa and nearby areas, which is if you haven't done, if you're still there, if you've decided to stay. They say, uh, get a permanent marker and write your name, date of birth on your and the contact for your next of kin on your arms or legs so that they can identify you, you're kidding. Yeah, no, that's the actual guidance.
2:05:02 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty grim, that's dark as hell. Please use an indelible marker and write your name on your arm, so we know who to call.
2:05:13 - Paris Martineau
I mean. Part of the issue in some of these areas is when it is going to be. It is that devastating of a forecast. Emergency service providers are also evacuating Right. So there's no one to come get you until things have calmed down.
2:05:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, we were talking about this yesterday. The other side of the story is there's looting and people are afraid if they evacuate, looters will come in. On the other hand, wouldn't you rather?
2:05:43 - Paris Martineau
lose your stuff than your life. Yeah, and it's also. I mean those looters. Let's say, if there are looters in some place, like where the hurricane is going to have a direct hit, those looters probably aren't going to get very far with your things before they are hit by a hurricane.
2:05:55 - Benito Gonzalez
Hit those looters probably aren't going to get very far with your things before they are hit by a hurricane. They're not looting your things. They're looting the supermarket for food because they can't leave.
2:05:59 - Leo Laporte
That's what I would think really.
2:06:02 - Paris Martineau
It sounds like more of that racist nonsense my family and stuff are fine, but it's been really dismaying to see the constant, I feel like refrain you hear from Floridians during hurricanes oh we were fine during ian or something else, so we're gonna be fine now. This hurricane is a big deal.
2:06:20 - Benito Gonzalez
It's gonna be worse than it only takes one to wipe you out, man, and for a lot of the places like sarasota, where callaway is, and things like that.
2:06:29 - Paris Martineau
The notable difference is it's going to be hitting kind of the north of them, and floridians know the south and southeastern part of the hurricane is the most dangerous because that's going to result in a huge storm surge, which is really what?
2:06:42 - Leo Laporte
a lot of this devastation is going to come from. That's the real threat is the rising sea level.
2:06:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
2:06:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah.
2:06:48 - Paris Martineau
Anyway, so that's my uplifting story for the day.
2:06:50 - Benito Gonzalez
And you know like none of the news ever, ever, ever brings up climate change when they report on this.
2:06:56 - Leo Laporte
No, one says it? No one says it. It's just going to become very obvious.
2:07:13 - Paris Martineau
And I mean for anybody out there who's poo poo is, because hurricanes come from heated water in the Gulf and the water has been getting hotter. It's unusually hot right now, and that's what's been producing this megastorm so quick on the heels of the last storm.
2:07:31 - Leo Laporte
But it's hot because of Jewish space lasers, right? Oh, of course, yeah, yeah, okay, just checking. You know, this is one I don't want to be right about. I just wanted to do something about it.
2:07:41 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I'd love to just be over cautious and have everybody be fine. But seeing what we saw with Helene recently, seems unlikely.
2:07:50 - Leo Laporte
I just I feel for everybody and stay safe, folks. Really we have a lot of listeners who lost power, lost internet in North Carolina. I was hearing from them.
2:08:03 - Paris Martineau
Some of them were able to watch over other systems and something that's worth noting for listeners who could be impacted by this or someone who could be impacted by this. If you have an iPhone or they do, the newest iOS update has a feature that could be really useful in this, which is, if you've updated the latest iOS, if you're in an area without cell service, as people often are after this, you can send texts via satellite and, I believe in the wake of Hurricane Helene, uh, people in kind of the north carolina impacted areas were able to use the feature without any charge, uh, but they were able to send texts to loved ones saying I'm all right or I need help amazing really I don't know satellite both I the newer iphones support satellite texting right, but but how can you do that with no electricity?
2:08:55 - Jeff Jarvis
You have no screen.
2:08:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, if your phone's dead it won't work If your phone's dead, it won't work.
2:08:59 - Paris Martineau
But a thing a lot of people do in hurricanes you keep your phone off until you need it. Right, Right.
