This Week in Google 725, 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff's here, Ant's here, Stacy's here. We're gonna talk about Stacy, especially the new Smart Home cybersecurity label and, and what it will mean. We'll defend Lena Conn and or FTC despite a couple of notable losses. And then we'll talk a little bit about ai. What is synthetic data and is it a good thing for ai? All of that and more. Coming up next on Twig, the show is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. Without a cloud managed network, businesses inevitably fall behind. Experience, the ease and efficiency of Meraki's single platform to elevate the place where your employees and customers come together. Cisco Meraki maximizes uptime and minimizes loss to digitally transform your organization, Meraki's intuitive interface, increased connectivity and multi-site management. Keep your organization operating seamlessly and securely wherever your team is. Let's Cisco Meraki's 24 7. Available support. Help your organizations remote, onsite, and hybrid teams always do their best work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:01:17):
From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:01:26):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 725 Recorded Wednesday, July 19th, 2023. But Senator Trellis this weekend, Google is brought to you by ACI Learning it Skills are outdated in about 18 months. You could launch or advance your career today with quality, affordable, and entertaining training individuals. Use the code TWIT 30 for 30% off a standard of premium individual IT pro membership@go.acilearning.com slash twit. And by Brooke Linen Summers in full swing. Brooke Linn's here to help you swap out that old warm winter stuff for easy breezy comfort with their award-winning sheets sent Home Essentials. Visit brook linn.com today and get $20 off plus free shipping on orders of a hundred dollars plus with the code Twig. It's time for Twig. Oh yeah. This week in Google the show where we cover all the latest news from the internet. Jeff Jarvis is here. He is our Town Night professor of journalistic innovation. He's the Leonard Town professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Hello, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:47):
Hello

Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
There. Hello. You're coming out in a week, right? I'm coming

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:51):
Out, yes. I'll be out. I'll be out the next Tuesday. I'm speaking at the Commonwealth Club. I'll be honest and humble about it. There aren't enough buying tickets yet, so I want Twit Army has come out nicely to my talks in London and in Boston. Can Twit Twig Army come out to San Francisco on the night of the 25th? Which

Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
Tuesday, 6:00 PM Well, I know I can't because I have the do do the show. But Lisa, Lisa and others from Twit will be there that so wonder look for her. Yeah. She bought tickets. And if you

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:21):
Go to bitly slash here Jeff, and if you use the code Jarvis Cwc, you get 10 bucks off.

Leo Laporte (00:03:31):
Now there are online only tickets, so you don't have to be in the Bay Area. That's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:35):
But you can also use the Jarvis c WC code and get 10 bucks off that. So it's free.

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
Oh, that's nice. So do it online if you're not in the Bay Area. But if you are in the Bay Area, Tuesday, July 25th, please come. You can see Jeff and Lisa go say hi. Yes,

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:51):
Yes. Be lots of people. A lot of my old friends be there. It's very nice of them.

Leo Laporte (00:03:54):
Oh, that's great.

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:56):
My old friend Susan, me, is bringing eight

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
People. Oh, I follow her. Who I know Susan Merna. Oh yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:02):
You should have her on someplace too. Thought

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
She used to follow her on Twitter

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:05):
News. Pioneer.

Leo Laporte (00:04:09):
Yeah. I think she Thank you for She invited, invited me to speak to the Online News Association, I think, I think it was. Oh, she might have. Yeah. also with us, Mr. Ant Pruitt manager, community guy, and the beautiful club twit in Byrons. He's gonna be doing a photo critique. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in Club twit. That's exciting. I hope you do this on a more, on a regular basis idea. I would

Ant Pruitt (00:04:33):
Like a great idea, like to do that as well. So yeah, join us coming up here soon at the beginning of August. And hopefully my description doesn't confuse anybody. I'm not just wanting to have coffee with people.

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
You don't have to have coffee to do

Ant Pruitt (00:04:44):
It. It says coffee time, but it's based on coffee with your photography. So nice. The, the theme is coffee time. Get your camera, regardless of what camera you have. Go take some dgu pictures and let's do a critique shower

Leo Laporte (00:04:58):
Friday, August 4th. Wait,

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:00):
Are, are we supposed to take pictures of our coffee? Are the coffee them

Ant Pruitt (00:05:04):
Fast

Leo Laporte (00:05:04):
Coffee time? Everybody's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:05):
It's so confused.

Ant Pruitt (00:05:06):
What does coffee time mean to you? Put that in a photograph. That's all. I didn't think it'd be that

Leo Laporte (00:05:12):
Difficult. That's your assignment. <Laugh>. The assignment is, well it sounds like maybe that it's coffee time with an, but it isn't coffee time with Ant. It is. Assignment is,

Ant Pruitt (00:05:22):
Oh, lemme go in here and rewrite this dead com thing. <Laugh>. And you

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:26):
Just showed a picture of Ant's coffee time,

Ant Pruitt (00:05:30):
Coffee time, life a minute

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:31):
Ago in his comfortable chair outside.

Leo Laporte (00:05:33):
Yes. <laugh>, I don't know if he had coffee. Stacy's book club is also coming up. August 31st you have decided on a book.

Ant Pruitt (00:05:41):
Yep. Translation state.

Leo Laporte (00:05:43):
What's that all about? We're

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:44):
Reading and lucky haha.

Ant Pruitt (00:05:48):
Finally, it's been suggested probably four times.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:50):
It's been a year and a half.

Ant Pruitt (00:05:52):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:05:52):
Probably four times. Finally got this book

Ant Pruitt (00:05:53):
In and it didn't get it didn't get to vote.

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Stacy Iham host@stacyoniot.com at giga. Stacy on the Twitter and our iot expert. And actually the first story is right up your alley and I know you're ready to Yes. Talk about this. The Biden administration has announced its new Smart Homes cybersecurity label. It's the US cyber Trust Mark.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:06:21):
Really? You're gonna use their? Yeah. You

Leo Laporte (00:06:22):
Could show Stacy their story's. You could show Stacy's story I have in the rundown. Okay. I put hair you How love that. Their, their

Stacey Higginbotham (00:06:31):
Headline was Biden administration does the cybersecurity label for Smart TVs, which I was like, I

Leo Laporte (00:06:37):
Mean, how about this? According to Stacy on iot, the White House details. There we go. It's iot Security Label plan. So what is it and how do it work?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:06:50):
This? Yeah. This is the US Cyber Trustmark. They introduced the concept of doing this back in October, and the Biden administration is basically creating a voluntary program, kind of like the EPAs energy star thing. And if you see this on a product, and it won't be out till like 20, 24, but if you see this mark on a product,

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):
You can trust it. This,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:07:11):
This product has met cybersecurity standards. And you might be like, what standards, Stacy? And the answer is we don't exactly know that, but <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:07:23):
So they it's your, our, our article says they're leaning on a NIST document. The National institutes are standards and time. Yes. So what is, it's

Stacey Higginbotham (00:07:33):
The NIST 85 24 document. It's actually a really good document. So I, this, this came out in 2022. Y'all are like, Stacy, that's crazy. It's too much. It's 30 pages. It's not, don't worry. What NIST has done basically is they took a deep dive into iot and they were like, well, crap, IOT is really hard to secure for a couple reasons. One, you got hardware, software, cloud, all this stuff. You got an ecosystem of devices talking to each other. And then you've got devices that range from like really important things like medical devices all the way down to like, I used to have an egg counter, right? That counted my eggs. And all

Leo Laporte (00:08:11):
Of those a minute different levels of wait, timed your eggs or counted them.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:08:16):
It was called the quirky egg counter. And it

Leo Laporte (00:08:19):
Put your eggs. Did it count how many eggs you have?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:08:22):
It literally only existed to let me know how many eggs were in my fridge. It was, it was a fun thing that I got,

Leo Laporte (00:08:28):
Wait, what? I've heard of an egg timer, but an egg counter that seems nuts confusing as coffee time. So useful. All that. Anyway. Good. I hope it's secure. God bless it. Better be secure. <Laugh>, don't wanna, the Chinese know how many eggs you have,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:08:46):
But server went down. But the point is like that thing did not need, like

Leo Laporte (00:08:50):
They went outta business <laugh>. We can try. How

Ant Pruitt (00:08:54):
Do I My eggs <laugh>. Not until they're hatched young man. Oh wow.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:09:00):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:09:01):
Wow. Is that a dozen anyway? Is it five? I don't know.

Ant Pruitt (00:09:05):
Unbelievable. So

Stacey Higginbotham (00:09:06):
That is, that is an example of a device that you're like, eh, if someone can see how many eggs I have, I don't care. Yeah, correct. But if someone can see like my glu blood, blood glu glucose or maybe can hack my pacemaker, that's a very different,

Leo Laporte (00:09:19):
Even more than that. It could be a gateway into your personal, into your network. So even if it could be a gateway, you know, it's not merely that they could hack your egg counter, it's that they could then get into your network and do other bad things.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:09:30):
That is true. Right? And that is why they're doing this. That is, that is one of the big reasons why the Biden administration has come out with this labeling plan. And everybody's on board. And by everybody I do mean everybody. Like the CTA is on board, the csa, which is doing the matter standard is on board. Amazon, Google, Samsung, best Buy. Logitech, like lots of companies are on board. But the standards so far are really good. They're things like no default passwords, you mean any multifactor authentication? Encryption at rest on the device, encryption when it's going any place else. And then encryption where it's stored in the cloud. Nice. there's a ton. There's actually a really interesting thing that we don't see on a lot of iot devices, which is data logging. They want to, well, NIST calls, let me rephrase this. NIST calls for things like data logging and monitoring.

(00:10:21):
So manufacturers and consumers should be able to see what's happening, who are their devices or communicating with how often they're communicating, logging changes to the systems. So you can read the document, you could read my blog post where I, I sum up like fairly quickly what the six items that NIST is kind of looking for are. But here's the cr here's here's the double and the details. That always happens with any legislative effort. What the White House announced is like, we've got this label and they showed off the label, yay. What they still need to do is build the program and actually set the security criteria. So they're gonna do that with the F C C and the FCC has, they're going to start what they call, it's called a notice of proposed rulemaking. But it's basically how the FCC sets rules and you'll get a chance to comment on all of these rules. Uhhuh, everybody else will. So, and then the FCC is gonna be like, here are the official criteria from on high,

Ant Pruitt (00:11:19):
Is this somewhere else? And then we'll have FCC lobbyists coming in into play and saying, Hey, well we like this

Leo Laporte (00:11:26):
Because this stuff costs money. You can't, you know, the only reason they wouldn't build it is cuz it costs money to do it and to maintain it. Can I ask one question? Does it, does the NIST document talk about update auto updating? Cuz that's, it does I think we agree the most important feature of all.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:11:45):
It does talk about auto updates. There's, I think it's like the fourth section maybe you were scrolling through. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:11:51):
Good. So, so it does suggest these devices should be updated firmware, updateable in case of

Stacey Higginbotham (00:11:57):
They have to be firmware updateable.

Leo Laporte (00:11:59):
Good. Very important. Good.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:01):
And they, I mean, yeah, the n I will say the NIST rules are very comprehensive. The one thing this label doesn't have that I'm really bummed about, but maybe it'll get it in the comments I don't know, is privacy. So there's nothing in here talking about like how someone's data, like what device, what sensors are on a device, how your data from that device is actually used. It's just all about, so this is all security only, which is good, but privacy is still a big part for most consumers.

Leo Laporte (00:12:29):
They do talk a little bit about it should, you know, the data should be, they don't talk about

Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:34):
Privacy at all. So two, 2.2, it's in documentation, but that is not actually one of the things you're gonna need. Okay. Like to get, it's not one of their I don't remember the words they used to describe it, but the product capabilities. So there's six product capabilities that need to be there. And if you go into developer activities, 2.2 0.2 is documentation. And that talks about like things you should have in there. But

Leo Laporte (00:13:02):
Yeah. Well, and also the, the Biden administration did not commit to fully supporting this document. They said leaning, right, leaning on this, this document, which is, by the way, they gotta see the National National Institute of Standards and Technology. Not Time. I said time and they are responsible for time, but it's technology. So yeah. More than just time. Okay. this looks pretty good though. I mean, I mean, it's impressive. What's the next step? Do they have to go to Congress or can this be done by fi No, they,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:32):
The FCC is going to sometime soon-ish within the next month or so, I hope will issue what they call a notice of proposed rule making. Okay. And then they'll be like, it's usually like a 60 day comment period. It can be anywhere from like 30 to 90 day comment period. And that's when they're gonna be like, Hey, here's the NIST document, here are the rules we're thinking of, what do you think? And then people like write the write in, tell 'em what they think and then the F C C will vote at a meeting to approve the program. Good. Now open questions. I mentioned privacy. Second open question. Hey, what happens if you don't, like, if you say you're secure and then you're not.

Leo Laporte (00:14:11):
Yeah. What's the fine? We don't have. What, what's the That's, well that's more FTC than FCC in that case, isn't it? So?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:14:17):
Well no, cuz the FCC is responsible for this program. And if you talk to people in Washington, the reason why is the FCC is like, we'll do it. And the FTCC is like, God, give it to them. We are so busy.

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
FCC has more enforcement arms than the ftc. FTC has very limited enforcement capability. FTC is busy losing cases these days too. So don't say that Cory doctor would spank you for that. Oh, and I'm gonna get to that in a little bit, but go ahead, <laugh>. Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:14:44):
So that's, so that's this. Oh, there's also a, so the trust mark will be on the box, presumably sometime around 20, 24 is the hope. And then there's also gonna be a QR component, which is where you can look to see more fine tuned details, fine grade details about things. And because security doesn't stay still, it's also where you'll be able to check and make sure it's still secure. So if you're buying this box, you know, you're, you're buying it off of a, from a Best Buy in the middle of nowhere and it's been on the shelf for two years, you can be like, Hey, are you still legit

Leo Laporte (00:15:14):
With this announcement? Have you seen any opposition? No one's gonna explicitly

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:19):
No. Cause no one's no one. Yeah, no one's

Leo Laporte (00:15:21):
Not yet anyway. No. They'd all be under the table and say, Hey, a Senator Manchin, you know, this is a terrible idea. Would you mind helping us that a little? That's what's whole lobby and all of this stuff. It just seems like

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:32):
Where, so they'll come into Million Shape some of the things, you'll see their comments. Yeah. You'll see them in the comments saying things like, all right, no, default passwords is fine, but requiring multi-factor authentication for some of this stuff. It's just too much.

Leo Laporte (00:15:46):
It's too much. Yeah. Do they, do they require mfa?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:50):
You would be surprised. So MFA is mentioned in there as one of the better ways to handle this,

Leo Laporte (00:15:55):
But not required because that's a little that Well, most consumers are gonna know how to do that.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:02):
Every device is actually, so I talked to Ann, oh gosh, Berger, oh, what's her title? Ah, this is audio. Ah anyway, I talked to, I'm not gonna call her.

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
Ann noi, Berger National Security Official serves as the Deputy National Security Advisor for cyber and merging technologies. Yes. For the Biden administration. That Anne Neuberger.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:24):
Yes. That is who Neuberger. Yes. That, okay. Neuberger, that's Anne. So she like, like with Energy Star, you know, every appliance has different criteria. They have to meet different levels based on what they are. Cuz like a washing to make an energy efficient washing machine is different than making an energy efficient refrigerator. Okay. So there will be standards for different sets of devices, different iot devices. So you may not need MFA on your egg counter, but you might need it on your baby monitor. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:16:55):
Okay. That is

Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:57):
Reason. So that's gonna be part, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're gonna hide a lot of complexity behind this, which is good because most consumers, they don't wanna understand all that and they shouldn't have to.

Leo Laporte (00:17:07):
There's an old joke about Silicon Valley companies, new startups releasing the T-shirt before they release the product. And this is the Biden administration releasing the T-shirt before they have

Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:19):
Anything. This is indeed

Leo Laporte (00:17:20):
<Laugh>. They got a label anyway. Mm-Hmm. Hey, we got a label. Right. there'll be a lot more, but as Stacy would always say, discussion is good. We need the discussion. Yeah. But I mean, really, seriously, they're announcing a label before, before they have a standard know. Yeah, good point. You know, I mean, come on. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:36):
And on October, I mean, so they announced this, they actually announced that they wanted to create this label back in October. Okay. So we were all like, okay. And then NS got, you know, they were like, okay, here, let's, here's, here's what we want this to do. And this was supposed to be announced in April and it was not. So, you know, these things take more time than

Leo Laporte (00:17:56):
It week. Hey, we got a t-shirt. I'm not complaining, but let's now let's finish the job and, and

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:01):
We're gonna get an N P R M. It's gonna be amazing. Good.

Leo Laporte (00:18:05):
I

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:05):
Wanna, so let, let the record also show, I got CC'd on an email this morning from Craig Newmark Oh, right. To Stacy responding to her newsletter saying what could news, this is how excited he is.

Leo Laporte (00:18:16):
I think it's huge news deeply

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:18):
About cybersecurity.

Leo Laporte (00:18:20):
But remember there's a presidential election in a year and who knows? You know, I, I knew congress in, in a two years and mm-hmm.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:29):
<Affirmative> well, but okay. So,

Leo Laporte (00:18:31):
And new members of the

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:32):
FCC will have made their rules. Yeah. Well, no, but new

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
Members, let's keep going. Let's hurry up.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:38):
Will have the criteria by the end of this year, presumably. Good. And then, so you would be able to see it before the election. 2024 is when we're doing the election.

Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
The other thing I really like is there's a kind of a nutrition label for iot security, security and privacy facts that will be on the box. So I think that's a, that's a really, that's for, I think for a consumer even more than the, the, the badge. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that's gonna be of value.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:06):
So that's not necessarily what it's gonna look like. That's theoretical.

Leo Laporte (00:19:11):
You mean there's no Bravo temp or Eco House

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:14):
Thermostats? No. That I'm talking about. I'm talking about the date that's going to be on that

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Label. But at least they wanna do something. Life is not

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:24):
Everybody does.

