TWiG 783 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 is here. Pavel Dorov, however, is in jail in Paris. We'll talk about the arrest of the Telegram founder and what it means for social platforms in general. We'll also talk a little bit about hamburgers, mozzarella cheese and the new AI features in the Pixel phone. That's just a small sampling of what's coming next on Twig Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

0:00:34 - Benito Gonzalez
This is Twig.

0:00:40 - Leo Laporte
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 783. Recorded Wednesday, august 28th 2024. The cat in the hat, it's time for Twig this Week in Google. Let me start the timer so I know how long this show is going. The show that goes on and on and never mentions Google. It's kind of an amazing feat. We believe it's a magic trick. Actually, I hope you enjoy it With me right now.

0:01:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeff jarvis he is well, no one knows as of today. Yes, officially emeritus.

0:01:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so now we've been saying emeritus wrong that was as good as emeritus.

0:01:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Now you're getting paid.

0:01:20 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm no longer. He is the emeritus tau knight professor of journalistic innovation at the craig graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york. Director of the townites. Now I'm no longer the director that's no longer that. You're not even an emeritus on that. You just don't have anything to do with them. Yeah, it'm just calling you. It's over.

0:01:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I left a million dollars behind me.

0:01:45 - Leo Laporte
The author of Gutenberg Parenthesis at GutenbergParenthesiscom magazine and soon the Web we Weave. It's a new book which is coming out next month. Now, ladies and gentlemen, to my left, paris Martineau, reporter for the Information, where she covers the utes the utes is that what is the? Actual. What is the actual beat?

0:02:13 - Paris Martineau
yeah, the utes uh kids in technology, online child safety and related policies yeah but she knows about everything, so I do a little bit of column, a little bit of column b. You know, every single week when you do uh jeff's intros I guess you're probably not going to anymore I want to say journalistic integrity instead of journalistic innovation. But I should of course remember that you know he's a man of innovation, yes, rather than integrity. Screw the integrity, yeah, screw the integrity.

0:02:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's gone no, no, no, you have lots of integrity. We, we count on that. Uh boy, I just I don't know where. I guess I should do a little elon segment. The big story to me is what's going on in paris with pavel dorov.

Let me we'll start with that it does send chills up elon's spine because dorov is, uh, um, the guy in charge of telegram, which is a platform not on, not dissimilar to twitter. It uses a client. It kind of looks like a messaging app, but I don't think it's the messaging. That's the problem. It's the public uh groups that telegram supports that the french are unhappy about. He was on an airplane flying in his private jet from azerbaijan. He has joint citizenship in, uh, the emirates and french france. He was flying to Paris. They saw his name on the manifest, even though it was a private plane and officials. Now it's different in France. It's a little. It's not like our form of jurisprudence. A magistrate can issue a warrant. It's not even an arrest. They just bring you in and then he can decide whether to indict you or not. And, as far as we know, he was arrested in the sense that he was stopped, but he has not been accused of any crime.

0:04:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Just no, I put, just put up. It just happened. He got charged, he did get charged.

0:04:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's online took a long time. He was arrested on sunday you're allowed.

0:04:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Today was the day they had to uh, and oh shoot, he's been charged in france with enabling various forms of criminality in the app.

0:04:29 - Paris Martineau
French prosecutors said wednesday one of the charges complicit I'm reading from an nbc news article by uh kevin collier and rob wheel um. One of the charges complicity in administering a online platform permitting illegal transactions by an organized group carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 euros.

0:04:51 - Leo Laporte
So no one disputes that Telegram is rife with criminality. I mean, I wouldn't dispute that Twitter is rife with criminality, or, you know, whatsapp. I mean that's kind of the nature of these platforms, the Internet the Internet is rife with criminality. There is some awful stuff on Telegram, including. Terrorist organizations used it to plan assassinations. The January 6th insurrectionists used it to plan the insurrection. Child pornography. People exchange CSAM material on Telegram. There are drug markets on Telegram, much like Silk Road, but there's also a lot of normal messaging going on. I use it, I love it. I really like its look and feel, its usability. I subscribe to some public channels. For instance, there's a channel that republishes Apple's press releases, so I get a notification from my telegram whenever apple puts out a press release.

0:05:47 - Paris Martineau
Apple doesn't notify me, but telegram does, so that's handy for a journalist yeah, telegram is quite big as kind of a news source in certain parts of the world. I know a lot of ukrainian media organizations exist largely on telegram, but so do the russian military right?

0:06:03 - Leo Laporte
yeah, this is what's so interesting about a platform it doesn't discriminate so reading more from this nbc news article.

0:06:12 - Paris Martineau
In a statement, wednesday, the paris prosecutor's office said that telegram had almost completely failed to respond with legal requests for user data. In prosecuting cyber crime cases, prosecutors cited numerous offenses, including refusal to communicate with authorities, quote complicity in offenses related to child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and implementing encrypted technology without proper declaration. It's kind of interesting because it does seem like this is one of the first instances where the CEO of a major internet platform has been charged like alleged criminal failure to basically moderate what users do on the platform, which is what you see, in the US it is to moderate, but I would submit that it's also a failure to give the keys to the back door to law enforcement.

0:07:03 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of what's implied with this indictment.

0:07:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it is, we failed to to cooperate.

0:07:08 - Leo Laporte
And now telegram has encryption. It is not by default end-to-end encrypted. In fact, its encryption is a roll your own. It was written by his brother pavildorov's brother, who is also now has a wet restaurant for him, uh, in france, but it it has never really been vetted. And and matthew green wrote a long piece of our favorite cryptographer, from jobs hopkins, saying there's all sorts of question marks about their encryption. Nevertheless, to call it an end-to-end encrypted platform isn't really strictly true, because you have to jump through hoops to encrypt it. Group chats are not encrypted and cannot be, so it's encrypted. Let me ask you there, leo.

0:07:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I interrupt for one second? Just what I saw is because one of the key questions here is what could Pavlodorov have known? So you're encrypted. If you want to be to Telegram, Are you then encrypted within Telegram and then on? In other words, is everything visible to Telegram or not.

0:08:02 - Leo Laporte
It's unclear. They claim end-to-end, which would be the answer. If it were real end to end, it would? Your answer would be yes. That telegram can't see it either but only certain things.

Only if you go to the effort and only if you're not grouped. Yeah, and it's not clear whether it is end to end encrypted, because they haven't. It's not open source, they've never really allowed really matter, let's assume for purposes of discussion. It is secure, encrypted like whatsapp is, like signal is, uh, but groups are never encrypted. There are a lot of public groups, including public groups where they sell drugs and they plot terrorist crimes and stuff. Um, the russian military uses it, the ukraine military uses it, uh, it's, but the thing is it's a. So so here's what's problematic to me is he's being held responsible, something that I think wouldn't happen in the us because of section 230. He's being held responsible for the content on the platform. Uh, you, you certainly wouldn't hold at&t responsible for terrorist plots conceived on the phone network. Well, well, this is the publisher argument.

0:09:05 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the argument that-.

0:09:06 - Leo Laporte
A publisher versus carrier.

0:09:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, which we have a argument about, david Kaye, who's a wonderful law professor in California, who also was the UN Special Rapporteur on Matter as Internet. He tweeted a little bit ago, or he blue-skied a little while ago. The complicity offenses will be something to watch. What did Doroff know about criminal activity? Is Telegram's knowledge if there was notice and there definitely was in some cases imputed to him? Do they have evidence of specific directives from Doroff on cooperation with authorities? So I think you're right.

0:09:41 - Leo Laporte
That's a key part of this. What do both of you think if Durov or people responsible at Telegram knew said oh yeah, that channel is full of illicit drug sales, do they have a responsibility to close it? They say they, by the way. They say they do that they close. What was it? There's something like 50 CSAM accounts a day.

0:10:08 - Paris Martineau
A Telegram spokesperson told NBC News that it uses a combination of moderators, artificial intelligence and user reports to remove public channels that host CSAM material, and it publishes a daily report claiming it removes thousands of channels a day for CSAM. But its terms of service says that there's no means for reporting illegal activity in private telegram chats and that it's never given any government any information on a user. To your question, Leo, I don't know enough about French law to be able to state with certainty what this means and whether or not that would potentially be an alleged break from what is legal to do in France.

0:10:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's I mean I don't either, but I mean just in general, morally ethically and, as a journalist, do you think they should be that the sites should be responsible for that, Given that he has almost a billion monthly active users?

0:11:04 - Paris Martineau
so it's a challenge to do it this is, this is where you get into, go ahead paris in general, it seems like I I uh, a couple weeks ago when I was in dc, I was at a conference on held by kind of the national center on sexual exploitation. They actually went into a lot of stuff relating to this, not on telegram specifically, but on a bunch of different other major tech platforms. And something that I was a little surprised to learn given you know we hear all of this back and forth over moderation of platforms is the major tech platforms all cooperate quite a lot with government officials in order to get rid of CSAM on their platform and take it down. In a lot of cases, videos that are known CSAM material are hashed in a certain way and then that information is transmitted to the tech companies. So if anybody ever tries to upload that CSAM again, it is automatically flagged and taken down and authorities are notified. Csam again, it is automatically flagged and taken down and authorities are notified.

And part of the thing that I think is interesting here is that it seems like telegram is not. I mean it, telegram seems to not be doing any of that and they are not playing ball at all, which is why I think they're getting in hot water legally is because their approach, which has been praised by a lot of kind of free speech. Absolutionist types is like anything goes as far as private chats, but obviously the people who police these things say anything does not go.

0:12:35 - Leo Laporte
But there are no private chats on Telegram. Really, If there's a lot of illegality going on in public chats, shouldn't the police arrest those people and not worry so much about Pavel Dorov?

0:12:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's the problem is, they can't find them and can't get them, so they go there.

0:12:51 - Leo Laporte
This is the argument I have.

0:12:52 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the same argument I have about AI these days. There's a three-tier matrix here of responsibility. Is it the technology Gutenberg we're going to be ahead You've worked with, comes off the press. Is it the application layer, the intermediaries, whether that was a publisher or a bookstore or another platform, or is it the user? I would argue the most responsibility should fall to the user, the person who creates it, spreads it, asks for it. But because two problems. One is it's anonymous, and we've had that argument plenty, and I still think anonymity is very important. But two is scale.

The government efforts cannot scale against this, and so they try to hold who they can responsible, and so they hold the platform and say you should do this. And this is what led in the UK to the duty of care in the formerly known as harms, now known as safety law. You do it and we're not going to tell you exactly what's wrong. We're not going to tell you what the law is. We're going to tell you you should enforce it.

Same thing with NetsDG in Germany, where Facebook has to decide what is illegal or manifestly illegal, because it requires different actions. This is intermediary liability. That's where it all comes down to. But your question I think is right, leo, is that if you do have the mechanism to know and all these other platforms, as Paris just said, do have the mechanism to know, they have to invest in it, they have to do it, but they do it. Should Telegram be held responsible in the same way? Well, that depends on the whole law, but I think the other platforms have set that precedent that says this is over the bar and we will cooperate and get rid of it to the best of our ability.

0:14:36 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and I think a user in our Discord just brought up a good point Trust. No one said I could buy the users are responsible argument if it was decentralized. But he in this case Telegram was hosting it all of it. A lot of other pirate sites, like Red Pirate Roberts, have tried the same argument, saying oh no, no, it's just our users, not us, and they lost and I think that that is kind of a valid argument. There's the aspect of this that Telegram is hosting a large amount of CSAM and other patently illegal content and I don't know, do you think that government agencies have the right to come after them for that?

0:15:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, here's the problem is I'll go back to David Kaye. He said the French are treading on complicated ground here and quite dangerous to the extent. States without strong rule of law or with underlying repressive laws, especially on speech and public debate, see this as precedent to go after senior tech execs. They want someone to blame. That's an easy target and I think that's going to be a horrible chill on speech.

0:15:41 - Leo Laporte
We've seen this in China and Russia. Both have said if you're going to operate in our country, you have to have employees on the ground so that we can arrest them. Yeah, if something, if we don't like what you're doing. Um, yeah, it does seem problematic. I mean, look, I don't, I don't if. If dorav knows there's child sexual abuse material on Telegram and does nothing about it, that seems reprehensible. Right, agree, but he also can make the case. We do everything we can, but it's impossible.

0:16:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Does he A? Does he Should he? Is he obligated?

0:16:22 - Leo Laporte
to. And what do the French authorities want? Do they actually want a back door into his encrypted? Well, that's the other traffic. They're not being clear about what they want. No, of course Elon Musk's is terrified, because, I mean, if I were Elon, I wouldn't go to France, but you make the point, it could be any country. Section 230 stops at our borders. Yeah, would section 230 protect him, jeff?

0:16:51 - Paris Martineau
no, because um I think what they're going after them for is uh this is from a politico article about this quote uh, telegram's almost total failure to respond to judicial requests is what the French prosecutor's office is claiming.

0:17:08 - Leo Laporte
So you got it. You didn't play the game. Yeah, you got to play the game.

0:17:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Well that is not and it's not just a game. And I'll go to our friend Craig Newmark. One of the hallmarks of his reign at Craigslist was that he cooperated with police very early on, and let's not forget that Foster Sessa passed and he took down personals and such or he didn't but Craigslist did, because he was no longer in charge. But the research is very clear since then that it has made enforcement much, much more difficult.

0:17:43 - Leo Laporte
Do you agree with Julia? Sign up in our YouTube chat. It says anonymity is a failed experiment. We should never have anonymity in public.

0:17:51 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that is easy for a person of privilege to say. If you are a person who's vulnerable, if you are trans, in many states in this country right now, you need anonymity to stay safe. I think you've got to keep that in mind. Anonymity is not a privilege, it is a right.

0:18:11 - Leo Laporte
So I disagree and it's a trade-off, because some people use anonymity to do bad things but it's also no.

0:18:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Identity is no solution. I can name plenty of jerks by name. Yeah, just because your name is there doesn't mean you're suddenly not a jerk but I'm curious, do you guys think?

0:18:29 - Paris Martineau
I agree, I think anonymity is a public good in many ways, but does that mean that a tech company has a right or a responsibility to protect your anonymity at all costs? Not at all when they know who you are, to protect your anonymity at all costs? Not at all. When they know who you are, not at all Do they have to protect your IP address from the government.

0:18:49 - Jeff Jarvis
No, if you're subpoenaed. If you are subpoenaed for somebody's IP address, when I ran online sites, we gave it up. We were legally required to give it up, yeah.

0:18:58 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I feel like this is kind of what the Telegram case is.

0:19:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, so do you think he was sending this stuff? And they're like we don't know, but you think maybe that he wasn't responding to legitimate subpoenas or whatever it is I mean that's what the prosecutor's office has addressed has alleged is that they were not responding to judicial requests but why didn't they go, did they?

0:19:19 - Jeff Jarvis
my question would be then did they first go after the company instead of him individually? Because there's a lot of things they could have done in the company. They could have seized things, they could have stopped it, they could have done anything.

0:19:28 - Leo Laporte
Use craigslist as a good example. Craigslist. There's something bad on craigslist. The law now prohibits it with sasta, festa, uh, festa, sasta, whatever it's called and, uh, and the, and, and. The government goes to craigslist to say this is against the law. Craigslistlist pulls it down. At no point is the CEO of Craigslist going to get arrested.

0:19:50 - Jeff Jarvis
No, Well, however. Well, no, hold on here. Let's take Craig out of it. Let's say that when I ran NJcom and we had people coming to us with subpoenas, if I had refused to answer that subpoena I would have gone to jail. Yeah, that's true, okay yeah, so so maybe the issue there would have been my non-responsiveness to a subpoena. Right.

