This Week in Google 798 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 back. Yay, we're going to talk about AI today. Lots of AI news, including the new Google Gemini Advanced, apple AI 18.2 comes out and OpenAI continues its 12 days of AI with more revelations. We'll also get Cloudflare's 2024 year in review, and then we're all going to help Paris pick a gift for her white elephant party. All of that coming up and a lot more next on TWiG

This is TWiG this week at Google, episode 798, recorded Wednesday, December 11th 2024. Great for soup. It's time for TWiG This Week in Google, the show where we cover big tech not just Google, but all the others as well plus a little journalism and some fun stuff thrown in with Paris Marinteau from the information. Hello, paris, back home hello, I am. I continue to be at my home where I live yes, where you live, in your home, the home where you live, I feel like the others home this is a code of some kind that I'm missing.

0:01:24 - Paris Martineau
It's good to see you someone's gonna burst into my door and, you know, extract me in seconds.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
I've been watching a lot of spy shows on Netflix, and I'm I'm prepared for that at all times. For a while I was pretty sure every time I crossed an intersection I was going to get t-boned. I should stop watching so much tv. I think probably that's the solution. Jeff Jarvis is back. He's worried about bridges, but he looks like a couch. In order to get the focus proper, he has to look like a couch because his Logitech Brio camera seems to want to focus on the couch exclusively. Hello Jeff, how was San Francisco had?

0:02:00 - Jeff Jarvis
you have a good time. Good yeah, I did I did?

0:02:02 - Leo Laporte
We missed you.

0:02:03 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not the same. I missed you guys.

0:02:05 - Leo Laporte
I was so near, yet so far Mikah filled in and he does a great job. We love having him on, but uh, this is as much as your house came down and Cathy Gellis came down, oh, and lots of twit fans were there, which is always lovely, oh nice. Kathy's going to be on TWiT on sunday. Oh, yeah, yeah oh, that's nice.

0:02:24 - Paris Martineau
Where did jeff used to work? San francisco examiner no, no, no, uh. Where was he? Perhaps a professor emeritus at? Oh? City university of new york. I'm sorry, john, we know you're you're a, you're a vacation sub here, but come on, come on. Harris was watching out for me.

0:02:50 - Leo Laporte
Yes, uh, he is also, uh, soon to be a professor at monk.

0:02:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I am state university I am a fellow at montclair state and I'm a visiting professor at stony brook at suny stony brook state university of new york.

0:03:02 - Leo Laporte
That's wonderful, yes, wonderful. So, uh, he has many credentials, of course. He's best known for the lovely gutenberg parenthesis, for the web we weave, for magazine, uh, all of the books you see behind you also, you know, let's not forget what would Google do, which got you on this show in the first place? That was his audition to get on the show called This Week in Google iv.

0:03:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I've had a white moment.

0:03:26 - Leo Laporte
Ah, you're a good hand model. Now in paperback I learned how to be a hand model on tech TV and I used to get a manicure because we had, like we show off stuff and I used to get a manicure was a $20 manicure, expensive manicure. At one point I knew tech TV was in trouble when the CFO said those manicures, you have to get a $20 manic. I said what he said you could go to the Vietnamese ladies, they're five dollars. I said what he says it's too expensive. I said I'll cut my own nails from now on. Thank you very much. It was. That was a bad sign, don't you think?

rough then they took the oatmeal out of the, out of the kitchen, and that was really then we knew we were in trouble that's like a time ink when they got a nice wine.

0:04:13 - Jeff Jarvis
You had wine at work oh yeah, we had a whole closet filled with. We had a wine and beer for the, for the plebes, but if you were a senior editor and above, they stocked your credenza with liquor. Mind you, you had a credenza, what that was?

0:04:28 - Leo Laporte
the good old days. That's Mad Men quality.

0:04:31 - Paris Martineau
That's Mad Men level. They stocked your credenza with liquor is an insane sentence.

0:04:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Now that was at People magazine, which they wanted to ignore, even though we made all the money At the time. They had a valet who would go around with a cart oh MG. I'm going to guess Our friend had people who used to go into Bloomingdale's and he'd look at a couch and he'd say that's 18 fake lunches. Wow.

0:05:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we had. At Ziff Davis they had a guy they told me early on when you're filing expense reports. He said the line was hide the boots the guy. The guy expensed a very expensive pair of Texas snakeskin boots and he put it under client service or something like that. Right, and they informed me that the best thing to do is to hide the boots from now on.

0:05:33 - Jeff Jarvis
My other favorite people trick was the two guys were in concert and if one was going to be late which he was always he would have his friend go into his office, put some paper in the typewriter we used to have these things called typew typewriters Paris and just put a hot cup of steaming coffee next to it, so it looks like they just stepped out yeah, yeah, maybe a cigarette.

0:05:52 - Paris Martineau
Just put a cigarette butt those days we could start a small fire and the waist yeah, so this was a we have.

0:06:00 - Leo Laporte
We should really be getting down to it, because this is a busy, busy day. The news just keeps on giving. Uh, apple and Google both pushed out updates to their ai. Uh, Google's probably the more more interesting of the two. They have. Now they pushed out earlier this week their new um video model. What is that called view? Uh, that's because open ai made sora available. So now Google says open.

0:06:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Ai has the 12 days of ship mess right, not for you but vo. But this is a private preview.

0:06:38 - Leo Laporte
uh, I can't get into either vo or sora, so I guess I'm not good enough. They're pretty awful, they're pretty awful. That's all I can say.

0:06:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, there's sometimes good, but what you'll see is the good stuff they're going to no Leo, it's going to fool everyone. We won't know what's true yet. I didn't put it in the rundown. The Guardian had one of those stories.

0:06:58 - Paris Martineau
They're gonna change the world.

0:07:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, we don't know. We all know what reality is.

0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
Leo, yeah, oh my god, just do a search for sora and gymnastics I literally was typing that into uh twitter as you spoke uh, it is some of the weirdest stuff I have ever experienced this is kind of compelling in a way this is why you don't want an ai to generate that.

0:07:26 - Jeff Jarvis
We saw this before. I could swear the old sora, I think we did, but this is the new sora.

0:07:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh my lord, it's better. Well, remember the old, the old one. She had 30 legs.

0:07:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Now she's just bending in unusual ways and floating, apparently I saw somebody did it and they wanted to say show me writing the column. And because it has no sense of reality, it had a keyboard and it had fingers, but the fingers were to the right of the keyboard, not anywhere near the keys.

0:07:55 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I thought you were going to say they were etching something into a column.

0:08:00 - Leo Laporte
I don't really writing on a column. I don't really want to get in the position of saying oh you see, AI sucks Because, honestly, it keeps getting better and better in many interesting and, I think, useful ways. It's just not.

0:08:15 - Jeff Jarvis
AGI. If we just didn't have that as this ridiculous supposed goal, we said, hey, it's got a new trick.

0:08:22 - Paris Martineau
Cool, we'd say, right, yeah, I think if we're evaluating this on a like, just as a technology that exists. Cool, really interesting stuff that's happening has made great leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, but it's because the people who lead these companies and the proponents of this technology herald it as the most world-changing thing ever that is going to replace all jobs within like two to five like, within like five to ten years and completely remake reality. Then they're setting themselves up and their customers up for disappointment yeah it was, and yet, I mean, I can now talk to.

0:09:04 - Leo Laporte
So one of the things I think that's going to be fairly important is Google has attached uh, gemini, gemini, advanced to search, so now I can ask it questions that are tied to current. If well, for instance, can you tell me the latest news from syria? And uh, and I guess I'll, I can, it can read it to me, to me. Let me see if it'll do that. Well, maybe not. Can you tell me the latest news from Syria?

0:09:41 - VO
The latest news out of Syria is that the Syrian government has recently collapsed. The opposition, led by a group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, took control of the whole country after a really fast offensive.

0:09:51 - Leo Laporte
A really fast offensive. It was really fast. It goes on, there's actually some pretty good stuff in here and it's current. The point is that it's current. If I ask chat gpt uh, the same question, I'll do it uh for you right now, what's hold on? What's the latest news from syria?

0:10:18 - Paris Martineau
I don't have access to real-time news updates or current events until october 2023 october 2023.

0:10:26 - Leo Laporte
So it would obviously not know anything.

0:10:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It would say do you pay for open air? Both of those are I pay for, not the $200 a month right, right, that's, you can't even get Sora, even though you pay for um.

0:10:40 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's in there because, I think eventually paid customers yeah, they said they're rolling it out, so last time I checked I could check here on the on the computer so you can see it. Last time I checked. By the way, now you can go to chatcom. They spend a huge amount of money to get chat. Let's see analyze images. Code. Summarize text more models. No, this is. I can get all those models, but I don't think I can analyze images. I can make a plan, I can create images, but I don't have.

I don't think I have video, unless I'm not seeing it. Let me view the tools here. Uh, picture dolly canvas. No, but some people do. I think it's rolling out. Is the idea right?

yeah I, I have to say, regard the video is. Maybe that's in the parlor trick category. There's still incredibly useful stuff. Here's one. Google says that they now have used deep mind to create forecasts weather forecasts, 15 day weather forecasts that are better than the best predictions, which is great and very important if you're a farmer, or to predict uh, hurricanes and so forth. Wow, yeah, this is a good use of AI, Because weather is a chaotic environment very hard to predict because there's so many variables.

0:12:13 - Jeff Jarvis
As I was just reading a friend's book proposal multidimensional Right. It can deal on a number of factors that we just can't get our little heads around.

0:12:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is a big step forward, and I can go on and on. There was a study of women who got mammograms and the women who paid extra to have the mammogram analyzed by ai had a 20 better, uh, cancer discovery rate. Uh, that just came out wait, wait, wait, wait. They had to pay extra well, however, it's just like welcome to america it's the bank tellers.

0:12:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, we're going to get rid of tellers and use the force you to use these machines, and then we're going to charge you for the machines yeah, well, that's right now anyway, but yeah, I mean, that is an excellent point.

0:12:57 - Leo Laporte
They did pay extra, but when they paid extra they got 20 better results. In other words, the ai did make a difference. And there's lots of these. I can go on and on. There was a recent study of scientists who used AI to create new materials in the labs, and the scientists who used the AI had I think it was like 50% better results than those who didn't. So more and more we're seeing AI be used not AGI, not RoboCop, not HAL 9000, but we're seeing AI used in very useful and interesting ways, and this is in just a few years. I think we can mock Sora today. We may regret it tomorrow.

0:13:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, I want you to take off your shoes right now and show us whether there's any sand in the socks.

0:13:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, let me know what's in there.

0:13:45 - Leo Laporte
They're referring to this many now. Many months ago, watch on the beach, I took with somebody who works in the business who did say you know, we're going to have a very interesting 10 years. I don't think that's wrong. And he did compare it to an alien intelligence. He said you can't judge AI intelligence against human intelligence. It's like a new species. It AI intelligence against human intelligence. It's like a new species. It's like a new and that's maybe a little woo-woo but I think it's not so far off. So pixels have added new AI features. I mean, everywhere you're seeing this and Apple just now. I have to say Apple is way behind. Apple just added something they call the image generator.

0:14:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they just added ChatGPT to the next version of the OS.

0:14:30 - Leo Laporte
They also added ChatGPT and actually interestingly. Well, here's an interesting thing I can take a picture of something. Let me hold down the camera thing and then you'll see that two things have popped up ask and search. So if I take a up, ask and search. So if I take a picture of something and search, the funny thing is the search does not use Apple intelligence. Did you just see what it said? It said searching with Google.

0:14:54 - Paris Martineau
And the ask. Oh, that's interesting.

0:14:56 - Leo Laporte
The ask and Paul. I showed this to Paul Theron and he said well, maybe it's because that's your search engine. So I changed the search engine, so I changed the search end agenda being the default search engine and still search with Google.

0:15:06 - Paris Martineau
The ask, uh searches with chat gpt no, you can't see it, but uh and is this just on the new phones or?

0:15:17 - Leo Laporte
oh wait, no, it's, it's got on my phone too yeah, yeah, this is no, this is 18.2, which just came out today. Uh, by the way, I guess it was taking a picture of the mouse 18.2, which just came out today. By the way, I guess it was taking a picture of the mouse. 18.2 is the latest Because it says a wireless computer mouse often used for its portability and convenience.

Connects to Bluetooth. This particular model appears to have ergonomic features designed for comfort. What it didn't do is say what model it is. Let me take the same picture with Google Search.

0:15:48 - Paris Martineau
See if it can figure out?

0:15:48 - Leo Laporte
Does it Google lens? Um, I don't know if it's using lens or not, so it did. It identified as the logitech mx anywhere.

0:15:54 - Paris Martineau
That's correct that looks like Google lenses uh shopping results. I know that because I use Google lens all the time for identifying interesting good furniture I see out in the world specifically, and this actually would be super useful for me, because then I don't have to open up the Google app.

0:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Can you ask it when you see a piece of good furniture?

0:16:12 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious as to what the permissions are then.

0:16:15 - Leo Laporte
Can you ask it how many business lunches it costs? I will, I will do that next time.

0:16:26 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious as to what the permissions are, because part of I I very privacy centric, I think, as we all are, and so I like the feature that apple has introduced sometime in the most recent couple of os updates, where you can be a lot more selective with what apps you're giving full access to your photo library.

0:16:40 - Leo Laporte
So what I have it what apple's where? What Apple said when they announced this and I did not see any permissions, by the way, but maybe I went through them too fast but what they said when they announced it is that they asked Google, but they don't give Google any information about you.

0:16:56 - Paris Martineau
That's good. So it just gives Google that photo that you Google thinks Apple is asking Exactly it's a privatized search.

0:17:03 - Leo Laporte
Same thing with ChatGPT asking exactly it's a privatized search, same thing with chat gpt.

0:17:09 - Paris Martineau
I love that then yeah, I wish I could do something. Besides, product is phenomenal. I mean, are there other lens like products out there that you think are comparable or better for that specific task of searching products?

0:17:18 - Leo Laporte
interesting. You should ask because microsoft just announced a similar product for microsoft's co-pilot ai, they call it. Uh, what do they call it? Co-pilot Vision? Same idea, everybody's doing the same thing. Uh, it is a very it's a useful way to search, to search, but Google's had image search forever, right, that's not bad yeah, I just feel like it's gotten really good in the last couple of years in a way that.

0:17:43 - Paris Martineau
I've just found very delightful I agree.

0:17:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, the fact that it knew exactly what the mouse was and, by the way, the search results included a link to amazon. So interesting, that's interesting. We are in a. This is um. So today is a big day and, yeah, open. Ai is doing the 12 days of ai.

0:18:04 - Jeff Jarvis
They also put up um, what's it called? Um canvas for drawing open. Ai makes canvas, it's editing tool, available to everyone. Ah, so today they announced the apple deal. Yesterday, I think, was sora day, before, yesterday was canvas day, before that was sora yeah today.

0:18:23 - Leo Laporte
Today is ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence, which we just were looking at. So OpenAI does a little video for each of these this advent calendar. There's Sam Altman in his ugly Christmas sweater. There's the Canvas that you mentioned. That was yesterday.

0:18:39 - Jeff Jarvis
What is Canvas?

0:18:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's watch the replay, shall we?

0:18:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.

0:18:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. Here we go.

0:18:49 - Speaker
Just to make it a little bit easier to see in context, what's? Changing. We know a lot of people also use it for programming and we've made some really exciting improvements to programming in Canvas as well. Let's check it out.

0:19:00 - Leo Laporte
Ah, that's interesting.

0:19:01 - Speaker
So I've also been helping Santa with some logistics. Steve Brown.

0:19:04 - Leo Laporte
This is the other thing that's really breaking through now is the use of coding AI to do coding better and better and better. Steve Gibson yesterday was talking about this on Security Now. He was shocked that he could have a conversation with ChatGPT about Intel x86 assembly language and it helped write it. It didn't get it right at first. Steve was impressed because he said no, that's wrong. And it came back and said oh, you're right, it's wrong. Here's, here's, here's a better answer leo, what's this?

0:19:33 - Jeff Jarvis
what's the programming challenge you do this time of year?

0:19:35 - Leo Laporte
uh, it's the advent of code, and in fact could you have used. Well, here's an interesting story there is a real controversy going on in Advent of Code. People are saying we gotta start. We gotta start banning people because if you look at the leaderboard, people are solving this stuff way too fast this guy's nine seconds the next.

These are the best by. These are competitive programmers who do do it in minutes, but the next best was a minute. These are competitive programmers who do do it in minutes, but the next best was a minute. He had later admitted oh yeah, I had, uh, I had a. Ai read it. But if you go back, uh, there, and as you go through the days, this is starting to even out a little bit. But I think more and more, the top results people are getting a little suspicious are generated by like there you go, 49 seconds. Little suspicious are generated by like there you go, 49 seconds 50 seconds, and this was for day seven, which is you go?

yeah, oh yeah, they get harder. So there has been a little controversy about the and you know what?

0:20:37 - Paris Martineau
this is not unusual they'll take a NaNoWriMo approach where they say, yeah, go for it, use AI.

0:20:43 - Leo Laporte
Look at that 38 seconds an anonymous user. Yesterday's problem 42 54 and 57 yeah, well, you know what. So maybe it's not, I don't know. That seems awfully fast. You want to see what day, what the day 10 problem was?

0:20:57 - Paris Martineau
you want to, you want to just see like how long would it take you even to read that?

