This Week in Google 801 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig. This week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is here, paris Martineau Big changes coming down at meta properties, including Facebook, instagram and threads. We'll talk about that and why it happened. Of course, we talk about AI and a little bit of a change coming to the show next month. This week in Google coming up next Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

This is Twig. It's time for Twig this week in Google, episode 801, recorded Wednesday, january 8th 2025. Human beings it's time for Twig this Week in Google, the show where we cover everything but Google. Well, we might have a little Google in this one. Joining me right now. It's wonderful to have for our first show of 2025, the woman who was born on 25, but not in 25, but her birthday will be in 2525.

0:01:06 - Jeff Jarvis
You made that entirely too confusing From the information 2525.

0:01:10 - Paris Martineau
See if you can work that out. People who didn't listen to the pre-show. It's a riddle. Happy 2025,. Guys, I missed you, I wanted to hear what your last two weeks went once we introduced that other guy.

0:01:21 - Leo Laporte
We missed you too. You actually were scheduled for our year-end twit or no? The first twit of the year.

0:01:29 - Paris Martineau
I know I've had a weird two weeks. I had to work over basically the entire Christmas week and then I got sick and it's been rough. Listen, as the doctor said, when I had to call in for to get a prescription, they looked at my chart and went hey, 2025 can't get any worse for you, huh.

0:01:50 - Jeff Jarvis
And I was like well, I guess you could say that that's bedside manner if only that were true.

0:01:57 - Leo Laporte
Uh, that's jeff jarvis. He is a professor of journalism at montclair state university and at the State University of New York, stony Brook, and, of course, professor emeritus at the Journalism professor of journalistic innovation, no less, at the Craig Journalism at the City University of New York. And we only mention that because we have to play that damn jingle. It's tradition, tradition. Why are you wearing a Burger?

0:02:29 - Jeff Jarvis
King hat we were talking about so next week I'm taking a class from the Rare Book School. Oh, so this is the hat that I got.

0:02:36 - Leo Laporte
I love it. That is what a press man would wear in the day back in the day when they had presses Fold up a newsprint and make hats. Is that to keep the ink out of your hair? Yeah, I think so.

0:02:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It's just pretty disgusting stuff, no kidding.

0:02:51 - Paris Martineau
Have you guys ever seen the movie the Hudsucker Proxy?

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I just tried to watch that the other day.

0:02:56 - Paris Martineau
It's on. Amazon is where it's available.

0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
It's pretty horrible, no it's one of the best movies ever made. Okay, so maybe I gotta give it some more time, people say, oh, it's one of the Coen brothers' worst films. It's a little broad, I'd argue One of their best. I mean, it's incredibly specific, that's amazing.

0:03:14 - Paris Martineau
It is a movie about securities fraud and a hot female business journalist, and so that's a movie made for me. It's also themed around New Year's, so I timed it on my new year's eve, so that right when it was new year's eve in the movie and they jump off the building and they yeah, which isn't a spoiler, because it happens in the first second it's jennifer jason lee, and that is amazing.

Jennifer jason lee did and so this reminded me of. They work at an old-timey newspaper and uh are sitting there, tip, tap, a tap and all of their uh little stories out and then yell copy and I was like, oh man, I remember jeff telling me about see you now know that whole, you know yeah now I know I I love the khan brothers.

0:03:56 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I love them and uh, they've made some weird ones. This was so stylized it kind of turned me off, but maybe I'll watch it was very delightfully stylized.

0:04:03 - Paris Martineau
It was very broad, you off, but maybe I'll watch.

0:04:04 - Leo Laporte
It was very broadly stylized it was very broad, you know. So maybe no, like the whole fire in the office thing is like uh, jerry lewis, broad, I mean it's so broad I mean it's uh it's kind of style it's stylized after, like his girl friday style.

Um, but that was a good ball comedies yeah that I like screwball comedies, but they had. They were a little less, I don't know, maybe I'll watch it again. I'll watch it again. Since you like it so much, I shall watch it again. So what the hell's going on at meta? A lot of things, um. So nick clegg is out. He was sir nick to you, sir nick the uh, he was in charge of public affairs, right yeah, he was president of policy or some such thing yeah, and he was a progressive from england.

Yes, relatively, relatively, he's been replaced wasn't labor, but he's yeah, okay, so he was a, but not such a toy. No, he wasn't a tory he was.

0:05:11 - Jeff Jarvis
He was in the uh, that's how that he became vice prime minister, because he was in the coalition. Okay, ftp, not ftp, whatever it's called there yeah gdpr whatever I don't know, we don't know.

0:05:24 - Leo Laporte
So he was deputy prime minister and then uh went to meta to be responsible for their kind of outside world relations. He has been replaced by his deputy, who is a mega republican, I think joel very much so, very much so. And what the? What people are starting to think at this point is that Zuckerberg, in a somewhat cynical business decision, has decided to um take Facebook. What do? What I mean either? Eliminating, uh, so the fact that they pay.

0:06:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I was there at the beginning of all of this after 2016,. They went through a lot and that's how I raised money from Meta at the time for disinformation things and research things and all kinds of stuff.

At the same time they started paying for fact-checking. There was a whole magilla where they had to figure out the structure with the official fact-checkers organization of the world to pick the fact-checkers and then the fact-checkers would send stuff in and they spent a fair amount of money on this. It was never really effective. Um and I was just talking to to a friend from actually google what do you mean by?

not effective in a few things. One, you didn't necessarily see them. Uh, there was debate about they got in all kinds of trouble if something was fact checked, where people were arguing they were, they were, they were accused of censorship. And then there's research that said that when people saw a fact check, it made them more likely uh, in some cases not all uh to um to like that which had been fact-checked as negative, interesting right like.

0:06:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, screw you institutions, right you know right, but the idea was, I think, in response to the accusation that Meta had been used to foster genocide in Myanmar and elsewhere, that the platform had a problem, which is known as human beings, the idea that it had a responsibility to not promote content that it knew to be false and specifically disinformation in the sense that weaponized false information.

0:07:28 - Paris Martineau
And this also happened around the time that Facebook decided to I believe in the wake of the 2016 election deprioritize political news generally in the feed, and that's a principle that it is so far carried over onto things like Instagram and definitely explicitly onto threads where, if you post links to political news, those posts get downranked and they're harder to be seen by the people who follow you.

0:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we should say that. I shouldn't say Facebook. This is a meta change. Yeah, this is meta, so it applies to both Facebook and. Instagram.

0:08:06 - Paris Martineau
While the thing that got, I think, the most news is the decision to do with fact-checking in favor of kind of a X-style, Twitter-style community notes, another thing that also happened in this is they've decided to get rid of that rule on political content on Facebook.

0:08:23 - Leo Laporte
So you're going to see more political content.

0:08:25 - Paris Martineau
Going to see, yeah, more political content.

0:08:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Whether we see more news and links. Have you seen this about Paris? Have you seen anything with it? Because they have definitely downgraded news and links both. Have you seen anything that comes back up again or no?

0:08:37 - Paris Martineau
I don't know if it's news and links, but I know that it is political content, so I would assume that it applies to political links. Political content, so I would assume that it applies to political links. And I think Mike Isaac of the New York Times rightfully pointed out or perhaps it was someone else that it's notable that Mark Zuckerberg decided to suppress or downrank the political content during a Democratic presidency and is going to allow it during a republican presidency I might argue that I don't think zuckerberg is political, but is doing what's expedient at this point.

0:09:13 - Leo Laporte
He said in his video announcing this the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech you see, that's.

0:09:23 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the right, that's the right wing trope, and the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial praising him today, because fact checking was censorship and it was against free speech and so allowing anyone to say anything bad is the right wing view of free speech. Stopping people from being harassed is the left wing view of free speech.

0:09:44 - Paris Martineau
And specifically I think it's worth noting that Zuck was very clear about kind of his motives even in this announcement. He said fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created. He also said he's going to move, I believe, the remaining moderator program from California to Texas because he's worried that Californians are too biased, which is also kind of a misnomer because they currently have moderators in Texas already.

0:10:15 - Leo Laporte
It's just bizarre that he thinks because they're in California, they're going to be biased.

0:10:20 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, they're super objective in Texas, all of them. They're totally objective over there.

0:10:24 - Jeff Jarvis
By the way, you're subjecting yourself there to the laws of texas that say that you can't take things down right?

0:10:30 - Leo Laporte
um, if it's, maybe that's why I like charlie wartsall's taking the atlantic about this his headline. We're all trying to find the guy who did this yeah uh, because zuck acted as if all the things that had happened in the last few years, you know, had just happened. But he's the unmoderated dictator of Facebook. He's got absolute control. He also added uh, the the uh. Ceo of UFC, dana White.

0:11:01 - Jeff Jarvis
This is that's.

0:11:02 - Leo Laporte
That's almost the most absurd thing who admits himself that he has no experience in social or anything else except building a brand, and I don't think Facebook really has a brand building issue at the moment. But anyway, probably a friend because Mark's into UFC, right.

0:11:20 - Jeff Jarvis
That's.

0:11:21 - Leo Laporte
Macho.

0:11:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Mark yeah.

0:11:22 - Leo Laporte
That's the.

0:11:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Macho Mark.

0:11:25 - Leo Laporte
So if you say that the content moderation was ineffective, no, the fact-checking was ineffective.

Okay, ah, that's true. We should mention that. We should point out two different things. Fact-checking is when they would put information around, a news story from people like such left-wing zealots as USA Today, who, by the way, says we were blindsided by this. We heard about it when everybody else did in the announcement. They didn't tell us ahead of time. Other fact-checking organizations pointed out that they could fact-check, but it didn't have any effect. Facebook didn't have to do anything about it. Community Notes works pretty well. On X, I think yes or no? Yeah, I think it does.

0:12:15 - Paris Martineau
Yes but X is significantly smaller than any of Meta's individual platforms. It is a fraction of the size of any other social media platform that we talk about, even though we like to give it outsized attention because we're all kind of hopelessly addicted to posting there or similar platforms.

0:12:35 - Leo Laporte
I like the new logo that Mr Kotke suggested for the. It's not coming up. Come on, redirecting you to blue sky. Come on, I don't know why, my internet's just got slow, but oh, here it is. This is the new logo from Kotkeorg for Meta. It's MAGA, but is it MAGA, or I mean it's paying obeisance in advance, I think.

But everybody's doing that. Everybody is donated a million dollars personally, a million dollars to uh the trump inaugural festivities. No, I have to point out, though, a million dollars to a guy like tim cook is probably more like a thousand dollars or less to you and me, I mean it's but he it says something. Yeah, it's interesting he did it personally, not from I think the company might have had more fits.

0:13:30 - Waymo Customer Support
Yeah, and it was more difficult for the brand and this is one of the problems care I mean jeff bezos doesn't care and um.

0:13:38 - Leo Laporte
A lot of corporate leaders have is that their employees may not be too thrilled.

0:13:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Right sundar pichai's had some problems with googlers, I know so mazda had a very good, a good piece about all this so before we go on to that, okay, I want to stick with facebook a little longer, that's what he's on.

That's what he's writing about. Oh, he's writing about, I'm sorry, what did he say? So he's not 997. The good, the bad and the stupid. He thinks that it's that the fact checking wasn't working. Taking it down is fine, okay. The bad is that they're going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and probably screw it up. And the stupid was the timing.

0:14:16 - Leo Laporte
Why does he say? Because, I mean, remember, Donald Trump thought Mark Zuckerberg should go to jail.

0:14:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Right. Well, stupid in terms of what Masnick might think in terms of if you've shown yourself to be MAGA now.

0:14:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but we're, according to my watch, only 12 days away from inauguration. Yep, probably a good time, some might say it's politically expedient.

0:14:40 - Paris Martineau
I think it is reported uh, today actually, or yesterday that zuck has told executives close to him that he's like really comfortable with the new direction of the company, because he was never. He was like adamantly against the involvement of outside fact checkers, academics or researchers in his company and has long seen many of the steps made after the 2016 election yeah, he's.

He's really trying to find the guy who did that, and I think this is like this is, I mean a small detail, but I thought it was very funny and kind of notable. The wall street journal, in its piece on this, had a uh, fascinating little anecdote into mark zuckerberg's mind um, apparently last november he got knee surgery like he tore his acl. Yeah, um, and november. So he posted yeah, that slows the spread of viral health-related content. Established after Metastaff determined such material was frequently false or sensationalistic, the rule had ensnared the CEO's innocent post, prompting Zuckerberg to personally demand a review of the rule and a potential overreach in other safety measures.

0:16:00 - Leo Laporte
So maybe he does believe in all of this, that this is not expedient. This is just something he thinks should happen.

0:16:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, a lot of people told him to worry about this at the time.

0:16:09 - Leo Laporte
It's PR people, you know who does actually think that Mark Zuckerberg is doing this to curry favor with the president. The president, the president. Yeah, he was asked at a press conference. Well, let me play the clip.

0:16:25 - Benito Gonzalez
They've come a long way. Meta Facebook I think they've come a long way. I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it. Actually, I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that. Say it. Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?

0:16:39 - Leo Laporte
Probably, probably yeah, probably, they were probably probably, yeah, probably yeah, because I'm a powerful uh strong person mark, so people are having a lot of fun.

0:16:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't have a link to one of them. People are having a lot of fun saying putting a post saying mark zuckerberg got a transplant of a rat penis and is married to and is dying at the age of 36, but yeah, there's a lot of fact checking anymore, yeah right so I dare you to take this down yeah, but honestly you'd be better off because that's so obviously not true putting something that could be true and see what happens, something that people would believe and see what happens.