Leo Laporte (00:19:25):
Well, of course. Yeah. That's the last thing. So

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:28):
That's, no, that's a proposed label. I think that's the slabs proposed label. Okay. That's not actually,

Leo Laporte (00:19:35):
Well this is from the fcc. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:38):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
I, you know, I don't know. I mean, obviously there will be opposition, although the good news is a lot of the iot manufacturers that don't want this are Chinese, no name brands that aren't probably gonna have much lobbying clout in the halls of of Washington DC And, and in fact, the big companies, you might be like Amazon and Wise, who are trying to compete against these no-name companies will mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So let's hope that Amazon and Wise and Apple and all these other companies say, here's an opportunity for us to distinguish our high quality products from these inexpensive Chinese knockoffs. I hope

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:18):
That is. Yeah. That is the hope. Oh, that's a different label. Okay. So that might be the fccs label, cuz that's a, that's a take from the slabs label, which has way too much information on it. So, yeah. Can

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:30):
I ask a question, Stacy?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:32):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:33):
It strikes me that there, when we talk about cybersecurity here, there's two ends of this. And you've talked about the consumer end of this. You want your baby monitor to be safe so somebody can't snoop in on it or whatever. But then there's the larger national secure cybersecurity question about shutting down systems and wreaking havoc. What is this really more about?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:54):
So remember Mariah all the way back in 2015, it was December, 2015. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:00):
Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:21:01):
Yeah. So that actually was taking over networked video cameras mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And they, they, they weren't actually true iot devices, they weren't modern. But what that did is that allowed hackers to take over gather an amount, enormous amount of bandwidth that was then used at against US companies or just companies. So this is more so your, there, there's two things. The main thing is we don't wanna give hackers access to bandwidth from consumer devices that they can then use to attack websites of whatever infrastructure, whatever. Right. So to do those kind of DDoS attacks. The other element is because, and that's because consumers are dumb. We d we don't, we're not cybersecurity experts. We shouldn't have to be. Right. Right. So they wanna lock that vector down. And then the other part is they, I it's good for consumers. I mean, if you can also benefit consumers by making it so, I mean, we haven't seen anything like this yet, but it's not implausible to think of hackers getting a hold of popular like thermostats and doing a ransomware attack that, you know, locks everybody's thermostat locks everyone out in in.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:18):
Right. But what I'm trying to, what I'm trying to get to is this, I wonder whether there's gonna be much consumer interest or demand for labels on things beyond your standard moral panic. The Chinese are watching, whereas the real import here is to not let their devices be taken over and bad things happen at a, at a national level, at a, at an infrastructural level. So that it's really the government that cares should care more about this than the consumer. Whether the consumer cares or not may not matter so much as whether or not there's an agreement on the things that matter. At the higher instructural level.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:54):
There's, there's two points there. One is that we're bringing things into our home that are going to be ultimately connected back to our public infrastructure. If you look at like, ener demand response programs and this goal towards smarter energy management, and they mention in here they're gonna work with the E P A for inverters and car chargers. We're bringing things into our home that we're buying that are gonna be connected back to the public grid in that case. Mm-Hmm. And the government does have a vested interest in this. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:22):
I agree with that. I think that's the, that's what I'm saying, that's the important part is the government's interest more than, so

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:26):
That's consumers, but yeah. In, in stopping DDoS attacks and those things are very important. But I do think there is also interest in making sure that a large swathe of consumers doesn't suddenly see all of their door locks open at once because mm-hmm. <Affirmative> we will.

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:43):
Okay. Okay. That's good. Right. All right.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:45):
You know, that's a good example.

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
It's a variety of things, so, yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:48):
I'm just trying, trying to understand the consumer demand for this,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:52):
But it is voluntary and so I could always buy an insecure device, but then at least the government will say, oh, well I'm sorry that you were one. I have

Leo Laporte (00:24:00):
To, you're gonna hear people like us and other, you know, the Verge and everybody else saying, make sure you get this, you want this. Yeah. You don't wanna buy a device that doesn't have this. I think that that's it just gives us a way to, in a simple way. I mean, we've been saying for ages, you've been saying for ages, Stacy, for instance, don't buy any iot device. It's not firmware updateable over ota. And we could say that until we're blue in the face, but most people don't even understand what we're

Ant Pruitt (00:24:28):
Saying. That's what I was gonna say. You we,

Leo Laporte (00:24:29):
But that badge will say it, and that's

Ant Pruitt (00:24:31):
That

Leo Laporte (00:24:31):
Badge. People

Ant Pruitt (00:24:31):
Want that. You still probably want to add an, an additional note to that and say, Hey, make sure it's this particular badge and not just company X, y z throwing their own version of the badge on there. Cuz

Leo Laporte (00:24:44):
Well, you'll want the, well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:24:45):
You have to look for the US cyber trust, right?

Ant Pruitt (00:24:47):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:24:48):
The thing. Yeah. There's, you know, you really need to specify US cyber trust, mark. No, I think that, that people aren't that dumb. Oh, no, they're not. Oh no, they're not. In fact, it's one of the reasons Apple with HomeKit has an advantage because people go, oh, apple, they're gonna do this more securely, so I'm gonna trust HomeKit devices over some no name. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Chinese smart plug

Ant Pruitt (00:25:11):
Apple's built that trust.

Leo Laporte (00:25:12):
Yeah. And I think that this is, you know look, it's our job to make this work. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it's their job to make sure that this happens and there are reasonable laws, and the lobbyists don't take all this stuffing out of the ottoman. But I think it's our job also to tell consumers, make sure, you know, look for the cyber trust mark. Right. That's that's important. Well, and,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:34):
And I don't know

Leo Laporte (00:25:35):
If it's done

Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:35):
Right. Who looks for the energy star? I mean, they're, they're modeling this out of the energy star. No, we

Leo Laporte (00:25:40):
All do. And every, every refrigerator you buy No, no, no. You can't miss it. Go to an appliance store. Yeah, that's true. That's true. There's a big number on the, it's, you can't miss it. Yeah. And people are smart enough to say, that's gonna cost me more in electricity than that one is. Yeah. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:54):
Okay, well that's cost, that's money. That's a pocketbook thing. This isn't money so much as

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:00):
In fact people are still concerned about security. Like, I will tell you, and granted my audience, they're great big giant nerds, so

Ant Pruitt (00:26:06):
Yes, they

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:07):
Are, you know, they're like us, but they're like, probably 50% of the questions I get about connected devices are, Hey, I'm looking at this thing. It's awesome. It's only $5. Is it secure? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:19):
Oh, no. Okay. I can't believe Jeff and Ant are arguing that in the favor of people being too stupid to care about this. They care about this. Oh, they really do. They do. They do. And they will. These are the, and we're gonna make them care.

Ant Pruitt (00:26:32):
These are the same people that are just all over TikTok and worried about China and those threats too. So.

Leo Laporte (00:26:37):
Well that's because other, it's other media forces have made them care about that. People listen and we just have to make sure they understand this is important. I think this is not gonna really,

Ant Pruitt (00:26:48):
I hope they care. I just hope that there is an extra Yeah, same here, but an extra bit of diligence on our part in, in, in administration to say, Hey, this is what we really need to care about.

Leo Laporte (00:26:58):
Well, the only thing you could do, a step beyond this is something like the fda, which is, it's, if it's not NIST approved, it's not available for sale in the us. And I imagine if frankly there we go, security becomes a bigger issue. Maybe that will happen. People are aware. People don't want to get hacked. How many people, virus, software,

Ant Pruitt (00:27:16):
And wait a minute, people don't wanna get hacked, but how many people, you know what their password is? Password,

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
Come on. Well that's just cause the word hasn't gotten out. <Laugh>. We need, I mean that's a failure of te of technology

Stacey Higginbotham (00:27:27):
Journalism. That's much, it's gotten much better.

Leo Laporte (00:27:29):
It has.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:27:30):
Absolutely. We actually got data on this like a couple months ago that was like, that showed, and it was actually generational. They broke it out by generations. And except for boomers, everybody's gotten that message. Hey

Leo Laporte (00:27:41):
<Laugh>, hey

Ant Pruitt (00:27:41):
<Laugh>. It's funny looking here in the discord and and mine

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:45):
Is password exclamation point.

Leo Laporte (00:27:48):
There

Ant Pruitt (00:27:48):
You go. Oh, you put a bang on yours. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People in the discord are applauding you and your faith in people's intelligence. Where I, not so much

Leo Laporte (00:27:59):
No. Quippy says I'm with Jeff and AB people are dumber than you think. <Laugh> and even the smart ones pretend to be dumb for people. Fear for fear. People will think they're intelligent and they'll be kicked out of the end group in the

Ant Pruitt (00:28:10):
End group. That's right. Mm-Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:11):
<Affirmative>. It's not that they're dumb, it's the do they what, what's their motive? Don't

Leo Laporte (00:28:14):
Care to care. They don't care. Right. There's plenty of motivation to care. There's been enough news about bad guys spying on you now mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that they are aware of it and much of

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:23):
That is moral panic and ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (00:28:25):
Well, that's fine. Stacey

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:27):
Stacy's argument was the best one is, and I, I'm never gonna put in one of these door locks anyway, but you don't want it to open, you know, without your, your by by some bad hack

Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
Going on. Honestly, that's how people show they care. They say I'm staying away from iot, which is why IOT companies ought to go go along with this. They ought to go.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:28:49):
Yeah. Well in, in iot companies have wanted the government to do something. Like the good ones have, like when I talk to people who are building connected devices, they're like, look, Stacy, I would love to like really go whole hog on this, but I can't because I have to make my device as cheap as this Right. Noname thing from China. Cuz people don't know the difference. Right. With this, they've got something like everybody who's, who cares about this will be working towards this standard and then everybody who doesn't Yeah. You could still buy a cheap no-name sensor, but you know, you, you won't know if it's as secure and there will be, I mean, and people will still buy that. Sure. Don't get me wrong,

Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
There'll be plenty

Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:29):
Of, you'll still a hundred percent do

Leo Laporte (00:29:30):
That. But you know, that's it's like public health. You don't have to have everybody get vaccinated to have a, a real impact on the spread of a disease. And so it's, it's just a public health measure. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And if you know more people buy this than don't, then that's a good thing and it'll make a big difference, I think. And I think that there's some incentive for the, for business not to undermine this, but to make it a real

Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:57):
Standard. A lot of companies legitimately want this and the fact that Best Buy and Amazon were there and talking about how good, good that could be used in retail settings. Good. So like, it's not just the manufacturers, it's also the people who sell these devices are like we really want to make this Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:30:13):
Work. It's in their interest. They get DDoS, they got, they get mm-hmm <affirmative>, they get breached. It's in their interest to do this. It's good for everybody and okay. Economically, it gives them a foot up against Chinese knockoffs, which are eating their lunch. So I think this might actually have a shot crossing my fingers. Cuz this does need to happen. I hope So let's take a little break and then I'm gonna tell you why Jeff is a, is a

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:41):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
You can't even say, well, I'm trying to find a, I'm trying to find a phrase from Cory, Dr. O, Dr. Rose. Peace. Great. Peace. He is somebody bad, something like that. <Laugh>. I will never be the wordsmith that Cory doctor O is, but I will, I will read to you. We shall all scratch Cory's great work in just a little bit. First to word from ACI learning. Our great sponsors, our listeners know, I know you know the name it Pro. They've been one of our trusted beloved sponsors for more than a decade since they started in Gainesville, Florida. Now they're part of ACI learning. That's why you see ACI learning all over our studios. They are our, our studio name sponsor and a great company together. ACI Learning and IT Pro have elevated their highly entertaining, highly informative bingeable video content with over 7,200 hours of on demand IT training to choose from, not just IT, but audit and cybersecurity too.

(00:31:41):
And it's all fresh up to date because they've got those studios running outta Gainesville, Florida Monday through Friday, nine to five creating more great bingeable, high quality IT training. ACI learning provides world-class service from assisting you in Tru in choosing which learning path suits you best all the way through helping you find the right career opportunity. If you're beginning a new career in it, this is the place to go. You could fortify existing expertise if you're already in it with self-paced IT training videos, interactive practice labs, practice tests. So you could take the test before you take the final exam and it really works. Felipe B was in public relations. Okay. He just on, on the website shared his testimonial about and, and how much he loves ACI learning's. Great edutainer their instructors. He talked about Wes, who's been with it pro forever.

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Learn it. Pass your cert, get your dream job with a c i learning. Learn more about a c i learning's premium training options across audit IT and cybersecurity readiness@go.acilearning.com slash twit. That's the special address. Go dot aci learning.com/twit and individuals twit 30. See that code right there? Twit 30 gets you 30% off of standard or premium individual IT pro membership go dot aci learning.com/twit. And we love ACI learning. We thank them, we love it. Pro some of the best people in the business, you're really gonna get great. There's no better place to get that training. Go dot aci learning.com/twi. Please use that address so they know you saw it here. Thank you. <Laugh>. Here's a new badge. <Laugh>. We gotta get stickers. We really gotta get these stickers. <Laugh> Well, well

Ant Pruitt (00:35:19):
We do, we do have some

Leo Laporte (00:35:21):
Leo LaPorte.

Ant Pruitt (00:35:22):
Mr. Benito

Leo Laporte (00:35:23):
Is Blue Sky hype influencer. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. What? We have stickers. We do

Ant Pruitt (00:35:28):
Have a

Leo Laporte (00:35:29):
A four. Oh my God. Where did we get these? Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (00:35:32):
My Lord Joe Esposito setting us up. And Mr. Victor and Mr. Nielsen, they

Leo Laporte (00:35:38):
Printed these, I'll

Ant Pruitt (00:35:39):
See him sat down and, and got us squared away with, with some stickers.

Leo Laporte (00:35:43):
I love this. I love yours, Jeff.

Ant Pruitt (00:35:46):
O

Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
F me Go bore a

Ant Pruitt (00:35:48):
Hole's. Brilliant <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:35:50):
Oh my gosh, these are great. Jeff Jarvis declares, this is moral panic. I love Stacy. I'm sorry about your boujee seal of approval, but it really is

Ant Pruitt (00:35:59):
No, the bougie seal of approval. It is really

Leo Laporte (00:36:02):
Awesome. It's really awesome. Ant Pruitt's seal of approval. No, that's legit. Yes or no? Thank you, sir for this

Ant Pruitt (00:36:09):
Disapproval that horrible whiskey. Oh, those are wonderful air quote whiskey.

Leo Laporte (00:36:14):
Oh, okay. You gotta get Lisa to add this as a member premium. We're working. We gotta find it. I'm taking these though to put 'em on my

Ant Pruitt (00:36:22):
Laptop. We're working on it. Yeah. I'm actually gonna put some on my laptop too.

Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
I was just gonna mention before we get to Lena Conn and and Cory, Dr. Rose spirited defense of her that the folks at Framework have just a couple of days ago opened up or pre-orders for their next generation framework 16. This, these are PCs, they're Windows are Linux. Yeah, I

Ant Pruitt (00:36:45):
Remember I thought you were all about linnux for these.

Leo Laporte (00:36:47):
Yeah, I run Linux on my fr I have the 13 inch, but this new one. Oh,

Ant Pruitt (00:36:52):
You said 16.

Leo Laporte (00:36:53):
This is this. Yeah. This is what you should be thinking about Mr. Pruitt. Mm-hmm. The, the whole idea of these, which I, you know, I'm, I'm not a shareholder in these, like Linus is, I'm, I'm not, they're not an advertiser. Right. I just really think it's, it's it's the answer to the right. Of for repair and yeah. For reusability and sustainability. These are upgradeable laptops. You can, as you can buy 'em, assembled or assemble 'em yourself. But more importantly if a new processor comes out, you can get a new motherboard and put it in yourself. They have keyboard modules. Look, you can have a number pad, or if you don't want a number pad, you can take out the number pad and slide the keyboard over and make it central. You can, you can change where the track pad, you just, this thing is completely customizable. Can

Ant Pruitt (00:37:39):
You hack and to it? Kidding. I'm kidding. You

Leo Laporte (00:37:42):
Could probably, yeah, you could. I don't know. They don't, that's not the promise of it. No. I would put Linux on it. Yeah. anyway, I just ordered it. They I won't be getting it to the first of the year, so I will that's pretty cool. I will do a unboxing and I'll, I ordered the DIY edition, which means I have to put it together.

Ant Pruitt (00:37:58):
Put it all, oh man.

Leo Laporte (00:37:59):
Well, that's right. I did the last time I have the 13 on the show. So and in fact I, at first I ordered an upgrade for the 13 inch mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you can upgrade it with an AMD processor and so forth. And then I thought, well, or <laugh>, I could spend just a few thousand dollars more, few more and get the 16 inch. So guess what that means that Leo's next Leo's garage sale will have the 13 inch Woo. Yeah. I wonder if

Ant Pruitt (00:38:23):
They're gonna update the Chromebook version.

Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
That's a good question. I know they did Chromebook. That's pretty 16 ish. They've Yeah. Lived up to their promise because they shipped the 13 ish in 2021. I bought it. You I could upgrade it now to a newer processor, a new A M D or Intel processor. I can upgrade a lot of features. Oh. So I betcha, I betcha. I don't know. I don't see that here. Their new 16 inches are all AMDs, which is interesting. Rayon r sevens. I don't have a problem with the am rising nines chip set. Most of my problems with Windows. Well, that's why I'm running Lin <laugh>. Yeah. But, and the other thing is you don't have to pay the Windows premium on this. Yeah, yeah. You can order it without Windows and it's 139 bucks less. What's

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:08):
Amazing is, is Dell show. I mean, this is what, this is how Dell started.

Leo Laporte (00:39:12):
Right. But, but Michael Dell was building it. Yeah. Right in his dorm room at I know

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:16):
Steven. So even

Leo Laporte (00:39:17):
So, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:39:20):
That was the dorm I was an RA in.

Leo Laporte (00:39:22):
No kidding. You were in the same dorm. Yeah. Oh, that's so cool.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:39:25):
Not at the same time as well. Michael tell he was there in 1984. Yeah, pretty. And I was six. Pretty

Leo Laporte (00:39:30):
Cool though. Well, the, the school didn't, the college didn't know that he was running his business.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:39:35):
It wasn't a college dorm. It was a private dorm.

Leo Laporte (00:39:37):
Oh, okay. Yeah. So it was legal for him to do that. I I can imagine.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:42):
Stacy is a good ra, can't you?

Leo Laporte (00:39:44):
Oh, she'd be so great. You

Stacey Higginbotham (00:39:45):
Can't.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:46):
I can can't. I can. No. Yeah, you came

Leo Laporte (00:39:48):
By him. It's really good. My boyfriend broke up with me. Miss Ham bath and I dunno what to do. Mother pucker, <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:58):
I just imagine Stacy broke up with you. It's a moving

Leo Laporte (00:40:00):
Look.