0:21:02 - Leo Laporte
probably more yeah, believe me, it takes me an hour just to understand the question this is yeah no all those, all those one-minuters are are all ai, all of them well, some of them okay. So it's. It's not immediately obvious, because there are people who do competitive coding. They have lots of tools right, you couldn't read this do they have historic data?

0:21:27 - Paris Martineau
can we go back five years?

0:21:29 - Leo Laporte
or something yeah and see see how that five years see the leaderboards from previous years yeah oh okay, that's an interesting question yeah, let's see, that's a reporter figuring out how to see she's smart. Well, let's go back to one of the early years, like 2018, where there was no. There certainly was no. Um, uh, nobody was using ai at this point. So here's 2018, day one. A minute 48, oh, okay, 222. But these are competitive coders. This is all reasonable you get today. Remember what?

0:22:01 - Paris Martineau
was it day 10, day seven day seven, so it's all right nine minutes was the very, very fastest guys starts to

0:22:10 - Jeff Jarvis
get you know higher up there 53 seconds is a little bit you were leo, sorry, you're gonna tell us how long you?

0:22:17 - Leo Laporte
are on that. Oh yeah, I actually streamed them live for the first five days I'm not in the ballpark. No, I'm not two hours for um the first four or five days, we're roughly two hours each well, you gotta talk to the chat. So well, I'm explaining what I'm doing I'm talking to chat, I'm making mistakes, I'm going, you know excuses, excuses looking stuff up. I'm asking the ai and this is what, how the hell?

you solve this caster's handicap yeah, I had a podcaster's handicap. Thank you, by the way, good name for the show. So let me go to chat. So canvas sounds like it's more than just what I would have thought, drawing right few tools where here it is collaborate on writing and code, I see. So, um, what are you working on right now, paris? Uh, let me write me a lead for a story lead write me a lead isn't that right tonight oh lede yeah okay, that's the technical term for a story about what A homeless man who turns out to be Santa Claus.

0:23:34 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, love that.

0:23:37 - Leo Laporte
Right Now. This is an opportunity to write a very provocative lead. Right, you could do something really good with it. Let's see what ChatGPT does with it. Homeless Santa story right, you could do something really good with it. Let's see what a chat gpt does with it. Homeless santa story in the shadow of the bustling. Wait a minute, go away. I don't want help. Oh, got it. Go away. In the shadow of the bustling city, where snowflakes melted into cracked sidewalks and the hum of christmas cheer dimmed under the weight of hardship.

0:24:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, wait. How does Christmas cheer? Hum and dim.

0:24:09 - Paris Martineau
How does the hum of Christmas cheer get dimmed, and how does it get dimmed under hardship?

0:24:15 - Leo Laporte
Under the weight of hardship. That's a triple metaphor. That is a very difficult achievement in gymnastics uh, gymnastics anyway. A homeless man named ben sat hunched in his tattered coat, his wiry beard streaked with white cost caught the soft glow of a street lamp and his eyes held a peculiar twinkle oh, does your beard catch the glow of a street lamp? Oh yeah no, I guess it couldn't unless itows yeah, To most he was just a lost soul.

But when a group of curious children stumbled upon him on Christmas Eve, the impossible truth. See, this isn't a news story, this is like a story story. Oh, he was Santa Claus and this year he needed their help to save Christmas.

0:25:02 - Paris Martineau
And that's when the sleigh bells come in. Okay, tell it to keep going.

0:25:04 - Jeff Jarvis
What's next? I want to know what's next now.

0:25:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, I want you to write something, and that's when the sleigh bells. The Google changelog.

0:25:14 - Paris Martineau
Write the nut graph of the story.

0:25:16 - Leo Laporte
Okay, okay, good, let's get another prompt. Okay, now write the nut graph. Do you think you'll even know? Oh sure, might, g, r, a, f, right. Yeah, it's going to be about hazelnuts.

0:25:33 - Paris Martineau
Nut graph for anyone who is kind of like the core graph, the top of your story that summarizes what it's about to what it's going to be about.

0:25:42 - Leo Laporte
The nut graph has been added, tying the story together and setting up the stakes Right. Despite his mystical identity, Ben had been stranded in the city for reasons he couldn't fully explain. His sleigh had vanished, His reindeer were nowhere to be found and his I'm sorry, I didn't mean to play that song and his magic. I pressed the wrong button. His magic seemed to disfalter. Play that song and his magic. I pressed the wrong button. His magic seemed to disfalter in the cold urban sprawl. As the children listened to his tale, a mix of disbelief and wonder, they realized they might be the only ones who can help him bring back the joy of the season.

0:26:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, well, how do they do it? How do the children do it?

0:26:21 - Leo Laporte
So how did they do it?

0:26:27 - Jeff / Paris
see if it gets those you have to hit enter uh, what kind of graph is that?

0:26:32 - Leo Laporte
the how do they do it graph that's. That's the kind of the nut graph, honestly yeah, actually the nut graph is not tying the story together and setting up the stakes. It is solving the problem, right or no?

0:26:44 - Paris Martineau
it is kind of like a little mini. Basically, what Jeff said is right. If you read the nut graph you could kind of get the gist of the whole story all at once.

0:26:52 - Leo Laporte
The children sprang into action. They pulled together what little resources they could found An old wagon to serve as a makeshift sleigh, flashlights as stand-ins for Rudolph's glowing nose, and even their family dog to pull the contraption through the snowy streets. Guided by Ben's fading magic and their unwavering belief, the group scoured the city for clues. Along the way they enlisted the help of a kind stranger. Midnight approached. The efforts culminated in a heartwarming scene at the city's Central Park. Ben's magic was reignited by the children's faith and the generosity of the strangers. He transformed the humble wagon into a radiant sleigh.

0:27:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, that's okay, that's not bad.

0:27:34 - Leo Laporte
The family dog pranced through the grace of a reindeer and Ben, now fully Santa, once more, soared into the starry sky. I feel like I'm drunk. I don't know why I'm having trouble Soared into the starry sky. I feel like I'm drunk. I don't know why I'm having a trouble to sword into the starry sky, deliver gifts across the world. The children watched in all the charts full, knowing they had made christmas possible, not just for themselves. I got goosebumps, everyone. Yeah, yeah, thank you. It's oh, henry.

Should I ask him to write a story about a comb and a? It's OHenry, ohenry. So that wasn't bad. That's canvas. Well, in the end, yeah, yeah, you know okay. So here's the thing I think when it comes to things like writing and art and music, it's very generic, it's very mediocre. That's not where they focus on that, because it's kind of wow, that's. That's not where I, I don't they focus on that because it's kind of wow, that's got a high wow factor. But in the long run, you see enough that you go yeah, not so wow, but but but finding breast cancers, yeah. Creating new materials, uh. Or predicting weather better. Those are really genuinely useful things and I don't think they're mediocre no, I think they're incredibly impressive yeah speaking of, uh, things with the wow factor, did you guys?

0:28:51 - Paris Martineau
I want you to try and explain this to me, because I don't fully get it. Google this week said that its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist.

0:29:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh, gotta talk about that. It's a big one, this is a big one. This is a big one.

0:29:04 - Paris Martineau
Um so this is about uh willow. It's like latest greatest quantum computing chip. Uh, it has made huge leaps in speed and reliability performance. Um, this is a. I'll read a passage from their Google's announcement. This is from Google's quantum ai founder. It says Willow's performance on this benchmark is astounding. It performed a computation under five minutes. That would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 125, or 10 septillion years, if you want to write it out, it's a very long number. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.

0:29:55 - Leo Laporte
Whoa, whoa I don't know what this means, but I know I've seen a lot of posts on x that say it's really big what this means. But I know I've seen a lot of posts on X that say it's really big.

0:30:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's what fascinates me about this and we've talked about this before in the show is, as I understand it, I mean quantum computing, and this is part of their advance here is the error rate. Is that not unlike generative AI? We're in an age of approximated computing, rather than. Here's the problem and here's the exact answer. It's close enough, it goes at such breakneck speed. It's odds of being near to truth or right and so on, and I find that fascinating because we were raised in this culture of exact computing and this is an age now of approximate computing. And how do you get close enough, given the scale? So, as I understand, what Google really advanced here was that they constantly reduced the errors, and that was the big deal.

0:30:50 - Leo Laporte
no, there were several announcements and, yes, that was one of the announcements is that they were able to get a stable qubit, um, but the one that paris was just talking is also it's kind of a related, but it's at the same time announcement, but a different one, which is that they did a very, very difficult computation that would, on a normal classical computer, take 10 to the 25th years, and they were able to do it in five minutes. Now we're not experts in this and then maybe we need a, an expert physicist to explain this. I, I know I shouldn't base it on what some guy on uh, on x, who says he's building a graduate school of blockchain engineering says well, he's building one.

0:31:43 - Jeff Jarvis
He's not in it. He's yeah, I don't even know.

0:31:45 - Leo Laporte
I don't even know who this guy is, but he's got a very elaborate explanation. The he's, he's. He's answering the question I have, which is what was the, what was the computation, what is it that they figured out? Standard computation, yeah, yeah, but what, uh?

0:32:01 - Paris Martineau
it's a, so it's a matrix multiplication, I guess here's a very long thread here's a summary from my colleague anisa gardienzi oh good is this on the information.

0:32:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's okay, let's go there.

0:32:16 - Paris Martineau
That's a better Google announces new quantum chip. It's a briefing that she did uh, two days ago she said. Google said a recent breakthrough which it published in the journal nature involved making making quantum bits, or qubits, less prone to errors. Qubits yeah, qubits, sorry. When more of them are added to a system, the performance of a system doesn't worsen, the company said. Google said that it performed a study that showed that its predecessor, willow, could produce below threshold quantum calculations, meaning its accuracy increased as the system scaled that's that's key.

0:32:52 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the key. That's.

0:32:52 - Leo Laporte
That was the big discovery yes as they made it bigger, they got fewer errors, not more um, so that I mean I honestly that could end up being. We might look back and say so that I mean honestly that could end up being. We might look back and say, wow, that was a big breakthrough. We don't know.

0:33:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

0:33:10 - Leo Laporte
We don't know, I don't understand how that means that multiverses exist.

0:33:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah that's a bit of a stretch, I don't know. Okay, well, ask Google, use Gemini to explain, okay.

0:33:25 - Leo Laporte
Gemini, who should I? I have many choices. I think Gemini. To explain. Okay, gemini, who should I? I have many choices. I think Gemini, because it is a Google question, that's probably not the one to ask you were going to say ask.

0:33:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Gemini Paris. How would you phrase the question based on what you just read? Explain how.

0:33:42 - Leo Laporte
I would Could I just say, explain the latest Google quantum computing breakthrough. I don't think it has up-to-date information. I would, can I just say, explain the latest Google Quantum computing breakthrough.

0:33:47 - Paris Martineau
I don't think it has up to date information.

0:33:49 - Leo Laporte
No, that's the point this one does. Oh, okay.

0:33:53 - Paris Martineau
I would send it the paragraph From the quantum AI founders blog or send it the link and be like explain what this has to do with Multiverse theory. Can you explain what?

0:34:06 - Leo Laporte
Google's latest quantum and can be like explain what this has to do with multiverse theory? Good, can you explain what Google's latest quantum computing breakthrough has to do with multiverse theory? I'm going to ask that just because I don't have access to the article. Where, where, where, where, uh-huh, uh-huh, mm-hmm. Can you explain what Google's latest quantum computing breakthrough has to do with multiverse theory?

0:34:36 - VO
Google's latest quantum computing breakthrough is a big deal, but it doesn't have a direct connection to the multiverse theory. It's more about building powerful new computers. With this breakthrough, Google's created a quantum chip called willow that can solve problems way too complex for regular computers. This could revolutionize fields like medicine.

0:34:53 - Leo Laporte
So you don't need material science.

0:34:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I interrupted okay, wait, wait that was impressive now say but your. But Google article says well, let me see where is that I it into.

0:35:05 - Paris Martineau
I put the article link into Gemini and said we're going to have to do the multiverse, and it just parroted the line from the article which doesn't really explain, it Doesn't explain it.

0:35:14 - Jeff Jarvis
No. Well, back to Jeffrey Schultz, who's building a graduate school of blockchain engineering.

0:35:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:35:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Not an undergrad.

0:35:30 - Leo Laporte
A graduate school. I don't know, I don't know. I just I shouldn't get answers from x. I think we know that much. Anyway, uh, could be interesting. This is not the. This is not the place. Go find a physics podcast where they can explain this he did.

0:35:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, he's x yahoo. That's all you need to know. Who built out the video machine learning department from scratch, leading to tens of millions of dollars in incremental revenue? That's Jeffrey.

0:35:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, he got incremental revenue right. So apparently you need to select Gemini Flash 2.0 Experimental from the dropdown, but I don't have a dropdown. Do you have a dropdown? All I have is the regular okay, hold on, I'll ask so I did. I'm just looking at the the ios app.

0:36:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know oh, gemini, no, I, I. No, it only goes to one five, this is two, yeah yeah, we all.

0:36:24 - Leo Laporte
We're all waiting to get this update anyway, okay, the experimental.

0:36:28 - Paris Martineau
One says this that says this article is about Google's new quantum chip willow. Quantum computers are based on quantum mechanics, which is a theory that also underpins the concept of the multiverse. However, this article does not explicitly mention multiverses, which is incorrect.

0:36:43 - Leo Laporte
But you know, you tried, you tried okay, I think that's just an article writer just trying to get some attention. I don't. I don't think we have proof of a multiverse. If we do, I'll let you know. Okay, I'll be looking great. Meanwhile, I think we should take a break and come back, because I just want to get a get an update on the hawk to a cryptocurrency after, after I understand paris gave you the birds and bees talk last week yeah, she explained it to me now I know, but uh I explained what that thing is that's fine no one is better for it uh

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Google is uh suing this is an interesting story or a federal regulator over supervision of its payment division, the consumer. This is the one more shot at the consumer financial protection bureau, cfpb. They're doomed anyway? Well, they probably are. I think that that's one of the first things to go on january 20th. Uh, Google's suing the cfpb this comes from reuters uh, after the agency ordered supervision of Google payment. Now the whole point of the cfpB is to protect consumers against financial fraud, against predacious companies charging too much. They say that Google's payment services carry risks for consumers, such as possible fraud and mistaken transactions. The funny thing is Google shut down Google Pay earlier this year.

0:41:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, didn't, didn't they just change?

0:41:07 - Leo Laporte
I yeah I mean, that's the question. Um, did they shut it down or they changed the name? The agency said they've gotten 300 consumer complaints, reports of fraud, scams and unauthorized transactions. Uh, it said it did constitute a finding that the company had engaged in wrongdoing the cfpb order. Nevertheless said, consumer complaints indicated that Google payment had failed to investigate complaints about erroneous transfers and that's why the law allowed for supervision, even if Google has discontinued the services in question. Okay, the company said well, your honor, as a matter of common sense, a product that no longer exists is incapable of posing such a risk if the customer is ripped off from the forest, there's no one there to lose.

Yeah so Google might have a case here.

0:42:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I have a feeling a court might be somewhat sympathetic to they're trying to smash in everything they can at the last minute yeah, yeah, well, you're not doing it anymore, but if you were, we would sure be.

0:42:20 - Leo Laporte
we would sure have something to say about it. Okay, fine, what else? Hawk Tua? So since we talked last, I hope we didn't encourage people to go out and buy that meme coin. Since we talked last, the meme coin went from a value of a market cap of 490 million dollars a lot of people bought it. It was launched December 4th at 10 pm quickly rose to a peak market of 490 million dollars. The price then plummeted, trading at a valuation of 4141.7 million, 91% down in three hours.

0:43:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Is this what you call a pump and dump Sure? Looks like it.

0:43:12 - Leo Laporte
Hawk Tua. Hayley Welch says I didn't make any money on it. I wasn't. Nobody I know was involved. Team hasn't sold one token, not one, and not one of our members was given a free token. So she said it was snipers. Uh, that did it. Of course. Somebody pointed out when we talked about this on sunday that she did get the gas fees. She probably made millions. Oh Wow.

0:43:43 - Paris Martineau
I love that slide of Hawkenomics.

0:43:50 - Leo Laporte
Hawkenomics. Baby, get to know your Hawkenomics. This is from Hayley Welch's ex. What is it Ex? What are we calling that Ex Twitter post when the money went? Seems like what all these people say is. Well, let me tell you where the money went. Some people were sniping, apparently. Money went, uh. Some people were sniping, apparently, uh. One wallet managed to snipe hawk seconds after launch, so they bought it at the launch price about 17 and a half percent of it, a million dollars worth and then, over the next one and a half hours, it sold 135 million hawk tokens for a profit of 1.3 million. This is what you have to do these days right.

0:44:28 - Jeff Jarvis
If you can do it hey Arbitrage.

0:44:31 - Leo Laporte
He had a million, almost a million dollars in Solana, which is another coin. He had something called wrapped Solana. It's crazy out there, man, wow. And yet, with bitcoin hitting a hundred thousand dollars, I think a lot of people are saying I should, I should be investing in this right no, everybody, no don't, I wouldn't yeah, don't consult a financial advisor yeah, but well, some of them are going to say yes, some of it.

The problem is, you look at the. It's very speculative, right. But you look at the amount of money some people have made, you go, well, geez, I, that's pretty good. I wonder if I could make that kind of money. Right now it's at 101 472 dollars. It's underneath that This Week in Google logo.

0:45:25 - Paris Martineau
We don't want you to actually see it I think that uh, any person thinking about investing in a meme coin should think long.