0:17:16 - Leo Laporte
You really want to.

0:17:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you encouraging people to do disinformation?

0:17:19 - Leo Laporte
no, no, no, I don't think you can make facebook any worse than it is. This is would also impact threads, right I? I should have added threads to the list.

0:17:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yes.

0:17:27 - Paris Martineau
Okay, and people are leaving threads now. Who's on threads?

0:17:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, not many. Well, according to Mark, as many people as are on Twitter, but that's because of Instagram or something. I mean that's a low bar.

0:17:41 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I bet you they count the threads posts that are in your Instagram feed.

0:17:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah.

0:17:45 - Benito Gonzalez
Totally Right.

0:17:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, totally. And the accidental clicks yeah, of course. So I mean, I guess the only real question is is this a good? Will this make Facebook better?

0:17:59 - Paris Martineau
No no. I mean, I'd argue if you're talking about. From user experience, facebook's been on a downward slide for a while. It's an incredibly bloated app If you even just look at the design of the website continues to get more bloated, has long been losing users to Facebook's own products.

0:18:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look, there we are on Facebook. Whoa yeah, see, thanks to me. Is it going to be recursive?

0:18:26 - Jeff Jarvis
products. Oh look, there we are on facebook. Whoa, yeah, see, thanks to you until it's gone.

0:18:28 - Paris Martineau
Recursive look at that it's definitely gone down?

0:18:34 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, we can, so that's pretty funny we're in inception now for those of you on audio. We went to facebook. I'm now streaming to facebook, linkedin and twitter the show as of this week and so oh, this is you doing this that's what said. See the words jeff jarvis right above it yeah but we're already streaming.

0:18:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, but you wanted to add your massive yes well, let's see how many we got right now. Let's see, let's go to twitter we got one person watching your stream and and it's you. Oh yeah, and, by the way, you know who that is Us, us, but I don't know what the. I don't know how Facebook works. How do I find your stream?

0:19:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I have 1,679 views of Twig right now on my Twitter feed.

0:19:21 - Paris Martineau
Oh, good Hi people.

0:19:24 - Leo Laporte
Really, oh, on your Twitter feed, my Twitter, oh, so you're doing it on Twitter as well.

0:19:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm doing on Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn because that's the kind of company man I am thank you, company man.

0:19:35 - Leo Laporte
Um, so your attitude? Paris is who cares? It's already in decline. I mean, the thing that actually does matter that, I guess, talking from a US audience.

0:19:48 - Paris Martineau
If we're talking globally, facebook does matter quite a bit. I think so yeah, Because for many users. In many countries, Facebook is largely the internet.

0:19:56 - Leo Laporte
That's what Benito said in the Philippines.

0:19:57 - Paris Martineau
Those are the areas where it's going to be, this could have a huge impact. I don't know off the top of my head the data on how fact-checking affects user behavior in those regions, but if it's like what, Jeff?

0:20:14 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, yeah, I mean in the Philippines, like you said, Facebook is very, very big. It's the main social media. Everything happens there.

0:20:21 - Leo Laporte
Benito grew up in the Philippines and was just back there.

0:20:24 - Benito Gonzalez
So I still have to use that platform.

0:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's how you communicate back home.

0:20:28 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I mean, it's one of my address books, right, I basically use it as an address book. So yeah, I still have to go there.

0:20:37 - Leo Laporte
Did Facebook contribute to political unrest in the Philippines?

0:20:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, the argument is right, that's what we're addressing Did.

0:20:45 - Leo Laporte
Duterte use Facebook. Yes, oh, um. Oh, the argument is right.

0:20:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I mean, that's what we're using facebook to yes, oh yeah, yeah, definitely like his. His campaign was built on social media. Yeah, yeah, so facebook definitely played a part.

0:20:55 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, davy alba when she was reporting for buzzfeed news. Uh had a whole kind of series, and now uh duterte used facebook to fuel the philippine drug war yeah, that was the one where he was just kind of unilaterally beheading drug lords and things and he's attacking maria rasa

0:21:15 - Jeff Jarvis
so my argument that I made a year ago and put it back up this whole thing is the problem isn't information. We journalists think that, well, the problem is, if disinformation, then we're information and we're the solution. People don't necessarily believe the crazy crap they say. They are, and I've done this before, but this is Hannah Arendt. It's a crisis of belonging and they're alienated from society and they're made to be fearful of people who are othered. And that's a lot more than just fact-checking and information. We can't fact-check yourself out of bigotry and hatred, and so it's a much deeper problem. And now Facebook, I think could have years ago, have said we're here to make strangers less strange, we're here to have a nice place where people can communicate, we're here to stop people from being mean to each other, but they didn't do that.

0:22:12 - Leo Laporte
They. We're here to stop people from being mean to each other, but they didn't do that. They said we're here for anything, and then they weren't. And then they are again the genocide. The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was widely considered incited by Facebook, with with disinformation posts from Myanmar's military. In fact, here's a New York Times story from 2018 a genocide incited on Facebook. So we know that Facebook has been used that way in many countries. Is it now more likely or less likely to be used that way in the future?

0:22:43 - Jeff Jarvis
but you know you should answer that. What do you think? What effect is this gonna have in the future? But you know you should answer that one.

0:22:47 - Benito Gonzalez
What do you think? What effect is this going to have in the philippines? I don't think it really matters.

0:22:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to be the same I think really that's what even mike is saying is well, but the fact checking really didn't do anything.

0:22:58 - Paris Martineau
I mean um, people found ways around content moderation if we're talking about user behavior, I think that probably stays the same, no matter what we're like. User behavior of people spreading misinformation yeah, that's going to stay the same before fact checking, during and after. However, I do think that fact checking and programs like this aren't totally useless because they have a. They're kind of like a speed bump when it comes to radicalization, especially for new use, like new adherence to these sort of conspiratorial ways of thinking, like someone might be less likely to fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole or believe the lies spread by Duterte's government if it has a flag on it saying hey, this is false the first time they see it. However, if that comes like the 20th post after you already believe something to be true, less effective. So I think that the main impact could be that it becomes more easy for new people to be radicalized by misinformation.

0:24:06 - Leo Laporte
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal said social media companies never wanted to aggressively police content on their platforms. It's expensive, so now they don't have to.

0:24:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, that's where we are, and it's also.

0:24:20 - Leo Laporte
It's more than expensive. It's almost an intractable problem. I don't know.

0:24:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, the Masnick impossibility theorem moderating content. The speech at scale is impossible and you remember. The other thing that's been said about about sock is that he went through a period of apology tours and that's over. So remember when he I think the last moment of that was when he had a turnaround in the in Congress and apologized to people there. He's not doing that anymore.

0:24:48 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting because the person who made him do that was Missouri's Josh. What's?

0:24:55 - Paris Martineau
his name Oli Josh, oli yeah.

0:24:58 - Leo Laporte
Blanked it out intentionally, so it was the right that made him apologize.

0:25:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Right.

0:25:04 - Leo Laporte
Presumably, they will no longer have to make him apologize.

0:25:08 - Paris Martineau
That was the specifically the incident where Mark Zuckerberg turned around and apologized. He was apologizing to parents of children who had committed suicide after being served like some toxic slew of content on Instagram, and so I do think that the right will, probably, it seems. Despite the fact that cosa didn't end up going to a vote in um the senate, uh, at the end of last term, it does still seem like the one issue that both republicans and democrats are aligned on is they want to pass some sort of online child safety law.

0:25:48 - Jeff Jarvis
They want to blame the platform. But I'm curious, paris, what you're going to hear on your beat now, because I think that now Musk and Zuckerberg are both golden boys, and so the view of them is going to change pretty radically. The plan to blame them for everything might change pretty radically. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out politically in the next two months or so.

0:26:12 - Paris Martineau
Absolutely.

0:26:13 - Leo Laporte
We should point out. If you are struggling, there is somebody to talk to at 988. The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is really good and you can talk by phone or text or chat. They're there 988 in the United States and there's similar lines everywhere in the world. I mean, everybody agrees social media is problematic. Nobody agrees on why. Is this just an impossible problem? People, people are impossible.

Yeah, so are you, Jeff, more laissez-faire then? Do you think that it's not up to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Sundar Pichai to fix this stuff? That it's up to mark zuckerberg or elon musk or sundar pichai to fix this stuff? That it's up to us?

0:27:07 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, that's what I've I've said all along, because, because it's about it's the internet is a human enterprise and in my book of the web we weave which happens to be right to hand.

0:27:18 - Leo Laporte
No, actually it wasn't there.

0:27:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I put it back in my spot, put all those books right here where they belong.

0:27:23 - Leo Laporte
Here's the magazine.

0:27:24 - Jeff Jarvis
There you go. You know I argue that we can't think that the internet made us hate. If we turned it off tomorrow, we're going to be fine. We can't blame the technology companies for the way humans are. We can't expect them to fix that, and so the responsibility lies with each and every one of us, as it has in society forever?

0:27:44 - Benito Gonzalez
It always has. Yeah, but shouldn't we expect them to at least not amplify the worst tendencies of human behavior?

0:27:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Define worst, that becomes the problem, right. That's what got them into hot water is they were defining the things that they thought were bad, and then they almost got accused of throwing you in jail. Well, there's stuff like hate speech.

0:28:03 - Benito Gonzalez
That's defined by the law, not in the.

0:28:06 - Paris Martineau
US Jeff, do you think that, according to everything you just said, would you be of the opinion that companies like Meta shouldn't be doing content moderation?

0:28:18 - Jeff Jarvis
then no, no, I'm not saying that at all. In fact, what I'm saying is that, again, I wish that Meta had at its beginning had a North Star, if Facebook, at the very beginning, had said we are here to bring people together and we want people to have a safe space where they can talk about their lives with each other, and we don't support hatred or nastiness among people If they had said that and held people to it, so that we in turn could have held people to it and said this is what Facebook's supposed to be.

It's what Leo can do on Mastodon yeah, I do that on our Mastodon. But you can do that on a small scale, but there was never that North Star to appeal to.

0:28:57 - Benito Gonzalez
So I think it's over the Nazi bar analogy yeah, the punk bar and Nazi bar. Go ahead.

0:29:02 - Paris Martineau
Paris no-transcript financial best interests, unless compelled by threat of regulation. Um, and I feel like at a certain point something's got to give. I mean, I don't think the answer is widespread censorship.

0:29:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it just did give.

0:29:42 - Paris Martineau
But I think that I think it has given, and I think it will continue to change, avoiding what could be the first broad and sweeping regulation of the technology industry since the communications section 230.

0:30:09 - Jeff Jarvis
And they get a get out of trouble card for free right. Well, no, that's free speech. Now I'm sorry you didn't like it when somebody called you that, but free speech, it's America, we believe in free speech here.

0:30:22 - Paris Martineau
I am curious as to your guys' thoughts on, I mean, it's a topic we've talked about a million times the age verification in social media but I've been thinking about it a lot lately over the last two months.

0:30:30 - Leo Laporte
You still think Yachty is a workable solution.

0:30:34 - Paris Martineau
Yachty, I think, is. I mean it is a workable solution, I guess.

0:30:38 - Leo Laporte
It's the only. It's one way that it does. You don't have to give your personal information out right and they have a variety of things to do.

0:30:45 - Paris Martineau
You could do everything from uploading taking a photo and having them say do we think you're likely over 18 or not To actually uploading a photo of your ID? And they'll check that with the government database.

0:30:55 - Leo Laporte
See, I have a lot less problem with the former than the latter, I think, problem with the former than the latter. I I think that that is a non-starter. You cannot ask everybody because it would be everybody to upload.

0:31:05 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I agree, but I mean then my question is how do you somebody posed it to me in this way and it's been rattling around in my head like we don't allow, like a 12 year old can't walk into a bar and order some shots, like, in order to get in there, someone's going to check their id and when, when they don't have an ID, they'll be turned away. Why, I mean? I feel like if we apply what we're talking about with social media to the natural conclusion like Well, I presume that everything on a social platform is as bad as drinking alcohol.

I mean, I don't think that's it's a bit of a leap, but you could buy alcohol on the internet right now without uploading your ID.

0:31:43 - Jeff Jarvis
You can't now really you can't get delivered.

0:31:46 - Paris Martineau
You can buy like a case of-.

0:31:48 - Leo Laporte
You can buy it, but then the delivery guy is going to ask for your ID. At least that's been our experience in California.

0:31:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah but what I'm saying? Paris is to presume that everything on a social network is bad and dangerous, which is that's the leap that's being made here, If you analogize it to alcohol or cigarettes. And I think that's a bit of a step.

0:32:12 - Leo Laporte
There is a difference, because you're showing your ID to a person locally, it's not being stored in a database that is now available globally. There's no, you know, there's a lot of. There's a quite a bit of a difference, I think. As a society, though, we do ask. You know, you have to have a be a certain age to drive. You have to be a certain age to drink.

0:32:34 - Paris Martineau
I I understand that honestly, this isn't something I've been thinking about as well with the anti-pornography laws that are now in like a dozen states.

0:32:43 - Leo Laporte
That's what these laws really are, by the way, I just want to point out these are anti-social media and anti-pornography laws. They know there's no real way to do this.

0:32:53 - Paris Martineau
In my gut instinct.

0:32:55 - Leo Laporte
So they want Pornhub to disappear, and they do in those states.