0:20:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's more than what was underlying. Yeah, still this is.

0:20:18 - Jeff Jarvis
This is dangerous and it's not, and france is not being forthcoming enough for us to know what the implications of this are, because they could be great.

0:20:28 - Leo Laporte
The New York Times says in the article about the charges, light oversight of content on the platform has helped people living under authoritarian governments to communicate, but it has also made the app a haven for harmful content. Right, can you have the former without the latter? I?

0:20:46 - Jeff Jarvis
think you can. So I'm going to quote David K again, and then the thread is almost done so I'll stop. He said the tightrope walk is preserving the ability to promote free expression while signaling commitment in addressing actual crime. I think that's well put. You're trying to balance. Twitter was great at that in the old days before Musk Twitter said was great at that in the old days before musk. Twitter said we are going to fight for freedom of expression, we are going to fight for the rights of our users, but we're also going to deal with crime as crime. What does mike masnick?

0:21:13 - Leo Laporte
say he he was writing something? Yeah, I remember, because he was doing research on pavel durov.

0:21:19 - Paris Martineau
I saw that on on uh blue sky obviously whatever, when we learn the details of these charges, any of the things we're saying could totally change. Right now we're kind of speculating, but if it's as simple of a case as like what you're saying, telegram wants to take kind of a free speech approach and say, no, we don't think the government should have the right to request this information. That's fine, but you have to go through the court and judicial process that's right to make that claim, you've got to yes, like Twitter or any of these other companies.

Have your lawyers make that claim in court. You can't just throw up your hands and say, no, thank you, we're not playing game.

0:21:57 - Leo Laporte
I've heard through this process with Twitter back in the many years ago. Um, uh, family member received a death threat on Twitter and we went to the local police here in Petaluma, got a good detective I mean I think this is probably unusual who then subpoenaed Twitter, got the information from Twitter All they get from Twitter is an IP address but was able to use that IP address to track down the ISP. Then had to issue a subpoena to the ISP to get the name of the subscribers whose IP address that was at that time because they rotate found that and then got the local Chicago police to go to that guy's house. That's a long process but I've been through it and Twitter complied. I mean, they didn't, they didn't gladly comply, they had to have a legal subpoena. But once presented with the subpoena they complied paris.

0:22:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I think your point is really, really important here, because, if you listen to, this goes way back. I haven't heard this in a long time. But it was also the use of the argument that if you were in china or if you were in turkey, what the platform said is we will follow local law, and you may not like us for it in the west, but we have to follow local law. Yeah, so clearly in this case, it would seem, telegram was not following local law and, if you know, the case comes out and they tried a hundred times and they found out that it was durov who personally said don't do it all. Right, then that sounds like there might be a case, but if they didn't have that preamble of trying, uh, then it looks like a showcase you could see why, uh, there's concern in the tech community around this.

0:23:39 - Leo Laporte
There, there are legitimate reasons that you could go after bell durov, but we also don't want this to become a regular habit of any country to go after the owners, uh, the, or the platforms themselves for the transgressions of their users but there'll be a there'll be a human cry in this country to say we should do what france does and we should get rid of section 230.

0:24:02 - Jeff Jarvis
We should hold these bastards responsible. I'm already starting to see it online and I'm saying no, no, no and here's the implications of that.

0:24:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's why we're worried, right? Yeah, yeah so it may well be that pavaldorov deserves to spend the rest of his life rotting in jail.

0:24:15 - Jeff Jarvis
We don't know it's like silk road. Silk road was an awful place.

0:24:20 - Leo Laporte
Still in jail doing awful things.

0:24:22 - Jeff Jarvis
He's in jail.

0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
He should be he should be, and, and some are saying this is just like silk road what was going on in telegram was just like what was going on in which case, yeah, and much more public I was saying, uh, on a kind of similar note on the topic of section 230, there was a really interesting decision made by the Third Circuit Court where they reversed a dismissal on a case concerning TikTok.

0:24:48 - Paris Martineau
that is part of this case I guess concerns the whole TikTok blackout challenge, but it is part of this like wave of litigation that the social media companies have seen in the last year or so where instead of suing and then immediately getting blocked by section 230 because they're suing over the content, lawyers and plaintiffs are arguing that under that these companies should be held liable under the theories of product liability and negligence, in a way to kind of sidestep section 230 and it's a very controversial legal strategy but has shown a surprising amount of.

it has been surprisingly successful so far. I mean it hasn't outright won that many cases but it has not been dismissed. This lawsuit over TikTok potentially being responsible for the death of some children who participated in a trending like challenge that resulted in them blacking out the court had originally dismissed that because TikTok had said hey, Section 230, we're not responsible for the videos. But the attorneys in this case arguing we're not saying TikTok's responsible for the videos, attorneys in this case arguing we're not saying tick tocks responsible for the videos. We're saying that the product of tick tock is defective because it served um, the recommendation algorithm, served increasingly radical content to users that the company knew were like very young, and what the third circuit court today did was they said I want to see that all right, we're um, we're taking, we're saying you can go forward with this.

They reversed a dismissal which is kind of interesting which one is the third circuit.

0:26:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I always get confused. I don't know my circuits uh, because this at this point. I need to know who appointed the judges, because we have two different systems, appeals philadelphia based from the us district court in eastern district of pennsylvania.

0:26:45 - Leo Laporte
It's philadelphia, based from the uh us district court in eastern district of pennsylvania based um, maybe it was a 10 year old girl who died after taking part in a viral blackout challenge in which tiktok users were dared to choke themselves until they passed out. And you can't expect a 10 yearyear-old to know enough to know. Oh, I shouldn't do that. This is from Reuters. While a federal law typically shields Internet companies from lawsuits over content posted by users, the Third Circuit yesterday ruled the law does not bar the mother from pursuing claims that the algorithm recommended the challenge.

0:27:22 - Jeff Jarvis
This is back to the publisher thing. Well, we've got to see, we got to see the data as to as to how much it recommended it.

0:27:28 - Paris Martineau
That's important yeah, and so part of I am. I did a story last month on one of the kind of leading firms that is arguing this theory, because it has become. It's quite interesting. Actually, it's something when I took on this new beat I didn't realize had become as big of a deal as it had, because there are like thousands of lawsuits around the country that are arguing the same thing, saying like, maybe it may not be the TikTok blackout challenge, maybe pure social media addiction or something totally unrelated, but saying we want to try and hold these companies liable using product liability theories, saying that they were defectively designed or negligently designed.

And it has become such a big deal lately that there are there they've consolidated it in state and federal courts and there are thousands of cases in each one and it all ties back to this decision that took place and I think it was 2018, 2019, sometime in the last, like last couple of years, I guess. The appeal happened in 2021 called Lemon v Snap, and this was a case where you had some teenagers who were out driving late one night. Their car swerved off the road and they hit a tree and they all died and, looking into it, investigators found that at the time of the crash, they were going 120 something miles per hour and one of the kids in the passenger seat had his phone open and was using TikTok's speed snap filter. Which is, or not, tiktok Snapchat's speed snap?

0:29:01 - Leo Laporte
filter. I've used that on the bullet train. It tells you how fast you're going. It tells you how fast you're.

0:29:05 - Paris Martineau
It tells you how fast you're going and a big thing that was happening around this time is like tiktok or not tiktok. Snapchat also has these things where, like, you can get certain rewards or awards for stuff, like if you send a snap so many times. And a big thing that a lot of kids believed was that if you hit 100 miles per hour on the speed filter, it would give you an award.

0:29:26 - Leo Laporte
And this was like because I tried it and it didn't.

0:29:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah people, a lot of people tried, but I wasn't driving huge online thing for like years, and what they argued in this lawsuit was that there had been a number of these cases around the us and that snapchat should have been aware that, when it was designing a feature to be used by predominantly children, that it was incentivizing them to speed they did turn that feature off after that case they did, they did and they ended up settling the case eventually, after a ninth circuit judge in this kind of landmark decision said actually, actually for the first time ever, snapchat, section 230 doesn't apply here.

This is a product that was designed effectively and they deserve to have their day in court. And it created this whole field of law that you're now seeing today.

0:30:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, but this Third Circuit opinion is because of a July Supreme Court opinion opinion is because of a july supreme court opinion. Remember when the supreme court was sued about uh, the, the social media platforms, the texas and florida laws? They essentially sent that back down. But one of the things they said is that an algorithm reflects editorial judgments about compiling the third party party speech it wants in the way it wants it. And the judge, the justice in this uh circuit court appeal uh opinion referred to that july supreme court case and said tiktok makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users and by doing so has engaged its own first party speech. So this the supreme court in july. And TikTok makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users and by doing so, has engaged its own first party speech. So the Supreme Court in July, a couple of months ago, made this ruling that made them responsible, and this is the fruit of that. So now this is going to go on.

0:31:25 - Paris Martineau
As part of this article I'd reach out to kind of a bunch of legal experts to get their thoughts on this, because and the consensus was that a couple of years ago these theories being advanced in courts much less like upheld by major circuit courts, it seemed totally implausible.

But some sort of shift has happened in the last couple of years and part of I guess how our court is shifted is one the supreme court has shifted, but also all of these judges further down have shifted their opinion too, and the thing that a lot of legal scholars told me is like part of it is that people just hate tech companies a lot more now, and they are more open to arguments that will chip away at their this like long it is a different argument, the right, it's not a point out the circuit point judge court.

0:32:10 - Leo Laporte
Judge patty schwartz specifically pointed to the supreme court opinion from august and said that or in july said. That's why she said the reasoning no longer holds after the uS Supreme Court ruling in July. In other words, we have to change our holding because of this. So this is directly a result of the Supreme Court decision.

0:32:35 - Jeff Jarvis
But which part of that decision?

0:32:38 - Leo Laporte
I'll read from the Reuters article US Circuit Judge Patty Schwartz, writing for the three-judge panel, said that Section 230 only immunizes information provided by third parties and not recommendations. She acknowledged the holding was a departure from past court rulings by her court and others. Holding that Section 230 immunizes online platforms no longer held after a US Supreme Court ruling in July on whether state law is designed to restrict the power of social media platforms to curb content they deem objectionable violates their free speech rights. In her opinion, she wrote in those cases, the Supreme Court held a platform's algorithm reflects editorial judgments about compiling third-party speech the way it wants it in the way it wants it and she says, says under that logic, the company is not protected by section 230 so I hear paris's.

0:33:30 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's two things going on here. One is that is that recommendation becomes editorial, becomes something that can be liable for. The other thing I heard you say, paris, is that basically the new strategy here is also a product liability strategy, a product yes the design strategy as opposed to the content correct. So section 230 protects the content, ergo the speech, and and what you just said is no, that's not an issue. That issue is is recommendations recommendations specifically.

0:34:00 - Paris Martineau
In all of these cases, the commonality is they're saying like we don't care about the content, we're talking about, agnostic from that, unrelated the recommendation algorithm and what it is doing, and this is something you're seeing in these like federal and state, like multi-district litigation things that you have like 46 states, attorneys general chiming in, plus all these school districts and all these parents, is they're all trying to push this argument that we should be able to hold these companies accountable for harms in a way that is unrelated to content produced by users and is more about how it was designed.

0:34:43 - Jeff Jarvis
You and I have had that discussion many times, and the problem is if it's a bad algorithm, I get that, but what's going to happen is that if you, as you have wished to do in the past, outlaw all algorithms, then you get this boundless feed that is easily manipulable by the bad guys, and it will be worse, and research shows that it's not better to be without the algorithm worse.

0:35:07 - Paris Martineau
Well, and research shows that it's not better to be without the algorithm.

I I agree in that sense, but I think that when I was taught, I spoke to um, this uh asbestos attorney, this long-time asbestos attorney who is now, who left asbestos law after like 25 years and founded a firm called the social media victims law center, um, that handles just cases like this and he said, part of what excited him and interested him in doing this work is what led to asbestos law, as well as laws prosecuting big tobacco companies, were initial cases kind of like this, where, once the case makes it into court and discovery can happen, they are looking to see what they can glean during discovery and if they can get any information that would indicate these companies were truly negligent when designing their products, and then they can have more specific, I guess, cases from there. So part of this is a ploy to get a better look inside these tech companies so that then litigants can determine whether or not I guess they have a case.

0:36:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, in fact there's the Reuters quotes a lawyer who says, hey, they're no longer protected, let's go. I'm not sure I disagree with this. Is a very nuanced thing that, just like the Pavlodorov story, where I think reasonable people might say, well, that's too far, that's not far enough. Yes, we've got to balance the rights of victims with the rights of people who have free speech. I think in this case, if TikTok's algorithm promoted stories about hanging yourself to a 10 year old, they should be held liable. I don't think that's unreasonable. Tell me why Section 230 should protect that, jeff.

0:36:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I'd say two things, not just Section 230. One is that we need to be careful here. That choice is speech, and this could be turned around badly, and it's being used in Texas and Florida to say no, you can't have the choice of what to put up, you must put up all speech. You must put up our noxious speech, say extremists. And if you abrogate the right of, if you dilute the right of the platform to make choices and we can next argue whether they're good or bad choices, but make choices I see danger there. Point one. Point two I think what the world needs more of is good algorithms. Blue Sky gives me the choice of algorithms. I want those algorithms. I don't want a raw feed of the internet.

The internet is being ruined not only by jerks, but also, next, by AI and spammers, and so we need better choice spammers, and so we need better choice. Um three, you get to the intermediary liability problem of and it's the same as dorav. Did they know they were doing this? Did they know they were doing bad? Was it drawn to their attention? Now? If it was, then I think, yes, they were responsible for taking action. Yeah, but at the earliest stage of it. Um, somebody manipulated it and used it in a way that probably wasn't designed for, then who's responsible? The manipulator, who was trying to get people to do bad things?

0:38:16 - Leo Laporte
or the intermediary and, as wizardling points out, in our discord in our club, to a discord. Doesn't the mother bear some responsibility for letting her 10 year old hang out on tiktok? Yep yeah 10 year old especially yeah, she's 10, she's not even tiktok's rules say. I think that she's not even supposed to be there at all but I mean there.

0:38:35 - Paris Martineau
This is also part of what the doj a couple weeks ago um sued tiktok, in part because they were saying tick tock knows that a significant portion of its users are under the age of 13 and it purposefully has designed its content moderation approach to one not have very many people making decisions, so it's not super effective, and also to have the rules around when you can take down an account for being under age. Be very rigid in a way that some people allege makes it so that they have a lot of kids on the platform with adult accounts.

0:39:15 - Leo Laporte
But we also know that age verification is supremely problematic and a privacy violation for violence. Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the issue.

0:39:26 - Paris Martineau
Here is what I found really interesting reading the doj um complaint or I don't know if it's a complaint or indictment in this case uh, the complaint filed in their lawsuit is they the justice department seems to outline that tick tock has a pretty good idea of when its users are underage. It can be as simple as things like when somebody signs up for a tiktok account, if they put in their date of birth and they are nine years old, uh, and that would be, a giveaway.

Sorry, yeah, you can't, you can't make an account. The person can just click back right on the window and then put in 90 and tikt tocks like well, the doj is like that's probably a sign that they're nine years old similarly, or that when they have typos, that they're 90 and they can't type very well, I mean we're old people, can't do it very well, that's true, you're probably not wearing your glasses.