0:45:34 - Leo Laporte
This isn't a meme coin. This is bitcoin oh bit. No, we're talking about bitcoin, sorry yeah, don't invest in meme coins, although doge is doing pretty good right now well, but leo yeah, well, I am, I am, you know me, I hate all this stuff. I think it's burning at the uh ecosystem, uh, to the ground, just as ai is but leo, if you went to bitcoin you maybe you'd uh I should be a graduate student at bitcoin, you, yeah have I spoken to you guys about my obsession with bed bath and beyond stockholders before?

0:46:09 - Paris Martineau
I think you've mentioned it, but but, phyllis, if you mentioned, these are people who bought into bed bath and beyond when it was a meme stock, as you know. But Beth beyond has since gone bankrupt and the assets have been sold other people. There is this group of people, I'd say at least, like hundreds could be in the thousands of people who still believe that they have Bed Bath Beyond stock and that their Bed Bath Beyond stock, which again canceled, is going to be the most valuable stock in the world.

0:46:40 - Leo Laporte
Diamond hands.

0:46:41 - Paris Martineau
Ryan Cohen, ceo of GameStop, combines, buys Bad, best and Beyond, combines it with GameStop and a bunch of other super stonks and turns it into the most profitable company the world has ever seen, while also sticking it to big hedge funds.

0:46:59 - Leo Laporte
That's basically. I'm fascinated by it. That's like QAnon, I mean.

0:47:02 - Paris Martineau
It's like oh, it is basically QAnon yeah. It's fantasy and the aliens are going to whole subplot where they analyze ryan cohen again, the gamestop ceos line of children books that he's released. Uh, because they have um the clues. They're out there, they have. They have clues in that.

0:47:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Do your own research yeah, so when I was, when I was a sunday editor of the new york daily news, we tried to save money. Did I ever tell this story before they tried to get rid of comics? You always got rid of comics and then old ladies would call and say how dare you get rid of Beetle Bailey and all that? I need.

0:47:33 - Leo Laporte
I need my Dagwood Right.

0:47:35 - Jeff Jarvis
You gotta have it. Beetle Bailey served this country. Oh my God.

0:47:39 - Leo Laporte
RSPC.

0:47:40 - Jeff Jarvis
So there was this racist. I love that.

0:47:43 - Leo Laporte
Beetle Bailey served this country, so it was very good.

0:47:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It took me a little while, Thank you. Thank you. So in the sports section in the Daily News, which was a sports newspaper, we ran this racist Chinese uh like fortune thing with a Chinese caricature worst ways, right. And there were a hundred reasons to get rid of this. Because it was racist, we got rid of it. It turns out that it was used by all the numbers people were there there are of course that's right, of course.

0:48:13 - Leo Laporte
How many? Hairs on Mr Chong's head, it was a giveaway.

0:48:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, Right, and so we couldn't get rid of it. No, no, no, no, no, we had to keep running it here's the latest.

0:48:24 - Leo Laporte
Uh, beetle bailey, by the way. Apparently it's. It's still being published, in fact it's. You know what beetle bailey is in the 21st century? Wow, how about Dagwood.

0:48:38 - Paris Martineau
Beetle Bailey definitely believes in QAnon. Beetle Bailey has said where we go one, we go all.

0:48:47 - Leo Laporte
Dagwood Bumpstead. I was talking about my son Henry a while ago and I said he makes his sandwiches are like Dagwood's and nobody in the audience had any idea what.

0:48:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I was talking about 've likely right now.

0:49:01 - Paris Martineau
yes, here is a picture of dagwood bumstead and his oh I know that guy yeah, I know, I know those sandwiches that is a really old-fashioned looking cartoon look at people with hair like that anymore no, I would like to get my.

0:49:18 - Leo Laporte
I think you have to use shoe polish to get your hair like that.

0:49:22 - Paris Martineau
Your hair is kind of parted in a similar way.

0:49:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It is today. Yeah, it is actually.

0:49:26 - Paris Martineau
Today you've got, you know.

0:49:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I just need this yeah it is I just? Need that. Yeah, yeah yeah, nancy.

0:49:40 - Leo Laporte
Nancy is the most unfunny comic ever done. No family circus family circus rough, I know that one but you're right, nancy never really had a punch, that's he does not. No, no, no.

0:49:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Family circus at least tried to have a punch line by the way you know, paris is policing the socials and catching me oh yeah, she is he.

0:50:01 - Paris Martineau
Oh, it was just, I was, just, I was scrolling through blue sky because there's no problem with me doing that, and I saw a uh post from jeff like 20 seconds ago and she said our dramatic reading. Jeff, we're literally hosting a podcast I mean, it's true, and yet jeff has time to screenshot and come after the broken commercial uh, and joe sb zito, who thank you, joe, for coming to my talk, as oh nice Social media samurai. I can do it all.

0:50:41 - Jeff Jarvis
By the way, I did my most touristy thing in years in San Francisco. You want to guess what I did? What'd you do? What'd you do What'd?

0:50:47 - Leo Laporte
you guess you went to Alcatraz, nope.

0:50:52 - Paris Martineau
No, that involves being on the water.

0:50:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's true. Also, you have to plan eight months ahead. It's a modern touristy thing to do in san francisco you went to pier 39. No, god, no, what do you think?

0:51:03 - Leo Laporte
I am you went to the exploratorium. No, you went up to the coy tower. No, see the view.

0:51:09 - Jeff Jarvis
No, appropriate for the show, a man who lives la vida, Google. What would I do in the city limits of san francisco? Did you stop by the Google building in san francisco? Well, I did that too, but I was next door to the thing. But no, I don't know what there is to do. That's googly. What's googly in san francisco? You went to anchor steam brewery? No, that's. Did you ride in a waymo car?

0:51:32 - Leo Laporte
yes, oh, you wrote a waymo. I did a waymo, so that's timely, because Cruise announced this week that they're going to kill their self-driving taxi.

0:51:42 - Leo Laporte
Their robo-taxi business is a terrible business they're getting out of it.

0:51:47 - Leo Laporte
But Google's still doing Waymo. So how was it?

0:51:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought it was going to be freaky. It's not at all. I only went a mile to the wonderful City Lights bookstore where, god bless them, they have all three of my current books on sale.

0:51:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a classic.

0:52:00 - Jeff Jarvis
They're the best, they are the best. Um, and so it's just a mile, but it was fun, and it's fun to see the wheel go around. I took video of it, which everybody does. Uh, and somebody had left their glasses. They were they were not just sunglasses, they were prescription glasses in the in the car, oh. So I hit the call button like you know what's? This thing is going around on the street, it's going to the ocean. No, I just uh. Some lady has uh left their glasses in the thing he fills out a form and then they're gonna they're gonna say, well, okay, we're gonna bring it back to the Depot, so we're trying to reunite the glasses, wow wow that's pretty cool that is fun it is fun, it was fun so driver a good driver well, that's the thing, paris.

You know, normally when I sit in a taxi I feel too privileged, like someone's driving me. Oh yeah, you feel they're bored they're thinking of all kinds of things. I agree with you. I'm thinking that, but of course there's no one driving. And then I'm thinking well, I tip no need because there's also no salary for anyone doing this, which is a whole other issue. But we'll leave that for later.

0:53:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's why I over-tip, because I have guilt, white guilt. Yeah, I do too. Here's a hundo. I'm sorry you have to do this. Can I drive you next time? That's what podcasting has gotten to podcaster and taxi driver.

0:53:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's not far off, my friends.

0:53:29 - Paris Martineau
I know my friend, next time you're going to call into this show from the front seat of a cab hey I'm uh driving a cab.

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, that's what george burns said. He says too bad. All the people know how to run this country are either barbers or cab drivers. Yeah, it's true.

0:53:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that's, that's so old fart, that is such a fart story.

0:53:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh my god, george who george burns, burns and alan, good night.

0:53:52 - Paris Martineau
You gotta play I'm I'm not even going to try and guess what that is.

0:53:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it a? Black and white show no, no. Yes, was there color. No, it was also radio.

0:54:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh, my God. There was not even any pictures. They didn't even have video. It was just someone screaming into a conch shell and hoping someone else heard it.

0:54:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, so let's do it. Leo Say goodnight, gracie Goodnight.

0:54:15 - Leo Laporte
Gracie.

0:54:17 - Paris Martineau
That's funny, that's hysterical hilarity ensued well, I mean, you probably back in the day hadn't heard many people say things, so that would just be fun.

0:54:31 - Leo Laporte
Based on the novelty right, you're like who's Gracie? I actually I don't know. Do you feel this way, jeff? I often feel like I'm watching my era disappear in the rear view mirror like, oh, try teaching. Yeah, and I don't even understand where we're going, where this car is headed, but but I remember back there and it's like that I'm in a new. This is a different world.

0:54:52 - Paris Martineau
That's why the ai thing is so uh all right, give me, give me a short list of essential content, be it video or radio, from your era you feel like is disappearing, and I'll watch it and review it.

0:55:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's this show. All the time we talk about beetle bailey and george and gracie, and I mean everything we talk about is ancient history. Now, do you remember tom jones tight pants?

0:55:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think about it. You may, but I don't, do you remember?

0:55:26 - Leo Laporte
do you remember martin, mull and fernwood tonight?

0:55:30 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, let's not go back far enough.

0:55:31 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to say she doesn't remember it doby Gellis, doby Gellis, no, no fernwood tonight, do you have you ever heard of?

0:55:39 - Paris Martineau
that fernwood tonight I, you could be just making up words to me. That's how little I know wait wait I got one all right max head. Oh what she knows. Max head, no of max headroom, yeah because that's kind of become a culture. I haven't seen that, but I will watch it you'd like it.

0:55:55 - Jeff Jarvis
You'd like it. It's great. What you know it's great.

0:56:00 - Paris Martineau
Wow, this guy was doing your rubber head for you going like this guy want was this before? It was before dev no it was so is the reason why you're jealous. Animosity because you're jealous.

0:56:17 - Leo Laporte
I hate him. He's a guy in a rubber head, hate him. So what's going to happen to TikTok? So TikTok has now said we want to go to the Supreme Court. Let's place the bets. Ladies and gentlemen, it's getting worse and worse. They got a federal court. They asked a federal court to pause the congressional order to sell or be closed down. The federal court said no, that's well within the power of the United States government to shut you down. It's not a first amendment issue, it's a security issue. So now they're saying we're going to the Supreme Court. They they also. They want to pause, at least to get to January 20th, because they have to be sold by January 19th. It is, it is coming down to the wire now for tik-tok. There is a white knight. Have we talked about Frank McCourt, do you?

0:57:16 - Jeff Jarvis
know we have it.

0:57:16 - Leo Laporte
I want to know what to think about this, so tell me what to think so frank mccourt is, uh, not so loved in los angeles, former owner of the la dodgers, but he's an interesting fellow. He created something called project liberty. Actually, what I know about him I read in, uh, on wikipedia, uh, and it's kind of interesting project liberty. So he's a billionaire, right, he's one of those rich, but he's one of the good ones.

I think that's what we thought of some others I know, I, yeah, you know what they're all bad, aren't they? Um? So he's not loved because of uh the dodgers. He does own the football club marseille in france and he's the founder of the non-profit Project Liberty. So Project Liberty, and he's donated a hundred million dollars to start a school of public policy at Georgetown. He actually gave him another hundred million dollars for the McCourt School. The Project Liberty, which was founded a few years ago, developed the decentralized social networking protocol, or dsnp, the idea being, he believes, that you should be able to have social media without giving up you know everything to a centralized body that might sell him on. So he has put together now I don't think it's enough money, but he says he's put together a 20 billion dollar consortium to buy the us arm of tiktok.

0:58:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, he's got the commitments for the money half the price of tiktok of twitter sounds like it seems like a. It seems like a low ball. I agree, the 44 billion was ridiculous, yeah, well it's now written. It's now written down to, I think, 16 billion yeah, uh, project liberty.

0:59:06 - Leo Laporte
This is from. Axios has held conversations with a diverse set of stakeholders. They will begin an investor road show early next week. That's this week in new york, this coming week in New York City and San Francisco. Tim Berners-Lee supports it. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. Tim Berners-Lee is also an advocate for a decentralized web. He wants you to control your own personal data. He's got his own project to do that and David Clark, who's a computer science and ai senior research scientist and is fairly well known. So I don't know, I don't know. Is this better than tiktok shutting down the? They will not get the algorithm, which is the thing that makes tiktok tiktok, and I have a feeling it's also the thing that he doesn't care about, because, you know, the algorithm is the controversial part of tiktok but the algorithm is the good part.

0:59:57 - Jeff Jarvis
well, part of Tick Tock, but the algorithm is the good part.

0:59:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, china says, the Chinese government says we're never going to let that out of there.

1:00:01 - Jeff Jarvis
They're not going to sell anything.

1:00:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, they might sell the name and the users, the US users in the name they might sell. I think most I mean TikTokers are up in arms, but I think most TikTokers like my son who has I think two and a half million tiktok followers, are just moving to Instagram.

1:00:20 - Paris Martineau
It's so similar, oh no, something I found interesting is trying to figure out how the tiktok ban would actually work in practice. Um, some people have written a bit about this, which is, uh, the most likely we're going to see, obviously, obviously it being banned from Apple and Google App Stores, but we could also see like an outright block of access by internet service providers, which is where it starts to get tricky, because TikTok also has kind of a deal with Oracle to to keep its users, like US users' data, on US soil rather than in China, and so if TikTok doesn't get sold and is banned, it'll be interesting to see what happens to that data.

1:01:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, I guess it just all goes back to China. I don't know.

1:01:16 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, Because I mean oracle. Then would face penalties on the daily if it was oh that's a good ostensibly hosting right uh, the tiktok data in the us yeah, the project does it all just go back to china yeah, yeah, no, they probably have to erase the drives yeah

1:01:33 - Leo Laporte
perhaps something and the big question is what will happen january 20th, because it's on. I don't think, see, I don't think donald trump's gonna weigh in at all on that. I think he's got bigger fish to fry. He's much more interested in what he's gonna do with the border um, and he's gonna, despite his mandate which isn't much of a mandate, but it's's by his mandate. I think he understands he can't do everything, so he's going to do the things that he thinks are most important. I don't think TikTok is very high on that list.

1:02:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So the night first, amendment center at Columbia university, jamil Joffer uh and a colleague wrote a post essay in the New York times urging the Supreme court to step in on first amendment basis the new york times urging the supreme court to step in on first amendment basis.

1:02:23 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, but the problem is there's a lot of precedent.

1:02:24 - Jeff Jarvis
First amendment does not protect foreign nationals trying to protect my speech on tick tock yeah, that's the issue, but you still have speech elsewhere. But that's like saying, okay, fine, you don't need the New York Times, use the Washington Post, we'll shut down the New York Times, that's okay. No, first Amendment there Fine, okay, this is government involvement in speech. It is exactly that. It is the press of the people.

1:02:52 - Leo Laporte
I will ask Kathy Gellis on Sunday, for sure, Cathy Gellis on Sunday for sure. She's our lawyer who has admitted to the Supreme Court.

1:03:01 - Jeff Jarvis
She can work her magic. She even got a new router for you.

1:03:04 - Leo Laporte
She did, oh. Thank you, Kathy. Aw. Yeah, because she was having trouble with her internet going up and down.

1:03:13 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious as to what the Supreme Court is going to say about all this.

1:03:16 - Leo Laporte
I think they're going to say no. I think they're just going to say we're not going to what the Supreme Court is going to say about all this. I think they're going to say no. I think they're just going to say we're not going to take the case. The First Amendment there's a lot of precedent for the First Amendment. Not that's why we have CFIUS, the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States. They have the right, and the president has the right, to ban foreign entities if they deem them a security threat. That's not a question.

1:03:42 - Paris Martineau
So I hate to say this but what does elon musk think about all this? I was wondering that seems to actually be a relevant question as to determining what trump would do.

1:03:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting. I don't know, I don't think, I think Elon. So this is interesting because Elon, of course, wants free speech for X.

1:04:00 - Paris Martineau
He opposes the TikTok ban.

1:04:03 - Leo Laporte
He does Okay.

1:04:05 - Paris Martineau
Or at least did in April. Maybe it's changed.

1:04:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the problem. Who knows?

1:04:11 - Jeff Jarvis
It's more than just a business thing, right? So the piece in the Times it's down in the lower part of the rundown online 123, says that the most consequential conclusion of the appellate court decision, the First Amendment, permits the government to protect Americans from covert foreign manipulation by restricting their access to foreign controlled media, even when that means American speech is restricted too, there you go.

So imagine if the government said okay, we're going to cut off RT. The government's going to do that. I don't think they could do that at all. But it's further than that it's affecting Americans' speech.

So the appellate court's reasoning deviates from ordinary First Amendment principles in a number of ways. To begin, the judges gave near categorical deference to the government's claims about the risks associated with TikTok and of course this is the Biden administration, not the Trump administration. But courts have recognized the crucial importance of scrutinizing government claims more closely when First Amendment rights are at stake, given how vital free speech is to the operation of democracy. When the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration's attempt to request to bar the New York Times from printing articles related to classified da-da-da-da, it did so even though the administration warned that publishing would derail peace talks and expose intelligent agents. You're talking about the Pentagon Papers. Pentagon Papers, yep. The Court of Appeals did not cite the Pentagon Papers case, even though the Titcock case, like that one, involves a request to preemptively bar speech in the name of national security. They failed to interrogate the government's claim that the ban is intended to prevent Chinese government's covert manipulation of American users.