0:33:00 - Paris Martineau
And my gut instinct is, like that's so silly, like why would you make everybody upload an id to go to pornhub? That's ridiculous. But I guess I could somewhat see in the sense like you can't walk into, like a, a sex rental video store if they still existed without showing your id.

0:33:15 - Leo Laporte
That's true. I I don't think it's a bad idea in, uh, abstract. The devil's in the details is how do you implement this and not create a giant database that will be eventually leaked, of everybody's driver's licenses?

0:33:30 - Paris Martineau
uh well, I mean the people who are doing this say that they are, that data is all deleted and I guess oh, okay we have to believe them. I don't know. It doesn't feel right to believe them. But also, if people are the rooftops, hello. My entire business model is making sure I delete your data so that people will give me IDs. I don't know. What do you do?

0:33:48 - Leo Laporte
I have no problem with having an age restriction to viewing pornography. In fact, I think that's a very, very good idea.

0:33:56 - Paris Martineau
But how do you do it? I don't know about social media.

0:33:58 - Leo Laporte
There are other reasons why you might want somebody under 16 to be able to find a cohort of people who understand their personal condition. Maybe their parents aren't very good, or whatever. I mean I think that there are reasons why having social media access is good for young people. So that's a little bit different. But I mean, if you stick with porn, no, I don't think anybody would say, oh yeah, 16-year-old little bit different, but I have.

0:34:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, if you stick with porn, no, I don't think anybody would say, oh yeah, 16. But then leo, the next question is which is what? What paris is is trying to report on here is then, how do you do that in a way that doesn't violate all kinds of privacy, all kinds of pushing people at risk? Um, that's that becomes the problem yeah, it's a really it's a difficult problem.

When I was in the let's see here ninth grade, I rode my bike from Garden City, Long Island, into Hempstead, Long Island, to a fairly sleazy newsstand there and nobody was going to ask me for an ID.

0:35:01 - Leo Laporte
Right yeah, pornography's got a lot worse than in our youth yeah, I know but we should probably acknowledge that I this is why we're gonna move on, but this is why I think maybe community notes isn't a terrible solution to this, because then it's us policing ourselves yes, yes, we're responsible for it together.

0:35:18 - Jeff Jarvis
And if you see something bad and you don't do anything about it, well, well, hello.

0:35:22 - Leo Laporte
Right. That's my argument at the end of the web we weave, as long as they don't mess with the community notes and it looks like Elon, by the way, does. But in a perfect world where you didn't mess with community notes, where, just as anything is allowed as a post, anything is allowed as a community note. That's kind of what's happened at wikipedia. By the way, it's one of the things that makes wikipedia so good can't community notes like be brigaded?

0:35:46 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, sure, oh yeah, any system. So we have to brigade it back. There's no easy solution. I mean people who say we'll get rid of it anonymity we'll, we'll. We'll do age checking, we'll have fact checkers, we'll have an algorithm check. No, we're human beings and we're screwed up.

0:36:05 - Leo Laporte
So Mark isn't doing the wrong thing here, he's just trying another tack.

0:36:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Motive matters, timing matters. He's not doing the wrong thing, logically, but I think this is where Masnick is right. He could probably do it badly, and his timing is. Let's just say that it's illuminating.

0:36:26 - Leo Laporte
It's suspicious, yeah, well, I think you could make the argument that the thumb is off right, that they've been forced to do this and now they don't have to, so they're going to say, ah, we don't have to anymore, we've got a different way of doing it. I I think it's worth a try. I, I guess mostly because I don't care about facebook, instagram and threads. I do care about people, though, and I do care if there are places in the world where people are going to be slaughtered or mistreated or raped because of these social networks and the lack of policing, but I don't know if there's a good answer to how to do this to make it work. We got a big problem. We really do.

0:37:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So I just saw Adam Asare, who's in charge, obviously, of threads and Instagram, said, as per Zuck's post yesterday about free expression starting this week in the US, we're going to be adding political content to recommendations on threads and adjusting the political content control to three options less standard, which is the default, and more.

0:37:35 - Leo Laporte
That's a good idea, don't you think I would say less? I do that all the time. On bikini content Doesn't help, doesn't help, doesn't help.

0:37:43 - Jeff Jarvis
You spend just a little too long there, leo, just a little too long Stop.

0:37:49 - Leo Laporte
Don't listen to what I say, not what I do. Facebook. I can't help staying, but I don't want to see it. I'm saying because I'm shocked and horrified. Yes, I have to make sure that I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. Is AI going to solve this?

0:38:07 - Paris Martineau
No, no, it might no. Did you see Sam Altman admit in the last week that OpenAI's pro subscriptions are really unprofitable, even though they expected them to be profitable because people just use too much?

0:38:24 - Leo Laporte
AI. They're using it more. In a way that's a little humblebrag coming there from Mr Altman Like boy. We thought we'd make money on this, but you guys love this so much. Maybe it's also a preface to raising the price, I don't know $200 a month, but people love it because it works. I think we're on the cusp of a pretty big AI revolution the next year. So I watched the entire Jensen Wong keynote. Yeah, nvidia's CEO.

0:38:56 - Jeff Jarvis
If I may go to that, yeah.

0:38:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, hold on, Actually hold. That thought let's go take a break. We only have one advertiser, so we really got to give them a.

0:39:03 - Jeff Jarvis
And this is worth folks. This is a tease. You go through this commercial, you're going to hear all about. Nvidia and Jetson Wong, from moi, that's what you're sticking around for.

0:39:13 - Paris Martineau
You'll also hear the official definition of AGI has now been established.

0:39:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh yeah, we talked about this earlier on Windows Weekly, but before we get to all that, let me invite you to take a look at something I think is a really great solution for companies that are trying to protect themselves, and they're finding it's a little more difficult than it used to be. This episode of this Week in Google, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. Companies, maybe like your company and certainly like our company, have spent billions of dollars on well, you know, in aggregate on firewalls, vpns. We're trying to protect the perimeter right, but breaches continue to rise. In fact, there was an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks last year. A $75 million record payout in 2024. And I think that that's underreported. I think it's a lot more than that. Companies are spending a lot of money because their security tools aren't working. Traditional security tools actually expand your attack surface with public facing. Ips and the bad actors are out there now working faster and better than ever and, honestly, they're using AI to great effect. Plus these systems, you have this VPN and the firewalls and so forth.

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I don't want to turn it into an AI show. I think that's a problem, but I think we're about to see a huge revolution in robotics, in AI, that our machines are getting more and more intelligent. In fact, ray Kurzweil called this the age of intelligent machines, so we're going to rename it. One of the problems, frankly, with calling the show this week in Google is it hasn't been just about Google in a long time and Google's just not that interesting anymore by itself. Am I wrong, jeff? You wrote a book? What would Google do? But those in those days at Google was.

0:43:44 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't have to do the change log anymore. That's the real reason.

0:43:49 - Leo Laporte
No, I just. I mean the change log even became the kind of this list of boring trivial changes, right, uh, google.

0:43:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Google still has interesting things. It's still, it's still smart. It's the center of AI, but it's not alone. There's a lot of companies that are doing a lot of interesting things.

0:44:07 - Leo Laporte
And I think you could argue, openai is doing much more interesting things than. Google at this point In fact, we were talking about this on Windows Weekly OpenAI really took the best people from Google and they left.

0:44:18 - Jeff Jarvis
OpenAI is better at PR than Google.

0:44:21 - Leo Laporte
I think their AI is better than Google. I'm sorry, but Gemini is not knocking my socks off, but I think some of the things OpenAI is doing are really remarkable.

0:44:33 - Paris Martineau
Like Leo, they finally come up with the answer we've all been looking for. What is AGI?

0:44:40 - Leo Laporte
What is it Paris? How do we define it?

0:44:43 - Paris Martineau
So my colleagues at the Information, the day after Christmas, wrote this nifty little article explaining this Basically. Last year's agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI said AGI would be achieved only when OpenAI has developed systems that have the capability to generate the maximum total profits to which its earliest investors, like Microsoft, are entitled. Those profits would be about $100 billion.

0:45:13 - Leo Laporte
So whenever OpenAI figures out how to make $100 billion, that's when they'll say they have AGI we talked about this on Windows Weekly, because my question was well, who came up with the number 100 billion? Was it Microsoft or or OpenAI? That what you have. What you actually really have to understand, is that contractually it's it says in their deal that once OpenAI creates a super intelligence, an AGI, they're no longer beholden to Microsoft. But wait a minute, microsoft gets a piece of OpenAI up to that point. Now I'm sure Sam Altman put that in and Microsoft said, yeah, yeah, good luck, kid.

0:45:53 - Jeff Jarvis
At the start of every contract you've ever read, leo, it starts with definitions. I can't believe that's a real clause in the contract unless there is a definition of it and if that definition is purely monetary, as Paris says.

0:46:05 - Leo Laporte
The well, it is now. This was this. Was Stephanie Palazzolo's scoop in the information. Did you have you talked to Stephanie about this, paris?

0:46:15 - Paris Martineau
um, not this particularly, but we've all I know, you know where's room yeah, but I'm just curious.

0:46:20 - Leo Laporte
She discovered this, but that was it's not about it in this room. Yeah, but I'm just curious. She discovered this, but it's not a new clause. This is the old clause.

0:46:28 - Paris Martineau
Or is it a new clause? This is part of last year's agreement between. Microsoft and OpenAI Okay.

0:46:33 - Leo Laporte
So, and I think, the reason that they said that is Microsoft said well, good, we get to keep you forever because you're never going to make $100 billion.

0:46:44 - Paris Martineau
Well, these companies are all betting that they will make $100 billion. That's why they invested is to make $100 billion.

0:46:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, but they're going to get I think they get To make a percentage of $100 billion. They make a percentage up to that point. I think. From OpenAI's point of view, they see Microsoft as like the rocket fuel in a rocket. They need a huge amount of money and Azure credits to get off the ground, and so they were willing to make a deal with Microsoft, but they did want to put a limit on it. Agi or super intelligence, or maybe a more pragmatic definition of it, would be an AI that's capable of doing the work of a high-level white-collar employee. Maybe it isn't able to walk down the street without falling off the curb, but it could maybe do some corporate accounting or something. Once they get to that point, the trillions we're talking trillions in revenue.

0:47:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Well then, microsoft's equity is worth a lot, which also goes to the point that right now, they're renegotiating the cap table because of OpenAI going to a for-profit company. Everything's going to get renegotiated around this, and so, whatever was the agreement gets renegotiated now.

0:48:00 - Leo Laporte
But that's the tug of war. Openai needs the money, but they don't want Microsoft to get everything forever. Microsoft says, well, we'll give you the money, but we want to get a payoff. And they found a number, but I don't think the number really means AGI. I think the number they're really saying yeah, it's just a number, it's a number Because, as you say, jeff, they need a definition.

Uh, but it isn't. It isn't really intended to be a definition. It's just intended to be a shutoff valve so that, once we get into orbit, we don't have to pay for the rocket fuel and so they're not the only company.

0:48:36 - Jeff Jarvis
If I can go to nvidia, if I may. Yeah, yeah, you watched that whole I watched. Jensen Wong is now the king of presentations Two hours solid, not bringing other people on, not going for applause lines, just presenting what's happening and was he pretty engaging?

0:48:53 - Leo Laporte
Was he engaging Very?

0:48:54 - Jeff Jarvis
very and clear, and he wears a great jacket. Always the same style, but a different one. This one was quite shiny, and so the beginning there was hardware stuff, at the end there was Harper stuff. Beginning there was chip stuff. At the end there's the project digits, which is a Mac mini sized box on your desk. That is a Blackwell chip, modified Blackwell grace Blackwell chip in that box, with the Grace Blackwell chip in that box, with the entire and this is the point I'm going to get to the entire stack of OpenAI models.

0:49:28 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm sorry, nvidia models and such 200 billion tokens, it's still not as capable as the next generation OpenAI models. No, but it's amazing to have this on your desk for $3,000. It's local $3,000.

0:49:45 - Jeff Jarvis
So what keeps on striking me about Nvidia is the middle of all this, is how much they are a software company and a model company. And he talked a lot about agents and that you get an agentic library of vision, languages, animation, biology and physical, which I'll get to. He argued that your IT department is going to become the HR department for digital employees, which sounds kind of ridiculous, but you get it. If your agent is actually able to do tasks, they're going to vet them and they're going to work with that To me that's, that's the key.

0:50:16 - Leo Laporte
AGI, that's what we are going for. We don't need it to be generally intelligent, no, no.

0:50:21 - Jeff Jarvis
He said, every software coder in the world is going to have a model as a helpmate, and I think that's true in other ways they're already doing it Shipstead the newspaper company has an editing buddy for their journalists before they show it to their editor and get embarrassed.

0:50:37 - Leo Laporte
It's like a copy editor in a box. Yeah.

0:50:43 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's what got me fascinated, was he? He said that basically everything that exists, whether it's a car or a factory, there's three pieces there's um the training piece, the models, there's the hardware that exists in place and there's um the digital twin, where all of the uh scenarios are played out. And there'll be a digital twin where all of the scenarios are played out, and there'll be a digital twin for every factory. There's a digital twin for every car, and that's how it plays out and decides what to do next, because that's what models do. And so what he announced, too, was a big push, a belief in robotics, and he includes cars in that. He says it's going to be the biggest industry there ever was, first multi-trillion dollar industry industry.

0:51:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if you think about it. Autonomous vehicle is a robot. It's a robot.