2:09:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal story I have in the rundown there at the top of the end 114, has a kind of animation of what it looks like and pixels will do it. Some pixels will also you have to stand there and point it at the satellite and it guides you to do so and then says okay, you're in. You have to go outside, not under trees. Clouds are okay.
2:09:27 - Leo Laporte
Paris. Have you ever been through a big hurricane? Not?
2:09:31 - Paris Martineau
really Sounds like you know a lot about them, no. I mean, there were hurricanes, a lot growing up but we never experienced much devastation.
2:09:41 - Benito Gonzalez
In comparison to this, I have.
2:09:41 - Leo Laporte
They were called typhoons in the philippines. Yeah, so, yeah, so you have benita many times.
2:09:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I mean, it's terrifying. It's old hat to me, but these, these storms are a little stronger than you know what we were going through. We went through seasonal monsoon and things like that, right, and there were typhoons, but not like cat five.
2:09:59 - Paris Martineau
No, not like this yeah, I feel like we had like cat two, cat three, cat four, but in most cases power came on after a couple days um, and it was the only impact to me was like having to spend days as a child picking up down trees and things like that, but it's quite sad.
2:10:20 - Leo Laporte
Um, what's about to happen yep, our uh thoughts, I want to say thoughts and prayers go out to you but uh I really. Uh, we stay safe. If you can. All right, let's take a final break and then we'll get your picks of the week. As we wrap things up on this week in Google Pick of the week time, I like to start with Paris, because Paris always has she always has the good stuff.
2:10:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I have kind of another silly pick.
2:10:47 - Paris Martineau
I was trying to think today of what I want to do for my Halloween costume. I was trying to remember all the things that had happened in 2024 and then I remember that there's a woman I follow on twitter uh, I think page skinner is her name that has been keeping this google doc where she just almost every single day for the full year has been just jotting down what's happened, what's been happening in popular culture, and it's a real delight to look through.
2:11:11 - Leo Laporte
It's not always big news, either right it's not always big news, either right it's not always big news.
2:11:15 - Paris Martineau
It could be January 25th, selena.
2:11:16 - Leo Laporte
Gomez says she told Sailor Swift about her friends hooking up at Golden Globes. Could be. That was January 9th.
2:11:22 - Paris Martineau
Media layoffs in the Dune 2 popcorn bucket. You know there are some just ones in these that are really funny, Like the cut $50,000 scam article.
2:11:36 - Leo Laporte
Is this going to be the new tweeting like don't tweet creates Google Sheets that you then tweet?
2:11:41 - Benito Gonzalez
February 25. That's a whole.
2:11:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, nothing happened.
2:11:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know they. As the year goes on, it's clear that this person is living their life and kind of forgets to do it Sometimes a lot of tick tock in here, a lot of tiktok really an interesting mix of things.
2:12:00 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna save this, for you know we do year-end shows uh on this show and on uh on twit and mac break. I gotta save this and we can just go go through it may 8th rfk's brain, may 9th. Hayley bieber pregnant, may 10th. Northern lights in the us. Wow, there you go july 25th jd vance couch you know that that that story kind of went away, didn't it kind of uh drifted off into august 4th rfk junior jumped a bear in central park september 19th tim robinson nude africa, olivia nuzzy and rfk affair.
Diddy on suicide watch. Wow, that was a dark day wow, it really will.
2:12:48 - Paris Martineau
Just, you know a lot of boeing yang parodies chapel ronan mudang.
2:12:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, she's getting busy, isn't she?
2:12:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It's kind of blank here. It's good to see that she's doing it, I mean it's good.
2:12:57 - Paris Martineau
It would be a little sad if it was still going on in full. Let me see. February 21st Biden dog commander has bitten 24, says Secret Service.
2:13:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was a big story that kind of nobody talks about anymore.
2:13:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, if I may, I think I have the help for you for Halloween.
2:13:18 - Paris Martineau
All right, because we have a story here from Tom's guide about a woman who used Right now I'm thinking of being the RFK brain worm.
2:13:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that would be good. I like that.