1:05:48 - Leo Laporte
They accepted the government's assertions on the face of it, which is not surprising. This is the problem is the government's never told us or anybody but perhaps you know, the Congress why they think TikTok's a threat.

1:06:07 - Jeff Jarvis
All this leads us to the most disturbing feature of the ruling, which is its audacious denial that the TikTok law constitutes censorship at all. Censorship at all. And the court's telling banning TikTok actually vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment. Now, how's that for paradoxical? By protecting Americans from possible Chinese government influence over the editorial decisions that power TikTok's platforms, In other words, if you had an American making the editorial decisions it would be okay. Yeah.

1:06:34 - Leo Laporte
But because it's Chinese government. So this protects really the rights of Americans to free speech. But I think they've always said that, you know, foreign governments don't have free speech rights in the United States foreign governments do, but we do.

1:06:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That's that's what I keep coming back to. It's a platform for us on TikTok yeah, yeah but our content is not.

1:06:53 - Leo Laporte
Our content is not posted on TikTok, as is TikTok and its algorithm and and potentially, the chinese government decide which of us is seen which of us is that?

1:07:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I for one like my new tick tock masters you know?

1:07:10 - Leo Laporte
my, you can see how they say it. Yes, it's your speech, but it is the chinese are deciding who gets to talk uh, my book was printed, my paperback, the gutenberg parenthesis, on sale now.

1:07:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It was printed in the uk, it wasn't printed in the us. So could the, could the us government say, oh no, that those brits, they're trying to influence american brains. Nope, you can't do that it's it's it's ludicrous, it's it's acting like the world doesn't exist well, we'll see.

1:07:38 - Leo Laporte
I mean, uh, I don't know, did uh, did tick tock go to the supreme court? Have they asked for cert? I don't know yet. That's we will. Uh, this is definitely something we'll talk about with Cathy gellis. Uh, on, and she's been a very uh strong advocate of the first amendment.

1:07:54 - Paris Martineau
Uh, we'll ask yes, uh, I think tick, think TikTok has seeked a Supreme Court hearing.

1:07:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, yes, it does. Two hours ago, in fact, voice of America's-.

1:08:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they just did. Okay, you seek a hearing. So they're looking for cert and this is where the Supreme Court this isn't shadow docket, because the Supreme Court is sitting so the Supreme Court could respond to them. An individual justice could respond, respond, or they could respond uh as uh, anonymously, or they could give it cert.

1:08:23 - Jeff Jarvis
They could say, yeah, we'll hear that case it was and if it even delays for two days, then that changes. A delay would be all they need right?

1:08:30 - Leo Laporte
well, presuming you could get, uh, the president's attention, and he really has a very long to-do list on january 20th, if, if you read what he says, so I don't know, I don't know, I would be sad. I don't think it's the end of the world.

1:08:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean if they're given cert. Oh, one thing to ask, Cathy, if you don't mind um is what? What is the? Then? Probably would k Kathy file a front of the court brief and what does that timetable look like? How does she get her voice in there?

1:09:04 - Leo Laporte
She's probably written it already. Knowing Kathy, she's probably written it already. She works for Mike Masnick's Copia Institute, tech Dirt's kind of policy arm, and would presumably, if she wants to file a uh amicus brief, would file it as the copia institute. Um, I'll be very. I'm just curious what if mike has said anything about this let me just look, you know, let's look or if she's written on tick, because she writes for tiktok, uh, tiktok band stories. Here's one from carl bode november 15th trump may kill america's performative tiktok ban for the benefit of his billionaire buddy carl never really love the mince words their headlines are so great, which?

buddy. Uh, probably elon, right? I don't know. Well, how would benefit elon, I don't know.

Let's see the ceo of tick tock has been asking elon for his help on this president-elect has not yet announced a decision on or if or how to proceed, but some advisors expect him to intervene on tick tock's behalf if necessary, including conway and three others. Who's conway, not george conway. Who's the conway he's talking about? I don't know who spoke in the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump promised in the campaign to protect the app, even though he also signed an executive order in his first term that would have banned it.

1:10:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that was then.

1:10:29 - Leo Laporte
This is now, yeah right, oh, his buddies. Well, larry Ellison is definitely a buddy was there. He was at mar-a-lago with elon musk. Safra katz, big donor, she's the ceo of oracle, big donor to the trump campaign. Jeffrey yes is, of course, a minority holder of tiktok stock. He has a 15 stake in tiktok and he's a major billionaire trump donor that's where you're talking from.

1:10:58 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the buddy, Jeff.

1:10:59 - Leo Laporte
Yass. Probably Is that the same Yass as in Yass Queen. Has he been Yassified? I don't know.

1:11:05 - Paris Martineau
That's a great question.

1:11:06 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's the same. Now, remember, the other person who's potentially going to benefit is Mark Zuckerberg. Meta Instagram will absolutely benefit from the banning of tiktok.

1:11:19 - Jeff Jarvis
People like my son will move just move over there if youtube too, if and if zuckerberg had any generosity, he would, he would come out publicly and say don't ban it you think he would do?

1:11:35 - Leo Laporte
you think he'd do that? No, probably not. Do you think generosity?

1:11:39 - Jeff Jarvis
is his first name that started with if, if anyway.

1:11:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, we'll watch with a great interest. Um yeah, forbes uh has an article that says emily baker white saying if tiktok's banned american data could end up back in china okay, I don't think I that's a good question. I think they would. I don't know what. I don't know what the law said or anything. I'll be very interested to see what happens. Meanwhile, blue sky's uh benefiting. They're now talking about charging, having a paid subscription. It'll still be free, but if, if you wanted to, you could pay, what is it? Eight bucks for a better internet?

1:12:27 - Paris Martineau
I would pay for. Uh, I would pay you love blue sky yeah I don't know extra features, I just do by using it videos limited to uh seconds.

1:12:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I'd pay for longer videos. Yeah, I'd happily support them.

1:12:43 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I had been one of the first subscribers to Twitter Blue back when it was still Twitter Blue. Just because I used Twitter so much back in the day that I was like. Of course, I'd pay for this. I also loved the nuzzle-like feature they added on that I have a completely off the wall uh question. Jeff, have you seen the new jersey drones? Question mark yes, jersey lights in the sky that are mysterious and no one can explain them. I haven't seen myself, oh they are, I mind you.

1:13:12 - Jeff Jarvis
I remember I live about five miles from trump's golf course bedminsterminster. So they've been seen over Bedminster, where there's also, by the way, right there, a major AT&T knock.

1:13:23 - Paris Martineau
If you want to see a video of it, I put it in the rundown right above the changelog. My buddy and former coworker, dave, like a week or two ago had posted videos from his mother and brother, who both live in that area of like new jersey, and they were.

1:13:39 - Leo Laporte
They're crazy all right, let's let's see what line number did you uh post those?

1:13:44 - Jeff Jarvis
145. All right, let me go down to 145.

1:13:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh, this is the new york times story. Oh, no, this is video from my buddy dave sorry listen, there is a new New York Times story. It's close to a New York Times story uh, something really weird is happening in Morris County. Okay, that's not an airplane, that's for sure not an airplane. It looks kind of big for a drone, maybe Amazon's testing drone delivery. I mean, the Pentagon has gotten involved why is that the lights are on? They're very bright.

1:14:17 - Paris Martineau
They're not hiding no, and it's just. I mean, it's very strange, there's quite a few different videos in there kind of looks like a helicopter.

1:14:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll be honest with you there's been more helicopter activity around me, yeah it looks a lot like a helicopter.

1:14:30 - Leo Laporte
I hate to tell you I've seen. I mean I saw that at my window last night it was a helicopter. I saw that out my window last night. It was a helicopter. Looked just like that.

1:14:38 - Paris Martineau
Officials have said that they don't know what they are, but that they're not US military. How do they know? And they don't think they're foreign.

1:14:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, they have radar. That's a helicopter. Give me a break.

1:14:53 - Paris Martineau
If it was a helicopter Leo, I think they would say it New York Post. If it was a helicopter Leo, I think they would say it.

1:14:56 - Jeff Jarvis
New York Post Mystery NJ drones are coming from Iranian mothership offshore congressman suggests Should be shot down.

1:15:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's the Jewish space lasers. Now I know, yeah, just shoot at them. What the hell? What could?

1:15:15 - Paris Martineau
possibly go wrong. At this time, we have no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign adversary. We're going to continue to monitor what is happening, but at no point were our installations threatened when this activity was occurring.

1:15:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh pentagon denies, says the press secretary.

1:15:29 - Leo Laporte
Jersey drones are from iran I just want to tell you that when times get weird and tough, people kind of get a little nutty and you're going to hear much, much more of this kind of crap for the next few years yep, I certainly, I'm trying to keep my feet on the ground or anything, yeah I just think it's kind of interesting.

1:15:50 - Paris Martineau
It's interesting that a bunch of people are having, uh, these strange unidentified flying object set sightings.

1:15:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's more a reflection on our psyche. We're not calling it from space. If this were other states, they'd be saying it comes from outer space.

1:16:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, new Jersey is just like there are drones.

1:16:09 - Leo Laporte
It's just up there.

1:16:11 - Jeff Jarvis
There's some drones up there. I don't know what they're doing. Staten Island it must have come from Staten Island. You're always bothering us, those people.

1:16:17 - Paris Martineau
I will say. According to Lance, the Pine Bush UFO Museum in New York, this area has a lot of very specific things about it that result in aliens visiting us. He said it's because the ley lines connect and there's quartz in the ground in high quantities. It could be. Lance could be right.

1:16:39 - Leo Laporte
Did you ask him how he feels about Bed Bath Beyond stock?

1:16:43 - Paris Martineau
No, but twice during our tour he did ask our group if we've heard of this cool guy named Joe Rogan who's got a lot of good names.

1:16:54 - Leo Laporte
You're watching, listening, participating in this Week in Google with Paris Marinteau and Jeff Jarvis. We're glad you're here. Um more stories from the front. Reddit has decided hey, everybody's scraping us, using us for their search. Why don't we have an ai based on reddit content? They call it Reddit Answers. Redditors can ask questions and receive answers using a new AI-powered conversational interface that pulls up curated summaries of relevant conversations from Reddit. That seems like a good thing. As an avid Reddit user, paris Martin, do you think you would use this?

1:17:39 - Paris Martineau
no, because I don't. I don't feel confident in its ability to appropriately like. When I am using reddit to get an answer for something, there's a lot of different calculations that are going on in the back of my mind. I'm like how old is this? If I find a thread that answers my question, I'm like was this from seven years ago?

1:17:57 - Leo & Paris
Oh, yeah, you definitely look at that. Or two months ago.

1:17:59 - Paris Martineau
You know what is the context of what this person is responding to Okay, but look at what this does.

1:18:04 - Leo Laporte
So the first thing it does you ask a question, it gives you a summary of some of the answers and then it gives you links to the actual Reddit thread.

1:18:18 - Jeff Jarvis
So you still would have opportunity.

1:18:19 - Paris Martineau
This is just finding reddit threads for you that answer that question. That's called a search engine. Isn't that just search?

1:18:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I could just search better sleep in redditcom and get that, yeah, or use Google isn't reddit competing with the companies it's licensing to?

1:18:28 - Leo Laporte
the wall street journal has a story about them saying that their licensing revenue grew 60 million point three nope 81.6 million yeah, they got a 60 from open ai yeah, first nine months yeah because it's good percentage of its overall revenue oh, you have to ask me. They don't have a lot of revenue. I know that it's not a big money maker what is reddit's there was 3488 million in revenue last quarter. What was the profit?

1:19:01 - Paris Martineau
Profit in quarter yeah, and profit was $29 million.

1:19:07 - Leo Laporte
That's good. They haven't made a profit in very many quarters.

1:19:10 - Jeff Jarvis
What's the current market cap?

1:19:15 - Paris Martineau
Billions Great question.

1:19:17 - Jeff Jarvis
At the dinner Paris and I attended, I saw my old boss, Steve Newhouse, who's the one who decided to buy Reddit and then turn it back to the market 29 billion yeah amazing, I will say. I've noticed as an avid Redditor.

1:19:30 - Paris Martineau
Sometime in the last couple of days my app is updated. Now I'm seeing ads in Reddit comments Like every, because most of the time I spend on Reddit.

1:19:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm showing through comments. Oh see, I pay for.

1:19:40 - Paris Martineau
Reddit. But now there are ads. I mean that might make me pay for Reddit. I don't know. I will say over the last couple of years, especially over the last year, reddit ads have gotten good and that's like never something I would really say, but they've gotten targeted. They've gotten targeted. They've gotten. A lot of their ads are in like Reddit lingo, like they fit very well into the site.

1:20:13 - Leo Laporte
They're clearly doing some like work on their ad strategy and the ad strategy for ad buyers, which is interesting. Here's Cloudflare's year in review. Here's some stats. Cloudflare, because they give away so much stuff. Uh, they shield so many sites. They really have kind of their finger on the pulse of the internet. So they, for the last five years, have been putting out a review of internet trends and patterns. They have observed um.

Global internet traffic, they say, grew, grew 17% this year. It's kind of interesting that there's still room for growth. Google is still the most popular internet service overall. Openai number one in AI Binance. Number one in crypto. Whatsapp, top messaging platform, facebook, the top social media site that's kind of a surprise. Starlink traffic tripled in 2024. That's about what it did last year as well. I'm not surprised, um. After initiating service in malawi in africa in july 2023, starlink traffic from that country grew 38 times in 2024. As starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. Starlink has got to be another SpaceX home run. Google bought Google's web crawler responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2024. Not a surprise. Bytedance the owners of TikTok have an AI crawler called ByteSpider. That traffic declined over the year, while Anthropix AI crawler Clawdbot first started showing signs of ongoing activity in April and then declined after initial peak in May and June. Globally, one-third of mobile device traffic from iOS. Android had 90% share of mobile device traffic in 29 countries and regions. I would imagine.

And you snobs all ignore us Android users, well, but I think most of the iOS traffic comes from the US, frankly, but there's a lot of it, right? Peak iOS mobile device traffic share was over 60 percent in eight countries and regions. They don't say which one. Well, maybe they do. I could click the link and get more detail. You could, but I'm not gonna because this is a short show and, uh, I got a lot to talk about since when wait I'm curious is this based on desktop and browser use Like?

obviously this doesn't account for All traffic. I think it's all traffic Cloudflare.

1:22:42 - Paris Martineau
So it also accounts for, like app users? Yeah, I'm shocked. It all goes through Cloudflare. Facebook is over.

1:22:50 - Leo Laporte
I know I don't understand that. That's a shocker. I would understand that, if it was more browser-based because Remember, this is global and I would understand that if it was more browser-based.

1:22:58 - Paris Martineau
Remember, this is global and I think that Facebook probably has bigger market share globally than it does here in the US.

1:23:02 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the internet in certain places.

1:23:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly that's why Google is far and away the most popular search engine globally, across all platforms. To answer your question on mobile devices and operating systems, Baidu, the Chinese Google, is a distant second. Bing is a distant second across desktop and Windows devices, of course, With DuckDuckGo the second most popular Mac OS Copies. Here's one for you, Jeff. Google Chrome is far and away the most popular browser overall. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is also true on Mac OS devices.

1:23:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh wait, wait, wait, that's interesting. Google is the also true on Mac OS devices? Oh wait, wait, wait, that's interesting.

1:23:40 - Leo Laporte
Google is the most popular on Mac devices, yes, but on iOS devices, safari is well ahead of Chrome. I mean, you pretty much have to use Safari on iOS. On Windows, edge is number two, of course, because it's pre-installed, it's the default, but still Chrome is number one. On Windows, even installed, it's the default, but it's still Chrome beats it is number one. On Windows even, um, the top 10 countries ranked by internet speed all had average download speeds above 200 megabytes or megabits per second. Spain, if I went and asked you, uh, let's say we're on Jeopardy and I say this country had the best internet speed in the world. This is a family feud question.

1:24:21 - Jeff Jarvis
So you say I'll take Bali Survey says Spain.

1:24:26 - Leo Laporte
Spain Isn't that interesting Really. Yeah, wow, let me see if I. 41.3% of global traffic comes from mobile devices and the majority in 100 countries is from mobile. This is why I find this one of all of the different summaries the most interesting, because Cloudflare really has its fingers on the pulse.

1:24:48 - Jeff Jarvis
They have the picture, yeah.

1:24:50 - Leo Laporte
They have a big generalized picture of the world. So Instagram is definitely feeling the heat from competition and seeing the opportunity if TikTok closes its doors in two months. In a month be a month, wouldn't it A month and a few days? So they are trying new stuff. You've seen Instagram for teenagers. Now they're rolling out something that nobody does. Tiktok does not do trial reels, so you can see if a reel is going to do. Well, this is so. I know a little bit about this because Henry kind of fills me in. There's a lot of AB testing. When you put out a video, you look at the uptake of different styles and so forth, but you've never been able to post a reel or a TikTok for non-followers to see how it will do.

1:25:42 - Jeff Jarvis
I find that a little weird, so subject the rest of the world to it.

1:25:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, you want to kind of.

1:25:48 - Paris Martineau
Because I guess they're trying to A B test performance on the Explore page.

1:25:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, followers kind of color it. So you want to post the video to kind of a brand new set of people that don't know you, Wait, wait wait, let me understand this.