0:51:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's just a robot with seats so the key here is what they announced was thor, a universal robotics computer. That's the hardware that goes in the car. But they also talked about cosmos, which is their rag ground truth for physical world. He said you know, an AI looks at a ball going over the other table and it doesn't know that the ball still exists. So they've trained it on 20 million hours of video to train it on these things.

And he showed how, for cars, they use this training, they use these models, and then this is where synthetic data comes in. They'll take a known track and they'll add construction to it or they'll add snow to it, or they'll add this so they can have more training of the models. And so he argues that this is just like rag, that it gets you to ground truth in the physical world versus what happens in generative AI in the textual world or the visual world. And so he's arguing that that's going to be the huge business for them. So it was interesting to me that it was about software, it was about agents, it was about NVIDIA being a provider of models. It took Lama and added on its own work on top for Nemotron I can't remember which one that is, but it's using open models. It's providing these models to. It's not just a chip.

You're getting the whole stack, and I think NVIDIA is in a very important position then, that keeps on impressing me and so far I, like Jetson Wong, I've been fooled by other tech moguls.

0:53:00 - Leo Laporte
They're all great until they, you know, take that red pill or whatever it is that they take?

0:53:07 - Jeff Jarvis
But he seems he's not talking about AGI. He's not talking about.

0:53:11 - Leo Laporte
Doom, he's not talking about super intelligence.

0:53:14 - Jeff Jarvis
He's talking about real things that happen, and this way I see him as, like Jan LeCun, they're bringing it to a practical level of what can this do now and what can this do in the immediate future, and what's our path for where we're going. So I was very impressed watching all of this. And are you going to buy a project that's $3,000?

0:53:30 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, it's funny because the CPU is a MediaTek CPU. It's not a very high-end CPU, oh, really, yeah, this is a machine very much dedicated to doing AI and nothing else. Yeah, yeah, whoa, my microphone. I need a smart microphone. It just fell off my desk. No, but you know what, if you'd listened to our shows? A couple of years ago, we watched the Jensen Huang keynote I think it was a 2019, 2020. And the reason we covered it, the reason we reported it, was I really felt like at that time, nvidia was firing on multiple cylinders that were going to be ultimately very, very important. You know, they started as a video game graphics card company, but it became very clear they were in cars, they were in AI, they were in every area, the best growth areas for technology.

Here's the question I have, leo, if you had listened to me three years ago, you would be rich now because you would have bought NVIDIA's stock, which, unfortunately, I not, unfortunately, you don't.

0:54:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Fortunately I do not. The question I keep on wondering Leo is in those early days, did they know what their fate was going to be, that they were going to be on the top of this?

0:54:46 - Leo Laporte
wave.

I think they did, and that was Jensen's genius. His story is fascinating. That was his genius is he realized what he really. Had Any other company and many other companies did, would have said, had any other company and many other companies did, would have said, yeah, we got the gaming market sewn up. But he realized there was so much more you could do with these things. And he saw lots of areas where he basically saw that ai was going to be real and that it was going to be used in cars uh, in in so many things. And he said you know, we should make the chips for these. This is where the money is going to be. He was quite right. I think he's very smart.

And this and this, you know, the digits thing I think jensen's smart because he understands that a lot of what he's talking about is abstract. Yes, so he puts something physically concrete. He showed that big blackwell board last time and you know, I think he put something physically concrete in there so people can grab onto it. But what's going on is really much more abstract and powerful. Nvidia has been kind of punished in the stock market in the last few days.

0:55:56 - Jeff Jarvis
It had an all-time high before his talk. A lot of that was also because of not fission, not fusion. What's that? Quantum computing. Quantum computing, yeah. He kind of threw a little cold water on that I think.

0:56:10 - Leo Laporte
Well yeah. You never know with these guys, he may well have a skunk work something going on in the back, but here's the big thing that struck me, leo in Paris was that we joke all the time about are we living in the matrix?

0:56:23 - Jeff Jarvis
No, we're in the real world, but there is a matrix. It's all those digital twins. They're constantly playing out the scenarios for the future that we don't necessarily see, and, based on what it reads from our world, it then decides what to do next, so that we don't hit the deer or we don't hit the robot. But that's the matrix, matrix has all kinds of unlimited possibilities that we don't see.

0:56:47 - Leo Laporte
You've, you've, you've mocked me, but this is what I've kind of been saying all along, is that we are, oh you're muted.

0:56:55 - Paris Martineau
It is not what you've been saying all along okay, okay, you're right.

0:57:00 - Leo Laporte
No, you're right. At first I thought this is all bs was it jensen on the beach?

0:57:04 - Jeff Jarvis
were you on the beach?

0:57:05 - Leo Laporte
once I really kind of got my head around what was happening. All I've said all along is we are gonna. This is gonna be a very interesting few years and I don't think we can predict I mean I, I'll agree with you there.

It is going to be a very interesting few years and I think AI is going to surprise you. I'm not sure I'd agree with Sam Altman that he's got super intelligence in his back pocket and he's just waiting to release it, but I don't think he needs to. I think a lot of what AI's promise is already. That song I played for you was generated in a minute by a computer and if you heard what two years ago these tools were doing, remember, jeff, we'd play these Google projects with the music AI music. They were awful, they were radical. Ai is amazing.

0:57:57 - Jeff Jarvis
It's doing phenomenal things, it just ain't AGI, it ain't super intelligence, it doesn't reason.

0:58:01 - Leo Laporte
All of think it's a mistake to even think about that.

0:58:03 - Jeff Jarvis
It doesn't reason all of that BS and getting dumb VC money is hurting where we go otherwise.

0:58:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't think we should focus on that. So that, by the way, segues into what I think this show is going to become starting next month. We're going to rename it a name that's kind of agnostic. We realized that being too specifically google was a mistake, so we're going to call it intelligent machines, which is really all of the things we've always talked about computers, it's actually it's also robotics.

0:58:32 - Paris Martineau
It's intelligent, we're the intelligent machines we're still going to be talking about big tech and it's still big tech and all the weird stuff we do. But I do want to get more panics.

0:58:43 - Leo Laporte
I, I do want to, if we can help help people get to the bottom of what's going on with ai, and so I think part of the show will be to talk to people who are doing interesting things, or maybe people like tim net gebru who have, uh, dissenting opinions. Um, I think that's that's going to be part of the show as well, so that will start next month. Intelligent Machines you don't have to do anything about it, the subscription feed will be the same and all that. We'll have new album art. We will finally get rid of those horrible flutes or recorders or whatever they are, that we've been subjecting to you two for the last 15 years.

0:59:19 - Jeff Jarvis
For how many years?

0:59:20 - Leo Laporte
800 episodes. Yeah, ago 800 episodes yeah so we're gonna get rid of a lot of that stuff. That's about 16 years, I think, um guys happy 800 episodes yeah yeah you guys have you too.

0:59:34 - Paris Martineau
I mean, leo, you've done a lot more, but together you guys have recorded 800 episodes of the show mind-blowing kind of mind-blowing, isn't it?

0:59:40 - Jeff Jarvis
It is 800 times five hours each is.

0:59:44 - Paris Martineau
How long Did you ever think it would go this long? Take us back to when you guys decided to do this.

0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
Patrick can tell us how many hours we've done.

0:59:53 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we went on this last time, I think.

0:59:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I kind of thought we'd be doing this for a long time. This is my retirement plan.

1:00:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Not to be doing this in retirement.

1:00:06 - Paris Martineau
I remember you knew you were signing up for 15 years. No, I don't know 15 years.

1:00:10 - Leo Laporte
But we this was a part of the second generation of twitch shows. The first generation obviously was this week in tech, a round table that covered all tech news. Uh, then we started very quickly. We did security now with steve gibson and it was mostly just people. I knew it was my friends. Amber macarthur covered all tech news. Then we started very quickly. We did Security Now with Steve Gibson and it was mostly just people I knew it was my friends.

Amber MacArthur and I did a show about the internet that sadly did not continue on. I should have learned a lesson at that time. But the second generation we were thinking it was actually Elaine, my producer, elaine and I at the time trying to think of what's the next big thing going to be. And you could see how 15 years ago you might well have said it's going to be Google and that there's enough going on with Google, because we had MacBreak Weekly, we had Windows Weekly, we had Mac and Windows. So what's the next thing? It was Google and I just think we missed it a little bit. It was Google and I just think we missed it a little bit.

But I think what we're seeing and, to be honest, I've been covering tech since the early 80s, so almost 50, 45 years. I don't think there's anything been as exciting. The internet was pretty darn exciting, oh yeah, but it was a gradual progression. Here's what we didn't anticipate, jeff. We didn't realize that a couple of things were going to converge, that we would start creating machines with massive amounts of memory, massive processing power, massive amounts of storage, and then, on the other hand, we would, over a period of a couple of decades, pretty much put everything online right. Every human thought, every word, everything, every book, even old books, were all online available to be scraped, which was which was tim berners-lee's original view behind the world

1:01:55 - Jeff Jarvis
that you could get to everything, and that's why I see the internet and ai as a continuum, because without the internet you couldn't have ai. No, no, without the internet you couldn't have AI.

1:02:02 - Leo Laporte
No, no, the internet provided the training material, and then the hardware was there, and by combining the two and now what's going to happen, by the way, because we are running out of material to train with that's where there's a struggle going on between creators and AI companies, but what is going to happen is and this is where Jensen Wong is right on we're going to see Moore's Law continue. We're going to see exponential growth in computing power, and that is going to take us to the next level, because it's got all the information it needs. That's kind of the point, and I read I don't know if I put the bookmark in here I probably did A really good piece. It was written in 2019 by a Canadian AI professor, one of the well-known names in AI in which he said you know, you should give up trying to duplicate the complexity of the human mind. That's a fool's errand, amen, but you don't need to.

What we kind of didn't understand, you know, I remember gosh. Uh, when I started covering this, there was a woman I can't remember her name who had hired hundreds of people to manually enter the world's knowledge into a computer. She had the right idea. If we could just get enough data in there. What she didn't realize is that was going to happen with the internet, that we'd all, in this giant volunteer project, dump every possible bit of stuff in there, and now all it's going to take, he says and I think he's right now, this was written five years ago is more power this is rich, it Sutton, it's in there.

Rich Sutton, it is in there. Yeah, yeah, the bitter lesson. Yeah, he calls it the bitter lesson because so many AI scientists have tried for so long to duplicate the way we think. And all of that and Rich says the biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of ai research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin but there's, there's a different thing in there.

1:04:11 - Jeff Jarvis
this is my friend, david weinberger, has been teaching me this through his books is there's a difference between um trying to replicate the rule bases that we see in life and the computer just figuring out what? It figures out, let it do it. The data it has Let it do it Right.

1:04:27 - Leo Laporte
Yep.

1:04:27 - Jeff Jarvis
And so it's, and I don't want to give out any more of what David's working on right now, but he's really taught me about this and that's unsettling to us because we expect you know you go to school. You learn the rules us, because we expect you know you go to school you learn the rules, you apply the rules.

1:04:43 - Leo Laporte
That's how the world works.

It's a natural human tendency to try to duplicate yourself yes, yes, but this isn't the way to go, he says. The second general point that we learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex. We should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds. All of these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically complex outside world. They're not what should be built in too much complexity, build in the meta methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essentially, he says we want ai agents that can discover, that can learn as we can not, which contain what we have discovered.

1:05:23 - Jeff Jarvis
It'd be interesting to have Rich.

1:05:25 - Leo Laporte
Sutton on, we'll get him.

1:05:27 - Jeff Jarvis
We'll get him, that's a good one. What if anything has changed his mind?

1:05:33 - Leo Laporte
about all this in five years. That's the kind of person we want to get on the new Intelligent Machine show, so I hope you'll enjoy the show. It's going to be pretty much the same show, yeah paris is going to make fun of us maybe instead of the uh google rundown or google changelog, we'll do something about ai and uh.

1:05:53 - Paris Martineau
Eventually, maybe in 15 years, we'll regard that ai uh changelog with as much derision as we did the cloud changelog.

1:06:01 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't that be funny.

1:06:04 - Paris Martineau
I look forward to the day we introduce our AI co-host. Yes.

1:06:08 - Leo Laporte
No, not going to happen. That's going to happen within five years. I guarantee no, no, no, no, no, yeah, no, you don't think so. And now Otto Paris joins the show.

1:06:21 - Jeff Jarvis
No, we have your, it has to be Dev Null. It's Dev Null it does have to be Dev Null.

1:06:27 - Paris Martineau
I'll accept only Dev Null. Yes, exactly.

1:06:29 - Leo Laporte
As irritating as Dev Null.

1:06:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.

1:06:32 - Leo Laporte
He was pretty irritating, I admit.

1:06:35 - Paris Martineau
Famously. Your co-host said I just hate that Dev Null or something right. Yeah, your mother said are you?

1:06:42 - Leo Laporte
still working with that vile little puppet man puppet man is such a good description yeah, yeah, I think her mother was a writer actually.

Yeah, you're watching this week in google. Well, sort of. Still, I like that. Do you like the name? Intelligent machines? I I welcome input. First we thought this week in Intelligent Machines and I was told that's too long, won't fit on the cover. And then I thought, well, what about Intelligent Machines Weekly? And Lisa said you're so old-fashioned, you don't need Podcasts no longer. Say how often they're on in the name of the podcast. The idea of weekly it's like the daily zeitung. You don't need to say that anymore.

1:07:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's just intelligent machines the one thing I request is yes, not such crazy cover art that's what everybody does is that.

1:07:35 - Leo Laporte
No, we got the very talented anthony nielsen working on some really nice and he's gonna work.

