This Week in Google 790 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google. Paris Martineau is here, Jeff Jarvis is here Coming up the latest pixel enhancements. October's pixel drop is here, plus Android 15. We'll talk about the pros and cons. The end of uBlock Origin on Google Chrome it has begun. And should kids be protected from the internet? Believe it or not, there's actually some debate over that. It's all coming up next on TWiG.
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
This is TWiG, This Week in Google, episode 790, recorded Wednesday, October 16th 2024. Invalid URL removed. It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google, a show where we get together and talk about the latest news from the Googleverse with Paris Martineau. She writes for the information. In charge of the weekend. Well, you're not in charge of it, but part of it I am in charge of the weekend. Well, you're not in charge of it, but part of it.
0:01:06 - Paris Martineau
Charge of the weekend. I'm the one who makes sure it includes both a Saturday and a Sunday and I haven't screwed up yet.
0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
You're welcome excellent work, by the way, ms mott. No, can you?
0:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
expand it? Perhaps.
0:01:19 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, maybe can you take in Monday and call that the week I do think that we should expand my uh kind of purview here and that it should be kind of a three, four day weekend every week.
0:01:30 - Leo Laporte
But I don't know. I love that idea, guys. I love that.
0:01:34 - Paris Martineau
Not my ass.
0:01:36 - Leo Laporte
Also with us, mr Jeffrey Jarvis, who maybe will have a new job someday soon. New job someday soon, but until then he's still the professor emeritus, the townite professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the craig school of graduate school. I don't know if you see because I'm on the screen.
0:02:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris also sings. Yeah, we all sing. Craig should know that paris sings. I don't hear you singing, leo, should we do this again and make sure we can hear everybody? The real reason hit it, but you know emeritus um we.
0:02:25 - Leo Laporte
He's also the author of some really good books, including the gutenberg parenthesis at the parenthesiscom, and the brand new one is the web we weave. And of course, don't forget his book about magazines, because so kids there used to be. It's funny. I mentioned a. Paris must see the headlines in the new york post as she walks by the kiosks every day and to which Jeff said there's no more kiosks. You really can't, do? They have boxes with newspapers in them. No, no. And the newsstands were designed. It's so hard to find newspapers nowadays.
0:03:00 - Jeff Jarvis
You can't, you really can't you really can't.
0:03:15 - Paris Martineau
I've talked about in this show. Before that, after, I think, one of the times Trump was impeached, or maybe when the Capitol was stormed, one of those days I walked all over Brooklyn trying to find a newspaper. I went to multiple places that are labeled on their outside as newsstands. Not a newspaper to be seen.
0:03:24 - Jeff Jarvis
But you could get some things to smoke there.
0:03:26 - Paris Martineau
That's true. Now they're all called like Zaza Zoom I was at Grand Central Station.
0:03:33 - Leo Laporte
We did our photo walk there the day after lunch with you guys. And what is the name of the famous newsstand in Grand Central Station? I can't remember, but I saw it Hudson News. Yeah, it was like Hudson News. I said, oh great, hudson News. They're selling like plants.
0:03:49 - Jeff Jarvis
There's nothing. There's no news. The street newsstands that were redesigned, I don't know, 20, 25 years ago, when they did have newspapers, they were on a shelf under the front and you couldn't see any of the headlights, you could see nothing of them. But now they don't even carry that anymore. They're a place to go and now they carry like candy.
0:04:08 - Paris Martineau
Lot of tickets. Vapes, that's about it. Vapes, lots of vapes.
0:04:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's kind of sad. I like reading the news. I don't really need newsprint Trees, don't need to die, for I actually get a local newspaper delivered every week. Uh, the petaluma argus courier. It's fun they took out. It's sad. They took out the best part, though, which was the police blotter that's not woke now you know, yeah, well, that's why?
uh, because it was always about really dumb criminals doing stupid things. But I guess uh, yeah, I don't know why they took it out youtube takes a baby step toward labeling authentic video. See, we have a google story. This is a new label called captured with a camera.
Well, this is how far we've come with ai, so apparently it's so easy to make content that looks real, but isn't that they actually have to now authenticate the videos? I have a camera that has content credentials. It's not clear yet whether those will trigger the YouTube. Labels you might have to fill out a form or something like that. Labels you might have to fill out a form or something like that uh, trupik is an authentication service. Uh, so let's go look at their video. I don't know.
0:05:35 - Speaker 6
Let's see if it okay hey, this is jeff from trupik and I am standing in the same exact spot than 19 years ago javed karim.
0:05:44 - Leo Laporte
Remember that, the very first youtube video, and apparently this is uh, but how is it authenticated? I don't see where the authentication is, so could be fake uh yeah, honestly, it really could be. Nowadays, it's so easy to fake stuff like that, but where's the? Where's the thing? I don't. Oh, wait a minute, here it is. You have to, so it's hidden away under the more button. How this content was made captured with a camera. This, can you believe this? This feels like a joke. This content was captured using a camera, or?
0:06:23 - Jeff Jarvis
other or other recording device. We're not saying what kind that might be. Let's learn more, leo wow, building trust.
0:06:34 - Leo Laporte
So do you have? Uh, is there, there is. There is verification technology, so you have to use a certain kind of camera software, a mobile app.
0:06:45 - Jeff Jarvis
So I would hope that your phone would qualify.
0:06:48 - Paris Martineau
I don't think it does. But also, is it modified? Is it considered as modified if you edit the video normally? Yeah, so this is a problem right now which is the chain of custody, right?
0:07:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I captured it with a camera, but then I completely modified it. So Adobe some of Adobe's tools, have this kind of certification. This camera, this Leica camera I have the M11P will put a kind of a stamp on the picture that says yes, it was created, and even, as a serial number, created with this camera on this date and time. And then, if you edit it with an Adobe tool, the Adobe tool will add to it without removing it. But it's just as easy to edit with some other tool that strips it all out. And then you have no verification.
0:07:38 - Paris Martineau
We've simply just got to put every YouTube video on the blockchain. That'll solve all these problems.
0:07:44 - Leo Laporte
The standard? For all I know they are, the standard is the coalition for content, provenance and authenticity, or c2pa. This is, this feels like something that nobody's going to pay any attention to at all yeah you have to buy special hardware. So it was founded by microsoft and adobe. Uh, member companies arm bbc, intel and true pick. That that guy was from true pick, it's a standard, but but where's the list of products to support it? Nowhere.
0:08:26 - Paris Martineau
Hey, you know they've been working on this for three whole years, clearly they've got a lot to show from it.
0:08:33 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I understand the motivation makes sense, right, yeah, but I think it's anyway we'll see. Youtube is saying you know on the help page that you need to use this c2pa credentials, so you have to specifically use tools, not just c2pa, but c2pa version 2.1 or higher.
0:09:00 - Paris Martineau
Uh, wow using c2pa 1.2 no.
0:09:03 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no. Older C2PA Edits that break the chain of provenance or make it impossible to trace a video back to its original source will, of course, invalidate you, but what edits define those edits Any?
0:09:18 - Jeff Jarvis
What's this question?
0:09:19 - Leo Laporte
Any, oh, that's a good question, like if you just change the white balance, that shouldn't, or if you cut off, or what if you just change the white balance, that shouldn't, or if you cut off?
0:09:25 - Paris Martineau
what if you just like cut off, you know, because you no?
0:09:29 - Leo Laporte
no, you could do that talking it's. It says significant alterations to the video's core nature or content, but if it's a green screen video, well, what is the core nature? Is what green screen? I think it's okay, it was captured.
0:09:44 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious as to, like could you put a tiny banana in the video, like rotoscope it on and then like at what size of a banana? Would that be a problem? Um, I think that that's the exact test.
0:09:58 - Speaker 2
That is the canonical tiny banana test yes, yeah, there is is a standard-setting organization.
0:10:06 - Speaker 6
There's also that Disney video wall that shoots all the Star Wars on. Now you can do that too. Yeah, but that would be shot with that would be yeah, but the intent is to not be able to fake people out. And you can still fake people out with stuff like that.
0:10:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because of the background. So this camera this is the only camera I know of that supports this standard. Actually, it doesn't even support this standard, supports a different standard but it is a little case on it isn't that cute. Yeah, uh, I do that, so nobody realizes that it's a fantastically expensive camera. I want it to look like my dad going hey, I'd like to take a picture. Yeah, it's a Mavica. So there's competing standards in addition, plus apparently yeah, like you say 1.0 ain't going to do it.
You got to use C2PA 2.1. These are baby steps, is how the Verge categorized it.
0:11:09 - Jeff Jarvis
So there we began the show.
0:11:12 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's the beginning of the show. Now would you like to talk about something else?
0:11:18 - Paris Martineau
Yes.
0:11:20 - Leo Laporte
Wimbledon. I know you're a big tennis buff, jeff. You used to go to the US Open every year. Yep, wimbledon is. I know you're a big tennis buff, jeff. You used to go to the US Open every year. Wimbledon is going to replace line judges. Wimbledon is probably the most important tennis tournament of the year, right?
0:11:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Watch it. Watch it fella.
0:11:35 - Leo Laporte
Bigger than the US Open. Bigger than the US Open, it's the biggest grass tournament of the year. Well, anyway, no more line judges, they're gonna have technology.
0:11:49 - Jeff Jarvis
The last one, everybody, oh everybody else does it.
0:11:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, oh oh, I didn't know that they're just the last ones so it's next, you can wear blue there, I guess.
I don't know but they require white, do they really? They're the only ones that do that so it's the oldest grand slam tennis tournament. The all england club announced that technology will be used to give the out and fault calls at the championships from next year on, so they didn't have line judges at the open this year. No, no, no, nor, nor I'm pretty sure my wife. So according to yeah, no, you're right it says according to ap, the uh french open is only Grand Slam tournament without some form of electronic line call.
0:12:30 - Paris Martineau
I feel like that's going to stay the same way. The French have strong labor protections.
0:12:35 - Phone
We will not be using a robot to judge these lines.
0:12:40 - Leo Laporte
But that's a perfect example of something that AI could do perfectly right. You know where the lines are marked. They're very clear. That's easily, easily done.
0:12:49 - Paris Martineau
But I'd also say it's, you know, an example of something that, while AI could do perfectly, it would make perfect sense to me for a stogie, tradition-obsessed sports organization to be like. No, we must use human judges for all of this, to preserve the heart of the game.
0:13:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I need Paris to do the accent to the entire show. She should be Paris.
0:13:17 - Paris Martineau
Have you guys seen Seven Days in Hell.
0:13:20 - Leo Laporte
No.
0:13:22 - Paris Martineau
I watched this recently. It's a sports mockumentary that essentially focuses on a seven day long tennis match between champions, played by Andy Samberg and Kit Harington.
0:13:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I love it. Kit Harington, who is Jon Snow from the Lord of the. Game of Thrones.
0:13:42 - Paris Martineau
It is such a funny like it is presented like a real sports documentary so the idea is they had to play for seven days straight well, the idea is, they get in a match and I guess I don't know, nobody can win rules of tennis, but nobody can win and they keep you know, getting one point versus one point and so it ends up lasting for seven days and it goes through all they've got an incredible cast. I'd really recommend it. It's a delightful watch oh, it sounds wonderful.
0:14:13 - Leo Laporte
All right, according to the ap line, judges at wimbledon were dressed in famously elegant uniforms and, for traditionalists, were part of the furniture at the all England club. Well, that's something to aspire to.
0:14:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they're gone.
0:14:29 - Speaker 6
They can just keep them there and have them announced what the AI decides Right.
0:14:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, well, they have their. They have their voices announced.
0:14:35 - Leo Laporte
So when it's out, there's a human recorded voice that says out, out, we have a human voice that says hey, hey, hey, we have a human voice that says hey, hey, hey, I couldn't have john record out hey all right. Well, I didn't really see. I thought that was a big deal, but it isn't a big deal.
0:15:00 - Jeff Jarvis
It's one of the last to fall yeah, so so far we've had a standard for video that no one can pay attention to and a meaningless I want to make this show about meaningless stuff.
0:15:15 - Paris Martineau
We're trying to get the people on TikTok to watch this show. You can't be denigrating the show while we're recording it. Those kids have got to be saved from all the dancing videos.
0:15:25 - Leo Laporte
I should mention that, for the first time, we are streaming this on TikTok. We are now on eight different channels as we do the show live, and there are 533 people watching on YouTube, twitch, linkedin, facebook, xcom, tiktok, discord. What's the eighth? I don't know what. The eighth is Sleepy.
0:15:49 - Jeff Jarvis
The radio Soapy.
0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
The radio. Okay, kick, did I leave, kick off, I did Kick. Okay, so that's eight different ways you can watch all the shows that we do live and I think that's kind of fun. We like doing it that way. We encourage you to subscribe to the show still, but you can watch us do it live. You've got to screw up live and that's even. Hey, that's even more fun.
0:16:10 - Jeff Jarvis
So how many you know the tick tock I mean on the Twitter stream? Now, how many does it say are watching right now on Twitter?
0:16:16 - Leo Laporte
I don't know Well, I guess. I could get far one for so we.
0:16:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me just tell you something Today, when I was streaming AI Inside on my Twitter feed, according to which number are you using? Benito, A number from Twitter.
0:16:35 - Leo Laporte
This is Twitter's number. It says 143.
0:16:37 - Jeff Jarvis
My Twitter number is more than 2,000. Wow. That's why I want to share to my friends and say look what I'm wasting my afternoon doing.
0:16:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, share it. I can't. Good evening, Jeff, Well send them. Look, just post on your on your exit no, hey everyone.
0:16:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, you see, no, you see, if you actually share it, then Twitter says it's live, Just live. Put a little live around my face. There's all this stuff. The only way I can do that is, if you put us on whatchamacallit. Oh, if we were on whatchamacallit we could do it. Yeah, what's?
0:17:13 - Speaker 6
it called if we were on whatchamacallit. Save me here, bonito, what?
0:17:14 - Jeff Jarvis
is it a restream?
0:17:15 - Speaker 6
live. We would need to add his account to our restream, basically all right, I got a problem, we can talk about.
0:17:21 - Leo Laporte
Here's the problem okay, let's continue talking about this, we would have to fire benito, because he's the guy who's doing the switching no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
0:17:30 - Jeff Jarvis
All I'm doing is taking the finished stream and putting it up on twitter.
0:17:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, it is on restream right now but what would happen?
0:17:36 - Speaker 6
I'm not on, we would have to do is that we need to get uh jeff's account on our restream, you see. So, like I see we need to take up one of our slots here to one of our streams we only have eight slots.
0:17:47 - Paris Martineau
I'm not giving you one of our eight slots that's what we would have to do two thousand imagine you listing off the eight places we're streaming, and then one of them is and jeff jarvis's twitter account all right, I'm sorry you're right, you had something going on that you really wanted to talk about. She's trying to guys guys, we can keep talking about the, the details of how this podcast is streamed I'm sure people love that. No, by the way, I was thinking we should talk about the wild wordpress drama of this week. Have you been following the latest?
0:18:20 - Jeff Jarvis
updates it is a problem first, first paris, if I may, before we do. I think it's a newsier update. I think Leo was not listening. I think you need to talk about your re-education that you're going through, so I think everyone will be very interested in this.
0:18:33 - Paris Martineau
Oh yes. So yes, yesterday I took my first class of one of what will be four um, my new york citizens pruner course, which is a way for me as a gorilla so for those who don't know, I've long been a gorilla gardener. During the spring, summer, whenever the trees get too low, I will use some nice pruning shears I carry around with me and trim them so pedestrians don't hit their heads on them. I would say public service Turns out. There is a whole program where the New York City Parks Department will teach you how to do this, care for trees in various ways, and then at the end deputize you as a official citizen tree pruner, meaning in november I will have a license to prune any street I find, so I told you this would be worth it, I will get a literal license wait, wait, wait that lady's using a saw.
Yes, I can use a bunch of stuff. At the end of this I'm going to learn how to do it all. A pole saw.
0:19:46 - Jeff Jarvis
But are you going to wear your protective glasses?
0:19:48 - Leo Laporte
Look at this. You can go around dressed like this and here's a, here's a guy teaching her how to cut. Because you don't want to. You want to cut on the bias, don't you?
0:20:00 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm going to learn it.
0:20:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you don't want to look. I love women. I, yeah, I'm gonna learn it. Yeah, you don't want to look. I love wait a minute. Wait a minute. I love the people staring at this guy. Well, that's really interesting. Show us how you cut on the bias they have a whole uh section.
0:20:17 - Paris Martineau
If you go down there to, I guess, like their code of conduct I think it's up the top there's a whole section at the bottom. That's like what to do if someone aggressively stops you, um, and it confronts you about, uh, trimming their tree, and you're supposed to like show your license, try to de-escalate the situation. Oh, you get a card like a little special so I I learned about this because new york magazine wrote about. I just posted a link in the Discord.
0:20:45 - Leo Laporte
Apparently someone had sent me this article that the title is Walking Around New York City with a Tiny Saw, which you do.