2:13:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Or I think you should be the bear.
2:13:28 - Leo Laporte
So you still do a Halloween costume even though you don't work in an office. Oh, you do work in an office.
2:13:32 - Paris Martineau
I do work in an office. Okay, I don't know if wearing it to the office would be the highlight for me. I have a pretty popping neighborhood for Halloween, so I'd wear it around there.
2:13:41 - Leo Laporte
You just kind of walk around the block.
2:13:43 - Paris Martineau
Oh. Yeah. I was the Ocean Gate Submersible last year and groups of children were oohing and aahing and stopping me for photos.
2:13:57 - Leo Laporte
So you for photos. So you made a giant like bean that you have a photo of that. Did it explode periodically? Did periodically you?
2:14:00 - Paris Martineau
just go down flatten. I've got the part that I had an ocean gate oh, so you were just flattened.
2:14:07 - Leo Laporte
This was the post.
2:14:08 - Paris Martineau
Oh, you were flat that was the front of it. You can kind of see the guys in there. Oh geez, they're not the actual guys. I wasn't that dark and then I had an Ocean Gate hat on, I don't know.
2:14:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's good, I like it. So you like to do topical costumes?
2:14:23 - Paris Martineau
I like to do a topical, ideally something that's not a person. I was the ever-given container ship in the Suez Canal one year.
2:14:37 - Leo Laporte
That's suez canal one year.
2:14:38 - Jeff Jarvis
That's good. Um, that's good. I like that. The one that got stuck, yeah, yeah. So amanda caswell, at tom's guide, went to metaai and perhaps you could do this for paris, leo, oh and asked what she should be for halloween and she says why didn't I think of that sooner?
2:14:52 - Leo Laporte
so what did she get? She uh oh I hate this.
2:14:57 - Paris Martineau
I hate this so much this sucks. Meta suggests create a colorful costume with a pinata inspired design. You can use cardboard, felt or even balloons to create the pinata shape this is I suggest dress up a vintage suitcase with a fun twist. You can use cardboard or foam to create the suitcase shape and add some travel stickers. To be clear, the AI is suggesting I go as a suitcase, not a time traveler with a suitcase.
2:15:27 - Leo Laporte
Hey Meta, can you make some Halloween costume suggestions for me? I wish I could. Witch Vampire suggestions for me. I wish I could. Which vampire would you like more ideas? That's terrible. At least give me a forgotten library book?
2:15:46 - Benito Gonzalez
I don't. I asked metaai my friend is a nihilist what she should do.
2:15:48 - Leo Laporte
She do for halloween, all right, oh that's good number one, the correct Wait, wait, wait. A literary book.
2:15:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I asked metaai my friend is a nihilist what should she do for Halloween? All right, oh, that's good. Number one. The correct answer should be nothing, the absurdity of existence Dress up as a random, meaningless object, eg a cardboard box, a leaf or a forgotten sock or a plastic bag blowing in the wind.
That's what I look for Two the void we are all black, with a black hood or mask, symbolizing the emptiness of existence. That's really good. It is A forgotten soul dressed as a ghost, with a sign that says no one remembers me. Or the meaningless reaper dressed up as death but with a twist Carry a scythe with a rubber chicken or a whoopee cushion attached. Activity ideas for you and your friends Host an existential crisis party. Decorate with absurd, contradictory or meaningless signs and symbols. Two attend a Halloween party, but only to highlight the futility of social interactions.
2:16:52 - Paris Martineau
These are all actually entirely accurate, my friend is a journalism professor.
2:16:57 - Leo Laporte
What should he dress up for as Halloween? Clark? Kent. Superman. Old school reporter.
2:17:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Do it on metaai. That's chat GPT. This is chat GPT.
2:17:08 - Leo Laporte
Citizen Kane Edward R Murrow.
2:17:10 - Paris Martineau
I will be throwing an existential crisis party, though that's on the list.
2:17:14 - Jeff Jarvis
At that party. Harris, you should go on a search for meaning scavenger hunt, where clues lead to more questions, not answers. That's brilliant.
