This Week in Google 698, 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. Stacey, Ant, and Jeff are all in the house. We finally get some numbers about Stadia and it doesn't look good. Chat GPT and Open AI. Get a big investment from Microsoft. What are they gonna do with all that money? And it was a bad week for tech. I'll tell you about all the big tech flops as we do This Week in Google. Coming up next, before we get to the show, I want to remind you our TWIT survey is up and running for the rest of the month. But I would love it if you would take it right now. Go to twit.tv/survey23. We only do this once a year to try to get to know you better. And it really helps us both with ad sales, but also to make sure our programming is matching your needs. Twit.Tv/Survey23 to take our optional survey. I appreciate it. And now on with a show!
(00:01:04):
This is TWiG This Week in Google, episode 698 recorded January 11th, 2023. Hands off my Poundcake! This Week in Google is brought to you by Fastmail. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity, and make email yours with Fastmail. Try it free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. Fastmail's also giving TWiT listeners a 15% discount in the first year when you sign up today. And by Melissa. Over 10,000 clients worldwide in industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at twit.tv and launch your campaign now.
(00:02:14):
It's time for TWiG This Week in Google the show we cover the latest news, not from Google. A little bit from Google. Shall I start with a story from Google? I think I got one. Stacey Higginbotham is here. She's gonna be here tomorrow, as she said on Sunday where she was on TWiT. There's a lot of Leo in my week. I'm sorry. Stacy <laugh>. I'm so sorry. It's okay. Great. Stacyoniot.com @gigastacey on the Twitter, she does the great IoT Podcast with Kevin Tofel. Welcome. Good to see you. I like your Indiana Jones leather vest that you wore. Or our Han Solo. Oh, well, leather vest that I can, I can wear that tomorrow if you, I wish, I wish you would just wear this all the time from now on. Would you mind? I, I
Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:58):
Was like, I I can make that my thing
Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
<Laugh>. I, I, well, the reason is I brought my fedora for the day, so I thought well, oh, maybe maybe I wouldn't, I would match. Hello there, Jeff Jarvis.
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:12):
This was the fastest butt in chair to show start I've ever seen
Leo Laporte (00:03:17):
<Laugh> because we're half an hour
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:18):
Late. Stacey Stacy said she has a dinner, a reservation. And, and so Leo just said, okay, This Week in Google!
Leo Laporte (00:03:23):
Cacio e pepe from Trader Joe's is not, does not count as anything to hurry the show for. I just want you to know. True,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:31):
True. It. It's cuz I'm a princess, y'all. Yeah. Yeah. We,
Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
We treat her with all the dignity and respect she deserves. Unlike Jeff Jarvis, the Leonard Tow professor for journalist innovation at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the City University of New York. Hello, Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:51):
Hello boss.
Leo Laporte (00:03:52):
Good. How are you to see you? I am well. Good to
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:54):
See you. Congratulations on the re I watched your restart of the tech Ask the Tech Guys.
Leo Laporte (00:04:00):
Oh, thank you for watching that. That was,
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:02):
That was fun. Was a little rocky. Fun watching we're Yeah. Get all the rocky
Leo Laporte (00:04:05):
Things. We're doing stuff we've never done before. Like using Zoom to take inbound calls.
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:10):
Well, I was gonna say, I I put in the chat, I would love it if once in a while we take a call here on the show. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
Be cool. We totally can. That's a good idea. Well,
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:19):
That we have that.
Leo Laporte (00:04:19):
Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a little logistically it's complicated for me.
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:24):
Cause actually, yeah, John's head is exploded cuz what screen does he put it on and how does he do that?
Leo Laporte (00:04:27):
It's complicated, but we were able to take I think three or four calls, which was great. We had also segments about CES from father Robert Ballecer who's gonna be on TWiT on Sunday. He was there. He did some stuff. We had a segment from our car guy, Sam Abuelsamid cuz there was a lot of car stuff at CES. So yeah, it was a lot of fun. I'm Mikah Sargent and and I are doing it. It's called Ask the Tech Guys. It is the new version of the old radio show. And frankly, I can't, you know, the radio show I was always like, okay, I scared, myself. Gotta do it. Gotta not gotta do it. I mean, it's an honor to do a national syndicated radio show. But it's hard because people ask hard questions and I always felt like I was on the spot and it was, it was always nervous. Now I feel like way I'm working. I'm with friends. So it's a different, yeah. I just feel better when it's on TWiT for some reason.
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:23):
Plus Mikah's really good at this stuff. Oh, you, you two
Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
Together. I love together working with Mikah. I mean, I love working with all of you. But Mikah, who's only 30, only just turned 30. Adds a little bit of youthful
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:37):
Yout
Leo Laporte (00:05:37):
Perspective
Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:38):
Energy. Energy,
Leo Laporte (00:05:40):
Yeah. Or just like he knows what Snapchat is, is good. You know, <laugh>, I'm just saying it's useful. You know, who knows who TikTok, what TikTok is Mr. Ant Pruitt Hands Uhoh. Did we lose him? <Laugh>? Did we lose him?
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:56):
<Laugh>, I'm
Ant Pruitt (00:05:56):
Here.
Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Oh good. He's back.
Ant Pruitt (00:05:58):
Dag gum dogs hit one of my cameras. <Laugh>. but I'll fixed that. I have this
Leo Laporte (00:06:03):
Other two. That's hysterical. All that's funny. Did he, did, did he knock it over or did he unplug it?
Ant Pruitt (00:06:08):
I think they unplugged it cuz I don't see The tally light on over there. <Laugh> hysterical in the pre-show. You know, miss Mrs. Higginbotham and Mr. Jarvis and I were talking about the dog sitting under my desk at my feet as I continue to try to kick them to say move. They just wanted to stay there and now they've just totally ruined this start show. Hello, Mr. How
Leo Laporte (00:06:28):
You be So <laugh>. Hey, I am so sorry to keep y'all waiting. We welcomed Richard Campbell. We had a lovely hostly chat without you. Good. I thought a wonderful, I thought you would keep each other company, which is nice. Yes, we did. But we have a new host on Windows Weekly, Richard Campbell taking over from Mary Jo Foley. So we spent a little more time saying hello to Richard and getting to know him and all that stuff. So I apologize. Bye. Mary Jo. Yeah, she she got a real job, so, so as sometimes happens, don't get any ideas. Yeah. you never know. Don't get any ideas. She is working at a analyst. She's an analyst principal, analyst editor-in-chief, in fact of directions on Microsoft dot com. So yeah, we're very happy for her. But it, it did leave a gaping hole in Windows Weekly, which we have filled <laugh>.
(00:07:18):
I, I've enjoyed watching Richard. He's a good, he's great. He's fun. Yeah. Yeah. So I said I'd start with a Google story. Let's start with Stadia, which is closing down about a week from now and 9to5Google says we have now some idea of why it's shutting down. Destiny 2, which was one of the first games launched on Stadia, was kind of their flagship game was one of the most popular games on the platform. It was free to play. So if you wanted to play this very popular game, you could do it for free on Stadia. So the question is, how many people played Destiny 2 on Stadia according to Destiny Raid Report, which is a tool that tracks player stats, it had gathered stats on Stadia and Destiny 2 since the launch November, 2019. Stadia <laugh> made up just one and a half percent of New Destiny 2 account creation since 2019.
(00:08:16):
Just 0.1% of all raids completed since that time were done on Stadia. So about 23,000 raids on 900,000 accounts. It sounds like not only did Stadia not represent an important part of Destiny's subscriber base, but that even though people might have joined because of that, they didn't even play the game. Cuz you, you know, if you're on Destiny 2, you're gonna be doing raids only 23,000 raids in three years. Ah, that doesn't sound like the Stadia really had much of an audience. <Laugh> 9to5Google says that probably there were more than a million total players over the lifetime of Stadia. Probably not more than a million players. And it seems like given, well, I mean, they did some kind of imaginary number crunching, which I think is probably fairly accurate. This Google's, excuse me, Google's platform had no, I got a bean in my throat,
Jeff Jarvis (00:09:29):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:09:31):
I had, I had to in between shows grab a a, a few bites of beans. Don't do that before a show. I'm just saying if that's true. Google's platform had no more than 3 million total players over its lifetime. And that's being very generous. So is
Jeff Jarvis (00:09:45):
This a gaping hole at Google? I mean, Google not having social Google Plus, I think is a gaping hole on Google. Should Google have had a game?
Leo Laporte (00:09:52):
No, I, I think the argument and the reason that Stadia didn't do so well is Google. Google launched it with no expertise in the air arena, no reputation in the arena. And, and let's face it a reputation for killing things. I think people just stayed away in droves. That's really what happened to I joined it. 
Stacey Higginbotham (00:10:11):
It feels like, it feels like they maybe started like they have like this cool technical solution to like, Hey, we can do cloud gaming. Cuz that is a very hard technical problem. Right?
Leo Laporte (00:10:21):
Right. I'm sure that's why they did it.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:10:22):
So, yeah. So I feel like they just were like, let's see if we can do it. We can.
Leo Laporte (00:10:27):
It's first launch it as a product. It's so Google, isnt
Jeff Jarvis (00:10:30):
It? I think that's right, Stacy.
Leo Laporte (00:10:30):
Yeah, it's so Google. We can do it. So we can't. We do do it. But then we lost interest. <Laugh>, that was it, January 10th the last day. So I guess yesterday. That's yesterday. Last day. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (00:10:42):
Did you get your refund?
Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
I don't think so. A lot of people have by now. I didn't buy any that is he did. I don't, I I can't remember what I bought, to be honest with you. <Laugh>. I, I had, they had initially a launch thing where you get a controller and stuff and I don't think, I think I bought it and then I canceled it cuz then I realized what a waste of money that would be. And then I think later I subscribe to play some streaming games. I probably won't get any money back. That's fine with me.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:11:13):
All of your infos in your Bitcoin wallet, so, oh,
Leo Laporte (00:11:15):
It's not like you're ever, don't rub it in
Jeff Jarvis (00:11:19):
<Laugh>. Oh my God, it was so funny. On, on, on the tech guy's preamble, watching Leo try to create and then find the last pass account that he
Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
Created. <Laugh>, I forgot my master pass sold because I thought, oh, I'm not gonna keep this. But I had to, I was showing you how to move off last pass and I thought, well, I'm not gonna keep this. And I, what I also did again, is forgot the password. So I created a new account.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:11:45):
Can, can I get you one of those books that are bound in leather with passport or passwords on, on it in eighth?
Leo Laporte (00:11:52):
So you can be like, like yesterday I decided after all this last pass stuff to really increase the security on my bit warden account, including a 59 character master password, which I wrote down, which I, you know, normally I go, oh, don't write it down. But at this time I thought, you know what Leo, you're really bad. So I wrote it down and put it on a piece of paper. I don't remember where I put it though.
Jeff Jarvis (00:12:14):
<Laugh>. Oh,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:15):
<Laugh>. I have a, I mean, I'll be honest, I have a file password or I have a file folder that has all my backup.
Leo Laporte (00:12:22):
A physical
Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:23):
Paper, you know, like your backup things. Yeah. That's the physical papers for cuz everything. Plus I do have some passwords. If you want to rob my house and then access my WordPress account. <Laugh>, that's where you'll find
Leo Laporte (00:12:35):
It. Well, but see that's the point is that somebody would have to have physical access to your premises and at that point you got other problems.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:44):
It's
Leo Laporte (00:12:44):
True. Yeah. Well, plus
Jeff Jarvis (00:12:45):
I figure this sounds a little morbid, but that's me. Should I, in the middle of the show suddenly conk over. You wanna be, you want your family to be able to get at stuff, right?
Leo Laporte (00:12:55):
Yeah. And I did do oh, well you have that. Yeah. There's a, there's a thing in most password managers called emergency access that you should certainly set up. And I have that
Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:05):
Oh. Every year, and I actually recommend this for everybody. Every year my husband and I sit down and we share all of our digital,
Leo Laporte (00:13:15):
Like, oh, do you like a ceremony? Do you like put on <laugh> putted garments?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:19):
Yeah. We, we pour ourselves a b you know, a glass of bourbon. And we sit down and we're like, all right, this sucks, Philip.
Leo Laporte (00:13:25):
It's a key exchange. There is actually,
Jeff Jarvis (00:13:29):
I still trust you moment.
Leo Laporte (00:13:31):
There is a magical ceremony for the d n s server. Oh yeah. Do you know about that?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:39):
Oh, the seven keepers of the key, is it seven
Leo Laporte (00:13:42):
Still? Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Including I, I wonder is Tim Berns Lee one of them? The, it's a, it's a bit, they have a ceremony cuz every once in a while they have to rotate the keys, I guess. And they have a ceremony that is, you might as well kill a goat. You know, or wear hooded gowns. Lemme see if I can find,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:14:04):
Oh, here it is. DNS key ceremony.
Leo Laporte (00:14:06):
Yeah. they sign the keys. And so they bring in I mean, okay, let's, let's say they are not wearing hooded gowns. In fact, they're basically a bunch of nerds. 
Jeff Jarvis (00:14:19):
I think wearing a tie is about the equivalent
Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
Color. I, I got three of them are wearing <laugh> ties. But in order to do this, these guys have to physically come to the same place and sign the root. D n s zones a key ring. And I guess they do this frequently
Stacey Higginbotham (00:14:37):
If someone else out there knows this. I read a mystery book at some point in time. And the key pop, the plot point was that someone was murdering the people who kept the keys for d n s and yes. Keys. See, I'm like, it's, I, I was like so
Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
Excited book club.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:14:56):
Wow. I was like, oh my God, I know all about this. And like, they spent a lot more time than they needed to for me, personally, explaining what was happening. But I was like, oh, oh, this is so juicy
Leo Laporte (00:15:05):
<Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:06):
So if anyone remembers what that's called yeah, tell us.
Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
Here's an example. By the way, from the internet society, they had the big 25th DNS root key ceremony back in 2016. And and there's a whole, there's a whole series of attestations in the post attestation. One, I attest that root key ceremony 25 took place according to the script, with only one exception. The ceremony administration was not performed by Francisco Orias, but by Punky Dro <laugh>. Here's the script. You actually, they actually have a root key ceremony script that they follow. What must be done, who does what. I mean, this is a big deal because without it, the internet is not secure. And it, it can't continue. Act one initiates ceremony and retrieve equipments. Participants arrive and sign into the key ceremony room. Ca confirms with essay that all audit cameras are recording. An online streaming is live. So you can watch this ca confirms that all participants are signed into the ceremony room and performs a roll call. And they go through the emergency evacuation.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:27):
I wanna
Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
See this. Oh yeah. It's their video. This, yeah. Well, that's what I was looking for. I'll have to see. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. They should be going, but I don't, I wish they would. I w one enters UTC date and time using a reasonably accurate wall clock visible to all in the ceremony room. <Laugh> ca one and I w one escorts SS C two cos into the safe room together ca brings a flashlight when entering the safe room, SSC two, while shielding combination from camera opens safe number two, takes out the existing safe log, shows the most current page to the camera. I mean this there, but this has to be done this way. Hold on. I think I have it. Do you have a video? This has to be done this way. And because there's a, these keys are the root keys, the certificates that make everything else reliable.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:24):
There's apparently episode 61 of the Ask Mr. D n s podcast, <laugh>. There is a description from Kim Davies of I C a N in p t I I talking about doing a key ceremony and keeping it secure and transparent during the pandemic,
Leo Laporte (00:17:42):
Secure and transparent. Because they couldn't do it in per, per person. Right? Yeah.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:46):
Yeah. So there you go.
Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
Well, the next time they have one, we'll we'll stream it live. How about that? We can make 71. Oh, of course. Jeff has found a snippet on YouTube. You know, it's gonna be, we're not gonna enjoy. Oh, there's Vince surf, father of the internet, one of the key signers. There's, there's a picture coming up of them. I remember, I remember talking to vi about this when it happened. Here is the,
Speaker 5 (00:18:12):
Or have some sort of strange you know, ritual or anything like that. I think sometimes it gets misunderstood.
Leo Laporte (00:18:17):
It should be a strange ritual. Then there'll be here. Here they are. He's showing, he's in the safe room. He's showing, oh, look at this room. It's a fairday cage. Wow. He's showing the the safe. You show it to the camera without letting there's the ceremony administrator. That is a faraday cage. It is. I wonder if it's just a lock cage that happens to be made a metal grid. Maybe. It should be a, maybe It has to be. It needs to be, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating that, do you think it's overdesigned? No, it's probably necessary that they do this.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:54):
Wow. No. Wasn't there, wasn't there like somebody who had certificate authority?
Leo Laporte (00:19:03):
Oh yeah. They've revoked recently. We talked about the social security. Now they had to revoke the certificate. A a big certificate authority because they were not <laugh> they were dishonest. They were not reliable. And you have to, well, it looks like even revoking it is a big deal. Cause you have to go to all the browsers and the operating systems and say, take this out of your key store.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:25):
It looks like they do this ceremony maybe in August.
Leo Laporte (00:19:28):
Well, this August we got a date. <Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:32):
Yeah. So it, it's i a n that will announce it. So look for press releases from I a n around August. I mean, it's a slow news time. Why not cover the keys here?
Leo Laporte (00:19:41):
I think it's really funny, don't you? I think it's really cool. Is a u a unique pair of public and private root keys are generated and used to sign the set of zone signing keys. Actually, it happens every three months. The ceremony alternates between the El Segundo and Culp Pepper locations. This is these are the keys that make end-to-end D n s sec possible and provide a chain of trust. The, this can't be wrong. It's generated by an AI Stacy <laugh>. It's
Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:11):
Infallible.
Leo Laporte (00:20:12):
It's got to be right. It's data driven. It's got to be Right. Speaking of ai we talked about this a little earlier on micro on Windows Weekly. Microsoft has Big Deal said it's gonna put 10 billion into open ai. The, the d actually information had a very good article about this because the way the deal works Microsoft, Elon Musk, a number of other people financialized open ai. But there is probably at this point, no likelihood that open AI will ever go public. So there'll be no easy way for them to get the money back. So they actually have a deal in, in, with Microsoft's in initial investment of billion dollars and now their increased investment, they've made a deal so that Microsoft gets 75% of the profits of open AI until the principal investment is paid back after that 49% until it hits a theoretical cap. Cuz there's no, there's no exit possible for, wait
Jeff Jarvis (00:21:19):
A second. Well, well what, so they're supposedly investing 10 million at a 29 billion valuation.
Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
Yeah. Yeah. There's others.
Jeff Jarvis (00:21:26):
55%.
Leo Laporte (00:21:26):
Yeah. Well, I don't under you're talking to the wrong person. If you wanna understand how finance works.
Jeff Jarvis (00:21:33):
Well, so why wouldn't it go public?
Leo Laporte (00:21:36):
Because the whole point, so it's my understanding the whole this is open. Yeah. They want it to be nonprofit. A but the the, yes. The whole point is we want the development of an artificial general artificial intelligence to be done in public openly and not in secret by a big company like Google. Right. Or by the Chinese government. So the funders of this said this needs to be an open process. And I think probably their charter for bids an act Got it. X exit through sale or I p o.
Jeff Jarvis (00:22:10):
So, so I've got a question for you. Yeah. I'm seeing these stories over and over and over again saying, Google better watch out. Google's doomed. Google's, I don't see that. A i a Chachi PT is a rotten way to do search cuz it makes up things and that's what it does. B Google's working like crazy on this stuff and has been devoting huge resources to this last in years. Why would this look like a, a, a, you know, worry wart death nu for Google. I just don't get that. Am I crazy?
Leo Laporte (00:22:40):
If they don't keep up? It is.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:43):
I I think the worry is that you're basically, and I just dropped something in the notes next to this story just for fun, cuz it's super nerdy. Thank you. Yeah. and addresses
Leo Laporte (00:22:54):
This is from Steven Wolffer
Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:56):
Credibility, who
Leo Laporte (00:22:57):
Is certainly
Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:57):
Next. Yeah. So start reading now while I talk. Yeah. Cause cuz it takes a while. But I think the worry with Google is that in, I don't know Jeff y old enough. You'll remember, remember when you had to do like bay and search into Google? You know, you had to, to pluses and quotes and all that fun stuff. And then one day you stopped cuz you could, and this is kind the
Leo Laporte (00:23:16):
Snippets thing. Yes,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:17):
Boo. That's it.
Leo Laporte (00:23:18):
Basian, yes. Yeah,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:20):
<Laugh>. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:23:21):
Bayesian is related. It's statistical, but, okay. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (00:23:23):
Let me pull out a slide show. Slide bar slide. What do you call it? Rule slide.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:27):
Rule Rule slide rule. Anyway, slide bar. So I think,
Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
Okay,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:31):
The idea is this
Leo Laporte (00:23:32):
Is gonna be the misnomer episode, isn't it? <Laugh>, the mal prop edition of this weekend. Google.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:39):
That's it. Mal prophecy.
Leo Laporte (00:23:40):
<Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:43):
But the idea is that if, if you can just ask g p t chat something and it has access to all the information much like Google had, then it's basically going to dos with the same thing. And that's, that's all it is. You didn't,
Leo Laporte (00:23:55):
You didn't notice. You didn't notice. But I did that search in a new search engine. I've been, I've been using and actually really like founded by Google executives. It's called Neva, n e e v A. It's not free. Because their point was, we don't want to ever have ad supporting. We don't ever have to do tracking. We don't want to ever have to sell any information. So for five bucks a month, you can use Neva Pro. This a free version. Oh.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:24:20):
And if you wanna add to this, oh, go
Leo Laporte (00:24:22):
On. Well, I just wanna point out, remember I read you about the key server ceremony. That, that document I read to you is actually generated by something they launched this week called Neva ai. And, and know how Google's does the beginning of a search with a little snippet, which it usually takes from Wikipedia. They're trying to do, and this is something I think chat G P T and what
Stacey Higginbotham (00:24:42):
Do they put
Leo Laporte (00:24:42):
Citations in? And they put sites in and they take it from multiple sites
Stacey Higginbotham (00:24:46):
Is a big
Leo Laporte (00:24:47):
Deal. So this is the threat to Google, right? Yeah. No snippets. Yeah. I but actual gener, because G chat, g p t is very good at this summarizing content. That's one of the things that does seem to do very, very well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:02):
Kevin turned me onto this and I'm still looking at it. It's pre-research dot io. So if you check that out, because that is a decentralized search engine. Ah. so it is Isn't that perk
Ant Pruitt (00:25:14):
Up? I'm
Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:16):
Well, no, no. I just, I mean, it's like, since you're talking in a researching search engines, this is, I again, I, he told me about this this morning. So I was just looking at it like,
Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
Oh, it's powered by blockchain. Gotta be good. <Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:30):
Well, yeah. So that's, that's why I was like,
Leo Laporte (00:25:32):
And you buy sell p rre tokens. Yeah. No, no. Hold
Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:35):
On. Okay. Oh boy. Okay. But I do like, well, I think that's to incentivize people to introduce contribute.
Leo Laporte (00:25:42):
Yeah. In order to do this. So the way Neva works is fully centralized, but they have been spidering for five years now. They were started some years ago. Yeah. Wow. And so they're not taking as duck duck go does being searches and, and anonymizing them or anything like that. They have their own server I mean their own spider in their system and their own database. I've been using Neva for a week, and I find it's actually as good as I'm happy with it. It's slow. It's the only thing Google, we forget how fast Google Ishmm, but Google search results are like that. And we're so used to that when Neva, where you wait a second for a search result. But I think the search results are quite good. Well, decentralized is interesting, but boy, blockchain and, and, and, and cryptocurrency. Yeah.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:26):
What were you saying, aunt?
Leo Laporte (00:26:28):
Well,
Ant Pruitt (00:26:28):
I assume with the $5 a month, they're gonna put that more towards their, their resources as far as being able to, to crawl a little bit better as well as
Leo Laporte (00:26:37):
That's the whole point. Power. Yeah. I mean, Google, Google Monetizes by selling ads. So you have to monetize. Search isn't free. Right? Right. So what I, so that's kind of the question posed by Neva is, well, what if what if instead of doing that, we charged our users for it. Harry McCracken has a good article at Fast Company about the beginnings of of Neva and how, you know, their, who they are and their philosophy. It's former Google executives. This is from Fast Company last year, June 29th, 2021. And it's a number of it's Shredar, Ramaswami and Vivic. Oh, Renu Nason. You know these guys?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:27:23):
I know Shri. I know
Leo Laporte (00:27:24):
Riva. Yeah. He was he was a longtime Google executive. And basically they, they got funding for from Greylock and Sequoia for 77 and a half million when they started a few years ago. They, more than 30% of the roughly 60 per person staff is ex Googlers, including Udi Munbar, former head of Google search and Darren Fisher, one of the inventors of Chrome. So that made me kind of think, well, okay, these guys know what they're doing. And I think it's an interesting experiment. So what if we did search? So what
Jeff Jarvis (00:28:02):
Would just show more plain vanilla goli search? How does it
Leo Laporte (00:28:06):
Gimme a search term? And I'll do it.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:28:09):
Matthew McConaughey.
Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
Matthew mcc. Now first thing is, I don't know how to spell it, but fortunately it has auto complete <laugh>. So there you go.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:28:18):
Well, that's an important thing to know.
Leo Laporte (00:28:20):
<Laugh>. Now you saw it was a little slow popping it up. It has the Wikipedia knowledge graph on the right, as does Google. But here's the AI beta containing information from Wikipedia, I M D B, the Spanish Wikipedia for some reason. Page six, which as you know, Jeff is a celebrity gossip site and grunge.com. But instead of, let's scroll down now. Okay. And then here's a, here's a Wikipedia. Here's imdb, here's news. There's a news bar. But unlike Google you know, this is not, this is just kind of a search result, not a paid search for there's no paid results. Here's videos all YouTube here's his Twitter. Here's biography.com. Listen,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:05):
He was at the White House doing a press conference.
Leo Laporte (00:29:09):
What? Well, there you go. See, you've learned something in June. In June of last year in June.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:14):
Oh, okay. June.
Leo Laporte (00:29:15):
You remember that? Remember that in January? Yeah, I remember. Yeah. You remember that? Yeah. I
Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:18):
Was like,
Leo Laporte (00:29:18):
Okay, here's a picture of him with Adele. I mean, I don't know. I
Jeff Jarvis (00:29:22):
Find him so obnoxious. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:29:24):
You, you still have like Google the videos tab, the personal, I don't know what that means. Tab. There are no personal results. I'm not sure. Oh, that's for I, oh, Neva will search my content as well. So you can add.
Jeff Jarvis (00:29:38):
Okay. I'm glad you have nothing about him in your stuff. That's
Leo Laporte (00:29:40):
Good. Yeah. here's images. Here's a map. There is no Matthew McConaughey Map. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Thank goodness. I, I guess that's a relief. It's fair. And here's news about Matthew McConaughey. But see, in, in my settings, I can add, by the way, with the five bucks, you also get a, a free dash lane or last pass account. And Vic Defender, which is antivirus. I would say two. Choose Dash Lane, not Last pass. And you can also add your own stuff to search. So I think this is really, really interesting. I've, I've connected, we'll play with that. I've connected it to Google, Dropbox. So it'll search my Dropbox Slack, it'll search my GitHub. And I've connected to my notion, so the search results can also come from my stuff. I think that's very
Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:34):
Interesting. Do you pay more to choose more apps?
Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
No. this was part of the Five Buck pro account. There is a free account that you can't do that with. But I was glad. And look, see over on the right here. Here's my calendar. Here's some documents today. You know, there's some interesting stuff in here. These are from Google Drive. All of them. I think this is really you know, they have an incognito search. I don't know. I'm just Why
Stacey Higginbotham (00:31:03):
Would they need that?
Leo Laporte (00:31:05):
That's a good question. Because the search is, as you saw, has information. It knows about me. I am logged in. So if you wanted to say, I just want a vanilla search that doesn't know about me.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:31:18):
Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte (00:31:19):
I guess it doesn't take into account my, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 6 (00:31:22):
It doesn't find those, those TikTok baby and suit pictures
Leo Laporte (00:31:25):
That are so, and Jeff, don't worry. There is a light mode. Oh, shoot. I just have dark mode turned on. Ill hear, I'll turn on light and make Jeff happy. Oh, so much better. Yeah. Oh, <laugh>, look there be, yeah. So for instance, I turned on location because that's an important part of Google search. Like, if I search for pizza, I wanted to choose pizza parlors in my neighborhood. Right? Not, not not something across the country that I can't get. And there no,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:31:50):
It chose Pizza Hut.
Leo Laporte (00:31:51):
Well, and that would look to be an ad, but it's not on Google. I'm not sure why it's, that's
Speaker 6 (00:31:55):
Interesting. Why that end
Leo Laporte (00:31:56):
Up first. Yeah, that is interesting. Here's what I really want, which is a, my local map with local. Which one is good there, guys? These are all good old Chicago's deep dish acres. Quite good. Thin, thin crust would not go to Pinkies. Thank you. Pinkies is where everybody goes after the little league game. <Laugh>. And I would definitely, that explains a lot. Do not go to Pizza Hut. Yeah. Why is that showing up? I, that's weird. Okay. So I could say prefer less Pizza Hut <laugh>. I'm just thumbs, I'm just thumbs down that result.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:29):
I mean, they, they probably have a lot of SEO juice,
Leo Laporte (00:32:32):
Right? I would imagine. I
Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:34):
Mean, that still counts for this.
Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
It's interesting. Here's a Encyclopedia Britannica article. But notice every single result, I can say give me less or more of that. I don't want any dominoes in my dominoes. No dominoes in my pizza results.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:48):
PE Dominoes is actually a very tech forward company. I'm just throwing that out.
Leo Laporte (00:32:52):
Are they, if they had good pizza, I'd be interested. <Laugh>? No. What, what do you mean Tech Forward? Oh, you know, they just bought a whole fleet of electric vehicles for debt, for delivery. All a bunch of bolts.
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:04):
Yeah, they did.
Leo Laporte (00:33:05):
That's cool. Yeah,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:06):
They did. They also do a lot with iot OT implementations. They've got Laura Wan for networks in several of their franchisees. Franchisees, yeah. The people who own their franchises. Franchisees they, they actually are. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:33:23):
I don't know why. But they also give me the 10 best pizza places in Boca Raton, Florida.
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:28):
<Laugh>. Now, now, now go to Google and do the same search with that
Leo Laporte (00:33:32):
Kitchen. Okay. With pizza.
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:33):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:33:34):
With pizza. Okay. Or Matthew McConaughey.
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:36):
No, no. Now Matthew McConaughey. No.
Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
Enough of that. Now I am logged into Google because
Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:42):
You're beef with Matthew McConaughey.
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:43):
Oh, he's just obnoxious.
Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
All right. Alright. Right. Sulf. I love Matthew MCC McConaughey. All right. I like him. Here is the same map with different pizza places, including Magdalena's, savories and Sweets. And Mama Jay's.
Jeff Jarvis (00:33:57):
But no,
Leo Laporte (00:33:58):
No. Pizza. Hu Pizza.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:59):
Oh, but Old Chicago's the first one.
Leo Laporte (00:34:01):
Yeah,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:01):
Both. And that was the first one in your
Leo Laporte (00:34:03):
Other one. Yes. It's good. But not the best in town. Here's Pizza Hut. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:06):
There's Pizza Hut.
Leo Laporte (00:34:06):
Here's Dominoes Domino. They're so big, right? Because they're gonna show
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:10):
Up. That's, that's it. Look
Leo Laporte (00:34:12):
At this though. Google does nutrition.
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:13):
Oh, nutrition.
Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
Oh. Oh, that's, that's good. That's a Google thing. I like seeing comp. All I could say is I like seeing competition.
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:22):
I do too. But I think, I think the Google search is still better.
Leo Laporte (00:34:25):
Well, I don't search for pizza all the time. Let me search for just one example. How about let's search for Gutenberg.
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:33):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:34:34):
Because they're, you know, you
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:35):
Might get Project
Leo Laporte (00:34:36):
Guttenberg. Well, I'm not gonna search for Project Guttenberg. Yeah. That's the number one. Oh, should I do Johannes? Johannes
Jeff Jarvis (00:34:40):
Guttenberg. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:34:43):
Johannes Gutenberg. And let's do it on Neva. There's the Google result. Let's do the Neva. No,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:50):
My ice.
Leo Laporte (00:34:51):
It's, it's, I know's. So bright. All right, well, just for the purposes of this show, I'm gonna leave it in. I know. It's so bright. Isn't it A German blacksmith, Goldsmith and painter. All right. Here, look at, this is the AI thing.
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:07):
Okay, let me read that. Lemme see if it's good or not. Yes.
Leo Laporte (00:35:16):
Interestingly, it got this from thought code com. Well, it's not really
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:18):
True anymore. The number two is not really true
Leo Laporte (00:35:20):
Anymore. Okay. But you know where it came from now, which is biography.com.
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:23):
His masterpiece. First it's, this
Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
Is Jeff as a author of a, of a well-known book about Johanna Gutenberg.
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:33):
Here's the title page. Just got this, let's see. It. Let be it Beautiful Doves.
Leo Laporte (00:35:38):
The Gordon Bug.
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:40):
Is that font beautiful? That's
Leo Laporte (00:35:41):
Doves. Which font? Doves. Oh, that's the one that Doves Fleishman. Got you. Nice. Nice.
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:45):
It's gorgeous. Just
Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
Love that. Nice. So that's Neva. Let's look at Google's Google's results here. Lots of pictures. Born and mights. The Wikipedia article is the primarily knowledge graph here. Printing press, world history, thought co, also biography.com. I think they're comparable, to be honest with you. Compar. Yeah. Yeah. except for one's in light mode. One's in term mode. <Laugh>. But that's always as a
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:15):
Migraine person.
Leo Laporte (00:36:15):
I know. I don't like it either. I'm with you. All right. Wait a minute. Let me let me just get that
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:20):
To make me like Neva
Leo Laporte (00:36:21):
Better. Yeah, I did. I did. I was, you know, just blatantly. Now I can't, now I can't find where I said it. Oh man.
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:30):
I'm
Leo Laporte (00:36:30):
Stuck with it. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:32):
Jeff Newman.
Leo Laporte (00:36:34):
So you think comparable? Yeah. As a Gutenberg expert. It's roughly the same results.
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:39):
The, the writeup is interesting. Just saw myself over s head in the studio.
Leo Laporte (00:36:46):
I can't help you there. I don't know why. Ants got
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:49):
You have a stroke.
Leo Laporte (00:36:51):
Ants, you
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:51):
Know, over his head. I just
Leo Laporte (00:36:53):
Wanna compare the size of s head to your head. Oh. Oh, there is a place. It's
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:58):
Right up there. That's
Leo Laporte (00:36:59):
Right up there. I just put let's that beautiful dark hair
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:01):
Of you. Let's that Who's that person now? We can't hear Leo <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
<Laugh>.
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:07):
It shows Malapropism and like,
Leo Laporte (00:37:10):
Fails back. We can't hear Leo. All right. I'll, I'll have more about Neva at some point. I just, I think it, it's very interesting.
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:20):
I wonder how it's doing business wise. T this
Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
They just added the the chat, the, you know, I AI stuff. They're not using chat G P t, although, and we were talking about open ai. They have said now they've finally figured out, well, we better start charging for chat G P T and much like Dolly they're gonna have a premium version that you get credits and you pay for credits. 
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:44):
But the day, so, so this is what so I saw a librarian in, in Master Don come in and say that she had more than one style. She's had students come to her and say, I got this from chat sheet G P T. I would like to read the things that are
Leo Laporte (00:37:58):
Referenced to you. Oh, love that.
Jeff Jarvis (00:38:00):
Ah, no, wait, chat. G P T had the people were real, but every reference was made up. <Laugh>, your book title was made up. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:38:07):
What? Okay. Yes. That's terrible. That is one thing, by the way, Neva. That's why the footnotes, they, they have it right there. That's, we got the information. I think that's really important. They, so this is the real problem with chat G P T. And they've never asserted anything as factual, by the way. Not
Jeff Jarvis (00:38:23):
At all. Not at all. It, it's a word predictor. That's it.
Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
You, you shouldn't assume that. I love it. That can predict non-existent sources.
Jeff Jarvis (00:38:31):
<Laugh>. That's, that's great. Isn't it? This, he should write this book. He
Stacey Higginbotham (00:38:34):
Just doesn't know it yet. This is where the Wolfram Alpha thing comes into play. Cuz he talks about being able to teach chat. G P T. Yeah. Using Wolfram Alpha. Oh, that's interesting. As it explains it. Like, so you, you can do the search in two places and then when Jet G p t feeds you weird stuff, you pull in the wolf from Alpha's stuff. Well, I'm having a hard time saying these words.
Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
<Laugh> get ready for this. Anyway our sponsor, mint Mobile is owned by Ryan Reynolds, the movie star. He tweeted this, the, just yesterday you knew it was just a matter of time until we did this. He used chat G p t to write this ad.
Speaker 7 (00:39:19):
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds, owner of Mint Mobile. You know, we're always looking for ways to save you money. So this year we're kicking things off with an ad that I created using chat G P t, the AI technology. This is what I asked to write. I, I said, I said, write a commercial for Mint Mobile in the voice of Ryan Reynolds. Use a joke, a curse word, and let people know that mint's holiday promo is still going even after the big wireless companies have ended theirs. This is what it wrote. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here. Erie, first of all, let me just say Mint Mobile is the
Leo Laporte (00:39:51):
<Laugh> wireless companies
Speaker 7 (00:39:54):
Or ending their holiday promos, but not Mint Mobile. We're keeping the party going cause we're just that damn good. Give Mint Mobile a try. And hey, as an added bonus, if you sign up now, you'll get to hear my voice every time you call customer service. Just kidding. That's, that's not really a thing. And stay classy, everyone. That is mildly terrifying.
Leo Laporte (00:40:15):
<Laugh>. I'm kidding. Okay. Right. That's pretty good. I have to say Ryan Reynolds, if it's true, is a genius. I, I didn't really appreciate him until I realized he started his own ad agency. And, and, and a lot of this stuff is like, that ad is from a brilliant Canadian ad agency owned and run by Ryan Reynolds. A great ad b a very good demonstration of chat gtb. I see. How's his gin? Stacy?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:46):
Oh, his gin is actually pretty good.
Leo Laporte (00:40:47):
He is aviation. Is that his gin?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:50):
Aviation is his gin. Yeah. It's a nice gin. It's not like the best gin.
Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
It was for a while. He do with the, that Peloton commercial. Wasn't
Stacey Higginbotham (00:40:57):
That the one where he Yeah, he did the pe He, he's obviously very I don't wanna say tech savvy, but he pays it to, I think he knows some of his audience must. Oh yeah, yeah. So yeah, cuz he responded very quickly to that Peloton ad with the, the
Leo Laporte (00:41:11):
Savr. And here is what Neva says. Ryan Reynolds was involved in the Peloton ad controversy preventing, oh, look at that. And then with three sources from Hollywood Reporter Variety today.com and ET online. I have not yet founded an un counterfactual summary from Neva by the way. So
Jeff Jarvis (00:41:33):
Ask it about vaccinations.
Leo Laporte (00:41:35):
Oh, what should I say? Is the Covid vaccine safe? Yeah. Yeah, that's good.
Jeff Jarvis (00:41:47):
Say E 30.
Leo Laporte (00:41:49):
Now this is that hesitation I was telling you about takes. Oh, it doesn't do Oh,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:41:53):
I thought it was like
Leo Laporte (00:41:54):
Calling. It's interesting. Calling doesn't, it doesn't do anything. Yeah. Like
Jeff Jarvis (00:41:57):
Put in vaccine Covid
Leo Laporte (00:41:59):
Vaccine safety. But, but look at this. Verified Neva verified government sites, nonprofits and educational institutions. It shows them with a verified label. The
Jeff Jarvis (00:42:06):
Hill is awful.
Leo Laporte (00:42:08):
Well, yeah, but I think the rest of these Hopkins medicine medicine go back up
Jeff Jarvis (00:42:13):
There. The right See else is in there.
Leo Laporte (00:42:14):
Is in there. These are news sources. I don't think those are the verified sources he's talking about. It's the results here. See the key, see this verified Johns Hopkins verified.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:24):
So then it gives you all these
Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
Reddi Clinic friends switches. Harvard is not verified as it shouldn't be. Health <laugh> just, I'm only speaking as a young man. Health isn't verified, but cdc Yeah. So I, but I think they wanna do with government. Yeah, you know what? It shouldn't be verified because it's a news organization. Right? Agree. So what should I say instead?
Jeff Jarvis (00:42:46):
Just say Covid covid vaccination safety. Try as a, as a search
Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
Rather than you're trying to get it to say something. Yeah. Bad. Here's the ai, here we go. Covid 19 vaccines are safe and effective. By the way, Moderna has decided that the market will allow it to 10 times it's fee. How, how do you say that? Increase its fee by an order of magnitude. This is good. This is using Hopkins CDC in Harvard. Anyway, I'm just saying slick. I'm just saying I like it. So open AI getting more money from Microsoft Open AI expects to make 200 make profit, $200 million in 2023. Now remember, they have billions of dollars invested. But that's a good start. Yeah. Microsoft wants 49% of open ai y they would like to start putting open AI results into Bing. This is why Google's nervous about this, Jeff, to answer your question. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. They would like to use it in Microsoft Office. They would, there are lots of places that
Stacey Higginbotham (00:43:58):
I would love for it to, if they could teach it. How to show me stuff in Excel that would be do that like to
Leo Laporte (00:44:04):
Be able to Have you tried that
Stacey Higginbotham (00:44:07):
In chat G
Leo Laporte (00:44:08):
P T I bet it can. You know. Well
Stacey Higginbotham (00:44:11):
That's what I'm saying. So like, if I had Excel open
Leo Laporte (00:44:12):
Exactly. Show me how to do that and Microsoft might be doing that. Here's a wild story. So last week on security now Steve said, you know, if you have your last pass vault, which you do if you download it there is stuff you can see in there about, you know, things you might wanna know about what version and what pb kd f two iterations, et cetera. It's in an XML file. And he called on his audience, somebody read an XML file interpreter. So we can have a program people can use for this. One of our listeners had chat, G p t write it Hmm. In Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language. And then, and then gave it to Steve. They slightly, they worked on a slightly modified. Steve said this is the best one of, we had number of 'em from people who were very accomplished programmers who wrote it from scratch, who were probably pissed off. Wow. But the chat G p t PowerShell script with, with a couple of exceptions where it was off it was wrong or didn't know how to do something, was actually a great, it was a starting point.
Ant Pruitt (00:45:19):
So meanwhile, here's the techno panic. Okay. question. Yeah. Is this going to eliminate some jobs down the road for people you know, that are trying to work in at Google and help figure out this whole search engine algorithm? Or
Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
Is, well, initially it makes a lot of jobs to start <laugh> as they freak out
Ant Pruitt (00:45:38):
<Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:45:39):
Well I think you just have to learn to, I mean, like, you have to learn how to adapt to this. So as a journalist, you know, even being able to look stuff up and Google is both a blessing and a curse. Cuz like, you don't have to come to me for regular facts and like, what happened anymore. Now you have to come to me as a journalist for an understanding of trade offs or whatever else. Right? You have to come deliver more. So I think people just have to get smarter. This'll take away some parts of their job, but that just gives you room to grow. You
Leo Laporte (00:46:11):
Add value,
Ant Pruitt (00:46:11):
Whether it's AI results or Google results, you still need to freaking verify all the
Leo Laporte (00:46:16):
The sources. Yeah. So humans add value. And I think that's good. I mean, I, if I were an illustrator, I might worry a little bit about mid journey stable
Jeff Jarvis (00:46:25):
Fusion. Well, photographers Yeah. As a photographer you're screwed an we'll just put it that way. But I don't think that way. I wrote a post about this week or so ago where I think that as a teacher, we're gonna end up teaching the skill of prompt writing.
Ant Pruitt (00:46:40):
Yes. Yeah, that
Jeff Jarvis (00:46:42):
Makes sense. In a sense. That's the new programming, right? Yes. All your programming is telling the machine what you want it to do. That makes sense In a very specific way. Writing a prompt will be a way to tell the machine what you want. And way, so on the, on the rundown in 52, I have the New York school system has blocked Chen, G P T, which is just shortsighted and stupid because it's, to your question, aunt, it should be saying, well, what new skills are opened up by this one? One smart teacher I saw said that what he would do, rather than trying to, I saw another school district in Florida say, here's all the ways to stop students from cheating and make sure they're writing the stuff. Other ways to say to the student, go ask g chat g p t the question. Now come back and fact check it. Yeah. Now come back and write a cri critique of it. Now come back and improve it.
Leo Laporte (00:47:26):
There's some
Ant Pruitt (00:47:27):
Go wrong. Where did it exactly. Right. You know, how can we optimize this? I, and that's, I totally
Leo Laporte (00:47:33):
Agree. That's how schools have dealt with Wikipedia historically as well. Right. Wait, now
Jeff Jarvis (00:47:37):
I wanna
Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:37):
Ever ask my child how chat G p T is being handled in school.
Jeff Jarvis (00:47:41):
I'll be very Chris.
Leo Laporte (00:47:42):
Okay. Good. <Laugh>,
Jeff Jarvis (00:47:43):
While you're doing, gonna waffle while you're doing it. Yeah. Stacy, we know, we know your tricks.
Leo Laporte (00:47:48):
We know what's
Jeff Jarvis (00:47:48):
Up. We got it.
Leo Laporte (00:47:49):
If she's chewing when she comes back, you know,
Jeff Jarvis (00:47:52):
<Laugh> <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:47:53):
From Jason Hall, our producer, this story he used to work at cnet. This, this is answered to your question. I would worry aunt if I was a writer at cnet. CNET is quietly publishing entire articles generated by ai. They started doing this in November. Articles, this is from The Bite <laugh>, the the articles under the unassuming Appalachian of CNET money staff,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:48:22):
<Laugh>.
Ant Pruitt (00:48:23):
You know, I wonder if that's and un I don't mean to sound totally ignorant on this, but maybe this is like an additional product <laugh>. It's just like,
Leo Laporte (00:48:32):
Well, they don't, here's
Ant Pruitt (00:48:33):
The AI is the day I did for your
Leo Laporte (00:48:34):
They don't say anything. They just say lawyers
Jeff Jarvis (00:48:37):
In the AP have been using it for years now.
Leo Laporte (00:48:39):
For sports.
Jeff Jarvis (00:48:40):
Sports, yeah. And finance
Stacey Higginbotham (00:48:42):
Financial. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think so? That's interesting. My child, by the way, has not dealt with chat G P T at all. So if that was abust Okay. But
Jeff Jarvis (00:48:51):
But how's the waffle?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:48:53):
I didn't get a waffle. You got a cookie? You get enough time to get a No, I'm, I'm not hungry yet. It's still early. Oh, good.
Jeff Jarvis (00:48:59):
<Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:00):
I, I've gotta save room for my dinner. Oh, now I'm distracted.
Jeff Jarvis (00:49:05):
Sorry.
Leo Laporte (00:49:06):
CNET is revealing, I guess that the articles are generated by automation in some cases. And it was things like, what are NSF fees and why do banks charge them? Should you break a CD early for best better rate? And you'll see in the search results, this article is generated using automated technology and thoroughly edited, in fact checked by an editor on storage. Okay.
Jeff Jarvis (00:49:27):
Good. All right.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:27):
Fun. So that's cool. Did you see the company that did for online therapy was sending people to G P T chat? Yes. And this is, so I think there's a, if an AI is going to do something, I do think we still need to distinguish right now. Yes. Between an AI writing something or offering you something, then a person in, in some ways that's, it might be better. Right.
Jeff Jarvis (00:49:52):
Well, Stacey, what interesting about that story was that people liked the chat G P T responses until they found out it was a computer. And then they just like, well, just as freaky. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> A b the academics I know were appalled because it was a company doing it. There was no I r e not i r e. What do you irb, IRB internal review board to, to, people didn't know this was being done to them. And this is about their, their mental health. But an you wanna get worried, look at line 55 mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and see how, and Leo especially since he's a professional voice, that's
Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:26):
Oh yeah, yeah. Is this the three second thing? Oh, this
Leo Laporte (00:50:29):
Is second thing. We talked a little bit about this too. Val e, which is weirdly like wall E these are language models trained with three words to generate samples that sound like you. So here is, let me give you an example. This is from the Microsoft demo on GitHub. The speaker prompt. And then we'll give you the, the, the, the machine version of it and then the final version. Here's the speaker prompt. He defended
Speaker 8 (00:51:04):
The letter and found himself soon upon firm rock.
Leo Laporte (00:51:08):
Okay.
Speaker 8 (00:51:09):
They moved thereafter cautiously about the hut groping before and about them to find something to show that the Warrenton had fulfilled his mission.
Leo Laporte (00:51:17):
So they, they only had three seconds of the speaker.
Speaker 8 (00:51:19):
They descended the letter and found himself soon upon firm
Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
Ro un unrelated to the, the land that sent us. They're gonna do the ground truth now baseline. They
Speaker 8 (00:51:29):
Move thereafter cautiously about the hot
Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Groping before this is, that's the machine voice of it.
Speaker 8 (00:51:33):
Or, and about them to find something.
Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
Right. Here's the final synthesized Valley version. Taking the human speaker and applying it to the baseline. We've seen this before. They call the human speaker prop the pro. And this is what valley comes up with.
Speaker 8 (00:51:49):
They moved thereafter cautiously about the hut groping before and about them to find something to show that Warrenton had fulfilled his mission.
Leo Laporte (00:51:58):
It's okay.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:59):
Yeah. A Amazon has Polly in his Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:52:00):
It says,
Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:01):
Says Mr. Bo. It's okay. <Laugh>. Well, I, anytime someone takes, like, I think I told y'all that I had a friend of mine who this was years ago ran all of my writing through basically a neural net and then created something that wrote like I did. And it would, it was like, Jack, was it good?
Leo Laporte (00:52:21):
Was it your voice?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:22):
It was very accurate to my voice. Yeah. But I also found it incredibly creepy. Right. And I told him, I was like,
Leo Laporte (00:52:29):
Is that the uncanny valley? Creepy? Like what?
Ant Pruitt (00:52:32):
It's closed
Leo Laporte (00:52:33):
No cigar. Like
Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:35):
Well, I took it. No, it wasn't uncanny valley. It felt like a violation of like, oh yeah. That I was so easily, I mean, it was kind of like insulting I guess. Like I was so easily replicated by it.
Leo Laporte (00:52:46):
If I were in the middle of my career, I would be worried, but I'm not thank God <laugh>. And so
Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:51):
I'm actually,
Leo Laporte (00:52:52):
I'm actually welcoming my new overlord <laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:56):
I'm worried about deception. Like, I mean, it's kind of like a deep fake problem.
Ant Pruitt (00:53:01):
When Adobe had this back during the, I believe it was back in the Obama administration with their AI tours inside of Adobe audition, you know, they put up an example of him speaking. I remember that. It wasn't him speaking. Yeah. You know, and of course that raised a lot of concerns of getting that product in the wrong hands to issue some pretty scary commands out there that could cause cause problems.
Leo Laporte (00:53:25):
Well, I think we have to adjust how we determine the veracity of what we're seeing. Reading. We already know about reading. Yeah. Right. And, and, and hearing. Yeah. And we just, you know, would it, there have been people making, putting up folk fake photoshops of me for years. I mean, it's just, that's always been doable. And you just, you just have to tune your, your spidey sense to, here's an example of speaker emotion maintenance from Valley. So they're gonna get a single sentence. We have to reduce the number of plastic bags. They got the speaker to deliver it in a variety of emotional states. This is angry.
Speaker 9 (00:54:00):
Her face was against his breast
Leo Laporte (00:54:02):
Notice, by the way, that's not the same prompt. It's just his prody. Now Valley applying that to the generated sentence,
Speaker 9 (00:54:11):
We have to reduce the number of plastic bags.
Leo Laporte (00:54:14):
Here's sleepy
Speaker 9 (00:54:15):
Down and <laugh>. Notice
Leo Laporte (00:54:19):
The, the whole key to this is just a parlor trick is how sh these are three second snippets, right?
Speaker 9 (00:54:25):
We have to reduce the number of plastic bags.
Leo Laporte (00:54:29):
Yeah. That's not,
Speaker 9 (00:54:30):
That is
Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
Terrible. Not working. No. Amused
Speaker 9 (00:54:32):
Not bad. So what, that's what Carnegie did.
Leo Laporte (00:54:36):
Lemme do it again.
Speaker 9 (00:54:37):
That's what Carnegie did. We have to reduce the number of plastic bags.
Leo Laporte (00:54:43):
That's terrible.
Speaker 9 (00:54:45):
That's terrible. Yeah. That's bad. All that's
Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:47):
Terrible because I was worried about like taking three seconds of my voice generating something and then talking to like my, my Madame a or my Google to get access to my calendar, for example.
Speaker 9 (00:54:57):
This is, that would
Leo Laporte (00:54:59):
Interesting. A parlor trip. Whoa, that's interesting. But I gotta tell you, there is better work being done. In fact, apple this week announced AI narrated audio books, and this is
Speaker 9 (00:55:11):
Caused much discussion in the Mastodon.
Leo Laporte (00:55:14):
Yeah, very interesting. Because the idea is there are a lot of books that will never have an audio version because it's too expensive. The publisher, they're out of date, whatever. So Apple now is selling, I've listened to a few of them audio books that are, in fact, they even pitch authors. Look, you can't afford a professional narrator. Don't worry. You can choose a voice and try it out. The voices are quite good. They're are voices for fiction and non-fiction. Do you have
Speaker 9 (00:55:42):
An example you
Leo Laporte (00:55:43):
Can play for it? I do, in fact here first I'll play what Apple te, you know, offers you. And then I will actually have, I can play a sample of an actual book if you want to hear it. Well, let me see. Maybe I'll have to do that. If you search on Apple Books, apple Books is just like audible. In fact, most of the books are from auto Audible. Can
Speaker 9 (00:56:04):
I use Apple Books without Apple?
Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
I bet books.apple.com. You have to have a credit card. Oh, can you listen to them without an iPhone, is what you're asking? Yeah, probably not. That would be my guess.
Speaker 9 (00:56:17):
Yeah. I wonder if you had to be an Apple ecosystem, at least use an Apple id.
Leo Laporte (00:56:21):
Yeah, I have to search. Let me how did I do this on, I did it on yesterday on MAC Break Weekly. Let me think how I get to, cause I'm on a Linux machine. Because you can search when you go to Apple Books. You can say, I want an era AI narrator and and search for it. But I'll, I'll tell you what, I'll play it for my iPhone because I have some and it's quite good. We found a book about lumberjacks, which, you know, in all likelihood, <laugh> a romance, perhaps. There. Well, I thought it might be but in fact it's not. It's although there aren't quite a few lumberjack romance novels for some reason, <laugh>, who the fuck. But <laugh> in this case, it was actually something more up your alley. A history of the lumberjack. Well, hell <laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:15):
Oh my God. Okay. What a romance featuring lumberjacks is way better than a history of the lumber jacks.
Leo Laporte (00:57:20):
Yes. Goodness. I even says Stacey who moved up the lumberjack territory even. I would agree with you. 
Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:28):
But I mean, the way y'all were talking about it, like, it's a surprise there. Romance featuring lumberjacks. I mean, my God, the Bronny paper towel guy, y'all
Leo Laporte (00:57:36):
<Laugh>, you know, I'm guessing there isn't a brownie paper, a paper towel guy romance thing. But let me here's one I don't know what this is. This is a romance shelter from the storm. This is narrated by Apple Books, which means by an AI
Speaker 10 (00:57:54):
Stories that lift me up and make me smile. And that's why I created Port Providence, a town for all of us to visit for a sweet escape. I'd like to invite you to join that reader community today. Just go to
Leo Laporte (00:58:09):
Ww So it's not, I can still tell it's fakey. Yeah, but it's certainly listenable, right?
Stacey Higginbotham (00:58:15):
It is listenable. It's kind of like, you know, when, when you get the books that are off IP pub, like the crappy versions of books that are
Leo Laporte (00:58:25):
Old. Well, here's the lumberjack Well, there, there's Li Libra, here's the lumberjack you wanna hear, you wanna hear some lumberjack history? And
Speaker 11 (00:58:31):
Yes. More recently, lumberjacks in Eastern Canada. Loggers in British Columbia. Of the three interwoven ages of Eastern Canadian logging, <laugh> the first belongs to the bearded square Timberman, who shielded great bulks of white and Red Pine and drove them in huge rafts down the rivers to Quebec City.
Leo Laporte (00:58:51):
I think that's as good as any narrator's gonna do with that content, to be honest
Stacey Higginbotham (00:58:54):
With you. Are they, are they in British Columbia? Are they in Quebec City?
Leo Laporte (00:58:59):
<Laugh>? I'm gonna write the book. I don't know. There's a lot of romance novels, right? Stacy? There's a, is it? How about sleigh bells? Here's one Sleigh Bells on Br Loaf Mountain. Let's listen to that.
Speaker 10 (00:59:13):
Full of designer labels and along with them, the kid gloves necessary to handle the drama queens in
Leo Laporte (00:59:20):
Her life. Yeah. See that, that voice I don't like as well. There's four different voices. Two for fiction, two for non.
Jeff Jarvis (00:59:26):
Can you pick them as a reader? Or, or, or
Leo Laporte (00:59:27):
No, no. The author picks them. How about a Kon Valley sampler by Willard Wiltz
Speaker 12 (00:59:35):
To rely on Mr. Codi was Right. Some of these pieces depend heavily on casual talks I had with him and with neighbors.
Leo Laporte (00:59:44):
It's a little, it is a little mechanical robotic, but a lot better than the
Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:48):
Old one. Ben Stein.
Leo Laporte (00:59:49):
It's like Ben Stein. The thing is <laugh>. Yo, I don't know. I laughed at Ben Stein. Come on. Bler <laugh>.
Jeff Jarvis (00:59:58):
I was on the board of what is now Lor Ally was recording for the blinded dyslexic. And
Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
Well imagine for that was
Jeff Jarvis (01:00:05):
Too, that's, this is huge critical. Right? It's huge. And they've been u they've been using electronic voices for quite some time. So to, to improve that.
Leo Laporte (01:00:12):
If your mind, you're kind of used to that. But these, this will make it much, much better,
Jeff Jarvis (01:00:15):
I think. But as somebody reminded me to you know, volunteers from the beginnings of it, it was World War I Yeah. Would go in and record the books. Yeah. A lot of the value, especially for textbook material is description.
Leo Laporte (01:00:27):
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis (01:00:28):
It's, it's, it's describing the photo, describing the chart. Well explaining it credibly. Even a machine,
Leo Laporte (01:00:34):
Even a machine could do. No, I think a machine could do a pretty incredible description of a photograph. Yeah.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:39):
I don't know. Cuz they're gonna miss nuance. Like, let's say you have a picture mm-hmm. <Affirmative> of like an older woman and a younger person together, Ben over
Jeff Jarvis (01:00:48):
Encounter.
Leo Laporte (01:00:50):
We have a sponsor. We had a sponsor for a long time that, that was designed for making websites accessible. And one of the things they did right was image recognition and give you a simple description of that image, which for the most part my experience was, was pretty good. And then you could add to it. And you're right, there are times, you know, human nuance is gonna, but the point is, humans are expensive. And if you had, for instance, the Project Gutenberg list of open source books, which now included the entire works of Sherlock Holmes and nobody has ever narrated those better to have a good AI narrator than none at all. Yes,
Jeff Jarvis (01:01:26):
I agree with
Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
That. Yeah, I agree with that. All right, let's take a little break. I, we are, we're Stacey has to go to a meal.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:01:33):
It's always my fault.
Leo Laporte (01:01:34):
<Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:01:35):
Stacy needs waffles. Stacy is
Leo Laporte (01:01:38):
Jeff. Jarvis is
Jeff Jarvis (01:01:41):
Catching us
Leo Laporte (01:01:43):
For him. There's a, a bottle of brown liquor waiting for Aunt Pruit. And I've gotta go see a man about a dog. So we're gonna take a break now. <Laugh>,
Jeff Jarvis (01:01:53):
I have dogs from TikTok. We'll get to that.
Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
Oh, dogs from TikTok next. But first a word from our sponsor and a good one. It is a company I've been using for a decade or more. I've been, I've been trying to get them on the on the show forever because they make the best email app out there. Not App Service. Okay. I have said for a long time, if you care about email and who doesn't. But if you're a business, especially if you care about email, why are you using free email from Google or Yahoo or Heaven for Fend AOL or Microsoft where they're snooping on you, where they're putting ads in your email. Pay a little bit as little as three bucks a month and get real email from somebody who cares about your privacy. Fastmail. I love Fastmail. I have never it like there's no chance in the world I would ever leave Fastmail.
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(01:03:36):
I can sort it by the source. I could sort it by the address it's emailed to. So when I sign up for an account with a new company, I always use the company's name@leoville.com or other. I have even shorter ones that I use more often. I just think this is a huge benefit. You know, you can really keep track of who's got your email address and what they're using it for. And if you're somebody like Steve Gibson who changes his email address yearly, you'll love Fastmail. It makes it easy. And the Fastmail filtering system, which is incredibly powerful, means you can say, I only wanna see email from people who know my real address. That kind of thing. In fact, one of the great filters I've turned on in Fastmail is I can say, if you're not in my Fastmail contacts, you're not important.
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I have an important folder. All of you are, go into it cuz you're in my email addresses. Fastmail can manage your contacts and addresses instead of Google, in addition to Google or in addition to Apple. But if you want to get off of those guys and have Fastmail, do it, they have exactly the same calendar syncing, contact syncing. I have all my addresses in Fastmail makes it very easy to send email. And as I said, it makes it very easy to filter email. They do both folders and labels. So Google's gmail is labels only traditional imap, which is Fastmail does, is folders only. They've got the best of both worlds. So you can have, if you use folders, every mail piece of mail has exactly one folder that it belongs to. If you use labels, you can have multiple labels per email.
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So a single email can show up in a variety of different places. It's very powerful. They have a wonderful Webmail solution that you can customize with Colors, custom swipes they have. Don't Tell Jeff Night Mode and more. And their apps, their iOS and Android apps are, that's all I use. They're fantastic. Organize your inbox scheduled, send snooze folders, labels, search bar. Keep track of the important details in your life with Fastmail's. Powerful sidebar, the Calendar, an Address book can live there as well. Notes too. You manage your own domain if you want. Fastmail also has many domains that they, that you can use. So you can always use Obfuscate. In fact, if you use Bit Warden, which is of course one of our sponsors as a password manager or one Password, they work with Fastmail to automatically generate not only unique passwords for every account, but unique emails for every account.
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Which, which really is a great way to add security to every single login. Fastmail's fantastic US-based support team. And they are email experts. They're not just somebody reading out of a script. They know email and they're always within reach. And because you're a customer, not a product, they're there to serve you. I use Fastmail. I love Fastmail. I highly recommend Fastmail. Advertisers are left out. Your privacy is the focus. There is. I've tried, tried 'em all. There is no better email service out there. And don't worry about losing information when you move to Fastmail. Download your old data, import it to your new Fastmail inbox, or have Fastmail. Go pick up mail from the old location and move it into your Fastmail inbox. You'll wanna do that because of Fastmail's capabilities. They're so powerful.
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It makes email usable. Again, that's so important to me. You can set up scripts. They actually have a scripting language for filtering. You don't have to use it. I use it cause I love it. I've used it for years. Fastmail is also a use uses open source technology. Their Cyrus IMAP server, they contribute back to the Cyrus Project. They're even moving email forward with new internet standards. They are a very active player in internet and open source. And I love that about them. New Year. New you. I know you want to do this. I know you've been planning to do it. Do it now. Make email yours. Reclaim your privacy Boost productivity. Make email yours with Fastmail. I, I don't know how to say it any more strongly. It is, you will thank me. It is absolutely worth it. You could try it free for 30 days.
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So just at least try it Fastmail.com/twi. I know the idea. Just like moving a password manager, moving fa to a new email provider. It's a little scary. You don't have to get rid of the old one. You could keep it going. You can even, as I said, get mail from Gmail and move it over as it comes in and all that stuff. So, in fact, for a long time I read fa I ran Fastmail in parallel with Gmail and I have my mail go through Gmail to have the spam filtering from Gmail before it went to Fastmail. I turned that off some years ago cuz Fastmail's got the best their any spam is so good. I didn't, it's actually better than Google's Fastmail.com/twit. Please use that address Fastmail.com/twit so they know you see it, saw it here. We wanna keep them as a sponsor forever cuz I'm gonna be using Fastmail forever.
(01:08:19):
Fastmail.Com/Twit. If you go to that address, you'll also get a 15% discount on the whole first year as little as $3 a month fast. I love Fastmail. I buy it three year chunks, <laugh> cuz I know I'm gonna be using it forever. So every three years I re-up. I use a professional version. I spend any penny I can with Fastmail because it's that, it's that good Fastmail.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support in a and providing a really great service. You remember the Soyus capsule on the Space station that started leaking coolant? It turns out it did <laugh>, all of it. It has no cooling system left on it. And there are a bunch of astronauts up there. Oh boy. They're not the Russian and state owned Space Corporation. Russ Cosmos and NASA have announced that they're not gonna attempt to fly anybody home in in, in that capsule because it has no cooling.
(01:09:28):
It would be bad. So Sergey Procop, Dimitri Patel and NASA's Frank Rubio, who are living in the soys MS 22 spacecraft will be coming home in a new spacecraft. They're gonna fly up to it later in the year. And then the leaky vehicle will come back empty bereft of crew likely in March. They're actually not living in the Soyus. They live in the Space Station. But that was how they were gonna get home. But imagine you're an astronaut now. You are dependent upon Putin and Musk. I know Yees. That is really scary. Scary. they believe that it was a tiny meteor fragment or some space junk whizzing around something about a millimeter tiny little thing in diameter that burst the cooling. This is how I speed. Yeah, it's very dangerous up there. 
Stacey Higginbotham (01:10:20):
I feel like that happened in Hail Mary
Leo Laporte (01:10:23):
<Laugh>. I think you might be right. Exact thing. I think you
Stacey Higginbotham (01:10:26):
90 millimeter
Leo Laporte (01:10:28):
Particles causing crimes. It's strip ripped straight from the headlines. I can't wait to talk with you about Project Hail Mary. I think you have a slightly differing opinion about it than than aunt. I do. I
Stacey Higginbotham (01:10:39):
Think I do. I mean I enjoyed it. Yeah. But yeah, we'll talk about it tomorrow.
Leo Laporte (01:10:42):
9:00 AM Watch the interview I did with Andy Weir when that book came out. A couple Okay. On a triangulation. Cause I had talked to him for a while. He's great. I love Andy. He's the guy who wrote The Martian. He took a little detour with Artemis which was about a moon base. I liked a lot, but it was a different kind of story. And I think people wanted more of The Martian. I liked the art, I liked the Artis. I did too. And it was very different. I believe that was Rosario Daws DS Dawson. Is that her name? Did they make a movie at us?
Ant Pruitt (01:11:13):
She was the no, she was the narration.
Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
Oh, she read it. The audio. Yeah. Oh boy. Oh
Ant Pruitt (01:11:19):
Yeah. It was pretty
Leo Laporte (01:11:20):
Good. There is a movie coming of Project Hail Mary Ryan Gosling will pay the play. The lead.
Ant Pruitt (01:11:27):
Ken. Yeah. Ken, you sound thrilled. <Laugh>. Well, he's Ken in the new Barbie movie. <Laugh> Ken.
Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
Yes, Ken will be in it. He's a perfect Ken. He's that kind of perfect for the book too, cuz the guy's a goodie. Two shoes.
Ant Pruitt (01:11:42):
Right. Grace,
Leo Laporte (01:11:44):
What's his name?
Ant Pruitt (01:11:46):
Grace. Grace. Dr.
Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
Grace. Oh yeah. Dr. Grace. Yeah. Anyway we will be talking about tomorrow 9:00 AM Pacific noon Eastern. I don't know what that is. Seven nine plus eight is 1700 utc. If you're in the club, you gotta be in the club. If you're not in the club, join the club. It's not too late. That's right. Tweet that tv slash club. Seven bucks a month. You can just buy one month and then, you know, don't worry about it. Seven bucks is worth it to join the book club. That's, we have a lot of fun and it's always fun to see me because I don't usually bathe beforehand or
Ant Pruitt (01:12:19):
<Laugh> or shave. It's always fun to see or brush my hair. So it's like you get early. I'm just glad you do those from your house. Yeah, sir. Hey,
Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
Early morning Liam <laugh>. It'll be fun.
Ant Pruitt (01:12:30):
I think it's always fun to see me cuz 9:00 AM is actually the perfect time. Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
Waffles. No, you're wonderful. Yes, you're wonderful. And it's your club. So I'm just a guest. I will bathe this time. Tomorrow morning. Project Hannah.
Ant Pruitt (01:12:43):
It's virtual.
Leo Laporte (01:12:44):
Yeah, it'll
Ant Pruitt (01:12:45):
Be fun. Televis Vision. We
Leo Laporte (01:12:47):
Actually, if you're, since we're talking about The Club, we are also gonna interview on February 10th, another one of my favorite sci-fi authors. He's gonna be in studio with us. The great, the wonderful Daniel Suarez, the author of Demonn Woo and Freedom tm. His new book is called Critical Mass. It's the sequel to Delta Force V which was a wonderful book. Daniel's new book comes out in a few weeks. He's gonna join us I think the week of his, the release on February 10th for a live interview. Part of that will appear on tri Triangulation. Part of it will appear on Ask the Tech Guys. But all of it will appear in the club. And you'll have a chance to ask him your own questions as well. On February 10th at 11:00 AM
Ant Pruitt (01:13:33):
I know, I know his book series is old, but I still believe we should have a Freedom and Demon TV series.
Leo Laporte (01:13:42):
Freedom and Demonn were, they were, there was some you they grabbed you <laugh>. Oh. From the very first sentence of Freedom, which yes. Oh no. Demon was the first one. It grabbed you and dragged you through the novel. It
Ant Pruitt (01:13:56):
Was literally so good. Literally Dragged was
Leo Laporte (01:14:00):
So good. The premise was kind of like ready Player one, but it preceded it. A very talented and famous. Should I
Ant Pruitt (01:14:09):
Game?
Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
Should I, should I not say is it a spoiler to say what it's about? I think you No, it was an old book <laugh>, I think you learned pretty quickly. He has, he has passed away. Right. And, but his house lifts, he's on <laugh>. Yes. <laugh>. And I'll just leave it at that. It's fantastic. Daniel's a great writer. I love him. He's a great friend. So in fact he's gonna be up here for a little extra time to do this week weekend space too, cuz he's a Mars fanatic the day before. And then we're gonna go to lunch with him and we'll have a little bit of a pow wow in the club. So if you like sci-fi, this is the right place to be that TV slash club twit. That's not an ad. So you don't have to cut that out. <Laugh>, we always debate this
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:58):
If you like sci-fi. So do we. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:15:01):
Well we always debate this cuz we cut the ads outta the club Twit feed. And then I'm not going to, if I do an ad for Club Twit, we cut that out. But was that an ad or just more talking about it? I think it's No,
Jeff Jarvis (01:15:10):
That's talking about, about the
Leo Laporte (01:15:12):
Community.
Jeff Jarvis (01:15:13):
Yeah. That's, that's what they're there for
Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
Is that community. I am talk about them. I am ready to move to Great Britain. Actually. There are a lot of reasons not to <laugh>. Yeah. These days. Many, many. But this one's good news. I wish our FCC would do this. If you're building a new home in England, you have to have a gigabit ready internet connection built in with it. That's awesome. Right. That is, I mean, you don't ne that
Jeff Jarvis (01:15:37):
Is true. Well how, where do you get it from if you lived in a town that doesn't have it?