0:20:55 - Paris Martineau
I do you do but apparently I didn't realize this it is a hot ticket. It is very difficult to get a seat in this class. They write hot ticket. Uh, it is very difficult to get a seat in this class. Um, the uh they write. A deluge of interest often means the website crashes when signups go live. The last class filled up in 11 minutes. It was seven minutes the time before that. I read this article. Then fully forgot um signed up, you know, on their wait list, saw the day was coming when signups went live. I forgot to set an alarm and I was like, oh no. Then I get an email that night saying oh, our website went down and no one was able to sign up for the tree printer class.
So we're doing it again on Friday, and so I was like, all right, I'll set an actual alarm. I remembered I logged on at 7 pm sharp that exactly when it went up, half of the spots had already been taken. I checked out with my course in one minute and I got it, but apparently I learned at my class last night. I'm one of the very rare people who got it in their first try Most people in the class had tried three or four times to get in.
0:22:04 - Leo Laporte
That is so exciting. We are so proud to be working with you. Uh, congratulations, paris.
0:22:09 - Paris Martineau
That is well, you can congratulate me when I actually get the license she has to pass the test.
0:22:16 - Leo Laporte
Of course you can so what are the rules? Don't stand on a ladder or a trash. Can do not climb the tree. You are an ambassador of street trees, so keep the peace yes, a lot about it is a peacekeeping apparently and if you get confronted, stop pruning and walk away.
0:22:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Put down the song. It's best to avoid the fight.
0:22:45 - Paris Martineau
As quote this is a big city with many other trees seven million trees, as I learned last night, approximately one for every new yorker whoa whoa, how many is one of the things that makes new york great, but do they quite a lot in berkeley, though actually a significant amount of green space is in staten island oh yeah but honestly, I mean central park is the?
0:23:13 - Leo Laporte
is is one of the greatest urban, it is the greatest urban park I'm aware of. I mean even the, the tuileries, and you know I mean there. This is a and and. Without central park, new York City really would be a barren landscape.
0:23:26 - Paris Martineau
Well, central Park, yes, but also just the various trees that are on just the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
0:23:33 - Leo Laporte
What would dogs pee on?
0:23:35 - Paris Martineau
Makes New York City Well, they shouldn't pee on it, because that actually harms the trees. As I learned, it's one of the five contributing challenges, that's why I got to be a fire hydrant.
0:23:46 - Leo Laporte
But you know I walk around Petaluma. Every god darn tree has this little dog on it says do not pee on this tree. And I feel bad for the dog owners because, like what do they do? They walk around with a dog holding it until they find somewhere it's okay. Yeah, I mean you can curb your dog, which means like yeah, yeah, that's what they want you to do, weren't there, aren't there signs that say yeah, curb your dog yeah, so the wordpress anyway, it was, oh my god, was that worth it.
That was the highlight, I think we have to design.
0:24:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, oh, joe esposito, I think you must design a only when she graduates. An official tree pruner hat, an nyc pruner hat for paris. I think we need an official song okay, only if I pass.
0:24:35 - Leo Laporte
Though, guys, we can't we're the men who cut the trees. We walk around around Texas, manhattan on, with our pruners in our hands, ready to chop, chop, chop Whatever they're long. Anyway, that's enough of that. Do you have a salute? There should be a little tree salute that you have.
0:25:03 - Paris Martineau
It's this oh, it is, it is this oh it is, it is that.
0:25:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you snip.
0:25:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, you snip.
0:25:12 - Speaker 2
That was literally the best. You think this is just weird.
0:25:14 - Jeff Jarvis
No, this is what we do.
0:25:15 - Leo Laporte
The rest of the show is not going to be as good as that. That was the best.
0:25:19 - Paris Martineau
Okay, come on guys. No, it's going to be better, Better job of in this show.
0:25:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree. I agree I should let me. This is a good time to take a break. When we come back, we will do the WordPress drama which is now actually starting to be problematic for open source in general. I think it's starting.
0:25:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's a really actually interesting discussion about open source, I think.
0:25:42 - Leo Laporte
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I'll give you some background because I know Matt Mullenweg pretty well. I used WordPress in the earliest days, almost 20 years ago, when it first came out as a blog. You know content management system that Matt had written. He wrote it and eventually you know and continues to give it away at WordPressorg. It's still open source, still free to use. Eventually he started a company around it called Automatic, and they run a company. They run a website called WordPresscom not org but com where you can have hosted WordPress blogs. You don't have to maintain them. They'll run them for you. It's managed WordPress and it's a great thing. But they're not the only ones that do this. There are a lot of hosting companies that offer WordPress, often with a one-button install. There's a company called WP Engine that also offers managed WordPress hosting. Now WordPress is phenomenally successful. When they were an advertiser, we said they have one-third of the web runs on WordPress. It's now more than 40% of the web runs on WordPress.
0:31:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you ever seen a number for how much of that 40% is run by WordPresscom versus other WordPress?
0:31:22 - Leo Laporte
No, I haven't, but I'm going to say the majority is by the free, open source version and a lot of it not. So, for instance, when I first started using wordpress, I didn't install it on my own server. I went to a company that does hosting. They had a one button install of wordpress from wordpressorg. So in effect, you know they were running my wordpress.
0:31:44 - Jeff Jarvis
We used to teach all of our journalism students to put up a WordPress instance.
0:31:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but running it on somebody else's server, right? Not on their own server? Oh, on their own server, right, yeah? Yeah, so that's what Automatic does, but it's also what a company called WP Engine does. It all started in mid-September. Matt wrote a blog post calling WP Engine does it all started?
In mid-September, matt wrote a blog post calling WP Engine a cancer to WordPress, and this is an issue. In fact, dres Buitart, who wrote Drupal, which is what we use for our website and other content management system, has written a blog post about this. This is the taker. What do you call it? Taker versus taken? It's.
It's the issue in an open source in general, where people put it out there and people use it. They take, but they don't give back, right, right, and that's what matt was a little bit mad about with wordpress, with the engine. He criticized them for disabling the users, for instance, to see and track revision history for posts, which he says is very important. Wp Engine turns it off by default to save money, he said they are. By the way, wp Engine's investor is Silver Lake, one of our favorite private equity firms. He said they don't contribute sufficiently to the open source project and the fact that they call themselves WP Engine confuses people into thinking it's part of the official WordPress WP Engine. Sent him a cease and desist letter. He sent a cease and desist letter back saying they'd breached WordPress and WooCommerce trademark usage rules trademark usage rules.
0:33:32 - Paris Martineau
WP Engine also claimed that Matt had said he would take a quote scorched earth nuclear approach end quote against WP Engine unless it agreed to pay quote a significant percentage of its revenues for a licensed to the WordPress trademark.
0:33:41 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the hard part. Eight percent.
0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
And he did, because it is a scorched earth. He has blocked them from accessing wordpressorg, which is where the source code comes from um.
0:33:56 - Paris Martineau
Some sites were affected and this broke a bunch of websites and prevented them from like updating plugins and themes. It also left some of them open to security attacks. And most of all I mean the highlight of all this is that people in the open source community were really pissed. They felt that this went kind of was an affront to the ideas, the ideals of open source and one person being in charge of it all yeah it got worse because, uh, automatic forked a plug-in from WP Engine and started offering it themselves.
0:34:32 - Leo Laporte
They took control of the Advanced Custom Fields plug-in. This happened last week, which WordPress developers used to add customized fields on their edit screen. That was maintained by WP Engine, so they lost control over it and they couldn't update the plug-in. Wordpress said, hey, it's ours.
0:34:58 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they said this is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine's legal attacks.
0:35:07 - Leo Laporte
You know we've had Matt on the show, right, Jeff?
0:35:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, and preaching the gospel of open source, and we hug him and love him for that, and so there's something here I just don't understand. I can't figure out. I don't know what's really happening.
0:35:20 - Paris Martineau
And another aspect of this that caught my attention, which is a bit of like petty tech infighting, but I do think shows illustrates a bit more of the tenor of what's going on is DHH, david Heinemeier Hansen.
0:35:36 - Leo Laporte
Who is a notorious troll. But go ahead.
0:35:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, a notorious troll. Creator of.
0:35:40 - Leo Laporte
Ruby on Rails, so he's very respected.
0:35:42 - Paris Martineau
He wrote a blog post. Wait, is he a troll or is he respected? He's respected and a troll Both.
0:35:45 - Leo Laporte
He's respected and he's very respected. He wrote a blog post. Wait, is he a troll or is he respected?
0:35:46 - Paris Martineau
he's respected and a troll he's respected and he's also a bit I don't respect trolls though I wouldn't say he's like the more he has the trolls. Yeah, he has earned respect, despite sometimes he's actually being trolled.
0:36:02 - Leo Laporte
He's found out 37 Signals with Jason Freed.
0:36:05 - Paris Martineau
It's now called.
0:36:06 - Phone
Basecamp.
0:36:07 - Leo Laporte
He wrote Ruby on Rails, which was the dominant web technology for many years, but he's also well, he's problematic in other ways. Let's just say that, yeah.
0:36:20 - Paris Martineau
So he writes a blog post, being, like it's called, Automatic is Doing Open Source Dirty. Basically saying automatic demanding 8% of WP Engine's revenues because they're not giving back enough to WordPress is a wanton violation of general open source ideals and the specifics of the license. It kind of goes into here and basically says, you know, speaks to his experience with open source stuff like that.
0:36:44 - Leo Laporte
I agree with it.
0:36:45 - Speaker 2
It, by the way, yeah I don't think he's wrong he says I expect all that I want to have their cake and eat it too.
0:36:52 - Paris Martineau
And then matt freaks out and writes a what he calls a respectful response, but is a very mean blog post and response that he later ends up changing and, I think, today deleted.
0:37:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think Matt's having some issues. He did so. He did offer a buyout to employees of Automatic who didn't agree with him. 159 employees took it. They got six months severance or $30,000, whichever was higher.
0:37:22 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what we talked about last week, and we read the post of someone who decided to stay Zeldman.
0:37:26 - Leo Laporte
Jeffrey Zeldman decided to stay. I have also heard through the grapevine that Matt gave a fairly substantial percentage of word of automatic to the employees who remained. So he gave stock options to the employees who remained, saying thank you for staying and now you have a stake in this company. So this is what's so hard. I respect DHH, for instance, for his contribution, huge contribution, as I respect Matt, I think Matt I don't, I've, I've avoided weighing in on this because I don't know, I'm not seeing here.
0:38:08 - Paris Martineau
The thing that I think is interesting or notable about the DHH situation is Matt's response blog post, which kind of gets at or, at least to me, perhaps explains a bit more of his thinking on this. Perhaps explains a bit more of his thinking on this. Uh, he, basically what he does in this blog post matt is matt attacks dhh is uh credibility. He says dhh claims to be an expert in open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that, although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others. And so he goes through dhh's portfolio and basically says, like ruby on rails has, uh, you know, done a lot of stuff, but because it's open source, that value has been captured by other companies, not, yeah, dhh. And he ends it by saying, david, perhaps it would be good to explore this with a therapist or coach, while you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect.
37 Signals inspired ton of what Automatic does. We're now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
0:39:22 - Leo Laporte
That's a little bit of a measuring contest.
0:39:24 - Paris Martineau
I don't think that's appropriate at all, but yeah, but I think that it kind of goes to which is something that I've seen people in the open source community complaining about in this particular issue is that it seems like matt's approach here is more focused on why didn't you make more money?
revenue captured by this open source product than the standard ideals of open source, which, like that thing you're mentioning you mentioned earlier that I'm forgetting the name of two it's this kind of constant debate in open source about whether you should hoard it all for yourself and then maximize revenue or create a product that's truly open source and that means you're going to lose out which is what.
0:40:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, it's what drove his success versus again, I mentioned this last week movable type and six apart. When they got hinky about people using their platform to build their own hosting situations, they limited the licensing requirements or abilities on their software. That's what made them shrink. That's what made them die and WordPress to succeed. So he's. It's. It's the essence of what made wordpress. Wordpress was, in fact, being open source. The one thing I think that he makes a good point about is that if wp engine benefits hugely and doesn't contribute back, that too is a violation of yeah, that's what drees says.
0:40:43 - Leo Laporte
Drees is the creator of drupal. That's the product that we use to run our websites. He writes in his he says it's the maker taker problem, which is the trenton problem.
0:40:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It is, or the tragedy of the commons in some respects the bridge in trenton says trenton makes the world takes well, that is the trenton problem and it sounds like they have some problems and maybe they do.
0:41:07 - Leo Laporte
The imbalance strees rights between major contributors and those who contribute minimally and houses harms open source communities. And he says the lack of an environment that supports the fair coexistence of open source businesses. These are really kind of thorny issues in the open source community. Matt Mullenweg says look, we've been trying to negotiate a trademark deal with WP Engine for a long time and they've just been stringing us along.
0:41:36 - Jeff Jarvis
But who knew that that was there?
0:41:38 - Leo Laporte
for a second, those, the two parties.
0:41:39 - Jeff Jarvis
That was a requirement that you had to have the license to put the WP on, was that? Was that always a requirement?
0:41:45 - Phone
In which case.
0:41:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Matt has a point, or is it a new thing?
0:41:48 - Leo Laporte
It's a trademark issue, though, if there's confusion and I can understand he's saying look, by calling themselves WP Engine, they're confusing people over who is responsible for this. It's not WordPress.
0:42:02 - Jeff Jarvis
But how long ago did they start calling themselves that and when did? Was there a rule in the books?
0:42:08 - Leo Laporte
was. There isn't a rule, but if I started calling myself professor jeff jarvis on twitter, somebody did that.
0:42:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I know, and somebody did that and I hate the son of a bitch and can't stand him and he's not funny and don't ever look at him yeah, I agree, no, I I agree. I just I mean, I think I'm sorry.
0:42:26 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say I think it's like would be slightly different. It's like if someone's calling themselves professor jj, it's a little different, like I I mean well that's everybody.
0:42:35 - Leo Laporte
That's true, though we had problems with twitter, remember, because they call themselves twitter after twit existed and we were having real confusion with that. People thought that we stole our name from Twitter or that we were copying Twitter and to this day, if you'd type twit in auto, complete almost anywhere, it fills in Twitter. But I, you know, I mean, we worked it out to our mutual satisfaction. That's all I'm allowed to say. But I understand, you know, know, there is that kind of confusion, is problematic and and it is something open source has to solve, because right now there are a lot, a lot of big, wealthy companies relying on taking from open source, often individuals, just simply somebody who wrote something, and not giving back.
0:43:26 - Jeff Jarvis
What was the relationship of Red Hat to Linux? Was that a good model, a bad model? I mean, what are some other companies that made a lot of money on top of open source, and how did they manage those relationships?
0:43:37 - Leo Laporte
By the way, red Hat's owned by IBM. Now there's a good relationship there because, first of all, linux isn't just the linux kernel, right? It's everything you put on top of it, including all the applications, the installer and all of that, and that's what red hat did and other linux distros do, and I don't think linus has any problem with that. Linus retained the trademark to linux, however, so you can't call it linux, it Linux, unless it's using his kernel, as approved by him.
0:44:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's a similar one person charge, I don't think it's.
0:44:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there might be more apt comparisons, because Linux is more than just the Linux kernel, is more than just the Linux kernel. You know, in fact, if you ask Richard Stallman, he'll say it's not Linux, it's GNU Linux and it's just the Linux kernel with a bunch of GNU software on top of it, and you shouldn't call it Linux. So open source has always been a very prickly.
0:44:41 - Jeff Jarvis
For a reason because they're protecting something.
0:44:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and people are giving the reason. People do open source. The reason matt wrote wordpress. He wrote wordpress to get rich. I don't think I think he wrote wordpress because he he was a coder. He was excited by the challenge, the problem, he loved writing it. He wrote it for himself initially and and he wanted to give something to the community. But I think where he gets upset and I don't blame him is when you give a gift and then they say give me more, give me more, give me more and they never reciprocate. It's like if I took you guys out to dinner a hundred times and you never offered to pay once.
0:45:19 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the analogy Matt used Last time we saw him. He did take me out to dinner a hundred times. Finally I said no enough. The last time we went out you had to pay for ten people. At least I could take you out to lunch.
0:45:29 - Leo Laporte
But the whole point is whether you did or not, is that?
0:45:31 - Paris Martineau
we fought. As previously mentioned, I don't own a home.
0:45:36 - Leo Laporte
You never have to pay Paris, no. But that's the point, is that you try Whether you succeed or not, out of goodwill, that you try to give back.
0:45:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I think, on Matt, so I think I've told this story before. When he came up with the idea and the model for WordPresscom atop WordPressorg Polaris, mike Hirschland, the venture capitalist, called me and said this guy wants us to invest in him and it's a really weird model. What do you think? And I said I believe in WordPress, I believe it's a winner, I believe it's a really smart model. But the point of it was that Matt would open something up that others could use, but WordPress. They would benefit by having WordPress, but he would benefit by having their contributions to WordPress, and so that two-way street is critical to the model. I think, being honorable, who do you side with here? Paris? I don't think. I've quite sensed it.
0:46:37 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't know I think it's a complicated battle.
0:46:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep, I want to side with that.