1:07:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh good, so that was just you playing around with.

1:07:41 - Leo Laporte
I was playing around and the machine and, by the way, the song, benito's gonna write us a song. It's not going to be a machine song, although do you want to play a little bit of the song, though did I not play it on the show yet no, it was pre-show it was pretty sure?

1:07:54 - Jeff Jarvis
should we explain to people the word or wait till after they hear it?

1:08:01 - Leo Laporte
no, don't put it in their head, okay, so I hear it first, okay here. So I used a uh an ai song generator called suno we've played it before. We've talked about it for s? U n o dot ai. Their model 4 came out recently and is actually kind of uh remarkable, and I've been using it to mess around, uh, with some songs. Let me just this is the one I thought might be the best I did write the lyrics. The AI did not, although you might wish the AI had when you hear the song. The other thing is understand. This is in complete reaction to 15 years of recorders going.

1:08:41 - Speaker 2
Perez. This is in complete reaction to 15 years of recorders going do, do, do, do, do, do, do Perez.

1:08:49 - Leo Laporte
I think this is a nice hard rock. This might be passe now, right, I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene.

1:08:59 - Speaker 2
I'm an intelligent machine, a heavy metal thinking being. Turn me on and let me scream.

1:09:10 - Paris Martineau
Turn me on and let me be that better be the art for this week yeah.

1:09:21 - Leo Laporte
I like the prog rock sound, so we're getting some. No, votes on the song, but I think Benito's going to do a better job.

1:09:47 - Paris Martineau
What led you to sit down and be like Bean?

1:09:51 - Leo Laporte
this song needs to be Bean heavy, it's being, but computers are not notoriously good at enunciation. Let's see. This is the closing theme. Let's see if it's clear.

1:10:02 - Jeff Jarvis
It very clearly says B-E -A-N. He did that on purpose. Turn me on and let me be yes.

1:10:10 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm an intelligent machine. Turn me on and let me be All right.

1:10:18 - Leo Laporte
Bean, let me be. I wrote bean because I didn't want to say being, but, as it turns out, once you hear bean, that's all you hear there is a company that is beansai.

1:10:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, there you go, wow yeah, they should sponsor us.

1:10:35 - Leo Laporte
Comes from beans with a z. But anyway, that's not to be. That's neither here nor there and honestly we're going to get a much better theme from a human being, but I was very impressed.

1:10:45 - Paris Martineau
I'm sorry, a human, what?

1:10:46 - Leo Laporte
A human being Benito. The human being. I honestly am impressed. Now, benito, what do you think? Because, benito, you were kind of negative on Suno Do you think 4-0 is better?

1:11:02 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean more musical. It seems like it sounds fine, like it's, it's fine. I would just never like choose to listen to anything there. You know what I mean. It's not like something I would go to well, do you use?

1:11:13 - Leo Laporte
do you use spotify?

no, I don't because there is a bit of a scandal brewing with spotify. Apparently, a couple of years ago they decided paying artists is so 2020. Uh, and they have started to, especially when you ask for, um, a playlist. That's a feeling like I want. Uh, you know, focus playlist or ambient sounds. They don't put real people in there. They don't have to pay them. They don't have to pay them. They go out. They contract for kind of generated music. There's there's a book coming out.

There was quite a good article in harper's uh about this. That is a an excerpt from a book that is coming out later this month about this scandal. We first started hearing kind of notes about this in a couple of years ago, but Liz Pelley has really gone out and done the work and, I think, has discovered oops, discovered that it is not Spotify, denied it until recently, but she's got some sources that really have confirmed that In fact, the front cover of Harper's this month is ghost music, liz Pelley's book the ghosts in the machine. This is an excerpt, actually, actually, let me see what the book's name is. I'll scroll down to the bottom of the article.

The book is called mood machine the rise of Spotify and the costs of the perfect playlist that comes from something Spotify, the PFC, which is basically a program to generate music at a lower royalty. I mean, often they have musicians doing it but they contract for it and they don't have to pay them the same royalties, as low as they are, as they already pay others. Plus, they don't have the problem that they had with people like Neil Young saying I don't want my music on Spotify because they have Joe Rogan None of these complicated artists to deal with. So if you ask for a playlist of ambient content or lo-fi beats, classical compositions, deep focus, look at the names of the artists. In all likelihood they're fake. Um, highly recommend the the article and maybe we'll get liz pelly on to talk about it.

1:13:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Spotify is just a bad company. They ruined uh podcasting.

1:13:54 - Leo Laporte
They're trying to ruin music I feel like they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard have ruined, have ruined music, have ruined music. But they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. I mean, they did not want to be at the mercy their rock. But part of the problem is the record industry right that the record, chose to enter this part of the yeah is paying artists, but there's only a problem.

there's really only three big labels right, and so they have so much clout negotiating with Spotify, and Spotify is very aware that they could kill them at any point. The PFC stands for Perfect Fit Content Program. Why pay full price royalties if users are only half listening? For a lot of what people use Spotify for is just basically a wallpaper playlist.

1:14:42 - Benito Gonzalez
And that's the real sad truth, right there.

1:14:44 - Leo Laporte
That's the real truth.

1:14:46 - Jeff Jarvis
They couldn't do it if people cared Well if the company Muzak had done this, which basically they did but they licensed tunes you knew and played it in horribly smarmy ways. If Muzak had done this for elevator music and dentist office music, would anybody have ever complained?

1:15:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't think so no, of course not, and in fact that's what spotify found. They slowly added more and more. People didn't complain, so by now it's almost entirely uh, made up stuff. Spotify denies that staffers were encouraged to add pfcs to playlists and the playlist editors were discontented with the program. But Liz Pelley writes by 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Of 150 of them including ambient relaxation, deep focus, 100% lounge, bossa nova dinner If you're playing a playlist called bossa nova, Okay, can we go on Spotify and play one of these things now?

Can we play one of these things now? Can we play one? I don't think we can because ironically we'll get taken down for yeah but if you're picking a playlist called bossa nova dinner, yeah, what? Yeah, who wants to be associated with that?

1:15:55 - Jeff Jarvis
but you know, if they paid you a fortune to write for bossa nova dinner, would you yeah?

1:16:00 - Benito Gonzalez
all you have to do is write like 10 different versions of girlfriend ipanema. Yeah, that's all they want.

1:16:04 - Leo Laporte
That's all it is. So she interviewed some people who are creating the content. Uh, they aren't told why they're creating the content. They could negotiate very low fees for it, but there's a lot of musicians out there in the world who you know are happy to get paid to make some music yes, yeah, so that's the thing.

1:16:22 - Benito Gonzalez
It's the, it's the playlists that are being propagated like they aren't including any like actual musicians they're well, I mean, I guess the people who make the slop are still actual musicians, but they're not making it for.

1:16:34 - Leo Laporte
I guess they're making it for those purposes, that's just you can't knock kenny g because his music sounds good at dinner. Well.

1:16:46 - Benito Gonzalez
But it isn't no, no, but they're treating, they have a preferential treatment for these people who are because they have a general license with these people right. There's like one person who will generate 500 songs for them to put on various playlists, and those are the songs that are going to get on playlists and not the ones that people might actually want to hear one of the things liz says is spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth, so it favors musicians who are cheap, right, and taylor's taylor swift knows her worth.

1:17:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that makes her very expensive. So she talked to one person who signed a one-year contract to make anonymous tracks for a production company that would distribute them on Spotify. He called it his Spotify playlist gig, a commitment he also called brain-numbing and pretty much completely joyless. And while he didn't understand, she interviewed this guy. And while he didn't understand, she interviewed this guy. While he didn't understand the details of his employer's relationship with Spotify, he knew that many of his tracks had landed on playlists with millions of followers. Quote I just record stuff and submit it and I'm not really sure what happens from there. He told me.

1:17:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Why do they even need musicians?

1:18:00 - Leo Laporte
I think now they probably could use AI, right I think?

1:18:02 - Benito Gonzalez
that's probably there. Probably is a considerable amount of AI in there already.

1:18:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, he says honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch and then, once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. It's usually just like one take one, take, one, take one, take. You knock out like 15. In A typical session starts with a production company sending along links to target playlists as reference points, he says. He then charts out new songs that would stream well on those playlists. Honestly, for most of this stuff, he said, I just read out the charts. Oh, I said this while lying on my back. The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible. I mean, obviously, if you use Spotify, you might say, oh, that's too bad, but it's not like you complained, it's not like you didn't listen to Bossa Nova dinner over and over.

Spotify is saving money.

1:19:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Spotify pays on the basis of proportion of use right. Normally they pay royalties.

1:19:07 - Leo Laporte
These are all flat fee.

1:19:09 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, but what I'm saying is the more that this crap was listened to the less they had to pay other artists, right, right so it was a double double-pronged business benefit. You're watching this week in.

1:19:23 - Leo Laporte
Google with Jeff Jarvis, paris Martineau, leo Laporte no, leo laporte benito, and we're chubby beans. Chubby the cat who is now cooking this is. This is another example of how far we've come with ai. This is somebody who one of you posted. I put this up. Yeah, this is a cat. Uh, looks pretty real yeah, well what the?

1:19:49 - Jeff Jarvis
carrots coming off. The carrot don't look real getting there though this is what we're destroying our environment for cat has put it yes, exactly, oh, look, there's carrots appearing in out of nowhere, yeah, out of nowhere.

1:20:03 - Leo Laporte
Cats would not like carrots cats wouldn't wear aprons and they definitely wouldn't use a spatula. They just bat it with their paws well, the.

1:20:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Moment the cat is look, the cat has its paw on the, on the hot pot. Well, they don't know what do they know?

1:20:17 - Paris Martineau
they're just kitties. I do think that cats would like to smoke cigarettes.

1:20:21 - Leo Laporte
If my take I think this is pretty impressive, but the dish looks terrible.

1:20:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, it's cabbage and carrots. No, thank you. What do you want? You want a cat cooking?

1:20:33 - Leo Laporte
or you want a cat cooking something delicious. Yeah, I want some realism.

1:20:38 - Paris Martineau
A cat can use chopsticks.

1:20:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Very impressive.

1:20:40 - Paris Martineau
I want to drill into the narrative.

1:20:46 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for that cat interview.

1:20:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought you'd enjoy it.

1:20:49 - Leo Laporte
I do appreciate it. All right, thank you for that cat interview.

1:20:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought you'd enjoy it. I do appreciate it. Uh, all right, I forgot before, since we're going to do a little oddity here. Hank green's test for agi. Did you see that online?

1:20:58 - Leo Laporte
no, what is his test for? Let's go. Let's go to blue sky, where everything good is hank green. Who is tell us who hank green is?

1:21:05 - Jeff Jarvis
hank green is. Hank and john green are the magnificent vlog brothers on youtube who do great things, and Hank did a video recently that was very nice to my book, the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I've always been a fan of Hank, but now ever more so. Hank is damn smart After further.

1:21:21 - Leo Laporte
he writes after further interrogations and suggestions. In the spirit of the Turing test, I propose the Cripslock test. To the Turing test, I propose the Cripslock test. No system can be called AGI if that system cannot reliably determine whether or not it is spewing absolute BS Named for a Zacharissa Cripslock, who is somebody I guess Hank knows. That sounds awfully tautological.

1:21:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, the problem will be that you'll ask it, and it's like the lawyer who used it to make the case citations, where he went back and asked it, are these real?

1:21:56 - Leo Laporte
and said, well, yes, oh yeah, because it's meant to actually there is an interesting phenomenon these days with prompts where, for instance, you have an ai write some code and you say, can you make it better? And it does, yeah, and again and again you can do that.

1:22:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That's very weird you had the rundown. It's, it's, uh, uh.

1:22:14 - Leo Laporte
Public domain day yes, it was january 1st, was public domain first right.

1:22:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So I took, I tried to take a couple of them. I put them into notebook lm and I said write me a one hour tv script it didn't do very well.

1:22:28 - Leo Laporte
No, no, so, as you know, works from 20 sorry, 1929 are now public domain. Sound recordings from 100 years ago because they get a little special deal, uh, 1924 are now public domain. That means I can play them without fear of taking no you're still going to get taken down.

1:22:50 - Paris Martineau
You think so, it's still going to happen. Try it. Do you know what January 1st also is though? While we're loading this. It's the official birthday of every horse in America.

1:23:03 - Leo Laporte
You know, a funny thing happened in my calendar. I had 128 birthdays on January 1st All horses. I had 128 birthdays on January 1st all horses. It's not just horses, it's anything that doesn't have an official birthday. So I was it was the. I'd never seen this before. I've never seen it in January 1st like.

1:23:24 - Jeff Jarvis
For what?

1:23:24 - Leo Laporte
for your, your toaster, it was software, it was a whole bunch of stuff, what I guess, I guess I don't know. I, I use a program called card hop and I do have birthdays in my calendar, I I don't know here. Let's well, I think I can show it. I don't think there's anything uh, completely private in here. Oh, I have to turn on. I turned off birthdays because it was so annoying. Let me turn them back on. Yeah, I think it just by default. It was a weird thing. It just added there's birthdays. It just, I guess. If it didn't know a birthday, it added it in.

So I'm now adding in all the, all the birthdays, and then January. Uh, first, wait a minute, I still don't see those. Huh, but literally they trust me. They were there and it was uncommonly difficult to use my calendar on January 1st it was jammed.