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:02):
Come in

Leo Laporte (00:40:02):
Too late. What if, what, what if, so ARI stands for resident assistant. It's a upper class resident advisor. Resident what advisor? Okay. It's a upper class person who is in living in the dorm to advise the underclassmen. Right. Kind of a little bit of it. I

Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:18):
I've never heard it upper class. I'm like, that was Stacy's ra bougie <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:23):
Or bougie <laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:26):
Yeah, it's an older, yeah. I was a sophomore when I was an ra. Sophomore,

Leo Laporte (00:40:30):
Junior. Oh, you were sophomore. Oh gosh, sophomore. I thought it would be higher, higher than that, but Okay. Yeah. I always thought it was like juniors and 16 years talking about the blind leading the blind. Yeah. My B said

Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:39):
That too. Hey,

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
So what was, what, what did people come to you as an ra? What did people come

Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:46):
To you? Your, your job was just to be like this person, like the adult on the floor, but not actually an adult. And you would, I mean, yes. You were there to help your residents, you planned social activities. I had a listen board that I would, I used to physically print out onion articles. Oh, wow. Like

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:05):
Did you cut out little animals when they arrived? You know, your, your, your spirit animals.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:41:09):
Oh. So my first, my first door, like you, you do stick their door knockers with their names on their door before they show up. My first one was actually three and a half inch. No, no, five and a quarter floppies. So I, I

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:20):
Had a big cause we cleaned you.

Leo Laporte (00:41:23):
Perfect.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:41:24):
I put them on there. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:41:26):
To make them feel welcome because they're coming there for living away from home for the first time and dangers

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:30):
In a strange

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
Land.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:41:32):
That's so, and you're, you're supposed to like stop them from smoking. Right. And plan like one social outing. I did actually have to, I mean, there was a lot of drama. These

Leo Laporte (00:41:41):
Kids. Yeah. My daughter's ra kept taking her magic mushrooms away from her. Things like that. Yeah. <laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:41:47):
Yeah. And that's, that's actually where I met Andrew. He was an RA too. Oh, you're kidding. So when you're, oh. When you're together at two in the morning and you can call someone and be like, Hey, I'm on call and someone just dumped out a keg of beer down the stairwell. Oh, geez. You mind helping me mop that up?

Leo Laporte (00:42:04):
Oh, that's

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:05):
Great. And they show up

Leo Laporte (00:42:06):
True romance. Wow. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:08):
That's a guy you should marry.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:10):
It's, it's a, it's a wedding of narcs. It's just great.

Leo Laporte (00:42:12):
It's perfect. <Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:14):
A narc. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:42:15):
Prefer to think of them as prefects, if you don't mind.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:18):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:42:20):
<Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:21):
That's cute. I had tell I had to call an ambulance on two of my residents. Okay. Gosh. Like

Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
No happens. Sure did. Did you have ra summer camp where you all could bond and Wow. Get to know each other before the, the semester

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:32):
Became. We we drank a lot. Yes. Yeah. Yes. It was <laugh>. We didn't do that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:36):
It's Texas after all.

Leo Laporte (00:42:40):
All right, now on to Cory Doctor Row from his fabulous blog, pluralistic t net. Now, as you know, Cory, and he's been on the shows many times. Good friend love Cory is a bit of a muckraker. Some might think of him as a leftist, a progressive. He is a little hopping mad at all of the Appium Lena Kahan is receiving from people like the Wall Street Journal because she's a loser. You said it even yourself, Jeff, it's kind of you sure did. Getting into

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:11):
The It's not program so much as it, I would think that her fans are disappointed in her.

Leo Laporte (00:43:15):
No, let me read to you my God writes Cory, Dr. O. They sure hate Lena Kahn. This once in a generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest. Oh wow. This sounds like I could be the opening of Hamilton. Yes. Yes. The slayer of Reaganomics has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory. She sure must be doing something right. Huh. A quick refresher. In 2017 Con then a law student published Amazon's Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal was a brilliant blistering analysis showing how the Reagan era theory of antitrust, which celebrates monopolies as efficient, had failed in its own terms using his Amazon as an exhibit A of the ways in which post Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate use or abuse, abuse. The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles and goose. Ooh, the neo brownian movement. Brande ian movement, I should say searingly dismissed as hipster antitrust. This movement is I can skip the, the history lesson.

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:28):
You just want the zings.

Leo Laporte (00:44:29):
Yeah, I like the zings. History's good though. You should, you should read the whole thing. When Biden won the election history is good. History's very well. There's history calling right now. <Laugh>. I just say, is that your landline calling <laugh>? I told you not to bother me. Mr. Mr. Meel. <laugh>. When Biden won the election, he surprised everyone by appointing con to the ftc. She's the chairperson. It wasn't just that she had such a radical vision, it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require experience, that would ensure that the FTC was helm by people whose default view of the world is It should be structured and regulated by powerful wealthy people in corporate boardrooms. Even more surprising was that Kahan was made chair of the SDC ftc. And of course she got in because it just happened to be a moment in time where there were some Republicans who wanted to screw big tech.

(00:45:29):
Not because it was too big and powerful, but because tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways these Republicans preferred. So they got, they gave him some votes. They, and he, and he got her in. But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project, a permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they're less full throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities. Biden's seating of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party combined with disaffected G o p senators viewing Kahan as their enemy's enemy led to Khan's historic appointment as FTC chair joined by Jonathan Cantor at DOJ in the antitrust division. Tim Wu in the White House Avaro Bedoya at ftc. Rebecca Slaughter, Rohe Chopra really a some big antitrust brains. Crucially. These new employees weren't just principled.

(00:46:32):
They were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu, who brilliant professor wrote an executive, you don't like him so much Okay. Wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act with no further congressional authorization to blunt corporate power and insulate Americans from oligarchs abusive and extractive practices. Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been effing ninjas, <laugh> and getting expletive, getting stuff done in ways both large and small working for the first time since Reagan to protect Americans for predatory businesses. You can gather from this that Cory is a fan, right? Yeah. Right. You think? Yeah. <laugh> this in market contrast, this is interesting to the corporate Dems champions in the administration, the corporate Dems champions like Pete Buttigieg. Harold is competent. Technocrats realists who are too principled to pedal hopium to the base writing checks they can't cash. Hopium hopium. That's, I like that. That's nice. That's

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:41):
That's a

Leo Laporte (00:47:41):
Coism. That's a COism. I don't think that I've ever seen that word before. Hop. That's kind of an

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:45):
Obama. I'm surprised that wasn't put on

Leo Laporte (00:47:48):
Obama. Ho hopium. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people. America's billionaires, <laugh>, and they're cheerleaders in the press government and the hive of scum and villainy. That is the big law think tank industrial complex. <Laugh> hive of scum and villainy is a Star Trek. Yeah. A Star Wars reference, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think that was the that was in the first one. Yeah. It's the ca mosley spaceport. It's the Moss Isley Spaceport. Yeah. A hive as Opi one says of scum and villainy <laugh>. It's beautiful. Take the Wall Street Journal. Since Kahan took office, they've published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and their policies. Kahan is living rent free in Rupert Murdoch's head. <Laugh> <laugh>, one major subgenre of the taxes that Kahan shouldn't bring, bringing any action against Amazon because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly says Cory Ro, is this a stupid thing to say? The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert. <Laugh> is what the physicist call not even wrong, <laugh>. He is, he is a very good writer. In any event he, he defends. Connie says the fact that people are saying she's losing it means that she's actually winning. Well, she lost cases. Stop. No, stop there. Okay. Stop there.

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:23):
Right? I mean that's, he wants her to be winning, but the truth is she's been

Leo Laporte (00:49:27):
Losing. Which is she, what cases has she lost?

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:32):
I'm not, you, you couldn't remember the, the word trellis. I can't, I can't.

Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
Well, I'll give you two recent ones. The Activision case, and then she sued meta over their acquisition of Yes. Within which Right. Makes a, a thing called Supernatural. She didn't want them to buy a company that does a VR game. Yes. She's lost in those two cases and I expect her to lose more. That is not reason not to file those cases. I would submit a, the very fact that the FTC is finally doing something is enough to get corporate boardrooms to set up a case.

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:03):
Well, another way to look at

Leo Laporte (00:50:04):
People on is, right.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:06):
So the only thing, so the FTC does a lot more than just cases, right? Right. So they've actually revoked some of their merger guidelines for older merger guidelines that are no longer applicable. They've also, so they're trying to modernize the industry. They're also issuing rulemaking. New draft merger guidelines are actually really good. They're actually talking about what we talk about, Jeff, changing the fact that we only look at low prices for consumers as mm-hmm. <Affirmative> the only reason to prevent a merger. So they actually, this month issued, they're asking for comments on new merger guidelines. So in addition to the cases that we're hearing a lot about, they're also doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. Absolutely. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:50:49):
They're very, this is,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:49):
And they're, they're doing a lot of smaller enforcement actions

Leo Laporte (00:50:52):
Here. Here's more. Cory. Before Kahan, the FTC was a conflict of interest assembly line moving through corporate lawyers in industry hangers on without resistance for decades. Kahan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts outta thin air for these corporate lick spits. Khan's conflict is that she has a point of view, specifically she thinks the FTC should do its job. And yeah, you're gonna lose a few. You're gonna win a few, maybe you're gonna lose a few. Okay,

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:28):
So here's, here's, here's the question though. If they had someone who was, pardon me, older and more experienced, would they have done a better job of picking the battles right. And winning more and then making more actual progress rather than giving the right wing capitalists of Wilbert Murdoch the opportunity to say, yeah. Yeah. we, we we can do anything we want now Cuz, cuz because you keep losing.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:52):
So cases are brought for a couple reasons, and yes, it does suck that she's taken on two, that's my only big cases and lost at, well at that moment. Now she's taking on a lot of other cases that they're either driving to settlement or actually winning on or being told, Hey, you have a point, but you gotta come back with this. And what I think is worth celebrating is the fact that a, there is a point of view, and it is a very pro-consumer and pro small business point of view, and B, they're firing on not just the major cases, but all cylinders. And a lot of times you see like activists kind of are, people say they're activists or democratic people come in behind the scenes and try to like do a lot of fluffy stuff that's pretty low value and low risk. And they can get, like Jessica Rosen, sel, bless her heart, is a good case of somebody who's going for low risk, low value kind of wins when it comes to policy enactment. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, she's very liberal. She's, she's making changes that are pretty small fry and not really consequential. Lena's doing

Leo Laporte (00:53:14):
Well and now

Stacey Higginbotham (00:53:15):
She's actually going after big stuff. Why does

Leo Laporte (00:53:16):
It seem, it's really important that she's there because we have this AI thing looming over our head. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, she's announced the FTC is investigating, suing, but investigating open AI for non consensually harvesting a bunch of personal information that needs to be investigated. Right.

Ant Pruitt (00:53:34):
That's, that's an in sue, but at least she's keeping everybody honest.

Leo Laporte (00:53:39):
She's gone after Amazon ring as a privacy dumpster fire. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's, this is Cory's words. Con has talked to how her agency is protecting mom and Pop grocers from giant price gouging, greed, ifl, drunk national chains

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:55):
And then maybe costing consumers more money as a result. Just as the, just as the old fight. We can't just as the old fight against a and p back in the day where consumers were hurt.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:05):
Yeah, no, but we can't just look at cons like lowering prices as the only metric by which we judge if something is a good thing

Leo Laporte (00:54:13):
To, Amazon brought prices down initially, but eventually exactly what happens. They drive everybody out of business and then guess what?

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:19):
The exact same fight over A and p mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
Exact same. All right. I think

Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:23):
Well, and so, and the FTC is also, look, I mean, you could lower prices for consumers, but then hurt the environment. You can lower prices for consumers and drive all of your competition out of business. And those are some of the, like if they, do you look at her paper that Yeah. That's dumping. Wait, I mean, if you did, did you read her paper?

Leo Laporte (00:54:41):
The law school paper? No, IM got to now. I wanna read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure that's kinda was the, about that inspiration for Cory's in acidification article, which is similar similar premise. I think cons, opponents did manage to repeat a lot of smears against her, but not the bogus conflict of incest interest story. They, this is where it's germane to Jeff's accusation. They also accused her of being oh and four in her actions to block mergers. Now here's the response, Jeff, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated, because m and a professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waived

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:20):
Through unless having seen four losses. Maybe they're now gonna be emboldened.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:55:26):
They might try, but she's gonna, she's still gonna go after thems Cory

Leo Laporte (00:55:30):
Uses gonna cost. As an example, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out only to withdraw from the deal because Meta's lawyers told them it would get challenged at the ftc. That's with an uncertain outcome.

Ant Pruitt (00:55:43):
That's what I'm digging right there. It it's keeping folks honest and not trying to just slide stuff from under the table. Table. I, you

Leo Laporte (00:55:50):
Can't, you don't want what the said about, I understand what you're saying is there might be a middle ground. What you don't want is an FTC that says, come on, everybody just merge. We don't care. Exactly. No, you don't want care, but you don't want somebody to pick fights. They can't win. And so the only argument would be is she picking fights that she can't win.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:05):
That's my point. Okay. That's my

Ant Pruitt (00:56:07):
Point. Okay. That's fair. That's fair.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:09):
And it's not just winning. I mean, it also, I think one can judge whether all the fights are the right fights. I disagree with some of the fights. You're gonna agree with some, we're gonna disagree with some, and that's okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> but I think she came in, oh, now I'll piss you off. She came in as an ideologue and it's hard for an log in Washington to make great victories. And so at some point she's done, she's gonna disappoint those at some point. I I, I, I'm surprised I don't see, you know, Corey at some point kind of saying, but I wish we win more cases.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:56:42):
That's the sort of centrist BS that people say. And that's what ends up, that's how we have been ending up pandering to the farther and farther Right. By calling these people ideologues.

Leo Laporte (00:56:52):
I agree a hundred

Stacey Higginbotham (00:56:53):
Percent. And I'll also say, you mentioned Amazon ring privacy. She did a privacy settlement against Microsoft around children's rules. She also is helping dismantle non-competes, which I think, Jeff, you would be Oh, I agree with that. A big fan of agree with

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
That. She's also,

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:10):
I'm not saying, I'm not

Leo Laporte (00:57:11):
Saying FTC is fighting a lot battles. That's the point. The fact that she's lost four is not, is not the only story. Remember, click to cancel. They, we had this story last week. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they're, they're fighting companies that make it so hard and they're actually changing rule making to cancel something. Yeah. Are

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:28):
They doing, I haven't heard a thing about doing that with newspapers, by the way. And, but okay.

Leo Laporte (00:57:32):
Well, but they wanna make it as easy to cancel as it was to sign up. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And who is against that? Except against I know. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:38):
Absolutely agree. Yeah, absolutely agree.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:41):
So, and they're doing their junky stuff. I mean, I, I get you, Jeff, but I think you're doing the sort of thing that you actually hate when journalists do like headlines that totally like occlude the rest of the value of the story or the situation. I feel like you're looking at the headlines of no legal con's lost four big cases. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:00):
I think those headlines matter. I'm not doing what Cory is accused of the right wing in the Wall Street Journal are doing. I'm not accusing her of, of, of conflict of interest or any of that stuff. I, I do say, I don't know why that was a laugh line. I do say, well, she, the right wing is going after her in all kinds, a whole laundry list of things. I'm not doing any of that. I'm saying A, she's lost important cases. B she is treating all of technology moral panic time as a bad, a presumed bad.

Leo Laporte (00:58:34):
That's where

Stacey Higginbotham (00:58:34):
She gets mine. She's not treating all of technology as a presumed bad. She's actually actively Thank you. Thank that is why I was laughing. Jeff <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:42):
Oh, oh, okay. I see

Leo Laporte (00:58:44):
It. Stacy Higginbotham's last nerve has been hit. Yes. Let's add another sticker to the collection. Oh gosh.

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:52):
Okay. I didn't have that on my screen down.

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
Usually, usually that's me. That that gets that button. Oh, man. Finally, listen, I'm sorry. I have, I'm gonna finish the Cory Doctor article with this concluding paragraph, and then we can all burn Jeff at the stake <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:07):
What, what normally happens if

Leo Laporte (00:59:09):
We back Conn and her team, Corey writes, they will protect us from these scams. Don't let them the right. I'm saying him convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We're trying to reverse 40 years of Reaganomics here. It won't happen overnight. There will be setbacks, but keep your eyes on the prize. This is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people. In my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids, and our planet to fight one union. No <laugh>. Sorry. I wonder if he's projecting this to be another 40 year battle since we're trying to clean up 40. Cory is great and he's also one of the best writers. He's, he's, he's a polemicist and he's without equal. What's a brilliant polemicist? And this is polemic at the highest order.

(01:00:02):
Yeah. Yeah. That's you gotta take. And I don't disagree with him. I understand your point. Absolutely. Jeff, and you're a little bit of hand ringing here, but I I think in the final analysis, if you look at the entire scope of what this very active FTC has done it is absolutely positive. And and, and so I just want, I just wanna caution people to be a little bit careful focusing on, well, she's lost four cases now cuz there's, so, just as you say, Stacy, there's so much more going on that they've done that we all, we agree with, you know, things like this can't have

Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:38):
To cancel, invite and activist FTC is the right way to look at this. It, the FTC under Le Kahn is issuing more statements and settling and pushing more lawsuits and pushing back like more than any other FTC in like recent memory. Yeah. And I mean, you could categorically look at that just by looking at the press releases issued,

Leo Laporte (01:01:02):
FTC announces nationwide enforcement sweep to stem the tide of illegal telemarketing calls to US consumers. That was just yesterday. Look at all this. This is, these are all FTC actions. FTC and federal and state partners nationwide, robocall and telemarketing enforcement sweep in Chicago. FTC sues to block IQ vs. Acquisition of Propel Media to prevent increased concentration of healthcare programmatic advertising. There's this, there's the headlines. And then if you go to, this is just the last week by the way. If you go to just the ftc.gov website and look at their actions, they have been very active in doing a lot of good things, I think.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:01:45):
And a lot of the, I mean, I mean, honestly, I want my government agencies to actually take action against things. And a lot of times there's so much regulatory capture in these things and it, it, it makes us so cynical about government. And I think we're of an era that is super cynical. And this is a Lena Kahn's actually helping me not be a cynical, I guess. Thank you. I guess by actually taking these actions. I agree. So

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
Thank you Corey, Dr. O too for, for clearing my mind, allowing me to steal your P pros. And I will get up on this table and, and, and hammer it home. We need a, why don't we have a speaker's corner in the US Like they have in Hyde Park in London. <Laugh> where?