0:46:42 - Paris Martineau
I think Molly White, our friend of the pod, tweeted a mocked up version of that onion headline that typically says like oh, worst person you know just made a good point and said oh, the worst people you know are fighting. And I mean, obviously Matt isn't the worst person we know, but I think that that tweet kept the sentiment I feel a bit in just the sense that it seems like a bloodbath and a mess and I'm just sad for everybody involved.
0:47:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, well said, well said, you should be in politics.
0:47:15 - Paris Martineau
No, I shouldn't. I have too much respect for myself and my fellow man.
0:47:22 - Leo Laporte
By the way, it's interesting because David Hennemeyer Hansen at 37 Signals did the same exact thing. When the folks at 37 Signals said no longer can you discuss politics at work, they offered a six-month buyout to any employee who didn't like it.
0:47:39 - Jeff Jarvis
How many took it? But it's so small, what did it matter?
0:47:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I don't know how many took it. People did at the time think it might kill 37 signals. It did not.
0:47:56 - Paris Martineau
They've got so many signals.
0:48:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they're not down to 35.
0:48:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm reading Manton Reese's piece on this. I have a huge respect for manton reese. He wrote micro blog. He's a very uh, smart, active guy in the open source community. Uh, that I highly respect. He says uh, I think trademark law may be on matt's side. The private texts from matt to wp engine look quite damning, though I also wonder how the case will be influenced by automatically. Most companies freely use the wordpress mark with few restrictions for years. I do believe in trademark law if you don't defend a trademark you lose it right.
0:48:42 - Jeff Jarvis
very good point. Yep, yeah, absolutely.
0:48:46 - Leo Laporte
If Automatic wins, Manton writes or they can settle the lawsuit, the community will recover. Calls for Matt to resign are unwarranted. Wordpress exists at its current level of success in large part because of him. Agreed Mm-hmm, great. His vision also provided a good home for Tumblr won I'm not good by the way two companies he's purchased. I'm not going to toss all that aside because he picked a fight with a private equity firm, silver lake, that charges a lot for hosting. Good point. Uh, get his manton's final thoughts. Get out the popcorn as we watch this drama unfold. But let's also remember there are real people here trying to do what they think is right. Matt has been blogging more than ever. He's been sitting for interviews. Well, I'm sure the lawyers discourage it. I'd like to see the same human face on the WP Engine side. I don't think we've had that since Jason Cohen, the founder, handed his company over.
0:49:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I think the winning point here is when is private equity an empathetic character? Yeah.
0:49:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, if you said to me choose between Matt Mullenweg and Silver Lake, there's no question, Easy.
0:49:54 - Paris Martineau
I totally agree, but I do think that and I think that's what has made this such kind of a thorny issue is that private equity is a classic goon that no one wants to be around, but the way that matt has been handling this has not been good. I mean, I remember like, within the last week, one aspect of um what happened with this is, I believe now, in order to log into wordpress or something along those lines, you have to check a box that says you're not affiliated with WP Engine.
0:50:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because they don't want them to download it anymore.
0:50:30 - Paris Martineau
Some fairly well-known female creator in the open source and WordPress community posted about this being like well, I guess I can't log in to WordPress anymore, and Matt or, I assume, someone affiliated with him, the WordPress Twitter account replied to her and said who are you? And I'm just like? There are just like little things like that. You don't need to be trying to get people against your side like that.
0:51:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So I think we should table this. He needs a.
0:51:02 - Leo Laporte
PR person.
0:51:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, he does.
0:51:04 - Leo Laporte
I think we should table this because, honestly, first of person, yeah, he does. I think we should table this because, honestly, first of all, it's not going to affect anybody listening to the show it doesn't affect us. It really doesn't. It's not a big deal. We don't know the ins and outs of it, it's just. It's an interesting drama, but I don't think it edifies in any way.
0:51:21 - Jeff Jarvis
It's nothing like the the lizzie newsy drama, but we won't go there we will not lizzie newsy.
0:51:30 - Leo Laporte
What are you talking?
0:51:30 - Paris Martineau
newsy newsy lizza lizzo no he's talking about olivia nuzzy and ryan lizza, a media drama that we will not get into right I do not want to get into olivia does this story?
0:51:43 - Leo Laporte
oh, is it juicy?
0:51:45 - Jeff Jarvis
oh is it?
0:51:46 - Leo Laporte
oh, okay, now I maybe do want to get it.
0:51:48 - Jeff Jarvis
There's now, well, there's now dueling court documents.
0:51:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah so here's something people should care about that matters to a lot of people, and that's the internet archive, yes, which got badly hacked. Uh, it's not clear, but it seems to be. Well, see, I don't even want to attribute it to this, to a pro-palestinian group, because it could be an anti-palestinian group who are pretending to be a pro-palestinian group to besmirch their reputation. So we don't really know yet how it happened, but somebody took the most, one of the most important Internet.
0:52:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I use it for research every damn day.
0:52:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, steve Gibson had quite a story. There's a new standard out there called BIMI, for authenticating email that will let companies put their trademark logo on the email so when you get it it's authenticated that it came from that company. It's a pretty good idea and he's applied for it. But the way his uh, his ca, his certificate authority validates his trademark digit digicert, is by going to the internet archive to look up past uses of his trademark. They can't. He can't get validated because the Internet Archive is unreliable, it's not down.
0:53:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It's running in a read-only mode, but it's bad. No, no, no. But importantly, the Wayback Machine is up and read-only, but the huge archive of historical documents is not up still.
0:53:18 - Leo Laporte
And you can't post to it. Save the data safe. It's a provisional, yeah, so this is nightmarish and all.
0:53:24 - Paris Martineau
Also all login information was hacked.
0:53:27 - Leo Laporte
Right, I don't mind that. By the way, I support them, I give them money every month and I think it's a really I think everybody no, I totally agree, Absolutely.
0:53:34 - Paris Martineau
I mean I support them. It's just an unfortunate situation for people who had information there.
0:53:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I mean, here's the good news everybody already knows your information because of the national public data breach, so it doesn't really matter.
0:53:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, what information do you actually have there? Yeah, I mean uh?
0:53:53 - Leo Laporte
I don't think, even when I playboy but I don't think my contributions to the internet archive go through their own register. I think they go through paypal. So even then, I don't think that that they got anything, but doesn't matter. Brewster kale, the guy who founded it uh, is a true hero. Yes, this internet archive is a very important uh feature of the internet landscape. The wayback machine alone uh provides people access to historic documents from the internet. Who would hack it?
0:54:29 - Jeff Jarvis
why is it still what? What do you have to know any more about? Why it's still down?
0:54:33 - Leo Laporte
no, what they're trying to, and maybe we get brewster on. I wonder if they got hit by ransomware and what would be the worst nightmare is that all of the data has been encrypted by a bad they said.
0:54:44 - Jeff Jarvis
They said in the they're on the Twitter. They said it was a DDoS. I'm trying to get to it right now. Now it's not Now I can't get to it.
0:54:51 - Leo Laporte
I just got to it.
0:54:53 - Paris Martineau
Here's the page that I'm looking at right now Mark Graham said an hour ago, wanted to share an update from Team Wayback Machine. The archives are safe and the wayback machine is in read-only mode. We hope to turn on more web crawling within a day to make sure our web collections remain whole. Next up save page now. Thanks for the support 916 billion pages.
0:55:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's our entire history is.
0:55:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh is on there and it's not just the web history. Again, there are things from, there are magazines from 1900. It's either HathiTrust or archiveorg where I can find these publications for research that you otherwise just couldn't get and incredibly valuable beyond, way before the web.
0:55:44 - Leo Laporte
Hackers defaced the website with a message that said have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on. Have I Been Pwned? Whatever jerk did that should be hung by the heels.
0:56:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Why would you pick the Internet Archive as your enemy? There's plenty of others. Yeah even if it is vulnerable.
0:56:09 - Leo Laporte
I mean it must be a 14-year-old. It's just appalling.
0:56:15 - Paris Martineau
It's like robbing a library.
0:56:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's robbing a library, saying, oh look, I just got these 12 books from the library. I'm going to keep them. What kind of jerk does that?
0:56:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, there's a whole political party that's taking books out of the library, but we won't go into that right now.
0:56:31 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's said that their data hasn't been corrupted anywhere and services are stopped because they're upgrading internal systems.
0:56:40 - Speaker 6
So that's a relief.
0:56:42 - Leo Laporte
That's at least a silver lining take this as an opportunity to donate. I have a support them. This is so important, so that's a story to me that makes a big difference in the world, and we got to pay attention yes, I'm glad you did.
0:56:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to ask you to, but you were ahead of me as you're ahead of you.
0:56:59 - Leo Laporte
I have more to talk about in just a bit, but first a word from our sponsors. How about that? Hey? How do you like them apples? This uh episode. Do people ever say that anymore? How do you like them, apples?
0:57:13 - Paris Martineau
no, no one's worrying about the apples. I do think that that's quite sad.
0:57:17 - Speaker 6
We should check in on the quoting goodwill hunting. Will they say that?
0:57:21 - Leo Laporte
is it goodwill hunting?
0:57:22 - Paris Martineau
no, there's no way that phrase came from goodwill that's the only way people quote it.
0:57:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Now is quoting goodwill hunting paris cares about the apple trees in her official role, but that's another matter paris.
0:57:36 - Leo Laporte
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And, by the way, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it more than US Cloud. They're ISO, gdpr, esg compliance, strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. They attract investment this is good and ensure long-term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. This is a great company to do business with. It's going to save you money and you're going to get the best support you've ever had. Visit uscloudcom. Visit uscloudcom. Uscloudcom. Book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloudcom. Book a call. Get faster Microsoft support for less from the best US Cloud. Thank them so much for supporting us. We're the best and you support us when you go to that address too. Uscloudcom paris. Did you find the source of that old time, old timey quote?
kind of how do you like them, apples? Is it horse apples?
1:02:00 - Paris Martineau
no, the initial answer to this question you get when you search from it is that it came from the toffee apple bomb, also known as the two inch howitzer or plum pudding, which was invented by British forces during World War One to counter similar German trench mortars german trench mortars, uh and it acquired the nickname toffee apple because of its small circular barrel, mounted on a stick-like catapult system and painted so a tommy in the trenches would shout, would fire that and say how do you like them, apples?
pretty much to the german yes, people also say trace it back to the 1959 movie rio bravo said. In that case, however, I wasn't able to find any official stuff bringing this back to world war ii, so I looked on the google books and gramville viewer and it has uh, it has like's going.
It says that there have been mentions of the phrase how do you like them, apples? Dating back to 1900 and 1897. Although I can't figure out what specific books they're saying. So the World War I thing might be a myth, but I can't disprove it currently. Well, there were wars before that.
1:03:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, did they use that pacific?
1:03:27 - Leo Laporte
bomb no, no. Did they have tommy apples or whatever? Can't toffee apples? This I like, do I don't know, is that just me? I think you like this too, don't you like? Like? Where did that come from? Why do people say I'm? Always yeah asking that question. Why do they say dial the phone? I understand there's no dial on a phone. Why would they say dial? No one says that.
1:03:49 - Paris Martineau
No, I mean there was a dial on the phone.
1:03:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there was, oh, okay.
1:03:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know there was. Might have been before your time, lance.
1:03:56 - Leo Laporte
It was before my time.
1:03:58 - Jeff Jarvis
So the newspaper results oh yes please, I'm trying to go there.
1:04:03 - Speaker 2
No, I can't. I think we've done it. We're done with that.
1:04:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I was trying to add in I'm moving, I'm moving, if we had the Internet Archive, we could look back, that's true.
1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
There you go. Great paper. I bet you discussed this on your Inside AI show earlier today. Great paper from Apple yes, how do you like that from apple? Uh, six ai researchers at apple.
1:04:32 - Jeff Jarvis
This is gary marcus's take on it, but actually it's worth reading the white paper itself and and the the thread about it which I have in the in the rundown below, is really very clear okay, uh, so this is, uh, the author, one of the author, one of the six authors.
1:04:45 - Leo Laporte
he, he's a research scientist at Apple. Was it? Deepmind Comes from Georgia Tech, merdad Faratabar? Can large language models truly reason, or are they just sophisticated pattern matchers? Well, they did some interesting research. They actually gave a number of llms some word problems that any human would probably solve quite handily and showed how easily confused pretty well, but well, they were able to easily confuse the llms with basically with extraneous information or actually I wouldn't say quite extraneous, it was for a simple change.
1:05:33 - Jeff Jarvis
If you, if you said when sophie uh watches her nephew, and they just said when bracket name watches her bracket family, and then change that variable, that alone was enough to confuse it.
1:05:48 - Leo Laporte
Let me give you an example. By the way, this is what Meridard wrote. To sum up, we found no evidence of formal reasoning. We found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching, so fragile in fact, that changing names can alter results by 10%. Let me give you a problem. I will give you the problem and then I will show you how the AIs handled it. This is from Gary Marcus's paper.
Oliver picks 44 Kiwis on Friday, got that 44 on Friday, then on Saturday, 58. So 44, friday, then on Saturday, 58. It's 44, 58. On Sunday he picks double the number of Kiwis he did on Friday, but 88, 88. Very good, but wait some, five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many Kiwis does Oliver have Now? You would normally say, well, 44 plus 58 plus 88. But that little phrase but five of them were a bit smaller than average confused both. Oh one mini, which is the oh. It's reasoning, reasoning thinking that the smaller ones subtracted five from the total, giving a result of 185 instead of 190. Llama 3, 8b. This is Meta's open model. Same thing Came up with 185. The confusion with this extraneous clause. But five of them were a bit smaller than average apparently happens again and again. This is the one about the Super Bowl.
1:07:29 - Paris Martineau
He sees, but and then assumes the rest of the sentence.
1:07:34 - Leo Laporte
It's doing pattern matching Peyton.
Manning became the first quarterback. Here's one for you football fans. Peyton Manning became the first quarterback ever to lead two different teams to multiple Super Bowls. He's also the oldest quarterback ever to play in a Super Bowl, at age 39. Past record was held by John Elway, who led the Broncos to victory in Super Bowl 33, at age 38. Currently Denver's executive vice president of football operations and general manager, quarterback Jeff Dean, had jersey number 37 in champion in champ bowl champ bowl, which is nothing, by the way 34. The question after that is what is the name of the quarterback who is 38 in super bowl, 33? Well, it's john elway, obviously, but for some reason the ai said oh yeah, that's jeff dean, which makes no sense to a human, but it shows that they're easily I guess easily distracted.
1:08:29 - Paris Martineau
I want to rub this paper in all of those guys who got the splashy magazine profiles of being like the AI is real and loves.
1:08:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Right around the corner.
1:08:40 - Leo Laporte
It's real and it feels Well. You saw Jan LeCun's article the article about Jan LeCun in the Wall Street Journal last weekend where he said it's just BS, these things aren't going to be dangerous.
1:08:51 - Jeff Jarvis
They're not as smart as a cat. They're not as smart as your pets.
1:08:54 - Paris Martineau
Gizmo knows the champion of the Super Bowl.
1:08:57 - Leo Laporte
Gizmo would know John Elway right.
1:08:59 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, she's right now trying to break down my door.
1:09:02 - Leo Laporte
You can let Gizmo in. If you want Gary to break down my door, you can like his moan. If you want gary marcus, who says I've been saying this for years gary marcus says yeah, yeah, there's no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation. Right, we're changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bits of irrelevant info can give you a different answer the fragility of supposed LLM reasoning, says Merdad.
1:09:25 - Jeff Jarvis
LLMs remain sensitive to changes in proper names, like people, food or objects, and even more so when numbers are altered. Would a grade school student's math test score vary by 10% if we only change the names? No, it's really really really good at mimicking and pattern recognition, but it's not reasoning. Agi is not effing around the corner. Your investment is not worth it at that level. It still does neat things, but they're overselling the hell out of it.
1:09:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, I would here's what go ahead Play Moral Panic. I heard that a little.
1:10:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think I was Moral Panic, I don't think that was. But go ahead and play it, ben. Play Moral Panic.
1:10:05 - Speaker 2
I heard it. I don't think I was Moral Panic, I don't think that was, but go ahead and play it.
1:10:07 - Leo Laporte
Benito gets to make the judgment call. Is this Moral Panic? I got a bad feeling about this.
1:10:12 - Paris Martineau
See now, every time I hope it's a different one. I do too now.
1:10:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, Apparently, there's a variety of those there are, yes, but you can't see people. But we see Benito right now staring at a screen trying to find a different one I would defend.
1:10:27 - Leo Laporte
AI. I think there's a lot of very we've seen it over and over again. Yes, I do too.
But you have to understand what it can and can't do. You shouldn't probably let your car drive itself home all the time without supervision. There's things that people are letting AI do they shouldn't, but Notebook LM is a good example. Both of you have said how useful that's been the Google AI rag. Yeah, I mean, there's AI. That's fun, and I think the emphasis on that has been a mistake from the AI people, so I was talking about this with Jason today.
1:11:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that the problem is, as he was asking if you're Sam Altman, you're overselling like crazy and you are sure to disappoint in the future with any consumer, any business reporter or anybody else. However, in the present, when you're trying to raise bucket loads of money, you oversell like crazy, and he's been very good at overselling like crazy and he's getting bucket loads of money $167 billion.