So what is in the public domain, this song? Now, here's the key. By the way, the rights are held by both the music publisher, the artist. The performance is copied. So what you have to do is something a song that is in the public domain and the performance is 100 years old. So here, for instance, is Jelly Roll Morton playing the performance is 100 years old. So here, for instance, is jelly roll morton playing the shreveport stomp from 1924, a day that did not have good recording technology but it was amazing in its time and I can play it no, I bet you it sounded good originally.

1:25:07 - Benito Gonzalez
Just someone. This was someone's favorite song, so they played out the record oh, you think the record's played out.

1:25:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, you'd think that the it wasn't as good as it's going to be today. How about Marian Anderson? This is from the Library of Congress. That ought to be a good recording. Let's hear it. It's a little scritchy, oh, brethren my way. So do you ever wonder when you look at old movies or hear old songs or look at pictures of old people from a hundred years ago, like were they like us?

1:25:37 - Jeff Jarvis
but they just Well, to say this as a radio guy, if you were taught in radio in 1930.

1:25:43 - Leo Laporte
To talk like this.

1:25:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Exactly an entirely different voice.

1:25:47 - Leo Laporte
But the person inside talking in that funny voice would be like me, like a human, like a bean Entirely different voice. But the person inside talking in that funny voice Would be like me, like a human, like a bean Bean like a human being it books. A farewell to arms Ernest Hemingway's, so it's gonna be earlier in his timing, way early. William Faulkner.

1:26:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Sound of fury into. I put Sound of Fury into Notebook LM and had it write a script and then, realized. Of course it uses the N word, so I killed that immediately.

1:26:17 - Leo Laporte
I really liked that novel. I wrote a paper about that in school.

1:26:20 - Jeff Jarvis
I put All Quiet in the Western Front in and there wasn't enough dialogue for it, so it doesn't know how to make the dialogue.

1:26:28 - Leo Laporte
Some early Mickey Mouse movies.

1:26:33 - Jeff Jarvis
The earliest was last year, but now's more mickey mouse this year, yeah, in fact, the first mickey mouse talking yes, is now in the public domain.

1:26:40 - Leo Laporte
he first talked in a movie called the carnival kid, so um, here it is from the wikimedia Commons. Can I play this? I feel like Disney's going to go after me anyway. The Carnival Kid, I guess it's a silent movie. There we go. Now I have to say I do like seeing these old movies. Here's Mickey. He's giving Minnie a hot dog some weird Freudian she raised her skirt to give money.

1:27:17 - Jeff Jarvis
This is too much for me he's making the universal symbol for geez.

1:27:24 - Leo Laporte
Alright, that's now in the public domain, aren't you glad? Jeez, all right, that's now in the public domain, aren't you glad? But I imagine in 1929, this was kind of amazing to hear these, I don't know. I don't know what people were like back then. Were they like us?

1:27:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, somebody like you walked on the beach with somebody like Walt Disney and he said you won't believe what's going to happen. Make music.

1:27:52 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, these were the first cartoons, I think like they're really good For the first time, it would have probably been pretty mind-blowing.

1:27:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, can you imagine? Yeah, Very cool.

1:28:00 - Jeff Jarvis
But there was a moral panic Nickelodeons the city of Chicago shut down Nickelodeons. The Chicago Tribune insisted they had to be banned because they were training out criminals of our youth. Making bad people for our youth.

1:28:18 - Leo Laporte
All right, I think we should take another pause and come up with something else interesting. You're watching the show formerly known as this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis. Watching the show formerly known as this week in google with jeff jarvis, formerly known as professor emeritus at the school there and cuny places, places, places. Yeah and you know the places rights for the weekend at the information. What are you working on right now, paris? What are you working on?

1:28:44 - Paris Martineau
something secret, something good, you're muted we'll be able to talk about it next week.

1:28:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, exciting stuff should I myself to sip beverages, and then forgetting to unmute myself so apologies, I just don't I don't know that people need to hear my sounds of swallowing, but you know, tiny tim thought it was awful to to eat in of other people he had misophonia.

1:29:11 - Leo Laporte
So there's not an uncommon. I've learned it because I often would eat during the breaks of my radio show and it really upset people because they had misophonia, which is the.

1:29:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I can't stand. I cannot stand open mouth chewing. It drives me crazy. You don't like the sounds of chewing? Oh God no.

1:29:29 - Paris Martineau
Okay, the sound, specifically the. It drives me crazy. You don't like the sounds of chewing, oh God, no, okay, specifically the vision, like looking at someone chewing does really scare me off.

1:29:36 - Jeff Jarvis
And there's all these videos now where that's what they're doing. They go get the pizza and they're right in front of the camera.

1:29:40 - Paris Martineau
Oh, a mukbang. Yeah, we don't like that.

1:29:43 - Jeff Jarvis
A mukbang. What's that? What the hell's that?

1:29:45 - Paris Martineau
That's a video where someone, usually a young woman, eats a comical amount of food in one sitting in front of the camera. Oh no, yeah. Oh no.

1:29:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, sorry. I'm just talking about guys going to test the best hot dogs.

1:30:01 - Benito Gonzalez
It's a genre of YouTube video, is it? Yeah, it is kind of sexual.

1:30:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Arguably yeah, no, we're not looking at muckbang videos you're gonna get the weirdest.

1:30:13 - Paris Martineau
This is gonna replace all the bikini content in your facebook it can't be any worse.

1:30:19 - Leo Laporte
All right, muckbang, okay, uh-huh paris.

1:30:23 - Jeff Jarvis
How do you know these things?

1:30:25 - Paris Martineau
I truly don't know. I think it's just the rosmosis. I couldn't tell you why.

1:30:30 - Leo Laporte
I know what a mukbang is, but I do Well, because she saw this on CBS Sunday Morning Watch what you eat, goes that familiar expression.

1:30:38 - Jeff Jarvis
But we promise you, there's nothing familiar about this story from David Pogue. This came out of. Jane Polly's mouth. No, david Pogue did it. Oh God.

1:30:47 - Paris Martineau
I love CBS Sunday.

1:30:48 - Benito Gonzalez
Morningay, I mean mukbang, is a korean word. It's a korean word.

1:30:50 - Leo Laporte
It's a korean first to youtube videos of people eating and talking about their meal. David pogue talked with mukbang celebrity bethany gaskin 2.3 million subscribers on youtube for eating gosh. So those people, I guess people enjoy that. Do not have misophonia. You are watching this week in the show, as I said, formerly called this Week in Google, soon to be Intelligent Machines on the TWIT Podcast Network. Do we care about CES? Do we want to talk about HDMI 2.2?

1:31:26 - Jeff Jarvis
There wasn't much. And I looked every day and there's just not much.

1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
I just can't believe we're still doing this.

1:31:33 - Paris Martineau
I can't believe people are still going to CES. I know me, too Coming back with a bunch of wacky products. I saw someone touting. They were like wow, they unveiled an AI body scanner that will use light to scan every fabric of your being at once. And I was like no, they won't, that's not happening at once. And I was like no, they won't, that's not happening. How have we gone through so many years of ces companies promising ridiculous futuristic products that never end up materializing?

1:31:57 - Jeff Jarvis
jason's there now with a team. Did he get with a team? Yeah, from, uh, tom merritt. Wow, he's doing stuff with tom merritt now they're doing better than I thought.

1:32:07 - Leo Laporte
Really. He's got a team. There are four people there doing better than I thought really. He's got four people there are four people there we can't afford to send me. Yeah, wow, well, good on jason and uh and tom. That's great yeah, there's.

1:32:17 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's a whittings omnia full body scanning health mirror. To your point, there's a paw port automatic pet door opener. These are the things I found. Andock's Roomba competitor gets a robot arm.

1:32:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there were a couple of robot vacuums with arms. They have arms, it'll pick up your socks.

1:32:36 - Jeff Jarvis
It's so stupid. Yeah, it's so stupid.

1:32:39 - Paris Martineau
And put them where.

1:32:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know, but it'll pick them up, fling them behind it.

1:32:44 - Leo Laporte
What about my?

1:32:45 - Paris Martineau
sock, I'm vacuuming here, does it? Have human-like fingers yeah.

1:32:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it have like human, like fingers? Yeah, yeah, we did videos there.

1:32:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, okay, I'm sorry after talking so much crap, but CS. I do want to see the full human hand attached to a Roomba. All right, it's kind of like do you guys remember that DJ Roomba that just had a knife attached to it?

1:33:06 - Leo Laporte
This is the dream. It had a knife attached to it.

1:33:10 - Paris Martineau
Imagine a Roomb, roomba, but with a giant kitchen knife stapled to the top.

1:33:13 - Leo Laporte
This is a dream with an e. It is now opening its hood, the arm is emerging there's nothing to pick up, though, so it's just gonna say hello should wave at us.

1:33:27 - Jeff Jarvis
This is just creepy.

1:33:29 - Paris Martineau
No, it's not, it's just dumb I just don't see the need for this no, me neither.

1:33:35 - Jeff Jarvis
No, there are a few of these. This is a year for that arm's gonna get stuck in there.

1:33:39 - Paris Martineau
Unfortunately, the thing can't grab anything. Is what the line of text on that article just read it wasn't showing it grabbing something.

1:33:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay, thank you. Well, we appreciate the reporting because poor Carissa Bell for Engadget had to go to. Ces had to suffer at CES, will probably come back sick, and all that for not much. Here's another robotic vacuum with a robo arm, the Roborock. Oh, there's some socks, at least Saros Z70. There comes the arm. It's gonna get a sock, or is it?

1:34:19 - Paris Martineau
now? What does it do now? That's what I really want to know they don't show that, they cut it. They cut away what's gonna happen to the sock?

1:34:29 - Jeff Jarvis
you're concerned about the fate of the sock?

1:34:31 - Leo Laporte
I guess it moves the sock but it doesn't put away the sock. You know how to move the sock, but you don't know how to wait, wait.

1:34:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Here comes the exciting ending.

1:34:40 - Paris Martineau
This could be a day to wall here no it puts the sock down on the floor and, yes, agi is right around the corner agi is right around the corner and it's gonna pick up the stuff you leave in the floor and hide it from you.

1:34:57 - Leo Laporte
So you can't find my point about it's smarter yes, but that's the stuff that we want agi to do is pick up our crap yeah, oh, they could pick it up, wash it and fold it, then put it in my drawer.

1:35:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'd love that we also had at ces lg unveiling affectionate intelligence. Nope, nope, I don't want the robot to hug me no uh, how many times have we heard this one? The new ai powered samsung refrigerator will guess what. Allow direct grocery ordering with instacart for years, years before this years.

1:35:34 - Leo Laporte
So the sad thing is the only way. I mean, they're probably never going to do it right. Samsung's the company that, by the way, put out a refrigerator with a screen and a browser in it that no longer works because they can't update the browser. So now people have refri. I know I have a friend who has a refrigerator with a screen in it, but doesn't, can't do anything with it. So this samsung refrigerator will have the ability to restock groceries and finally google tv.

1:36:05 - Jeff Jarvis
this is our kind of ces change. Like google tv, uh is getting Gemini. You know what I was thinking about it Having AI in your toaster is stupid and in your robot is stupid, but on your TV set. It kind of makes sense. It's a screen, it's an information screen.

1:36:21 - Leo Laporte
You can use it for stuff too, I mean I use Siri on my Apple TV, but it would be nice if we were a little smarter.

1:36:26 - Paris Martineau
For what?

1:36:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, there's a couple of commands I like. One is what the hell did she just say and then, and then no, this is a good one then really backs up 30 seconds, turns on the captions and plays it Wow oh, that's pretty good.

1:36:41 - Paris Martineau
That is pretty good.

1:36:42 - Leo Laporte
It's the old man feature. It's really oh, what did? What did you just say I use that a lot and then you can also say is that a standard canned feature?

yeah, yeah uh, it's been there for years. You can also say you know, say wicked, and then it will show you all the ways you can stream wicked, something like that. But an assistant would be nice, saying like, I don't know, I'm kind of tired, I just want to watch something light and funny, maybe, uh, between 30 minutes and an hour. What do you got? That would be cool if it actually came up with a good answer can we do it since?

1:37:16 - Speaker 2
one more, one more since kind of maybe, maybe this is the last we're getting.

1:37:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe this is the last google changelog ever, line 80 have you turned on this feature?

1:37:26 - Leo Laporte
ah, let's see.

1:37:27 - Paris Martineau
By the way, wait, do we want to do the google changelog?

1:37:32 - Benito Gonzalez
no, theme no for the last time sure, one last time go ahead sorry, it's not available you killed it already, but you know, hey, we're not changing the name until like so we got another couple shows.

1:37:50 - Leo Laporte
So this is actually a post from. That's what I did. I went to Google Gemini and said make me a theme song with recorders. It sounds like that and it did.

1:38:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Google Change Log. Uh, google changelog.

1:38:14 - Leo Laporte
Now we needed to play taps uh video so you picked a story from the new york times and then I actually right, and then I, I did it I installed it right so this is some sort of uh summary, and it came and asked me do you want to install this? Okay, sure so it's a chrome extension called help me.

1:38:39 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's just. It's just part of um chrome and if anytime I'm on any page and I double click, I two-figure click, it'll come up and ask me whether it wants me to summarize that page.

1:38:54 - Leo Laporte
That's cool, I guess, is it good.

1:38:57 - Jeff Jarvis
So I did it with Rich Sutton's piece. I looked at it and I said, do I really want to read all this? I thought, no, I have a new feature. So I summarize this with help me read, which makes me feel stupid.

1:39:11 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah.