Um, they would have instances they they cited in this uh complaint where someone would say in their bio I am nine years old and like well that would have videos of them looking to be looking like they are young and the person wouldn't be able to take them down because of kind of rigid rules, and our tiktok police is that I do think that there's something to the argument that we don't have to have like some awful age verification system where we input our face print and driver's license, where you could just use common sense If you have a reasonable suspicion that someone is under the age of 13, you're responsible for not allowing them on your platform.

0:41:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, cosa will make it 18. Somebody we ought to have on at some point. If you want to go into this and I think people are introduced to you Paris for reporting. Talia Stroud at UT Austin and Josh Tucker at NYU do a tremendous amount of research on this and they've done it with Facebook data and other places and they have a sense of kind of what we know and don't know about this and and what the algorithms really do and don't do, and I think it might be useful at some point to have one of them on.

0:41:32 - Leo Laporte
I think our real concern is there seems to be this howling that in fact, this is what the judge, the attorney for the mother said big tech just lost it's get out of jail free card. There's this kind of howling with pitch forks and torches uh, against big tech, uh. But it is much more complicated than this. I have sympathy for the mother. I have sympathy for any parent. Um, if tiktok I don't think tiktok, probably tiktok did not. There was no executive at tiktok who said, yeah, let's push more of that, go hang yourself content. But the algorithm, which is automated, noticed people were watching that and promoted it. Now what's the responsibility? There is a very difficult thing. I mean, do you write a code that says, well, um, you could promote stuff algorithmically, but only if it's okay, and then somebody has to see if it's okay?

0:42:27 - Jeff Jarvis
And then it doesn't scale.

0:42:29 - Paris Martineau
It doesn't scale very well. Part of the argument that people in support of laws like COSA make not saying I agree or disagree with it is they are arguing for a duty of care that would right, that would make companies like tick tock when they are making product decisions that will impact kids and in this case it would be for like tick tock kids that they have the risk they have to be risk make decisions that uh are I think it's like vaguely responsible towards benefiting the safety of their user.

Like they have to make decisions that are not actively harmful, and I don't know what that would mean in practice.

0:43:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's the problem Paris is there's not specific enough. That's what makes it unconstitutional. This is the basis of the UK's online safety bill. Is duty of care. It's the basis of the California AI bill. Is duty of care it the basis of the california ai bill. Is duty of care.

It's a way that that legislators say well, we really can't define what you shouldn't do, so we're going to say you should be careful and and we don't know it until we see it. But if you aren't careful, then we got you and that's a really difficult legal regime to deal with them, because they're not going to the effort to to see what the issues are here and and and and, to take that to the extreme and say this is what's wrong. You know, I would say that if you were notified, I don't want to slice up 230 because that act is just dangerous. But in this interesting discussion you bring about product liability. If you knowingly build something bad, well then that's, I think, an issue. If you've been notified of something and take no notice of it and do nothing about it if any reasonable person should have, then we have a discussion. But to just to say that you're responsible for everything bad that anybody chooses to do on this platform or with this ai um or with this printing press is foolhardy.

0:44:31 - Paris Martineau
I guess an interesting thought experiment, then, is something a lot of these advocates of these bills and advocates of this legal strategy point out as a potential turning point, for it was when the Facebook files dropped, all those files leaked by Francis Hogan, that were originally published in the Wall Street Journal, leaked by Francis Hogan, that were originally published in the Wall Street Journal. Would you say that something like those documents we saw from inside Facebook or Instagram, that said Instagram is harming the mental health of X percentage of teenage girls, would?

0:44:56 - Jeff Jarvis
you say that that counts as them being notified. Let's not, let's take a break.

No, no Let me say one sentence. Let me say one sentence just to add to that, because I do write about this in the. The way we weave is that the problem was that the hoggins papers were quoted quite selectively, yeah and so that in the same studies there were as many and more students saying, or young people saying, it helped me, and so uh is selective, uh, quoting of the stuff for your purpose by a moral entrepreneur. Reason enough, no, I would say.

0:45:28 - Leo Laporte
This is a great conversation that we will continue to have for years to come, I imagine, but I'm glad we have it and obviously it's difficult. Here's what's difficult we only have about an hour and a half left in the show and we have about 43 stories. So I want you two to have a cage match and whoever wins gets to pick the next story. I don't know how you're going to figure that out. Pick a story. Each of you get one.

Each of you get one and we will come back in your picks coming up. But first a word from our sponsor for this portion of this Week in Google, bitwarden. There's one thing I know for sure. I'm not sure what the answer is to all these questions, but the one thing I know for sure if you want to protect yourself online, you need to use a password manager, and you should use the one I use because it's the best and I've researched them all and I love it because it's open source, it's affordable In fact, it's free for individuals. It lets you, if you wish, host your vault locally. I don't I trust Bitwarden to do it and because it's open source, they're always adding new features. This is the password manager I prefer and if you're a business, you should absolutely be using a password manager for all your employees, protecting yourself. What was you know? We learned the npd breach. Three million records social security numbers for pretty much everyone in the us leaked out because why there was a zip file on their website that had names and passwords in it. Not a good way to store your passwords. Get bit warden. It is a cost effective solution that can drastically increase your chances of staying safe online and if you're a business leader, you will love to see the features Bitwarden adds specifically for businesses, like its new collection management settings. These are very granular permission settings which make it very easy for you to protect yourself, owners, that's, you can choose how much or how little access admins have to things in the vault. The settings can be set up so that users can create and delete their own collections that admins can't see inside. That's nice, because then your employees will start using Bitwarden for the stuff they need, or your department will have access to stuff but no one else will. That kind of thing. It's a policy of least privilege, right? That's very handy. Another possible setup and again you get to choose full admin control for everything. Here's the point it's very granular, it's very powerful. With these new settings and a new can manage permission, you could choose how access, control and sharing works in your Bitwarden organization. And that's just one of dozens of features specifically for business that make Bitwarden the obvious choice.

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You need to protect your business. You really do. One of the great things you can do with the business is get all of your employees to set up their personal Bitwarden vaults and then have them join the organizational vault, and then they will. Whenever they're browsing, they'll always have a secure way of storing passwords, both theirs and yours. It's a win-win. Bitwardencom slash twit. I am a big believer in Bitwarden. I'd love to support them. I've been using them for years. I want you to try them. Him to bid wardencom slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting this little little show we call this week in google. This week in google, jeff jarvis is here, says paris, martina, they're such great people. Uh, let's start with paris and your uh, your story that you pick.

0:50:24 - Paris Martineau
My story is really related to technology and Google.

0:50:30 - Leo Laporte
Good, wow, that's a first. It is Holy cow.

0:50:34 - Jeff Jarvis
I could get you kicked off the show. Paris.

0:50:36 - Paris Martineau
I really want to keep the story grounded and related to the topics that our audience knows and cares about. That's why mine is line 104. Chick-fil-a has hatched plans for a streaming service.

0:50:48 - Leo Laporte
You know, I thought that, I saw that. I thought what the hell would they stream?

0:50:53 - Paris Martineau
also well, in the same couple of weeks new york's largest hospital system is setting its sights in the entertainment business also.

0:51:01 - Leo Laporte
What yes, why?

0:51:03 - Paris Martineau
uh, you know this for the first article. Chick-fil-a is moving aggressively into the entertainment space rights deadline with plans to launch a slate of originals for will they only be chicken focused content, I mean uh, that's a great question oh, I wouldn't be surprised to have a little religious taint given them yeah, yeah, it's probably gonna be a little uh

0:51:25 - Leo Laporte
will they go dark on sundays?

0:51:28 - Paris Martineau
yeah, you can't stream on sundays actually just hymns a family-friendly game show uh. It's previously produced content for its own site before including the stories of evergreen hills, a series of short animated films. It's diversified into other areas, like making children's puzzles and games under its penny cake brand so it'll be family reality tv industry, though, which is interesting.

Um and let's watch our terribly underpaid people make chicken all day, yeah yeah, northwell health, a large health care system in new york state, is moving into the entertainment business as well and developing scripted and unscripted content. I don't know. I just found both of these stories everybody's doing it.

0:52:12 - Leo Laporte
How about this?

0:52:12 - Paris Martineau
leads me to believe that there's some sort of tax break situation happening I know, in new york state at least, production companies can get serious tax breaks if they're have production based in the state.

0:52:24 - Leo Laporte
It's like if they were doing pocket. They're getting into a business. It's dying. Streaming is is in deep unless you're. Netflix in deep trouble. Chick-fil-a is the latest company deadline says outside the entertainment industry to move into making its own shows. Lyft produced a show called lucky lyft, a game show hosted by bob the drag queen. Airbnb produced documentary gay chorus deep south.

0:52:51 - Paris Martineau
That ended aired on mtv companies need to have less money. All those funds should go to twit we do streaming.

0:53:00 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's like if twit's gonna get into the chicken sandwich business.

0:53:04 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean could be a good idea.

0:53:06 - Jeff Jarvis
It's TV ego. It's, you want to believe. When I was at People Magazine, we hired people and then we were going to have our TV show and we did and it was on I don't know one network the 25 Most Intriguing and they had people singing and dancing, going down stage singing the names of the 25 most intriguing Look, valenza. You know, when I was at Conde Nast, we hired people to put us on TV. It's just some kind of ego thing. It's ego.

0:53:37 - Leo Laporte
It's the same reason. You see the guy who owns the local carpet store doing his own TV ads, even though he's terrible, right? I remember when I worked in local radio this was a constant problem. The salesperson I was, you know, sitting in the production studio ready to do an ad Salesperson would drag in the owner of some store and say, hey, joe's Burgers wants to do the ad for himself. And it's like okay, take one. And we knew this was going to be a long afternoon. Well, if Mr beast can make burgers.

0:54:10 - Paris Martineau
I guess we can make chicken sandwiches.

0:54:12 - Benito Gonzalez
I guess there's a quick tie in there. Leo for sandwiches.

0:54:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my son had a luma. Salt Hank. Oh hmm.

0:54:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Plus, you are in the chicken capital of the world, Leo. Don't forget that we are.

0:54:24 - Leo Laporte
That's true All right, let me call Hank.

0:54:27 - Paris Martineau
Well, Hank, the butter capital, you can put some butter on those chicken sandwiches.

0:54:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh man, buttery chicken from the nation's egg basket to your home, brought to you by this Week in Tech.

0:54:43 - Benito Gonzalez
Makes perfect sense featuring salt hank.

0:54:48 - Leo Laporte
Maybe could happen.

0:54:51 - Paris Martineau
Uh, it's his birthday, you know how his, uh, the cover of his book is him biting into a sandwich. You could be on the other side. You could kind of spaghetti.

0:54:59 - Leo Laporte
Lady in the trumpet he was just on maddie madison's youtube channel. Maddie's a very famous youtube chef, uh, and maddie was mocking hank's steak sandwiches but ended up making one. So it was very funny. Oh, that's funny. And he called hank uh to be on the show. I guess, I don't know, maybe they hadn't set it up. He called him hank, told me I I was like fast asleep. It was like six in the morning. Hey, it's Matty Madison and he did the whole thing.

0:55:25 - Paris Martineau
Calling someone at 6am is crazy.

0:55:28 - Leo Laporte
Live on his YouTube channel Alive yeah, and he picked up. Not only did he pick up, he did the whole interview. You can kind of tell he just woke up. He's talking like this. Anyway, happy birthday Hank. It's his 30th birthday, oh, yay, Yay Today. And I gave him. I thought this might be Coles to Newcastle, but I'm going to try it. I gave him a pepper mill. He was happy.

0:55:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't know about you, Paris. This is a kid who used to like getting sandwiches.

0:56:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, he this is a kid who used to like getting sausages. Oh yeah, he lived on salamis Every Christmas. In his stocking there'd be a giant salami. It'd be gone by the end of the day. He would eat the whole day.

0:56:07 - Paris Martineau
A giant salami, I've learned, is one of the perfect secret Santa gifts. You've got to wrap it in a box like something normal and they pull out a really large salami. It's great.

0:56:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. Make sure that that person carries a knife with them at all times so they can share it. So where was I? I forgot now Birthday gift. So I have spent 60 years of my life looking for a decent pepper grinder. Paris, do you have a good pepper grinder?

0:56:34 - Paris Martineau
I have one from Deuce Deuce and I don't know if it's great at pepper grinding, but it's very cute.

0:56:41 - Leo Laporte
It's a pepper grinder. It should be good at pepper grinding.

0:56:42 - Paris Martineau
That seems like the basic I mean it's not bad at pepper grinding, but I don't, I can't like control the size, the flex, yeah my whole life I've been using pepper grinders that are not bad at pepper grinding.

0:56:54 - Leo Laporte
So I did some research. I went to reddit and I found the pepper cannon. Oh, this thing, it's a man kitchen, man, kitchen. This thing is 200 freaking dollars, jeez. But it is made of steel. You have to be tatted up to use it and you have to be. It is made for salt. Because I get. I said, look, I'm gonna give you a pepper grinder. I gotta admit he said well, better, look good, because I can't use it on camera. I said this looks good, you're gonna be proud of using this. So he is he. As soon as, as soon as he tried it, he said, oh, my god, my whole life. So this is why I'm passing this along to you, paris spend the 200 bucks because you'll never buy another pepper.

So do you have one, Leo? Of course? Oh, and you should have one too. You make cacio e pepe. How do?

0:57:48 - Jeff Jarvis
you make your pepe.

0:57:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:57:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Huh, well, trader Joe's does it for me. Yeah, no, they're terrible.

0:57:55 - Paris Martineau
You get the loose pepper.

0:57:57 - Leo Laporte
We've been buying the Trader Joe's plastic pepper grinders and then you use up the pepper. You have to throw it out and get a new grinder. Not good, this is amazing. It's the best pepper grinder ever. Okay, I'm sorry that was his birthday gift. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for you, jeff Jarvis.

0:58:16 - Paris Martineau
Wait a minute Before you do.

0:58:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me take a break.

0:58:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay.

0:58:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Because I have a great story. I have a wonderful story. You're going to want to make sure you come back for it Come back.

0:58:24 - Leo Laporte
Don't miss this fantastic story. Jeff Bitward is going to share with us. Oh, no, that's the sponsor. Jeff Jarvis is going to share with us. That's my middle name Bitward, Jeff Bitward and Jarvis. And, of course, Paris CacheFly, Martino.

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Learn how you can get your first month free at CacheFly.com slash twit. You've heard me say it right Over and over again Bandwidth for this week in google is provided by CacheFly at c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y dot com slash twit. Thank you, thank you, thank you CacheFly, and thank you. Matt levine used to take us out to a great steak dinner every year at ces. Haven't been to ces in a while, not since covet. All right, now it is time for jeff jarvis's. We need a little I. I think I have some echo I can put on here a little, uh you should do the demon voice should I do the demon?

voice people no no, I'll just do some. Uh, I think I have some echo here somewhere. Well, I need to give myself a button for it. It's time for jeff's pick of the week, or should I?

1:02:23 - Jeff Jarvis
say that's not that that's later no well, not just to talk about a story so I complain about the new york times, the washington post, these days, but I also like to point out good journalism when I see it. And the new york times magazine had a great story related to another story you had leo on the rundown about a um prospera, a uh ultimate capitalist haven in the honduras.

1:02:54 - Leo Laporte
Uh funded by uh peter keel, sam altman and um they keep doing this, these, these guys, they do and remember when we were watching um the google io and larry page said you know, we just need a google island where there'll be no government restrictions at the time you and I said we wanted to move there.