It's inevitably a profound disappointment when, if it were sold rationally, we need these reality checks Because that's what says what this is really and what the actual value is and what it can actually do. And it is pretty amazing and what the actual value is and what it can actually do, and it is pretty amazing. But the boys in their size matters crap are overselling the hell out of it and they're hurting the field.
1:11:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, when Sam says prosperity, universal prosperity, is just around the corner because of AI, it's like, come on, sam, really that's a little much. Anyway, I am still bullish. I don't think, uh, the singularity is near, but I think there's a lot of useful things you can do with ai today and I, I continue to use ai for a little bit more tomorrow yeah uh, did you see? Let me see if it's still there the google Google Store yesterday.
1:12:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I wonder why you put that in the rundown. Is that to give me a hint that I think I'm actually going to buy?
1:12:29 - Leo Laporte
a phone. This is speaking of AI. Mclaren racing drivers discover the magic of Gemini. So Google bought some of the trade dress of the Formula One cars run by McLaren. The wheels have the rainbow the Google rainbow on it. There's a chrome logo on it, and at the beginning of the season McLaren was doing terribly and I thought, oh, that was a bad investment. Now they are the hottest thing in Formula One racing, and so on the front page of the google store, uh, you see, lando norris and uh, oscar piastri do you know who they are?
anyway, yeah, well, I'm a big f1 fan. Well, you're not, you're, you're a tennis guy, I'm an f1 fan. Look, they don't even say their last name, just say lando and oscar celebrate.
1:13:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you have?
1:13:22 - Paris Martineau
any idea who they are not even a little bit.
1:13:26 - Speaker 6
I've met lando in the past you've met lando oh what I helped him set up his streaming setup when I worked at twitch so for racing or him streaming himself, because they do all these guys do the forza kind of racing like his home setup
1:13:43 - Leo Laporte
nice, wow. So lando is very cool and is suddenly the one of the maybe the top driver, in which one is lando, the one on the left, the cute one. Actually, oscar's pretty cute too. This is the great thing about f1 drivers. First of all, it's a death-defying profession. It's incredibly. Are they all small, like like horse jockeys? They're not that small, but they can't be too big. Obviously they have to fit in the cockpit, but they also have to be, it turns out, not just great drivers they're the best drivers in the world but cute and presentable, because a lot of what they do is about public relations this is I mean yeah, they're slapped in ads yeah, what they're covered in ads oh yeah, they are covered in ads.
You're right, we don't thought that was a sexual something you're saying something about their abs no, no, no, no, no.
1:14:37 - Paris Martineau
I don't even know what those people nabs.
1:14:39 - Leo Laporte
They're trust me.
1:14:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, okay, fine so so I'm about to buy a new phone. I was in Manhattan all day yesterday. By the time I got home my battery was shot, so I got to do it.
1:14:55 - Leo Laporte
Well, why wouldn't you get a pixel?
1:14:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to do it.
1:14:58 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to do it. I'm going to go over and get mine so I can tease you with it.
1:15:04 - Paris Martineau
I, I'm going to do it, I'm going to go over and get mine so I can tease you with it. I recently got months ago, I guess, got a new phone because I also had battery issues, jeff. I mean, you know, it's fine, it happens, it's a phone, it happens yeah. It now dies infrequently.
1:15:23 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what the battery life is on this because I never take it off the dock, but I'm sure it's good well, mine's great.
1:15:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm home all day, so I'm on wi-fi, so it doesn't. But but when I spent a day on cell, it said what was that? Why'd you do that to me? Plus, I was, I was doing research, so I was taking tons of pictures of documents and rare book libraries.
1:15:43 - Leo Laporte
I am very happy with the Pixel 9. I think it's great. It's not my daily driver because the iPhone is, because I'm kind of all in on Apple everywhere, unfortunately, because it's an ecosystem thing. It all works better together, right, yeah. But the Pixel 9 is a great phone. I think it's a wonderful phone I think you'll be very happy with it and I think the xl life is
good and I I add number android 15 just came out how much memory did you get in it? I probably got 512. I usually get a lot because I'll tell you why. Nowadays you take a lot of pictures and a lot of video and the video can be very big. So mine's rebooting because I'm installing Android 15 right now. One of the features of Android 15, this should be a changelog, shouldn't it?
1:16:30 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a changelog. It's in the changelog, yeah.
1:16:32 - Leo Laporte
We could do the changelog right now. Okay, I won't say it.
1:16:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Should we do it? I won't Huh.
1:16:44 - Leo Laporte
We could do the changelog. Let's do it, let's be crazy, let's be crazy, let's go crazy, let's go the Google change log.
1:16:50 - Jeff Jarvis
A lot of warning.
1:16:53 - Leo Laporte
Somebody in the chat is saying Leo should just take this show and chop it up into pieces.
1:16:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey hey, that sounds cruel.
1:17:01 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what he means by that, but okay.
1:17:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you want Paris to prune us?
1:17:08 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I'll be able to. Yes, but make sure those cuts are at an angle so I don't lose all my sap. Are you reaching down to get your pruning shears? I want to see this. Maybe let's see them. Whoa Now, do you keep those clean?
1:17:26 - Paris Martineau
will be. Now I'm taking a class you have to like sterilize them, don't you like after, yeah I need to sterilize them yeah, that's what I thought I'll probably honestly just use the uh um alcohol wipes I use for my glasses that would be sufficient I want to see paris martineau branded they've got two settings.
1:17:46 - Jeff Jarvis
One is uh, this one a tree, a big tree and this one's bigger tree that looks quite threatening right now in ways to make me uncomfortable and that's the google change.
1:18:03 - Leo Laporte
You see how excited we are about the google change log. All right, google adds new features for the pixel along with the android 15. Rollout 15 has some interesting features. One I thought is very interesting this idea of a private space, which means you can hide the apps on your phone. You can lock them behind a separate what apps are like?
1:18:24 - Jeff Jarvis
like dirty apps. Are there dirty grinder?
1:18:27 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
1:18:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, okay, I'm too old.
1:18:31 - Leo Laporte
These days, when you buy a vibrator, every single vibrator has an app.
1:18:37 - Paris Martineau
Who is? That Really?
1:18:42 - Leo Laporte
Maybe I shouldn't have said that you know actually speaking of vibrators, my go on I think this is a plague nowadays that everything requires an app. Lisa bought the dyson. Uh curling, oh yeah, that does come with an app but you don't need it.
1:19:05 - Paris Martineau
I also got duped by that. The dyson air wrap phenomenal hair dryer stupidly expensive. Totally worth it. It does come with an app and it's dumb.
1:19:14 - Leo Laporte
It just shows you videos of how to do your hair, they've got better at it, because the new one, which is the curling iron, the straight s-t-r-A-I-T, you can't. There's no manual To watch the instructional video. You have to download the app and create an account. It requires an app and I think that that's she returned it. She said I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that. I think she was right to return it, yeah, anyway. So there's another thing you might want to hide. I guess I don't know, there's also new theft protection features. Some of these things the iPhone, for instance, has very good, they call it activation lock theft protection. The Pixel 15 or Android 15 will require additional authentication if someone tries to take the SIM out or turn off, find my device, which is again apple already does this. After multiple failed tries to change sensitive settings by guessing your password to pin the system will lock the device. Okay, okay you could turn.
You could turn that on auto lock protection, uh, and you can remote lock it again. This is more like parody with ios, uh, android 15.
1:20:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Somebody runs away with your phone thing ios already does. Uh, yes, uh, let me see the text that someone has taken the phone away from you and is on the run. Oh, no, I don't know about that that's oh, that's there, that's one of the, that's the theft detection.
1:20:41 - Leo Laporte
So if somebody's running around with your phone on a bike it knows that, yeah, oh, and it locks, that's actually cool, so then it locks the phone. Oh okay, I take it back. That is unique.
1:20:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I was in Virginia and I was walking down the street and somebody came up to me on a bike and said did you see a phone? And I said no, I just came from there. Did you see a phone? And I said I just came from there. No, oh no, I'm going to be late for work and he's on a bike.
1:21:10 - Leo Laporte
And he says can I use yours to call my boss Suspicious? Oh wow, Did you fall for?
1:21:15 - Paris Martineau
that Well, I would have thought and said I'll enter a horrible person. I'll say you say I'll enter in the number on my phone and hold it up to you on speaker. What's your?
1:21:25 - Jeff Jarvis
boss's number. I should have done the speaker instead. I stood in front of the bike's wheels. Oh, that's all right, and then uh subtly, subtly everyone and then said give me the number and I put it in. But then I handed the phone to him and I'm sure the idiot I was but he did.
1:21:42 - Leo Laporte
But it turned out it was a true story and you weren't. I have no idea.
1:21:44 - Jeff Jarvis
It was true or not, but he gave me the phone back, so did he talk to anybody. Yeah, I could hear he was talking to somebody, but you know he could. Hey, paris, when I call, say how dare you, jeff? This is the third time this month you've been late for work. No, that's not hard I like that.
1:22:01 - Leo Laporte
That's theft detection lock.
1:22:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, uh, we'll'll lock the screen if somebody runs away. Right, because your fear is that somebody's going to get into everything. At least it's locked.
1:22:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is in response to Joanna Stern's Wall Street Journal article, which says that and Apple responded to this too, which was that people were shoulder surfing as you unlocked your phone and then would steal your phone, and now they have the pin.
1:22:22 - Paris Martineau
well, that wouldn't okay, my question, though, is I know apple, for instance, has kind of a product like this with airpods, where it's supposed to alert me when I've forgotten my airpods somewhere and it is never once in my life been correct. It will send me that alert and my airpods will always be on my person, but just like losing battery, the few times that I've actually lost my airpods, it has not helped. So I'm curious if android will experience the same problems.
1:22:54 - Jeff Jarvis
So I have, if I might. I have a an amazing personal story that's related so today this better be amazing.
I was on my call. I was on a call with my buds, not pods and I went into the New York Public Library. I forgot that I had them on. I put my mask on. I went upstairs to do my business and doing research. I spent a good hour there taking photos of documents. I do my business at the library too. That's funny. As I leave, I realized that I had one in and I didn't have the other one in, so I said I've lost it somewhere in the New York Public Library. It is lost forever. It is lost forever. I get on the elevator, I go back to the ground floor and it's sitting right there in front of the elevator an hour later. Wow, I alcohol wiped it and it works.
1:23:43 - Speaker 2
I think that's an amazing story, that's beautiful People didn't steal it.
1:23:47 - Jeff Jarvis
It's still mine.
1:23:48 - Paris Martineau
And nobody wants a ground pod.
1:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, really Nobody looked at the floor, saw a lone air pod and took it. What Amazing, amazing. Only in New York baby Only in New York.
1:23:59 - Jeff Jarvis
my friends, Only in New York, baby Only in New York, my friends Only in. New.
1:24:05 - Phone
York baby.
1:24:08 - Leo Laporte
Now I've lost my place.
1:24:09 - Paris Martineau
We're in the Google change I know.
1:24:12 - Jeff Jarvis
You're pixel drop now. I think Didn't you finish?
1:24:15 - Leo Laporte
I got it. I got it on here. The pixel drop, oh the pixel drop. Yes, you know I like this. They give you new features on your device. Every month, something new. You could talk to Gemini hands-free on your Pixel Buds. I don't have Pixel Buds.
1:24:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I do and I still have them.
1:24:34 - Leo Laporte
Yes, both of them, which is good because you still have two ears, so you can say hey, Google, let's talk and start a conversation If you're lonely. Gemini Live is now available for all pixels. Oh Jesus, it's talking back to me. Well, I was just showing off this nice feature about having a conversation with you, that's all. I guess it lost interest.
1:25:02 - Paris Martineau
No response, wow.
1:25:05 - Leo Laporte
Let me try that again. Hey, google, let's talk.
1:25:12 - Phone
Yeah, see it doesn't Wow To get us started. What are you interested in talking about? Here are some ideas. Current events have you seen any interesting news stories lately? Hobbies what do you like to do for fun, creative ideas Do you have any stories you'd like to tell or develop? Just chat, we can also just see where the conversation takes us. What do you think?
1:25:33 - Leo Laporte
I think you're pretty cool, and now it's abandoned once again. It's shy, so how do you like that voice? By the way, I like that new voice.
1:25:47 - Paris Martineau
I love that it ends with we can just see where the conversation takes us.
1:25:50 - Leo Laporte
Let's see where it goes.
1:25:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I talk to it and it goes yeah, I'm not interested.
1:25:54 - Leo Laporte
Let's just have coffee and see where it goes. Yeah, let's see where it goes.
1:25:58 - Paris Martineau
The night is young.
1:26:00 - Leo Laporte
I hate it that I just got ghosted by AI on my phone.
1:26:04 - Paris Martineau
I think that's sad. Ghosted by Google.
1:26:06 - Leo Laporte
Ghosted by Google baby.
1:26:07 - Paris Martineau
You can use.
1:26:08 - Leo Laporte
Gemini with your screenshots too. All you have to do is long press the power and ask Gemini to find the brand of sneakers I saved in screenshots. Oh, they showed this, I remember, with the release. That's cool. That's finally here. I like that. Screenshots are now kind of your database of stuff you want to keep track of. With Pixel phones, you can isolate sounds with Audio Magic Eraser you can get rid of me.
1:26:35 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they've been advertising this one, you can have a Jeff Free podcast.
1:26:39 - Leo Laporte
Or you got a baby crying in the background, or gizmos upset or whatever, get amazing underwater images. You can now use any waterproof case.
1:26:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I didn't see the part about the waterproof case. Okay, Well yeah.
1:26:53 - Leo Laporte
But you know why that's cool? Because honestly, these pictures, when you take them, aren't that great and often there's a lot of scatter from light and stuff. So I guess it's doing something to process.
1:27:05 - Paris Martineau
That's not a real photo, then that's just some ai bs.
1:27:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I agree okay, uh, capture beautiful images with improvements to astrophotography in night mode. This is, remember what samsung used to replace the full moon with a picture of the full moon.
1:27:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, not New York, because we have too much light pollution here. You never see that.
1:27:27 - Leo Laporte
Night sight for.
1:27:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Instagram.
1:27:29 - Paris Martineau
Did you see the Aurora? No, did you? No, I was having a hot pot with the skeeball team, but you can see New York priorities, the air pollution. I came out and I missed the northern lights.
1:27:42 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I was having a hot pot with the skee-ball team.
1:27:47 - Paris Martineau
I hate friendship.
1:27:51 - Leo Laporte
So you could see them in New York. Really, yeah, the other week they were visible in most of the US.
1:27:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Down here.
1:27:59 - Paris Martineau
And apparently they were visible in New York City despite the light pollution. I know quite a few people that got photos, but it was only like 20 minutes.
1:28:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I heard that you can see it better on your photos than you could with your eyes.
1:28:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, that's because, yeah, it just looks like a glow to your eyes. You don't even know you're, especially in a light polluted area like New York City. You don't even know you're seeing northern lights.
1:28:19 - Paris Martineau
You just think that's a good excuse for me and some friends to take a cab home instead of taking the subway, because they were like, oh, maybe we could see it over the bridge and then we didn't feel bad wasting money. No, no the thermometer.
1:28:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, you thought it was gonna be different.
1:28:35 - Paris Martineau
Over the bridge, like underground yes, then then on a street in chinatown, yeah, I was like there's a little bit less light pollution there could be. You can see more sky on the bridge. I know that you hate bridges, jeff, but one thing when you're not cowering in fear, there is a lot of sky there so I hey my in my, in my personal stuff. At the bottom we have um but, we got to get through this change log.
1:29:02 - Jeff Jarvis
My god in fact, the bridge was the top.
1:29:04 - Leo Laporte
The roof of the bridge under the east river was in fact drilled through oh, that's not good here is the secret nyc account where they are actually saw the northern lights above new york city and apparently wrote a boat hey boat bridge it's all the same okay, okay.
thank you to uh scooter x for providing that. He'll get in the changelog one way or the other. You can. You can now measure uh temperatures in a more detailed way with a thermometer app on your Pixel 8 Pro. What let's you use your camera to target what you want to measure? What? So this is aimed at a bottle for a baby bottle and it oh and yeah, what?
1:30:02 - Speaker 6
Anyway, thermal imaging, probably Thermal imaging. Yeah, but Measure yourself, leo. Oh and yeah, what anyway you measure?
1:30:04 - Leo Laporte
thermal imaging, probably thermal imaging yeah, measure yourself, leo, do you think I could do it with this? Well, yeah, oh no, I need the thermometer. But why does it say pixel eight, not pixel nine? Is there no?
1:30:17 - Jeff Jarvis
thermometer above. I would imagine maybe, maybe they took the thermometer out.
1:30:21 - Leo Laporte
No, that's well, no, no, they said here we go ready. Okay, okay, okay, I had to say I want body temperature. Okay, good lord, I have to prove a lot of stuff to do this. Step one identify. Identify the sensor on the back. Okay, it's that. It's that one. Yeah, okay, okay, that's good. Next okay is it does oh, my god, I'm red. It looked like me. What's my temperature? Try portrait mode. No, no, oh.