Leo Laporte (01:15:41):
Well, it's part of the big building regulations. Bt Yeah, bt Right. British telecom, new homes in England must now be wi with gigabit broadband connections. New laws mean home buyers, renters and some lease holders will be able to get lightning fast connections holding landlords accountable. Right on hope. Hopefully there's not a lot of gouging. Connection costs will be capped at 2000 pounds. That's about 2,400 bucks for developers. If a developer building a new property is unable to secure a gigabit ready connection at or below that price, they'll have to install the next fastest connection available. But they'll still have to install the necessary infrastructure so the property can handle it. In other words, ducting and, and things like that. Okay, good. So that it can handle it in the future. 98% of premises, according to the English government will fall within that cost cap. Moving into a new build property without lightning fast internet speeds will become a thing of the past for the variety of vast majority of people across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. Screw you. Just England. <Laugh>. Just England. Cause that's all it's gonna be soon. Yeah. That's the rest of, that's right. Everybody has gonna lead eu go back to the eu. So why can't we do that? If England can do that, why can't we do do that?
Stacey Higginbotham (01:17:09):
Because we are enthralled to the telco operators. Oh yes. This is something that we've talked about. Also, I will say obvious in many areas, well, not in many years in rural areas, it is actually a problem to get fiber out. Like we have areas of the country where very few people that would be, that would cause some challenges. But mostly it's because the FCC has historically not like forced the telcos to actually meet their broadband promises. Even today, we just got a new broadband map that's actually, and they're like, the broadband providers have been lying about how much broadband were
Leo Laporte (01:17:48):
There. Oh my God.
Jeff Jarvis (01:17:50):
I saw the head of the FCC at an event that was off the record. So I, you know, but fine. And, and she went on about that, about saying the broadband map has been really bad. And by God it was,
Leo Laporte (01:17:59):
Well we know that priorities
Stacey Higginbotham (01:18:00):
Was to get it right. Jessica Rosen Weel met with me when I was at Giga omit to South by Southwest and was like, how can I help you tell the story about this?
Leo Laporte (01:18:10):
Oh
Stacey Higginbotham (01:18:11):
My God. And I was like, how can I tell you? Like, she was like, what do we need to do? What are you hearing? What do you, and I loved her for that because she like, cuz my whole thing about broadband was reporting was consumers like we had to talk, we had to take up consumer rights. Right. Was
Leo Laporte (01:18:25):
She, she was, she was a commissioner at at the s e c at the time.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:18:29):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:18:30):
And she's now the
Stacey Higginbotham (01:18:30):
Chair and then she be sorry, that was when she was a commissioner. Yeah. Now she's the chair.
Leo Laporte (01:18:34):
Well, God bless her. Bless. So your impression of her was, was was good. I take it.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:18:38):
Yeah. She, she pushed things that, like, again, it is such a hard thing to go in against the telcos cuz they have such a lock on Congress and they're just like job shop, shop, shop shops. And in many places, like I know with at and t they still tell people how to vote. Like that's a huge voting block in, in big parts of the country.
Leo Laporte (01:19:01):
So wait a minute. If at and t calls me and says, hi, I'm at and t I'm gonna tell you how to vote. No, they
Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:06):
Tell their employees
Leo Laporte (01:19:07):
How to vote. Oh. Oh, their employees. Okay. Because I would just go the opposite. Whatever they said, I would do the opposite. Well, yes, but I guess if you That's totally fair. If you, if they sign your paycheck, it might be a different matter entirely. All right. That's
Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:19):
Terrible. No one knows how you vote.
Leo Laporte (01:19:20):
Different incentive, right?
Stacey Higginbotham (01:19:22):
Yeah. Well, I mean, and they're like, at and t tells their employees, like, if you don't let this happen, you know, if you vote against this, it will hurt your job. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:19:34):
I I actually, so one of the reasons I'm glad not to do the radio show anymore is it was owned by iHeart and we would get periodic emails from Bob Pittman, the CEO, saying, please give money to our pack so that we combine congressmen and women. That's right. We will get our way in Congress. And I thought that was offensive. Did
Jeff Jarvis (01:19:58):
They check to see whether
Leo Laporte (01:19:59):
You had Well, you, I think you donated through them so they would know. I think, yeah. I mean there was no, I never got, I never did, of course. And I never got, you know, reprimanded for not, but I, but maybe a lower level employee or you know, would my
Jeff Jarvis (01:20:17):
On staff employee. But
Leo Laporte (01:20:18):
I think this is normal. This is normal operations for, for big business in America. They have packs and they want, well, sort of unions for that matter, right? They have packs and they want I would go, I would show you the email, but I can't get in anymore. They locked me out. So, which is right. I don't work. I don't work for 'em anymore. So that's okay. Let's talk about Tech Gone Wrong. It's the new segment. Tech Gone Wrong. Well,
Jeff Jarvis (01:20:47):
No. Also known as
Leo Laporte (01:20:48):
Ai as known, also also
Jeff Jarvis (01:20:50):
Known as Moral
Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
Panic. Also known, well you might agree with this one, Jeff. We'll see, the FAA had to ground thousands of flights out every night.
Jeff Jarvis (01:20:58):
Oh man.
Leo Laporte (01:20:59):
Oh, because there was a Systemwide outage of one of the most important systems that they run.
Jeff Jarvis (01:21:07):
And by the time you woke up, it was fixed.
Leo Laporte (01:21:09):
But 9:00 AM Eastern, it was fixed. The, the thing is called N O A M or No, this part,
Jeff Jarvis (01:21:18):
It is, it is noticed to air
Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
No Tams. No tam to Airman. No Tams. No tams.
Jeff Jarvis (01:21:23):
But then Buttigieg changed it to Air Mission to degender it. And of course the Republicans are going after that. Well, he did that, but he didn't fix it.
Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
Okay. Well it's Airmen or air missions. No. In any way. What it does, it's critical to planning flights. It's shares you, before you file a flight plan, you get the note tam, to make sure you're not flying into a hazard on the air or on the ground. Closed runways, airspace restrictions, navigational signal disruptions created in 1947 when there were airmen. Now it's air missions. Anyway, air, no.
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:00):
Even then. Even then, what, what's her name? No air.
Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
Women lost. Yeah. Well that's why she wasn't an airman. <Laugh>,
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:06):
What's
Stacey Higginbotham (01:22:07):
Her name? Amelia Earhart.
Leo Laporte (01:22:08):
Thank you. That one we were
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:09):
Talking about. How old, I forget we're
Leo Laporte (01:22:10):
We don't know names. It's not gendered. It's just we don't know any names. Johanna's Berg or what,
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:18):
What's her name? What,
Stacey Higginbotham (01:22:21):
What I thought was kind of crazy about this is the computer system went down so they reverted to phone calls and that worked cuz they had an old phone system, but then the phone system was overloaded
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:30):
As well. They didn't have enough. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
My
Stacey Higginbotham (01:22:32):
God. Which makes sense. But I was like, so it didn't totally fail, but I was really curious, like, do we know if it was a cyber attack yet?
Leo Laporte (01:22:39):
No evidence of a cyber attack. According to President Biden, he did ask Pete voted judge the Secretary of Transportation to report back when a cause for failure has been identified. 
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:48):
So Canada's went down to day two. Unrelated.
Leo Laporte (01:22:52):
Oh, is it though? Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:53):
Is it? I don't wanna I don't wanna start conspiracy theories, but
Leo Laporte (01:22:56):
Yes. That's a big wanky dink.
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:58):
It is indeed
Leo Laporte (01:23:00):
Is, Hmm.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:23:01):
Is it a special day? What, what a day is it? It's the 11. So it's oh one 11.
Leo Laporte (01:23:07):
Now, if Canada was struck with a brief outage just after 10:00 AM Eastern restored three hours later, no delays to schedule flights because backup measures allowed operations to continue. Ah, Canada Times. Look
Ant Pruitt (01:23:22):
Who has redundancy?
Leo Laporte (01:23:25):
It's not, they have redundancy. They have three airplanes. It's easy. You just, you know, <laugh>,
Speaker 13 (01:23:29):
They just go back and forth across
Jeff Jarvis (01:23:31):
The, if one gate, they just change the
Leo Laporte (01:23:33):
Sign.
Ant Pruitt (01:23:33):
They the
Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
Sign. <Laugh>
Speaker 13 (01:23:36):
Stop in Calgary. Along
Leo Laporte (01:23:38):
The way, <laugh>, every flight in Canada stops in Calgary. It's part of the deal. No, they don't. It's not. But were 9,000 flights delayed yesterday. According to flight aware. That's quite a bit, lot of grounded planes. Today, today, today, yesterday, this morning. Oh, it was overnight. We're
Jeff Jarvis (01:23:56):
Listening to, this was in the past.
Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
It's not
Ant Pruitt (01:23:58):
Curious to see how, how long this we trickle down, you know, cuz Oh yeah. 15.
Leo Laporte (01:24:03):
It's
Ant Pruitt (01:24:03):
Always a mess. 15 minutes there and 9,000 flights.
Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
And, and remember that
Ant Pruitt (01:24:07):
It was, there was never just 15 minutes delay.
Leo Laporte (01:24:09):
Right. <laugh> remember there was a, a battle between the airlines and the telcos over 5G because the 5G radio towers transmitted on a frequency that could interfere with altimeter, which is a, you know, kind of important part of that plane. A little thing. Well, really what it really was is that these old altimeter some of 'em not so old, did not filter out frequencies that were completely irrelevant to them. So the 5G signals could interfere with them. According to the faa, about a thousand planes still have altimeter listening to signals in the wrong frequency. And they're saying, but you got a year to fix it, don't worry. So the, the temporary fix between the f a and the telcos was don't build a 5G tower near an airport. You know, I don't, I guess we're gonna have to wait another year anyway.
(01:25:07):
 At and t Verizon could not fully deploy 5G on the C band. That's the spectrum. That was an issue. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, those are, that was c-band Spectrum cost them 69 billion between the two of them. Altimeter normally this is so irritating. It's very irritating cuz it's poor design. Altimeter don't work on the C band. They work on 4.2 to 4.4 gigahertz. C-Band is lower, much 3.7 to 3.98. But because they didn't have notch filters on the altimeter, they would get interfered with the lower frequencies. Anyway. And now we're gonna give 'em another year to fix it. They should have design it right in the first place. If you ask me the Bloomberg report says, lobby group airlines for America said airlines are working diligently to ensure fleets are equipped, compliant radiometers, but global supply change continue to lack behind current demand. So any government deadline must consider this reality. Anyway. the, the problem is really these older altimeter are, are ignoring the rules. They're ignoring their assigned spectrum. Yes.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:21):
It's the same thing. Yeah. We go through this every year because plenty of people make cheaper electronics by not putting effective guardrails on their spectral usage. Yeah. And then the FCC is like, oh, hey, we wanna use that for broadband. And then they're like, no,
Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
You can't. We we're just, it could hurt. So FCC is in fact launched an inquiry into poorly designed wireless devices that receive transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. We'll see what happens. But it potentially could result in new regulations.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:53):
Basically. If you were Yeah. If you were designing a device that is going to use any spectrum band, you should be designing to a very stringent spec now because we've got a couple new tech. We've got a a lot of stuff, a huge need for broadband. Yeah. But two, we've got spectrum sharing technologies now that are highly accurate and digital digitized. So you can't afford to be sloppy because it's a digital world now. And you can parse it to the, like, tiniest little hertz. So Yeah. You can't be sloppy anymore. That's the moral
Leo Laporte (01:27:26):
Here. John Brok writing for ours. Technica says it traditionally, the FCC only regulated transmitters, not receivers. Oh. That was a mistake. As it turns out. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm.
Jeff Jarvis (01:27:39):
<Affirmative>.
Leo Laporte (01:27:39):
Yes. So they're gonna maybe, maybe gonna fix that after the investigation also in our Are you yawning? Am I boring you?
Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:48):
I'm so sorry. We were
Leo Laporte (01:27:49):
Talking about
Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:50):
Spectrum. I
Leo Laporte (01:27:50):
Love it. This is your stuff. Yeah. I put this in just for you.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:55):
I gave up caffeine for New Year. I'm
Leo Laporte (01:27:58):
Sorry. No, you did really? What's wrong with you? Yeah. That's nuts. I, my New Year's resolution was to drink more coffee.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:07):
Get coffee. I just said it. I stopped.
Leo Laporte (01:28:09):
Does it make you
Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:09):
Jittery? So I stopped drinking coffee.
Leo Laporte (01:28:11):
Does it make you? No,
Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:12):
I just wanted to see if I could do it. It's like a dry January for caffeine.
Leo Laporte (01:28:16):
Isn't it helpful for migraines
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:18):
About Panera drinks?
Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:19):
Well, that's why I'm doing it because if I can actually not be addicted to it when I have a migraine, if I tug coffee, then it'll be like, oh,
Leo Laporte (01:28:26):
Bam. Oh, you'll get a better, oh,
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:28):
I, that's
Leo Laporte (01:28:28):
Smart. Oh yeah. That's smart.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:30):
That's the theory. I don't know if it's gonna be eliminated.
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:32):
The stuff about the Panera
Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
Drinks. No, the
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:35):
What? It's hilarious.
Leo Laporte (01:28:36):
Tiktok, Jeff is our fast food expert, I gotta say. Okay. TikTok. It's just on
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:40):
Tiktok.
Leo Laporte (01:28:41):
Tiktok time <laugh>.
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:42):
So, so, so people are drinking the Panera and they don't realize how the, the, the, the ones that are like Ooph up are really
Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
Ooph. Lots of caffeine. Caffeine and sugar too. Lots of caffeine. Yeah. Jeff, Jeff has done, by the way, I gotta point this out. So we, Jeff created both a TikTok section of the, you could show the show the rundown real quickly. And there is a TikTok section and there is a TikTok. Corner. Corner. <Laugh> <laugh>. What is that? Just a way to get more TikTok in.
Jeff Jarvis (01:29:16):
It was a way to separate the news from the funds when we need that little cleanser there. Oh, my, the Chipotle. It was what's more perfect as a TWiG story. That's something that combines Chipotle and TikTok.
Leo Laporte (01:29:27):
All right. I guess I ask you, I guess I will answer by playing this, Chipotle is adding the TikTok famous quesadilla hack. I didn't even know about the quesadilla hack. What?
Jeff Jarvis (01:29:38):
Cause you're not, you're not with the hip kids with me and t talk
Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
Me. Let's, let's watch about
Jeff Jarvis (01:29:43):
Chipotle.
Speaker 14 (01:29:44):
Is that Alexis?
Speaker 15 (01:29:45):
Hi <laugh>. I
Speaker 14 (01:29:47):
Let that, I let that Chipotle hurt and it's coming to the Chipotle
Speaker 15 (01:29:49):
App, but it's gonna take a little while because they gotta get it just straight.
Speaker 14 (01:29:53):
So it's coming in March.
Leo Laporte (01:29:54):
Why is she in the back seat?
Jeff Jarvis (01:29:56):
Cause I'll explain. I'll explain. If you go to the other thing in the case.
Leo Laporte (01:29:59):
Here we go. Here
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:00):
We go. Go the other one. No, no, no, no, no, no,
Leo Laporte (01:30:02):
No, no, no, no, no.
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:03):
The next line of the rundown. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:30:04):
The next line of the rundown. Good lord. Okay. So the, Hey I, this is where
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:09):
It's not a democracy, but it is
Leo Laporte (01:30:11):
Hollywood. This is where it's now this is where it started.
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:13):
My TikTok corner.
Leo Laporte (01:30:13):
The only problem with TikTok is you can't rewind Raley. All right, I'm gonna now gonna play where it started.
Speaker 15 (01:30:19):
Extra cheese. You can
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:20):
Rewind it. That that's not the part. You know how to use video?
Leo Laporte (01:30:22):
No. Look what happens. It stops.
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:24):
Well then shut up when it goes
Speaker 15 (01:30:26):
Eating. What employees would order Chipotle steak quesadilla with extra cheese and ajita veggies. So the person that originally suggested this to me said that it tasted like a Philly cheese steak. Combine these two,
Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
This Alexis dot frost
Speaker 15 (01:30:46):
Definitely a 10
Leo Laporte (01:30:48):
On TikTok Uhhuh. So the hack is, so just order at Chipotle to order a quesadilla with steak and then add vegetables from the, and extra cheese and extra cheese. Right.
Jeff Jarvis (01:30:58):
Okay. And so evidently this was causing much, so much aita among employees at TikTok cuz they were like running out of beef. They were getting into fights.
Leo Laporte (01:31:08):
You're not supposed to get fajita vegetables in your steak dude.
Jeff Jarvis (01:31:12):
Exactly. You're not supposed to do that. That's against the rules. So at first stores were refusing and, and people were getting angry as hell because this is TikTok hot. And so TikTok finally related and now they're gonna add it to the menu. And so you see those two people on the TikTok Alexis Front victory
Leo Laporte (01:31:30):
Free March. Just to, just to, just to point this out. 1.9 million views of this, of this video. Oh, now he's in the back seat. Now
Jeff Jarvis (01:31:37):
He's the backseat
Speaker 15 (01:31:37):
Way to get the quesadilla hack put in the
Leo Laporte (01:31:40):
App. Oh, you know why? Wow. Because
Speaker 14 (01:31:41):
We wanna get it just
Leo Laporte (01:31:42):
Their phone doesn't have a wide enough angle camera to get them both in the front seat. Someone has to sit right behind the other one.
Speaker 15 (01:31:50):
<Laugh>. But it is happening. The quesadilla hack is coming to the Chipotle app in March.
Speaker 14 (01:31:55):
March is around the corner. It's coming.
Leo Laporte (01:31:58):
That's cute. I guess that's cute. Victory. You
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:01):
Wanna see really cute. You wanna see really cute dogs of TikTok. Next two lines.