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:31):
Well, they had it in Canada, in Toronto. They had great speaker's. Corner. They cannot

Leo Laporte (01:02:34):
Imagine. Did they really? City tv. Oh, city tv. Yeah. Yeah. They had those machines. You'd go, they have

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:40):
Public access, isn't

Leo Laporte (01:02:41):
It Portland <laugh>. I actually did one of those machines in Toronto. That was actually really cool. But who was, that was Mo

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:49):
Moses

Leo Laporte (01:02:50):
Ziemer. Moses Ziemer who was a great visionary yeah. Way back when with city tv. And he put all over the city in the early days, little kiosks with video

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:02):
Cameras. I think it was one, just, oh, there was just on Queen Street, there was one on Queen

Leo Laporte (01:03:06):
Street. There was one on the city tv offices on Queen Street. Yes. And you

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:09):
Had to put in a loon,

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
Which was a single dollar coin Loon. Yeah. With a, it had a, a loon on it. Is

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:17):
It, is it a loony?

Leo Laporte (01:03:18):
Oh yeah. It's a loony. Yeah. A loony

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:20):
Is

Leo Laporte (01:03:20):
The loon. It's a single, yeah. There's a loony and there's a TuneIn. Okay. Which is two loons. Two. Two.

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:25):
Oh, did not, no.

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Okay. Two, $2. There are dollar coins and $2 coins in the case. He made

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:30):
Whole shows out of it. I mean, was the original TikTok? It was the original YouTube, yeah. 15 started Players would come in after a seventies game and apologize for a play. Yeah, yeah. People would propose to each other. They'd make up songs and come into each other. And they made shows outta this. It was brilliant when we started what became News 12, New Jersey. I insisted on doing the same thing here in New Jersey. And they built a kiosk and they put it in a mall, but they didn't know how to do it. And

Leo Laporte (01:03:58):
We it's funny you should say that, because I went, made a field trip to City tv. There it is. On, on young Street to a field trip on, on to city tv and did a tour on the inside with Amber MacArthur as we were setting up Amber Twit. Because I wanted to have an open studio. He was the one who, who invented the idea of open studios. Oh, okay. Yes. And I wanted to duplicate what Moses did there. And he was the

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:26):
Whole, the whole building was a studio. Yeah. They could, they could plug in anywhere in the building. It was brilliantly done. And, and, and it was also the anchors, you know, not sitting at a desk walking around.

Leo Laporte (01:04:37):
It was exactly what I wanted to do with in the early days of Twit with the brick House. And then you can go to any desk and you'd plug in the camera and plug in the microphone. And now it's live. You know,

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:47):
If you look up Speaker's Corner and City tv, there's some video you can probably

Leo Laporte (01:04:51):
Show. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah. There's actually a TV series. Yeah, there's the kiosk <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:01):
You'll put it in the

Leo Laporte (01:05:02):
It does say notice out of order. So the guys just <laugh>. Wow. It was outta order when I was there as well. Insert Looney and then start.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:11):
Is that where the kids in the hall came from? Start?

Leo Laporte (01:05:13):
No, it might be, actually, come to think of it. I City TV was, you know, acquired and lost its edge. Oh, it lost Its over time. Mojo. Yeah. But yeah, this is putting

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:25):
It in the Discord. Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:05:27):
Heres another one. The Discord. This is at the A Channel Victoria building. So this would be in, in bc. All right. I'm gonna let me, let me click this link here. Oh, I still have Stacy Higginbotham's. You put it in Discord. <Laugh>. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:40):
Put it Discord. I accidentally closed the

Leo Laporte (01:05:43):
Discord. I don't see it in Discord. I don't know where you put it. Mr. Jarvis. Are you lost?

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:48):
Right there? It says Jeff Jarvis today. Well, it's a brick house. That's the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:05:52):
Look at you, <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:54):
I'll, right. All right. That's why I didn't see

Leo Laporte (01:05:56):
<Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:57):
I got, see, I get in before everybody else.

Leo Laporte (01:06:00):
Here we go. Speakers corner. Ladies and gentlemen,

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:03):
You wanna fast forward some using this?

Speaker 6 (01:06:06):
Help out our farmers big time. Give 'em money, what they need, because we got problems with food. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:12):
And that's, that was in the store that was there at the, the television

Speaker 7 (01:06:16):
Between six and seven. Because my mother has the biggest crush on you.

Leo Laporte (01:06:20):
<Laugh>

Speaker 7 (01:06:21):
Picked up a girl. Okay. And all those other women are trying to pick up the guys second time. He is spoken of it. I think someone's a little obsessed. Don't you just let, I think somebody needs him.

Leo Laporte (01:06:33):
Oh boy. This is TikTok.

Speaker 8 (01:06:34):
Nurses in the icu. We just like to say that without them, these two

Speaker 7 (01:06:40):
Wouldn't have never made it

Leo Laporte (01:06:40):
Here. Aw. This is why it works. Right. This is why it works. It's real. People talking about stuff sometimes dumb that they care about. This is TikTok. It is. Is TikTok in the early days

Speaker 7 (01:06:53):
Where we got to meet, come on guys, help us out. We need money. We need to make a living. We're teenagers. Come on guys. Teenagers, chief and boss. And how's it going? Slugger. And nice to see ya. Big guy. I hate that <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:07:11):
That's, by the way. That's me. I don't know. I me too. I recorded that some years ago. <Laugh>, you don't say babe. I hate that. Actually, they probably call you big guy all the time. I have a buddy that calls me Tiny. Actually. Tiny's, even better, better. One of, one of

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:28):
The unknown things about it was you thought you had to put in the loony to make it go. The truth is, the camera was just on

Leo Laporte (01:07:33):
All the, it was always on. They didn't, they weren't that sophisticated. They hadn't figured that part out. That's hysterical. That's pretty cool though. That's so Isn't that, that's so

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:41):
Cool. Zimmer was such a pioneer in

Leo Laporte (01:07:44):
Television. It was. I don't care to be a part of it, but that's, it is still a pretty cool idea what they did. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you don't, dude, you

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:50):
Could go on there and make a petition for the hard headss to get into college.

Leo Laporte (01:07:54):
Yeah, I could, couldn't I? You basically, you have Speaker's Corner. It's called Twitter. Really? Yeah, right. Yeah. Same thing. This was Twitter's before Twitter speaker. Exactly the thing. What'd you call that? Speaker? Table Speaker's. Corner speaker. Speaker's corner. And it's because in for, I don't know, for a hundred years, they've had speaker's corner at Hyde Park in London where you people crazy people would go put a apple that I thought that was Portland. <Laugh>. No, London, England. That too. I thought that was just New York City <laugh>. Hey, hey.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:24):
I lived in New York. The street preachers.

Leo Laporte (01:08:26):
That's basically that. Oh yeah. Absolutely. And they have megaphones. Right? I don't know if you're allowed to have a megaphone in Hyde Park. Maybe you are. I don't know. Speaker's Corner. Here it is. The Royal Parks a traditional site for public speeches and debates since the mid 18 hundreds. They even have a little plaque there. That's, see, we didn't invent free speech <laugh>. No. What? No such thing. No, we did not. No, we did not. All right. Let's take a break. When we come

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:57):
Back, I just, I just read a wonderful book. I listened to it on, on, on Audible. Do a quick plug here of it called, oh Hell, where is it? Life, Liberty of The Pursuit of Happiness by Peter Moore, which is the British Roots. No, shush.

Leo Laporte (01:09:14):
So we

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:15):
British roots of our sense of, of freedom.

Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
Ah, very

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:18):
Interesting. And Don Wilkes, who's one of my heroes, Benjamin Franklin. And other characters in it. It's, it's really well done.

Leo Laporte (01:09:25):
Nice. I must read, I will add it to my wishlist, which is ever growing. Now you

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:33):
Can do a commercial

Leo Laporte (01:09:34):
Ever-Growing. Well, we just did an audible commercial and they didn't even pay for it. Mm. Damnit <laugh> <laugh>. Dang it. Life Levi. And the Pursuit of Happiness Britain in the American Dream. Well, it makes sense,

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:46):
Sense if you listen to the sample. It is that accent too.

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
Is it really? It's narrated. Oh, John Lee is wonderful. One of my favorite readers

Speaker 10 (01:09:54):
Adams had done as much as anyone to bring the issue of independence to a hand as he rose in Reply

Leo Laporte (01:10:00):
To Dick Who holds. I love John Lee. I love John Lee. He does Peter f Hamilton's novels. You've probably heard his John Lee's narration. John. No. Oh, you read him in book form. You old-fashioned fuddy. You <laugh> our cha today brought to you by Brooke Lennon. I must buy more so that I can have, cuz I change the sheets every week cuz I'm a civilized human. Brook Linen is the best linen ever from Brooklyn b r o o k l i n e and sleeping during the hot summer months. And we are getting the hot summer months to say the least. Can be a little bit sweaty, a little bit difficult. That's why you need Brook Linens Hotel Quality Luxury Banning delivered directly to you at your door for a fair price because they have sheets for the Cool Sleeper. Cool off with their Crisp Classic per Kale Weave.

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Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:10):
Multiple of sheets for, you know, when that doesn't work,

Leo Laporte (01:14:13):
But Yeah. Well it, it does solve the problem of how do you sh fold a fitted sheet <laugh> True. If you don't ever have Exactly. Yeahs True. That's true. You put it

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:20):
Right back on <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:14:24):
I need to. Why is it? Well, you know, why is it there a, a, a Silicon Valley startup to solve that problem? The fitted she, I'm sure somebody

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:32):
Has because it's, it's not a solvable problem.

Leo Laporte (01:14:34):
It's not solvable. <Laugh> really isn't. Wow.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:38):
It's, it's like fission

Leo Laporte (01:14:40):
<Laugh> with fission. We've solved. You mean fusion?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:44):
Oh, fusion. Sorry. Fusion.

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
Yeah. That one. That's the thing the sun does. That one. Can't figure that one out for the life of us. So let's do a Google story. This comes from Paul Thro. I love it. Paul does not like Google. No. Mark Koski leaves Google Calls Company unstable. He didn't like it either. Former member of the original Microsoft NT team, he left Google 20 years after joining them. He's been there 20 years writing this. Get ready. Well, actually he tweeted it. Does that count? Is that writing today? It does. Yeah. I have decided to, I'm gonna do him in a cranky old man voice. I have decided to step away from my role at Google where I was a senior director of engineering responsible for OS and software platform for AR and XR devices. Now this is where it gets mean. The recent changes in AR leadership and Google's unstable commitment and vision have weighed heavily on my decision.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:47):
So let's stop there. He's bitter that he can't make his toys that nobody really wants. Anyway. So Google made a smart decision to get out of AR

Leo Laporte (01:15:57):
Moving forward. I'm eager to explore opportunities that allow me to further advance augmented reality. I'm

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:02):
Job hunting somebody higher than please gimme

Leo Laporte (01:16:03):
A job. And it's intersection with generative ai because that's the hotness, that's the hot thing right now. Yeah. I

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:09):
Row in some NFTs and, and Bitcoin

Leo Laporte (01:16:12):
Fella <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:13):
Know somebody will give you a job out there. He has

Leo Laporte (01:16:15):
Worked. Okay. This guy may be less incredible.

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:18):
This is, yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:16:18):
He's worked at Google, Facebook, Mambo, VMware, Google, Microsoft Deck, color Data General, and Victor. Wow. Huh . Okay. He was at

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:28):
Google, left Google came back to Google. So add that in too,

Leo Laporte (01:16:31):
Right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:32):
Yeah. He's a grumpy

Leo Laporte (01:16:33):
Cuss. Okay. But maybe there. Okay. I'm just looking for anything.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:37):
Well, so Google has been kind of waffly on their ar they're

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
Waffly their smart

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:44):
Yeah. To do it.

Leo Laporte (01:16:47):
I mean maybe

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:47):
He, I I'm just like, if we're going,

Leo Laporte (01:16:49):
Maybe he should go to Meta cuz Meta is finally, actually there are two stories this week. One is meta, the other is Apple, both of whom are working hard, they have never released publicly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> chat gpt style products as Microsoft and Google have. Microsoft is working with Meta on the next generation of Llama. Or is it Yama? Lama. Lama. It's l l m. So it's just that added some letters to llm. Make it llama. It's the llama two lama one leaked out, I don't think was ever officially released by meta. But yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:17:29):
That someone kind of stole

Leo Laporte (01:17:30):
It. That got stolen today. Or are we

Stacey Higginbotham (01:17:32):
Gonna talk about them playing fast and loose with open source licensing?

Leo Laporte (01:17:35):
Yes. Okay. Sorry, go ahead.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:17:39):
No, go on. You're

Leo Laporte (01:17:40):
On <laugh>. I don't know anything about that. I will, yes, we will. Today we're introducing the availability of LAMA two rights. Mr. Meta. No, no. Byline. The next generation of our open source, large language model free for research and commercial use and Microsoft making sure they have a hand in every AI basket is working with Meta. They are the preferred partner for Llama too. But if it's

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:08):
Free, what does it mean to be preferred?

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
Well, the real, I think the real issue is, and we were talking about this on Windows weekly. Richard Campbell's been beating this drum. It's surprisingly expensive to generate these models and then to support them. And they need somebody like Microsoft with very big cloud infrastructure and Azure and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and lots of Nvidia processors to do it. So partnering with Microsoft makes I think a lot of sense. In fact, here's my

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:36):
Question on the free part. Is this an, and this is a stupid question, but the most of mine are, is this an Android like strategy? Like we're gonna undercut everybody else and that's how LAMA will become a dominant model.

Leo Laporte (01:18:53):
I don't know. It has to perform, right? Because even with an Android, there's people that are so against Android because it doesn't necessarily perform the way I, they're introducing an open ecosystem for interchangeable AI frameworks. So that sounds interesting. Say again? <Laugh>. Wait, what? <Laugh> <laugh>. I don't know if I can, they are introducing an open ecosystem for interchangeable AI frameworks. Oh my gosh. Okay. I think that means there'll be a standard, which would be kind of cool. And having Microsoft involved is interesting. Is this

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:27):
The llama news?

Leo Laporte (01:19:29):
This is the llama. This is all we talking about. Llama. We're still talking about Yama.

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:31):
Wake up

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:32):
Stacey. Wake up Stacy. Hey, I know.

Leo Laporte (01:19:34):
Hey they are also watching wide for Stacy with AWS and hugging face. But Azure, it'll be part of the Azure AI model catalog so that, you know, this is this. Microsoft will make money cuz you'll be paying Azure hours for this Azure Minutes. It,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:53):
This framework sounds less like a standard in more like an app store or something like

Leo Laporte (01:19:58):
That. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Like you'll

Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:58):
Have interchangeable plugin models that will work. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:02):
Right. Although Google was really promoting that idea. What weren't they of a kind of a plugins and so forth. Apple has announced, or maybe it's leaked Apple, G p t <laugh>, the headline from the Verge. Apple is testing an AI chatbot but has no idea what to do with it. This is, this is a Bloomberg Sure of Apple Care, part of a genius bar or some sort Apple test. Apple G P T develops generative AI tools to catch open ai. Gotta catch 'em all. But, you know, I don't know what, how this will be released. According to people with knowledge of the efforts. So this is not an announcement. This is Mark Germin, the Apple rumor guy. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> he's usually pretty Who's very good. Tight, tight on this stuff. With that foundation known as Ajax, apple has also created a chatbot service. Some engineers call Apple G P T. What does G P T stand for? Stacy?

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:01):
Oh, I did, I did look that up. Just last week.

Leo Laporte (01:21:03):
She knows. I have no idea off the top of head. No. Generative. I truly do not know. It's a generative

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:08):
Generative pre-training transformer.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:11):
Oh, there you go.

Leo Laporte (01:21:14):
In recent months, the AI pushes has become a major effort for Apples, says germin with several teams collaborating on the project. I mean, I guess if you're meta or Apple or you know, Bob's, you know, shop and drop, you're gonna be working on ai. Cuz that's the hot thing right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:31):
Why is it pre-training?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:36):
Pre-Training.

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:37):
Yeah. Generative pre-training transformer. I get generative. I get transformer. I don't understand the pre-training.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:44):
Maybe they train it halfway and then they stick

Leo Laporte (01:21:47):
It on another. It's wrong. It's not pre-training. This is very clear. Important. Pre-trained. Trained pre. So the training does, does is done first. Right? That's the key. I'm so confused. It's pre-trained. We've pre-trained. It's like pre chewed. Charlie's, you go there, they chew the meat, then they spit it into your mouth. It's pre-trained. They've chewed up all of the stuff to make a large language model. It's

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:10):
All, as I wrote recently, it's all the cultural cud.

Leo Laporte (01:22:14):
It's the cultural cud. See? Good. You two are ruminate. Good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:19):
<Laugh>, Stacy, look.

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
<Laugh>, we need a new sticker. Stacy is disgusted. <Laugh>. So here's a picture. Perhaps this will help if I show you this picture of something. What is this? It's going into this. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:37):
Well now it's all clear. Thank you very much. Leo. You people on audio, you're missing <laugh>. The the light shining on you. I'm telling you. Come on to video and all will become

Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
Clear. Now you see I need explain it. You see you have here on the left is scatterplot with a linear support vector machine's decision boundaries. That's the size. The stash it lines there. And which we move it over

Speaker 11 (01:23:04):
As we move it over. Or the white do go left. Or the black Dutch go the right. We have the segregated vector machine

Leo Laporte (01:23:12):
Boundary.

(01:23:14):
It's very simple. I don't

(01:23:15):
Understand why you don't understand <laugh>. Generative pre-trained transformers are a large language model type and a prominent framework for generative artificial intelligence first introduced in 2018 by OpenAI, but I guess they don't own the, the name.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:23:31):
Okay. Okay. You pre-trade a model so you don't have to put a bunch of data into it. Right? Oh my

Leo Laporte (01:23:35):
Gosh. Right. So you train the model, it just sits there and that's why. And then you have the model on your phone and it doesn't have to have even have an internet connection anymore. It could just do the answers. Oh, okay. To your questions. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:23:44):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's inference. That's different than training. Oh. So pre-training, you can do a model that is pre-trained. So you feed it a whole bunch of stuff, you get it pretty good, and then you're gonna like tweak it some more. So it's even better.