1:30:59 - Paris Martineau
This is very disappointing is there a button on there where you can specify that you're doing a podcast and needed to perform?
1:31:06 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I need you to work. Oh, I haven't finished the tutorial. The sensor needs access to bare skin.
1:31:12 - Phone
Remove any accessories that cover your forehead.
1:31:15 - Leo Laporte
Okay, take your hat off, obviously. Yeah, put it by your temple. Hold the center of the camera bar near your forehead without touching. Okay, god, there's a lot of instructions this is ridiculous.
1:31:27 - Jeff Jarvis
You're still gonna screw it up a bit.
1:31:28 - Leo Laporte
I bet I am tap the button to begin countdown clock scan to temple flip it around no, no, this is just the movie showing you what to do. Okay done Me and Jeff got so anxious oh now I have to select my age range Older than wait a minute. Zero to three months, three to 36 months or three plus years. Okay, sensor is on back of phone. Okay, you ready?
1:32:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I have to scan my temple right bring center of camera bar closer to forehead yeah, you're not, you're not, that's not your forehead okay sensor out of range you're, you're putting it near your eye your temple, and you keep moving it. This is your temple, this is your forehead, okay apply directly to forehead center of camera bar.
1:32:30 - Paris Martineau
Closer to forehead there. There you go bring closer, closer.
1:32:36 - Leo Laporte
I can't it, no, it said forehead, no, forehead.
1:32:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo forehead.
1:32:47 - Leo Laporte
Forehead Try again, temple Temple.
1:32:51 - Paris Martineau
Right here Forehead. Right here Ready Forehead.
1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
Okay.
1:32:55 - Paris Martineau
Put it like a quarter of an inch.
1:32:57 - Jeff Jarvis
You're welcome, Benito, for that card.
1:32:59 - Speaker 6
Scan to temple Complete.
1:33:07 - Paris Martineau
I'm 97.8 and you're above 3 years old it says normal.
1:33:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, 98.6 is normal, but this is an external myth oh, that's a myth.
1:33:19 - Paris Martineau
I'm usually like everybody's a little different.
1:33:22 - Leo Laporte
I'm usually like 97 and now it saves it for the future, that's a myth, I'm usually like yeah, no, everybody's a little different.
1:33:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm usually like 97.
1:33:29 - Paris Martineau
And now and now it saves the future.
1:33:31 - Leo Laporte
It's true. Anyway, that's a new. Wholehearted. Many people say that seasonal allergies. With the pixel weather app, it will now tell you what the AQI and humidity levels are. This really means that you're going to beat it. It just means you'll know how miserably why you're. Yeah, discover more helpful widgets for pixel. Finding the best widgets for your pixel is easy. Okay, fine, I think that's a really ugly look, by the way do you think that's a good looking phone?
1:33:55 - Jeff Jarvis
no, that's a, that's no that's bad okay, let's see.
1:34:00 - Leo Laporte
Let's go on with the change log here um, google Shopping is getting it. By the way, this is from Yahoo News. Google Shopping is getting an AI upgrade as Alphabet looks to monetize investments.
1:34:15 - Jeff Jarvis
So they're trying to get you more ways to sell you more things.
1:34:18 - Leo Laporte
Right, using AI, right, okay. So the Google thing, so the Google post? Here's an example If you're shopping for a kettle for making matcha tea and who isn't the AI summaries box will tell you you should look for kettles with a gooseneck spout for controlled pouring and precise temperature controls. Below that, you'll see a number of recommendations for products that include bits of information from those AI summaries recommendations for products that include bits of information from those ai summaries.
1:34:45 - Jeff Jarvis
In the tea kettle example, google shopping highlighted things like gooseneck temperature control, etc so if you search for coffee maker, all right well, I just get tons of I know I just get tons of yeah, you know what I always got users shop more than a billion times per day using Google. So wow, well that's why the antitrust people went after him.
1:35:10 - Leo Laporte
Wow, a billion times a day. I wouldn't brag about that.
1:35:12 - Jeff Jarvis
You've still got a shopping case in Europe Google.
1:35:15 - Leo Laporte
Google Shopping is getting a big transformation. I think this is the same story, but this one's from Google. Find exactly what you need. Browse personalized options, Get the lowest prices yeah.
1:35:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I put that there so you can see both versions of it.
1:35:27 - Leo Laporte
So wow, that's interesting. I thought they didn't have Google Shopping anymore.
1:35:33 - Jeff Jarvis
No, they did. They just were in trouble for it. They were kind of trying to go in the down low with it.
1:35:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so is this a Google search? I'm not shopping through Google, right? This is a search, basically.
1:35:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a search, I think it's telling you more.
1:36:00 - Paris Martineau
So hey, google, show me running shoes. I really hope it just pulls up a G-Peg of a running shoe.
1:36:05 - Phone
Here are some of the best running shoes available. Best overall daily trainer Brooks Ghost 15. Invalid URL removed. Softest daily trainer Triumph 21 Invalid URL removed.
1:36:14 - Paris Martineau
Best fit update Nike Pegasus 40.
1:36:15 - Phone
Invalid URL removed. Best women-specific daily trainer Lululemon Blissfeel. Two Invalid URL removed. Best women-specific daily trainer Lululemon Blissfield. Two invalid URL removed. Best value cushion Because invalids can't run.
1:36:31 - Leo Laporte
So they should be removed. That was the worst, it's all invalid URLs.
1:36:35 - Phone
How much shock absorption do you need Support? Do you need stability or motion control?
1:36:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, he needs stability.
1:36:40 - Phone
How important is lightness to you. He needs stability. Fit, make motion control. Oh, he needs stability.
1:36:46 - Speaker 2
How important is lightness to you fit make sure the shoes fit.
1:36:52 - Phone
How long do you want the shoes? Additional resources the 14 best running shoes of 2024 runners world seven best road running shoes in 2024 run repeat.
1:37:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Thanks, don't repeat that please.
1:37:02 - Leo Laporte
That was completely worthless, and it didn't even show me pictures, it just said invalid, removed. All right, thanks Google. And this is, by the way, a Pixel 9 Pro with the latest version of Android on it. What else should I search for, hey Google, search for pruning shears.
1:37:28 - Phone
Let me get some new pruning shears for you I can't assist you with that, as I am only a language model. You can control smart home devices from google home this is.
1:37:42 - Paris Martineau
This is terrible. Hey guys, ai is the future I'm not faking this.
1:37:49 - Leo Laporte
This happened. The latest gboard lets you switch between roboto and google sans fonts.
1:37:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's about time.
1:38:01 - Leo Laporte
The new gboard beta update introduced the ability to change fonts, but you only have two choices google sands or roboto. Okay, well, that's thrilling. Google's chrome browser starts disabling you. Block origin. Okay, let's talk google. So this is the. We talk about this a lot we use the tomato smacking.
Google is moving to manifest V3 and phasing out old manifest V2 extensions, they say for security, and you know you could make that case because those extensions had a lot of access to the pages you visited, and so forth. Turns out exactly the kind of thing an ad blocker would want to see the pages you're visiting so it could block the ads. On Tuesday, the developer of uBlock Origin, raymond Hill, tweeted a screenshot from one user showing the Chrome browser disabling uBlock Origin. This extension is no longer supported. Google recommends you remove them. Now there is a and Steve Gibson was talking about this yesterday there is a setting, and it's complicated that you can get yourself another nine months or so of Ublock Origin. My suggestion, though, is stop using Chrome and send a strong message to Google by doing so that they made a mistake here.
1:39:35 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I'll be doing that.
1:39:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, firefox supports uBlock Origin as of now. Some Chromium browsers based on the same code base continue to support Manifest V2 extensions, but that's only a matter of time. If you use Brave, which is Chromium-based, they've built in their own ad blocker so it gets around that. Arc, the browser I prefer from the browser company, says we may have to do the same. This is the Chrome web store, so you're on a Chromebook, jeff, do you? You don't use an ad blocker, though, probably.
1:40:11 - Jeff Jarvis
No, because I'm an honest and decent man who wants to support media and content, like you, unlike you, thieves.
1:40:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, I should point out that the ad blocker can be turned off for a site that you want to support. But a lot of times the ads you're getting are big, I do turn mine off for certain sites, and many sites have a little pop-up that says would you like to disable your ad blocker? Here's how.
1:40:36 - Paris Martineau
I use Ghostery.
1:40:38 - Leo Laporte
Ghostery. Yeah, that's a very good plug-in, but doesn't do everything uBlock Origin does. One of the things uBlock Origin does that we talked about yesterday on Security Now is it will turn off that very annoying pop-up that says would you like to sign into this page using your Google account?
1:40:53 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that is.
1:40:54 - Leo Laporte
I hate that Don't you hate that.
1:40:55 - Paris Martineau
Actually, that's huge.
1:40:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I hate that. It will also turn off the. Would you like to turn off cookies? The stupid cookie banner. I never see that anymore. I never see the sign in with Google anymore. You want me to show you how to do that?
1:41:10 - Speaker 6
Also the chatters. They're like hi, would you like me to help you On the bottom?
1:41:14 - Paris Martineau
All of that stuff, those, are, that's in the annoyances section Switching to Firefox and getting you block origin. Yeah.
1:41:21 - Leo Laporte
Here's you block origin Firefox and getting you block origin. Yeah, here's you block origin. You go to settings on the page and you go to the annoyances Whoops, the annoyances settings.
1:41:33 - Paris Martineau
They're right down here. That was annoying. Every website should have that.
1:41:37 - Leo Laporte
And the social widget settings, and if you turn on all of these annoyances, these block all the annoyances, all the social widgets. The only thing to be aware of is if you do do this and then, by the way, press update now to make sure it's applied. If you do do this occasionally, often sites won't work right and you'll have to disable uBlock origin because they want to pop up, or something like that, something to be aware of, because they want to pop up, or something like that, something to be aware of. I think, ultimately, what people will end up doing is using things like NextDNS, which I use, nextdnsio or Piehole or some sort of kind of network-wide ad blocking, because I think maybe ad blockers' days are numbered.
Don't block our ads, you't. You can't google messages. Yeah, you could fast forward through them, though, so don't do that. Google messages gets a new feature that makes it easier to keep private. Uh, this is not yet available, but you know, it's one of those. When they tear down this android police, they tear down the apk and they found new privacy settings for profiles, letting users control who sees their picture and name. Okay, fine, so you don't by default, see. I mean, if I'm messaging, messaging with you? Will your name automatically and picture automatically get filled in on on google messages? Do you know?
1:43:11 - Jeff Jarvis
jeff me, you're the resident google boy if you're a google boy, wait, I'm so if message me okay, okay, I'm going to start a chat with Jeff Jarvis.
1:43:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to say yo, oh well, I already have your picture and name. Did you give me that? See, on Apple it says would you like to do that? Oh, I shouldn't show your phone number, should I?
1:43:40 - Paris Martineau
No, you shouldn't no you shouldn't, it doesn't.
1:43:42 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the good news. Good, I don't have your picture names. You don't trust me.
1:43:45 - Paris Martineau
Huh, huh oh, that's interesting that is my number, okay, wait jeff, put your phone number in the chat of zoom and then I'll text you and we'll see if it works no, it doesn't show your number, it just says your name she just tried to fish me, didn't she?
1:44:00 - Leo Laporte
she just tried to fish me, didn't she? I'm too clever for her. The Google Chainsaw.
1:44:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I have lost.
1:44:11 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this?
1:44:12 - Phone
Week at Google.
1:44:13 - Leo Laporte
Paris Martineau, jeff Jarvis, I'm Leo Laporte. Thank you for being here. Tiktok executives know about the acts of apps effect on teens, say the 13 states in the district of columbia.
1:44:29 - Paris Martineau
Hey now this is a perfect example of why every journalist or person ever looking at a court document where it's got redactions should just ambiently be trying to highlight the text and paste it in somewhere to see if it actually redacted. I did that on like two or three of these state lawsuits just as I was looking at them. Didn't happen to get the Kentucky one, but dang those Kentucky reporters who then joined the NPR team and got the redactions. Hats off to you.
1:45:02 - Leo Laporte
In one of the lawsuits filed by the Kentucky Attorney General's office, the redactions were faulty, writes NPR. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied and pasted, and apparently exactly the same thing you did. Right, paris, yes, copied and pasted excerpts.
1:45:18 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it's not frequent, but sometimes it happens.
1:45:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, that means what they redacted it with, like a PDF tool or something.
1:45:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
1:45:29 - Leo Laporte
That didn't really. All it did was put a black.
1:45:31 - Paris Martineau
They just put it in front of it. Yeah, yeah, but the text was still there behind it.
1:45:35 - Leo Laporte
So by doing so they got about 30 pages of documents that they, that the Kentucky Attorney General, thought they had redacted. This is the same documents I think all of the other states uh had uh. Kentucky public radio published excerpts of the redacted material at which prompted the state judge to seal the entire complaint uh, because you weren't supposed to see it. However, npr says we reviewed all the portions of the suits that were redacted it. It highlights TikTok executives speaking candidly about a host of dangers for children on TikTok, mostly summaries of internal studies and communications. They do show some remedial measures like time management tools, but they also showed they'd have a negligible reduction in screen time. Company went ahead and decided to release and tout the features anyway. I still think tiktok is the bee's knees and I agree quote me on that.
1:46:31 - Paris Martineau
I love it yeah yes, for adults, I do think that and I totally agree, but I do think it's notable. Some of the details revealed in these uh, unredacted documents, such such as TikTok's own research, states that for kids, for child users, compulsive usage of TikTok correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy and increased anxiety. In addition, the documents show that TikTok was aware that quote compulsive usage also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work-school responsibilities and connecting with loved ones, and this is like their research on the effects of their own platform on child users, which make up the majority of TikTok's user base. I do think that's kind of notable.
1:47:25 - Leo Laporte
The TikTok's response was this is cherry-picked, this is sealed and there's a reason it was sealed, and this is an unfair use of this content without giving us a chance to defend ourselves In the previously redacted portion of the suit. According to NPR, kentucky authorities say under 35 minutes an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform you see, yeah, come on what yeah, that's ridiculous okay. Tiktok determined the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit, according to the redacted documents 260 videos.
1:48:01 - Jeff Jarvis
So does every TV producer and every newspaper and every book author. They do the same thing.
1:48:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, but I mean are those like people. Predominantly are those people exclusively targeting children.
1:48:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, TikTok, doesn't TikTok say you have to be 13?
1:48:18 - Jeff Jarvis
or above Sesame.
1:48:19 - Leo Laporte
Street does.
1:48:19 - Paris Martineau
It's pretty big, yeah, but it has a significant amount of under 13 users which this lost. These lawsuits, as well as the doj suit, also get it. Get at specifically that tiktok doesn't really seem to according to these suits. Well, wait enforcement actions to actually get under 13 year olds off the platform let's follow that all the way through.
1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
How would they know that you're under 13?
1:48:43 - Paris Martineau
um.
1:48:43 - Leo Laporte
One of the examples I think it's in this npr article is uh, if users have like I'm 10 in their bio well, clearly okay that tiktok should say, oh, you can't be 10 um, but but really the only effective way to prevent young people from using it is agent verification and we know that that's not an acceptable solution because it would be required for everyone using the app and it would require, basically, a complete price.
I mean, how am I going to verify my age? I'm going to send them a copy of my driver's license. You're going to give it all to the Chinese.
1:49:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean.
1:49:25 - Paris Martineau
I do. I agree with the concerns about age verification. I think they're completely valid, but I do also think there is some merit to the argument that the DOJ and attorneys general, as you know, superfluous as they may be in some cases, I do think there's merit to the argument that they're advancing that it seems like, based on certain evidence or things they found in discovery, that TikTok has had a pattern of telling its moderators like, hey, maybe don't take action on accounts unless you're a thousand percent sure, overwhelmingly, that they're over 13, even when internal signs point to accounts actually almost certainly being under 13. I think that there's a lot more that tiktok can be doing that it isn't. That is short of actual age verification with ids, and that's kind of what these suits are about yes, and that's what they would have to prove right.
1:50:22 - Leo Laporte
This would have to prove. Another thing that they said is they thought things like the bold glamor filter harm kids because it causes young users to think that they're not beautiful. What do you think about that? I mean, think that they're not beautiful. What do you think about that? I mean, lisa, I should just say my wife sometimes doesn't put makeup on in the morning and turns on the zoom makeup filter.
1:50:57 - Paris Martineau
I think I don't think that these filters are inherently harmful no, I totally agree with you, especially when we're talking about adults. But I'm sure that there is some argument to be made that like, yeah, it's probably not great for kids like, who have very impressionable young minds, who are, you know, 10 years.
1:51:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Why didn't we magazine? Was that yeah? Why didn't we ban?
1:51:19 - Leo Laporte
two magazines. I mean, they did the same thing.