2:17:25 - Leo Laporte
This is actually really good. This is really good.
2:17:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Organize a nothingness movie marathon featuring films with existential or absurdist themes.
2:17:35 - Leo Laporte
Let me try the optimistic nihilist on uh chat gpt the void, but make it sparkly, existential detective, smiling grim reaper. Combine a classic groom reaper robe and scythe with a big goofy smile and upbeat accessories like party hats or balloons. Meh, dusa, a twist of medusa. Wear a snake covered wig and greek inspired outfit. Have a nonchalant or bored expression. Make signs that say turn to stone. Yeah, that's, this is earth. You know what?
2:18:14 - Jeff Jarvis
okay because you got to be a nihilist. That's this is good create a graveyard of lost dreams, with tombstones burying absurd epitaphs I.
2:18:25 - Paris Martineau
They really got me on the go as a meaningless household object, that's. That's kind of the vibe I'm trying to bring I am a whisk.
2:18:33 - Benito Gonzalez
There's also that Japanese tradition of going as really mundane situations like a person waiting at a gas station or a bus stop and they have a bus stop with them.
2:18:43 - Paris Martineau
I've always wanted to do just the bag of plastic bags that's under the sink, wow.
2:18:53 - Leo Laporte
You guys are so much more creative than me. Was just gonna, you know, go as a baseball player, so how?
2:18:58 - Jeff Jarvis
how should we describe you, leo? What should you go as? Oh no, no, no, no, let's do benito, benito. What?
2:19:04 - Leo Laporte
how would we do what's a short description of benito I wanted to.
2:19:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I want a description of benito's psyche oh, what do you mean?
2:19:10 - Benito Gonzalez
like what's? Your philosophy I'm I'm very, very much aligned with paris, like I'm kind of the same way you can't be an optimistic nihilist, that's taken no, it's already taken me out. Yeah you know, but I have the, I have the pin and everything. I have a pin and everything, are you?
2:19:25 - Paris Martineau
in the club oh, he does, he has a card. This is optimistic nihilism.
2:19:30 - Leo Laporte
And then, what the hell? Oh, wait a minute.
2:19:33 - Paris Martineau
Oh, maybe we have to change uh maybe I have to not be the one.
2:19:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he's got the he's got the official right wow, that's really good.
2:19:42 - Paris Martineau
That was really good. All right, let's see. Um, that's the first good chat, another experience I've had, yeah, that's really Former radio DJ, now podcaster.
2:19:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh God, what should he go? As for Halloween Question mark? Oh, pretty obvious. No, dress up a 50s DJ no, no, no. Podcasting phantom, wear a ghostly outfit with a headset microphone no, no, no.
2:20:13 - Leo Laporte
That's terrible. Okay, stop your turn for Jeff's pick of the week oh, um, that was pretty good actually, but uh, let's see you can stop now.
2:20:24 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no no, no, no, no. My sushi's not ready for another 40 minutes, so oh dear fine, we're ending too early here. Uh yeah, which is unusual. I just put the order in because they take forever, but it's good, all right. Two things real quick. Jealous One at the Dutch Museum, the maintenance guy threw away a whole exhibit.
2:20:50 - Paris Martineau
Of course I love that.
2:20:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Was it a banana? No, the exhibit was two beer cans, All entitled All the Good Times we Spent Together. They thought it was rubbish. Of course they did.
2:21:05 - Paris Martineau
Perfectly reasonable. I'm such a freak I would see that and be like deeply moved.
2:21:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, yes. So the curator came along and discovered it was missing, realized what was happened, managed to uh rescue the beer cans out of the garbage. Um makes clear that we don't blame the custodian, because it would only be logical and make sense and was only trying to do his job. He was new on the job, and so then they took the exhibit and put it elsewhere on a pedestal, so you knew it was art.
2:21:36 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a real statement. Frankly, I commend the custodian.
2:21:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I think he did the right thing. I think he did too.
2:21:44 - Paris Martineau
What else? In middle school I went to some exhibit in DC at the National Art Museum but there was a girl on our trip who had like long jean pants that were dragging on the floor always kind of tap always kind of tattered.