1:03:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, so this is unbelievable. It is, it is. It is just the worst imagining of crypto libertarian. There's no laws here, but you have to sign a like 2500 page document. When you come on, you agree to arbitration by three retired arizona judges. Um honduras is trying to get rid of them. They allow kind of any business to come in, so let me guess it's tax free right? Um, well, it was, but then they've gotten some more of that because, you need to pay for stuff.

Well, it was duty free. It was duty free then the government stood on duties right yeah, uh. So um the uh. The early members of the group overseeing it included former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugman, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, libertarian economist Mark Susan, ronald Reagan's son, ronald Reagan. So they have all these businesses there. They have a Guatemalan entrepreneur who's already identified a couple of plots of land. No, where was it here? I missed it.

1:04:14 - Leo Laporte
If Grover Norquist is involved, it's definitely a way to avoid taxation. Yeah, it is Right. That's the whole point. We don't want to give any of our hard earned, ill-gotten gains to the government well, here it is, I found it or to any other any of you lazy people who don't deserve any of my money so you can, you can move there.

1:04:33 - Jeff Jarvis
You can, you know, become a citizen there, I guess, but you can also just incorporate your business there but aren't you a Honduran citizen, or did they have something to figure out? They have their own thing. So they have 222 businesses there, including Mini Circle, founded by two young biohackers, offers a product they say might cure Alzheimer's and suppress all tumors. It might.

1:04:55 - Paris Martineau
It might.

1:04:56 - Leo Laporte
Might.

1:04:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Might not. No one says it won't. Symbiont Labs manufactures implants that turn people into self-sovereign cyborgs. The Bay Islands Fitness and Transformation Center offers affordable semi-glutide injections and Global Alliance for Regenerative. Nobody wants a fat entrepreneur, uh-uh. They offer stem cell treatments. There's also a dome where they have special events for businesses. Biotech innovators who want to quote make death optional.

1:05:27 - Paris Martineau
Yes, Love the death. Optional dome.

1:05:31 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I'm looking at this picture in the New York Times and the thing that's most prominent to me is the golf course. Of course, of course, yeah.

1:05:39 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's just truly obnoxious, truly terrible. Uh, there's a there's an english-speaking black community nearby that they're trying to kind of subsume.

1:05:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh so the honduran government's not happy they're not happy right now.

1:05:52 - Jeff Jarvis
The honduran government's been gone through a few regimes lately, so it was an earlier regime where they where they snuck in with all this um, and it's a really well reported story, I think it's it's really good journalism, but it's tied to another story that you had in the rundown, leo well, it's not the only place that billionaires can I just try to read a couple lines from the story that I just came across great stuff, I couldn't find them, yeah talking about how this this the reporter is talking about how they weren't allowed in any of the like conferences or things he's like.

1:06:22 - Paris Martineau
So I just hung up by the pool and down the street at the amity age academy, an old restaurant that a slovenian math tutor had turned into a bitcoin education center in cafe. That's where I met zosel remos, at the time amity age'syear-old lead educator, next to a bookshelf stocked with Ludwig von Mise's bureaucracy, ayn Rand's capitalism and. Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, oh dear. I bought a coffee the barista. Let me pay with fiat paper money on a one-time basis.

And then Ramos took me on a tour on the walls downstairs hung a Bitcoin mining machine, a portrait of Guy Fawkes, a stride, a buckling green stallion and a map of Roton with colored squares of paper marking the dozens of businesses that now accept Bitcoin. Nightmare, Wow.

1:07:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Also, in order to enter the jurisdiction, I was told I needed to sign an agreement of coexistence jurisdiction. I was told I needed to sign an agreement of coexistence quote binding myself to 4202 pages of rules, violations of which would be subject to jurisdictional authority of the arbitration center. And again, that arbitration center is run by three retired arizona judges wow, this is oh wait, there's another one, there's another one, there's one.

So, uh, the week of my visit, uh, the grandson of Milton Friedman and founder of a startup city that invested in Prospera had a chip with a Tesla key implanted in his hand. On a previous trip, he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities cavities. Another time, he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him stronger and faster, as he put it at a conference in rotan that weekend.

1:08:07 - Leo Laporte
I think I speak for all of us when I say go, just go go to honduras.

Go live in your little fantasy land, which will collapse under its own weight. Just get out of. Brush your teeth with whatever poop you want to, just get out of our lives. Um, you know, puerto rico, uh, tried this. Remember, puerto rico doesn't have an income tax as a way of developing. You know, getting people, and it became a bitcoin, uh, paradise. I think a lot of this is driven by cryptocurrency oh, those nut jobs are out there right now.

Yeah, yeah, uh yeah, the story I have is from solano county, which is just up north, and it was and these are, I would say, better, not not bad guys, they're at least better, yeah it started with michael moritz, whose name you probably know. He was the super agent, right and uh, a billionaire doesn't he support san francisco.

1:09:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Standard is that, like boritz, maybe.

1:09:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he decided in 2017 that if they bought up land without telling anybody what they were up to in the agricultural county north of san francisco, about 60 miles north, it's just over here as a piece. Uh, it's cheap because it's very hot and it's it's on zoned agricultural, uh there's not a lot of what they were doing?

there's not a lot of water. They tried to keep it secret because they wanted to get the land cheap and they knew that prices would go up. Uh, he went to mark andreason. Uh, andreason horwitz got money, linkedin co-founder reed hoffman. Uh, laureen powell jobs, steve jobs widow. They spent 800 million dollars, bought 60 000 acres. They would call california forever.

The idea was they were going to get it rezoned, turn it into a city uh, kind of a utopia, right, and I don't think they had the same kind of uh, let's get away from all the laws and the taxation idea. They just wanted to have a sensible city where people could walk, people could live with their families. Um, but before any of this could happen, they had to get the, the indigenous population of Solano County. We'll call them the Indians. No, they weren't Indians. The indigenes of Solano County, the, to vote to rezone it because it's for zoned agricultural. You can't build anything there. They put a ballot measure on the ballot for November, spent $9 million for TV ads, website banners, billboards. They just pulled it because they realized they're going to lose Bad. Rip.

By maybe. In a poll commissioned in March by the opposition, 400 county voters found 70% said they'd vote against it. Voters were highly aware of the issue. They weren't as ignorant as these billionaires were hoping. Three quarters saying they'd heard of California forever.

1:11:15 - Jeff Jarvis
They decided we better not proceed with this because if we lose, it's all over and it really strikes me as a new kind of white flight is oh, san francisco is going downhill, so let's just abandon it.

1:11:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it was close enough to san francisco so that you would be still connected, right, you could commute if you wanted to, right, but the idea was get companies to move there. Um, you know, I, I understand the. You know, we all have this kind of I have a utopian streak. I would like to live in a walkable city where there were no longer you can do that. It's called moving to brooklyn, oh I kind of like that idea yeah hey, I don't have to have starlink because my internet works oh, don't you have fiber

sorry, who's your? Who's your internet? Horizon fires yes, yeah, I don't want that. Verizon's as bad as comcast.

1:12:07 - Jeff Jarvis
No no, I've had one two weeks ago. It was for me, but otherwise it's not I will say we're sitting out doing the show on your patio.

1:12:15 - Paris Martineau
I'm gonna continue knocking on wood because what I'm saying sounds like it's about to jinx me.

1:12:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you are.

1:12:19 - Paris Martineau
But in the six years that I've had Verizon Fios, I've never had an issue.

1:12:26 - Leo Laporte
I think you're in such a dense population area that it makes sense for them to, just you know, put it everywhere.

1:12:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I mean I also do choose where I live, based on Fios, Like I was looking at a different apartment a couple years ago and I was like I probably won't go there because I'd have to have, uh, whatever, yeah, not comcast. There's a um, there's a nice um new retirement community in the bronx, leo the bronx oh, the bronx, there's a, there's a new book out right now, just saying the bronx is the place. It's not it's the next big place, is it?

1:12:59 - Leo Laporte
getting gentrified.

1:13:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, book just out this week.

1:13:02 - Leo Laporte
New York, New York, it's a hell of a town. The Bronx is up and the battery's down. The people ride around in the train in the ground. New York, New.

1:13:11 - Paris Martineau
York. Oh, there's the water park that's going to be you next week luxury senior living in Brooklyn Heights.

1:13:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh. Brooklyn Heights is lovely. I used to live there. Can I go down and get a schmear and a nosh? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:13:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, this looks wonderful, the watermark at Brooklyn Heights. I think maybe we could be neighbors there, Leo.

1:13:31 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, do they have a podcast studio in the?

1:13:33 - Jeff Jarvis
building the watermark in Brooklyn Heights. Well, it's murders in the building. We'll just do that. And the three of us?

1:13:38 - Paris Martineau
it's perfect, we are murders in the building we could solve crimes.

1:13:43 - Leo Laporte
I remember talking to steve martin during covid and he said, yeah, I'm working on a new show, but I don't want to leave the building and it is a hit right it's a yeah yeah, he does it, is it?

unfortunately it's not in his building. It's in a building that's uptown a little bit, but otherwise, yeah, he wouldn't want that actually. No, he really doesn't want it in his building. Uh, yeah, it's amazing. Uh, well, we had douglas rushkoff on right talking about the billionaire's plans to live in you know, decommissioned missile silos and and all that. I think it would be better if, honestly, if all these rich people had a stake in the communities that they're in, so they would make them better, instead of saying, yeah, we can't deal with this local government, we're getting out.

1:14:32 - Paris Martineau
Yeah I think that we should take, we should follow a tried and true method as depicted in the um early 2000s game, bioshock, where all the rich people that want to do this can just finance a precarious underwater living space and whatever happens there, that's their problem I loved that series because it was so retro.

1:15:00 - Leo Laporte
It was really the look and feel it was phenomenal right, what a great game that was. Yeah, we should bring that back. Are they doing a bioshock 4?

1:15:10 - Paris Martineau
I don't think so. I think they it's just done. They maxed it out. I like it they just finished.

1:15:15 - Leo Laporte
It they don't make too many.

1:15:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think you should you stop while you're ahead so let me ask you paris, because you rent right yes, I do do you notice that rents are exorbitant?

yes, in new york especially I believe there was just a study that came out either by like zillow or zumper that the average rent for a one bedroom in new york city is four thousand five hundred dollars, which is insane. Uh, I'm very lucky in that I, during the uh, like last gasps of the pandemic rental crash, moved into a lovely apartment that I'm still in with is it rent controlled?

no, but it is. My landlords live in the building and they are two delightful, much older twin sisters who bought this building with their money from both working at fought with their pfizer viagra money from when they worked there and really like just knowing who their tenants are and they fell over you because you saw they just want to nudge your cheeks.

1:16:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know, I mean it's like the pigeon sisters from the odd couple.

1:16:24 - Paris Martineau
You live downstairs in the pigeon sisters Basically.

1:16:28 - Leo Laporte
Yes, the Craig Newmark would love that. Well, the one of the reasons the rent is so damn high as they say.

1:16:34 - Paris Martineau
As they say is the.

1:16:38 - Leo Laporte
Justice Department has gone after these guys now. They sued him on friday. There's a software called real page that is used by landlords everywhere across the country. They have third let's see, let me see if the I can see the number here. They have a huge market share, uh, and what they do is they use ai to collate information about what people pay, what they're willing to pay, what prices stimulate traffic on a page, what prices keep people from renting, and it has effectively raised prices on renters illegally. According to the department of justice, they're the top software provider to the multi-family rental industry. The lawsuit says real page has built a business out of frustrating the natural forces of competition wait, wait.

1:17:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Isn't that what every landlord has always done is try to raise the prices as high as they can, but they didn't have the information to really let them nudge it.

1:17:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, part of the problem here is this is this not me?

1:17:41 - Jeff Jarvis
they have the information to really let them nudge it. Well, part of the problem here is this is not me. They have the information because they bought all these buildings, right, that's the multifamily thing.

1:17:46 - Leo Laporte
That's the problem. Training a machine, says Merrick Garland, to break the law is still breaking the law. The average rent has skyrocketed 33% since the beginning of the pandemic. Realpage management software is purposely built to be legally compliant, says RealPage, and we have a history of working constructively with the Department of Justice to show that. It's based in Richardson, texas. It helps residential landlords market vacant apartments, screen prospective tenants and set rents. I have to say, since my kids are renters, I've watched with real interest how much it's changed since I was a renter back in the day. It wasn't that long ago. But you go through, it's all online. It's very automated. There's no pigeon sisters. In most cases, you're dealing with a big company that owns many, many, many units. Thomas, toma Bravo, the big private equity company, acquired RealPage in 2021.

1:18:55 - Paris Martineau
It's worth knowing. This story was kind of busted open by a fantastic series of investigations by ProPublica and the lead of one of them takes readers inside a real estate executive summit in 2022. And a VP of RealPage says never before have we seen these numbers posting how much money they're making. They're saying apartment rates are recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in the video touting the company's services. Turning to his colleague, parsons asked what role had RealPage's software played? And another RealPage executive says I think it's driving it. Quite honestly, as a property manager, very few of us would be willing to, would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.

1:19:44 - Jeff Jarvis
So yeah, the uh there's a burning lease for you.

1:19:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, department of justice says real page is an algorithmic intermediary that collects, combines and exploits landlords competitively sensitive information and in so doing enriches itself and compliant landlords at the expense of renters who pay inflated prices and honest business. So businesses that would otherwise compete 80 of the market for commercial revenue management software. They, they have 80 of the market, wow, um. And the real page says well, we anonymize it. Landlords don't have insight into competitors pricing, but that's why it works. Right, they have this big database and landlords in your area have effectively raised rent by 0.38%.

1:20:32 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's the thing again is who's responsible in that case, the provider of the data or the person who exploits it as a price gouger?

1:20:43 - Leo Laporte
oh, that's interesting. Well, I think if it allows you to collude, then you probably have a pretty good case against it, right?

1:20:51 - Benito Gonzalez
is that collusion actually? That's, I follow this story because this story fascinates me and, uh, I think that our producer is talking. Yes, that's the bottom line. I think it's the collusion aspect of it that, uh, that people really, really hate is that we know, we know it we know it's caused gouging.

1:21:10 - Leo Laporte
Uh, my daughter pointed me to the pro publica story, uh, when that broke, and we know it's causing gouging because rental prices have gone skyrocketed right and there's.

1:21:20 - Benito Gonzalez
There's all kinds of accounts of people who have to leave their apartment, um and go to an apartment like in the same in the same complex, just to get lower rent right and like their rent was going to go up 200 but the rent like a bigger place in the same complex would be like 200 cheaper yeah, honestly, this is just.

1:21:39 - Leo Laporte
this is the same technique airlines use to price seats airplane seats, it's. You know you don't pay the same price as the guy sitting next to you, ever, it's all over the place.

1:21:48 - Jeff Jarvis
This is why price gouging is an issue in this election. It's not price control.

1:21:53 - Leo Laporte
Right, it's price gouging, but the ability to use software and in a way this is AI right To actually analyze the prices and figure out what the optimal price for your apartment optimal in the sense of how much money you can get for it.

1:22:08 - Benito Gonzalez
By the way, this is also happening with our general goods, Like. That's why everything's getting more expensive, right.

1:22:14 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, interesting story DOJ going after this company. We'll see what the courts say. I think you're right, Jeff. It's complicated. What is the law and who is at fault? Let's see what else. So those were our three choices. Let's take a little break and come back and you can pick some more stories from the giant pile. It's a democracy today. Today, I proclaim this week in google.