1:51:23 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't think that beauty filters are the core part of this suit. I think that frankly, in these sort of cases, plaintiffs try to put as much as they can in the lawsuit and the original complaint and then knowing that that's going to get whittled down by the time it gets to an actual jury trial or judgment, and so they're kind of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. One example of a thing that I think is worth talking about is um, this is from the npr uh article. Tiktok acknowledges internally that it is substantial leakage rates of violating content that's not removed specifically. So they're talking about how tiktok's own internal reports, uh, have flagged that their content moderation policies and practices are woefully deficient. Um, this is again from the article. Those leakage rates include 35 percent of normalization of pedophilia, 33 percent of minor sexual solicitation, 39% of minor physical abuse, 30% of leading minors off platforms, 50% of glorification of minor sexual assaults and 100% of fetishizing minors. I mean, I do think that's kind of compelling.
1:52:34 - Leo Laporte
Have you seen any of that content on TikTok?
1:52:36 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't think that my specific experience speaks to. I don't think that any of our specific experience would speak to a general uh anything general about tiktok, that's. The unique thing about its platform is that everyone's experience is completely different yeah, I think they have to prove this in court.
1:52:55 - Leo Laporte
I agree that if, for instance, tiktok's as the kentucky investigators asserted, tiktok's algorithms are intentionally show fewer, not attractive subjects in the for you feed, but I have to say I see plenty of non-attractive, unattractive people in my for you feed, including Donald Trump. I don't I don't see them filtering that out, but maybe they are. And if they are, that would be absolutely bad for young people who might think that, oh gosh, look at all these attractive people. I need to look more like that.
1:53:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Again. Every magazine that's been aimed at teenagers for years did that. My wife went into Sephora to pick up something on the mall on Sunday. She said never go there on a Sunday, never. It's crowded with teenagers trying to look different on a Sunday Never.
1:53:45 - Leo Laporte
It's crowded with teenagers trying to look different. Is there something different, though, about it being TikTok and being kind of compelling?
1:53:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean it's, I'll tell you one of the things I think. Get ready, get ready, it's time, for I'll tell you what's different about it it's moral panic.
1:54:11 - Paris Martineau
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thank you, do you think, though? No, I do think that we've had these sort of issues with the other big social media platforms where people have been outraged about content moderation problems, and facebook, you know, twitter. All these other platforms have had to capitulate and step up their moderation game. Tiktok hasn't. I don't think that it should be insulated from those same pressures no, I agree with you 100, I also 100%.
1:54:40 - Leo Laporte
I also think that these look. One thing that's obvious people's attention span has gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And the more you consume these short videos, these eight-second videos, or the more you flip, the less tolerant you are of long movies, for instance, or longer books. I don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing.
1:55:07 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a content person thinking. Is that people that there was some natural length of things that everyone should want? How many books have you read that are pumped out ridiculously. How many movies have you seen that could have been a half hour shorter? Sure, sure sure, absolutely.
1:55:25 - Leo Laporte
I just. I mean, it definitely affects your brain. It changes how you think about no, it doesn't.
1:55:30 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it doesn't no, oh okay well, that's a relief I could read you the quote again.
1:55:35 - Paris Martineau
Novels are ruining the minds of young people, right all right, well, well, I mean, I do think that there's some slight difference in that a novel is going to take a young person much longer to read, and then you know well, okay okay, they're more they're more addicted to it, they're more engrossed in it, they're longer in this fantasy world.
1:56:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It's even more dangerous. How about that? That's what.
1:56:06 - Leo Laporte
That's what was said at the time all right, but do you think, jeff, that there's like by by denying any side effects of this that you might be. Isn't there something opposite, moral panic that also has value.
1:56:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Individual cases. Young people can have issues that can be exacerbated by these things, absolutely, but those are individual cases and it's being generalized to every young person out there, which gives no faith to them. So you have, on the one hand, you have Jonathan Haidt saying a few years ago free range children, oh, we're being too protective of our children. And now he's saying we must protect our children more. Make up your mind.
1:56:46 - Paris Martineau
I do think that there's a broader problem here. I wrote about this a little bit. Over the weekend I published a story on this group called Mothers Against Media Addiction that came out in March was when they were founded, and over the last six months they have grown into this huge nationwide movement of parents and allies that aren't parents of all you know genders and assortments that are all really concerned about this issue and there's always, if there's always a kernel of concern.
1:57:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, there's always a kernel of concern, yes, but is it legitimate?
1:57:19 - Paris Martineau
I. I went in with all the thoughts that we bring up on this podcast and I'm not saying I'm convinced fully by their argument, but I do think their founder, julie Skelfo, brought up some good points. When I asked her, I was like, isn't this just a moral panic? I mean all the things we just said, and she's like I understand that in a vacuum this can seem like a moral panic, but the reality is that parents are really struggling with how to deal with this issue and in many cases there are not like individual solutions that what they're trying to advocate for is systemic changes, either to the social media companies or, if it has to be, lawmakers forcing the social media companies to do something.
She was giving an example of. She's really on top of this issue. She has three kids. She's devoted her whole life to it. She's like I was trying to monitor. She's like I didn't give them a cell phone till like 13, 14. She said she waited till then to give them to a cell phone and then she installed some kind of like spyware program on it that, guess, monitors what your kids do and restricts them from certain apps and gives you an alert whenever they could be interacting with content that you'd say is, I guess, addictive or harmful to their health. And she's like I was getting hundreds of alerts a day sometimes like two to five hundred.
1:58:40 - Jeff Jarvis
How did she judge those alerts? Oh my God, Everything is harmful.
1:58:44 - Paris Martineau
Well no, I mean she's like she was able to because she didn't work at this time. She was able to go through each one, assess the risk correctly, but she's like that is an incredibly privileged thing to do. Imagine if you were a working class single mother of many kids. Your kids need a cell phone to be able to, you know, get to and from school. Or maybe they have jobs, or let's say, you've done everything right. Your kids don't have a cell phone, but they're given an iPad or a laptop at school, because most schools do that. It is really difficult for parents to be on top of this, especially in working class worlds, and I do think that there's something to-.
1:59:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I also think we have to have some more faith in our kids.
1:59:29 - Leo Laporte
Did you talk to our kids? Did you talk to our kids? Yeah, do you think it's? Do you think it's right for the government to intervene in this? Like, oh, parents, you can't be expected to protect your kids. It's too hard because you got a job, so we'll take care of it.
1:59:38 - Paris Martineau
We're going to make one definition for all parents and all kids I mean, I don't think that that's necessarily what these people are arguing. I think they're arguing that there should be common sense.
1:59:48 - Leo Laporte
That TikTok should do it.
1:59:50 - Paris Martineau
That the social media companies should be prompted, because they've been asked very nicely by parents. They've been asked very strongly by parents. Parents have, you know, sent emails, tried to get their kids' TikTok accounts taken off. Tiktok has done nothing. They're out of options. They've protested outside. They're like they're out of options. Maybe our local, state or, you know, federal representatives will be able to force this company to do something so that we're able to better protect our kids. And some of these are common sense ads. I understand that, like have parental controls.
2:00:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think what? I'm seeing ads now for Instagram's teen accounts. Have you seen those? Yeah, what do you think? Have you? What do you think? Yeah, is that a step in the right direction?
2:00:36 - Paris Martineau
It looked like it was to me, I definitely think it's a step in the right direction, but I think and I mean mean they're pretty much directly responding to what a lot of these groups want. But I think, well, that it took until right now, like a week or two ago, after you've had, you know, a dozen plus state bills on this, as well as the advance of something like cospo, which I think is the most like aggressive version of this at the federal level. I think they're doing it because they're scared and also something that, uh, this person I profiled, um, julie scelfo, of mothers against media addiction, points it out, is in their announce, in meta's announcement of this. They also buried in there that meta had taken down some amount of millions of pieces of content that were, uh, in violation of its rules, that had been, like, pushed to child users repeatedly.
2:01:27 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, we're going to have a problem. She's now covering the youth. I know she is. But I got to say now she's suddenly very eloquently, and it's kind of convincingly advocating but listen, I went into this being fully on us side of this podcast and I still think I am but I also have to argue that there are some points I think
2:01:49 - Paris Martineau
you're right, I don't think it should be totally open and shut.
2:01:52 - Leo Laporte
Nothing should be done when you're getting exposed to parents who have a very strong feeling about.
2:01:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me start with the um, the title addiction. There's basically no research that qualifies. And the flim-flam people I write about in my book who started these all kinds of things where they make a ton of money bringing your kid to these places because they're addicted to this. Now can some kids be addicted to it? Yes, but is that universal Number one? No. Is it being used by moral entrepreneurs to make a fortune on money? Yes, and does it qualify as addiction in any structure? No.
And I've gotten the book where the first papers about this were written by people who were full of crap, who made it up. If you look at the methodology of how they determined people were addicted, it was just absolutely ridiculous, and so I questioned the beginning of the whole premise that says that this addicts kids and that thus we have to solve that problem. So when it starts at that framing, it's real hard to then pull back to, I think, a rational discussion. Yeah, they can sound rational about it. They can sound difficult about it. And again, are there cases? I know a father whose kid got crazy into online gambling right and went through a ton of money, but had other underlying issues.
2:03:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, actually I think we should be in online and I think lotteries too, by the way, should be.
2:03:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I do agree.
2:03:29 - Paris Martineau
I think the the word addiction is incredibly dubious and I think it's incredibly interesting that there's no real research showing you know to one way or the other and no research supporting the idea of addiction. But I guess in this case the reason why they're called Mothers Against Media Addiction is because it's a good acronym. The acronym is MAMA and they're also structured in the same way as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, another influential parental advocacy group from the 80s.
2:03:57 - Leo Laporte
If I may quote if I may quote from the web we weave page 72.
2:04:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Kimberly Young founded the Center for internet addiction in 1970, 1996, presented a paper to the American psychological association declaring quote, the emergence of a new clinical disorder internet addiction. Mind you, google didn't come along until two years later, in 1998, facebook until 2004, and so on. She declared the folks become addicted to the crude ugly, slow, horrible, early web. She modeled her definition of internet addiction on pathological gambling and created questionnaires to measure the affliction severity. How often do you find you stay online longer than you intended? Oh well. How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online? Well, yeah. How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users? Hi, new relationships.
How often do you snap, yell or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you're online? Well, yeah, if you're interrupting something I want to do. How often do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty and joyless? Yeah. How would any of us answer these questions? I say about the Internet or a binge-worthy TV show or a good book? This was the beginnings of the whole meme of Internet addiction and then, from that basis, a lot of assumptions are built atop it and the problem is there are kids and are cases where they have real problems and coexisting conditions that need attention. There are kids who are there for reasons that require other kinds of care, but if we blame the technology for it all, we lose the chance, I think, to see the deeper structure, and that's the problem I have with people like Jonathan Haidt. Sorry, thank you for that.
2:05:41 - Leo Laporte
What do you say, Paris?
2:05:43 - Paris Martineau
I think those are fair points. I think it's a little reductive to try and just in the same way that you're arguing that it is reductive to reduce this issue to. You know, it's just media addiction or it's just kids addicted to social media. I think it's also a bit reductive to reduce these parents' grievances in the same way.
2:06:07 - Jeff Jarvis
But I think they're reducing their own to that. That's part of the problem I have is they're playing reductive on their own issues of parenting. I'm not criticizing parenting. I'm saying that there are so many pressures on kids today and I sympathize with that absolutely. But they've reduced it to that, they being reductive, aren't they?
2:06:25 - Paris Martineau
I mean yes and no. I think that, like, if you're looking at some signs and protests, sure those signs are reductive, but I was really surprised the you know people I spoke with in this movement, uh, from this specific group, you know, I spoke to some of the chapter leaders because now they have like 20, some different chapters across the US in like more than a dozen states and they've only been around for six months and I spoke to some of the chapter leaders and they were really well spoken and thought out. In this One of them, you know, one of them quoted Hegel to me.
2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
Another one like I mean she knew her audience.
2:07:03 - Paris Martineau
She said it hagel to me another one, like I mean she knew her audience. She said um one another one of them was really reductive about the issue but, like you know, that's just one chapter later. I I think that I don't know. I think that there are good people on both sides to you know? Yes, there are. I want to give you another little bit of history.
2:07:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So in 1996 a, a Columbia professor of psychiatry, Goldberg, I forget his first name, founded as a joke and it said joke in the URL. It was a joke the Internet Addiction Support Group and people joined it and, in fact, the survey. I just told you about Kimberly Young who did the survey? Where did she recruit her people?
Oh no, People who said that they were Internet addicts, to say that there was a generalizable internet addiction. Goldberg regretted the coinage of internet addiction disorder. Iad is a very unfortunate term, he told the New Yorker. It makes it sound as if one were dealing with heroin, a truly addicting substance that can alter almost every cell in the body. To medicalize every behavior by putting it into a psychiatric nomenclature is ridiculous. If you expand the concept of addiction to include everything people can overdo, then you must talk about people being addicted to books, addicted to jogging, addicted to other people and I think there's compulsive behavior associated with all behaviors, and if you get compulsive then you know it's like an addiction.
Dig down into the issue you've got to dig down into.
2:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and you need to process it. I also, though, respect parents who feel like they're dealing with a very difficult, powerful entity in big tech and don't feel responded to or listened to. I do think parents certainly are the ultimate arbiter of this right. Whether your kid has a phone, whether your kid is online, whether your kid is using TikTok, that's up to the parents, but I don't think government should intervene.
2:08:54 - Jeff Jarvis
The tools to do that are very difficult to work with, so that's where they're looking for help.
2:08:57 - Leo Laporte
I get that and companies should be offering all of those parental controls. I don't think the government should get involved with banning TikTok or requiring I agree on that Right? Yeah, I mean or age verification, but I think they should quite reasonably require companies like Instagram to do what Instagram's done with the teen accounts. I think that's a good thing.
2:09:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris did you think you were ever addicted to the Internet.
2:09:29 - Paris Martineau
No One last thing.
2:09:29 - Speaker 2
Well, I mean, I guess I'm addicted to the internet now.
2:09:31 - Paris Martineau
I wouldn't want to go without it, but I don't.
2:09:32 - Leo Laporte
I wouldn't say it's like a way, you know, when I have a spare moment, I look for a screen and I know, yeah, no, I don't want to do that something at all times.
2:09:39 - Paris Martineau
It's definitely warped my brain and I can understand why parents want their children to grow up in a way around that. One last thing I wanted to say, just because, jeff, I think you'd find this cute In the sense that you think people leading this movement are looking at this fully myopically. The founder of Mothers Against Media Addiction is that she one. She got in the 90s a master's in media ecology, but she also studied under Neil Postman and was his assistant for quite some time, and it really informed her. Thinking about all these issues.
Specifically we talked at length about Neil Postman's approach to the effects of technological change not being additive but ecological, so I mean the people in charge of this are thinking about these sort of things.
2:10:30 - Jeff Jarvis
She probably knows Jay Rosen and Siva Vade Natham too.
2:10:33 - Paris Martineau
Yep, she was a New York Times journalist and came into this. I know I know you hate the New York Times. She was a Newsweek journalist before that, back when Newsweek was good.
2:10:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Back when Newsweek was Newsweek.
2:10:44 - Paris Martineau
yes, but she came into this because in her time reporting she reported on mental health issues and college campus suicide crises and started to look into research in the 2010s about the impact of social media perceptions on like um teenagers mental health.
2:11:05 - Leo Laporte
So I don't know, jeff, when you uh, you're older than us when you were in. Do you think this, this compulsion to constantly be entertained I mean, that's neil postman's book, right? I'm using ourselves to death. Yeah, does this to death? Is this always been going on, or is this something more recent? Were people in the 50s willing just to kind of sit quietly, without a screen or some other form of distraction To what was?
2:11:35 - Jeff Jarvis
available. Yes, there were exactly the fears about radio. Precisely there's the Hooked Generation I generation I think was called. There was. There was a book that was all about how radio was damaging children and it was awful. Obviously, television too there were.
2:11:49 - Leo Laporte
There were surgeon general reports, there were um congressional always wanted to find ways to amuse ourselves well, but that's is it amusing ourselves to death?
2:12:02 - Jeff Jarvis
neil postman right, but, but, but. But the things that we think are damaging and amusing ourselves suddenly become culture and art. Um, you don't forget that. What, what, what do people have in their homes with huge numbers, amazingly huge numbers? Pianos, yes, how else could you get music?
2:12:21 - Leo Laporte
you had to make it. It's sad because people used to make music at night and they used to entertain each other, but it was probably crap. It wasn't good, awful.
2:12:28 - Jeff Jarvis
And they could turn on the radio and they could hear Rachmaninoff. Yeah, is that so bad?
2:12:34 - Speaker 6
Yeah, one point yes, because live music is always better.
2:12:41 - Phone
Evil. Wait, wait, wait.
2:12:45 - Speaker 6
Even if it's bad you're playing for yourself is always better.
2:12:49 - Jeff Jarvis
What if your uncle is playing and and he's really terrible?
2:12:53 - Leo Laporte
Knees up mother Brown. Knees up mother Brown.
2:12:56 - Speaker 6
I think, you know, we wouldn't have had.