And at one point we get in this big room and everyone's kind of gathered around looking at something on the floor and it's a long piece of denim that's like tattered and you know, really artfully arranged. And then I look around and realize it came off of that girl's jeans and everyone just thought it was art oh god all right, my other one is this so mark zuckerberg is trying to become the ideal husband on earth.
2:22:28 - Jeff Jarvis
He made, he commissioned a whole statue for his wife, priscilla chen.
2:22:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, by the way, ugly, yes, but hey, it's a statue.
2:22:36 - Jeff Jarvis
My wife doesn't have a statue. Does Lisa have? A statue. Have you got a statue for Lisa Leo?
2:22:43 - Leo Laporte
No, but I think that's a good idea. See Right, so at least he has a statue. So what's he doing?
2:22:48 - Jeff Jarvis
next, she wanted a minivan, so on his Facebook, of course, he has pictures of having designed for her a custom uh porsche cayenne turbo gt minivan oh my god threw in a manual gt3 touring to make it his and hers. So his is the is the midlife crisis car and hers is the minivan, but they're both Porsches.
2:23:19 - Paris Martineau
What an insane place this is photographed it really is. I guess it's a car show, are they?
2:23:24 - Leo Laporte
No, I think it's a dealer's.
2:23:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a rebuilding place. One of those, oh, custom car, Custom car yeah, so he designed it.
2:23:40 - Leo Laporte
Oof. Well, pr priscilla, you married well, that's all I can say. I mean, really, if you are infinitely wealthy, think of the challenge of gift giving, because it you can't just, you know, buy a box of chocolates, it would just really be challenging. What a hard life he lives. Yeah, seriously.
2:23:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Ooh, boo-hoo, yeah, boo-hoo, Boo-hoo.
2:24:03 - Leo Laporte
He has to build his wife a statue that looks like ass. I wish to give you a palace in Bavaria. What about that? That would be. I think real estate is always welcome.
2:24:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, he's got the Hawaii. Oh, that's true, he doesn't need it. Palace. I also want to mention because because paris introduced me to this and I and I love if books could kill and I hope and pray none of my books ever ends up on if books could kill, uh, and they have a teaser, which I guess they do, paris the teasers are for their patreon episodes, which are like a membership.
2:24:34 - Paris Martineau
It's kind of like club twit where it's like you can pay what is it like? Five dollars a month, and then you get access to their special episodes because this is great.
2:24:41 - Jeff Jarvis
So they, they, they did.
2:24:43 - Paris Martineau
Uh, glenn kessler, retire bitch oh, this is such a good he's the fact checker at the washington post.
2:24:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, who has reached new levels of pedantry. Oh gosh, and it's. I only listen to the teaser. Now I have to pay money to listen to the rest, and I will, because it is brilliant, it is, it is so what is the, the podcast, if books could kill?
2:25:03 - Paris Martineau
remind me, you describe it paris basically they um, it started with them taking on like airport books and incredible, like books that are really popular and popular culture, like, um, and deeply analyzing and kind of ripping them apart, uh, like the secret rich dad, poor dad, um and really, really, really researching.
It's not just no, incredibly well, they probably read like five book, five other books for every episode. They talk to people, they read studies like. It is a very well researched endeavor and it kind of goes into both the meaning of the book, what things have been misinterpreted, what things the authors misinterpreted I'd highly recommend it.
2:25:46 - Jeff Jarvis
They did. They did jonathan height and it made me so happy because they tore him to bits. Wow, and who are?
2:25:54 - Paris Martineau
they also did the coddling of the american mind, which is jonathan height's other earlier book?
2:26:00 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, quite good, michael hobbs is one of them, and who's the other?
2:26:03 - Paris Martineau
one, uh, peter shamseri, who's from five four, a podcast about how much the supreme court sucks. That I'd really recommend to anybody, if they're all right with. Imagine the tenor of ed, plus four people with law degrees uh yeah, what's michael hobbs's?