Leo Laporte (01:23:59):
Oh. So, oh, then I've actually wondered this for a long time. So if I type into chat g pt a question, it's, it is working on a static model though, right?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:24:10):
Yeah. So, but you could pre-train a model with like basic rules. So let's say for chat G p T, you pre-train it to kinda get a sense of what comes next in English or how the English language works, right? Right. So then it can actually generate things, go back English, but

Leo Laporte (01:24:24):
There's a feedback loop, but it doesn't need to go out on the internet again, does it? I mean, it's, it's got what it needs, doesn't it?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:24:31):
Hold on, hold on. So you start there. Yeah. And then you take that pre-trained model <laugh>, and then you're gonna fine tune it with even more stuff. And I don't know what they're doing for Chad J PT to make it even better. This is a very theoretical thing. So now you're gonna do it. So you can do like, like Shakespeare maybe. So it's pre-trained on English, the English language, and then you're gonna train it specifically for Shakespeare. So then when someone gives you the prompt, so now that's a model that can do that. And then you've got the prompt. The prompt is what you can put in and eventually the inference is how it's going to generate the response based on the, the prompt that you've asked. Did that make sense?

Leo Laporte (01:25:10):
Yeah. And in fact, I asked chat G p T, it says it works by leveraging its pre-trained language understanding and generation capabilities to process and respond to natural language inputs. So it actually has this long eight step explanation. It starts with training, which is what? No, sorry, I asked, I had a question. I didn't forget what the heck my question was.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:32):
I I gave you like a really easy answer.

Leo Laporte (01:25:35):
Yeah. I'm just,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:35):
There were no scatter plots.

Leo Laporte (01:25:37):
There's, I'm going, there's just

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:38):
Slopes.

Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
Keep going. What I'm trying

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:45):
To, I stick my face in front or my hand on my face a lot in this show. I'm just Yeah, you

Leo Laporte (01:25:49):
Well, we make you do that and it's understandable. You're provoked, you're provoked. We put you in that position. With this, this partnership. Here we go with micro here. We, while Chad GBT is pre-trained in a vast dataset, it can also be fine tuned on more specific data sets for particular applications. So that tailors it like Shakespeare, but it is essential note chat. G P D does have a knowledge cutoff. In my case says chat. G P D was September, 2021. So he doesn't have access to information beyond that date. But you could, you could add it. In fact, this is well you could

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:26):
Feed in information.

Leo Laporte (01:26:28):
Yeah. This is a new and fair, I think kind of interesting. Financial Times had a article today on how they've run out of stuff. They've run out of cud to chew and they're looking for new ways to get new data into these new models. And I'm a little nervous about what they've, what they've come up with. They call it well here's the ft. Oh darn you Ft. GI

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:58):
And Bender and Company would say this is like a boy's bsd problem is they're trying forever bigger models and that only makes it worse. You run

Leo Laporte (01:27:06):
Out, make it better. Yeah. The internet is, no

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:07):
It's not. No, it's not that you run out, it's that they're too big, you don't know what's in them. It's a mess. And there's no need for them to be this big.

Leo Laporte (01:27:15):
Here's the FT article why computer made data is being used to train data models. They call it synthetic.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:22):
Oh, that's just synthetic data. Yeah. Yeah. That's just synthetic data. That's, so they do synthetic data, not because they've run outta stuff, but because it's cheaper and easier to get

Leo Laporte (01:27:30):
Well also cuz they're

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:30):
Running out. Synthetic data's been <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:27:32):
I mean, well in fact this is they're quo

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:36):
Synthetic, no synthetic data. They don't use it because they're running out of it because like, synthetic data is fake. So you can't use it to train something to be understanding of like how humans are or whatever. You use synthetic data because it's cheaper to get,

Leo Laporte (01:27:50):
Here's what Aiden Gomez, who's the CEO of a, of a startup, coherent, that's using this a lot. If you could get all the data you needed off the web, that would be fantastic. In reality, the web is so noisy and messy that it's not really representative of the data you want. The web humanity just doesn't do everything we need. So, and Sam Altman talked about this, the founder of open ai. He said he's pretty confident that soon all data will be synthetic data. So forget this. Listen to how they do. They do this. He, Gomez says synthetic data is already huge, even if it's not broadcast widely. For example, to train a model on advanced mathematics cohere, which is one of the, the startup that's doing this might use two AI models talking to each other. One is the tutor, one is the student.

(01:28:43):
Gomez says they're having a conversation about trigonometry. It's all synthetic, it's all just imagined by the model. And then <laugh>, the human looks at this conversation, goes in and corrects it if the model said something wrong. That's the status quo today to studies from Microsoft Research showed that synthetic data could be used to train models that were smaller and simpler than the current chat. GT four or Palm two. One paper described a synthetic dataset of short stories generated by GTB four, which only contained words that a typical four year old might understand. This dataset is known as tiny stories, was then used to train a simple l l m that was able to produce fluent and grammatically correct stories. So my concern is it's like mad cow disease.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:32):
Right? Well, okay. So synthetic data isn't just for, I get it. I get what you're saying. It's not just for chaining language. Large language models. They use synthetic data for all kinds of things, and in other cases it works really well. So like they use it to train drones on how to spot faults and pipelines. Instead of sending over drones to take photos of millions of lines of millions of miles of pipelines, they just generate what the flaws look like. They show that to it. Ah, they use that to train it instead of, so synthetic data is actually highly useful for a lot of situations. It could even be useful for teaching some, teaching a computer about how a four year old speaks, because we don't have a lot of examples of four year olds. Right. And their language abilities on the computer. But you do have it, you'd have to type it out. You could generate, figure it

Leo Laporte (01:30:25):
Out, and then it chat you before it can generate small words, tiny stories. And then you learn from that. They give, as an example of hedge funds, which are looking for black swan events. There aren't a lot of black swan events. So what they do is they create a hundred black swan, fake black swan events mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and then test against that. He says for banks where fraud constitutes less than a hundredth of a percent of total data, the software generates thousands of edge case scenarios on fraud. And then trains AI models with this just like your drones searching for pipeline breaks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So, okay. So that's not so bad. It, it's learning right. From generated data to simulate the problem you're looking for. So it's, if you wanted to create a radiology analysis ai, you, you may not have enough scans to show it, to train it on in from the real world. So you can create a bunch of all,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:17):
All the weird stuff that people hurt their butts. Right. Right. You may not have

Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
Enough of that. You may not have enough of that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you create many, many more often with an a. This what's interesting, it's often with an ai, that's why I probably in a, in a inappropriately described it like mad cow disease, which mad cows get from eating dead cows. The bovine encephalitis is communicated by eating right. Their brains. Some

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:43):
Of this is exactly where Matthew Kirschenbaum goes with his wonderful, I put it in the discord right place this time as say, prepare for the text apocalypse in the Atlantic where he says that that we'll have plain text, but in quantity, so immense as to seem unimaginable a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting

Leo Laporte (01:32:10):
Because there's so much, it's real bogus content what's

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:12):
Made up it's gray go. Yeah. And then there's a paper I also put in there where, where researchers trained a model on content created by a AI models. And in the, and they call it the cursive of the recursion, it leads to what they say is model collapse.

Leo Laporte (01:32:30):
Yeah. You would, it'd be almost like

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:31):
Junk here in junk here in junk. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:32:33):
Yeah, yeah. We talked about that months ago. Yes. Yeah, we did. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:37):
I'm just trying to be relevant at this point. Yeah. As opposed to the last time I talked to you.

Leo Laporte (01:32:39):
Oh, <laugh>. My mind, my mind is going,

Ant Pruitt (01:32:42):
Yeah, I've been talking about this about 12 minutes and that just now made sense to me.

Leo Laporte (01:32:47):
<Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:49):
You're welcome Ant.

Leo Laporte (01:32:50):
You're welcome. By the way,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:52):
By the way, Ant by the way, I wanna, I wanna make your your, your beard's distinguished. It's getting a nice gray

Leo Laporte (01:32:58):
To it. I like it. Look at that. That sounds yeah.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:00):
Good. That's always been there. I'm supposed

Leo Laporte (01:33:02):
To grow it as know

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:03):
It's always saw it the same. It's kind of, it's the right length. It's very good as a, as a white bearded.

Leo Laporte (01:33:07):
So I'm

Ant Pruitt (01:33:07):
Just weathered

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:08):
Walking

Leo Laporte (01:33:08):
Me to the club. I, I think eventually Chris, all the host of this show will grow beards.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:14):
You think so?

Leo Laporte (01:33:14):
<Laugh>? Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:15):
You think so?

Leo Laporte (01:33:16):
It's spreading from Jeff to, you know,

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:18):
Stacey fears. She fears at the end of our show. She's been here so

Leo Laporte (01:33:22):
Long, y'all, I've been tweezing out my beard forever. I mean, my God, I, I think I, if I could, if my beard would look like that, I, I've been trying to convince Lisa, let me grow a beard. She said, don't grow a beard. Why would you want to grow beard? But I just think as you get older, he kind of hides a multitude of defects and oh yeah. I want him look like most interested. It hides, jowls. I gotta tell. Thank you. And

Ant Pruitt (01:33:46):
Can't say that's why I have beard, but sure. I get where you come.

Leo Laporte (01:33:50):
No, you don't have that problem. But some of us and a little waddle. I wanna look like waddle. Waddle. I wanna look like the most interesting man in the world. You know, he kind of like yours, like kind of acro, closely

Ant Pruitt (01:34:03):
Groomed,

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
Groomed beard. Yeah. Yeah. You look good. Yeah, it looks good. Your face. It looks good. You. Yeah. Thank you. Very

Ant Pruitt (01:34:10):
Smart.

Leo Laporte (01:34:10):
Yeah. Speaking of ai, oh, I think we're in our AI segment. I forgot to mention that. Man.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:15):
Where's Mr. Howell?

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:16):
Where's the, where's the trumpets for this?

Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
Where's Mr. How There's no trumpets. It just is. It happens. You're going, this is, this is Vox. Wait a minute. Writing about their competitor. Are you in trouble? Geo media? <Laugh>. What

Ant Pruitt (01:34:30):
You say the name? Lisa's coming. She comes,

Leo Laporte (01:34:32):
I running. Lisa came in. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:33):
I have no, Lisa, can you have a beard please?

Leo Laporte (01:34:35):
Can I have a beard?

Ant Pruitt (01:34:36):
She came running.

Leo Laporte (01:34:37):
No, we want every, so see, look at ants. See ants. See how good that looks? So we think the beard is spreading from the left to the right here. So maybe if Lisa just punch him in the arm for me. No. See, is it too scratchy? Too

Ant Pruitt (01:34:51):
Scratchy? Scratchy?

Leo Laporte (01:34:52):
No.

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:53):
Oh, Lisa's,

Leo Laporte (01:34:54):
That's her fear is scratchy smooth? Yeah. No, she has very, very delicate skin. <Laugh>. Yes, it does. And she doesn't want a big, but see, I'm scratchy. Even when I shave, I have to shave like three or four times a day. And do you mind? No, I didn't think so. It's worth it.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:35:07):
What about beard oil.

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
Beard oil? Would that help? I

Ant Pruitt (01:35:10):
Have, I have oil on this. Oil doesn't help.

Leo Laporte (01:35:12):
Yeah. I Does it get get softer as it gets longer, Jeff? It does, doesn't it? Yeah. Not

Ant Pruitt (01:35:16):
For me.

Leo Laporte (01:35:16):
Yeah. Yeah. No, yours

Ant Pruitt (01:35:17):
Is really not for me. But

Leo Laporte (01:35:19):
See, he's, yeah, he's got a different, I

Ant Pruitt (01:35:20):
Got a different grain of hair. Black folks. Hair.

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
He's got his <laugh>. Your cur is

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:24):
Tighter. There is that difference. Yes, there is.

Ant Pruitt (01:35:26):
Black folks whiskers. That's what it is.

Leo Laporte (01:35:28):
Is it d Yeah, it's tighter. But see, I, I wanna look, I want it to look like that <laugh>. So I guess it's helpless,

Speaker 12 (01:35:34):
Honey. You can get that much brown in your beer if you tried.

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
Oh, so Vox, which is I would imagine a competitor to Geo Media, right? Yeah,

Ant Pruitt (01:35:44):
I thought so.

Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
Geo Medias like, yeah, because

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:47):
Vox would like to think that they're above geo's.

Ant Pruitt (01:35:49):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:35:49):
Yeah. Vox writes, you're gonna see more AI written articles, whether, whether you like it or not. They're talking about Geo and their CEO Jim Span feller, who apparently said too bad. It's absolutely a thing we wanna do more of. Merril

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:08):
Brown, who's the editorial director? There's an old friend of mine.

Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
Oh, actually it was Merril who said this? Yeah, Gizmoto the Onion. AI can't write the Onion. No,

Ant Pruitt (01:36:18):
No, no,

Leo Laporte (01:36:19):
No. Jezebel not well geo, he could

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:23):
Write the Onion. You know, those, those little like comments from people being absolutely ridiculous. Right? I might even get a little bit more surreal.

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
No, I wonder if they could. There is, it is. The Onion is almost formulaic, right? Area, man. You start with Area Man. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Well, maybe they could, maybe they could. Anyway, they could start, they've already published four tour stories entirely generated by ai. The stories, and this again, is Vox writing mm-hmm. Which included multiple errors and ran without input from geo's editors or writers Infuriated Geo's staff and generated scorn who are,

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:57):
Or infuriate infuriating bunch. They like to be infuriated.

Leo Laporte (01:37:01):
Well, but, but also that's their job. They're talking the Gawker

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:04):
Ethos brought down in time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
Wouldn't that be ironic? But I, I agree with them. If Gawker were written by an AI would be,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:12):
If I worked, like when I worked at Fortune or Gigo, if Yes, my company started publishing AI generated stuff without telling people and it was wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:37:23):
It was crap. You're trying

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:24):
To, that's the thing.

Ant Pruitt (01:37:25):
If, if you're gonna use this AI stuff, make sure that you're fat checking and, and have some sort of editor in there that's gonna make it a bit of

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:31):
The Star Wars roundup that have mistakes in, I mean, Jesus

Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
In a note set, two top editors at his company last Friday, Merrill Brown said, editors of Jalopnik and AAV Club are planning to create content summaries or lists that will be produced by ai. But that's, that's

Ant Pruitt (01:37:48):
Reasonable

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:48):
Summaries. Reasonable summaries I can live with better.

Leo Laporte (01:37:50):
That's reasonable. Brown's memo also noted that the Associated Press recently announced a partnership with Open ai.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:56):
Money, money, money. Mm-Hmm.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:58):
I also think doing it like jalopnik or I don't know the other site.

Leo Laporte (01:38:04):
AV club. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:38:05):
Av. Okay. These are pe the people who read those sites are not casual. Right. These are people who know their stuff. Right. That's, and, and I think it's a real risk. I mean, like, just generating a list. Sure. But you

Ant Pruitt (01:38:16):
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:38:18):
You don't, it'd be like if someone like tried to generate AI content about like IOT stuff, you

Leo Laporte (01:38:23):
Know, what it would like, you know, if, if I bought for instance, tried to generate a chronological list of Star Wars movies and TV shows, <laugh>, like talk about a, an audience with an investment Right. And got it wrong. Yep. And left out, like, left out and or entirely. And well, they've added and or since, by the way, they've fixed the errors. Did

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:46):
They put a, did they put a disclosure at the end?

Leo Laporte (01:38:48):
Yeah. correction was made to this story. The episode's rankings were incorrect. In particular, the Clone Wars was placed in the correct chronological order. In the corrected list. They also added some, here's

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:59):
The real problem, Stacy. It's not just that, that, that they put something next to you that's wrong. It's they've commodified you as the writer. Right. And, and, and no says, says to everybody there, they're tr

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:11):
It's, they're trying to commodify me and they're totally in doing so. And by making it so wrong, they're actually insulting me by thinking That's right. That that's my sole value. That's right. Where it's actually the years of expertise that I have. Absolutely. So it's kind of like,

Leo Laporte (01:39:27):
But on the other hand, in most of these articles, I would guess, oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:29):
We need, we need a sticker for that bitch. I'm irreplaceable <laugh> <laugh>. I'm just saying. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a must sticker. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:39:41):
Working on It's on it. Joe's on it. There are, but these are those, these listicles, these can, because they're really just link bait. They're just search engine optimized articles that you would type in and spicy article. Correct. What's the correct chronical chronological list of star Wars shows?

Ant Pruitt (01:40:01):
That's the spicy art. Correct. You talk about

Leo Laporte (01:40:03):
Listicles. Yeah. And it's good at that. Yeah. But except it's not <laugh>. But if it were, it would be good at that <laugh>. If you wanna do something, if it only we're good at that, that would be great.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:12):
It's, I mean, and this is an interesting, I think Ed Zitron actually did something with this, but it is replacing the stuff I used to have, you know, we would have interns do. Right. Go back and check out all of our wifi five coverage and write an explainer for someone. Or like, that's basically it's taking the low value stuff that we use to teach people how to do the jobs that we have today. Isn't

Ant Pruitt (01:40:35):
That what CNET said? And that's something to Wonder or Red Ventures, whomever that was Isn't that, isn't that what they said as well? Is it they trying to take those Yes. Entry level pieces of content, but

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:44):
Maybe they shouldn't be doing that entry level crap content in the first place. It's making content for content's sake

Ant Pruitt (01:40:52):
Somewhere

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Place for this. The canonical one is what time is the Super Bowl? And, and well, no.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:57):
Okay. There's what time is the Super Bowl? But there's also things like, how do I get a driver's license or think about the sidebars in a comp, like in the cybersecurity label story. Like any sidebar that I might have, like what the last five big iot consumer device IOT hacks. Yep. That's something I would have an intern pull up. Would you,

Leo Laporte (01:41:15):
Would you use use an AI to do this instead of an intern?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:18):
No, that's, I mean, would I, oh my would I <laugh>? No, because I wouldn't trust it. <Laugh>,

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:26):
I

Leo Laporte (01:41:26):
Should say the Oh my has nothing to do with what we're talking about. It has everything to do with this Photoshop's generative AI

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:34):
Tools.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:35):
I, I cannot do, I cannot look at the Discord while it being on the show.

Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
No, this is a picture somebody has done that is really not good. Mr. Nielsen of me and a beard. And I bet

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:46):
He tool

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
And Photoshop. I think it's probably exactly what I would look like with the beard. And that's exactly, exactly why I'm not gonna grow a beard

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:53):
<Laugh>. Now that's better. Oh, that's a better one. It's a Jeff Beard.

Leo Laporte (01:41:57):
Yeah. Give gimme a nice white beard. Yeah. Yeah. That looked like Cat and Lee on Below Deck. I'm, I'm mad in a pissed off chicken. Good. all right. Whatever. where were we? Yeah, that isn't, we were. Oh, here, I'll give you another one. Get ready Open ai. Okay. And I'm sure Jeff, you might have something to say about this has done a deal with the American

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:20):
Oh, I have had something to say about everything we owe,

Leo Laporte (01:42:22):
But has done a deal with the American Journalism Product project. Oh yeah. For 5 million to help fund efforts by local outlets to experiment with writing AI articles.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:37):
So they also did a deal with Associated Press, as we mentioned earlier. And this is out of the playbook of Facebook and Google trying to make friends with the media industry before the media industry turns on them and gets regulation. And then that's our predict is what's gonna happen. So

Leo Laporte (01:42:52):
Open

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:54):
For a

Leo Laporte (01:42:54):
While. 5 million in funding for local news initiatives through A G A J P. Now it's not, not, it's not all cash. Some of it is chat. G B T api. Yeah. Tokens.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:08):
American Journalism Project is, is a $50 million, I forget fund. Started by John Thornton, who was co-founder of the Texas Tribune. The try to get, they're going, they're going crazy cuz of the Discord. We can't allow

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:26):
Discord show. No, I don't. John Thornton show. She

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:27):
Does not like show. So you don't like John Thornton?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:29):
I know, I know John Thornton.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:31):
Wow. Wow. Okay. She was, I never talked. See Stacey reactions. I Are you, are you racking to, to your, to your bitch of your replaceable sticker. Are you reacting to a name? I just said, are you reacting to the hunger for the waffle? I can't, I can't read you Stacy. I can't read you

Leo Laporte (01:43:49):
Funny. I thought that was

Ant Pruitt (01:43:51):
Behind me that was so strong and powerful. Where does that sound come from?

Leo Laporte (01:43:57):
She really, really don't like this guy. <Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:00):
I,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:44:01):
I, I, I personally, but I get

Leo Laporte (01:44:03):
It. I can understand one

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:04):
Of the things he started Texas Tribune and, and, and, and dealing people also started American journalism project. And it's an effort to create basically Texas Tribunes across the country, which would be a good thing

Stacey Higginbotham (01:44:15):
As a journalist who had to cover John Thornton. He did not treat journalists well at all.

Ant Pruitt (01:44:22):
Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (01:44:23):
Funny. There's a revelation. Right? Here's the guy who wants AI to start writing these articles now. No, this has been a problem in local journalism. We're gonna get to cover the city council meetings, the school board meetings.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:35):
Then you go to forget ai. You go to a startup called City Bureau that is doing brilliant work training citizens to cover these kinds of things, know the limitations of that and pay them for it. Darryl Holiday, the co-founder, just announced that he's gonna move on to something else, which is interesting. City Bureau is a great example of that at a ai it is empowered citizens. That's how you're gonna cover that stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:44:58):
Well, but what if, I mean, remember we talked last week about how a conversation was recorded fed to oh, whisper AI to transcribe as you might do with the city council meeting, and then fed the chat G P t to summarize. And it did a really good job. Now, I guess you'd still need it or want a human to check it. Mm-Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:17):
<Affirmative>. Well, no, you know, here's the thing. If it's, if it's about the sewer plat on Elm Street. Okay. But like the school board meeting that I went to, the last one I went to was about the right wing trying to eliminate a sociology textbook cuz it was a mean to white people. No AI is gonna get the nuance of that, babe.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:35):
You might be surprised. Yeah. There's a lot of content about that running around right now. But

Ant Pruitt (01:45:41):
That's the thing. If, if you're going to use these ais, go ahead and use 'em, but still have some sort of, of human involved to, to clean things up and help with corrections and whatnot. An editor. But it's

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:53):
Also about going up and asking the right questions. And it's about, it's about more, I mean, I have to sound like I'm an old fart defending the, the human journalist. What I'm really saying is, is that, is that we in journalism thought our value was in this thing called content. And so a machine comes along that can make unlimited amounts of content. That's not where our value has ever been. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, our value has been in asking the right questions and challenging power. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in representing communities and understanding their needs. Mm-Hmm. Giving them service. That's where the value of journalism is. But we see it a place like gold media now you see it as let's make more content to get more pages with more ads.

Ant Pruitt (01:46:25):
Yeah. But there's

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:26):
Still's,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:46:26):
Still's the economic value to the people who own papers. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (01:46:29):
There's still a balance though cuz like when Miss Higgin Moham was pointing out earlier, I agree. There are still a place for some of those low hanging fruit pieces of, you know, how do I connect to a wifi securely, you know, stuff like that. People, some people still don't know. We've already talked about how much people don't know. Previously in the show,

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:48):
One of my students in in our, in our executive program was talking about that from Sweden was talking about evergreen content. Once you've written that once, yeah. You don't need to read it a hundred times, you just link to it. But people don't wanna link to each other cuz they want their own page with their own content, with their own ads, with their own traffic, with their own seo. Yeah. And that's, that's the ruin of, of journalism. Did you

Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
See that?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:47:09):
But it's also, it's also how journalists learn. I mean, the fastest way to get when you like, I mean, I'm sure you tell you, well, you don't teach 1 0 1, but in journalism 1 0 1, the fastest way, everything is 1 0 1. Okay. <laugh> is to, to get on a beat is start doing profiles. People

Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
Is to the city counseling meeting. Right. And start, start doing it from the ground up. No,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:47:33):
It's evergreen content. Oh, it's profiles, it's how-tos, it's those kind of things. And you do that. So you can get, so you can learn <affirmative> and build the expertise. And I would argue that the one thing you left off isn't, it isn't knowing what your audience needs or wants or isn't, just that it's the expertise that you build up over years of covering Yes. A place or a topic. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:47:59):
And the know for news, the know for I at a city council meeting and Oh, that's interesting. The commissioner doesn't want that sewer built, doesn't he own a store? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> right next door and Right. And then doing a, a, a, an investigative piece on it. That's right. You don't get that unless you actually go out and start doing reporting and go out in the field. And maybe that's doing reporting on something that's ostensibly pretty dull. I wish we had local reporters who were going to those things and looking for those stories. But if you're sensible and smart, you're probably not going into journalism anymore. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:48:35):
Gonzo journalism. Oh, yes,

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:36):
You are.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:48:37):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:38):
I'm sensible as professor. Smart. No, but Yeah. But you went into it years ago.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:48:42):
Oh. But Andrew does tell me that whenever someone tell, like when teenagers ask me about journalism, I'm like, don't

Leo Laporte (01:48:47):
Do that. Well, I say that about podcasting too, and radio and everything I've ever done. Oh, the local. But fortunately my kids didn't listen to me, so it's okay. The

Ant Pruitt (01:48:57):
Local what do you call 'em? They do strikes,

Leo Laporte (01:49:01):
Reporters.

Ant Pruitt (01:49:02):
Reporters. And Trellis.

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:04):
A local trellis. No,

Ant Pruitt (01:49:05):
Trellis. Why can't I think of

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
Words? Does it

Stacey Higginbotham (01:49:07):
Organizations word for everything. Papers,

Ant Pruitt (01:49:11):
Union. That's it. Yeah. Logs Union with press Democrat. And

Leo Laporte (01:49:15):
Are they unionized?

Ant Pruitt (01:49:16):
There's, there's something going on with

Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
Oh, they are planning to unionized. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (01:49:20):
And

Leo Laporte (01:49:21):
See, you know, that in some ways that's good

Ant Pruitt (01:49:23):
Pay contribution.

Leo Laporte (01:49:24):
Yeah. I mean, I

Ant Pruitt (01:49:25):
Want to do this work that you're talking about, but there hasn't been any pay in it. Right. You

Leo Laporte (01:49:30):
Know. No. It's five bucks a meeting.

Ant Pruitt (01:49:31):
There's been a there was some stat that was listed like two or three days ago that talked about how those folks on those staffs are not even really making a living. Right. Actually,

Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
I should point out <laugh> in Petaluma, the five bucks a meeting is what the city council members paid literally five bucks a meeting. Wow. So they do that, I guess cuz you know, they want to be famous or they wanna support the community. You can't expect people to try to make a living doing that. But, you know, I feel sorry for anybody getting started these days. You, I don't. With the price of housing and the, the low wages, I don't know how anybody survived. The

Ant Pruitt (01:50:06):
Guys in this economy, the being a journalist high school. Yeah, exactly. I love em. And, and they're younger guys, and I know they're busting their hump, but I feel bad for 'em from a financial statement. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:17):
Our 20 year old's working at a grocery store making 20 bucks an hour, but he can't, that wouldn't pay. He'd have to have three roommates and I mean

Ant Pruitt (01:50:24):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. That's the norm.

Leo Laporte (01:50:25):
Well, yeah. I guess I did when I was a kid. Did you see Davindra Hardwar? Who's, what did he do? He was putting into a South Park episode. Not a real one. Huh? Fake. Really? No, I have to say South Park is probably something an AI could do. <Laugh>. good call. This is, this is a I was thrust into an episode entirely produced by the showrunner AI model from the simulation, which is the next iteration of the VR studio Fable. You wanna see a little bit of Davindra? He said, all it took was some audio of my voice literally recorded during a call with the simulation, c e o a picture and a two sentence prompt to produce an entire South Park episode. And while it wasn't the best I've ever seen, I was shocked by how watchable it was. He writes,

Ant Pruitt (01:51:12):
That's all it takes,

Leo Laporte (01:51:13):
Steve. Yeah. You wanna see a, I think I can play this. I don't know. Is this, actually, that's a really interesting question. Does this violate Trey Parker's? So, here we are in This

Ant Pruitt (01:51:25):
Is fair use. We're

Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
Good. Oh, this is them actually doing it with the showrunner system. So they're choosing the South Park characters. The hero is Davindra. They're gonna have Randy and Sharon in it. It starts in the living room. And here's the prompt. Davindra, a tech journalist is going from door to door <laugh> to warn people of the coming AI Apocalypse <laugh>. Sharon is annoyed while Randy wants to learn more. And now we take you to South

Ant Pruitt (01:51:57):
Park

Leo Laporte (01:52:00):
Aco, APO, apocalypse Now, and Zen, they call

Ant Pruitt (01:52:02):
It. Okay.

Speaker 13 (01:52:06):
Hello. Anyone home? I've got some urgent news. Oh

Ant Pruitt (01:52:08):
Boy. It does sound. It's seven in

Speaker 13 (01:52:09):
The morning. This better be good. It's not just good. It's crucial. Did you know that artificial intelligence is taking over the world?

Speaker 14 (01:52:16):
Ai Huh? Like in those sci-fi movies?

Speaker 13 (01:52:18):
Exactly. Mr. Mr. Marsh. Part of we don't act

Leo Laporte (01:52:20):
Now though. Part of Cause South Park's animation and voices are intentionally kind of bad. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I mean, that's part of the aesthetic of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's actually's. Pretty much like South Park.

Speaker 13 (01:52:31):
Right. Roll everything.

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
I wish you could see the video for those. Be listening here. End the world, world Feel

Speaker 14 (01:52:36):
So davindra. How exactly do these robots plan to enslave

Speaker 13 (01:52:39):
Us? Well, they're infiltrating every aspect of our lives. They're in our phones. Our cars. Even our toasters.

Leo Laporte (01:52:45):
Our toasters. Really? I always knew that little

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:48):
Something.

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
Oh, geez. <Laugh>. It's just a step above Eliza. All right. All right. Nevermind. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:54):
It's as bad as the Seinfeld.

Leo Laporte (01:52:55):
Yeah. Well, but see, that's the thing. But this goes back to your point, Leo.

Ant Pruitt (01:52:59):
It's still watchable. This

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:00):
Is still a parlor trick.

Leo Laporte (01:53:01):
Yeah. It's, it's, but I have to say with the actors, yeah. Actors, the neat things and the writers out on strike, this may be the parlor trick we get. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I mean, this may be the future.

Ant Pruitt (01:53:13):
Yikes. I think we've said before, there's still time. This stuff can get better.

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
That's my question. My full question is, can it get better? I think think it can. That's why this Yes. Yes. You think so? You all, you all think it

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:25):
Will. Gosh, God, you sound like, who was it? Who was like learning? No one will ever need more than 50 megabytes of storage or

Ant Pruitt (01:53:32):
Whatever. There you go. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:34):
<Laugh>. That's who you sound like. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:53:35):
He wasn't far wrong. No, he was, wasn't. I, I feel like we've been here before with ai and it's, I think the most important thing we can do at this point is to see what it's, to use it for the things it's good at summarizing documents. We're using surprisingly large amount of AI now in our show production. Yes. For instance, this surprises me. There's an AI we use that goes through each show and picks out clips for highlights. And it, I mean, you're not gonna use 'em all, but it, it's narrows it down, does the edit, and then shows it to the editor. And I'm not sure how it knows that this is a highlight. Maybe people are jumping up and down or something. Voice

Ant Pruitt (01:54:13):
Inflection. It could be a

Leo Laporte (01:54:14):
Lot of different error. It does a good job. And Anthony's telling me it does a good job. And then we pick a handful of them, and that's what we use for our promotion. That's a huge amount of time saving. Yep. And if an AI can do that, that's great. So I do think it's, there are things it can do, and it's important to know what it can do, but it's also just as important to know some things. It's not gonna do well and may never do well. Like drive a car, <laugh>. And, and you really have to know where to, I mean, maybe that's a bad example, but you really have to know where to draw the line.

Ant Pruitt (01:54:45):
Do you still feel like the, that AI will fill the world with paperclips

Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
If we like? No, but it will fill the world with disinformation because of bad humans who are gonna set AI to that task and get ready. Because between now and November, 2024, we're gonna see it's coming. Disinformation, apocalyp. It's coming. Yeah. And I think everybody knows that. Even Bill Gates, who just wrote a, he does the Gates notes. He's, he's not actually disagreeing very much with what I've said. He's, here's here's his latest gates note. The risks of AI are real, but manageable. He compares AI to other breakthroughs. It

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:27):
Wasn't long ago he was starting to decree apocalypse, though.

Leo Laporte (01:55:31):
Really? Well, he's backed down. Yeah. I

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:33):
Forget. I found another one there. But yeah. Fine.

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
He says it's not the first time a major innovation has introduced new threats to be controlled. We've done it before, whether it was the introduction of cars, the rise of personal computers in the internet. People have managed through other transformative moments and have, have, despite a lot of turbulence come out better off in the end. He says deep fakes and mi, he, he says, I've been thinking about the longer term risks. And he says they should not come at the expense of the more immediate ones. And these are the more immediate risks. Deep fakes and misinformation generated by AI could undermine elections and democracy. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. He says, to some degree he thinks AI can solve that. Two things make me guardedly optimistic. One is that people are capable of learning not to take everything at face value. We've had to do that.

(01:56:25):
Right. Let's, and that's a good skill. We gotta, we just gotta keep raising awareness on that. Just say, Hey, that's clearly bs. He says, people, you know, for years people fell for scams with somebody posing as a Nigerian prince. But we've learned we need to build the same muscles for deep fakes. The other thing that makes me hopeful is that, and I think you may be wrong on this, AI can help identify deep fakes as well as create them. We're starting to learn that AI is not great at finding their ai. No, of course not. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:56:53):
The, the, the Declaration of Independence is often found as fake, is one of the stories in the, in the rundown. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:56:59):
Ai, he also says, and, and these are the intermediate short term issues, makes it easier to launch a tax on people in governments. Yeah. He's you know, it's the same kind of, well, maybe AI can solve that one. AI will take away people's jobs. And you've talked about this, Jeff, and I think you're right. All new technologies do, but they don't take 'em away without adding new jobs. Is that right? Ai, that's a rough

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:23):
Period transition for people. Yes. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:57:25):
Yeah. Which is not to downplay the fact that coal miners Right. Are, you know, gonna have a hard time going forward. That's absolutely true. There's

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:31):
Not many of them actually left, left,

Leo Laporte (01:57:33):
So left. Well, that's end as a right. Ai, and this is a good one. This is the, the stochastic parrots issue. AI inherits our biases and makes things up. Short term issue. He has, there's nothing really genius in any of this. Here's one you might care about. Students won't learn to write because AI will do the work for them.

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:59):
So the aforementioned Matthew, Matthew, just the Modern Language Association just put out guidelines for this. And, and they emphasized Matthew Kirshenbaum was on the committee that did that. I was almost gonna put it in the rundown, but I thought I would get hooted down for such a thing. So but it says that writing is a process, not just a product. And that a lot of teaching about it is to get Sure. Do that. So there are useful things to do. Sure. Faculty need support and learning this. They're not against using it, but we don't use it in the obvious ways.

Leo Laporte (01:58:33):
Well, and as Dr. Dew, d e w is saying, in our discord, people said students wouldn't learn maths cuz of calculators. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:42):
Amen. Dr. Doe, Dr. Doe.

Leo Laporte (01:58:44):
And I guess to some degree they don't learn the basics arithmetic, but they certainly still,

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:48):
Well, my argument has been that, that that what AI can do, one of the things I'm enthusiastic about is to extend literacy. So that if you want help telling your story and that it's your story, so you're gonna care to get it right, you're really gonna edit it. But you need to get over a hump of, of communication. People are intimidated by rating.