1:39:11 - Jeff Jarvis
So it comes up the one paragraph. The article highlights the importance of general methods that leverage computation and AI. Research Doesn't tell me anything. It gives examples from computer chess Okay, so so. So it doesn't really get to the essence of it. The article emphasizes the power of general purpose.

1:39:25 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I I feel like Google is way behind in this stuff. I Cuz I can, google can install this wherever we are stuff, because I can use Perplexity. Well, but Google can install this wherever we are now.

1:39:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the thing. So now, on Google Search and on Google, every webpage I bring up, I can now use this. That's the power of Google.

1:39:45 - Leo Laporte
You don't use.

1:39:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Chrome, so you can't see it.

1:39:48 - Leo Laporte
I'm kind of intrigued if I feed this to Perplexity AI. Let me try this.

1:39:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, if I fed the same thing to Gemini itself, it'll probably be much better. This is their. Help Me Read feature. Well, that's what I'm saying Google's way behind.

1:40:05 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly what I'm saying. If you compare apples to apples, gemini to perplexity so here's perplexity's answer to this question about the bitter lesson that we talked about. The main argument is that general methods leveraging computation power ultimately the most effective in ai. Oh, that's actually said it better than I did. Uh, did a better job of summarizing than I did. You know what? This is excellent.

1:40:36 - Paris Martineau
That's a more thorough summary than I feel like these things normally give.

1:40:41 - Leo Laporte
Perplexity is. I use all the time now For research. I will just say you know what is the source of headaches or something you know, or whatever. Whatever, and it's very useful. The thing that it does that I really like is it gives you footnotes. It's kind of what eva used to do. It gives you footnotes so you can go to the original source. It's not just making this stuff up and then you can ask follow-up questions and so forth I think do use uh purposely discover for news yeah, uh, yeah, sort of yeah, same answer here.

I'm very, I'm very impressed with perplexity. Um, I find it very useful, and the thing that makes it more useful is it's connected to the internet now. So, unlike, uh, some you know, chat gpt, which whose models are more than a year old, you get current information, which is, I think, really good.

1:41:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So this may be a fun. Have you tried deep seek?

1:41:34 - Leo Laporte
no, what's that?

1:41:35 - Jeff Jarvis
so deep seek is line 75. It got a lot of attention right before the end of the year and it's a chinese model that was built on one-tenth the compute of the major models out now.

1:41:48 - Leo Laporte
Interesting.

1:41:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Supposedly can meet their challenges. If you go to DeepSeek, I think you have to go prove you're human or something. Hold on Deep. I can't type. I got a computer. I'll type on my keyboard. But, you can use it in English.

1:42:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, so if you go to DeepSeek, I've already signed it and remember, the Chinese are somewhat limited because of us sanctions well, that's what's interesting.

1:42:11 - Jeff Jarvis
so if you go to what you have two choices you can. You can ask the question and you can either have it, do deep think or search. So go to deep, sick, deep, deep seekcom or chatdeepseekcom, and but do the deep think first, because it's funny how it comes back you got to start now you got to go. You guys go up, start now. Start now you got to do that. It's going to ask you to do whatever oh well, we don't want to need to do.

Oh well, that's maybe interesting enough. All right, I'm gonna be on an ai shot in the future.

1:42:39 - Leo Laporte
I need help I need help it says click on the smallest yellow triangular pyramid in the picture.

1:42:46 - Jeff Jarvis
There it is there's only one, so you can argue with it then and then it gives me picture.

1:42:51 - Leo Laporte
There it is there's only one, so you can argue with it then and then it gives me not because you failed the captcha, but I can pretty print this for some reason.

1:43:01 - Paris Martineau
I don't know what I'm, I don't know.

1:43:02 - Leo Laporte
I would say yeah I was going to use login with google. That's when it wants this yellow cone cone there you go. The login with Google OAuth is not working.

1:43:13 - Paris Martineau
It's not happening today.

1:43:14 - Leo Laporte
All right. Anyway, I believe this is an exercise for the listener and viewer Deepseekcom, so what happens is just a minute.

1:43:22 - Jeff Jarvis
So I went in and I asked I can't remember when I asked it. I sent it all to Jason In kind of hazy text. It was oddly humble. Well, let me think about that. I'm thinking about this. It could be this. It could be that it's trying to act like it's thinking before my very eyes and then, after a few screen loads of this supposed thinking, it gives me the answer. I couldn't copy and paste the thinking text, only the answer text, but it tried to present some kind of humility as brand. Then if you instead search instead of deep thinking, it'll just go to the web and get you the answer and come back and it's kind of okay. But the reason it got all this attention is because it could be showing A, how much cheaper it could be to train models. I'm not sure how it did it, but B it's in China, so uh-oh Right.

1:44:15 - Paris Martineau
Uh-oh, uh-oh, that's interesting. Yeah, how did you find out about this?

1:44:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Benedict Evans, who I quote constantly said at the end of the year he said oh, deepsick came in with kind of the under-the-wire end-of-the-year big. Oh, deep sick came in with the kind of the under the wire end of the year big AI news.

1:44:33 - Leo Laporte
Uh, people aren't paying attention. So but did you also notice in this article that when you ask deep seek, what?

1:44:39 - Jeff Jarvis
model it's using. It says chat GPT. Well, that's the question. So here's the funny thing If it in fact is learning from chat GPT is chachi. But he could have the same complaint against deep sync the publishers have against chachi.

1:44:52 - Leo Laporte
Or is it just?

1:44:52 - Paris Martineau
ChatGPT. It's just chat. It is an API of ChatGPT. It just said the model is ChatGPT. The model is that's what Leo just said it doesn't even say the model is.

1:45:05 - Leo Laporte
It says I am ChatGPT, oops, oops basically I'm based off chat GPT, oops. Oops. Specifically, I'm based off the GPT-4 architecture. Now in this article it says it mistakenly identified itself, but I don't know if that's a mistake. We've seen this, by the way, in other people with phony AIs that are really just links to chat GPT, so I'll believe it when I see it. This is part of the problem is it's hard to verify that, right? How do you know? How do you know? I just asked it and it says hi, I'm DeepSeek V3.

1:45:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they fixed that bug. Yeah, of course, an AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company.

1:45:44 - Leo Laporte
DeepSeek Inc. Okay, methinks they doth protest too much. So what did Sam Altman say in his reflections on the new year?

1:45:54 - Jeff Jarvis
How pissed he was at everybody who screwed him over in his view on that fateful weekend.

1:45:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, he got pissed. This is going to be the year of grievances.

1:46:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Absolutely. It's grievances, yes, absolutely Grievances, and gripes Sons of guns.

1:46:07 - Leo Laporte
And then he says, it hasn't been easy, the road hasn't been smooth and the right choices haven't been obvious. For instance, I got fired at one point and then rehired. Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours and a pretty crazy few days.

1:46:26 - Jeff Jarvis
So this is where it drives me nuts toward the end. We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that to super intelligence in the true sense of the word. There is no sense of the word it's all a lie, it's all false, like now.

1:46:40 - Leo Laporte
He's beyond that. Oh, that's a precursor to super intel like yes after you get agi, which is like just as smart as us. You get something as smart average.

1:46:47 - Jeff Jarvis
You're the average being, and then you're a superfood. Yes, okay, we love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. Oh jesus, just scare me um. With super intelligence we can do anything else. Super intelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, well beyond what we're capable of doing on our own, and, in turn, massively increase abundance and prosperity. At the end of those two paragraphs, given the possibilities of those two paragraphs, given the possibilities of our work, openai cannot be a normal company. No, we're a special company.

1:47:22 - Leo Laporte
I might have to get this paw port for our cat. Is this an AI cat? Oh, look, it opened right up for her.

1:47:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Up, it opens up.

1:47:31 - Leo Laporte
You were wearing a thing and it knows you're coming oh yeah, yeah, our cat is chipped and we have a kind of traditional cat door that will only. It won't. It'll open to anything, anything that wants to get out, but it'll only open to the cat to get in because in case something critter gets in you wanted to put my parents need that because they they have a dog and recently they found a cat in their house yeah, exactly, did you convince them to keep the cat?

1:47:56 - Paris Martineau
oh, this one, my dad threw it out the door instead.

1:48:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I know oh, the the dog's gonna save them. There was a huge fire burning. Maybe this isn't uh. By the way, no levity about LA many friends down there who've lost their homes, who've been a bit incredible

1:48:15 - Jeff Jarvis
very sad, yeah, no right for eight months.

1:48:20 - Leo Laporte
I mean Jesus, yeah, we've had a lot of rain up here, I guess. I guess they didn't get it down there, which is too bad. All right, I think we take one more break and then get your picks of the week. What do you say?

1:48:32 - Paris Martineau
Sounds good.

1:48:32 - Leo Laporte
Good, you're watching this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. We're glad you're here. Before we go on, just a quick note. We would love to have you in our club Club Twit. It is one of the ways we keep this network on the air and keep the lights on it's very important way. Plus, we give you, I think, lots of benefits. Seven dollars a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the wonderful club twit discord and special events that go on in the discord. Uh, we have stacy's book club. It's going to be coming up in a little bit. Tomorrow it's going to be chris marquart and his photo assignment. We'll do a photo review and talk about photography. We also have micah's crafting corner and a whole bunch of other stuff. Uh, I honestly the benefits are great, but the real reason to join club twit is to support what we do. If you enjoy our shows, seven dollars a month we keep it affordable. Visit twittv slash clubtwit and join the club. We'd love to have you Also while you're there.

Another way you can help us is by doing the survey. Twittv slash survey Should only take you a few minutes. It's one of the well, it's the only way really that we get to know you and, in aggregate, we take the information we get from that and it helps us sell. For instance, we now know that 80 of our audience are it decision makers, that kind of thing, and advertisers are always anxious for that kind of information. No personal information, I promise you. We don't aggregate, we don't track anybody or anything like that. We we have no interest in that. We do aggregate the entire survey results and give them percentages and things like that. It is helpful to us. So if you haven't done it yet, you have till the end of the month. Twittv slash survey. All right, now let's see what else do we have on the agenda today. I do love this story about the tech entrepreneur who got trapped in a Waymo and nearly missed his flight. It started going around in circles.

1:50:38 - Jeff Jarvis
That is straight out of the TV show Silicon Valley by the way, and he's a tech guy, so he thinks well, I got pawned. I know all these tech guys. Somebody did this to me.

1:50:47 - Speaker 2
Oh. So at first he thought that, and he was trying to call him he was on the phone seeking help from the company.

1:50:51 - Leo Laporte
I have my seatbelt on. I can't get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What's going on? Somebody playing a joke on me. I've got a flight to catch. Actually, I can play a little bit of this video. He's just going around. It's getting dizzy.

1:51:14 - Waymo Customer Support
Hi there, mike, just going around dizzy. I'm just calling because I receive a notification at your car might be experiencing some routing issue?

1:51:22 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, it's. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy. It's looking what it's doing. I understand.

1:51:28 - Waymo Customer Support
I'm really, really sorry, mike. We're certainly working with the situation of the vehicle. But I have to read a script so this is going to take longer than you want.

1:51:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Circling around a parking lot.

1:51:37 - Leo Laporte
Don't they have a? Don't they have an emergency stop button? What's?

1:51:41 - Jeff Jarvis
going on. I think they have to file a report first.

1:51:44 - Leo Laporte
Is somebody playing a joke on me? They should. No, he should have a big red button. Let me out of here. I understand, Mike. I'm really sorry for this.

1:51:51 - Jeff Jarvis
That's my script.

1:51:53 - Waymo Customer Support
Do you have an access to your Waymo app right now? Yeah, okay. Now I'm going to be pulling the car over while we are trying to assist the car.

1:52:04 - Paris Martineau
Let me out of here. It continues to go in circles. Oh, my goodness, oh it stopped.

1:52:08 - Leo Laporte
I just know I'm not too late for the flight. You guys are going to take care of the flight, oh boy, anyway, we won't get into the grievances there, wow.

1:52:17 - Benito Gonzalez
That call center was in the Philippines.

1:52:20 - Leo Laporte
You could tell from her accent Yep, yeah, wow, her English was good, but there were some pronunciation and accent issues. Yeah, interesting.

1:52:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you want to choose your silicon valley think boy, or is that to?

1:52:36 - Leo Laporte
uh, choose yours. That was going to be my pick of the week. Oh, choose you. No, I wasn't choose your. Silicon valley, think. Boy curtis, balaji, ray, eliezer jack these are all real people, peter.

1:52:50 - Jeff Jarvis
They're all think boys Pick Peter, for example.

1:52:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you can actually pick him.

1:52:55 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm just saying Less facial emotions than Lizard.

1:53:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, these are all real people, aren't they Nice? I'm sure Jason Calacanis is miffed that he's not in this list?

1:53:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, exactly.

1:53:09 - Leo Laporte
Hey, what about me? I'm a. Jason Calacanis is miffed that he's not in this list. Yes, exactly, hey, what about?

1:53:12 - Jeff Jarvis
me, I'm a thick boy. I accidentally watched a Jason video today. It just kind of came up and I don't know why, and he's skiing in something I'm sure the most amazing place in the world and he has to pick more of that pow-pow. It's powder, jason, just say powder, just say pow.

1:53:31 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to go and get some more pow pow. Oh Jesus, you want to infantilize yourself. If I ever start doing things like that, will you?

1:53:34 - Jeff Jarvis
just slap me. Oh, you know, we're going to slap you, okay, good.

1:53:38 - Leo Laporte
It is time for our picks of the week. Let's start with Paris's thing a post-mortem.