2:26:23 - Jeff Jarvis
story I, I can't.
2:26:25 - Paris Martineau
I came late he, I'd say, is like, uh, one of the most prolific and successful podcasters of the modern time, and I mean podcaster as in like podcast specifically, not the live show sort of thing we're doing right now. Um, he, uh, I think, was a reporter at the huffington post and some other places, but really took off with um, oh, I'm forgetting the name of, uh, you're wrong about a podcast you, you had a woman named Sarah Marshall. It was phenomenal and went on for a couple of years. Then he started hosting a podcast with Opry Gordon that I really recommend, called Maintenance Phase, which is about kind of demystifying like wellness trends, and they had brought up the concept of the BMI like being a totally bunk statistic made up originally by insurance companies, long before it kind of that became known in the popular sphere. A really another phenomenally well-researched podcast and very funny, and recently he launched If Books Could Kill with Peter Shamseri recently he launched if books could kill with peter shamseri.
2:27:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, there you go, and they have a patreon page which uh will let you listen to, the entire episode of glenn kessler, retired.
2:27:42 - Paris Martineau
Retire biatch yeah, it's all right if you pronounce it like that is it, oh okay no uh, hey, I am about to retire this show.
2:27:54 - Leo Laporte
This show has put me right out. Thank you for being here. We appreciate it. Ms Paris NYC. Gosh man, you got to do something with that. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but something.
2:28:08 - Paris Martineau
It's just great right.
2:28:10 - Leo Laporte
It's so good, it's perfect. Paris writes for the information You'll see her in the weekend and covers issues of young people in the internet. You can send her a tip she's on and she covers youth soccer games. You flag football. I've got a request this week.
2:28:25 - Paris Martineau
If you are a listener that has a child that uses AI chat bots in any way, either for search, companionship or otherwise otherwise, reach out to me. I'd love to chat oh, I love that.
2:28:38 - Leo Laporte
Where would they reach out there?
2:28:39 - Paris Martineau
paris reach out via signal at martineau.01 or. Uh, if you go to my twitter at paris martineau, there's a bunch of other ways to reach out to me there too. It's also on my website, parisnyc my you know work phone number. Is there, my email, some other things. Reach out.
2:28:57 - Leo Laporte
I'd love to chat and if you do use signal, don't use your work phone yes, well, this is not terribly I mean, this is not terribly.
2:29:05 - Paris Martineau
Oh, we don't know. You know, by the way, that is one wild website.
2:29:11 - Leo Laporte
You got there, young lady right, what is going on?
2:29:14 - Jeff Jarvis
wiggle your, wiggle your mouse any less are we, are we uh?
2:29:19 - Leo Laporte
yeah are we, uh, are we going down to the titanic? What's going on here?
2:29:23 - Paris Martineau
there you are, yeah, you know, I just think it's kind of fun and this is so great oh and click photos of my cat up at the top.
2:29:31 - Leo Laporte
The more I know about paris, the more I like her. She there, oh hello, she's a sweetie hiding behind a plant. How, yeah, no one could see you, gizmo. Uh, paris, thank you for being here. Theinformationcom. Everybody should subscribe. Jeff jarvis is the emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. I think next week I can uh one of these. You know historians who writes about modern times. The web we weave is the newest. Why we must reclaim the internet.
2:30:24 - Paris Martineau
It's a fantastic read.
2:30:26 - Leo Laporte
It is really good, the gutenberg parenthesis magazine and he's writing a new one. Uh, I think, forget this teaching, forget the teaching.
2:30:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Just I know I'm buried right now and needing to write my book, but do you enjoy it?
2:30:43 - Leo Laporte
is the process fun? No, no writing is pain, it's fun, yeah, but having written is the best yes, having written rules writing said what I want to say. It's so painful and I mean I'm a competent writer, but it's just hard work and I never had resting from yourself, yeah yeah, and you have so much research and so much I wanted.