1:22:41 - Jeff Jarvis
we are in honduras, in the jungle, to be a tax-free democracy, democracy, that's right, jeff jarvis, paris martineau leo I'm 75 bitcoin uh yeah, your fiat paper currency is not welcome here.

1:23:01 - Leo Laporte
No, not on this podcast unless you're an advertiser, in which case it's more than yeah well, pennies, it's fine pennies, rolls of pennies. Okay, we'll take it uh, we do thank, by the way, our fabulous club twit members who, uh, who uh send us their rolls of pennies. 700 penniesies every month, it makes a big difference in our lives.

1:23:21 - Jeff Jarvis
See, that makes it sound so inexpensive it's nothing less than a latte.

1:23:27 - Paris Martineau
You're not even using those pennies.

1:23:29 - Leo Laporte
Right, Don't roll them up and send them to me. Lisa's going to kill me. She's going to say what did you do? What did you do, Leo?

1:23:38 - Jeff Jarvis
I've got a story. My dear beloved departed father-in-law, who was a dentist in Hoboken when copper prices were going up, he decided I'm going to make a fortune and he bought a mountain of pennies and when he died, god bless his soul.

1:23:56 - Leo Laporte
He didn't know they were made of zinc anymore.

1:23:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, we still have some of them downstairs because we have to behind this copper and the price would go up. And it was fine but, it was literally a mountain of pennies. It was about five feet tall, about five feet each side. Were they copper pennies?

1:24:13 - Leo Laporte
yes, they were, and we still have some of them and I bet there's some valuable pennies you know what they're valuable if you can melt them down, the copper is worth more than the penny. Now, I think that's illegal, though, isn't it? Yeah, definitely if you hadn't mentioned it on a podcast, you'd probably have gotten away with it or the pavel.

Now we've got the evidence pennies, the pavel doroff of ben jeff suddenly brings up his 20 copper bars from got from nowhere. Actually, if you want to get historic on this, there's a fascinating discussion about this, because I didn't realize this In the early days of coinage. It really was. This is how much that silver is worth. And it wasn't too long before they realized all our coinage is getting cut up into little pieces, you know, pieces of eight. It's a fascinating story and of course, it comes back to the war over the gold standard and the silver standard and the bimetal standard A couple of hundred years ago in the US.

This was bitterly fought, um, but it wasn't too long before Mintz realized we should not make the coins out of actual valuable metals. Originally they were right. If you had a penny, it was a penny's worth of copper and it was stable because it was stabilized by the value of gold and silver. It wasn't. They didn't use copper in those days, uh, but now most pennies are zinc because it's too expensive to make them out of copper. Uh, it's a, it's really an. Someday we should do a podcast on the monetary standards. I was, I did. I don't know how I got into it, but I started reading up on it and it's it, yeah, the monetary standard podcast I know that'll have.

1:25:56 - Jeff Jarvis
That'll have rushing in by the droves to watch here's a a story from our AI division. Did you finish thanking your members? I interrupted. You Join the.

1:26:06 - Leo Laporte
Twit Club $7 a month. Come on, 700 pennies. You get a lot of good stuff out of it Ad-free versions of all the shows, you get the special events. You also get the fuzzy feeling that you have contributed to our survival and you want to keep more content like this on the air. I don't know why you would, but you can go to twittv slash club twit.

1:26:30 - Paris Martineau
I'm a terrible salesman. Jack's gonna have to dig into that stack of his father and law's pennies a mountain.

1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
Do you know how much it weighed? The mountain of pennies? No, I don't.

1:26:38 - Jeff Jarvis
One, one box of pennies is very heavy. He the mountain of pennies. No, I don't. One box of pennies is very heavy. He bought a mountain of pennies. Yeah, yeah, it was in the basement. How did?

1:26:46 - Paris Martineau
that work? Was that shipped via the mail? Did some poor postal worker have to carry boxes of pennies, doc?

1:26:52 - Jeff Jarvis
knew everybody. Doc was an amazing character. He was in Hoboken. He was raised and was a dentist in Hoboken. He was raised and was a dentist in Hoboken.

1:26:59 - Paris Martineau
I love him being like I got a penny guy, don't worry.

1:27:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he had guys for everything, so he went to the bank and he said I want a lot of pennies. Give me a lot of pennies. He got them.

1:27:10 - Paris Martineau
Give me all your pennies.

1:27:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Give me all your pennies. Doc was amazing, but we grew up in Hoboken, which is Frank Sinatra's hometown, and it's like one of those movies where the one brother becomes the priest and the other brother the mobster. So Doc knew all these characters, but Doc was the good guy. Doc was the priest of your teeth.

1:27:34 - Paris Martineau
Toothpriest.

1:27:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he was a toothpriest, but he knew all these guys and he knew how it operated. And Hudson County is renowned for its corruption over the years. But he knew all these guys and he knew how it operated, and and, and hudson county is renowned for its corruption over the years. So I come in this really white bread, wonder bread. Uh, fiance, from the midwest. Oh, here I am. My eyes were just wide open. But fiori's mozzarella is killer, is just the greatest I've added it to my list.

1:28:04 - Paris Martineau
I gotta, you, gotta go there, you gotta go anyway I when did they stop?

1:28:11 - Leo Laporte
I'm trying to find out when they stopped making pennies out of copper, because I mean they couldn't make them out of copper now.

1:28:19 - Jeff Jarvis
People would just melt them down because people tear down buildings to take wires.

1:28:24 - Paris Martineau
Oh my god, yes um okay, fiori's house of quality mozzarella is a 24 minute drive from the medieval times yeah, oh, you could make it.

1:28:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're gonna have a trifecta look at the images.

1:28:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Look at the images paris I love that.

1:28:41 - Paris Martineau
It's called the house of quality wait a minute.

1:28:43 - Jeff Jarvis
He made mozzarella and he was a dentist, I don't know. No, no, that was furious. No, we were just before the show started. I don't know why because you were all these things you were gonna do.

1:28:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we're talking we're talking about my new jersey circuit, which involves going to uh, rainforest cafe, a uh new jersey korean spa, a japanese grocery store, and then, uh, medieval times. Jeff suggested that I add fiori's house of quality mozzarella to the list, and I will.

1:29:11 - Leo Laporte
It is they call the difference between the value of the coin, the face value of the coin one penny in case of the scent and the copper value of the coin. One penny in case of the cent and the copper value of the coin. Seniorage, and actually, countries make money if they make a one-penny coin for less than a cent. They lose money, they have negative seniorage if it costs them more than a penny to make a penny. Right, I'm just trying to find out when Okay, up to 1857, the penny was 100 copper. See you're, you're this guy. He had the wrong idea oh no, he wasn't smart.

When did he buy this, oh god?

1:29:52 - Jeff Jarvis
um, they were still 95 copper through 1962 through 1982.

1:29:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay, in 1982, they stopped making copper pennies.

1:30:03 - Jeff Jarvis
That's probably what he did it, and they made copper-plated zinc.

1:30:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what he did it, and he knew the copper was going to go up in value. So between September and October 1982, the penny went from 95% copper to 2.5% copper, see Okay.

1:30:18 - Benito Gonzalez
So what was the take. How much did he make?

1:30:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Well he did, because we never got rid of them because he didn't know how to get rid of them.

1:30:24 - Paris Martineau
He died.

1:30:24 - Leo Laporte
You gotta put them in a crucible and melt them and make copper ingots you can't say this. On the podcast, leo, they're recording us right now well, this is why they stopped making them out of copper. I mean, they knew this was going to be a problem. Did you know that until 1857, the penny was the same size as the dollar? The us dollar coins the dollars were tiny.

1:30:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, okay, enough enough. Well, and then meanwhile on facebook, so I put up a picture of fiores in in the discord. That's what it's looked like this for years. I put up some picture of Fiori's in the Discord.

1:31:01 - Paris Martineau
It's looked like this for years. I put up some videos and they're quite good.

1:31:04 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't want to get the roast beef? Don't listen to all that, you just get the matz on the bread. That's it. That's it, it's all. Matz, what's matz.

1:31:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh, mozzarella, mozzarella, Mozzarella, it's Fiori Sopranos. Oh yeah, oh yeah, so they make their own mozzarella.

1:31:20 - Paris Martineau
Look at that. Look at that it is incredible. Look at that.

1:31:23 - Leo Laporte
Motts that doesn't look like good Motts. Oh, my God, we got good Motts here. So let me tell you something oh, you don't know Motts. You don't know Motts. Good mozzarella is like taffy you.

1:31:35 - Jeff Jarvis
You know what? Paris? We're not going to the fancy restaurant we're taking you to Hoboken.

1:31:40 - Paris Martineau
We're taking you to Hoboken, leo next week For the 7th Street Burger.

1:31:44 - Leo Laporte
I want to go here, Just once a month 7th Street Burger, located in Hoboken, situated on cozy Washington Street, the powerhouse of the burger game.

1:31:54 - Paris Martineau
Wow, they're square Square burgers.

1:31:58 - Leo Laporte
They're square burgers. Oh, wait a minute. No, they, they're square square, they're square burgers oh, wait a minute.

1:32:02 - Paris Martineau
No, they're smash burgers. As the comment says, hoboken wants to be nyc, so bad isn't that where frank sinatra was from.

1:32:11 - Leo Laporte
It is hoboken. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, he, that's all I know about hoboken here's well, okay, here's the other place we're gonna go.

1:32:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, I got it. We're going to white manna. This is it. It. We're going to White Manor this is it?

1:32:21 - Leo Laporte
I'll put it in the Discord you mean M-A-N-O-R right, not M-A-N-A, m-a-n-a.

1:32:26 - Jeff Jarvis
It's in the Discord.

1:32:30 - Leo Laporte
White Manor Original Diner from the 1939 World's Fair. Yeah, it's Smash Burgers. I do love a good smash burger look at that.

1:32:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it really look like that? Yeah, it does, it does. Oh yeah, I'll go there, keep scrolling, keep scrolling.

1:32:47 - Paris Martineau
I love how the insane filter on all of these images.

1:32:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, let's go back to that there it was she burger? She burger? She burger? No pepsi coke. Wow, no coke, pepsi. Look at that, that does look good. Yeah, I apologize for anybody who hasn't had lunch or dinner, or on audio, or on audio. Actually, you probably looks better in audio. To be honest, google has rolled out an ai powered. Help me, me create list Wait, I'm sorry, google. What's that Google? They don't have Cheap Burgers. An AI-powered help me. This is the Google change.

1:33:28 - Paris Martineau
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I was about to say we need an intro for Speed Duo we have to have standards around. We're quite wacky today.

1:33:40 - Leo Laporte
Scooter x change log from scooter x in our discord. Google keep is rolling out an ai powered. Help me create a list an android. Why would you let an ai create your list? Because I don't like lists. I hate lists I already have lists.

1:33:55 - Paris Martineau
Leo, this was you a few months ago. You would have been like oh yes, I need the big AI to please create a list for me, and I need to do it while I'm driving, and with voice only. It's the future of technology.

1:34:08 - Leo Laporte
I probably should show on this show because I did get the Pixel. Let me give you a you should.

1:34:14 - Paris Martineau
This is probably.

1:34:15 - Leo Laporte
This is the show about yeah, about a show about google. I have the uh, the new pixel 9. Let me show you here. This is it. Uh, very, it's a pretty phone. I got the uh, I guess they call it obsidian or something, but let me show you. Did you get the excel, the pro? Yes, it's giant. Okay, let me show you in the photos some really cool stuff I can do and I've been doing this. It's been kind of fun on a number of shows. So I have a picture of my kitty cat there. So there's a couple of problems with this picture. First of all, let's edit out that pole coming out of its back. So I'm going to launch this is the AI. Okay, circle, brush or tap to select. I'm going gonna just circle or brush this pole and say just just erase that pole. Watch this, you see. First of all, it's I just kind of roughly selected it, uh, but then it knew oh, yeah, you mean this black thing coming out of the kitty's head more pole, oh, that's great no more pole.

So let's accept that that was good change, but I want to do some more. I'll save a copy. I want to do some more. I want to change this kitty cat, remember. One of the things it can do is reimagine images. So it's a blonde cat.

1:35:27 - Paris Martineau
Can you put a top hat on it.

1:35:30 - Leo Laporte
Sure, you can do anything you want. I'll show you. I turned it into a tiger a while ago. That was pretty cool. Please back up this photo to use magic editor. Okay, all right, I am now backing up. So first thing I got to do is circle the cat so it knows there it is. See, that's the cat.

1:35:45 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's good, and it's found it too.

1:35:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, it does a pretty good job. Reimagine a cat. How about a monkey with a top hat?

1:35:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well then, it's not a cat anymore.

1:35:57 - Leo Laporte
It's not going to be a cat, it still has to be that cat In a top hat, right, right, yeah, you're right, paris, we've got to you know, have standards on this show.

1:36:10 - Paris Martineau
Yes, it's the Google changelog Presented by ScoopX.

1:36:13 - Leo Laporte
It's the cat changelog. So now we're generating. Let's see, I haven't done this before. I have no idea how this is going to come out, and this is all on device, I believe.

1:36:25 - Paris Martineau
Whoops the top hat is on its back and it's a different cat, but I do respect the average. Wait a minute.

1:36:34 - Leo Laporte
Other than that that's bizarre. It's a different cat and it has a top hat, but it's on its back. I guess it just pulled it from its archives. It must have had. You think it had cats with it.

1:36:49 - Paris Martineau
Can you say no? Can you imagine as wearing top hat On its head?

1:36:53 - Leo Laporte
On its head.

1:36:54 - Paris Martineau
Or maybe just get rid of a cat, maybe because it thinks you're trying to make it a different cat.

1:37:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's a good question. I don't know. Undo cat changes A different cat. That's hysterical.

1:37:12 - Paris Martineau
Oh, there we go.

1:37:14 - Leo Laporte
There's a different cat, but he is wearing it very jauntuntily. What if you said this cat it's slightly askew, it's jaunty but would you believe red? You would totally believe that, wouldn't you?

1:37:29 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's a totally different image. Is the thing? It's not the same cat all right.

1:37:35 - Benito Gonzalez
Okay, I think you have to select where you want to put the hat, not the cat itself, because it's going to replace the cat.

1:37:40 - Leo Laporte
It's because you selected it, oh no we're imagining it as this cat, the same cat. How about that?

1:37:49 - Paris Martineau
not a cat, doesn't know that it's a cat. Imagine as wearing top hat on head let's say the same cat.

1:37:57 - Leo Laporte
How about that?

1:37:59 - Paris Martineau
let's see, this is a good if I can outwit the ai, I'm gonna outwit the ai.

1:38:07 - Leo Laporte
The editor can't complete this. Huh, reimagine as wearing.

1:38:13 - Paris Martineau
I think it doesn't know, it's a cat, so I just say, wearing a top hat on its head.

1:38:19 - Leo Laporte
How about if I say what? What should I say instead? It?

1:38:24 - Paris Martineau
just suggested hairless, which I wasn't expecting.

1:38:27 - Leo Laporte
Let's try that Reimagine a hairless cat wearing a jester's hat.

1:38:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Jesters. No, there you go. Okay, I'll fix it.

1:38:42 - Leo Laporte
And so that was the dictation, which actually is very good. I haven't tried the call notes yet. I want to try that. I was mistaken. I thought you couldn't do the call notes in the US, but somebody informed me you can in fact.

1:38:54 - Paris Martineau
That's true.

1:38:56 - Leo Laporte
It's a hairless cat.