1:26:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I see two possibilities here. Is it so you don't show crap to your followers? No, no, no, no. Or is it?

1:26:09 - Leo Laporte
to get a bigger audience. It's to get a signal, a better signal, a clean signal. Okay, all right, I thought it was so if we?

only if we only showed stuff to people who watch our shows. That wouldn't give us a good idea of how our shows are doing. You'd want to show it to people who don't know your shows and then you'd get a better idea if you were doing a comparison. Creators can share reel as a trial by toggling the trial option. The reel will then be shared with non-followers. It won't't appear on their profile's main grid or reels tab. Of course, followers could see it if somebody shares it with them. After 24 hours, creators can see how many views, likes, comments and shares the reel received. Then they can choose to throw it away or put it on their profile. I don't know. I think it's interesting. Instagram is doing that because TikTok does not allow it, and I'm guessing that this is something creators want. You're right, though, jeff. It does say a lot of creators see Instagram as their business card, which puts pressure on the content they publish. So they're not.

1:27:08 - Jeff Jarvis
They don't want to test new content so I'll show my crap to the plebes yeah, they don't want to lose followers.

1:27:15 - Leo Laporte
Or maybe, even more importantly, brand deals. Right, all right, yeah, yeah, it's interesting but anyway the whole idea is Instagram's trying to, trying to get out there and say hey, come over here.

1:27:27 - Paris Martineau
Creators I think one thing that's really. I'm still scrolling on the cloud for a thing. We touched on this briefly, but the top five of this is Google for most popular internet services. Google, then facebook, apple tick tock, then you go down.

Instagram is number seven yeah, I think it's a lot of very interesting that cloudflare says that, uh, tick tock, even unseated apple for number three, uh, like briefly throughout the year yeah, I remember this is eating Instagram's lunch and it has not been around even a fraction of the time it's better it's better though I feel like they have become a little inchified in the last few months.

1:28:08 - Leo Laporte
I don't know about you. I see many more ads than I have in the past. Sometimes every third tiktok view is ad.

1:28:16 - Paris Martineau
Well, are you considering the ones, the affiliate links, ads? Because that's, I think, different. I mean, ostensibly those aren't ads.

1:28:24 - Leo Laporte
That's organic content.

1:28:26 - Paris Martineau
They are, but they're an ad for that.

1:28:29 - Leo Laporte
It's a TikTok store ad, basically yeah. So the guy says, oh, hey guys, you won't believe this, but if I had a college student I would definitely get them this Ploud Note because it's amazing and it's on his channel. It's not a brand deal. I mean, henry does brand deals. This is like he's selling this in the TikTok store. But it means that everything I'm seeing on TikTok these days seems to be Okay, so there's a legit one USA Today and now immediately he's selling something, right?

1:29:00 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I mean it's because it's been a big kind of money. There's elton john with jimmy fallon and now he's selling something, so every other one is selling something well, I do think part of it is leo like oh, she's selling something you just paused on these, so tiktok is going to show you more of them because it thinks you want that that's why I whenever I see them. I don't I right right, right away, yeah yeah but sometimes you don't know.

1:29:26 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's the thing is. Sometimes these guys you think they're um, yeah, see, everyone's selling something on this. To me, this has really degraded my tick tock experience yeah, I agree yeah, so it happened. I was shocked. A bankruptcy judge in texas has rejected the sale of info wars to the onion, appointed by whom, by the way, I don't know. I think judge christopher m l. Every case now Federal bankruptcy court in Houston. Remember that the Onion offered less money to the. So the whole point of this Infowars sale.

1:30:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Do we know that? I'm not sure. We know that was last week. We do know that For sure.

1:30:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the whole bankruptcy sale, of course, is because the courts and juries ruled that the Sandy Hook families deserved $1.5 billion settlement from Alex Jones for lying about them, and he has to sell everything. So the Onion came along and said to they offered what I heard, but I'll have to check half of what this.

Unfortunately, the other bidder is an InfoWars affiliate right, somebody who would basically give it back to Alex Jones, who offered a significant amount of money they were only able to raise half, it was a sealed bid Total value of no, the total value of the onions bid was seven million dollars, including 1.7 million in cash put up by its parent company, the rest coming from the families of the sandy hook shooting victims. They essentially opted to put a portion of their earnings from the settlement against mr jones towards the onions bid. Why? Because they didn't want jones to continue to control info wars and they loved the idea of the onion doing it now. First, united american companies offered three and a half million in cash. Um, so, in effect, you're right, the, the, the offer from the Onion $7 million is bigger but not as much cash Half the amount of cash.

1:31:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Also, I think the Onion was going to offer. Part of the Onion offer was advertising for the family's cause.

1:31:47 - Leo Laporte
Right, which was an anti-gun cause.

1:31:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, by the way, just saying the judge was appointed in 2019, so guess by who?

1:31:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the judge acknowledged. The case involved lots of emotion thank you, judge from supporters of the onion and fans of mr jones. He concluded that, despite some good faith errors, neither side did anything wrong, but he decided to overturn it. I don't think he gave it to the other bidder, though I don't know what's going to happen. No, he didn't.

1:32:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No, there's some back to you kind of thing, I think to the the bankruptcy.

1:32:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the trustee. Judge Lopez's ruling put the fate of Infowars in limbo, instructed the court-appointed trustee to come up with an alternate resolution, though it's not immediately clear what would happen. The trustee didn't have anything to say about it. Ben Collins of uh the onion was deeply disappointed by the decision yesterday so the other hero would continue yeah, continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured. So they're going to continue to try to get in uh, get get it. I you know.

1:33:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Chris matey was an attorney for the sandy hook family said his clients were disappointed too now, the one thing I don't know about this case is that indeed, uh, in a bankruptcy auction, one is trying to get the highest monetary value for the creditors. Are there other creditors besides the families?

1:33:25 - Paris Martineau
I don't think so because I mean, I obviously don't know the specifics. No, I think there are.

1:33:30 - Leo Laporte
So here's from the New York Times. Judge Lopez said the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr Jones' creditorsors, including the sandy hook families, in part because the bids are submitted in secret. It was. It was a sealed bid. Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding, so I think there are other creditors that I'm sure the families are by far the largest credit.

1:33:53 - Jeff Jarvis
You bet, yeah, they were given what's their total? One and a half 1.4 billion yeah, so that beats the hell out of three and a half million or seven million, uh the.

1:34:04 - Leo Laporte
The thing that people are some people not not fans of info wars, but people who are not fans of info wars are concerned about is that this other group would basically put infamores back on the air. They would buy it and give it back, which to me, should be considered by the court. By the way, that is a reasonable part of the consideration, but maybe I don't know, maybe not, maybe not. Uh, I put in here a very long piece that I doubt either of you read.

1:34:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I tried to, but it's by someone I cannot bear. Oh okay, do you know Patrick McKenzie? Oh no, that was a different one, very long piece you put in here.

1:34:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's another one which I will talk about later. I put in two really long pieces. Patrick McKenzie is writing about debanking.

1:34:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I figured you'd just explain this to me.

1:34:53 - Leo Laporte
I will explain it to you and then I will explain the other piece to you. So you see, you don't have TLDR. No, the other one's trouble, go ahead. So Patrick McKenzie, who works for Stripe and knows a little bit about how the banking industry works, which most people have no idea, but it all started when Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan and said I know a lot of crypto guys who've been debanked. It's being used as a tool or weapon systematically wielded by specific political actors against private individuals without due process. So patrick took it on himself to explain in a very long piece what's happening. He says I previously worked for stripe. I'm currently an advisor there.

Stripe is not a bank, but many regulated financial institutions have similar considerations. If you are in finance his, the short version of this is you're very risk adverse and what you don't want to do is spend a lot of hours and uh, you know, employee time responding to requests from regulators. You don't want to get in trouble with regulators, so you're very risk adverse and one of the things you really don't want to do is bank. You want to bank people like you and me consumers. You don't want to bank cryptocurrency enterprises because you're going to get a lot of requests from regulators. You're going to get a lot of heat and it's going to cost you a lot of money. It's not illegal to do it. But to do what? To bank them or to refuse to bank them it's not illegal to do either either. Okay, uh advocates, he writes often invoke a user-centric perspective of debanking, focusing on the impact on individuals and firms, which is admittedly terrible, but then they conflate it with the regulators decisions regarding bank supervision in ways which are facially not about direct user impact. The industry doesn't call it debanking, partly, he says, out of the usual corporate euphemism concerns, but also because it's it's it's simply them denying a service to, to individuals or mostly companies, small businesses, who are going to cause them a lot of headaches.

He himself was and I'll put it in air quotes debanked because he had his small business selling software over the internet and received two incoming ach transfers a day from two payment providers. The bank said yeah, your business sounds legitimate, but we're going to give you 30 days to go to another bank because because not because they thought he was illegitimate, because they didn't want the hassle of all of the reporting they would have to do the bank, this bank, did not have a small business practice at this time. Uh, some banks do. This particular bank didn't and it hadn't built out the higher degree of policies and procedures that would support small business banking. They wanted a bank to consumers, not small businesses.

As you can imagine, a lot of banks really are nervous about crypto, right, yeah, uh, and so a lot of banks. Just, it's not that the regulators are saying, hey, you got to shut these guys down. It's these kyc and AML regulations know your customer and anti-money laundering and they have to. He says not only do they have to follow these policies, you can over-promise, but you can't under-deliver After you've told a regulator you'll do X. Not doing X can result in fines and other punishments, even if the regulator did not tell you specifically to do X. In other words, banks have a kind of a higher responsibility in this know your customer and any money laundering regulation and they're just understandably reluctant. They're also not very they don't communicate. Why? For a lot of probably good reasons um, the typical. So he uses as an example a bodega with an alt with a sideline and alternative financial services. But but I think it's worth just at least skimming this because it'll give you a better idea of where does he come out the debanking.

1:39:16 - Jeff Jarvis
He says first of out that debanking is an awful thing.

1:39:18 - Leo Laporte
First of all, the term debanking is intentionally loaded and it's not the term anybody in the industry uses. And what his point is that most of the time, the reason banks refuse or end up closing accounts of people involved in crypto and DeFi is it's too much trouble for the bank, they just don't want to do it. People involved in crypto and DeFi is this too much trouble for the bank? They just don't want to do it. They're not being asked to do it, they just don't want to do it.

1:39:49 - Paris Martineau
So, anyway, read it because, basically, I think it's very even-handed, or else he's just giving us homework, yeah all right he says possibly plausibly some crypto founders I was trying to get chat gpt to summarize this, but it seems to be down oh well, you broke chat.

1:40:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Gpt notebook lm, it's better perhaps a founder might ask a friend.

1:40:16 - Leo Laporte
I run a legitimate business, which happens to be in crypto, and suddenly found my personal accounts closed. Why did this happen? I did nothing wrong playing the odds. The bank thinks there's an unacceptable risk that you will use your personal accounts to launder money on behalf of the business, as somebody named samuel bankman free did.

1:40:34 - Jeff Jarvis
What's andreessen's whining about?

1:40:37 - Leo Laporte
well, it's the same, it's this thing. It's that a number of crypto bros have lost their accounts because their bank didn't want their business.

1:40:47 - Paris Martineau
I mean, where do you come down on this? Do you think that this is a nail?

1:40:50 - Leo Laporte
I think this is banks being banks.

1:40:53 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say this seems just like banks would do this normally if it wasn't crypto BS, but because the BS of this sort happens to be the crypto variety, it's just one more thing that they flag.

1:41:06 - Leo Laporte
That's why he talks about bodegas, because it's not so loaded, but it's the same thing. Very few bodegas can get a bank to bank them.

1:41:15 - Paris Martineau
Wow, I didn't realize that yeah, uh.

1:41:19 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I think he's basically saying this is propaganda in a sense this is not what you're saying. It is the the biden is shutting down maybe moral panic, yeah no, it's not, no, uh gemini did work for this and it's very the.

1:41:40 - Paris Martineau
The summary was short, but then I asked explain the part about bodegas and I've got multiple paragraphs I don't have to read it all.

1:41:47 - Leo Laporte
It's a lot of work. Um I I think the bottom line is it's not what you think it is, and the problem is most people certainly a lot of people in crypto and a lot of us in the public don't really understand what banks are up to and what kind of regulations they need to follow. So I thought it was a good piece. It's at bitsaboutmoneycom debunking and debunking.

1:42:15 - Paris Martineau
I'll give you the last note from the Gemini explanation of explain the part about bodegas. It goes into more detail.

1:42:21 - Leo Laporte
Maybe first some people are asking what is a bodega?

1:42:24 - Paris Martineau
A bodega is a small corner store in New York typically that you could go to get some grocery products. There's usually a cat there, not for sale, it's just a guardian at the store. You could probably also get like beer little.

1:42:39 - Leo Laporte
It can range anywhere from like and you might be able to send money to your relatives in another country, right, sometimes?

1:42:47 - Paris Martineau
they do that. I mean sometimes, yeah, but that's not in everyone.

1:42:53 - Jeff Jarvis
You might want to go to Bodega Cats right now and search for that, because it's a wonderful.

1:42:55 - Leo Laporte
No, don't, that's a rabbit hole, don't forget to get a chopped cheese. Chopped cheese, oh yeah.

1:43:01 - Paris Martineau
A big part of a bodega. In addition to being a store, they also have a counter where they'll make stuff. You can get smoothies, you can get chopped cheeses, you can get a bacon egg and cheese, chopped cheese.

1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
What is that? I don't know what that is. You need to new york.

1:43:14 - Paris Martineau
How?

1:43:14 - Leo Laporte
do you know this stuff, john ashley?

1:43:16 - John Ashley
uh, how do you not, how do you not know a chopped cheese and you were born in new york city.

1:43:20 - Paris Martineau
I don't know what we didn't have bodegas back in the 50s.

1:43:23 - John Ashley
A chopped cheese is essentially just a cheeseburger, but like in a little, uh, I'm frozen sounds good.

1:43:30 - Leo Laporte
That's because you're eating too many cheeses.

1:43:32 - JOhn Ashley
Cheeseburgers, yeah no, a chopped cheese is essentially just a hamburger, but like it was in a um, what kind of roll was it? Again, it was um, like a hoagie roll

1:43:41 - Paris / Leo
Yeah, I don't care okay, but it's topped up yes, okay, very delicious, fine, sounds good.

1:43:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna have to go to new york to get one, because I don't think you can get one around here my wife made fun of me because I would.

1:43:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I would go to the bodega and buy batteries.

1:43:53 - Leo Laporte
That's the last place on earth you should probably the most expensive batteries exactly. I mean, they go to target and buy them and then mark them up 100 yeah, well, so I was a busy guy, you know, okay, the unintended consequences paragraph from gemini's summary of this thing.

1:44:08 - Paris Martineau
To close us out, the article argues that this situation about bodegas highlights a flaw in the system. Regulations intended to target large-scale financial crime can inadvertently harm small businesses like bodegas, who are simply trying to serve their communities and may not have the resources to navigate complex regulatory requirements.

1:44:25 - Leo Laporte
A perfect summary. Well, that's accurate, except for the part that it's not the bodega that has to navigate those, it's the bank.

1:44:35 - Paris Martineau
And the reason the banks don't want the bodega business is because it's too much paperwork. Well, I mean, I'd assume the bodega's lack of being able to navigate, that is they're not going to be able to explain, hey maybe here's why you shouldn't do this maybe.

1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think this guy's basically saying look, this is how it is in financial services. You avoid risk and, uh, and risk sometimes doesn't mean that this is you're going to lose money, it means you're only going to. It's going to cost you money in staff time filling out paperwork for the federal government because of things like know your customer and any money laundering, and I think you know you look into those laws and they all make a lot of sense in a terror, in a world where terrorism, uh, relies on money flow, right, uh, but it's not to, it's not to infer that these bodegas are funding terrorism.

It's just that or or crypto complicated it's just that they're in the line of fire because banks don't want to take any chances. They're very risk adverse because banks have our money. We're kind of happy about that yeah, we don't want them to be risky. That's what happened to the silicon valley bank and look what happened to them. Uh, all right, let's, uh I do you want to do the other one? Let's do some, uh, new news stories, then we'll do the other one. Um, what do you think about david? There's a very cute.

1:45:51 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a very cute bodega cat in the chat in the scooter expert all right, one bodega cat, a cheeto cat it's falling asleep in a little pile of cheetos leo this one wait, no, no, no, go to the chat.

1:46:08 - Leo Laporte
It's in the discord it's not bodega cats of Instagram no, go to the chat.

1:46:13 - Paris Martineau
It's in the discord. It's not bodega cats of Instagram, I mean would be great. Oh the scooter just gave us one. Now are they going to sell those cheetos to people? Oh, sure, sure. They're in a bag, they're fine. Who cares if the outside of your back was, if you're concerned about the outside of your bag being touched by a cat.

1:46:30 - Jeff Jarvis
This is.

1:46:30 - Paris Martineau
New york gives us a stronger uh immune system, you know at my local bodega california, the fattest cat you've ever seen and she just lays on the ice cream fridge.

1:46:41 - Leo Laporte
Underneath the counters there's an ice cream fridge, yeah, which is warm, ironically, because yeah I don't know why it's warm gotta keep things cool, so it's warm, of course you're watching this week. You see, we learn things, lots of things. We learn about qubits. I don't know why. It's warm. Got to keep things cool, so it's warm, of course You're watching this week. You see, we learn things, lots of things. We learn about qubits and quantum computing and why bodega cats love ice cream refrigerators. It's true, this is what you learn here on this Week in Google with Paris Martineau of The Onion. I mean The information Of the onion.