Leo Laporte (01:59:06):
Yeah. So what does Bill Gates say we have to do? He says, I believe there are more reasons than not to be optimistic, that we can manage the risks of AI while maximizing their benefits. But we need to move fast. Governments need to build up expertise in AI so they can make informed laws and regulations. Political leaders need to be

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:26):
Equipped, which, let me stay there for a second of good Leo. Yeah. Really interesting. One thing I put in the rundown is, is, is it my senator, the senator from New York, the, the Senator Trellis

Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
Chuck Schumer.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:41):
Chuck Schumer. Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (01:59:45):
This before the show

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:46):
Began, it's gonna be my, I

Leo Laporte (01:59:47):
Was mentioning that I was, oh, sorry.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:49):
It was before the show. It was this

Leo Laporte (01:59:51):
Morning. No, it's a good running joke. But let me explain how it started. I was mentioning that I played Jeopardy with the Amazon Echo every morning. And the, and the final Jeopardy was name a crisscross, it was in the category gardens or something. Name a cri. Oh no. The category was words with two wells. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:09):
Wells

Leo Laporte (02:00:09):
Right name. A crisscross lattice work that is used to prop up plants in the garden. And I know I knew what that was, but I could not come up with the word trellis. And eh, you came

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:23):
Up with, so now trellis is the fill in word when you can't come

Leo Laporte (02:00:25):
Up with this. So now, whenever we can't think of something, you'll, you'll now know that's so, so

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:28):
Senator Trellis is going to basically hold courses on ai, which is a really smart, rather than starting with hearings, we gotta, we gotta control all this stuff. He's acknowledging that they have to learn about it. Good. Which I think is wonderful. Good. You mean who he's holding courses? Who's it?

Leo Laporte (02:00:46):
Who's for senator? For other senators? Who's,

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:48):
Who's running the courses?

Leo Laporte (02:00:49):
Well, that's a good question. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:50):
That's a good question. An

Leo Laporte (02:00:53):
That's cause of the smart, but you can call

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:55):
Me. I'd

Leo Laporte (02:00:57):
Like to tell you about ai <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:59):
And smoking. Hi. Hi. I'm Sam Altman. I'm gonna destroy the world if you don't stop me. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
Hi. Aye. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:01:05):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
Well, we agree. Governments lean to build the expertise. And I think Chuck Trellis is right. Political leaders will need to be equipped to have informed, thoughtful dialogue with their constituents. Oh, isn't that an a thought?

Jeff Jarvis (02:01:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:20):
They'll also have to decide how much to collaborate with other countries on these issues versus going alone, bill, right. On that. In the private sector, AI companies need to pursue their work safely and responsibility, protect privacy, make sure the models reflect basic human values, minimize bias, spread the benefits to as many people as possible, prevent technology from being used by criminals or terrorists. Yeah, that's fair. Finally, I encourage everyone, you all to follow developments in AI as much as possible. It's the most transformative innovation any of us will see in our lifetimes. So that answers the question of whether it's a parlor trick. He says no. And a healthy public debate will depend on everyone. Of course. He says, no, he's a whole lot of

Jeff Jarvis (02:02:04):
Stock. He doesn't have the company that's investing heavily in this AI stock. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:02:08):
Yeah. But, okay. And a healthy public debate will depend on everyone being knowledgeable. But at the technology, it's benefits and its risks, the benefits will be massive. And the best reason to believe we can manage the risks is that we have done it before. He liked Clara in the Sun. If that's any help.

Ant Pruitt (02:02:25):
Good book. Book. Good book. Good

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
Book. Good book. That was a good book. By the way we are, Jeff, you and Jason Howell are working on a new AI show where this will be one of the things that we'll talk about. Love

Ant Pruitt (02:02:37):
That photo,

Leo Laporte (02:02:38):
By the way. Nice picture. Did you take that? It is

Ant Pruitt (02:02:40):
Nice picture. I think you did, Jason. Yes, I did. I think

Leo Laporte (02:02:42):
You did. <Laugh> Jason's AI playground. I, I I think we weren't able to get you scheduled in for that, cuz of your travel. I,

Jeff Jarvis (02:02:49):
No. Cause I've just, the way it worked out when it was scheduled, I already had stuff jammed in.

Leo Laporte (02:02:53):
Okay. But we do wanna get you in that conversation cause I want you to, you wanna host that show. Well

Jeff Jarvis (02:02:57):
After the show next, after the show next week when I'm there, I think Jason and I are gonna do something

Leo Laporte (02:03:01):
Good. Okay. So to, if you are in, in the club and you want to input tomorrow at 1:00 PM Jason's, they call it, he's calling it the AI playground cuz it's not the show yet. It's just a conversation about what that show can and will be, which I think is really important. And you know what, I think what Bill Gates says is probably as good a charter as anything for people.

Ant Pruitt (02:03:25):
Yeah. Nobody beef with that.

Leo Laporte (02:03:26):
Yeah. To prepare for the, the future. Are there any other AI stories in our this week in ai? No,

Jeff Jarvis (02:03:34):
Not really.

Leo Laporte (02:03:34):
Hollywood, you know, the real, the fight in the Writers Guild and the actors is about a lot of things. The mini rooms and stuff. But there is this AI component. Writers are worried about it. Actors are worried about it. Studios who have proven themselves to be rapacious capitalists are, you know, clearly gonna look to whatever they can do to make this stuff cheaper. And

Ant Pruitt (02:03:58):
That means, I thought about that because I thought about Shonda Ryans and just how big she, shes been in the black community and the, the level of, she's

Leo Laporte (02:04:07):
A showrunner for Abbott Element. What are the

Ant Pruitt (02:04:09):
Shows? No, she she, Abbott a scandal. AB

Leo Laporte (02:04:11):
Scandal. That's right.

Ant Pruitt (02:04:12):
And Grey's Anatomy, you know murder Something. Murder. Mainstream. Mainstream. Then she went to Netflix and I believe the deal was damn near a hundred million dollars for Bridgeton. Yeah. And Queen Charlotte. And I mean, she's really good at what she does. Does, it's fortunate that now she's like, Hey, wait a minute. Hey, I can't come in here and do this.

Leo Laporte (02:04:36):
She's worth a quarter of a billion. So I'm trying, you know, steps up and says I want to protect the low paid writers and actors. Yeah. even though I've made, you know, she was, she started a writer. I'm sure. So yeah. She was an unemployed script writer in Hollywood who had to work as an office administrator, a counselor at a job center. But she, she worked her way up in, she did work in Hollywood work. Yeah, she did. She did the work. Yeah. Princess Diaries, what you worked on, she

Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:06):
Has made people who bet on her bank <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:05:08):
Yeah. Yeah. How To Get Away With Murder. That's the one. Yeah, that's the one you were talking about. I just saw something she did that I thought was really good, but I can't remember what the name of it was. Yeah. I can only think of the Bridgeton and Charlotte. Yeah. All the Netflix stuff she, anatomy she'd been doing is great. Yeah. And Scandal. Oh, inventing Anna. I loved it. Oh yeah. That was her too. Yeah, that's right. Was So Good's really good. That was the Anna Delvy story. Oh, she did Grey's Anatomy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said that.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:37):
Or she was this <laugh>. Oh, I'm

Leo Laporte (02:05:39):
Sorry. So she's supporting, I'm glad to hear that she, cuz she's, you know, a producer now. She didn't made her night, you know, but she's supporting the writers and the actors good for her. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> good for her. As am I, because even though I've made mine nut mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. You have mm-hmm. <Affirmative> <laugh> <laugh> in my dreams oh. This, well, this is another AI story that scares the hell outta me. This is from Forbes. That was, that was a waffle side, deep side. Okay. Okay. Real quick. Turns out they're putting in cameras everywhere. Right. The police, well, for instance in Westchester County, up by where you live near the fancy people, the police have put in cameras on the roads and cameras in the police cars. 434 stationary cameras, 46 mobile cameras and police cars scanning license plates, and building a database of travel of people moving around.

(02:06:46):
They used this recently to bust a drug traveler. It worked searching through a database of 1.6 billion license placed, records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State. The AI determined this guy's car was on a, was typical truck trafficker driving. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, he was going short stops in a bunch of places. He made nine trips from Massachusetts to different parts of New York following route to be known to you be used by narcotic butchers. That's the key. Is very specific. Yeah. And for conspicuously short stays. So Westchester PD pulled him over, searched his car, fa he was in fact a drug trafficker they found. But the question there was, there was there, was there probable cause to do so? Well, yeah. Wait, randomly do it. They found 112 grams of crack, a semi-automatic pistol. $34,000 in cash. Yeah. Whatever they

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:41):
Found. Did they have cause to pull him

Leo Laporte (02:07:43):
Over a year later he pled guilty to drug trafficking. But his lawyer has now said, having found out about this system, the license, the automatic license plate recognition system, his lawyers said this is the specter of modern surveillance that the Fourth Amendment must guard against. This is a systematic development and deployment of a vast surveillance network that invades society's reasonable expectation of privacy with no judicial oversight. This type of system operates at the caprice of every author with access to it. So we didn't know about this case. He pled guilty pled out. But I think you're exactly right. Who, who, who says this data should be gathered. How, I mean,

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:32):
Colombo can sit there and look and see the pattern of how people mm-hmm. <Affirmative> okay. New crimes and Colombo can then use that.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:08:39):
But this has been an issue for years. And the issue there, there's two big issues. One, there's, how do police, how are the police and law enforcement using this data? Right. So are they using it? Is it stored forever, for example, because it is unequivocable that this data can be used to track people at a personal level and monitor where they go. The same way your geolocation data can be used to monitor you Yep. From your phone. Right. So if you're driving, if you're not a driver,

Leo Laporte (02:09:12):
Which is another issue, that information is widely collected and sold on not only to law enforcement. Right. So they don't have to do a warrant, but to foreign governments like China.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:09:23):
Well, so the other issue, and this is a little bit more so a do what kind of due process things are there around this data and data collection for police officers. The second issue is you're seeing things like HOAs. Like ho what, what does HOAs stand for? Home, you

Leo Laporte (02:09:39):
Know. Oh, the homeowners association. Homeowner. H oas.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:09:42):
Yeah. Homeowners association. They're actually doing this and they're using it. These are just normal citizens who are deploying this. And then the president of the HU uses this data to track all

Leo Laporte (02:09:51):
Kinds of things. I have a friend, I didn't know that, oh God. I have a friend Yeah. Who was constantly getting notes on her door. You're parking and then around me you're parking, you sh this car has been parked here for more than 24 hours. I mean, that was just some busy body watching. Yeah. But imagine if you automate that lot was Kravitz. It was, yeah. It was Kravitz. So there's, there are a number of companies doing this. The one that the Westchester PD uses is reco. R E K O R. Reor has sold its a L P R tech to at least 23 police departments and local governments across America. And they, they're, they say the benefit of our system is you can use your already installed cameras <laugh> the problem. So you don't have to install any special cameras. And I remember about two years ago, the City of Petaluma installed cameras and all the poles. Yeah. All around town. Not speeding cameras. I'm thinking they're probably recording the license plates now. It's great. They caught this crack dealer.

Ant Pruitt (02:10:46):
That's what I was gonna say. I'm, I'm fine that this, this offender was caught because they were in the wrong, but my problem is when they went to pull them over, what was the reasoning? I mean, was he speeding?

Leo Laporte (02:10:59):
No, that's the thing. We, we've

Ant Pruitt (02:11:01):
Seen your, he's not speeding. So he is not breaking that law.

Leo Laporte (02:11:04):
That's exactly what Jeff was saying. Is there probable cause? Well, that's a interesting question for the courts. The other issue is

Ant Pruitt (02:11:10):
Because what if it was someone that borrowed my car doing all of that stuff. Right. And I happened to be driving.

Leo Laporte (02:11:15):
Well, also something that's illegal in some states may not be illegal in this state. For instance, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office in Sacramento, California, where abortion is not illegal, was sharing license plate readers data with states that have banned abortion. Presumably trying to track people visiting abortion clinics in California from states where it's illegal. And there are legislators all over the country now that are trying to use this information to prosecute people in their state who have gone to other states for abortions. This is

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:47):
A big issue. And ICE and Border Customs and Border Control also use it to track immigrants. So like I, I stuck a link in there about my state and talking about what it can and can't do with this and the concerns. But no, this has been a real, like, electronic Frontier Foundation has been really active on this front for probably before the pandemic. But I'm glad Yeah. This isn't really an AI story as much as it's Well,

Leo Laporte (02:12:13):
It is because, well, they've got this data and now they're using AI to look at this data and look for patterns. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's where it really becomes even more problematic. It's one thing if Colombo is looking at it, I, Shadish cars been going through the, that's one thing. It's another thing if a machine with all untold biases is looking at this data and saying, you know, well, there's not a lot of bias around license that's continental. And I know that people of color tend to drive that car, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I think that adds three points to the likelihood that they're selling crack and that kind of thing. Mm-Hmm.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:48):
Well, no, they're, they're, they're not using it quite that.

Leo Laporte (02:12:51):
Oh yes, they are. Read the article. They're

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:54):
Using it to using it to profile because to profile based on the car they using it. Cause they understand that this

Leo Laporte (02:13:00):
License reports not No, it records license plate. No plate. It records not only the license plate but the make model and color of the car. You gotta presume they're recording that because the AO wants to use it. They say it's because Oh, what if people change their license plate? But I don't think that's the only thing they're checking. No.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:19):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
Anyway, anyway. That's a good question. If you were a reporter, you might wanna ask them that question. <Laugh> go down to the Westchester County sheriff's office and say, dude, <laugh>, why do you need to know if it's a rambler?

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:35):
Say that word. Dude. Dude. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:13:39):
All right. Quickly change log because

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:42):
Do we have to there Google nothing Here. Change log Mr. House one in history. We do.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:50):
This is, this is the Google show. We spend an hour talking about ai. We gotta talk about

Leo Laporte (02:13:54):
Google Show. Google Check. Google launches nearby. Share for Windows in partnering to pre-install Google confirms related search operator is going away. Oh, that's too bad. I like the related search

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:04):
Operator. Oh, that's a, it, it said that the the, the, the results weren't very good. Danny Sullivan Is that Danny

Leo Laporte (02:14:09):
Sullivan, our good friend Danny Sullivan, who now used to be search engine land now works at Google. What is the search? Danny said it hasn't really worked well for some time, as in some cases the information was dated, the related search operator allowed you to type in the Google search box and Google return related websites to that url. Oh, so you'd actually type in a URL and then would give you some other URLs that are related. Oh, okay.

(02:14:39):
Hmm. Anyway, not gonna be, not gonna be around if you use it, Google is testing AI generated meet video backgrounds. I'll be using those cuz we have our Google meets. I like that. This is actually a little interesting. Google's BART is now going to respond to visual prompts. But companies like Google are very concerned about using this for face recognition. If you feed it a face, are we gonna have a little, are we gonna have a problem? Ooh, yeah. Are we gonna have a problem here? Safeguards. Yep. Safeguards. and Google is deleting some old Hangouts photos this week. So get your photos. Google takeout. Yeah. They better not delete that photo of you sitting out in the parking lot. <Laugh>, join it.

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:24):
Don't worry. It'll be refreshed

Leo Laporte (02:15:25):
Next week. <Laugh> <laugh>. And that's your Google change log coming up next. It's gonna be picks and tips and numbers and all that stuff as we wrap up this edition of this week in Google. Stacey Higginbotham, do you have a thing of the week to wrap it up this week?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:48):
I don't have a thing, but I have a pick

Leo Laporte (02:15:51):
Better yet

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:52):
Because Yeah. You know, with summer I've been reading. So this, I actually pitched this as, it's not the ones that we're

Leo Laporte (02:16:00):
Picked reading. Oh

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:02):
Yeah, yeah. It's not the ones we chose for the book club, but I just finally finished the whole series and it's, it's really good, y'all. It's kind of a banger of a series. So this, this series is, it's by Adrian Chaikovsky and it is the, they call it the architecture series. And the first book is called Shards of Earth. And

Leo Laporte (02:16:25):
It's sci-fi I take it.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:26):
It's, it's a sci-fi space opera. I mean, it's summer. What are you gonna read on the beach? Right. You know, I'm not gonna read about the British influencing our speech. You're gonna read a Space Opera.

Leo Laporte (02:16:40):
Shards of the Earth, eyes of the Void, Lords of Uncreation. The final architecture series.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:48):
It was a, it was a fun kind of, I mean I guess it's longish if you'd like it, but I, I liked it. Good Space opera.

Leo Laporte (02:16:57):
Kind of a novel concept of the it's heroes forgotten until One Chance Discovery. Iris Elba. Anyway, Iris Elba has never aged <laugh> No slept since they remade him in the war.

Ant Pruitt (02:17:14):
It's not Elba,

Leo Laporte (02:17:15):
Not Elba. Could be Elba. It's Elba. You know what I have to say, if I were reading this book, I'd see Iris Elba. Yeah, I would.

Ant Pruitt (02:17:22):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:17:23):
Well no, cuz they totally describe him as this like totally put upon like Jughead person. Oh. And I probably would not classify

Leo Laporte (02:17:30):
You. No, this looks good actually. Just this excerpt. It's looks really good. I

Ant Pruitt (02:17:34):
Will confess Ms. Stacy, that was my vote initially. Oh. But then I said no. Oh, look at you. But I said no, she's been mentioning and likey several times, so.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:17:45):
Oh, I feel my, do you you like space operas?

Ant Pruitt (02:17:48):
I, I didn't care. I was just gonna give it a shot <laugh>. I was just gonna give it a shot that's all. Like Yeah. This

Stacey Higginbotham (02:17:54):
Seems ing. I love, I love you Ant for giving it a shot. I think the people have more normal names than this one.

Leo Laporte (02:18:01):
Oh, is the names part of what's what you're struggling with? And

Ant Pruitt (02:18:04):
Most of the, most of the sci-fi stuff is the names and all of the other terminology that normal folks like must

Leo Laporte (02:18:10):
Use, you should read, use should read. I see sci-fi. I started reading Hyperion, which is widely considered to be a brilliant sci-fi novel. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it's, it's like this is all made up

Ant Pruitt (02:18:21):
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:22):
It came to me. This is all made up. Yeah. And I thought, I am not in the mood for made up stuff right now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So I started reading the longest biography in history. I think it is 1,246 pages long. Son of them. I was telling Jeff, I was telling you about this. Whose

Stacey Higginbotham (02:18:40):
Life is this?

Leo Laporte (02:18:41):
A guy you never heard of? Robert Moses.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:18:44):
Okay. I've heard Robert Moses

Ant Pruitt (02:18:46):
And love this book.

Leo Laporte (02:18:48):
I have I have Oh

Stacey Higginbotham (02:18:49):
The power

Leo Laporte (02:18:50):
Broker. It's called the Power Broker. And it Paul Surprise winners. My Godbody course Robert Carro. And it is considered by many to be the best biography of all time. Really? It is great. Yeah, because I grew up in New York. So this is the guy who built the Cross Bronx Expressway Riverside Park. He turned Long Island into a park for the poor tenement dwellers of New York City. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But he did it <laugh> by raising homes, cutting right through neighborhoods. Destroy. I mean that's, it's a fascinating, I know that name now story. Yeah. And I have to say I really am enjoying it. It's better than I thought maybe because I know that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know the history. I know that area. I don't actually know the history. So that's the thing. I'm learning the history of an area that I I know pretty well. He he he built 27 billion worth of public works.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:41):
Every senator and lobbyist, everybody in Washington DC has that book on their shelves.