1:38:59 - Paris Martineau
It's a hairless cat in a jester's hat. I don't know what's on its back.

1:39:03 - Leo Laporte
But it's fun, or it's cancer, I don't know. You know, maybe it's, it's uh, it's motley, it's jester's motley do you feel like this embodies the spirit of your cat? Yeah, I don't know here I'll show you some other uh images I did. Let's get out of this, um, because I can wait, wait.

1:39:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Can you just change the color of the fur on this cat? I?

1:39:24 - Leo Laporte
want to see if it can keep the cat the same way and do something to it. Okay, here's auto frame generating to auto frame. Huh, I think it's. You know, I this is one of those things where I'll use it for a little bit, yeah, and then I forget that it even is there. Tap and hold to see the changes. Yeah, though, not much auto frame did outpaint there's no lawn there, but it outpainted that. So that's interesting. Um, let's do something. Oh, actually, I should show you because, just like a cooking show, I did do some of these before. Let me show you some of the other images that I generated. There's the tiger.

Pretty good huh, what a friendly little tiger.

1:40:09 - Paris Martineau
It's a friendly little guy. Very jovial.

1:40:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oops, that's the studio. There's the tiger, there's the cat, there's the tiger, there's the cat, there's a tiger and there's the original. I think that's pretty good. Took the pole out, turned him into a tiger, anyway.

1:40:24 - Paris Martineau
I feel like the main use of this is going to be people doing little bits with their friends. Yeah, and not much else.

1:40:30 - Leo Laporte
You could see this, I could see this being useful Sure. You're at the Mozzarella Palace, you're waiting for your order and you do a little fun thing.

1:40:39 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:40:40 - Leo Laporte
Right. We announced on MacBreak Weekly that California was going along with Apple's wallet for their driver's license. It's now true for Google as well. The California driver's license will now sit in your Google wallet. But don't get your hopes up. The law requires you to still carry your driver's license with you, even though you have a digital version. Um, I'll come to. Did they ever? Explain why yeah, because I'll tell you why you get pulled over. And the chp does not have the special tool to read the driver's license digital.

1:41:12 - Paris Martineau
They want to look at they're also just not. Are you going to hand the cop your phone to take?

1:41:16 - Leo Laporte
yeah, no well, that's why they need the special tool. The special tool allows you to choose what date, what information is given to the bouncer at the bar or the police on the back of your driver's license, though can they just put that in the app too, I know?

honestly, that's what. That's all they really need, right? Uh, those in the pilot and there's only one and a half million Californians allowed in the pilot will still have to carry their physical IDs. It won't work outside of select retail locations and select TSA. Airports, law enforcement, state government agencies and businesses are not yet accepting digital IDs, so it's one of those. You probably could use it in Honduras, though, I would guess. All right, scooter x.

1:42:01 - Paris Martineau
I'm doing scooter x's changelog a brief aside before we dive back into scooter x's changelog a comment from discord. User wizardling about our cat, forays, said please stick to hard journalism, guys. No fake cats with hat humps, only the original cat with a top hat in the correct place.

1:42:20 - Benito Gonzalez
And I just want to say thank you for keeping us honest yes is definitely the uh, the journalistic ombudsman we need.

1:42:28 - Leo Laporte
Google tv has added a few more new free channels. I don't even know what google tv is anymore. It used to be that thing that you got on the dongle I'm not talking youtube tv, but google launched free ad supported channels on google tv last year. 80 channels to start. Wow, 120 different channels on google tv get ready for there, chick-fil-a practically family feud. Classic oh God Rig TV, which I guess is all big rigs all the time.

1:43:03 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I do actually respect that I'm not going to watch it, but I respect that it exists.

1:43:08 - Leo Laporte
Court TV, legendary trials, cheaters Always good for fun. Cbc news explore. For the serious canadians among us, uh, film rise, heartland, horror and true crime, grit extra. And the channel I'm gonna watch, which is laugh more l-a-f-f. Laugh more. Uh, you can see a full list of google tv's free channels right here. Celebrity name game who doesn't want to watch? This is a channel entirely devoted to celebrity name game. Stingray holiday scapes do they? Have a corner on.

There is my question probably they've got an entire channel dedicated to johnny carson. The war is all of these sitcoms that failed, failed.

1:44:01 - Jeff Jarvis
See, it's the remake of the odd couple. It's a man with a plan grounded for life superior donuts here's one for you, jeff anger management channel.

1:44:15 - Leo Laporte
Why do you think I need that? Entirely one channel, entirely devoted to anger management, you'll come. Here's one for people who are miss having kids in the back seat. It's a channel called are we there yet? Unbelievable. Who makes these channels, god knows?

1:44:37 - Jeff Jarvis
there's an mst3k channel.

1:44:39 - Benito Gonzalez
That's pretty cool.

1:44:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's pretty good tastemade channel if you like to watch cooking um cheddar news, which is not, I'm sorry to say, about cheese. Now, if they had a mozzarella news, I'd watch that. What else? Google, google change.

1:44:55 - Paris Martineau
I'm trying to find out more information about what rig tv is, and there's very little. But I found a tweet from a man called tv mode mojo that I guess, who he works for yeah, new fast channel alert that today they're unveiling rig tv, a 24 7 for tough jobs reality tv.

1:45:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It will have episodes of shows such as black gold, monster house and, later this year, monster garage wow a lot of fun stuff, so I put myself to sleep some nights with, uh, the show that is nothing but big cruise ships. It puts me right to sleep what are the cruise ships doing?

1:45:34 - Paris Martineau
there's cruising so it's just like boats, just boats moving. They have a voice and they and they and they talk to their captain svenson has uh, never been to this before let's watch a little rig tv together shall we say it's not even raining at their house oh, wait a minute.

1:45:51 - Leo Laporte
This is just bad. From the creators of the deadliest catch comes rig tv you gotta sit back, leo pardon me, oh, oh, I'm on the wrong channel. There we go. I gotta change channels on my switcher. From the creators of the deadliest catch comes rig tv, where grit and adventure meet the toughest jobs. I've seen black gold and this is what is black gold.

1:46:11 - Jeff Jarvis
It's people who are um, they're nutty people, who are nutty people, who are literally fighting for gold. Oh well, crazy rigs and all kinds of stuff You'd actually enjoy that it's ad supported.

1:46:23 - Leo Laporte
That's why we're seeing the bounty ad. He looks like the black gold guy Looks like the guy. Yeah, looks familiar, doesn't he no? But Just looks familiar, doesn't he no? But I hope Just me. I have that. You know, I do have a disease that means I don't recognize anybody's faces and everybody looks familiar. Yeah, so it's very challenging.

1:46:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm the opposite. Everybody looks strange. Well, that's true.

1:46:54 - Leo Laporte
Google Chat adds support for.

1:46:56 - Jeff Jarvis
If this, then that integrations okay that's so 2013 of them, yeah um, you can have a trigger.

1:47:07 - Leo Laporte
I guess you could say new phone, new phone, who dis? To everybody. That would be kind of fun.

1:47:15 - Paris Martineau
You could say text me every time a new episode of Black Gold is on RIG TV.

1:47:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, that also is available, by the way, google Chat has. If this, then that's integrations in Workspace. So that's something for you, jeff. Google finally lets you record call audio in the US, but but only on the pixel 9. So this is that call notes feature. They never had this before because, of course, uh, it's illegal in some places, but it does warn you when, when you turn on the call recorder, apparently it says this call is being recorded. Okay, I'm gonna, I've got to call somebody. I haven't made a phone call in years, but if I, what? Seriously, who do you make phone calls?

1:48:02 - Paris Martineau
all the time. It's my job oh, that's different.

1:48:05 - Leo Laporte
You're doing reportage. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I don't you answer the phone. No, no next time I do next time he calls I'm gonna do it.

1:48:15 - Paris Martineau
It's an unknown number to my personal number.

1:48:20 - Jeff Jarvis
How do you talk to your parents?

1:48:21 - Paris Martineau
Well, they call me. I mean I answer the phone if it's someone I know.

1:48:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's its phone. It's just you know, you Zoom with your parents or something, no.

1:48:27 - Paris Martineau
I think that's ridiculous.

1:48:28 - Leo Laporte
My parents do not call me.

1:48:40 - Paris Martineau
Google Pixel 9 launches Adaptive Touch which improves screen sensitivity while wet oh, I'm more.

1:48:43 - Paris Martineau
That would have been good for you earlier today when leo, before we started the show, unprompted and without any fanfare, just licked the screen of his phone and continued going about as if it was normal.

1:48:55 - Paris Martineau
I was just taking it back. I wasn't disgusted. I was like are we moving on? Did you really just do that?

1:49:02 - Paris Martineau
and it wasn't like a tip of the tongue like it was like a full width flick uh, google maps is I?

1:49:10 - Leo Laporte
this is barely news. Google maps is rolling out redesigned pin shapes and colors. Whoa. This is why this right here is why I stopped doing the google change log. Yeah yeah, even, even no, no, I mean, you could do this all I, literally scooter one of these days we could do this all day. We'll just do the whole show be changelogged, and you'll be so bored, so bored. Is there anything really good Scooter? He's good at this, though.

1:49:44 - Paris Martineau
He said, yelp filed a lawsuit against Google today.

1:49:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's been done a hundred times. Google search redesigns, web stopwatch and timer. Play Store can now download multiple android app updates at the same time. Google posts repair manuals for the pixel 9. Just tell me when you've had enough. Uh, meet, take notes for me rolling out in workspace. I think that's enough, and that's well. Here it is Mighty Cruise Ships.

1:50:26 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what you watch, it's a Smithsonian, I don't really watch it. It's about three seconds and I fall asleep.

1:50:31 - Leo Laporte
It's the perfect show for that, it's very relaxing.

1:50:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's in a weird way. I watch Guy Fieri too. It's docudramas. I know it's ridiculous, it's absolutely ridiculous. What's even too boring to fall asleep to is Aerial. America? Which one Aerial America. Have you seen that? Oh, that's good. No, you're flying over stuff. Oh, it's boring as hell, oh my.

1:50:53 - Leo Laporte
God.

1:50:55 - Paris Martineau
Do you have a TV in your bedroom? Is that how you watch stuff when you fall asleep? Yeah, when you get older you too will get older.

1:51:01 - Leo Laporte
Once you stop having sex, you got to do something.

1:51:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I made fun of my parents for this.

1:51:08 - Paris Martineau
I just like to doom scroll until I fall asleep.

1:51:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's what the kids do, so does the phone just fall over then yes.

1:51:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I specifically have kind of a pillow that I rest my hand on so that I can. Then the phone will fall back and the phone is cradled.

1:51:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it plugged in and charging?

1:51:24 - Paris Martineau
Usually.

1:51:28 - Leo Laporte
The.

1:51:28 - Paris Martineau
Google changelog.

1:51:30 - Leo Laporte
And that's the Google changelog, the enervating Google changelog. Pick some more, anything. Okay, you did your inside ai show today, yes, yes, with mr jason howell yes, we did.

1:51:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you come up with anything exciting that's going on in the world of ai? Um, we did, we did.

1:51:57 - Leo Laporte
Let me see what happened journalists are using ai avatars to combat maduro's crackdown in venezuela because they don't want to show their faces. Yep ganette is shuttering a site accused of publishing ai product reviews because they were taking all that junk, and kamala harris is not going to use AI to train for debate prep.

1:52:17 - Jeff Jarvis
There was a proposal that she should train. She should have an AI version of Donald Trump.

1:52:23 - Leo Laporte
It might be fun to watch. It would be. It would be. I don't think it would be helpful?

1:52:28 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't think so either.

1:52:31 - Leo Laporte
I want to do this story because I was going to be in this movie. I've told you this story when I met Francis Ford Coppola and he cast me. This is a good story.

1:52:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, no, you didn't tell the story. No, you didn't tell that story.

1:52:43 - Paris Martineau
I never told that story. He cast you in what.

1:52:49 - Leo Laporte
So way back when, when I was an acting student, so this is maybe 30 years ago. You know, when you're an acting, when you're an acting, when you're an early actor, you get this magazine. I know they probably don't have it anymore. We're in the back. There's all the auditions, and I spotted an audition, uh for francis fort coppola, for, uh, zoetrope, so I submitted a recorded monologue.

1:53:08 - Paris Martineau
Macbeth's how was it recorded? Was it on a vhs?

1:53:12 - Leo Laporte
do you know it was?

1:53:12 - Jeff Jarvis
just audio still have it.

1:53:15 - Leo Laporte
No, I wish I did, it was audio did you send it via?

mail yes, I mailed it and they called me and they said francis would like you to come down. So we went to the zoetrope building in san francisco with a few other actors down in the basement. Francis, francis ford coppola, the great director, was pretty big and, I think, wore the same black suit every night. It was just like a tent that he wore. And so you go down in the basement. He has a beautiful recording studio and we recorded from the script that he had. It was for a movie that was going to be called Megalopolis. Now this was the 80s. Jeez, he has been making this movie since then. Wow, the recordings that we were making were what they call pre-vis.

Some directors hitchcock was famous for doing a sketch of each shot. Many modern directors actually make audio comic books like a like almost an animated show of the movie ahead of time, and that's apparently what coppola did. So I was the we were doing. I was the voice talent for the detective in megalopolis. I only did it for a few nights. I I francis said, can you sound more like bob woodward? And I said what? How does bob woodward?

1:54:30 - Jeff Jarvis
sound.

1:54:31 - Leo Laporte
He's from nebraska I think he wanted me to sound more like Dustin Hoffman playing Bob Woodward.

1:54:37 - Jeff Jarvis
But Bob Woodward has a unique no, Bob Woodward and Kurt Anderson sound uniquely alike. They sound like a Nebraska accent. Well, maybe that's what he wanted.

1:54:47 - Leo Laporte
He wasn't clear.

1:54:48 - Jeff Jarvis
You could have been famous Leo, if you just listened to him and did what he wanted.

1:54:51 - Leo Laporte
Well then I made a mistake. It would have taken a while. So the next day I had Father Guido Sarducci on my radio show. You probably don't remember him, I don't.

Yes, I do. He was on Saturday Night Live. He was a comedian, don Novello, who played one role, one role only. It was a chain-smoking Vatican priest named Father Guido Sarducci, with a bad Italian accent. Coppola liked him. He cast him in other movies I mentioned. Made the mistake of mentioning oh yeah, I've been working with francis. We're doing the voice track you mentioned on air well, I was during the interviews, but it was probably wasn't on air but it but it was okay no, no, no, no, no.

I know I I know better than that. But during a break I said oh oh, you know, don I was. You know, I know you're friends with francis I'm doing. He called and snarfed my job.

1:55:38 - Jeff Jarvis
They recast the part with don novello so that was that.

1:55:44 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, the movie is finally out after, with don novello in it.

1:55:48 - Paris Martineau
No, I doubt okay, let's pull up the trailer, not play audio, but I'll read the first 45 seconds because that's going to lead into what you want to talk about next yes, okay, dramatic, let me.

1:56:00 - Leo Laporte
Let me see if I can get the trailer so a trailer for this movie recently comes out.

1:56:05 - Paris Martineau
People have been talking about how it's crazy. You know it's going to be so interesting have you seen it on tv?

1:56:10 - Leo Laporte
because I have I have seen it. I don't watch TV. It's been running, ah, that's why she's too cool for that. Maybe if I did- so here is the Megalopolis teaser trailer. This is a movie Coppola has wanted to make his whole life.

1:56:24 - Paris Martineau
You see the Statue of Liberty.