1:47:10 - Leo Laporte
Have you ever wanted to write for the onion?

1:47:13 - Paris Martineau
oh, I'd love that. Oh yeah, wouldn't that be fun.

1:47:14 - Leo Laporte
Be great, yeah, we used to baratunde thurston used to be on until he became famous and he doesn't want to have anything to do with us. But uh, I think you know he would, but he's just very busy I mean ben.

1:47:23 - Paris Martineau
I'm so happy that he owns it now yeah, yeah, ben collins is great ben's a great guy baratunde used to write for the onion.

1:47:29 - Leo Laporte
He also wrote for the daily show, so I'm not funny enough to write for the onion. I feel like there would be a lot of pressure there's a certain way to do it yeah, there's a stick there's a stick area man. You have to start with area man. Every joke starts with area man. Sees drone, thinks it's ufo, calls his mother I don't know no, I see the point.

1:47:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's why. That's why I don't work. It's a skill, it's a talent, skills, an art now I'm just looking at photos of bodega cats.

1:48:05 - Leo Laporte
I was all excited when I saw this story. Youtube is now turning on the auto dubbing feature for knowledge-focused content. You see how we are knowledge-focused content, but it's not on for us yet.

1:48:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So if you couldn't this week in Google, I'll do it, Sharon, Wouldn't that be cool?

1:48:25 - Paris Martineau
Vous êtes écouté à moi en français.

1:48:27 - Leo Laporte
Oui, there's a button you push turn on automatic dubbing and it automatically dubs english language youtubes which we're, you know, we're on your youtube into a quite a large number of uh, is it up on your account? Yet can you go there and do it? Well, I looked and I didn't see it, but then I was. Oh, it supports english, french, german, hindi, indonesian, italian, japanese, portuguese and spanish. We've got to hear us dubbed, wouldn't that be cool? And I think it even does the lip sync right.

1:48:58 - Paris Martineau
That's crazy if it does the lip sync.

1:49:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh please, oh please, oh please. You've got to, john. Would you tell Benito to put this on the to-do list. I asked.

1:49:08 - Leo Laporte
They said it's not very good, it doesn't. The voice is down. So I think we should do it, cause I think it would make our content available in more countries.

1:49:17 - Jeff Jarvis
It'd be great. Absolutely.

1:49:20 - Leo Laporte
Well anyway, I haven't seen any examples of it yet. Let me see if I can see, if I can find anybody. They showed it at Google IO, right, but I don't. I never like those.

1:49:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I feel like those are always overselling it, right harris, you yelled at me for putting up one skeet during a commercial and now look what you're doing on. The discord is she putting up bodega cats, cats, lots of cats I'll do one last one.

1:49:51 - Leo Laporte
Hold on this cat is protecting you for from buying cigarettes for children um uh, I'm still in the cheetos I have to that cat oh, that cat is very serious. She says don't use it to buy tobacco for minors. Do they all have cats? Bodegas oh yeah, you think it's a rat problem, yeah.

1:50:17 - Paris Martineau
It's definitely rat related. They earn their keep, but also they're just companions. There was once I went to a bodega and behind the guy in the shelf where, like the cigarettes and stuff are, there was a tiny little kitten like palm size and I was like, oh my gosh, what a cute kitten. And he goes one second, leans down, picks up a second kitten. It was great.

1:50:41 - Leo Laporte
Those are the sort of experiences that's new york well, I told you my son's gonna open his restaurant in uh new york in this oh, you weren't here oh, wow, that's all hank's sandwich shop is.

1:50:55 - Paris Martineau
We're going to the opening.

1:50:56 - Leo Laporte
It's gonna, oh, hell yes it's gonna be on bleaker street in the old slutty vegan space as a pop-up, or is it forever?

1:51:04 - Jeff Jarvis
no, forever, he's got investors he's got.

1:51:07 - Leo Laporte
He's got backers.

1:51:09 - Paris Martineau
He's gonna be executive chef and they're building a studio in the back and yell hey salts hey salts.

1:51:17 - Leo Laporte
So he's moving to new york. He's moving to new york, wow, wow. And he's initially said I'll get an extra room so you can come out and stay. I said that'd be great. Then he said uh, dad, I looked at the rents in new york. I'm not getting an extra room I was gonna say a little wow, it's gonna be, expensive. He's gonna build a studio in the back so that he can he can shoot his videos there, yeah, where?

1:51:43 - Jeff Jarvis
uh like when on bleaker street. When did you say? Uh, you know I don't know, they always take longer, they always so sometime next year, I think he's hoping that's so cool.

1:51:54 - Leo Laporte
Is that a good place? That's?

1:51:56 - Paris Martineau
a good location. Yeah, perfect for that.

1:51:58 - Leo Laporte
The village and there'll be NYU students there. Yeah, it's also just yeah, I would have gone when I was in college.

1:52:04 - Paris Martineau
For sure I'll tell my sister who lives in that neighborhood to check. It's pretty exciting, paris. You will come in to manhattan to have a salt hank sandwich.

1:52:17 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I will also be there. Yes, yes, we will. We will be there for the grand opening. Oh, three of us, I promise you yeah, yeah, that's gonna be.

1:52:23 - Paris Martineau
We should all dress like giant salt shakers.

1:52:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Embarrass hank let's see, can we find a salt shaker costume? Hold on here.

1:52:33 - Paris Martineau
So in the next year, I believe.

1:52:35 - Leo Laporte
So yes, the, the slutty vegan, bleaker street, is temporarily closed. It's, can I tell you, it's closed forever. That's where salt? Uh, you can tell me. Uh, I don't know, here it is, oh, it's right by the christopher street.

1:53:00 - Paris Martineau
Oh, this is a great location yeah, it is seventh ave yeah, is it it's right next to bleaker street, pecan it was not easy.

1:53:08 - Leo Laporte
It was not easy to uh get the um, get the place. They had to like audition for the landlords to prove that they would be the best people to put in there.

1:53:19 - Jeff Jarvis
It's very um, I put in the in the discord a salt shaker costume. I can see leo in this, I think I will wear it, you may come I will wear it I will wear it is? Is this it?

1:53:32 - Leo Laporte
Where is it? It's in the Discord. Let's scroll down, scroll down. Adult Salt Shaker costume. Oh, it's lightweight, I like that.

1:53:39 - Paris Martineau
That's great.

1:53:43 - Leo Laporte
If I showed up wearing that, he would kill me yeah you would he would kill me.

1:53:51 - Paris Martineau
It's on sale what if all three of us showed up wearing that.

1:53:55 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, you have to be Pepper.

1:53:57 - Paris Martineau
That's true.

1:53:58 - Leo Laporte
You have to be Pepper.

1:53:59 - Paris Martineau
I like that. They have a sexy salt shaker costume in the corner if you go back to the mail, of course they do, of course they do.

1:54:05 - Leo Laporte
Let me see, can I wear that new?

1:54:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It is less expensive, though, just uh I mean less fabric. Worcestershire sauce they also have a verruca salt costume, but that's not the same. Oh, you know what I think? Paris, oh, paris, paris, paris, there's a. I got it, I got it, we're, we're, we're coming like, oh, hold on in the discord. Okay, come on, come on, come on speed, I'm loading the punchline. Okay, there it is in the. I got it, I got it, we're coming. Hold on In the Discord, speed. I'm loading the punchline. Okay, there it is.

1:54:38 - Paris Martineau
In the Discord. Oh, that's great. We've already seen this.

1:54:42 - Leo Laporte
Haven't we done this? Oh, I did it one year. I've already done this.

1:54:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, and this also goes to the meme, the hot dog costume meme.

1:54:50 - Paris Martineau
That's pretty good, you know that right. No, what's the?

1:54:52 - Jeff Jarvis
hot dog?

1:54:54 - Leo Laporte
I don't. I'm not a New Yorker.

1:54:57 - Paris Martineau
No, I'd like you to explain it, Jeff.

1:54:59 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the. Someone must have been responsible for this.

1:55:02 - Paris Martineau
Guy in a hot dog costume says we're all trying to find the guy responsible for this.

1:55:06 - Jeff Jarvis
We're all trying to find the guy responsible for this. Yes, thank you, see. Why didn't you do? It sounds like a new yorker cartoon. Yeah, um, and the thing is there's no ketchup costume allowed next to the hot dog costume. It's against the law. No ketchup allowed. Do you allow relish green?

1:55:26 - Paris Martineau
relish yes okay, onions crunchy, oh yeah caramelized just no ketchup.

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
No ketchup. Ketchup is just red sugar syrup. Let's be honest, it's just illegal. Alright, boston Review time, kids.

1:55:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's the other story you didn't read even Gemini is having problems finding the meaning of this. So you don't like, evgeny.

1:55:50 - Leo Laporte
Morozov. More to the point, leo, he hates me.

1:55:50 - Jeff Jarvis
He wrote an 8,000 is finding the meaning of this. So you don't like Evgeny Morozov. More to the point, Leo, he hates me. He wrote an 8,000-word personal diatribe against me what? And so I really can't stand the SOB. And the irony of this is the reason he went after me so personally and so nastily is because I dared to be somewhat optimistic about the internet, and here he is being optimistic about a effing eye well, maybe he was.

1:56:15 - Leo Laporte
Maybe he's going to change his tune no, he's not going to, he's a gerk okay, well, I'm not going to talk about it then, even though he had responses from brian eno, terry weinegrad, bruce schneier he got responses from some of the biggest people in the intellectual community.

1:56:33 - Jeff Jarvis
He's saying if we turn the clock back before the Cold War, then technologists would be okay and then we'd have a nice AI.

1:56:39 - Leo Laporte
His point I'm going to do. I'll do a short thing and let's just divorce it from him. But his point is not wrong, which is that some people don't like the idea of AI because it was Cold War driven right, it came out of DARPA, net funding and all of that, and they worry that that same ethos lives on.

1:56:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think I've heard anyone say that to me. No, that's true. I've never heard anybody say that. I've never heard anyone say that. Maybe in the circles he runs in and if you're going to complain about DARPA, you complain about the internet on that basis.

1:57:12 - Leo Laporte
Right cases, right the internet, anyway, go ahead, leo, while you pointed to this. So he calls. He calls them the refuseniks. And then there's the ai futilitarians who think that ai will never go anywhere. But the the thing I liked about this article, the thing I thought was interesting about this article this is like casey newton's false equivalencies, but go ahead.

Is that his point and I think this is well taken is that AI is kind of driven by a certain class of questions, that the drive towards kind of order and it's true that from the very earliest days of AI it was all about the idea was goal-driven problem solving. Right, you're going to slowly work your way towards the answer to this problem. And he says that real human creativity is not so task-driven, it's more wandering in the meadow smelling the flowers, and that, because we have kind of put AI in this mindset of you know, it's almost a bureaucratic, task-driven kind of process. It's not going to be very good at some of the things that we think are maybe more important.

1:58:24 - Jeff Jarvis
That's another straw man. I don't think I've heard people say that at all.

1:58:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, he's saying it yeah, so so all no, well, he's saying it, yeah, so so well, I think he's making a good point and I certainly know this from the and he quotes the early days of ai, where it really was rand corporation. It really was kind of pushing it towards, uh, you know, solving a specific problem, a task, task-driven AI.

1:58:50 - Jeff Jarvis
At the time, that's what it could do, right? But now it has become a rather unbridled tool of creativity, even though it just spits cliches at us, right, it's being used that way, okay.

1:59:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, good, he's a jerk, so forget it.

1:59:04 - Paris Martineau
I would just like to say I briefly read the piece of criticism that you're discussing, jeff, from way back when. It's absolutely absurd, ridiculously mean and way too long.

1:59:17 - Leo Laporte
Who is this guy then? What is his thing? Is he a professor? What does he? Do no, that's the thing.

1:59:24 - Jeff Jarvis
He didn't make it through the doctoral program. But I'm not making casting aspersions.

1:59:31 - Leo Laporte
His bio at the Boston Review says he writes on technology and politics and he has a podcast called Sense of Rebellion. So there you go, and he's written a couple of books. Oh, he wrote. To Save Everything, Click here.

1:59:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he's kind of. I don't think he coined techno-solutionism, but that's one of his arguments. All right, and you know, the thing is, I actually quoted him favorably in what Will Google Do, but that didn't stop him from attacking me. Well, forget it.

2:00:03 - Paris Martineau
There are some just truly nasty things in here that I won't even dignify with quotes.

2:00:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you found the article right away, wow.

2:00:09 - Paris Martineau
It's bad, it's not.

2:00:11 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, I had no idea about the feud.

2:00:16 - Paris Martineau
I'm sure that your points in this are very valid. I just have to stand in solitude.

2:00:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Would you call it ad hominem Paris?

2:00:25 - Leo Laporte
At the very least Sounds like it. Yeah, sounds like it. Yeah. Okay like it.

2:00:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, uh, okay. So it was kind of a niagara falls for me.

2:00:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, slowly I will never quote that guy again.

2:00:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought there was some interesting points you were going to ask about david sack, so I interrupted you before, with mustard, I think, or something I think, and I was grateful, thank you.

2:00:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay, all right, I think we can just stay away from all of the people who have nominated positions in this new administration well, here's one thing that I don't think anybody's written about, though, which is why so david sacks is going to have a.

2:01:05 - Jeff Jarvis
He's going to have a job, apparently, in the administration as an aisar, but elon a position, by the way, that does not exist, will have to be and may not have any role at all, but we may not be reporting to him, but apparently that will be in government, as I read it right, whereas Musk and ramoswami are outside of government. Why? Because they don't want to divest. They don't want to deal with ethics. Ah, they don't want to deal with conflict of interest. So you?

think sex will have to be confirmed by I don't know no, that's not a confirmed spot, it's a made-up spot.

2:01:36 - Paris Martineau
It's a made-up spot I know that I will be requesting all copies of his communications as soon as possible. Oh yes, I'm quite excited.

2:01:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, one thing we know about david sacks who is the new crypto and ai czar and does not, in fact, really have much in involvement in either industry, is that he thinks open ai is what did he say? A non-profit piranha. So so does elon. So that's elon's boy there. Now it's now. It's two people who are against open ai.

2:02:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I think the one thing I just hope for I just should I say it out loud? Oh god, should I say it out loud. I just read the word appointment and jason calacanis ending up in the same sentence no, we can't even dignify that.

2:02:18 - Paris Martineau
Strike that from the record.

2:02:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Cut that, okay, thank you uh, john, can you, can you, can you put that in as a curse word?

2:02:23 - Leo Laporte
I think you're safe. Okay, I think you're safe.

I don't think calacanis is a is a as much of a trumpian as the rest of the all-in podcast is um okay, I don't listen to the podcast, so I don't know yeah, the only reason I say that is alex wilhelm, who is jason's co-host now on this week in startups and a good friend of our network. We love j alex. He's on all the time. Uh, I asked him. I said well, how's it working with jason? He said he's fine. He's not as much of a trumper as you think. I don't know what that means. Yeah, do you think? I don't think jason really wants a job in the administration.

But who knows, you know you just wanted to start a part of the administration called this week in government or something jeff, if, uh, if you got a call from the white house, would you, uh, if they, if they said we have a position for you, would you?

2:03:13 - Jeff Jarvis
wouldn't you have to say, yes, serve our country no, when I was uh at time inc my um editor, pat ryan, my mentor, tried to propose me for a um white house fellowship and you said no, it was an administration that I did not approve of.

2:03:33 - Leo Laporte
No right right uh, let's talk about kosa, which is now called cospa well, that changes everything.

Uh, you may remember privacy you may remember that linda yaccarino, the ceo of xcom, remember that Linda Iaccarino, the CEO of Xcom, said, after working with Congress to improve protection for free speech in COSA, I think this is a great thing and we should pass it. Cosa did pass, shockingly passed the Senate. What was it? 93 to 3? Like a ridiculous majority. But it still has to get through the house and house leadership has, at this point, shown no interest in a term that is rapidly wrapping up in. Uh and taking a look at the bill, um mike masnick, writing in tech dirt. He says the main issue with the bill is the so-called duty of care section, which has vague terminology that will encourage companies to simply remove any controversial content rather than have to fight in court after the fact about whether the content was harmful to kids. On top of that, the bill heavily encourages companies to embrace problematic age verification tools that have already been shown to be a privacy disaster. Yachty, notwithstanding Paris, I think we're still a little suspicious of age verification.

2:04:58 - Paris Martineau
Certainly.

2:04:59 - Leo Laporte
He does say that the changes that Yaccarino is talking about are purely cosmetic rather than substantial. He says it adds a weird reasonable and prudent person standard, which wasn't in the earlier version of the bill, even though it did have exercise reasonable care. So in other words, it's hand waving, it's, it's meaningless phrases that they've stuck in there. The real concern is that platforms are gonna just like those banks that are debanking people, so they don't, they avoid trouble. The platforms are going to do the same thing they're. They're going to just remove all sorts of content that might otherwise lead to lengthy draining and resource intensive legal fights, including all the negative headlines that you get with that, he says. Mike says that's why this is a censorship bill, pure and simple they say it's not about censorship, no, no, no.

In fact, they even have a section in it that says it doesn't violate the first amendment. Honest, mike writes if your bill doesn't violate the first amendment, you don't actually have to put into it.

Hey, don't violate the first amendment with the bill if anything, the new paragraph is an admission that of course the bill can and will be used to infringe first amendment rights. So fortunately I I don't think that it's going to happen just because there's only a couple of weeks left in the session, could come back they do come back, I think it could happen next year I mean blackburn today.