Leo Laporte (02:19:47):
Yeah. Cuz he, they haven't

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:48):
All read

Leo Laporte (02:19:49):
It. He knew how to do it. Well it is quite a read. It's 65 hours on Audible.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:56):
Oh

Leo Laporte (02:19:56):
No, I'm only about a third of the way in, but which is the equivalent of like reading three normal books. But it's really good. Wow. It's so good. Or

Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:04):
One or two sci-fi books. Two Robert Gordon.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
Yeah. This is like reading the whole, the whole Nutcracker series or the architecture series or whatever you call it. So the

Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:13):
Nutcracker

Ant Pruitt (02:20:14):
Series. <Laugh> it's Cracker series. I just caught that

Leo Laporte (02:20:18):
Jeff actually that's not my pick. I did wanna mention real quickly my pick, which is W i b y me slash surprise. The reason I say that is you, you have to click the link and every time you do you'll get a website that's still around that's firmly from the early 1990s. <Laugh> a very fun 1.1 web 1.0 website. So I'm gonna click the link right now and I will get a random surprise. Look it everything you'd ever wanna know about arrowheads. Oh my gosh. <Laugh>. Oh my. But every time it's different. So that's a good one. Lemme click it again, see what else we get. I clicked it and it's overviews of plugs and sockets. <Laugh> actually. Wow. I've literally been to this, the Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets website.

Ant Pruitt (02:21:16):
I like how it says right as it loads. You

Leo Laporte (02:21:19):
Asked for it. You asked for it. <Laugh> w y.me/surprise. It's a lot of fun. It is because <laugh>

Ant Pruitt (02:21:28):
Okay, this is good.

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
There's just some really bad websites out there. <Laugh>. This is good. But all our websites looked like this in the Sure did in the early days. Sure did. So this

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:39):
Is, this is, yeah, I built a, I built a website in 1998. I wish I were still around. It was amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:21:45):
Did you do it with MySpace? Tell the truth.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:48):
No, geo City did I do it with Angel Fire?

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
Angel

Ant Pruitt (02:21:50):
Fire? Geo Cities.

Leo Laporte (02:21:51):
Cities. I think Geo

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:54):
City. Oh, actually no, we coded it in HTML for my journalism class.

Leo Laporte (02:21:57):
Oh, cool. By hand. Because we

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:59):
Had to, we had to

Ant Pruitt (02:22:00):
Do it by hand at first

Stacey Higginbotham (02:22:01):
Too. It was a bespoke artisanal

Leo Laporte (02:22:04):
All the tag. We, we will, it's always fun to see what you can get This simplicity Boats a free boat building. You know what, this is what's kind of fun about this. At first you go, oh, these are so bad. These are all kind of built by more innocent times. They're innocent normal people. Here's a variety of varieties of goldfish in Japan. The Japanese goldfish catalog.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:29):
Hi, this is Benito. This is the stuff that Google killed.

Leo Laporte (02:22:32):
Google killed this stuff because they, this is stuff that Google killed. They said this is not, this is not authoritative. Right. Be careful what you get cuz I'm, I'm not quite sure what the heck this is. Oh, my screen. I want that site. I don't know what it is. A camera. There's a guy in a bathtub and there's a woman in a nightgown and, and, and she's just thinking, why is this guy in a bathtub? I think, I don't know what's going on. What the heck happened there? That's a great site though. Don't click whatever you do. I just, I don't know what that is. I mean, he's got a rope and what the, oh, there's a, I didn't see the rope. That's what the hell's going on here. Boy. Good old internet. Meanwhile I'm at myth and fantasy.com where unicorn folds prance through the fresh green grasses is Let's try more.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:22):
Right. Stacy's hungry. All

Leo Laporte (02:23:23):
Right. All right, all right. All right. Jeff Jarvis number <laugh>. You blamed it

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:27):
On Stacy. I'm using you. I'm using you Stacy.

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
He's tired. I'll, I'll be used

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:32):
In this case. That's fine. I thought so. I thought it would be in, in your interest. So I'm gonna go up the, up up the, the rundown here to the fact that Vox mentioned earlier which made a big deal of building its own cms.

Leo Laporte (02:23:47):
Oh, this is an interesting story. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:49):
It's got rid of the CMS and it's going to, what's it going to

Leo Laporte (02:23:52):
Wordpress Word Press, the vip.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:54):
And I, I did a, a thread where I went through, I, I installed my first editorial system with the Chicago Tribune, this old folks in 1974. And everybody thought they had to have their own special system with their own special

Leo Laporte (02:24:05):
Well, and that was their secret sauce.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:07):
Exactly. Cuz they thought too much of their value was in their content. And whether you have to manage a system to manage this content rather than they were making paragraphs. That's all they were doing. And so, again, I got into fights with this in San Francisco. I got, I ate the fights between the s I I system and the Atex system were horrendous when I started. Ew. I left all of them behind and my wife set up our Macintosh network and we, we left behind all of that computer junk. And it was, Macintosh became the standard until it came along the internet. And we all needed our special content management systems. Cause we're gonna do special things on the internet. And, and you know, Vox, Trey rre who ran product at Vox was brilliant and then Sure was a great system. And then Washington Post has its own special system and everybody built their own damn systems. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:24:52):
Worse than that box was licensing it. They were Oh yes they were. Our system is so good. Good. As

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:58):
Is the Washington Post. You,

Leo Laporte (02:24:59):
You buy it and use it for your We use Drupal for our content management system, which is an old cms, but we keep it up to date. But WordPress now is al almost half of all the internet. It's really started. Yeah. It's remarkable to win it all. So have you.

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:13):
So God bless Matt Mullenweg and the, and the open source model.

Leo Laporte (02:25:16):
He's been on the show one the day. I love him. Yep. And so that's wild. They must have spent millions on Chorus was their proprietary content management system. Maybe they made the millions back with licensing. I don't know. They,

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:30):
They made something, you know that and they, they, they did update the paper a lot. It was Bezos putting technology in where they updated it a lot and they did build some other things like ad systems. And they're now gonna bundle that stuff to big clients with

Leo Laporte (02:25:42):
Wordpress. They still have an ad system. So Yeah. And by the way, kudos cuz this is a scoop for Sarah Fisher and Carrie Flynn at ads. He's a great reporter. Yeah. So good. Good job. Fisher and Flynn. Nice. Vox Media, after all this time drops it's custom content management system at Pruitt. You, it is up to you to redeem our picks of the week. <Laugh>.

Ant Pruitt (02:26:06):
I think I've already done this before, but I've, I'd said, let me try just to be sure. My pick the week is,

Leo Laporte (02:26:14):
Ooh, that's pretty, what is that? This, you know, I'm mean bags.

Ant Pruitt (02:26:17):
This is, I'm the same way. Yep. Pete Designs camera cube, but I'm using it as a pouch because I just wanted to pack light some days when I come to the studio. That's your light pack. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:31):
That pouch, that's your five lenses. There's, there's

Ant Pruitt (02:26:33):
My camera that's

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
Bigger than my biggest purse.

Ant Pruitt (02:26:36):
My camera's in here. Some tools, some vitamins. My glasses. That's

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:41):
An kin bag.

Ant Pruitt (02:26:42):
Headphones. Dude.

Leo Laporte (02:26:44):
There's something about big guys. Diaper bag was smaller than that. Like to carry big bags.

Ant Pruitt (02:26:48):
Its, but this is

Leo Laporte (02:26:50):
Small. Used to carry the biggest backpack.

Ant Pruitt (02:26:52):
Right. This is way smaller than my backpack.

Leo Laporte (02:26:54):
Okay. You're right. It's way

Ant Pruitt (02:26:55):
Smaller than my backpack. It's all relative. But I I I really love their little camera cube system. It has a little

Leo Laporte (02:27:00):
Sense. They make it small and medium and a large, so you can, that's a medium it looks like, right?

Ant Pruitt (02:27:06):
Yeah. This one is the medium. Yeah. And then I just stuck a camera strap on it because you can use it with the strap.

Leo Laporte (02:27:12):
Oh, so this isn't really a backpack, it's just a

Ant Pruitt (02:27:14):
Cube? No, it's a cube. Oh, it's cube. But you can use it however you want. And for me, this works as a nice little pouch to carry some stuff around. If I want to go a little bit lighter and I could take some stuff out. I just packed it full just as an example. But cuz I mean I don't really need this in here right now or my microphone in here or you know, I don't really need all of that. But I got plenty of stuff in there and it's, it's,

Leo Laporte (02:27:38):
And I should point out you also carry a capture with you at all times. Oh yeah. <Laugh>. So it's, it's probably relative, right? That cube isn't all that large whose ain't getting ready for the show out in the front of it. You

Ant Pruitt (02:27:51):
Hate on my chair office that chair is is, is is where it's at. You gotta have

Leo Laporte (02:27:55):
Chair. Do you drive around with that? You always have it. Yeah. That's

Ant Pruitt (02:27:57):
Always in the trunk of my car.

Leo Laporte (02:27:58):
You don't do the thing where you come out with one hand and go,

Ant Pruitt (02:28:01):
I

Leo Laporte (02:28:02):
Have <laugh>. I have think that was Matthew McConnell. Have

Ant Pruitt (02:28:06):
You not

Leo Laporte (02:28:07):
Famously did that with his camp chair? Have you not? I have not, but no,

Ant Pruitt (02:28:12):
That's this, that's just peak design. I love Peak Design.

Leo Laporte (02:28:14):
I love, I you know what, I love them. They used to be a sponsor. I'd love to get 'em back on. But all my hey

Ant Pruitt (02:28:19):
Peak design my gear. Come on

Leo Laporte (02:28:20):
Back. Come on back. All my gear. Peak design. In fact, I just, I bought I just bought and I'm waiting for their latest Kickstarter, which is a you know, a little handle that goes under on your camera.

Ant Pruitt (02:28:31):
Yeah. they, they work with the Gimbals too. I wanna say. They didn't, they do something with the

Leo Laporte (02:28:36):
Gimbal. They might, they have this you know, thing that they this set that, let me, lemme just,

Ant Pruitt (02:28:42):
I'm, I'm drawing a blank now. I can't remember Squat today. It's been that kind of

Leo Laporte (02:28:45):
Trellis. Just call it all a trellis trellis. It's, it's a trellis Peak design trellis. It's quite famous. Let's see, this is what the capture cl clip. This is what I got. The micro clutch.

Ant Pruitt (02:28:56):
Yeah, that's the last thing I remember seeing. Yeah. I have, I have their clutch and I love their clutch.

Leo Laporte (02:29:00):
Actually. I'm waiting for it and I always, I don't

Ant Pruitt (02:29:02):
Want to micro cuz

Leo Laporte (02:29:02):
This is, I always do this. I pledged and I keep forgetting that I'm gonna have to get an email where I fill in the surveyor. I'm not gonna get it. Oh, I always forget that. Come on man. Come on man.

Ant Pruitt (02:29:12):
Gotta do better. But yeah, that's, that's my pick. And then my last one, I wanted to throw this out here cuz it's just been an interesting day for me for whatever reason. And I know this is first world problem, so I won't get into all the details, but I had to have a reboot this afternoon and this road titled by Mr. Yellowgold himself. Our very own Jason Howell. Such a great song. Go check it out. Oh, you kidding on kidding

Leo Laporte (02:29:38):
On Spotify? No, that's the name of the album. Is there a song that you

Ant Pruitt (02:29:41):
Yeah, dis Road. It's the song

Leo Laporte (02:29:42):
Dis Road. Oh, that's the name of the song? Mm-Hmm. Okay. Jason. Oh, I have to sign up to, oh

Ant Pruitt (02:29:48):
Well.

Leo Laporte (02:29:49):
Oh, wait a minute. I have a, I have a Spotify account account.

Ant Pruitt (02:29:51):
At least we know. Wait minute. He won't take us down on you. Youtube.

Leo Laporte (02:29:53):
Wait a minute. I have a Spotify account. Hold on there. I don't pay for it. Oh, incorrect. Username or password? I'm

Ant Pruitt (02:29:59):
Struggling.

Leo Laporte (02:30:00):
Uhoh. I'm in trouble here. Here we go. Let me play a little, yeah, little this road as we wind up this edition of our show. This is Jason on all the Instruments too, right? Yes. Very nice. Yellow Gold. It's the name of his band. Jason. So talented. Very talented. I don't know what he's a friend Jason doing, working for me. But anyway,

Ant Pruitt (02:30:21):
Just, just a good song to just sit back and

Leo Laporte (02:30:25):
That's you singing Jason. I love it. Leo,

Ant Pruitt (02:30:29):
Have you never heard

Leo Laporte (02:30:30):
Jason before? <Laugh>? That's good. I like it. Well, freaking out. Yellow Gold. This Road on the Fever Dreamer album. Our big hit this week,

Ant Pruitt (02:30:44):
Wasn't it?

Leo Laporte (02:30:47):
Once upon a time there was a guy named Jason Howell. Six foot four and a bundle of fuck.

Ant Pruitt (02:30:54):
See, you feel better already.

Leo Laporte (02:30:56):
I do.

Ant Pruitt (02:30:56):
I I just,

Leo Laporte (02:30:57):
I it's summertime. So Ant Pruitt catch him. Well here every week of course as one of the hosts of this week in Google and he is also our community manager for the club. Get on in there and join the club. If you're not, I remember seven bucks a month. Get you ant and add free versions of all our shows. Access, disco

Ant Pruitt (02:31:16):
Discord, this

Leo Laporte (02:31:17):
Content, all the bonus content we do, including shows we don't put out anywhere else, including the AI show when it starts coming out. That's gonna be club only and you'll know it does a very important thing, which is support this wonderful team we've put together

Ant Pruitt (02:31:30):
Here. That's right

Leo Laporte (02:31:31):
At at the TWIT Studios.

Ant Pruitt (02:31:33):
That's right. Sign up, join the Discord and hop into the upcoming photo critique, live photo critique that's coming up. Have some fun? Yeah. August 4th, take pictures of something that says Coffee Time to you. Okay, I'll do that

Leo Laporte (02:31:47):
Easy. And TWIT TV slash club twit is the

Ant Pruitt (02:31:50):
Address. That's right.

Leo Laporte (02:31:51):
Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen. Jeff Jarvis is the director of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. I gotta that out. Graduate school just gives him a plug of journalism at the city university. I gotta, but more importantly, he is going to be speaking at the Fabulous Commonwealth Club. And if you go to bi, do ly slash here Jeff, h e a r j e f f. You can, and you used the

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:19):
Code.

Leo Laporte (02:32:20):
Oh, what's the, the Code Jar

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:21):
CWC for $10

Leo Laporte (02:32:22):
Off. Jeff is gonna be talking about his latest book, the Gutenberg parenthesis. The title of the talk is the Age of Print and the Internet. Please, if you're in the Bay Area, come see Jeff. July 25th, 6:00 PM Pacific. That's this coming Tuesday. If you're not in the Bay Area, you can do it online as well. And with that code it'll cost you nothing. What's the code again?

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:46):
Jeff Jarvis Cwc

Leo Laporte (02:32:49):
Jarvis Cwc

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:52):
Cwc Commonwealth

Leo Laporte (02:32:53):
Club Commonwealth. Oh, I get it. Cwc we thank you for the plug. I can't go cuz I'll be doing the security now, but Lisa's gonna go. But I'll forgive you

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:01):
If you plug

Leo Laporte (02:33:01):
It on Twit and I will plug it on Twit and everybody should go because it's, I love,

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:07):
I love seeing t Twink twit fans at these events.

Leo Laporte (02:33:10):
So great. Yeah. And you know how much you love Jeff and his insights and so, or hate

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:15):
Me and want to come and make fun of me.

Leo Laporte (02:33:16):
No haters allowed. All right, so you can

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:21):
Make a poster that says Moral Panic. Can, you can just bring up

Leo Laporte (02:33:24):
Everybody, bring your moral panic or bring your stickers and get 'em autographed. <Laugh> <laugh>. That's awesome. I love

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:34):
Only for club

Leo Laporte (02:33:35):
Numbers only. Well, we don't actually no one has these stickers. Who

Ant Pruitt (02:33:38):
Made these? No one has them yet.

Leo Laporte (02:33:41):
I want

Ant Pruitt (02:33:41):
Joe, Joe made 'em in. Mr. Victor got 'em made. Pond and Vinyl.

Leo Laporte (02:33:45):
Victor has a, a like a sticker maker.

Ant Pruitt (02:33:48):
Yes, he does. Cricket. Mr. Victor is awesome.

Leo Laporte (02:33:51):
Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (02:33:52):
Wow. The Twig editor,

Leo Laporte (02:33:54):
Stacy Higginbotham is@stacyoniot.com. She just woke up. Great to see you Stacy. Her podcast, the io the Internet of Things podcast featuring Kevin Tofl is available@stacyoniot.com.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:10):
Oh y'all, if you like the cybersecurity label, you should listen to it. One, because you'll learn more about it with my guest this week. And two, he

Jonathan Bennett (02:34:17):
Sounds just like

Leo Laporte (02:34:18):
Fred Rogers and it's a delight, <laugh>. I can't wait. And you'll find that in all of the stuff she does, including her free newsletter@stacyoniot.com. We do this week in Google every Wednesday, 2:00 PM 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc. If you wanna watch live, you can. There's a live stream audio and video actually at Live twit tv. If you're watching Live chat, live in our open to all chatroom, irc twit tv. Just, you know, go in there with a browser. That's all you need. Although if you have an IRC client, if you're really wanna rock it old school, you can do that. After the fact on-demand versions of the show available at twit tv slash twig, you can also get shows on the dedicated YouTube channel, youtube.com/this week and Google, or best thing to do of all subscribe in your favorite podcast player. And that way you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. Thanks for joining us, we really appreciate it. I hope you'll come back next week for Ant Stacy, Jeff and some old guy falling asleep in a chair. And I hope y'all tell some other folks about the show too. Just remember, it's Trellis Trellis. We'll see you next time. Bye-Bye. <laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (02:35:38):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but your game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk, but you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning cis man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on The Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club twit exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit tv slash club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.