2:31:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I have a lot of research on this book. This book is about the linotype and I I wanted something that was narrative. I'd never really done that, apart from a news story, so I finally had to figure it out. For a while I said I'll use somebody's narrative and I'll get the damn chapter written, and then I go back through every source and put in the better quotes and better this and better that, and then I go back through and sand and sand, and sand.
2:31:31 - Leo Laporte
All right, here's a $64,000 question.
2:31:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Use any ai in this stuff, nope, nope. I wish I could figure out how to.
2:31:40 - Leo Laporte
But no, yeah, paris, you don't use ai either in your writing. No, just for costumers.
2:31:44 - Paris Martineau
She likes the pain I do like the pain I think it's more recent article I hand wrote out after I'd gone through all my different interviews highlighted in you know the text, uh transcriptions, the parts I wanted. I went through and hand wrote out on paper uh all the relevant parts I wanted to include from each interview, color coded it and then hand wrote an outline that incorporated all of those um, yeah, but it worked once through.
2:32:15 - Jeff Jarvis
When you write it, you write it, or do you write it and then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
2:32:18 - Paris Martineau
Uh, I write it once through. But as I'm doing that, I write and rewrite various sentences. But I do it. I write and rewrite the structure a lot. I'm one of those people who, especially in a feature, I can't really get going on it unless I get the top. Write the lead, as they say oh yeah so I will often write and rewrite the lead for like a day, and then the next part comes. A lot easier.
2:32:47 - Jeff Jarvis
my original training as a rewrite man sorry for the sexist nature was that I would have to write something on deadline and it would go down to the composing room as I was writing, which I think I'm supposed to do in class. God, In the class the worst. So what I learned to do was to write really fast to get a structure and then spend every minute editing Wow. Wow. And then the computer changed all that, because then I didn't have to wave goodbye to it and I could go change things all around.
2:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Right to it and I could go change things around, right? Thank you so much, guys. It's wonderful to meet with you. Every wednesday we do the show about 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100, utc, at least for the rest of the month. Uh, thanks to the candy makers of america, we don't change to daylight. Standard to standard time until until we're sneaking up on you, jeff. We don't change the standard time until the next month. Share, uh, but for now anyway.
2100 utc herself yes, she went, she dropped and I immediately followed soon thank you has a uh what do you call it?
2:33:57 - Jeff Jarvis
a card for the show?
2:33:59 - Leo Laporte
yeah, a little thumbnail yeah, thumbnail yeah, should we do anything else? We should go lower. What should we do for youtube?
2:34:06 - Paris Martineau
oh yeah I don't know if I can go lower kilroy.
2:34:11 - Jeff Jarvis
We should all do kilroy oh, this is so sad.
2:34:15 - Paris Martineau
All of this just to get a click on youtube you're out of focus, leo because I can't see my eyes gizmo wants to know what's going on by the way, I just want to reassure everybody.
2:34:30 - Leo Laporte
Gizmo has not eaten any haitians during this episode none that's a lie being spread by irresponsible politicians. Uh, we do this show, as I said, every wednesday, 2 pm pacific. You can watch us live on seven different streams youtube, twitch, facebook linkedin, xcom, kick and, of course, if you're a member of the club and I hope you are I mean, isn't this worth seven dollars?
2:34:56 - Paris Martineau
right here. This is the content.
2:34:58 - Leo Laporte
You pay for this is what you're paying for. You can. You can watch us in your club twit discord. Do join the club seven bucks a month. Ad, free versions of all the shows, access to the discord, lots of special stuff. Stacy's book club is coming up at the end of the month. We're going to do a coffee episode next week. Micah's creative corner a lot of great things in the club. So join it because it's a great club. Do you want to be a member of it? It helps us out to that TV slash club, to it. Thank you, everybody.
After the fact, get it on demand versus the show at the website Twitter TV slash. Twittv slash twig. Oh wait, let's do the mime thing. This is so sad for people listening to audio. There's literally nothing but me anyway. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Um, what was I saying? Oh, yes, uh, on demand ad. You can watch on youtube, you can subscribe. I don't know why you'd want to audio or video, but get the video because that's when all the site gags work. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on this week at google.