2:06:33 - Paris Martineau
Marcia blackburn today on fox business said that they have the votes for coast at a pass in the house. It's just a matter of the leader and speaker actually putting it on the floor, which um well, that's the problem session but, what happened next maybe uh rand paul who I'm not normally a fan of.

2:06:51 - Leo Laporte
Friend paul says cosa poses such a dire threat to our first amendment rights that house and senate leadership must not agree to add at the last minute to larger pieces of legislation that's what they often do. They put it in the defense spending.

2:07:03 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's the next frontier. What hate watching? Uh morning, joe, as I do now um, this morning, that's that horrible story about the chat that told the kid to kill their parents. I want to see more about that, but anyway. So now they're railing against open source AI. Oh, that's great.

2:07:25 - Paris Martineau
Well, it's not exactly that. They're railing against specifically companies like Character AI and entertainment or role-play based chat bots yeah, but they're going against the next companies like character, ai and entertainment or role play based chat bots.

2:07:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, oh yeah, but we're going against the next step. Yes, you're right, paris, but they went the next step then.

2:07:42 - Leo Laporte
One of the things that Mike says will be ironic.

2:07:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sorry, paris, I interrupted you.

2:07:46 - Leo Laporte
One of the first companies that will be harmed by COSPA is X, yeah, yeah. So that'll be interesting, we'll see. We'll see what happens. We'll watch that with with great interest. Get your popcorn, kids. What did you want to say? I'm sorry, paris, anything no, important. No okay, nothing important 404 media is in trouble now. We love 404 media? Yeah, we do. We support jason keebler and the crew, uh, and I think it's a shame that they are now being subpoenaed by texas attorney general ken paxton. And what does ken paxton want?

he wants access to their reporting notes and sources on an unrelated case so 404 did a story um about uh, Google leaking thousands of privacy incidents. A Google leak reveals thousands of privacy incidents. That was joseph cox story. Paxton is uh going after Google saying that Google violated a texas biometric privacy law. Nevertheless, that has not stopped him from subpoenaing 404. He says, uh, jason writes paxton. Paxton subpoena seeks to turn 404 media into an arm of law enforcement.

Now 404 is in California where there is shield law right, I guess there are no shield laws for media. Yeah, I guess there are no shield laws in Texas, but I don't know which law holds. The lawyers say that the not only is the subpoena oppressive, but their the reporting is protected under the california shield law. So tell us about this as reporters, as journalists. Um, why is this a big deal?

2:09:48 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it's a fundamental tenet of journalism that you protect your sources and that you not capitulate when parties be it Help solve crime.

It's not a journalist's job to provide data directly to law enforcement or agents of the government, be it the US government, european governments or something else.

Fundamentally, the agreement that reporters make, we make with our sources, is we line out how that information is going to be used and what we're going to do with it. And it would be a breach of that kind of contract between two people or multiple people to then hand that data over to the state. I mean from a completely practical purpose, like if you're not even thinking about reaching the sort of underlying agreement there that is between reporter and source. You can't guarantee that the, let's say, you hand over a bunch of documents and the state says, oh, we'll redact all the information that would potentially identify your source. You can't guarantee that the state is going to do that. There's frequently redaction errors or there could have been something left out that people are able to piece together your source, any bit of data that gets out, there is another chance for your source to be identified by people they didn't want to be identified by the sad thing about this is 404 media.

2:11:17 - Leo Laporte
I mean I'm sure it's a shoe shoe string operation. I pay for uh 404 because I want to support these guys. They came from uh well mother, but jason comes from motherboard.

He's former editor uh they all came from motherboard they're all former motherboard, okay, uh, and they're just great reporters who decided you know, um, onceboard was gone. We are going to band together and create our own thing and it's working. It's working. And I subscribe because I want to support Joseph and Jason and Emmanuel and Sam. They're great reporters, they're great people, they deserve our support and they've been on the shows and so I just sent them an extra hundo to support this. Because this, as they say, this is our biggest expense by far is protecting ourselves legally, and you can imagine, hiring a lawyer to fight Ken Paxton is not going to be cheap.

2:12:13 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and I mean they are all worker owners of this business.

They've been part of this growing trend of small media cooperatives that prioritize giving the journalists a stake in the company. They all make way reduced I'm sure I don't know the financials, but I'm sure they make way reduced salaries based on what they were making at Motherboard, which was not that much to begin with, so that they can do journalism from their own hearts, basically that they can decide what they want to publish. And they've made phenomenal decisions and you've seen it borne out and they, I believe, announced some somewhat recently that they now have a million uh hits on their website a month which is huge, like within their. That's great this is they've broken some big stories.

2:12:59 - Leo Laporte
They have broken independence, yeah, and and you know we need to support journalism. Uh, I subscribe. That's why I subscribe to the information, that's why I subscribe to 404. I'd much rather spend my money with independence like that than the big you know presses like the new york times or the washington post although I also do that just because I need access to that stuff and bloomberg, but boy, I think it's. I mean, that's what we are right. We're an independent, non-affiliated uh, journalistic enterprise. Do you believe in casey newton's phony comforts of ai skepticism set?

2:13:38 - Jeff Jarvis
paris on this one Newton's phony comforts of AI skepticism.

2:13:40 - Paris Martineau
Set Paris on this one, Jeff you describe the Casey Newton angle, and then I'll take the different ones that have come out against this.

2:13:47 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like the Boston article it puts up a straw man of two extremes of views on it and then tries to shoot them down. And the straw men are wrong. So, paris, you want to describe the straw men?

2:14:10 - Paris Martineau
So let me find it here. Casey newton basically is saying there are two different camps here in ai. Um, that there are the uh ai is fake and sucks camp and the ai is real and dangerous camp. And then he makes the case as to why the first camp is totally immune to evidence and has their heads up their own butts and the second camp is basically right and that eventually, you know, uh like ai is going to be real and dangerous but it eventually is going to make such progress that those dangers are going to become way more important than it not working. And this led to a bunch of different pieces criticizing his piece and then Casey criticizing those criticisms and you know it's-. Which is exactly what he wanted.

Of course, of course.

2:14:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a good way and I, by the way, I subscribed to the platformer too, because that was the place to I think Casey's great yeah, dave carp responding you know he had, I thought, a really good piece on this it's very um, I think it's very uh simplifying things to say there's these two points of view. Yeah, I'm not on either camp.

2:15:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I am a little nervous probably described what paris said to me before we got on the air is there's there's a lot of middle grounds between these supposed camps, between I won't do anything no, I'm in the middle ground well, another thing is yeah, I don't think

2:15:27 - Paris Martineau
he carp writes, there's a substantial difference between it's all fake and sucks and this cannot actually replace your radiologist, your lawyer or the entire epa, and I think that's really reasonable is the people who are saying that Casey is reducing to this is all fake and sucks are saying, hey, a lot of the things that these companies are promising this is going to do imminently or already can do, it can't, and that's a real problem and something that we should address.

2:15:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's much more nuanced than either of those positions. Obviously and I am a little nervous about ai, especially as we start seeing more and this is why I put the morris of article in there is um, it's off is especially now being used for, uh, military purposes.

2:16:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's concerning his, because paul murlucky wants to put ai in charge of basically murder drones. He says, yes, really need tech journalists to ask hard questions about whether his product actually works, because faulty, murder, murder drones deployed at the border by a government that is largely indifferent to excess casualties and a company that certainly won't be able to share that data could be a disaster. He basically just says that it's too dismissive to label this entire branch of skepticism as like it's all fake and sucks because lots of money is being spent here.

2:16:56 - Jeff Jarvis
And the other problem is that it misses. The argument I have all the time is that the conflation of safety in legitimate present tense concerns and doomerism and X risk, which is BS alongside AGI, and so the nomenclature of the discussion is all screwed up and you've got to define your terms going in carefully, otherwise you're falling into traps I read an article.

2:17:20 - Leo Laporte
I'm trying to find it, but uh, I read an article this morning by a coder who said uh, you know when all coders, when they're writing code, should consider some of the uses of this code and take responsibility for it, instead of just saying, oh, this is an interesting problem, uh, let me solve it, because very often it is going to be weaponized and used against people, sometimes even in a military context. He was working, he went out of school as an intern, a project he found really interesting, solving for how to do location finding using wi-fi signal strength. But the guy running DOD contractor, running the project that he was writing for, kept coming in and saying but can you use it to locate phones? And they said well, not yet. No, well, that's something we're not really. And he kept asking that question.

And finally, the guy who wrote the article I wish I could find it here, I'm gonna keep looking for it said oh, this is, the whole purpose of this is to be able to locate phones by their Wi-Fi signal so that they can kill the person who has the phone, so they can target them. And he said this is the problem is that we, as coders, we get excited about things. It's an interesting problem, but we often don't think hard enough about what the ultimate use of this would be. And and he says this is the thing you, as a coder, you have superpowers. You're able to get a computer to do what you know something interesting you really to. You have a higher responsibility to consider what you're teaching it to do before you do it.

2:19:07 - Paris Martineau
I feel like the crux of Casey's argument and all the backlash can be summarized, and I feel like we even talked about this a little bit earlier on in the show it's who should we be giving the benefit of the doubt to Skeptics AI skeptics that are perhaps underestimating what the technology should do, or AI hypers, who are overestimating what the tech can do and when it can do it? And I think that the answer is very nuanced.

Like I think, when we're talking about companies that have raised billions of dollars. I think it's way more reasonable to give credence to the skeptics versus those billion-dollar companies' marketing machines. It's all about power. If this was, you know, some kid who's developed a cool AI system and is like actually, I've done a lot with this and I think that in a year, we can do even more and it'll be incredible Okay, go off. That's great, but when it is someone incredibly powerful making these potentially hyperbolic statements, it deserves more criticism.

2:20:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah well, and he even has the famous uh quote from jurassic park, with jeff clovelem saying the problem was scientists didn't ask. They were so excited about what they could do, they didn't ask whether they should do it. And I think, with AI, this is something that is going on. I mean, we've said this from the very beginning, that this is an Oppenheimer moment. You know that the people who are creating this, I think, have a really higher responsibility to make sure it's not going to be used against humans.

2:20:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, but I will come up with my argument I do all the time is I think you're fooling yourself to think that that can be done.

2:20:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it may not, that may not the, the quest for the guard rails is um futile well, and so we gotta, we gotta, realize even if, even if we, as in the united states, as responsible coders, do it, there are coders in russia and china and all over the world who will not ask that question or do it.

2:21:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Somebody can create a model, thinking they've thought of everything. And then somebody comes along and says I thought of a new way to destroy mankind.

2:21:14 - Leo Laporte
Tell me how to do it and it will, by the way I think that's the conversation palmer lucky had with himself, which is well you know, because palmer lucky, of course, as the created andoril, but before that he was the oculus rift guy made billions of dollars when he sold it uh to meta, uh, and has since worked on ai in military, for military purposes. In fact, andoril, I think, was used, uh, to close the border, right, right, or to track people coming across the border. I think in his head he said, well, yeah, this could be used in a bad way, this could be malicious, but I would rather develop this for the United States as a defense project, given that other countries are going to be doing this. We can't just lie down and say, okay, fine, let them, we'll be ethical, we won't develop something dangerous. We need it for defense because they're gonna right, which is a nice rationalization.

You could say well, it's a rationalization, but it's also somewhat pragmatic, right they? We know that there are plenty of nations and very good coders in those nations who probably would like to make autonomous weaponry and so, and fine, put it in pete hexeth's hands. Yeah, yeah not that I'm being well should, should we be?

I mean, let's is it? Should we be? Um, okay, we're. Uh, it doesn't seem risky to say, okay, we're not going to do that, uh, we're going to be. You know, we're going down with the ship, but we're at least we'll be ethically, uh, clean well, there's defensive and offensive uses and ways to look at this yeah, but I think offense and defense are kind of uh indistinguishable.

When, let's say, the chinese come up with robots, this is completely hypothetical robot soldiers, that can you know. I mean, one of the one of the things that protects the united states is we're pretty hard to do invade. It's a big, big country and a lot of. If only canada would but let's say the chinese create a hundred million robot soldiers that can invade us. Um oh, but we were clean, we wouldn't want to ever do a robot soldier.

2:23:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Then we have no defense I think you could do research on how to destroy robot soldiers. That's a good start.

2:23:37 - Leo Laporte
That's a good start, it's, by the way. This is why we have mutually assured destruction. This is why, yes, nations with atomic weapons make sure that they can destroy the other country if it tries to attack them, because that's what's keeping us safe. We are walking on a razor's edge, let's just face it. And the ai company that made robots as comforts for children went bust. And now the robots Moxie. They're dying.

Hey kid your friend is dead. I have to think that there are very few people who bought these robots for their kids. Yeah, I think so, and they probably. I don't know, maybe you should have the robot go away. So $800,. The company that made them, the Moxie robot, was called Embodied. They announced this week that they didn't get their funding round and they're shutting down. So when they shut down, so will Moxie. Now I have a robot that shut down. I mean, of course, I didn't give it to my kids. Do you want to see Moxie at work Last chance? Aw, moxie's waving her arms. Aw, moxie made a doo-doo on the kitchen table. Oh, no, that's not Moxie. I don't know. I don't't know. Get your kids a dog, okay, or a bodega cat, don't. Don't get him a robot, although it's a teaching moment. So, yeah, we sent the robot to a farm. He's gonna be able to make a happy life. The robot farm. Did your parents ever do that to you with a pet?

2:25:26 - Paris Martineau
yep, yep I when I was, uh, a child. My first ever pet was a betta fish and, um, one day I came home and it was dead and my mother was like, oh, your friend came over and overfed it and it died. And then we ended up getting a new fish. But I only realized, like within the last like five or six years, I was like mom, what the hell was that explanation? Of course, a friend didn't come over when I was at school. Oh yeah, no, I overfed it. I don't know why I said that it wasn't me.

2:26:00 - The Panel
I fed it. I don't know why I said that it wasn't me.

2:26:02 - Paris Martineau
I didn't do it. That's really funny. Did you guys ever have death?

2:26:04 - Leo Laporte
via fish to your children.

2:26:05 - Paris Martineau
Worse, I didn't realize a common first experience with death is fish for kids.

2:26:10 - Leo Laporte
I didn't realize that beta fish are sometimes called fighting fish oh yeah, they will attack and you don't want to put two betta fish in the same tank.

2:26:19 - Jeff Jarvis
You think they'd be called alpha fish?

2:26:20 - Leo Laporte
then they will kill each other and we had quite an apocalypse. Oh no.

2:26:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no.

2:26:30 - Leo Laporte
On the bettas. But I told Henry that a friend came over and started betting money on betta fish fighting. And well, you know what happens.

2:26:41 - Jeff Jarvis
How many did you?

2:26:42 - Leo Laporte
have. I had a lot. I don't know why I was so stupid. I went out, I got the tank, I got the whole thing. You know what the pet store should have said oh, don't put these all in the same tank.

2:26:56 - Paris Martineau
Well, because then you came back and bought more fish, More fish yeah, and they died fish.

2:27:00 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I did, by the way, lessons yeah, I didn't learn my lesson, so, uh, do not, do not combine male betta fish, or actually male and female betta fish. Don't put them in this. The only people who can get together in the betta fish world are two female betta fishes. But how do you know?

2:27:19 - Jeff Jarvis
as as normal right.

2:27:21 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that the way of right, then, yep but guys are such jerks yeah, you can't have a male and a female, and you can't have a male and a male. Yeah, it's the guy, it's the problem, isn't it the? Male, always, always, yeah the uh court has decided to tell matt mullenweg you cannot cut off wp engine so now they have to roll it back, which is crazy that was a shocker.

Um, I'm not sure, I don't know. Uh, mullenweg said he had the right to disable wp engines account access and make changes to the plug-in for the sake of public safety. Oops, public safety, again, public safety.

2:28:07 - Paris Martineau
Um, however, wp engines executives said that the vulnerability was minor and was fixed uh the judge found merit in wp engines claims that automatics actions harmed business relationships, saying Mullenweg's conduct is designed to induce breach or disruption.

2:28:27 - Leo Laporte
Wow. So he ordered him put it back. Put it back. That wasn't the right thing to do. Bad Matt, all right. Right thing to do, bad matt, uh, all right. Let's, uh, let's break and we will have our uh bits, our final bits, and kibbles and bits at the end. The good stuff, the pics of the week coming up. You're watching This Week in Google with Paris Marinteau and Jeff Jarvis and, uh, this is the part of the show where I beg you for money because money's a little tight around here but if you've already given it, you won't hear this and think how nice that right only if you're watching live, because we haven't figured out how to bleep it on the live stream if you're watching live.

2:29:13 - Paris Martineau
This is what you're here for is to hear the behind the scenes yes, that's right.

2:29:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, yeah, this is the part you won't see to feel superior to all those people who aren't giving you get ad-free versions of all of our shows when you pay us a mere seven dollars a month.

2:29:27 - Leo Laporte
You know so a little behind the scenes, lisa and I are having discussions. She said I don't know what we're gonna do, we don't have any money. I said well, we could raise the price of the club. We both thought about that and we went nah, uh, we want to make it affordable. Seven bucks a month, it's not even a paywall. You still get all our content, except for like kind of the special stuff, and you can even watch that live.

2:29:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, what we really want huh, it's like the guardian, where you you want to reward it and you wanted people to be able to watch.