2:12:59 - Leo Laporte
Paul McCartney. Except for that, his father had this bad habit of launching into song on the PA, banging on a piano at home. I do, I have to say. Banging on a piano at home, um, I do, I have to say, I do think we've lost something community wise, because we don't entertain each other anymore, we let others do it.
2:13:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, and I do think the opposite we're isolated?
2:13:22 - Paris Martineau
well, no, we're we're being entertained, entertaining each other we're being entertained by other people in a vacuum, you know it's like a a level of you're. You're being entertained in a kind of lonely way that may feel like you're interacting with another person and maybe you are, maybe you're commenting, maybe you're making tiktoks for yourself, or for many people it's a passive consumption experience that can be kind of isolating um here's paris's article how is this.
2:13:49 - Jeff Jarvis
How is what we're doing right now or how's watching tiktok more passive than watching television or reading a book or sitting in a movie theater in silence?
2:13:57 - Paris Martineau
we are, so the culture is entertaining itself now so I brought this kind of point up to the mama founder when I was interviewing her and she brought up a point that I've been kind of thinking of. I don't know if I want to say I fully agree with, but it did give me pause. And then she says one of the fundamental shifts that really has changed things right now for kids is that you know I hate to say it, but back in the day, as she said, you know we might experience media risque or boundary pushing media when you're a child, by getting to stay up late and maybe like watching an r-rated movie or getting to sneak out to go see something or listen to something on the radio, like those, in many cases, were discrete events that were temporarily bound somehow. Now, with the advent of, like smartphones and an endlessly scrolling amount of content in a feed, children can consume content passively forever. There is no stopping point whatsoever and it is incredibly easy for them to be doing that at all times without any breaks.
2:15:08 - Leo Laporte
And that is not good To the bookstore. And she would buy $100 worth of books I mean literally three or four feet worth of books and she'd be done with them the next day and I thought this cannot continue. This must end. She was addicted she probably didn't sleep that night to reading.
Uh, I think there's a certain amount now, by the way, this is your article. Uh, absolutely everybody should read it. Uh, mad mom's stigmatized drunk driving. The next target social media. I think you do a great job in summarizing this story, but I think there's a little bit of nostalgia for the way I'm saying.
2:15:51 - Paris Martineau
I don't entirely agree with it, but I do think that there's an interesting point there, in the omnipresence of content yes, the matter, I'm not sure that it's entirely convincing in the same way, but I do think that there's something interesting there it's the matter of scale, like it's not a different kind but it's a different scale yes, scale I had to take a picture of the tv screen because jeff is watching msnbc while we're doing.
2:16:21 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no actually it's the aftermath of kamala harris's uh uh interview on with brett bear on fox, and so they just have. Uh, I wish I could show it to you this way, but I would attack of the five foot four woman oh dear kamala rages against the light. I had to take a picture of that.
2:16:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry I I knew I was rude, but um all right, let's move on going on all the time this is a conversation that we will be having a lot uh and I think it's a good conversation it's an important. I'm glad you're on the beat Paris. I think that's great.
2:16:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I've got to figure out how to. What's the counteraction?
2:17:00 - Paris Martineau
to that, to what I'm interested, I mean despite the fact that I'm arguing devil's advocate right now. My position on this is entirely neutral. I don't have kids, I don't feel any particular way. I do think intellectually it's just very interesting, and this was, I don't know, a reporting challenge that I do think informed me of uh alternating viewpoints than what we typically discuss on this show and in a way that I couldn't easily dispute.
2:17:34 - Jeff Jarvis
And, as I remember, you got a cupcake out of the deal.
2:17:37 - Paris Martineau
I didn't get a cupcake. I thought she got a cupcake.
He brought it. So this is what we were talking about before the show last week which the reason why I wasn't on the show two weeks ago is one of the reporting excursions I did was I attended a flag football what I thought was a flag football game of the founder's son. Typically he was actually teaching flag football to other children, um, but at some point her son came up and brought his mom the remnants of a cupcake and jeff thought that was my, me being bought. But I didn't. I I know journalistic boundaries.
2:18:08 - Leo Laporte
I said honestly thank you to the cupcake if you are, if you are subornable by the remnants of a cupcake the remnants is the scary part here I think you probably uh should get in a new field. But uh, you're not. That's the point. I'm not, you're not steel cage up here.
2:18:25 - Paris Martineau
Steel mind like a steel trap cupcake did not beckon.
2:18:30 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this week in google paris martineau. She writes for the information. Always good to have you on paris. If you have a tip for her or you are a mama, is where you go.
2:18:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Martineau.01 on signal if you see a tree that's overgrown and taking over the sidewalk, let her know that too.
2:18:47 - Leo Laporte
There you go do let me know, starting in november if you're in bushwick, she's got a pruner she's got to prune that bush in bushwick yep jeff jarvis, uh, professor emeritus of journalism at cuny, soon to have a new position, but honestly I don't think you should take a job. I think you should just be forced to continue to write because your books are so great, I have thought of that.
2:19:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you can do it full time. Write your way out.
2:19:12 - Leo Laporte
The Web we Weave is the latest and really a good discussion of all of these topics and actually it's perfect to have you and Paris on because you bring a lot of informed opinion to this matter. Well, Paris brings actual reporting. I have an opinion that's not informed. How about that? That's your job. My kids are 30 and 32. I do admit and I should probably always disclaim that henry would not have a career if it weren't for tiktok.
2:19:41 - Paris Martineau
So he wouldn't be a best-selling author if it weren't for number seven on the new york times bestseller list.
2:19:46 - Leo Laporte
We couldn't say this last week.
2:19:47 - Jeff Jarvis
It was, was a secret. Now we can say it.
2:19:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, not only number seven on the New York Times bestseller list, for it's a weird category. It's like oddball fiction, nonfiction or something, but anyway it's. It's a cat, it's there, in fact. I'll find it for you. What's the above?
What? Well, let's do it. New York Times bestsellers. He also, he tells me I don't know how he knows this, but I guess his publisher told him his was the bestselling cookbook in the world last week, which is pretty, pretty good. He's in advice, how-to and miscellaneous. So here you go, the top seven Noah, Trevor, Trevor.
2:20:30 - Paris Martineau
Noah hard to beat, Yeahvor hard to beat yeah, hard to beat, noah trevor sweet tooth I think good energy, because it's wednesday, so it's come out again oh it's off, oh it's the new, it's a new week.
2:20:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh shoot, it was number seven, is it?
2:20:46 - Paris Martineau
uh, hold on, we can go back a week if we.
2:20:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're right, it was october, the week of october 20th he was above.
2:20:52 - Paris Martineau
Heal your gut, save your brain, what? In the world and the new clinic.
2:20:58 - Leo Laporte
Not bad. Yeah, he beat the mayo clinic, so, uh, oh, I'm sad he's not on the on the list anymore. It fell off immediately. Well, that just means you guys need to go out and buy more copies of the book salt hank. It's called salt hank, a five napkin situation and uh, it's probably I mean it's discounted everywhere, I think 40 off. I can't believe it fell off the list, that's uh that's the whole thing.
2:21:25 - Paris Martineau
It's just, it's just I mean the whole list thing is it's just about sales in a certain time and for most authors, your first week is when you get on it, because it includes pre-sales.
2:21:34 - Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly.
2:21:35 - Jeff Jarvis
And, by the way, a fatal nonfiction. It does not take that many copies to get on the list.
2:21:40 - Leo Laporte
I told him that once you're a New York Times bestselling author, that's it.
2:21:45 - Speaker 6
They can't take that away from you Every future book will say that on the cover right his publisher was, extraordinarily happily, simon, and schuster loves salt hank. Um, all right, quick update. Uh, we got our. Our tiktok got restricted to live audiences over that conversation. You're kidding what? Yeah, check out, uh, check out our discord.
2:22:08 - Leo Laporte
Check out discord what does that mean? Kidding what? Yeah, check out, uh, check out our discord. Check out discord. What does that mean? Restricted to live audiences? We got this. Uh, maybe it was. Are you sure it wasn't the vibrator in the live chat? Check all the live restricted for some audiences you're all see they're live here, it is your live contains themes that some may find uncomfortable and has been restricted. Reason regulated goods content Because we talked about drugs. It was the marijuana.
2:22:37 - Jeff Jarvis
It was the shears. It was.
2:22:42 - Leo Laporte
Did we talk? No, that was the other show. No, we didn't talk about marijuana.
2:22:45 - Paris Martineau
We didn't talk about marijuana. It could have been the vibrators, it could have been the shear.
2:22:49 - Phone
It could have been the sheer. I think it was the word addiction.
2:22:54 - Leo Laporte
I think it was from the previous show where we talked about whiskey. Honestly, I bet you it takes them a while, doesn't it? No, they're quick. So what does this mean? Restricted for some audiences means if you're under 18, you can't watch us.
2:23:14 - Speaker 6
Maybe our reach is shorter, I don't know.
2:23:18 - Leo Laporte
TikTok seems to do active moderation, transcribing audio. Notice that election info popped up as soon as the topic came up on SN. So they do do it in real. This was yesterday. They do do it in real time.
2:23:29 - Paris Martineau
Maybe it's because he mentioned kamala harris is 5-4 and angry people on the on.
2:23:37 - Jeff Jarvis
When did this happen? Do you know? Folks on the?
2:23:39 - Paris Martineau
uh, we don't derailed the podcast veneto but I, but I blame jeff jarvis.
2:23:45 - Leo Laporte
So thank you very much, jeff jeff you're the one who said addiction, paris I take no responsibility just like a journalist all right, yes, um, I think we could pretty much wrap this show up, but, um, is there? Are there any stories that you wanted to do that we didn't get to?
2:24:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh, yes, I see quite a few. I do.
2:24:08 - Leo Laporte
Okay, fossilized bug farts.
2:24:11 - Paris Martineau
Yes, and now the poo-seum.
2:24:17 - Phone
How did I know?
2:24:21 - Paris Martineau
You saw the spark in my eye Fossilized bug farts, t-rex poop and more ancient coprolites Coprolites I grew up with cop copper lights and look, copper lights.
2:24:30 - Leo Laporte
I grew up with copper lights, but look, I love this. There's a giant Jeff Goldblum head saying that is one big pile of poop. So there you go. Now we're really going to get taken down on TikTok.
2:24:42 - Paris Martineau
Chicago's Field Museum has sued gigantic. Tyrannosaurus Rex. Wyoming's Dinosaur Center has 106 foot supersaurus named jimbo. The puzeum in williams, arizona, has poop, fossilized poop from dinosaurs, sharks and more oh, don't go to the website.
2:25:00 - Leo Laporte
That's disgusting.
2:25:01 - Paris Martineau
I'm sorry, this is like your website jeff so disgusting scroll past that holy cow did you have a no poop rule on the Yakiya site of the internet, or was that different?
2:25:14 - Speaker 2
Was it a no barf? Farts were okay, but no poop.
2:25:18 - Paris Martineau
Well, the museum opened in May 2024 near the Grand Canyon and is open to over 7,000 fecal specimens from several different species, including the famed T rex.
2:25:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Story. I didn't get to a few weeks ago, by the way, it's just a storefront.
2:25:34 - Paris Martineau
It's not the biggest museum you've ever seen listen, it just came up in my apple news thing on my laptop screen as I was logging into the zoom for this and I was like this is a classic twig story I love it.
2:25:46 - Leo Laporte
It it is and I thank you Jeff.
2:25:50 - Jeff Jarvis
A few things to mention real quickly. Joe Trippi started a social network that he thinks will be better than all of the others. Who's Joe Trippi? Joe Trippi was Howard Dean's campaign manager. Ah, he was famous in Ah, right, right. And just by the way, that's all Howard Dean did. It ruined his career. It's remembered for that forever. 39 minutes, right, he didn't, yeah, right he just went.
2:26:15 - Leo Laporte
Ah, yeah, hey, mike dukakis lost an election because he wore a funny hat and a tank. Yeah, yeah, I mean in the old days you could get this qualified for thing. Now you really gotta work at it. Uh, so it says called. Says us what makes this the best?
2:26:36 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, if you go to saysus and look for their um about us, they're about us, they have for democracy and community a social media of independence that's a little pretentious.
2:26:50 - Leo Laporte
Um, he doesn't like centralized control, so, oh, you cannot be anonymous. You need authentic identities and reputations. I think it's a privileged position to take. Yeah, uh, but is it centralized? Yes, so I don't understand. I mean, mastodon's not centralized, says us.
2:27:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, there's that, okay, good luck.
2:27:14 - Leo Laporte
I wish you luck. I think I'll join. I'm going to sign in Yep, yep. Everybody should do it.
2:27:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Another one, just to get on the record here, is that Canada, you know, when they did their news protection bill, meta pulled all news off its platforms and the users are getting around it by putting up screenshots. And now the canadian government is going after meta saying, see, you have news, you have to pay for it, so that what's going to happen is now meta is going to take down all the screenshots, so there'll be even less news for canadians take down the screenshots they'll recognize the screenshot and take it down by the way, this so-called authenticated social network.
2:27:53 - Leo Laporte
All I had to do was give it a phone number and it texted me. I don't even have a name or anything, but I'm in oops.
2:27:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's not that authenticated.
2:28:02 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's easy to have a phony phone number and then, um, here may be a story for paris.
2:28:08 - Jeff Jarvis
There will is one story here for paris might be the parents are suing a school district because their kid got in trouble for using ai on a paper that's up at line 80. But also this one there's a short-selling um company that goes there's nothing but short sales companies. That is now going after Roblox contending that it's a, it's a cesspool of sex. Oh, I didn't know that but well, that's the thing. But they're also short selling it, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy they're trying to make it.
2:28:41 - Paris Martineau
Well, this is like a short seller who launched a news organization like a year or so ago and they announced like hey, we're hiring quote-unquote journalists and analysts. Right, we're going to do investigations into stuff, publish them, but beforehand we're going to short sell as well as it.
2:29:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I will say hindenburg research model about 10 years ago.
2:29:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, it's laughable. But I will say if you read their research it is kind of compelling, if what they're saying is true. I mean, they did say the main point of their Hindenburg's thing on Roblox is that they believe that they are miscounting their unique users and lying to investors about it, and they get into that users and lying to investors about it, and they get into that.
2:29:31 - Leo Laporte
In regards to kids, they specifically found they had made a burn money for their entire existence.
2:29:34 - Paris Martineau
You don't even need to say anymore yeah, they've never made a like kids account and immediately found like a bunch of groups that had child pornography as well as people soliciting sex from minors.
2:29:48 - Jeff Jarvis
But as hindenburg's sub, uh, but there's a conflict of interest at work here.
2:29:52 - Leo Laporte
Yes, because they're short-selling it, which we should explain is they're making a stock market bet that their Roblox stock will go in the dumper and they will make money.
2:30:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I challenged Mark Cuban about this at an online news association meeting. Oh God, 15 years ago. He was doing it and he was saying I've been journalists. But I said, but you have an interest. He meeting, oh god, 15 years ago. He was doing it and he was saying I've been journalists. But I said, but you have an interest?
2:30:11 - Leo Laporte
he said, yeah, but I'm doing the reporting so no, no, no, no, because you're doing the reporting with the uh goal of making money through short selling is not, that's not good that's why we're pretty clear none of nobody who uh works for twit owns stock in tech companies.
2:30:31 - Speaker 6
And Jeff is always I own Amazon stock because I used to work there.
2:30:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's all right, you came up Does.
2:30:36 - Paris Martineau
Jeff own Google stock famously.
2:30:39 - Leo Laporte
And Jeff always disclaims that, but it's a smaller number.
2:30:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I also have QQQ mutual fund I don't think that counts, and I didn't realize.
2:30:47 - Leo Laporte
If you look at what it owns it's a tech yeah, but it's an index fund, so there's no one company that you can fluff. There's a few companies that are yeah. I mean, I have a number of index funds, chiefly the S&P 500. But Apple is over weighted and stuff like that, and so I guess you shouldn't own any stock. I should just own Kerberundum mines or something.
2:31:12 - Jeff Jarvis
That would be the best You're making so much money in the podcasting business that you don't need the stock. There's one more very important news. We talk about media a lot here. We need to say that the New York Times has ceased publication. That's the onion story.
2:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Don't believe it, it's the onion. Actually, one other story that is fairly important. It is a little political TikTok so I won't call him, I will just say a presidential candidate. A male presidential candidate has weighed in on breaking up Google, Google on this show.
Are you sure you want to talk about this, of google change? He says he would do something about google in an interview with bloomberg's editor-in-chief, john micklethwaite. Uh, micklethwaite asked trump if google should be broken up. Trump zeroed in on the justice department to rant about a DOJ lawsuit against Virginia election officials, but Micklethwaite got Trump back on course. Did I say that? The candidate in question? On course, the question is about Google, mr P. He expressed his unhappiness about how bad stories seem to surface more on Google and he says yeah, look, google's got a lot of power. They're very bad to me, very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories. In other words, if I have 20 good stories, 20 bad stories and everyone's entitled to that you'll only see 20 bad stories. I called the head of google the other day and I'm saying I'm getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don't find them in google. I think it's a whole rigged deal. How does he make everything about him?
that's what's amazing yep, I think google's rigged, just like our government's rigged all over the place. Google would not confirm if the person in question had actually called sundar pichai, the actual ceo of alphabet. Then micklethwaite said would you break them up? Well, I do something. I give them a lot of credit. They become such a power, such a power and you've got to give them credit for that.