1:56:27 - Leo Laporte
The City of.

1:56:28 - Paris Martineau
Man.

1:56:28 - Leo Laporte
Gotham. Oh no, what's coming from the sky? This isn't the trailer.

1:56:33 - Paris Martineau
It's not Wait. No, is it? Oh no.

1:56:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's a teaser trailer. I'll get the other trailer there must be another trailer.

1:56:38 - Paris Martineau
It's the trailer with the quotes. They took the trailer down, I think. I mean they did take it down, oh well, maybe that's why I can't find it.

1:56:44 - Leo Laporte
You should have mentioned that.

1:56:45 - Paris Martineau
They've got to you know.

1:57:00 - Leo Laporte
Here it is from youtube okay, don't take me down, baby from francis ford coppola. Is this what you were talking about? Oh, it's got, uh, no, it's got. What's his name in it? Oh, there's chariots, there's roman races. Oh, this does look overdone. So you know who has my part? Who? Uh, adam driver. Geez, there he is. That's my part. Damn it, the young actors always take over for the older actors, right, anyway, uh, so I, you know anyway, apparently, that that a that trailer was made with ai. Is that what you're saying?

1:57:33 - Jeff Jarvis
no, no so okay, go ahead the.

1:57:36 - Paris Martineau
Let me see if I can find it the megalomaniac ties with marketing consultant behind trailer you was gonna get bad reviews. It the trailer opens basically with a bunch of uh, short clips from coppola's past films. You have, you know, apocalypse, a clip from apocalypse now, and then it flashes on it a quote from vincent can be of the new york times that described the movie as hollow at its core. There's one from you know about the godfather, and someone says, oh, it was like really just vacuous or something.

Right, all these quotes from named critics basically saying and then it goes into the amentopolis trailer and basically what this communicating is. Oh, critics, they're always gonna be wrong, but they didn't like his masterpieces before our classics right somebody does the job of googling these quotes. They don't exist. The named critics in this that you know panned apocalypse now or pan godfather, all these other things.

They actually wrote glowing reviews of course they do and they had nothing, uh, even remotely resembling those quotes in their actual reviews from the time someone I think this originally started because people on twitter were trying to figure out where this came from. Someone has the bright idea? Ask chat gpt.

1:58:59 - Leo Laporte
Hey, give me an overview of all the negative reviews critics have published chat gpt always wanting to please gives them a bunch of reviews, some of which are the ones that are cited in this so it wasn't really malfeasance, except that he used it's like the lawyer used the AI to write his pleading.

1:59:20 - Paris Martineau
And didn't check it.

1:59:21 - Leo Laporte
And didn't check it. That's actually a brilliant thing to do. Ask the AI.

1:59:26 - Paris Martineau
Brief I mean caveat is we don't know for certain that this person used Chachapiti, but articles started to come out saying they appear to be fabricated. We can't find the sourcing of it, but if you ask Chachapiti it does give the quotes. And then Lionsgate said we screwed up, we're sorry. We're immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis and they blamed this marketing consultant.

1:59:49 - Jeff Jarvis
And cut ties with them.

1:59:51 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:59:52 - Leo Laporte
Megalopolis comes out September 27th. Coppola financed it himself. He's wanted to make this movie forever. No studio would do it. He financed it to a tune of 100 million dollars. Listen to the the preci. It's a roman epic set in an imagined modern america. Starting adam driver Giancarlo Esposito, Natale, Emanuel and many more, but not Leo Laporte.

2:00:19 - Paris Martineau
I can't believe you read the lines for the Adam Driver lead role.

2:00:24 - Leo Laporte
It was really good, it was kind of a noir detective thing set in a kind of fictional future. It was really cool.

2:00:31 - Jeff Jarvis
You know what Adam Driver sounds a little bit like Bob Woodward.

2:00:37 - Leo Laporte
He wanted Woodward and I, just you know, I wish you'd been on my shoulder.

2:00:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Go find some audio from Midwest. Find any interview from Bob Woodward. It's a very distinct way to speak. It's very slow.

2:00:47 - Leo Laporte
See, coppola knew Bob Woodward. The problem was, I knew who Bob Woodward was, but I didn't know how he sounded. Coppola probably was buddy and you didn't have Google. Then woodward was, but I know how he sounded coppola probably was. I didn't have google. Then I should have said get woodward then, if you want me to sound like bob woodward.

2:01:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Find any audio about woodward this time?

2:01:02 - Leo Laporte
I know that's, we've gone far enough down, all right, fine. In fact, this might be a good time to wind things up, uh, unless I've missed some big story that we uh should be doing. I've missed some big story that we should be doing. Zuckerberg says the Biden administration pressured meta to censor COVID-19 content, but really, the pressure came entirely. What are you doing? You're listening to Bob Woodward. I explicitly said Looking for something that might be meaningful? Oh yeah, he sounds Midwestern. Looking for something that might be meaningful? Oh yeah, he sounds Midwestern.

2:01:38 - Paris Martineau
Looking for something.

2:01:40 - Leo Laporte
That's not how I would have read that part at all. It was much more like a Dashiell Hammett kind of Sam Spade character.

2:01:46 - Jeff Jarvis
That's why you didn't get it, because that's very Coppola to know that this guy was not going to be what you expected.

2:01:51 - Leo Laporte
He was going to be a slow-talking Francis. No one wants to hear. That's how Adam Driver sounds.

2:01:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it is, it is Not how Don Novello sounds. Okay, sorry, I'm sorry, it hurts still, I know, leo, it's painful, it's painful, it's painful, it's painful, it's painful, it's painful, it's painful.

2:02:16 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting. I mean, of course, a lot of legislators and a lot of normal people said this is a terrible bill, but I think A lot of AI companies seem to back it.

2:02:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I think they kind of yeah, they back it Well, Sam Altman and Elon Musk because it's regulatory capture Right.

2:02:33 - Leo Laporte
So it has passed, Is it? But it still has to be signed.

2:02:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know what the governor is. Yeah, I don't think the governor. They changed it, they made some modifications, but I don't know what the governor is going to do.

2:02:46 - Leo Laporte
One of the things OpenAI has done recently. This is a story from the Informations AI Agenda. They've showed a new model to the feds. Strawberry, and that's an example of them trying to suck up to the government yeah, it's regulatory capture, yeah, but and thanks to stephanie palazzo for writing this story but I think this is kind of what the idea of the law is, is that, uh, we kind of want a heads up on what the AIs are doing, what the dangers are. We want to kill switch.

2:03:19 - Jeff Jarvis
How do you show it to them? Oh look, it'll make a picture of a cat and put the hat on the head. You know what?

2:03:25 - Leo Laporte
are you going to show? I agree, I agree.

2:03:29 - Paris Martineau
I'd like you to briefly click a link I put in the Discord, which is to the original article. The information published on this strawberry ai, solely because the art our team developed for this concerns me to look at it, it's upsetting oh interesting strangely muscular man with a strawberry head generated by ai and it they.

2:03:53 - Leo Laporte
They replaced it later, right.

2:03:56 - Jeff Jarvis
They replaced it later. Right, it's mid-journey.

2:03:59 - Leo Laporte
If you're wondering about the strawberry and said well, what model is that? This is the one they called Q or Q.

2:04:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah that's right. This is the one that's going to reason. This is going to have reasoning.

2:04:10 - Leo Laporte
They could do math.

2:04:12 - Paris Martineau
They could do reasoning.

2:04:14 - Leo Laporte
I think this is a good promo for open ai and like, oh, it's so good, we had to show it to the government first oh, that's exactly what they're doing.

2:04:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's all, it's all hype.

2:04:23 - Paris Martineau
This is from my colleague's article uh earlier this week, when, given additional time to think, the strawberry model can also answer customers questions about more subjective topics, such as product marketing strategies. To demonstrate demonstrate Strawberry's prowess with large language-related tasks, openai employees have shown their co-workers how Strawberry can, for example, solve New York Times connections.

2:04:45 - Leo Laporte
That's a hard one. Can you solve New York Times connections?

2:04:49 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

2:04:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh, don't be so cocky, let's just see.

2:04:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, I guarantee you.

2:04:59 - Leo Laporte
I can't. I love connections. It's a newer game from the times and it's tough yeah have you played strands?

2:05:06 - Paris Martineau
I love strands no it's a new.

2:05:09 - Leo Laporte
It's an even newer game okay, is that the one where?

2:05:13 - Paris Martineau
kind of like a word search, but yeah, yeah, I hate word search games.

2:05:17 - Leo Laporte
I hate word search games. All right, this is today's connections. Forgive us if we're spoiling it. Just close your eyes right now.

2:05:25 - Paris Martineau
All right, we got to refresh or whatever where it scrambles them, because they always put things in it to confuse you with.

2:05:34 - Leo Laporte
Okay, there's tip number one. Mix it up in it.

2:05:37 - Paris Martineau
Just confuse you like to confuse you with okay, there's tip number one, mix it up the idea, is it up? Because they definitely put stuff next to stuff, yeah to make you think it's like look at it, you swing yo yo teeter-totter.

2:05:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's all kids stuff, right? So the idea is there's 16 words here, there's four groups, so there's going to be four words in a group that are related. So there's going to be four words in a group that are related, and, uh, we'll shuffle it because you don't want to fall for that monkey bars tetherball, teeter totter no, not teetotaler slide.

2:06:05 - Paris Martineau
No, I think it's. I don't think it's tetherbar, I think it's uh it's gonna be a playground, yeah so slide and swing. So not tetherbar, though it's four ball is a playground.

2:06:15 - Leo Laporte
No, that's more of a no. All right, let's try it. Submit and that's the look you want where it goes, boing, boing, boing.

2:06:23 - Paris Martineau
Playground equipment.

2:06:24 - Leo Laporte
Now, that was the easy one, because it's yeller. Pendulum martini teabag steps yo-yo desert humor t tetherball teetotaler blues, teeth, yo-yo, teabag, tetherball and pendulum all have strings attached. Oh, I think we have a winner. Winner, chicken dinner. Look at that, this guy's brilliant. All have strings attached. Whoa, oh, all, right now we have Martini Humor, desert Steps, boomer, teeth Blues and Teetotaler. Martini and Teetotaler don't go together, do they?

2:07:04 - Paris Martineau
Humor and Boomer rhyme Humor and.

2:07:06 - Leo Laporte
Boomer. I always hate that because I know it's not. Oh, they rhyme. That would be no.

2:07:12 - Paris Martineau
Sometimes it's stuff like where the first half is different as well, yeah, I know, know, sometimes they're really mean on these. I don't know it should be illegal to have to do this live on a show well, you said, you were really good. I didn't know you were gonna challenge me. I'm really good, but I'm also very anxious.

2:07:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, martini, oh, these are things that are dry.

2:07:40 - Paris Martineau
Oh dry humor.

2:07:42 - Leo Laporte
Dry humor.

2:07:45 - Paris Martineau
T-Toteler is dry. Yeah, baby Steps blues, teeth and boomers.

2:07:52 - Leo Laporte
So here's the question you know that these are the group. Do you try to figure it out before you submit, or you just go?

2:07:59 - Paris Martineau
yeah, well, I know that one um, I usually try like baby steps, baby steps, baby blues baby blues, baby teeth, baby boomer that's what it is.

2:08:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, very good, you are good at this.

2:08:11 - Paris Martineau
Look at that perfect perfect life, yeah it's way better to watch the cruise ship show I could be watching, sure, but no, I just black gold.

2:08:23 - Leo Laporte
My brain, uh. All right, let's take a little break. And then your picks of the week. We just did a pick which is a new york times connection, and then strands. I've got a really good pick this week. Okay, you're watching this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis, officially emeritus. Can you announce your new job?

2:08:41 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I can't yet.

2:08:42 - Leo Laporte
Okay, still negotiating, but you know what His real job is writing fantastic books like the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine and the Web. We Weave soon to be in a bookstore near you.

2:08:53 - Paris Martineau
And his job is being angry at the New York Times online.

2:08:56 - Leo Laporte
It's very important. It is indeed, and I'm going to buy you a Google TV so you can watch the anger management channel and you wouldn't. You know what it would take away the spice.

2:09:06 - Jeff Jarvis
It would take away all the fun. You know it's funny because I talked to a New York Times reporter yesterday for an open writing on somebody I knew and then I just got an email from somebody who's from the New York Times is writing a book who wants to interview me. You know they can't stand me.

2:09:18 - Leo Laporte
Are they aware of your stand against them? I?

2:09:21 - Jeff Jarvis
suspect. So I bet there's a group Me, jay Rosen, yeah Other people.

2:09:27 - Leo Laporte
Mark, you know what they're saying in their heads and I'm. I think they're saying oh, he's just a Harris fan, formerly a Biden fan, and he doesn't like our treatment of the Democratic Party, and that's just partisan politics.

2:09:45 - Paris Martineau
I feel like they're probably just like people get mad online at us all the time.

2:09:50 - Jeff Jarvis
We've succeeded. When that happens, we piss everybody off. You know what I say.

2:09:52 - Leo Laporte
When Lisa says, oh my God, you won't believe what they're saying about us on Twitter, I say it's just Twitter, who cares? I think that's what I say, and I bet you that's what Arthur Oaks Salzberger says, ag. Arthur Gregg, ag. Also Paris Martineau from the Information, which is a must-subscribe website with the best scoops, the best information. I just renewed my uh subscription. I'm thinking my I said stay one. How many years now has it been?

2:10:21 - Jeff Jarvis
10 wow, that's a lot of rule you'd be profitable if you didn't know that's as we know that's 400 a year.

2:10:29 - Leo Laporte
No, it's worth it. I do pay for a lot of subscriptions like bloomberg, new york times, washington Post, because we cover the news, but the information consistently great scoops, really good stuff. Yep, I pay for it too and you should follow Paris on there If you have a tip. Her signal I'm going to give out. Her super secret signal handle is martineau.01 M-A-R-T-I-N-E-A-U dot zero one. Uh, here is the ars technica article. Thank you, chocolate milk mini sip. In our discord, durov was charged with providing cryptology services without making required declarations to government officials. That's concerning under french law.

Providers of cryptology must make declarations to annsi, the country's cyber security agency. French authorities may request that companies provide quote the technical characteristics and source code of the means of cryptology which was the subject of the declaration.

2:11:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Surrender cheese monkeys not being good here, not good. Not good, that's bad. That's an attack on privacy.

2:11:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they want to backdoor. Yep, yep. This is what we were afraid of. It's not about CSAM, it's about getting a backdoor. Yep, that's bad.

2:11:54 - Paris Martineau
I will say the quote also says he was also charged with also other charges too, but point still stands uh, paris martineau.

2:12:06 - Leo Laporte
What's your, what's your pick of the week?

2:12:07 - Paris Martineau
you know this uh week or maybe it was last week for the show I got we were doing our weekly editorial meeting at the information and as I get off off I get an email from our CEO and founder, jessica Lesson, that says very important question. I was like, oh my gosh, what could it be? She wanted to know where I go to print my hats because I guess, I'm well known for having a lot of dumb. Hat ideas that.

2:12:33 - Leo Laporte
I make a reality. And so this whole whole top hat thing was just a follow-up.

2:12:40 - Paris Martineau
And so I use Printfulcom because I like the hats to be a little embroidered. It's really good. You can order a novelty hat one-off, make a little thing, get it embroidered. It's usually less than $20 for one hat. I really like it. Their hats are nice. She was also asking about t-shirts. I didn't have super recommendations for that, but I like printful let me see, uh, your hats if you go to the uh second one my hats.