2:29:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't want to. I don't, I really don't want to pay. Well, I just want to be able to keep doing what we're doing. But currently advertisers are so scared even ones that have been with us literally for seven years are not returning our calls, and I just think that everybody's a little nervous about, uh, what's going to happen in the world? Anyway, for whatever reason, I did see a stat that 50% of all the ad dollars in podcasting go to 10 shows, the top 10 shows. Half of all the money is going to the top 10 shows and the rest of us are splitting. Historically, we've done very well, but it's just not going to continue to work without the help of our audience. That's all I'm saying. And you can do it by just joining the club. For seven bucks a month you get ad-free versions of all the shows, you get special programming. Tomorrow we're going to do Chris Marquardt's photo section. That's something we brought back because the club wanted it. We do a lot of club content, but we won't be able to do it much longer without your help.

Twittv slash club twit. I don't know. I don't want to beg, but I also don't want you to say, hey, you should have told us. You needed the money, we need the money, I told you, and it doesn't go to me, by the way, it doesn't go to my pocket, I'm not getting paid. It goes to keep people like Paris and Jeff compensated. You get a minor stipend, but that's where the money goes. It goes to people like John Ashley and Kevin King and Benito's coming back he just got back into town. It goes to our staff. Anthony Nielsen does such a great job. Please, if you have it, we would love it if you would participate. Join the club. You can be in the Discord. You can hang out with us. Twittv club to enough said. I don't want to. I don't want to belabor. It pays for patrick delahanny's son's cub scouts uniform. Just think of that. Poor caden could could go to cub scouts with no uniform and he would be so embarrassed. Just think about that.

2:32:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Oops, terrible. I was going to brag that I'm in Club Twit, but I just found out that I didn't change my credit card, so now I have to do it again.

2:32:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you don't have to pay for it.

2:32:11 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I do it.

2:32:13 - Leo Laporte
Our hosts are in there. No, I do it happily, a mere $7 a month.

2:32:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, no, I do it happily. A mere $7 a month.

2:32:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not expensive.

2:32:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, now I've got the right credit card.

2:32:21 - Leo Laporte
Okay now I'm back, we were thinking $10 and I thought, yeah, I just don't want people to not be able to afford it, and if you go to a Starbucks and you get a Frappuccino, it's going to cost you seven bucks. Don't you think this is worth at least giving up one Frappuccino a month?

2:32:37 - Jeff Jarvis
and no calories. It's calorie free.

2:32:39 - Leo Laporte
Twit is calorie free no content, but no calories either. So there you go, we're just passing the hat. Paris martineau, what do you have for us for a pick this week?

2:32:53 - Paris Martineau
uh, I was pulling up some data from similar web web for a different story and I realized that they're tracking uh daily active users on blue sky versus threads oh they're a little chart and I don't know. I just found it very interesting that, uh, over the last two weeks, blue sky and threads have been neck and neck. Basically, when it comes to daily active use that's actually impressive because threads has albiette.

There are a couple of caveats this is the web version of it, so a bit different. The app data is coming a bit later because they don't currently have uh worldwide data for ios devices. But this is worldwide. I think it's quite interesting. Um, my more in-depth pick of the week is more of a plea of the week. The skee-ball team has decided to do a white elephant party in a week or two. I love white elephant parties.

You know where everybody brings a silly gift of some sort, you all have to open it. You try to steal each other's gifts. What should I bring? It's got to be an interesting gag gift. I was thinking of maybe bringing a yard of beef. Have you heard of these?

2:34:07 - Leo Laporte
Is it three feet?

2:34:10 - Paris Martineau
Search Hillshire Farm yard of beef.

2:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Yard O.

2:34:14 - Paris Martineau
You could just say yard O beef it will come up.

2:34:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, I got this once at a. It's a three-foot-long summer sausage.

2:34:24 - Paris Martineau
It's kind of ridiculous.

2:34:26 - Leo Laporte
That's for Hank. Hank would love that. Oh no, these are not good.

2:34:30 - Paris Martineau
No, they're definitely not good, oh they're disgusting, but it's very funny. That's the thing is it can't. I mean, maybe it could be desirable, but ideally I just want.

2:34:38 - Leo Laporte
I think you've got to give some Hawk to a coin.

2:34:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh no, I can't. I can't purchase Hawk to a coin. But that's the right spirit of the gift. Right right, people have tweeted. If you can think of something incredibly silly that would be worthwhile for me to give, I think the Yard of Beef is pretty darn good Yard of. Beef right now is the current winner winner.

2:34:55 - Leo Laporte
What you want is. So the whole idea is you wrap it up right and then you draw numbers and then, uh, the first person goes and opens, picks it from the pile and opens it, and then in. Then ensues every time yeah free for all where people can take it.

2:35:13 - Paris Martineau
You can steal someone else's gift or you pick a new one. You want to have something that's kind of silly but maybe desirable, or something that people could get stuck with. I don't know. Yard of beef seems pretty good, it's either.

2:35:23 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why my two jammer b says it's it's hard to wrap a yard of beef, but I think you're wrong, jammer b.

2:35:29 - Paris Martineau
I think a yard long sausage a little a box like a big rectangular box, and it's heavy too.

2:35:37 - Leo Laporte
I would go right to it yeah because you're like what?

2:35:40 - Paris Martineau
is this strange? Why did I yard of beef beef? It's either that or a rotisserie chicken, is my two thoughts. I don't know why they're both. How about a bodega cat? I mean? Yeah, but that's the thing is, some of my friends have too many cats.

2:35:54 - Leo Laporte
We actually went to a white elephant where somebody gave a had a animal like maybe a fish or a lizard or something, and we said no, no, no you that's not okay. You can't do that no, no, no, um, but it is fun. I I always, all year long I think about, but nobody ever invites me to one of these I think about. Oh, I don't want that. I'm going to give that away as a never I, always, never get.

2:36:19 - Paris Martineau
I mean, you'd be a good person for this, because you have a bunch of stuff to give away a bunch of crap, absolutely.

2:36:25 - Leo Laporte
How about you know what? I think this would be a good, uh good gift. Give somebody a scary buddha scary buddha could be good scary buddha.

2:36:34 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's good I like scary buddha he's supposed to be cheerful, but he's.

2:36:38 - Leo Laporte
It depends on the angle of the light oh yeah, no, he's. He's goes from intimidating to haunting I have him here to inspire me, because I too go from intimidating to haunting. I would stick with the yard of beef, I think your yard of beef is the current winner yeah I think, uh, now, weirdly I also get, when I do a search for that, beef cattle yards.

2:37:03 - Paris Martineau
So be careful what you, what you give listen, I'm going to get the, og we know yeah, there's a part of me that I think you can get like. Uh, yeah get an entire lamb of some sort from costco? Yeah, that could be fun, but that would be hard to carry um yeah, we had so much good stuff but we gave it all away.

2:37:28 - Leo Laporte
When we closed the studio that was full of white elephant.

2:37:31 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, god yeah well, those are all good gift ideas.

2:37:35 - Leo Laporte
It's got to be bad I, you know, if it weren't the holiday season, I'd give you my bottle brush Christmas trees, but I can't afford to give those up. How about that telephone? That'd be good.

2:37:47 - Paris Martineau
I mean, listen, you're all once again giving actually good gift ideas.

2:37:51 - Leo Laporte
That's too good, wrong thing.

2:37:53 - Paris Martineau
It's got to be kind of a burden.

2:37:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, there is one of our listeners who's a wonderful guy. We call him mick the wick. He's from athens, ohio. He sends me every year about 40 pounds of cheese and and actually there's usually a summer sausage in there from ohio but one year he sent it to the post office box not knowing that I don't check the post office box all that often so you had a bunch of moldy cheese. Three months later I go and I get the cheese.

2:38:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, Jeff Jarvis so you know, you keep hearing how ai is going to take over the world. Agi is coming, it's going to be smarter than us, it's's going to destroy everything. And you keep hearing how the ad business is surveillance, capitalism. And you add these two things together and it's late stage capitalism. It's going to destroy the earth and it's awful. But advertising is so damn stupid. If you go to line 182, you'll see what this post was advertising me, and I had no idea what it is now. Since then I have asked but why was it advertising this to me?

2:39:11 - Leo Laporte
why did the washington post think you wanted whatever the hell that is? By the way, it's 68% off.

2:39:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, in that case? So people responded and told me what it was.

2:39:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, it says it's a something light, a flux light.

2:39:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's an optical fiber connector. They go to network switches, routers et cetera. And if you terminate fiber optical cable, why is advertising on the Washington?

2:39:42 - Leo Laporte
Post advertising that and then the next thing, and you don't, by the way, you don't do those things that many of our audience members do to kind of distract advertisers. You don't turn off tracking, you turn it on.

2:39:52 - Jeff Jarvis
You want it I want to be tracked. I take cookies. I take ads. I don't click on. Give me an advert right.

2:39:59 - Leo Laporte
Here's another one.

2:39:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Next thing find the right model for you advertising is stupid and stupid and it's not taking over the world.

2:40:11 - Paris Martineau
I had this exact same experience this week. We're on Instagram. I got a sponsored ad for a roll of like labeled stickers that just say shrimp, and then I went through the carousel and they were also stickers that said a hot dog, one that says warning that's your gift for the white elephant. Oh my God, you're so right. We've solved the world's problems.

2:40:43 - Leo Laporte
Yes, a roll of staples. That is such a non sequitur. I love it.

2:40:49 - Paris Martineau
That's really good actually.

2:40:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Now you gotta go find it again.

2:40:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I posted it on Blue Sky, so yes, I will be buying it. It's from In Stock Labels and dang it. They were right.

2:41:02 - Jeff Jarvis
What are some of the other labels that you can get there Paris?

2:41:05 - Paris Martineau
So Hot Dog, that's, a good one too. Warning this product has not been pasteurized and therefore may contain harmful bacterias and can cause serious illness in children, the elderly and persons.

2:41:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you give that to Robert Kennedy. That's too valuable. You put that on everything in your refrigerator and nobody would use your food soon, soon, when raw milk comes into the grocery stores, you put it on.

2:41:28 - Paris Martineau
That's true, right one that says italian and it says fully cooked. I do think I need all of them, is the thing?

2:41:36 - Leo Laporte
yes, yes wow, oh, how could you?

2:41:41 - Jeff Jarvis
not have seen it was.

2:41:42 - Paris Martineau
I can't believe I didn't see it, but it you're so right and so the advertising was brilliant it really was brilliant uh, did you?

2:41:52 - Leo Laporte
somebody put this in here the elon uh stickers from the new york times I just put it in. Yeah, yeah I. These are stickers that people who drive teslas put on their car. I bought this before elon went crazy. Anti-elon tesla club. Shut up, elon. It would be embarrassing uh for uh people of a certain political stripe to be driving a tesla right now. I'm glad I don't. Uh, there's some good stickers too, but those are too good. I don't think they fit the white elephant god, no, oh no I'm buying this shrimp

sticker is nine dollars, hot dog how many stickers do you get for nine dollars, though it's gotta?

2:42:34 - Paris Martineau
be a ton of uh 500.

2:42:39 - Leo Laporte
that's the beauty of it do you get points for actually giving a gift that nobody takes, nobody wants uh, no, you want something yeah what's the?

2:42:48 - Paris Martineau
what's the? Yeah?

2:42:49 - Jeff Jarvis
what's the winner?

2:42:51 - Paris Martineau
I do think that. I do think that if I'm going to include in this italian and fully cooked, and people will fight over that because you know, can you uh do a video of your white elephant party?

2:43:05 - Leo Laporte
I think that'd be really oh yeah yeah, I'll see what we can do.

2:43:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I would really like that at least, at least, who ends up with the shrimp stickers.

2:43:15 - Paris Martineau
I will take a photo of someone with a shrimp sticker on their forehead for sure.

2:43:22 - Leo Laporte
Little programming note. We will be here next week. That'll be the last show of the year for the three of us. Following week, of course, is Christmas Day. We do have a best of that our talented team has been working on practically all year. Thank you, fun note that will be episode 800.

The best of TWiG, episode 800. And is the next week? The worst of Next week is New Year's Day and you have the day off to recover from your hangover. So this is 798. Two weeks without you. We'll be here for 799, and then we get the rest of the year off and we will be back. I guess that means January 6th, a day that will live in infamy. January 8th Close enough, oh, thank God.

2:44:13 - Jeff Jarvis
What is it?

2:44:16 - Leo Laporte
Is that right? Wednesday? Yeah, january 8th, you're right. Oh, so we're not here New Year's day. Okay, that's right.

2:44:22 - John Ashley
Yeah, we're close New Year's day, but we are back live the following day, the following week, at the following day, yeah, yeah.

2:44:28 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis is the former professor emeritus. No, no, I'm still emeritus, oh, always emeritus. Now I'm a former professor, now emeritus journalist folks professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university of Newark, John Johnny you're sleeping.

2:44:52 - John Ashley
I'm purposely not doing it, just to spite, oh, cause I know, because this is. I do know. No, because Benita is coming back and I won't be here, aww.

2:45:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I know we love working with you, Alright hold on one second, craig Craig. Craig. Newmont, Newport. Patrick's School of.

2:45:11 - Leo Laporte
Journalism at the City of Newport Now at Montclair State University and at the SUNY Stony Brook campus, where he is still going to be teaching journalism to some very lucky people Are undergraduates or graduates, don't know yet.

2:45:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, you don't even know, I wrote a syllabus for an undergrad course, nice, in art and AI and creativity.

2:45:33 - Leo Laporte
I love that. Oh, that should get a lot of attention. Do they test your proposals to see if there's interest?

2:45:43 - Jeff Jarvis
No, they go through the curriculum committee and then they go up and if not enough students sign up, it gets killed from the catalog.

2:45:51 - Leo Laporte
So you do have to get a certain number of signups. You will. You will, in fact, if you're lucky enough to be at Montclair or SUNY, you ought to go right over there and sign up. Thank you, jeff. Appreciate it. Don't forget Jeff's book, the Web we Weave available bookstores now and, of course, the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine, now in paperback. Now in paperback, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which makes it a little easier to carry around in your pocket. Thank you, jeff. Paris Martineau writes for the information. She covers youth issues, but I think you cover whatever, right, because the yachting thing, whatever, yeah, I mean, that was in some way connected to child safety, because oh, I guess you're right one of the tech companies.

2:46:32 - Paris Martineau
But yeah, I'm currently uh, the shrimp labels are connected to everything. I'm currently looking at a label that says beef. That could be kind of funny Beef is good.

2:46:42 - Leo Laporte
Beef's going to go well.

2:46:44 - Paris Martineau
Italian beef and fully cooked. Yeah, there's a lot of them.

2:46:48 - Jeff Jarvis
That's nice. What's the name of this place?

2:46:52 - Paris Martineau
InStockLabelscom.

2:46:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh Okay, because Patrick found something at BrenMarcocom, which is a label that says great for soup.

2:47:04 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's actually huge. That will kill. Hold on. Yeah, I got to get in great for soup, Apparently there's a whole lot of these Paris.

2:47:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, paris. Did you shop? Did you go to the warehouse labels? There is Void if Broken Biohazard.

2:47:21 - Paris Martineau
Oh man irradiated is one that's really good danger poison stop.

2:47:27 - Leo Laporte
But you're not going to beat the brenmar price. Of four dollars and 30 cents for 1 000.

2:47:32 - John Ashley
Great for soup stickers, hold on oh my, how about the one I just linked you, paris, oh no.

2:47:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me see it's Sticker Mania. Exempt animal specimen.

2:47:43 - Paris Martineau
Exempt animal specimen Ha Ha Ha.

2:47:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Takeout. I like that one. This is sealed for safety. Oh boy, this is great.

2:47:54 - John Ashley
They have a whole section on medical shipping, healthcare labels, everyday use labels, food labels. This is instocklabels.com Everything possible.

2:48:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is a beautiful thing let's not promote this too big. We don't want Paris to be scooped. You could just give everybody a use-by sticker would be good.

2:48:14 - Paris Martineau
That is pretty good. It's tough, it's tough.

2:48:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So, many, but the shrimp were the entry.

2:48:24 - Paris Martineau
I think the shrimp speak. Shrimp is good. It should be simple, fantastic straightforward. It says I might be making two purchases for or purchase from two different stores, because I need great for soup, but I also need to spend this time, so ladies and gentlemen, I am hoping you get the stickers of your choice for this holiday season and, uh, share it with a friend.

2:48:46 - Leo Laporte
We do this show every Wednesday, 2 pm pacific, 5pm eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream live. That's why I tell you the live times, so you can't actually watch us do this live. If you're in the club, of course, you can watch on discord, but there's also Youtube, Twitch, Kick, X, Linkedin, Facebook, TikTok. I think that's it. I think that's all of them. Anyway, that's where we're streaming. You can watch us live. There are a good number of people doing that right now about 590.

Thank you, of course the majority of people watch after the fact, because it's a podcast. You can get your copy of the show at the website twit.tv/twig. When you go there, you'll see a link to the Youtube channel where you can find the video. That's actually a good place to share video from. Do a little clip, send along to your friends and family, say you won't believe what these people are up to, and, of course, you could subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That's the way I think you should do it. That way you get it automatically the minute it's available. Links all at the website twit.tv/twig. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, a special thanks to our club twit members who paid the bills for this show today. Thank you, thank you, thank you this show today.

Thank you, thank you thank you people, thank you and we will see you next week for episode 799 of This Week in Google bye.