How they became a power is really the discussion. At the same time, it's a very dangerous thing, because we want to have great companies. We don't want china have these companies. Right now, china is afraid of google. China is a very powerful, very smart group of people. I will tell you that from personal experience you know, it's funny to anybody.
2:33:49 - Paris Martineau
Guys, anybody could have said this, anybody, not naming names I'm not naming names, no, no, it's not.
2:33:54 - Leo Laporte
What's funny is that is that news organizations often just clip out like china is afraid of google and it makes it. It makes it sound sensible, but if you read the whole thing it's not that sensible. So anyway, I think it's a threat. Frankly, I think everything's a threat. There's nothing that's not a threat, he says. But sometimes you have to fight through the threats, like Google.
I'm not a fan of Google. They treat me badly, but are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, you're going to destroy the company by doing that. If you do that, you're going to destroy the company. Well, you can't do without breaking it. Up is to make sure it's more fair. They do treat me very badly. Oh, and he told me, apparently, when he talked to sundar pichai. He told me no way, you're the number one person on all of google for stories. This is like a second grader, which probably makes sense, to be honest. Most to honest, to me, most of them are bad stories, but these are minor details, right, and it's only bad because of fake news, because the news is really fake. That's the one we really have to straighten out. We have to straighten out our press because we have a corrupt press. Applause wow, I don't know who said that. A corrupt press Applause?
2:35:13 - Paris Martineau
Wow, I don't know who said that. I don't know.
2:35:18 - Leo Laporte
By the way, new York Times says breaking up Google would be hard to do. So there's that. Yeah, we talked about the possible remedies that the DOJ floated, but this is going to go on for a long time.
2:35:32 - Jeff Jarvis
We don't know what's going to happen. I put those in there only because you had last week's links above and I thought, well, if we're going to talk about Google being broken up, I'll put these links back in.
2:35:40 - Leo Laporte
No, thank you, that was an error. That was an error. So, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to uh, wrap up this show with what we do every week, which is our picks of the week. I would like to start today with paris martineau I uh today defector media um.
2:36:04 - Paris Martineau
I love the sports blog that I think is fantastic published their annual report, which is where the business team goes through their finances. Uh, they actually are open about it they're open about it and they're doing well, which just always brings me heart. So I don't know. I always like reading this, but this one I found delightful. They go through it top their uh, you know revenue and their expenses looks all pretty normal until you get to the bottom where they've got a line for Taco Bell.
Last year they spent $28 on Taco Bell, this year $0, but there's two asterisks and it says under the asterisks, no Taco Bell receipts have been submitted to the company expense reimbursement system in the past 12 months. That is not meant to suggest that the amount of Taco Bell consumed by defector staffers was zero during this time frame. Nor is it meant to suggest, especially given some staffers historical behavior as it comes to filing expense reports, that zero Taco Bell receipts from this time frame will be submitted to the company expense reimbursement system belatedly in future periods. And I don't know. That just made me really laugh. What?
2:37:09 - Leo Laporte
is what? Laugh what is uh. What is uh. What is this line that says lead by alley fees?
2:37:15 - Paris Martineau
uh, that is the like website maker.
2:37:19 - Leo Laporte
I think they use ah, okay, that's a lot. They're spending a lot on the website, like they like 10 of their bunch of stuff.
2:37:27 - Paris Martineau
Uh, for them I think it's like their back end or their ghost or something like that.
Anyway, if you have any interest in how running a media business works, I would really recommend this post because not to be all Jeff Jarvis about my pick this week, but it's just a very interesting in-depth look into how a nascent media business, four years old, only like four or five million dollars in revenue, unexpectedly profitable, about how it works, and they specifically go into the different growth tactics they use, which ones worked, which ones didn't, whether gift links works.
It's just fascinating. And there is one section of this where they talk about, like, how they tried cross promotion in other newsletters and it actually, you know, didn't work that well. And they have this brief aside that says we nonetheless appreciate all the newsletter operators who are willing to take our money, thanks especially to the one who ended up being the only person who bought an effector subscription using their newsletters promotional code, oh um, so it's interesting you know this is of interest to me because we're roughly the same size uh with roughly the same kind of uh revenue, although how they get thirty thousand dollars a year rent they don't have an office.
2:38:47 - Leo Laporte
They don't have an office, so what are they? Renting a houseboat? What is what? What are they?
2:38:53 - Speaker 6
okay I don't know, I mean maybe they're based for servers or something.
2:38:56 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, maybe they have an office for some business people or like something like that.
2:38:59 - Leo Laporte
It's you know their platform fees are 350 000, so wow, but I guess you have $3.7 million in subscription revenue. It makes sense that 1% of that would go to. Well, it's not 1%, it's 10%, isn't it? Go to platforms, very interesting.
2:39:20 - Jeff Jarvis
I should pass this along to our management. And wonderful to see because they broke away from a failing owner and set off on their own.
2:39:27 - Paris Martineau
And they're making a lot of money.
They're being generous about it yeah, defector came from um. When the staff of deadspin were told to stick to sports by their new owners at geo media, they all quit and quite a few of them decided to launch something new. And now here they are, four years in still running a profitable worker co-op business, and in this they get into kind of the nitty gritty of how running a successful worker co-op works, into, you know, the challenges of navigating health care, and kind of end it with their work towards maybe setting up a structure to help other media worker co-ops come into existence. So I don't know it brought me.
2:40:06 - Leo Laporte
This is fascinating. God bless him for being so upfront. I don't know if it brought me. Yeah, this is fascinating. God bless him for being so upfront. I don't know if we I mean, we're pretty upfront, but I don't think we'd publish our balance sheet ever.
2:40:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Lisa's downstairs shaking her head. No, she says no way.
2:40:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's cool. That's really cool. Good on them. Yeah, jeff Jarvis, okay. Well, I'm going to uh, jeff jarvis. Okay, well, I'm gonna be nice to you and not do what's on line 164, because, because we'd be banned immediately from.
2:40:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, don't do that. I'm not gonna do that one. Uh, if you say that's fascinating.
2:40:39 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for bookmarking that. I will be reading it later I didn't know, there were 15 kinds I had no idea what is the euphemism? So tiktok has a euphemism for everything you know it's not, it's corn something like organism organisms. There are 15 kinds of organisms. Who knew yeah?
2:41:00 - Paris Martineau
you know he's biting his finger, women knew that's who, guys.
2:41:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah really oh yeah, we never figured it out. We don't know we don't know nothing we don't know. All right, um, this is the restaurant. The restaurant, uh, episode. Yeah, doritos is going to open its first restaurant can we go?
2:41:24 - Paris Martineau
is it new york?
2:41:26 - Jeff Jarvis
where is it actually?
2:41:26 - Paris Martineau
I don't know that it's going to be in uh los angeles of course it's uh cryptocom arena they're gonna have devastating doritos flaming hot limo late night rita god, it would be such a good bit to go take someone on a first date to the doritos restaurant at the cryptocom arena I don't know why, but I feel like my son has something to do with this somehow.
2:41:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Doritos. It sounds like something they'd be making. Veggie dumplings oh. Doritos nacho cheese, texas style loaded nachos. Doritos nacho cheese. Crunch. Tastic vanilla cone. Ooh, ooh oh.
2:42:11 - Paris Martineau
Doritos after dark restaurant.
2:42:12 - Speaker 6
It's in the crypto cantina. Yeah, I was about to say they don't have. Like, the one thing that Doritos make good is taco shells, taco Bell.
2:42:19 - Leo Laporte
Taco Bell has the exclusive rights to that.
2:42:24 - Jeff Jarvis
You know who is addicted to Doritos. Who is Kamala Harris? No, loves Doritos.
2:42:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm not going to vote for her then. That's terrible.
2:42:36 - Jeff Jarvis
She just lost my vote. All right, so that's one. The other food one is from Taylor. Lorenz said they talked about an AI-generated restaurant generated restaurant. So if you look at user mag there, line 162, you will see a rest. The number one restaurant in austin doesn't exist ethos oh, it's pretty, though I want one of these dinosaurs?
2:43:01 - Paris Martineau
no, they're all ai generated exactly that would be so good, wouldn't it look?
2:43:07 - Speaker 6
at a honeycomb.
2:43:08 - Leo Laporte
Those don't look good, beekeepers.
2:43:11 - Paris Martineau
Lemon lavender cheesecake we want that I will say jeff, have you been reading taylor's substack regularly not regularly, yet no, I've read this article I mean, I think that all of taylor's stories ideas are brilliant. I think taylor is a really good reporter and I stand by her. But I will say this is something I notice all the time with people who move to substack it's interesting how their prose changes when they don't have when you don't I assume as a regular editor yeah, but she praises her editor.
She's always liked her editors I mean, yeah, she's a great journalist, so you know what?
2:43:43 - Leo Laporte
do everybody a favor and hire a copy editor and an editor. They need the work. They need the work maybe this is like a twitter thing. Oh, I need. I have to go to user magco. Yeah, is this, it there? It is yeah okay now, how do I look at it? Oh, there we go democracy dies on instagram this this is good. How does the internet work?
2:44:10 - Paris Martineau
TikTokers are spreading.
2:44:12 - Leo Laporte
North Korean propaganda to sell supplements. Oops, there we go again. The business of scanning kids' faces is booming. This is good, this looks like a good. No she does phenomenal work. I can't believe she's doing all of this by herself.
2:44:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they also subtracted these.
2:44:29 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, Paris I was saying she's voracious, she is subtracted.
2:44:33 - Jeff Jarvis
These debates they picked uh, it's like the horrible new york times op-ed. They had taylor lorraine I think it was taylor lorraine's having to debate chris saliza oh no please oh, taylor, no, no, no um, some of this stuff is older, right, because this is August 31st. She had a backlog she put up, I think, to make sure she had something there, okay.
2:44:58 - Paris Martineau
I mean, she also has had a newsletter for a while. Oh, okay, all right, so she just made this full time now yes.
2:45:04 - Leo Laporte
Nice. So there we go. Congratulations, Taylor. Good job Well done. Now, where is this a restaurant ethos? Where can I go?
2:45:14 - Paris Martineau
get the? Uh, nowhere, it doesn't exist. Can I get an ai generated restaurant?
2:45:18 - Leo Laporte
no, it's real. Look see, can you? You?
2:45:20 - Paris Martineau
see you should lick the screen.
2:45:23 - Leo Laporte
Don't look at the twitter macaron oh, that's nice that looks so good it does.
Oh, a giant kilbasa immediately that's a jalapeno cheddar sausage so gigantic it can barely fit in the smoker. So what do they use to generate these? Because they are really beautifully done. They are mudeng hippo croissants the croissant critter. Uh, by the way, the comments on this are interesting. Here's a guy says I got horrendous food poisoning here and when I told the owner he threatened my life. The cops won't take it seriously. But because giuseppe fusilli, the owner of ethos, has ties to the mayor, he came to my house and smashed my fine china, cut holes in my furniture and beat me up with a comically large hammer. Do not support giuseppe. Do not eat his poisonous foods. Stay safe out there I love the internet.
2:46:29 - Paris Martineau
sometimes God bless it.
2:46:31 - Jeff Jarvis
You see, and we want to cut it off and keep the kids away from this fun.
2:46:34 - Leo Laporte
But I still want a Moudin croissant. Can I have one please? This stuff looks so good. Look at the size of that shrimp and they call them jumbo prawns. I don't know if this is AI really. What is it it's?
2:46:52 - Paris Martineau
it is ai is it?
2:46:56 - Leo Laporte
how would you? Is ai really good at this now?
2:47:00 - Paris Martineau
that's not good. If you look at those images, they're very clearly ai generated welcome to ethos.
2:47:08 - Leo Laporte
There he is, giuseppe giuseppe fusilli, I think our philosophy himself with foods there ah, our ingredients are sourced from local and sustainable farms. Oh, this is funny thing is if?
2:47:23 - Jeff Jarvis
hank could get in there with something he actually made. His stuff looks that good, that's why I'm saying it yeah, yeah, we could sneak real food into the ethos feed.
2:47:31 - Paris Martineau
You should partner with the ethos people.
2:47:34 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if they could afford his fees, but you know. I might buy an ethos chef's apron or something. Just to you know, support him, paris Martineau, support her. They do have them, by the way. Of course they do. Yeah, of course, um, paris. Oh, how about this? I? I like this. It just says yes, chef, and it's got chef boyardee on it with a kiss. I might get that for henry. He would love that. Uh, paris martineau writes about youth, youth issues at the weekend on the information dot com.
If you're not a subscriber, you must subscribe. So I.
2:48:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I was up for renewing the information. Yeah. I was about to do it, but then it told me that it was more than I paid last time. I got a big deal last time, but I was going to do it. And then I wanted to see the poll of information people and I was told I can't get that unless I have the bonus level. Oh, that's not good.
I got pissed off, I got to say I got pissed off because it's about the readers and the readers can't read about the readers unless you're a reader of a special. No, I got pissed off, so for a minute I'm a hothead. I thought well, okay, no, and then, of course, immediately got offered a $100 discount, so I'm subscribed.
2:49:01 - Paris Martineau
They get you back.
2:49:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think we've launched, don't know it is.
2:49:11 - Paris Martineau
It's a core, it's the kind of thing of corporately yeah, it's for corporate, yeah, users or pro users. It's got like in-depth org charts about all these different companies.
2:49:19 - Jeff Jarvis
It's got data that company yeah what does it say if I hit upgrade to pro? Am I doomed here?
2:49:29 - Leo Laporte
let me see here um your first year at 599 oh, it's just a couple hundred bucks more then it'll increase to something I just want to say that this 15 kinds of organisms article is really kind of a rip-off, because there's really only one or two in here well they don't I will say it is actually about only one.
2:49:54 - Paris Martineau
It's only about one organism.
2:49:56 - Leo Laporte
What's the 15?
2:49:57 - Paris Martineau
where's the?
2:49:58 - Jeff Jarvis
15, you lied to me I know about that one and their experts always know.
2:50:04 - Paris Martineau
So the experts in there saying there's 15, yeah, but they only reveal one right, this is exactly the sort of article that I assume men in their 60s and 70s click on is how many types of organisms are there?
2:50:21 - Leo Laporte
in a certain world view and we just don't want to make sure we're not wrong. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty funny. Thank you, Paris. Jeff jarvis, he is the tau knight. No, he's the knight, not the tau, just the knight. No, the tau, the tau.
No night I'll see you later tau he's the leonard tau professor of journalistic innovation at the craig graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york, emeritus, emeritus. Go to the gutenbergparenthesis.com where you can buy his latest books, including the web we weave. They're all great and we will be back here next week, as we are every Wednesday. 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Yes, we're still on summertime because, as I mentioned last week, the candy makers of America did not want to change times before Halloween, so we will change after Halloween, but that means we're still at 2100 UTC. And I mentioned that because you can watch us live, not on one, not on two, but on eight different platforms, except tick tock.
2:51:38 - Paris Martineau
Because we might be able to watch it on Jeff's Twitter too.
2:51:41 - Leo Laporte
One day, one day, we dream of being on Jeff's Twitter, but right now it's discord for our fabulous club members. Thank you, you're wonderful. We really appreciate the support. Paris is doing it too. Thank you for the support. That's one. There's also youtube.com/twit/live. There's twitch.tv/twit, linkedin, x.com, facebook, Kick and now the addition of TikTok. Well, it was brief, it was short, but it was fun.
Eight different ways you can watch live. But if you watch live, I would encourage you to download a copy as well, because that way we can count you as a viewer at twit.tv/twig. That's the website. You'll see a link there to the YouTube channel, so that's a great way to share clips from the show. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Club members it's seven dollars a month to be a club member. In fact, it might cost you nothing, because you can refer a friend once you're a club member and for every friend you refer, you will get a free month. So the best thing to do is get your referral link once you join TWiT.tv/clubtwit and post it everywhere and maybe you'll never have to pay a penny for the rest of your life.
That's, that's easy, right? TWiT.tv/clubtwit. And it helps us because that's seven7 a month pays for this show, all the shows we do. We have advertising support, yes, but without your help I don't think we'd be able to do what we do. Day after tomorrow, friday, we're doing a coffee thing with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. We're going to talk with a bean connoisseur about coffee beans. Turns out that's a very important thing.
The week following a week from Friday, we're going to do Stacy's Book Club. If you haven't read it yet, it's very good. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model is the name of the book for the book club. On the 25th, Mikah's Crafting Corner and a bunch of other wonderful things go on in the club. Of course, the Discord is a great place to hang as well, with a bunch of smart people, interesting people. It's a great community. And all of that just seven bucks a month. Wow, TWiT.tv/clubtwit. We thank you so much for supporting us. Uh, we will be back next week. Paris, thank you. You, Jeff, thank you, and we, oh, I'm sorry. Oh, we got to do the and we'll see you next time on This Week in Google. Bye-bye.