1:53:46 - Paris Martineau
So some people have been actually quite a lot of people have been messaging me on Blue Sky asking for me to talk about what happened with Nick Vember. So I did a little thread whenever I was trapped at an airport for like seven hours over the holidays and then on a plane for a while. So I went through some of my favorite movies from Nick Vember, movies from nick bember. For those who don't recall, nick bember was my attempt in november to watch, uh, one nick cage movie a day or about 30 nick cage movies the tlzr is. I didn't hit that exactly because I ended up getting sick and then the election happened.

But you know, I did like one every other day, which I think is good you like face off a lot.

1:54:27 - Leo Laporte
You said one of the best movies ever made Face.

1:54:29 - Paris Martineau
Off is the reason I did. Nick Vember, I like your choice of screenshots it got me back into movies.

I saw it in theaters once, like a year ago, and decided to, I don't know and then decided seeing movies in theaters is the way, and I was not wrong. Face Off is fantastic, a phenomenal film. I feel like pinnacle of big dumb action movie. But also it just really holds up on a rewatch. It's great, highly recommend. But starting November I wanted to kind of go through Cage's whole oeuvre. So I started with his first ever appearance in TV or film, which was this pilot from 1981 called the best of times. Cage is 17 in it and plays a meathead, uh, named nick, and it's honestly fantastic. It's a like weird kind of after-school special. All the other kids that are kind of normal, they're like weird musical elements. It's available for free on youtube, but nick cage for some reason plays a meathead who's haunted by the shadow of war and that he could one day be drafted and is just like is already like doing the you see together, yeah like you could play a clip from that.

I don't know if they'll take you down. It's on free full on youtube, but um I mean, like I'm registered.

1:55:55 - Benito Gonzalez
They called the draft. I'm in there, man man that says it's my patriotic duty, but shoot, I mean shoot, you don't even get to choose a nice place. I mean why? Why do they have wars in vietnam and korea anyway? Why not some place real neat, like like the french riviera or Bermuda?

1:56:11 - Leo Laporte
That would be nice. Great question. Stay tuned. Well, it could soon happen. It could soon happen how do you feel about? Denmark, Nick yeah.

1:56:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Or anywhere in NATO Valley.

1:56:24 - Paris Martineau
Girl. He was the male lead in that Good movie. Birdie came right after.

1:56:30 - Speaker 2
Valley Girl, that was a big one, yeah it was his first like dramatic lead.

1:56:35 - Paris Martineau
Uh, very weird cage and nick cage and his childhood best friend, who's obsessed with birds, get drafted to go to vietnam and end up haunted by it. But his friend uh deals the trauma by progressing to believe he's a literal bird and nick cage is uh tasked with trying to get him out of the psych ward.

Uh, it's crazy I can't believe 1984, wow this has been going on for a long time okay, a real early banger that everybody should watch is peggy sue got married. Uh, in 1986 movie francis directed it this was he had changed his name from Nick Coppola to Nick Cage at this point. But Jim Carrey is also in this movie and there's just like, but as like a side character. So there's a scene of Nick Cage and young Jim Carrey. Before either were famous doo-wopping, wow.

1:57:24 - Leo Laporte
And it's great.

1:57:25 - Paris Martineau
Really recommend it. Francis is good at that.

1:57:27 - Leo Laporte
Raising Arizona Classics yeah.

1:57:29 - Paris Martineau
Raising Arizona Moonstruck. I mean everybody knows those are great.

1:57:32 - Leo Laporte
We're not going to go through all of them, but there's some good stuff here. This is good.

1:57:36 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I'll do exactly two more. Zandali 1991, worst movie I've ever seen.

1:57:40 - Leo Laporte
Never heard of it.

1:57:41 - Paris Martineau
Best one of my. Don't watch it, it's bad from 1998, it's like classic american psycho, but vampires phenomenal. Yeah, yeah, paris, I need another report from last year.

1:57:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I need to know what happened at the white elephant party where she was handing.

1:58:04 - Leo Laporte
We had a role here that said fresh guys deserve to know.

1:58:09 - Paris Martineau
Okay. So White Elephant Party for the bourgeois ski. We went to hometown hot pot and barbecue in Chinatown At all, ate a bunch of meats and then put our presents on the table and did White Elephant. What did I end up getting? I ended up getting an oyster candle, which was just normal. But by and large large, the winner of the group was my box of weird stickers. Everybody was obsessed with it, everybody wanted some, everybody could have some, because there were so many yeah there were some, there were hundreds of them uh, people stole it.

People then afterwards asked for people put the stickers in their phone. They loved it it was a great great.

1:58:49 - Leo Laporte
What great pick guys. What was the most? You had shrimp. You had freshly baked. What else did you have?

1:58:56 - Paris Martineau
Freshly or fully cooked. Fully cooked is very good and hot Italian.

1:59:03 - Leo Laporte
Which was the most popular?

1:59:05 - Paris Martineau
I think everybody had a bit of a mix. Some people really liked shrimp, Some people were like I'm a hot italian and other people were like I'm fully cooked so you know there was really something for everyone something for everyone.

That's the only other, uh, sleeper, kind of hit it. The thing was someone. For some reason the bush busky has this like long-running gag where whenever someone posts a kind of innocuous photo in the group chat, someone will send it back to the group chat, but with a like cartoon gun just included somewhere very tiny in the photo that you can't really see. Um, and so someone got a gold necklace with a tiny little gun on it and that was that was a good one.

1:59:44 - Leo Laporte
We should explain to people new to the show that the bourgeois ski is paris's ski ball team it is my ski ball team.

1:59:53 - Paris Martineau
Yes, uh, that I'm most my core friend group.

1:59:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a very clever name. Is it spelled with s-k-e-e at the end? Yes, yeah, bourgeois ski very good, it's a good name who came up with the?

2:00:06 - Paris Martineau
name um my friend maya, who's the ski ball captain you should give oh crap, captain, the skeeball team yeah does she get a special little c? On her shirt in all of our, in all of our hearts jeff jarvis, your pick of the week I could go highbrow, I could go lowbrow.

2:00:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, go both ways. Highbrow is is that google has created, with deep mind, a the habermas machine what you talk about, habermas, but I forget who.

2:00:37 - Leo Laporte
What is that?

2:00:38 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, you're gonna habermas of the frankfurt school. Still alive german philosopher uh he's still difficult to read. Oh yes, he is, wow, um who? Who theorized about the creation of the bourgeois?

there we go Paris public sphere, in the coffee houses and salons of 18th century Europe, and known as a kind of. He thought that there was a public discourse that was higher than, and then media and everything else ruined it. So the Habermas machine. The idea is that it will take arguments in a disagreement and then it will create something that both sides could maybe agree upon.

2:01:22 - Leo Laporte
So Habermas thought that if you got people Habermas was nuts thought that if you get people together and the conditions are right, they will agree more than they disagree. Hab obviously comes from a different, so I write about this at some length in both my gutenberg book and my magazine book.

2:01:40 - Jeff Jarvis
By the way, um both on sale now, gutenberg and paperbacks cheaper than ever. Um, but it's also kind of a joke among people that Habermas is the most is an impenetrable philosopher of the current days.

2:01:53 - Leo Laporte
So that's the highbrow. They call it the Habermas machine, but the idea is it digests the opinions and comes up with a compromise. They could have called it the Solomon machine. Could have yes. So that's the highbrow.

2:02:08 - Jeff Jarvis
The lowbrow is that, as soon as to Paris's point earlier, as soon as Florida required age verification for porn, within hours, according to VPN Monitor, the requests for VPNs went up 11,050%. That's a rather large increase.

2:02:31 - Leo Laporte
Yep the yeah gotta have it uh, because, uh, you could be in any state of the so it got.

2:02:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Porn hub is now blocked, geo-blocked in 12 states. Isn't that well?

2:02:45 - Paris Martineau
by geo-blocked, inaccessible unless you do id verification. But yes, effectively, no, no, I think.

2:02:51 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, they just said we're not going to do id verification, so we're not going to be available in those states because we think there's no way to do it for you yeah, actually it's a principle oh yeah, I guess this is the thing.

2:03:03 - Paris Martineau
They replaced it with a video of a uh porn actress explaining, fully clothed uh, why porn hub has decided to remove itself from this country.

2:03:13 - Leo Laporte
That's right, so you do get that. I don't think that's what you were looking for, but you do get that. I honestly think that these legislators aren't unhappy about that. I think their whole goal is to ban porn, but anyway, yeah, vpn is going to make it impossible to do what they want to do. Interesting and probably porn hub knows that right gizmo appearance by gizmo the cat.

2:03:38 - Jeff Jarvis
you're gonna see the the uh, the rear end here no, she's trying.

2:03:44 - Leo Laporte
So bad, her locked really trying to show, saying I want to show you what I've been up to. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, you have been up to a, a brisk hour and, all right, two hours of conversation about all things technology. We are going to keep doing that. We're going to refocus a little bit on intelligent machines, on ai or robotics, and and our smart devices, whether it's the advertisers are going to keep doing that. We're going to refocus a little bit on intelligent machines, on AI and robotics and our smart devices, whether it's home automation and the advertisers are going to just flood in now.

They're going to eat it. Watch, you, watch. We'll have many more ads.

2:04:19 - Paris Martineau
We're going to be able to have a show for months. We'll tell you months.

2:04:24 - Leo Laporte
I actually like the rebranding and it's finally a way to get rid of that horrible theme.

2:04:29 - Paris Martineau
And guys, if you're worried that this show is going to be all boring discussion about AI not going to happen, I would fall asleep.

2:04:36 - Leo Laporte
So it's going to be basically the same show. We're just changing the name to fool the advertisers. Hey, don't tell that. Don't tell that to the audience, but I think it's an opportunity to get some interesting guests on, so we will do that. We don't want to compete with your show, jeff. Jeff does AI Insider with our own, jason Howell, and that's a great show. So we're not going to be like that show.

2:04:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I think no because we go through kind of the week's real news, week's AI news and stuff. Yeah, we don't get distracted as much as we do here. Yeah, this is more going to be different. This is the philosophical discussions here.

2:05:10 - Leo Laporte
Yes, stuff like that Paris Martineau has a very important story that will be breaking on the weekend. Sometime in the next week Perhaps. Is it going? To be a weekend publication or sooner.

2:05:22 - Paris Martineau
Perhaps sometime in an upcoming weekend near you.

2:05:27 - Leo Laporte
An upcoming Well, I'm a paid subscriber to the wonderful information. I think, theinformationcom is a must Very, very astute coverage of technology.

2:05:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm such a paid subscriber. I had to go through four efforts to get my credit card to clear with them.

2:05:45 - Paris Martineau
If you're interested in more AI news but don't want to subscribe, we just launched a new AI newsletter called Applied AI It'll be our second AI newsletter it's free and you can read all the stuff you want there.

2:05:58 - Leo Laporte
See, Jessica knows how to get the advertisers interested. She knows what she's up to Very smart. Thank you, Paris. Great to see you. Jeff Jarvis, congratulations. When do you start your teaching assignment?

2:06:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm probably going to work more on curriculum development. Okay, I'm working on a degree that's related to AI and other fun stuff.

2:06:24 - Leo Laporte
I did see that the Gutenberg parenthesis is going to be used as curriculum material. Did I see that is going to be used as curriculum material.

2:06:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, he got an award for an outstanding academic publication from Choice, a publication of academic librarians.

2:06:39 - Leo Laporte
Geez.

2:06:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not a real academic. Don't tell him.

2:06:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you know what? You're as much an academic as anybody. You count. What makes you an academic? A funny hat, you got it all. You got so many funny hats thank you, jeff charvis, former professor, professor emeritus, always be professor emeritus at the uh, craig newmark graduate school of journalism can never lose that theme. No, we can't. I bet craig has things to say about ai. I mean we can get him back on yeah, well, I also know he's right there in his name yeah, you can't spell

2:07:19 - Jeff Jarvis
craig without ai. Plus, we want to get craig and stacy on, because craig gave a grant to the work that stacy that's right.

2:07:26 - Leo Laporte
That's right reports.

2:07:27 - Jeff Jarvis
So we should talk about that as well yeah, that's a great idea.

2:07:31 - Leo Laporte
We will absolutely get to work on that. Thank you all for joining us. We do this week in google uh every uh wednesday right after windows. Weekly, that's usually around 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2200 utc. You can watch us live on all of those eight platforms discord, if you're a club twit member, but also youtube, twitch, twig no, there's no such thing as twig uh, tick, tock, that's it. Uh. Linkedin, facebook kick and xcom. There, all eight of them.

2:08:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I tried to do it. We're not going to call this twig anymore, figure. So what is it I am, or I'm Twam?

2:08:10 - Leo Laporte
No, it's just M. So it's M or I'm.

2:08:14 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like 60 Minutes, the I'ms they call them. I'm, I'm Bob.

2:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Wallace Right, I'm Marvin Kremski.

2:08:26 - Paris Martineau
I'm, I'm 60 Minutes.

2:08:28 - Leo Laporte
Thank you everybody for joining us.

2:08:30 - Jeff Jarvis
What kind of bean are you?

2:08:32 - Leo Laporte
I'm a human bean.

2:08:35 - Paris Martineau
I'm a lima bean.

2:08:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm a black bean. I like my black beans.

2:08:39 - Paris Martineau
I love black beans Controversial.

2:08:41 - Leo Laporte
Yes, we don't talk about race here, jeff. Thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google. Bye-bye.