I started making them whenever I was a younger reporter and had to cover tech hearings, and they would always have so many ridiculous sayings in them that I would get them embroidered in a hat. So I have a senator I know what. The first one is the second one is mr bezos I believe you're on mute. Of all the different ones, there's also one that's not pictured here that says will you commit to ending finsta, which?

2:13:31 - Leo Laporte
is one of my favorite ones. I'm forgetting which one.

2:13:33 - Paris Martineau
It was, but I think there's a lindsey graham quote or something where they asked that and it made no sense then. But I got it on a hat and this one was my most recent one. My friend Maya it was her birthday and she had posted in her Instagram story months ago that she found this photo of her grandpa's hat that says screw up, call cause off.

2:13:53 - Leo Laporte
Was he an attorney he?

2:13:54 - Paris Martineau
was an attorney, yeah, and so screw up, call kazaf. Was he a little attorney? He was an attorney, yeah, and so I just I took a screenshot of it, put in an order for a hat, it was 15 bucks, came next week and then I gave it to her on her birthday and it was I gotta tell you your hat is nicer than the one mr kazaf was wearing in the picture.

2:14:09 - Leo Laporte
I know you.

2:14:10 - Paris Martineau
You got a nice embroidered version of that, I know, oh you made sure it wasn't red, because then that would potentially be problematic you've just armed us with some very dangerous tools I know anybody can make a novelty hat. It's really important to know well, that was 30 rock.

2:14:28 - Leo Laporte
There was the, the writer. The comedy writer would always have a non-sequitur hat, but I like yours.

2:14:33 - Paris Martineau
They're not non-sequitur, they're sequitur right so I mean sometimes I'll be in the subway like wearing my like senator we run ads hat or something and people be like oh, oh mark zuckerberg. Yes, that's the hat senator.

2:14:47 - Leo Laporte
We run ads. It's such a good hat what? Oh, I love this. How many do you have? That I've made, I think yeah, because I think I just imagine somebody in goodwill looking at the clothes and going where are all these hats? You gotta make more, you gotta make more.

2:15:08 - Paris Martineau
I know there was a brief time where I had a little online store for some uh, will you commit to ending finsta hat? And then I had the proceeds go to a charity. That's brilliant. I would buy that. It's a good thing, you can make your own.

2:15:21 - Leo Laporte
Do you wear them around the city of New York?

2:15:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

2:15:25 - Leo Laporte
That's wild, it's fun. You've got personality. You've got spunk yeah. I got moxie I hate spunk.

2:15:38 - Jeff Jarvis
She doesn't know what that's from, jeff. Obviously I think we really ought to do the sequel to only murders in the building.

2:15:41 - Paris Martineau
I think, I do think that'd be good, I think it's it we're the streaming low cost version.

2:15:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, ladies, only murders in the podcast.

2:15:52 - Leo Laporte
She just googled it. She just googled it and she has found the quote I have the mary tyler moore show that's right. Yeah, yeah, ed esner, lou grant, mr grant, it's actually a great scene.

2:16:02 - Jeff Jarvis
You got spunk kid and I hate spunk, spunk uh, it is now time for jeff jarvis's so I was gonna do the new wise photo bird feeder, so we can all be Craig.

2:16:16 - Leo Laporte
Newmark oh, I've seen these. I love these. In fact, we almost got one. There's a variety. Our neighbors have one. There's a variety of bird feeders. There's one where you wear it and you're wearing the feeder and the bird comes up and eats and doesn't know you're a human. So you can see up close. I swear to God, I'm not making this up.

2:16:35 - Paris Martineau
You can just hold bird seed, you don't need a theater. Well, no, no.

2:16:38 - Leo Laporte
The birds are cagey, they're not going to, so this one's a camera.

2:16:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you've got to buy the camera extra and the solar power extra.

2:16:48 - Leo Laporte
But then you get pictures up close of birds eating your food. Yeah, which is nice.

2:16:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Probably overrated, but yeah, which is nice. Probably over, but I was gonna do that, but I found something better. Okay, so uh, from ted underwood online a guy professor online, a wonderful paper called the unbearable slowness of being.

2:17:06 - Leo Laporte
But wait before you do that yeah, can I just show you sure somebody wearing a bird feeder it's hard to beat that that's pretty good, that's pretty good

2:17:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm gonna walk around new york city in that problem is you're gonna have a 15 pound pigeon is gonna come along and tear it off the unbearable slowness of being a book it's a wonderful paper by zhu zhang and marcus meister from uh cal poly, caltech, and what it says is it's I am charged with coming up with a number of the week, so this is very much numbers. So they they figured out that we um are so slow as human beings and we have a limit to our cognition and that we only do things at 10 bits a second wow all right, and we're going to explain that in a second, but that we gather data at an enormous rate of one gigabit per second, and so they try to figure this out.

So if you go through, for example, the photoreceptor cells on the human eye convert light um, so one human cone photoreceptor can transmit information at about 270 bits a second. With six million cones, one eye has a capacity of 1.6 gigabits per second Per second.

2:18:40 - Leo Laporte
Per second Wow. But we know, that's why we know that you reject most of what you see. Well, in fact.

2:18:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to tell you exactly. So then you go down and the output of the eye consists of one million axons With particularly strong stimuli. One can drive them at an average rate of 50 hertz. So the capacity of the optic nerve is about 100 megabits per second or less. That is 10 times less than the capacity of the photoreceptors. So the circuits inside your retina are already compressing the visual data substantially by a factor of at least 10.

2:19:19 - Leo Laporte
Compressing or ignoring, because that's a good question Interesting. Don't know. Are we seeing it all, but it's compressed. Or are we not seeing? Don't know?

2:19:28 - Jeff Jarvis
We're only seeing one tenth of what we see, a single neuron transmits at 10 bits a second, which is to say that the information throughput of an entire human being is one neuron. So basically, the question here is that we process information we get information a million-fold faster than we process it, and so there's a speed limit on our behavior, and they're trying to figure this out.

2:19:55 - Leo Laporte
They don't but they're trying to figure it out. Many of us feel that the visual scene we experience, even from a glance, contains vivid details. Everywhere the image feels sharp and full of color and fine contrast. However, this is an illusion, called subjective inflation in the technical jargon. You feel like it's sharp and colorful, but but you don't see it. I know this because I have a Fantasia. If I close my eyes, I can't remember any bit of that scene.

2:20:22 - Paris Martineau
Famously cannot picture an apple.

2:20:25 - Leo Laporte
I cannot, let alone the dew they ask about unconscious. This is really interesting. Do they come to a?

2:20:33 - Jeff Jarvis
conclusion Well, they say that Musk says that he thinks because he's going to put two things in your head that we have a bandwidth problem and he's saying that's not the. They're saying that's not the issue at all.

2:20:44 - Leo Laporte
They call it, the Musk illusion. It's a. For the most part, this is a harmless illusion. However, when paired with the immense fortune of Elon Musk, the belief can lead to real world consequences.

2:20:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, musk, the belief can lead to real world consequences. Wow, um.

2:21:00 - Leo Laporte
So if you go to page here, what is it again with the line numbers?

2:21:03 - Benito Gonzalez
page. This kind of study, like it, touches upon the hard problem, already, of of consciousness. Yes, exactly, very hard problem. It's an ai story.

2:21:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, yeah, so if you go to page 14, there's a table at the beginning, um, which shows so. If you're typing, that's where they begin this. They figured out this typing that. That's the way we process that. If you're doing characters that aren't logical, that aren't words, it's 10 bits a second and then they have other tasks here. Binary digital memorization it averages out to 4.9 bits a second. Blindfolded speed cubing not that I could do that. 11.8 is that like a rubik's cube? Yeah, okay, right, um, listening comprehension in english about 13. Object recognition is fast. 30 to 50.

2:21:52 - Leo Laporte
Uh, reading in english this is bits per second when he's a second starraft for an e-athlete 10 bits a second. Yeah, those guys, I watch them play and they're processing stuff so much faster than.

I can but it's still not that fast. So I'll tell you at least the trick for that for StarCraft and I know this from playing chess is what we are very good at as humans is pattern recognition, and we can take a pattern that might have a hundred bits and somehow store in our brain as just a few bits, and that's what's happening with these starcraft players. It's the reason they're good at it and they played it so long that they have globbed the all of that data down into smaller digestible globs and they can process it, whereas I'm seeing the details that are way too much for me to process. So I think that we do do something in our brain that lets us process more data.

2:22:47 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, I think there's also a problem with trying to compare our brains, how our brains work, with the way computers work yeah, bits per second we work in parallel our, our neurons are vastly parallel so it's very, very different. Yeah, it's a very different throughput we did.

2:23:02 - Leo Laporte
I interviewed jeff hawkins, who was the creator of the graffiti uh alphabet and palm pilot, and he's a neuroscientist. He actually wrote a great book about brains, but he's ended up, he said. He said we're never going to duplicate human cognition in a new von Neumann machine. It's too linear. We need to make massively parallel machines. Our brains are much, much slower than modern computers but much, much more parallel. And he, his company Numenta, is trying to make chips that are massively parallel, but he's been doing this for years. I don't know if he's made much progress, but that's the idea is we. We don't work like a computer, we're not a linear process.

2:23:42 - Jeff Jarvis
They argue here in section 6.1 is that image processing is massively parallel, yeah, but in contrast central processing appears to be strictly serial. So they they theorize that we have kind of an outer brain that takes all this stuff in. It's our inner brain that does the actual thinking. That is very serial. We can only do one thing at a time, we can only concentrate on one thing at a time, and that is very slow, which is really kind of interesting.

2:24:11 - Paris Martineau
Does that align with your guys' experiences of thought? I feel like the way that I think and process ideas is very fluid and not in a way that I would describe as serial. And sometimes to my detriment.

2:24:31 - Benito Gonzalez
Also calling it slow, though, is kind of a problem, because relative to what?

2:24:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Relative to the amount of data we're taking. You know what?

2:24:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to try to get Jeff Hawkins on again. I did a triangulation with him when his book On Intelligence came out, which I do recommend is a really good primer to how brains work. He's got a new one came out a couple of years ago, a new theory of intelligence. It's called A Thousand Brains. Let me see if I can get an interview with him and send him this paper beforehand just to react to it. Oh, I'm sure he's read it. I mean, this is he's a trained neuroscientist.

2:25:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, exactly and one more stat. Yeah, uh, section 5.1, how much information is stored? How big is our database? So they say that the upper bound of the brain's capacity, by counting the number of synapses, which which is 10 to the 14th, and multiplying by the dynamic range of the synaptic strength, estimated at five bits, resulting in five times 10 to the 14th, or 50 terabytes, which they think is an overestimate.

2:25:29 - Leo Laporte
Much, much less than a modern computer. Yeah, fascinating, yeah uh fascinating.

2:25:34 - Paris Martineau
So what? What makes our?

2:25:35 - Leo Laporte
consciousness different, and how can we do AI with with machines that uh are very different from how?

2:25:42 - Jeff Jarvis
our papers written in a very fun way. I mean I I skip over certain parts because I'm dumb, but jayu Zhang and Marcus Meister from uh Caltech, credit to them very nice.

2:25:55 - Leo Laporte
I shall save that and read it at my leisure.

2:26:00 - Jeff Jarvis
It's got some jokes in it.

2:26:02 - Leo Laporte
The Unbearable Slowness of being is the title of that.

2:26:05 - Paris Martineau
That by itself is a joke. Right, Look for that and you can find it Very cool.

2:26:11 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis, you have brought an unusual amount of intellectual acuity to the show this day. I barely expected it from a man.

2:26:20 - Paris Martineau
Must be, because now that you're officially emeritus, I'm emeritus.

2:26:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's it, he's got wisdom.

2:26:29 - Jeff Jarvis
My 50 terabytes. Doing a lot up there.

2:26:35 - Leo Laporte
Imagine, leo, you and me, me, what's not in there anymore oh, my god, I've forgotten more than you ever knew, or something. Jeff is the emeritus uh director of the town night. Well, no, you're not emeritus director of the town night, you're just not that anymore.

2:26:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I just think that's right.

2:26:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that's right, you're the emeritus professor. The town professor Tao.

2:27:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Professor of journalism and animation, craig Newmark.

2:27:11 - Leo Laporte
Formerly director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY Soon to be seen somewhere else. But you know what? Formerly director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism right at cuny soon, uh, to be seen somewhere else. But you know what the? I like the writing. Keep doing the writing. I love your books, thank you so much, yeah, I'm.

2:27:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm on chapter four of my line of type book right now, and I love your chairs.

2:27:29 - Leo Laporte
Now, I've never really paid attention to chairs, but that looks like you stole them from the library at a college.

2:27:34 - Jeff Jarvis
No, you know what you know those came from. So you spoke to me earlier. Those came from the waiting room at my father-in-law's dental office. Oh, that's even better.

2:27:42 - Leo Laporte
The sweat on those are from people oh yeah yeah, yeah, and I have, unfortunately, discovered lots of gum underneath, really because yeah, because you got to get rid of it before that's very funny, isn't it?

2:27:58 - Paris Martineau
who?

2:27:58 - Leo Laporte
chews gum on the way to the dentist you forgot.

2:28:01 - Jeff Jarvis
You got to put it down there yeah, maybe that makes sense.

2:28:03 - Leo Laporte
Where else, where can I put this? Oh well, it's so fun doing this show with you guys. Jeff jarvis thank you paris martineau. Thank you, uh, and thank you all for watching special thanks, coquettish.

2:28:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Coquettish.

2:28:16 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that was like a sitcom, let's all tilt our head to the right.

2:28:21 - Jeff Jarvis
That was kind of a that girl thing. Mary Tyler Moore.

2:28:25 - Leo Laporte
No, let's do it to the left, everybody to the left, and we'll do this for the thumbnail.

2:28:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait a second. Which left Stage left? We can't figure it out, then, okay stage left.

2:28:40 - Leo Laporte
We can't, we can't figure it out that. Okay, be coquettish. See, this is how you win on youtube. I just want to share that with everybody coquette uh, we do this.

We can google every wednesday afternoon about 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100 utc. You can watch us live now on seven different channels YouTube, twitch, linkedin, facebook, xcom. Of course, our club members get to watch in discord. We're on kick right now. I think we're moving to telegram, maybe not, I don't know. Now we're now. We don't know what to do. You don't want to be near to see Sam? No, but anywhere. Now we don't know what to do. You don't want to be near a CSAM no, but anywhere.

You see streaming stuff you might be able to find this Week in Google, but you know, I think very few people watch live. It's really easier to watch or listen after the fact, we do audio and video versions of the show. Make them available at our website twittv slash twig, thanks to Benino Gonzalez, not only our producer and technical director, but our editor as well. He our producer and technical director, but our editor as well. He wears many hats. On the website twittv slash twig You'll also see links, excuse me, to a YouTube channel dedicated to the video, and you will be able to find links to two or three of the best known podcast apps. But, truthfully, any podcast client should know about this week in Google and if you subscribe you'll just get it automatically. You don't have to think about it, and really the best way to handle this Week in Google is not thinking about it. Thanks for being here, everybody.

2:30:06 - Jeff Jarvis
We'll see you next week. Just let it soak over you. Yeah, just don't.

2:30:09 - Leo Laporte
It's like the Cruise Channel Let it happen. You don't really want to, just, I don't really want to just leave it. We're 10 bits a second. You can't handle the truth. You can't handle the twig. Bye-bye.