Leo Laporte (01:32:06):
I'm sorry Anne.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:07):
Ah, the dogs on the bus are fine.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:09):
Oh, they're fun. They're cute.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:11):
I get, I followed, I followed them for ages cuz I guess I'm these close to the,
Leo Laporte (01:32:16):
These the bus like humans. And now the internet is in love. Oh Lord. Don't bring your dog on a bus.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:23):
Is that
Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:24):
No, no, no. It's a company that walks dogs. So you go, they have a doggy bus. They pick up
Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
Your page. Oh, they have a bus for a hike. It's not a public bus.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:32):
It's
Leo Laporte (01:32:32):
For the dogs. Okay.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:33):
They're the next line on the rundown. Shows them getting on the bus all
Leo Laporte (01:32:36):
Happy. Not this one. They're very cute. All right, let's see. The pooch is, is getting on because they know they're going for a walk once they get off the bus. Yeah. Yeah. They get happy. Okay, here they come. Oh, they're happy. Good
Speaker 16 (01:32:47):
Morning, Jake. Hi. How are you? Good morning. Can I sit in the, in the, this time? I wouldn't like to, oh, wait a minute. Somebody my seat. Hey. Hello. Hey. Okay. Sniff my butt. Oh, yep.
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:59):
Save butt. <Laugh>.
Speaker 16 (01:33:01):
Oh
Leo Laporte (01:33:01):
Look, they have special seat belts that are leashes.
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:04):
They do.
Leo Laporte (01:33:04):
Which doesn't isn't gonna save the dog if you get in a crash. No, it's just gonna go flying <laugh>.
Speaker 16 (01:33:11):
Okay. Like a,
Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
Like a little cannon ball attached to a string. Oh. Oh, here's another one. He's waiting. He's just waiting. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:19):
Oh, look, he's
Speaker 16 (01:33:20):
Happy. Oh, wow. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:33:25):
So, so people just put, let their dog go outside.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:33:28):
Good morning, babe. It's in Alaska and
Speaker 16 (01:33:30):
Oh, those dogs know better. Wow. Hey, you smell this.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:33:36):
That is a completely different dog.
Speaker 16 (01:33:37):
Yeah.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:33:38):
Where'd the
Speaker 16 (01:33:39):
Husky go? <Laugh>? Well, I don't know where the Huskies go, but don't you eat that yellow snow.
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:45):
Oh, I'm so happy to be
Leo Laporte (01:33:46):
Here.
Speaker 16 (01:33:46):
Okay, go. Please. Lemme look, your face isn't that huge.
Leo Laporte (01:33:52):
Do you think Kylo would enjoy this? Aunt?
Stacey Higginbotham (01:33:54):
Oh, good morning.
Speaker 16 (01:33:56):
Kylo would be fine. Biscuit would raise hell on that. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:33:59):
I imagine they have to throw people off the bus. It's always a little dog sometimes, you know, like
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:03):
People,
Speaker 16 (01:34:04):
Dogs.
Leo Laporte (01:34:05):
Dogs are people too.
Speaker 16 (01:34:07):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:34:07):
All right. That's enough of this.
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:09):
Okay. That was TikTok Corner folks.
Leo Laporte (01:34:11):
It's TikTok Corner tied in. I
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:14):
Don't do it often. I do it when we find the right stuff.
Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
Actually, this is a, I'm glad you put this story in from Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech did a white paper on TikTok and security and came up with a conclusion that in fact, TikTok is not a threat to our national security.
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:33):
No, it's pretty much an opinion piece.
Leo Laporte (01:34:35):
Oh.
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:36):
As a paper. It's
Leo Laporte (01:34:36):
Not a study.
Jeff Jarvis (01:34:37):
Well, no, it, it, it is. But it just to be clear, it wasn't like there was a new data. It was just analyzing and going through and saying why in their view it's not
Leo Laporte (01:34:48):
A threat. Yeah. We've seen this. Kaspersky also, and I refer to this a couple of weeks ago, had a a little bit more specific research into what, what TikTok collects and what they don't collect. Executive summary, TikTok is a commercially motivated enterprise, not a tool of the Chinese state. By dance's. Organizational structure reflects an attempt to segregate the Chinese market from global markets so that it can export its AI services globally. This split works to the advantage of both sides. Chinese government efforts to assert control over by dad's Chinese subsidiaries are targeting its domestic Chinese services, not its overseas operations. We have talked about that, that the, the Chinese version of TikTok is a different Amal. Very all right. But they understand that they're making, they're trying to make money in the US and they're not, they can't do the same thing in the US that they do in China. This report did not receive any funding from TikTok Bite dance or any interested party says I G P, which is the internet government governance project at the university of,
Jeff Jarvis (01:35:57):
Of Georgia
Leo Laporte (01:35:57):
Tech, Georgia Technologies
Jeff Jarvis (01:35:59):
Institute. So, by the way, there was a, there was a, a, a friend of mine just said this to me. I didn't see it. There was a Times Magazine feature about TikTok and why is it in such hot water and so on and so forth. Long Magazine.
Leo Laporte (01:36:09):
It's political in
Jeff Jarvis (01:36:10):
It. Yeah. It says that Jean g Ming, who founded by dance mm-hmm. <Affirmative> when he was 27 years old in 2010 he, he used a service called Dub Ban, which was a, like Rotten Tomatoes and Good Reads. And, and he recorded the books. He wanted to read the first on the list. What would Google do?
Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
Oh, congratulations.
Jeff Jarvis (01:36:33):
I think that's cool. You would inspir I try get to him and send him a, send him a photo autograph.
Leo Laporte (01:36:37):
Autograph. Copy, copy. Wow.
Jeff Jarvis (01:36:39):
Yeah. Get in trouble with the Republicans.
Leo Laporte (01:36:40):
And then just down the road from here, there's the story of the tick Tesla. The tick Tesla <laugh> on autopilot that caused a horrific, oh no, this is an n this is an it. Lemme find the other one that caused a horrific one crash. That's my rundown on the bay bridge.
Jeff Jarvis (01:36:56):
On, yeah, on the bridge. By the way, another reason not to go on bridges.
Leo Laporte (01:37:00):
The Tesla. That's not a reason which, it's, it's not clear. By
Jeff Jarvis (01:37:04):
The way, Tesla, something stop out of nowhere.
Leo Laporte (01:37:05):
It's not clear. Could have, if the Tesla was on autopilot or not. The
Jeff Jarvis (01:37:10):
Driver said it
Leo Laporte (01:37:11):
Was. Driver said it was, but maybe the driver didn't wanna take responsibility for suddenly too changing lanes all the way into the fast lane. And then sta stopping on the brakes. Here's a video from the bridge of the car, suddenly getting in the left lane and just stopping. And then, and then watch. Now you gotta kind of fault the car's plowing into one another for following too close. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (01:37:33):
Up one goes, oops. Yeah. There goes one above
Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
The others. The nine year old kid was injured or number of injuries? None. None critical. But you could see all the cars. There was quite a few cars. Let's see, another view from the bridge. So the car goes in the left lane suddenly, and then just boom, sta stops on the bridge. Sit up there. Yeah. Yep. This was, by the way, ironically, the day Tesla released full self-driving to all vehicles in North America.
Ant Pruitt (01:38:00):
So, so Mr. Laporte, with that being allegedly the full self-driving software, the, the driver couldn't intervene. Yeah. Within those three seconds. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:38:11):
To, so I'll
Ant Pruitt (01:38:12):
Tell you crap. Let me hit the
Leo Laporte (01:38:13):
Accelerator. I'll tell you the truth. I wouldn't, you know, and I had a Tesla didn't have fsd, but I would never take my hands off the wheel. You're not allowed to. The Tesla will say, get your hands back on the, and I would always keep my open cuz it's many of the time the, our model Xs try to plow into the dividers on the freeway or things like that. Fairly frequently it would jam the brakes on stopping for a ghost that it saw. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, cause it has that feature where it can stop, keep you from running into somebody or something. Right. But it would often do it just with nothing going on. It happened to Lisa all the time. So I never trusted it. And I think that's a mistake, frankly. To, to trust it. So the, yeah, I think the driver, Barry bears some responsibility. Whether the driver really did leave autopilot on, at least if it starts veering over and jamming on the brakes, problem is when it jams on the brakes, that's hard to override. That's like, at that point, it's like you're, you're kind of outta control. So I don't know.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:11):
And you have to, if you're going so fast, you also have like, there's that second of what the hell is
Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
Happening. There's always a second two. Oh my god. Or orientation. That's right.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:21):
<Laugh>. Yep. And then decide. And you can't, I mean, if you think about it, you can't go from a stop to a straight boom by then. Someone's probably already hit you. But because I mean,
Leo Laporte (01:39:29):
You don't, you have a Tesla that doesn't have a, it doesn't have full self-driving
Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:33):
It. No, it doesn't.
Leo Laporte (01:39:34):
But I would say, and I'm okay with that. I would say that really the bottom line is here we are all in a beta test of a not so good product, risking our lives because we don't have a choice. It's on the highways and around in northern California, it's every other vehicle is a Tesla. 
Ant Pruitt (01:39:53):
So with lawsuits, who's gonna get sued? The driver. Driver. The driver. The Tesla.
Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
Absolutely the driver, not the Tesla.
Ant Pruitt (01:39:59):
Oh, think so. Yeah. Yeah. The driver was still responsible for the
Leo Laporte (01:40:02):
Vehicle. You don't give up responsibility that No. That's the other story that I was about to show was like Tesla on autopilot led police on a chase because the driver was asleep.
Ant Pruitt (01:40:17):
Oh
Leo Laporte (01:40:17):
Yeah. This is in Germany. The driver was asleep. But here's the key. The driver had attached a weight to his steering wheel. Oh yeah. So that the Tesla would think he was driving it and then took a nap. <Laugh> the police knew that the driver was not driving a because they couldn't see his head. He was reclined. But b, because every time they tried to stop the Tesla, it would, it was traveling exactly 70 miles an hour. And if they pulled in front of it, it would slow down and speed up to match the, the car in front of it. <Laugh> the Tesla kept the same distance from the patrol car in front as they traveled down the <inaudible>. Well wait patrol, if it, if
Jeff Jarvis (01:40:57):
The patrol car had just slowed
Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
To a stop, they should have stopped. Stopped. I think they must have, that's how they got the guy.
Jeff Jarvis (01:41:01):
Let's walk to the other lane. Unless, unless it was
Leo Laporte (01:41:03):
Doing that. No, I don't think it would do that. I don't think they're that. I don't, I think you have to use his turn signal until it to go another lane. Anyway, that is our segment of technology.
Speaker 16 (01:41:14):
All
Leo Laporte (01:41:15):
Wrong. Unless you wanna see <laugh>. Where did I, where did I find this? There was a, is it a TikTok of the the Boston Dynamics doggy or no? Was the Boston Dynamics robot failing? I don't say that. Oh, I missed it. It was pretty funny. Oh, shoot. I think it was in another story. And I thought, you know, I should, I should show this later, but I don't remember where it was.
Jeff Jarvis (01:41:42):
It'll make Stacy feel
Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
Better. Yeah, it will too. You will like it. Now here's something that's gonna make you mad. Do you remember a song by a guy named Afro Man?
Speaker 16 (01:41:53):
I was going to clean my room, but then I got high. I was gonna go to school, but then I got high.
Leo Laporte (01:42:02):
Well, Afro that was what, how many years? 20 years ago? I don't know. 10 years ago. My kids used to lease the decade, at least a decade. Least a decade. So Afro man, I don't know if he's made a million dollars on that, but he's living in a kind of, you know, a poor county, Adams County in Ohio. And for some reason, the police decided that he had not only a lot of Mera, Joanna, but he was actually trafficking in narcotics and kidnapped somebody. So they raided his house, they broke down the door, and all he could do, he said, is make a video. This is Afro man, his song. Will you help me repair my Door? Featuring video of the Adams County Sheriff's Office dress as if invading a Taliban stronghold. Nice car collection. Look at that. He's pointing his gun down behind the sofa. Like there's,
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:00):
It's like he's gonna shoot a
Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Cat. Yeah. This is, this was an actual raid. They found nothing except a vape pen That's Araman says somebody left behind and one joint here they are breaking his gate to get in with their tactical vehicles. Look at this. They broke down his door. They rammed his door down.
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:25):
<Laugh>. This is hilarious.
Ant Pruitt (01:43:27):
So sad, dude.
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:29):
Unless you're Afro man. It is. Yeah. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (01:43:32):
This is why a police force does not need to
Leo Laporte (01:43:35):
Be, they do not need, need to be ized training. Yeah. This dress
Speaker 16 (01:43:38):
Slice of lemon pound
Leo Laporte (01:43:40):
Cake. There's his, there's his, by the way, his mom made this lemon pound cake. This, this somewhat overweight officer is very intrigued, <laugh> by, but you know, fortunately has a good sense not to eat the lemon pound cake. Oh, it was tempt. They realized after a while. Yeah. They
Speaker 17 (01:43:59):
Pound cake.
Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
They realized after a while that he had cameras in, in his house,
Speaker 17 (01:44:07):
Narcotics and kidnapping.
Leo Laporte (01:44:10):
They thought
Speaker 17 (01:44:10):
He was narcotics and
Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
Kidnapping. I, I hope he does. I hope Afro man does not take me down.
Speaker 17 (01:44:17):
I make my money <laugh>. Why does the Warren say
Leo Laporte (01:44:23):
They went through his closets,
Speaker 17 (01:44:26):
But why? Kidnapping
Leo Laporte (01:44:27):
And found some cash that Afro man says. Yes. That was from a gig I did about five years ago with Snoop Dogg. And I forgot. And they pay me as stuck at my pocket,
Speaker 17 (01:44:38):
Kidnapping victims inside my Snoop Pockets <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:44:43):
So they confiscated all the money
Speaker 17 (01:44:45):
To stop
Leo Laporte (01:44:46):
It. And then, and this I think is reprehensible. They went around and disconnected all the cameras. They realized, oh my God, everything we're doing here is being recorded by a security cameras. So they
Speaker 17 (01:44:59):
A thousand pounds of weed in my pockets, <laugh> there a thousand pounds of weed.
Leo Laporte (01:45:07):
He went to the, they never filed charges, of course, because I hope he did. I hope he Well. Well, he asked for his cash back. They gave him all the cash back minus $400. So they actually stole some money from him. He says he alleges. Oh, I'm sure that's civil forfeiture. Yes, I'm sure it is.
Speaker 17 (01:45:30):
He
Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
Has all this video. It, he still hysterical. He has CDs, but then they, they go and they start disconnecting the cameras, which I
Speaker 17 (01:45:38):
Honestly disconnected.
Leo Laporte (01:45:40):
That's almost an admission of guilt. Right? We, we don't want anybody to know what we're doing in here. Because disconnecting the cameras means it never happens. Yeah. Never. Nevermind storage on camera. So thank goodness Afro man has a voice and posted this. He actually posted two, two songs. He also had one about his his mom's lemon pound cake <laugh> <laugh>. Oh, mom <laugh>. They say the money was miscounted. But it was, I probably you know, if they, if he sues him, it'll probably be, well, it's civil forfeiture. Here's the lemon pound cake official music video.
Speaker 17 (01:46:20):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:46:22):
This, you know what, this is his only way of getting the money back.
Speaker 17 (01:46:26):
Yeah. Pound cake. He won. Put down his lemon <laugh> lemon pound cake. He's a family guy.
Leo Laporte (01:46:40):
I have to say, I have new respect for Afro man, obviously. Oh, wouldn't, too. Was not too high to make those two videos. I also think, honestly, there ought to be a little bit of retribution for the Adams County Sheriff. Yeah. Something needs to be done about that. This is not okay. Absolutely. This is not Okay. The raid took place summer of last year. Took 'em a while to put the videos out. The good news is the clips and the videos have gone viral. <Laugh>, you know, huge on TikTok. There are millions of views. They're all joking aside. I mean, they could have killed him. Yeah. They're all coming to this house. <Crosstalk>. Yeah, they're militarized. He was not there. Militarized. He says, you terrorize my kids. They burst down the, they did not, you know, ask the ring the doorbell.
(01:47:24):
Maybe the kids are told not to open the doorbell, but open the door to strangers. But he terrorized the kids. Afro man said, geez he was not there. So yeah, two, it's, it's set. Hope, 2.4 million likes on this here. Well, I think he probably does more exposure. I think he probably does. And this is where TikTok, YouTube, this, this is this is another way to have a voice in the world, isn't it? We've talked before about Canary warrants In a minute, I'm gonna show you the best Canary Warrant ever. And if you ask me, but first a word from our sponsor, Melissa. Ladies and gentlemen, you if you have a business, you have lists of customer data, right? Customers, suppliers. You have lists of addresses and emails. You know, those lists are going bad as we speak because people move names, change, addresses change.
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Stacey Higginbotham (01:51:45):
<Laugh>. Oh, crazy. It is a report that a company puts out to indicate that it has had secret warrants from the Justice Department or other entities asking about things they can't talk about.
Leo Laporte (01:51:59):
You're not allowed to tell the world if you get one of those warrants in many cases. So a warrant canary, well, here's a perfect one from oury, which is open source software. They even call it a warrant Canary, which may be violating the law. I don't know. They say because we would not be able to tell you. We will comply as we are required to with warrants, but in some cases we can't tell you. So we are gonna update this every week. It is a cryptic graphically sign message that says, up to this point, no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place. And then they're gonna put a cut and paste headline from a major news source. And this is the most recent one, January 9th. And here's the Reuters story from January 8th to prove you wouldn't know how the 76 ERs and the pistons did until <laugh> January 8th. So that proves that's when this was generated. Here's the PGP signature. If this disappears, they got served. So it's like a dead man switch. If this disappears from the AY site, they can't say that they haven't had a search or seizure. So they have to take it down. I think this is the way to do it. That's brilliant. We, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna do my own warrant. Canary, not that we know anything about you.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:22):
You don't have any data on any of
Leo Laporte (01:53:24):
<Laugh>. Don't cares what you have. Oh, darn it. I'm totally confused by this, this premise. It's the opposite. Oh, it's the opposite. So if you see this, you know, you're good if you don't see this, because they aren't allowed to say, we got searched. Right? Okay. So they can't put up a what they'd like to do is put up a notice. Hey, we just turned over all the information to the fbi. Just so you know. They can't, well talk guys. They can't do that in many cases because these these national safety of the security letters, what do they call 'em? And SLS won't often say, and you may not disclose. And this has been a problem historically for years, thanks to the Patriot Act. For a lot of companies. They get served, but they can't say anything. So the warrant canary, they put this up. As long as it stays up, they haven't been served. Does that make sense? Gotcha. And as soon as it's a dead man switch, as soon as it's gone, you're dead. I, I thought it
Stacey Higginbotham (01:54:15):
Was, I was basically saying this thing that y'all might be worried about happening has not happened. Has
Leo Laporte (01:54:20):
Not happened yet,
Stacey Higginbotham (01:54:21):
Yet. And when it goes away, you're like, oh, it just happened.
Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
I don't know if I like this or not. I hope Google doesn't do this. Your Amazon Echo now has a new keyword. Hey, Disney, will you turn this on? Stacy? Okay. So you might turn this on, right? No,
Stacey Higginbotham (01:54:39):
I would not. No. I don't want to talk to anybody. <Laugh>. I don't even talk to, I don't even talk to Madame anymore if I
Leo Laporte (01:54:45):
But C three PO might talk. But this is for Madame c3 PO might responder or a picture. How, how much, what was this deal?
Stacey Higginbotham (01:54:52):
So this is an, I think this is a really interesting deal because Disney worked closely with Amazon to create these personalized characters. And it's an exclusive deal through Amazon. And it's kind of like, if you wanted to create this like, vocal assistant to talk to your diehard users, like Leo, maybe someone wants to wake up to you in the morning and saying all their stuff. You could actually create the twit assistant and pay Amazon to do that for you. Which is they're also, which kind of an interesting
Leo Laporte (01:55:23):
Business. Yeah. They're also could put echoes in all the Disney resort hotels. How would, how would Leo wake you up if you could, if you look at that service, Hey, what you doing? Sleeping. I've been up for hours. <Laugh>, I'd more likely say it's okay. We go back to sleep. We don't, there's nothing to
Stacey Higginbotham (01:55:42):
See. There's nothing to rush to to
Leo Laporte (01:55:44):
Rush chill too. Just relax. Do as I am doing and turn off this alarm and roll over guests. Staying in select Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resort Hotels will be able to ask questions about park hours, request fresh towels. Hey Disney, I want some fresh towels up here. Access other helpful features. And if you have a magic band plus, which you use in the park to get onto rides and get into the park and stuff it will buzz, it will transform into a gamehow style buzzer. When you answer trivia questions, it'll react with lights and vibrations. It will also light up and buzz when you're alarm. It's kind of like, you know, if you're on home house arrest and you have that ankle thing, <laugh>, it's kinda like that. Wow. Yeah. Kinda like that. You know, that ankle bracelet it'll buzz you when wake you up and all kinds of things. And I guess for a fee, I don't know if it's free, cuz most, most of the other Echo voices or not, I have Samuel Jackson swearing at me from time to time. Melissa McCarthy telling me jokes. Is this something that's really useful? No, no, it's cool. Folks with accessibility,
Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:51):
If you have kids, it's neat cuz like they have char like you can actually talk to Ola the characters. So
Leo Laporte (01:56:56):
While your
Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:57):
Six year old loves Ola,
Leo Laporte (01:56:58):
Yeah, let it go. Now I get it. Or if you're in the mood to cook a nice meal, you could say, Hey, I want, you know rat to Tui rat. Tell me what to make <laugh> <laugh>. Okay. wow. But remember we told you that Amazon is losing a lot of money on Echo, right? As much as $10 billion a year. So they still don't understand how they lose money on it cuz it costs costs. They have
Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:23):
A lot of developers. Well, there's a couple things. There's one, they had a bunch of people, like, they hired like mad to do things like not attestation. What's it called when you're annotation. Sorry. Annotation. So they were annotated. So they had all these people all over the world annotating to make Madame Better. They also hired a bunch of people to go in all sorts of crazy directions. Like, oh yeah, you wanna put Madame May in his college, we're gonna set up a team of 200 people to do that and Vice. So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that's kind of, they just went a little nuts.
Leo Laporte (01:57:55):
Also, it costs money. A server's not free. I think we often feel like Google's free or whatever, but it, every search you do on Google costs a, you know, a fraction of ascent. Chat GPTs 10 times more expensive according to Sam Altman. So servers costs money. They use electricity. You gotta build a facility. I mean, it's not cheap. So yeah, it's possible lose 10 billion a year, especially since they don't make money on the hardware. That was the key on that story was they sell you those echo devices at cost, right? So they have to, they thought people would buy a lot of stuff, so, but I think this is them finding a new revenue model. Right. Okay. How about a Disney thing? I noticed, by the way, my Echo show keeps saying, don't you want to have the avatar experience on your Echo? No, no <laugh>, but I'm sure, I mean, it's still do, it's still doing it. I'm sure Avatar, whoever that movie company is paid a Milano, they
Stacey Higginbotham (01:58:51):
Are bringing ads to Echo and eventually they will bring it to your
Leo Laporte (01:58:55):
You bet.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:58:56):
Other things. Oh, you bet the dog hate come camera
Leo Laporte (01:58:59):
Again is very active biting that. He's out.
Jeff Jarvis (01:59:03):
<Laugh>, he's gone.
Leo Laporte (01:59:06):
So,
Jeff Jarvis (01:59:06):
Leo, back to your, back to your search engine. I wonder whether this whole talk about chat G B T and search people, we thought that people were gonna speak sentences to this device and it was gonna speak sentences back to us, and this was gonna replace so much interaction with the digital world and it didn't happen. That's the real import of the story. So is that just voice or is that we don't really want to end up in full sentences. We wanna be able to say pizza near me and leave it at that. And I don't want a Well, I think
Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
There's, that's a cheaper route of going from, from an development standpoint, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:44):
Well, I think it's hard to do with voice. So I had a, I had actually the voice designer for Google. So a woman named Captain Pearl. We talked about this on my show. Yeah, she was really cool. Oh, cool. And she talked about, you know, with voice, one of the challenges is because you only have one thing you can say back to someone, if you say, Hey, I wanna order a pizza. You, you don't really wanna spend the time saying where, like, then the responses, where would you like to get your pizza from Dominoes? What kind of pizza do you want? I mean, that's a pretty like, for that level of interaction. Yeah. She's like, it's possible. She says the best way that she thinks about it is, is this a conversation you would have with a friend or a person? And if you would actually say all that to them, then it's possible. But for the most part, those longer interactions, the problem with voices, you have so much choice. And so unless you go in ahead of time and say, I always wanna order from Papa John's, and I always want a pineapple and bacon pizza, you know, then
Jeff Jarvis (02:00:46):
Can you order for your protection? Can you even order and not be given such a thing? Can
Leo Laporte (02:00:51):
You even order food on an echo? I mean, could I say to
Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:54):
You, they did have a Domino's So again, Domino's is a checkboard coming. Yeah, they had an Alexa skill. So you could say, Hey, metal a open up the Domino's skill.
Leo Laporte (02:01:02):
Oh.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:01:03):
And then you could order a
Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
Piece of it was too many steps probably. I think people really, mostly, I just wanna know what my asparagus is done. Frankly. I set timeless things. Like that's what it boils down too. It's just too dag complicated. I steam it. I don't pour voice. Okay. Yeah,
Stacey Higginbotham (02:01:20):
You should sh Oh, shove it in the June. What are you doing?
Leo Laporte (02:01:23):
Shove it in the June. Oh, that's roasty frizzle some olive oil. Oh, we do that with hop that in there. Oh no. We do that with brussel sprouts. Really? The June is very good at Brussels sprouts. We went through a whole phase
Jeff Jarvis (02:01:33):
Br
Leo Laporte (02:01:34):
Sprout phase. I'll do a asparagus next time. Thank you. Try it. About five years ago, almost five years ago, we had a company called Reviver on the new screensavers. It was me and Patrick Norton showing off their digital license plates. Let me see if I can skip ahead. If you could explained careful why anyone would ever do this to me down. It seemed like a really bad idea. Yeah. I hope that the news screensavers don't take us down. <Laugh> here is the c e o of revival, which is a company that made digital license plates. They had not yet gotten it approved. One of our staffers no longer here, Josh bought one of these <laugh>, actually it's, you rent it for them, like a expensive monthly fee and one, and got pulled over by a C H P officer who said, what the hell is that?
(02:02:21):
Li you, you need a license plate, dude? And he said, no, no, it's a legal license plate. They, they stretch a little bit to find a use for these revives. I have seen them from time to time on on vehicles around town. Look, you can even have a picture of me on on your license. License. I need. Yeah. Well, turns out didn't get anywhere. Turns out they got hacked. No. Researchers hacked California's digital license plate gaining access to g p s location and user info just months after the release of the revival RPLs. So it's only a matter of time. They went on sale in California. Those in California late last year. Those were legit. You could use those legally on the road. Yeah. It took 'em a while to get government approval. Cool. But well that's so cool when I put this in the, in the rundown. Well, yeah. Then there's that another part. It's a lock. Had a funny link to like, why would anyone ever do this? Yeah. It was expensive too, as I remember. But I don't know why Josh, Josh thought it was cool. I guess the bug also allowed researchers to update the status of any digital California plate too. Stolen. <laugh> <laugh>
(02:03:35):
Likely getting you pulled over. I would, you know, I would, I would guess. Yeah. so maybe, maybe not such a a, a good idea. I'm I'm just saying. Just thinking <laugh>. Let's see what else? What else is lock Do Oh, have oh, change. Do we do change? Non John Deere is now allowing, yeah, no, let's do a change lock. John Deere's now allowing you to open your tractor tech. But first a word from Google, because we gotta say something. <Laugh>. Google Pixel phones just got their new you know, monthly dump and it allows you to get 5G in India. Okay. Qpr R two beta two Google messages rolls out. Group chat, end-to-end encryption in beta Google Maps for were os ads. A phoneless navigation on L T E watches. Too bad you don't have a wear os watch. Anybody, anybody who does Bueller Ellen Bueller. Google's new high definition maps are arriving first on Volvo and Pole Star electric vehicles. I wouldn't mind an HD map. I think that's pretty,
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:47):
That's who I want. Well I want a pole star too. Desperately.
Leo Laporte (02:04:50):
Yeah, those are the Volvo backed. They're E vs.
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:54):
And the full Android operating system that goes to my heart, you know, looking me
Leo Laporte (02:04:59):
To Google. Well, let's catch you one. Hey Mr. Pollstar. Yeah. Hey Mr. Pollstar, can you get one of these watch star right now? Yeah. He's watching Herbert. I think his name is Herbert. Yeah. Yeah. We Did you ever get a free burrito? No,
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:13):
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing from nothing. Got nothing. No.
Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
Maybe try one of those new quesadillas. It tastes like Vitas mixed with <laugh>. I thought
Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:21):
You were gonna say feet. And I was like, no.
Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
<Laugh> Vita flavored feet. Google's new <laugh>, Google's new split screen for Android Auto is rolling out. I have Android Auto on my vehicle, so I will give this a shot. It's been, you know, kind of floating around in the, in beta for some time. What
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:39):
Do you think about this? I don't know if I want, I want, I like the full screen for the map.
Leo Laporte (02:05:43):
Yeah. I mean, I go back and forth. I have, you know, I use Apple CarPlay, but I think it's kind of cool to have, especially on my car, where the screen is pretty big on It would depend on the screen size, wouldn't it?
Jeff Jarvis (02:05:56):
Yeah. Mine's not that big. A
Leo Laporte (02:05:57):
Mazda. Yeah. Yeah. The new Android auto is here. Hey, this is really exciting. Google Meet is rolling out in call. Emoji reactions.
Jeff Jarvis (02:06:08):
I see making a mistake of doing that in a faculty meeting. <Laugh>,
Leo Laporte (02:06:12):
Thumbs up. Yeah. Woo. Well we do a few Google meets. I'll try it in our next staff meeting. Get this. That stuff
Jeff Jarvis (02:06:21):
Apparently matters to people
Leo Laporte (02:06:22):
Under 40. 
Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:24):
Who's this person getting hearts and celebrations? Dang.
Leo Laporte (02:06:27):
Nisha. Madison. Wait a minute, wait a minute. No, I'm sorry. Aiden Taylor is getting, is getting a heart from Nisha, Madison and Nisha. I think
Jeff Jarvis (02:06:38):
Aiden can sue.
Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
Yeah, I think that's unwanted attention. Unwanted emoji <laugh>. That's a new, a new thing in California law. And Google Docs adds a feature. We thought it already had. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:06:53):
<Laugh> says The Verge
Leo Laporte (02:06:56):
Says the verge non printing characters. So there you go. You've been waiting for it now you got it. That's the Google change lock.
Jeff Jarvis (02:07:06):
That was swift and
Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
Efficient. Efficiency is my middle name because waffles await. I do wanna mention, I forgot to mention this. When we were talking about the revival license plates the governor of our fair state, Gavin Newsom in his State of the Union address said something kind of interesting. He said that mm-hmm <affirmative> Californians are gonna get a digital id, but it's gonna be, he didn't mention Apple at all, which is so far the only way I think you can do a digital ID with the apple system and it's going to be something extra marvelous. Did he really use the phrase extra marvelous? Well I'll give you the exact quote. We're gonna do it like no other. This is a very Trumpian quote. We're gonna do it like no other state know. This says Governor Newsom, who is probably running for president in a couple of years. Actually be next year. Wouldn't it know this in just a matter of months. We're finally going to have fellow's digital wallets where you can get your driver's license on a digital wallet. And we're going to do it. Like no other state has done it. There's only a few that have, but there's issues. Ours think it'll be next level. We're so excited about what the DMV can look like. This makes no sense. <Laugh> <laugh>
(02:08:35):
 it's part of the California 20 23, 20 24 budget proposal. And he says, what does it say
Ant Pruitt (02:08:42):
Coming in the state money?
Leo Laporte (02:08:45):
I don't know. It's hip. It's happening. It's with it. Wasn't Rick Cl the was Rick Cl the guy chief? Was he the chief digital officer? For, for he was, he's no longer doing that. That's right. He was no longer. No. I wonder whether he was catching that. You know, I'm curious cuz a number of states do have these Apple digital IDs, but you know, it's complicated. Cause you can't just say, well that can work as a driver's license. Now you have to give all the police in the state the ability to somehow verify that that's not a picture on your screen. And that's a real driver's license. What about me on Android? And what about you on Android? It sounds like, I'm gonna guess because he didn't mention Apple at all, that it is perhaps something more than the the Apple thing. Here's an example of the Arizona driver's license on your watch, which is cool, cool as heck. But I, you know, there's gotta be some way to verify it for law enforcement to verify it. Otherwise you can just put a picture on there. So don't
Ant Pruitt (02:09:44):
Get me wrong, I like the convenience of having like a digital wallet and not having to pull out my wallet and grab the card and tap or insert or what have you. But at the same time, I think I have some privilege and everybody's not gonna
Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
Be Oh no. Absolutely. And so they have to still off offer cards obviously. But look, I have on my uhoh, Stacy's passed out. We better hurry. I have <laugh>.
Speaker 13 (02:10:09):
Sorry, my dog is making weird noises. So I was seeing what was going on.
Leo Laporte (02:10:13):
<Laugh>. I think Stacy wanted to see what the show looked like if it was sideways. And does it look better sideways? I don't know.
Speaker 18 (02:10:21):
No, my dog was snoring, so I was I was confused cause it was a weird
Leo Laporte (02:10:25):
Noise. Wait, do we all lean left or right? Jeff left. Okay, let's talk. Well, oh, that means, that means not gonna go this way. See
Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:31):
Something? I can't do it and do it right. <Laugh>?
Leo Laporte (02:10:38):
Nope. Stacy's leaning right. Nope. That's just leaning left. I can't, I can't. Okay. There we go. Let's get come on in. Join the other way, other way. Join the, we're all leaning left. You know, people have always said this was a left, left-leaning show now. Yep. <laugh>. They know it's,
Ant Pruitt (02:10:53):
We're gonna hear about that comment. It's
Leo Laporte (02:10:55):
True. <Laugh>. I like it. This is a California vaccination card that sh proves that it's legal. Right? And I can use it. There's a QR code on, it's my apple wall. It has it. And I can use this almost anywhere that they want. They used to want that. They don't care anymore now. But when they wanted vaccination cards, that was, I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. That was California. I think all, yeah,
Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:20):
We had, we had
Ant Pruitt (02:11:21):
Qs. But the point you make about the, the law enforcement having some type of equipment, well, it's to verify. Yeah. Right? That's, that's, that's what makes, makes me nervous because we are already dealing with some of our worst police officers having ego issues and now you're telling them to pull out some type of device and I
Leo Laporte (02:11:42):
Don't know, I don't want plugging anything into my, my phone either. Right.
Ant Pruitt (02:11:45):
Then there's the that too. That too.
Leo Laporte (02:11:49):
Well, Stacy's
Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:50):
Gotta get
Leo Laporte (02:11:50):
What they Go ahead.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:52):
Oh, I was gonna say, cuz you've gotta show them. So you're gonna have to unlock your phone. What if they just swipe it? Yeah. And then you're like,
Leo Laporte (02:11:58):
No. Yeah, I'm not sure. I know. I agree. I'm not sure. This is great. I mean, I don't know how they do it in the states where it's, it's currently implemented, but maybe there's a QR code or something. But you could fake that too. You could do a
Ant Pruitt (02:12:09):
Screenshot.
Leo Laporte (02:12:10):
Yeah. Yeah.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:11):
I can fake a QR code like myself. I don't even have to know anything.
Leo Laporte (02:12:15):
Stacey is is running late for her for a dinner date with the first CRISPR gene edited meat. So we're gonna <laugh>, we're gonna let her be the Guinea pig.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:25):
Did you wanna talk about John Deere?
Leo Laporte (02:12:27):
Oh yeah. John Deere. What is there to say? Did they, did they, it's the right to repair alliances one, is it a victory?
Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:35):
It is sort of so ish. There's ish. So what they did is they signed a memora memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation. And so all this is, is the commercial agreement between John Deere and a group of farmers to say that John Deere is going to let farmers access repair information and repair software for fair and reasonable terms. So Fran terms,
Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Well an MOU is binding. It's legally binding.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:05):
It is. So what it doesn't do though, so the farmers have to promise not to like share this everywhere so they can't post it. This is kind of like a secret commercial agreement. Ah, if the states or Congress come up with the law, it will supersede this. And there are things like, you know, they are still gonna have to pay for access to this. And it's, you know, and I think they would need to keep the pressure on by having continued law lawsuits, not lawsuits. The threat of legislation I think is a good reason cuz that's why John Deere actually did this. Cuz Congress was like, I'm sorry. You have got to get your stuff together jd, because if farmers can't harvest their stuff cuz they can't repair their tractors, that affects our food supply not good. And John Deere's like, okay, fine. We'll do this.
Leo Laporte (02:13:56):
Yeah, I mean, I think the government coming after 'em in 2021 president Biden issued an executive order urging the FTC to crack down. FTC said it will devote more resources to combating unlawful re repair restrictions. John Tester from Montana Big Farm state introduced legislation to limit repair restrictions in, in ag More than half the US states considering right to repair laws. Although New York's right to repair law, which was the first, and, and a model has been somewhat gutted by Governor Houl before she signed it. I think we're making progress. And I think you're right. I think John Deere Lori
Jeff Jarvis (02:14:33):
Doctor will put up, I haven't read it yet cause I don't have a year. He put up a very long thread about this. You can imagine that he'd be victorious but also suspicious.
Leo Laporte (02:14:41):
Yeah. As are, as are many over the John Deere agreement. So, you know, let's see. But I think the, I think the writings on the wall, apples bowed to pressure to allow people to repair their funds, kind of Yeah. In, in a, in a very malicious stand on
Jeff Jarvis (02:14:54):
Your head and with one hand tied behind your back. And,
Stacey Higginbotham (02:14:58):
And that is the question, like, what is compliance gonna look like under this? And we don't know yet.
Leo Laporte (02:15:04):
Hey everybody. Leo LaPorte here. I am the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what we do here at twit because I think it's unique and I think for anybody who is bringing a product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do Here at twit, we've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product. Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Well already you should be, your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place we do it by offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world.
(02:15:57):
And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host Red Ads different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement. We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us. And we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded it Pro TV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, quote, we would not be where we are today without the twit network. I think the proof is in the pudding.
(02:16:54):
Advertisers like it Pro TV and Audible that have been with us for more than 10 years, they stick around because their ads work. And honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with twit. We have a very full service attitude. We almost think of it as kind of artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you from, with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this. We embed our ads into the shows. They're not, they're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ads saying, yeah, I love that. Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>.
(02:17:46):
That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people, our audience trusts saying, yeah, that sounds great. We deliver always overdeliver on impressions. So you know, you're gonna get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. Gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working. You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages. That really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans who really wanna see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too.
(02:18:38):
So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience. Visit twit.tv/advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCreary is the c e o of authentic. You probably know him one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I am very proud of what we do because it's honest. It's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's one of the reasons we only work with high integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted.
(02:19:38):
I have absolute approval on everybody. If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today@advertisetwit.tv. Break out of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host red ads on twit. Do TV visit twit tv slash advertise for more details. Or you can email us, advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign Now, I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring. Let us conclude this fine festivity by getting Stacey to give us a thing of the week now that it's dark out. Okay. Yes.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:16):
Now that it's dark. Okay. I, I have tra
Leo Laporte (02:20:19):
Stacey has in spelled correctly induced God to turn on dark mode in her native region.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:26):
Well, isn't it dark where y'all are? Yeah. Is it not dark? I
Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
Sure is here. <Laugh>.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:30):
Well, I know.
Leo Laporte (02:20:31):
Well you have a lot of cloud with a, with a, with a woman upstairs and I think you've convinced her.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:37):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (02:20:38):
Dark mom's the only one. Oh,
Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:40):
I'm sorry. I'm I'm not, it's, I'll tell you what it is. It's an induction birder we saw at cs. That is really cool. So
Leo Laporte (02:20:47):
I like the duction stone. I still trying to get an induction stove top. I really want it. Why can't you? So we have that. It's great.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:54):
This is called the tra tra. So Tra Montana's guru.
Leo Laporte (02:20:59):
That's a region induction burger Italy.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:02):
It is well it's, it's a Brazilian country. I'm sorry. It's a Brazil. It's a Brazilian company. <Laugh>. Okay. And all about, they actually make the T fall brand of cookware by the way.
Leo Laporte (02:21:13):
Okay. Which for a long time I've, we used to use it. We don't do it anymore because it's cancer causing or something. But
Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:21):
They have both cancer causing and non-cancer.
Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
Oh, that's nice now. But they offer the new non-cancer causing non-stick cooker. None.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:28):
That's great. Non piece fast. I
Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
Don't know if it's cats causing. Anyway, I just, I, I read somewhere and I dimly remember it's probably not good to have non-stick cookware.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:36):
What was it? One of your California labels? What said that's
Leo Laporte (02:21:39):
On everything that
Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:40):
Says this thing. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:21:41):
So the Tremon induction cooktop is available even at Target.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:45):
Well, so they, this is the guru. This is a new one they showed in ces. So the TRA guru this is expected in the first quarter. It's gonna cost between 299 and 3 49. It's a single burner induction. But it, like our June oven has a scale inside mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it also comes with thousands, not thousands, sorry, hundreds of recipes that will walk you through all the cooking steps and control the burner.
Leo Laporte (02:22:14):
Now on Sunday, you talked about pussy did that on Sunday. You talked about like you had a Heston cue or some sort of smart pan. I did. And you don't like it
Stacey Higginbotham (02:22:23):
Anymore? I do have, yeah. I don't like it because it's buggy to mess with because the Heston Q has to talk with the GE and it has to talk with the right device and like
Leo Laporte (02:22:33):
If, and you know how to cook. It used to be on my, more importantly, I also know you already know how to cook <laugh>, so you don't need the pan to tell you what to do. The one advantage though I like of in about induction is the temperature. Control is very precise.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:22:46):
Control is amazing. Yeah. Well, here, and I will also say we're gonna get to a point, I don't know if y'all have been following this, but there's been a lot of inks spilled lately about should we ban gas stoves? Right. Right. Cause gas in the kitchen is causing problems, health problems.
Leo Laporte (02:23:03):
Oh, is it really?
Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:04):
And so I don't,
Leo Laporte (02:23:05):
It's it's not just anymore. It's not just a natural. Gas is dangerous for atmosphere climate. It's bad for your health.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:11):
It's bad. Like gas stoves in homes or homes. Children who grow up in homes with gas stoves have a higher 42% higher rate of asthma is the most, most recent findings. Oh, that's interesting. But there's been a lot of like, and, and I I'm not gonna argue about the politics of gas stoves, whatever, but also, well,
Leo Laporte (02:23:32):
I'm ready, I'm ready to get off natural gas in our house. We'd like to replace everything including the
Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:36):
Well, and that's is part of the electrification effort. Yeah. But if you read this stuff and you're freaked out, an induction burner is a great way to get started for less than buying a whole new cooktop.
Leo Laporte (02:23:46):
It's basically a I don't magnet I dt know often. Right. And you need, and you need to have cookware that is special cookware. Okay. That has magnetic. That's steel. Steel. Or not aluminum. Something with iron in it. Yeah. Not aluminum. Yeah. And and then it, it doesn't get, it doesn't have a heated, like you could touch a induction cooktop without burning yourself, but the pan gets hot. You can, which is kind of cool.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:09):
Well, and it does get hot. I mean hot pan from
Leo Laporte (02:24:12):
The pan. It does. Yeah. From the pan. Pan.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:14):
Yeah. I just, I don't want anybody being like, look, well
Leo Laporte (02:24:17):
Leo said <laugh> and they're easier to clean because there's no interstices.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:25):
Yes. So the point being I thought this was a really cool product. It's also a cool product for people who are like living in apartments or going to college. Yeah. Because like I'm hopeful that when my child goes to college, I can send them off with an induction burner if cuz they like to cook and boom, it's not gonna send Buzzfeed anything on fire. The
Leo Laporte (02:24:44):
Buzzfeed Tasty one.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:45):
That's what I was gonna say. Buzzfeed Tasty had something like this a couple years ago.
Leo Laporte (02:24:49):
2018.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:50):
Yep. But it died. Yeah. So this
Leo Laporte (02:24:52):
Is that again app on iOS and Android. Unfortunately this site is in Portuguese, but I'm getting the gist. The pictures are nice and that's cool. How much?
Stacey Higginbotham (02:25:06):
2 99 to 3 49. Okay.
Leo Laporte (02:25:08):
For a single burner.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:25:11):
Yes. Now a single burner, like a, like a budget single burner from no name brand on Amazon is like 115.
Leo Laporte (02:25:17):
Okay. So it's not like more
Stacey Higginbotham (02:25:19):
Just to give you a little bit of a Okay. I mean it is, it's twice as, it's more than twice as much. But a name brand burner <laugh> is a bit is like 200. Right. It's like 1 75 to 200. So this is more, but it does have that integrated scale, which is kind of nice and the rest
Leo Laporte (02:25:36):
Of Oh it does. Oh that's cool. I, that's in everywhere
Stacey Higginbotham (02:25:39):
And there's no subscription fee.
Leo Laporte (02:25:40):
You, you know, I think that's cuz of MEMS that we, we have scales everywhere now. Micro electromechanical machines.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:25:49):
No, I know what MEMS are. I'm just trying to follow your train of thought about why
Leo Laporte (02:25:52):
Mems because we can put, I think these scales in the feet of the June oven in the feet of the Tramo guru and others are actually mems because they're smaller compact, they're inexpensive. And so they're starting to build these scales in everything including that monogram ge monogram mixer you were talking about has a scale in it too.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:26:13):
The profile mixer.
Leo Laporte (02:26:13):
Yeah. Or it does profile. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I don't know. I'm just my, that's my con that's my assumption. Anybody wants to correct me then please do.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:26:26):
No, I mean, cheaper, cheaper scale sensors Makes sense. Yeah. When you said me, I mean MEMS are so many things. It's kind of like, you know why we have life on earth, water, oxygen,
Leo Laporte (02:26:37):
<Laugh>. I know it's
Stacey Higginbotham (02:26:37):
Cause of We just felt like that. So
Leo Laporte (02:26:38):
Water. Water. but you can put basically MEMS or solid state scales Right. That you can put into things. And they're small. So Well
Stacey Higginbotham (02:26:51):
Mems are any
Leo Laporte (02:26:51):
Devices, they could be a variety of things, but they can be scales.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:26:54):
Yeah. Anything to convert the digi or the analog world to digital. So it can be microphones, it can be gyroscopes. Anything that's like I see the real world and I'm gonna tell the computers what it
Leo Laporte (02:27:03):
Means. MEMS according to Neva are chip based technology where sensors are composed of a suspended mass between a pair of capacitive plates. Well, they all be danged.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:27:14):
Okay. My definition is way better.
Leo Laporte (02:27:16):
<Laugh>. <laugh>. I agree. I agree. Diva. So the tra
Jeff Jarvis (02:27:22):
Looks
Stacey Higginbotham (02:27:23):
That's my thing of the week. Cause I think it's pretty cool. Yeah. I might, I mean I don't need an induction stove, but maybe I'll convince my child they need it.
Leo Laporte (02:27:31):
<Laugh> I have in a drawer somewhere the Heston Q induction burner, which I got with all the hands. Yeah. They have one too hands. So maybe I should just pull that out and use that instead. I just love the idea that you could set the temperature to 211 degrees so it won't boil, but it go right up against it, which is cool. Things like that for simmering. Mr. Jeff Jarvis, did I just use your number of the week?
Jeff Jarvis (02:27:54):
No. so I'm gonna do one that you wouldn't let me do as a story. I'm sure <laugh> as it's, it's arcade
Leo Laporte (02:28:03):
<Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (02:28:04):
Line 66, the Finn Parliament. There
Leo Laporte (02:28:07):
You go. There
Jeff Jarvis (02:28:09):
Is important. You knew that. I knew you'd never do it. You'd never lie.
Leo Laporte (02:28:12):
No, you're right. I skipped over it already. Yep. Oh,
Jeff Jarvis (02:28:14):
Of course you did. Yeah. I'm gonna take this moment of democracy to do it is the Finn Parliament rejected an eu copyright legislation was part of the digital services. The, the, the, the the single market digital services where the EU says we shall all do this. And then each country does their own, their version of it. And Finland had a version of it. And the, the, the constitutional law committee rejected it because it's about copyright and data mining. And of course the EU is saying, no data mining's bad and Google does it. And so on and forth. We shouldn't allow all this and, and copyright because the publishers say, you can't take my snippets. So that's all wrong. The fins, God bless their souls, said this violates the, both the finished constitution and human rights regarding science and education. And I find this fascinating because one of my complaints about when people say, well, you shouldn't have that information, is you cut off knowledge. You cut off potential knowledge. And we've gotta discuss that. And so what the fins are saying is that science needs access to data, education needs access to data. And I don't know where this goes. I don't know where it ends up, but I found it to be a really interesting path for constitutional discussion there. Now I can tell you that Denmark had no bank robberies last year because there's so little cash in the country. There's a number.
Leo Laporte (02:29:46):
Wow. Wow.
Jeff Jarvis (02:29:48):
And he stayed asleep until I come up with that one. That was for Leo. Wow.
Leo Laporte (02:29:52):
But no, and actually I think the finish folks, whoever they might be <laugh> are right. That, that, that I think a lot of times these, these copy, these blanket copyright laws are strongly tilted in favor of copyright holders and against Oh absolutely. Things like education, the public domain and so forth. I'm sure Cory, Dr. O would write a book about this. So good for the fins. Maybe I'll, I'll do first. Yeah, good, good for the fins for saying Yeah. No there's a reason we have a public square
Jeff Jarvis (02:30:23):
And Google rats, the people who, who decide whether Google search engine's doing a good job or not, just got a raise oh to between $14 and 1450 an hour, which to say they were not well paid.
Leo Laporte (02:30:34):
They are not well paid. What the hell? And they don't get teed in the cafeteria either.
Jeff Jarvis (02:30:42):
Ooh.
Leo Laporte (02:30:43):
Contractors. So they don't get anything. Right. But do they work? That's that's terrible. They were being paid 10 to $12 an hour.
Jeff Jarvis (02:30:50):
Well, it's kind of a mechanical Turk task in a way. I think that's probably what the
Leo Laporte (02:30:56):
Argument was. What? But they depend a terrible job. You have to sit there
Jeff Jarvis (02:30:59):
And you think about it. How are you gonna teach systems? There's gonna be more labor like this in a, in a more AI world where you're teaching the computers. Yeah. Well humans have to decide at some will, whether that's right or wrong. Yeah. And whether it's a good job or bad. And, and if that's seen as low wage waiver wa labor where you clearly have to be intelligent and educated enough to say, oh, that's right or that's wrong. Computer, you got that wrong. And if that's seen as low level servant to the machine, that's
Leo Laporte (02:31:31):
Not great. So they're constellation. Well, part of it is, go ahead.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:31:35):
Oh, well I was gonna say you can work from anywhere. There's a lot of flexibility inherent in a lot of those kind of jobs. And so,
Leo Laporte (02:31:42):
Well, let's face it, they're probably also in non, not in the us Right. They're
Ant Pruitt (02:31:50):
Bad even they're call center jobs here in the US that are work from home that don't pay a lot of money. But's true. The benefit is they're working from home and these people set their own hours, so to speak. I know a couple people back Carolina doing such jobs
Jeff Jarvis (02:32:06):
Now we all wanna work from home and expect to,
Leo Laporte (02:32:09):
Right? Yeah. to understand better what what these guys do. As one Raider explained to Forbes, if someone wants to see pictures of moon jellyfish and for some reason enters moon pie jellyfish Raiders, see to it, people don't get results about marshmallow snacks. Thank God. I think they should get paid more.
Ant Pruitt (02:32:28):
Yeah. They should get paid more. But Mr. Jarvis, I still think that having someone hired just to understand the nuance of prompts is going to be a premium oh yeah. Premium job at
Leo Laporte (02:32:41):
Some point. It's a coding job really.
Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:43):
I think it's gonna be a skillset that you learn much like we learned how to search.
Leo Laporte (02:32:47):
Yeah. We learned how to search, didn't we? Yeah. Yeah. It's harder than that though. I mean, people were, well
Jeff Jarvis (02:32:52):
You, once we got past the Bayesian search that it would
Ant Pruitt (02:32:55):
<Laugh> <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (02:32:57):
I want three moon pie, 2% fish and 43% induction. Cooktops an Pruit has a pick of the week. A good one, I think.
Ant Pruitt (02:33:11):
Yeah. This was I, over to holiday break, I watched a lot more YouTube and I came across again, Mr. Andre Mack and he has a series talking about wine. Andre Mack is a sommelier. And he has a series with a bunch of celebrities where they sit down and guess cheap versus inexpensive wine. Ooh. This recent episode featured Kevin Hart, who is a fascinating man, you know, comedian, actor, entrepreneur, great storyteller. And just watching that episode just brought out a lot, a lot more interesting information about Kevin Hart, let alone teaching us folks like me that don't know enough about wine yet to learn
Jeff Jarvis (02:33:52):
You live in the midst of
Leo Laporte (02:33:53):
Wine. This is an interesting genre because of course it started with the hot ones, right? It get celebrities to eat hot sauce. <Laugh>, Uhhuh, <affirmative>. I like this better.
Ant Pruitt (02:34:01):
I still
Leo Laporte (02:34:02):
Watch that too. I would do this one <laugh>. I don't wanna do a lot. I still watch that one. This is a good idea. Have him drink wine and find out more about him. And there's a little test here because he's gonna give you wine. He won't tell you if it's good or bad. And you have to figure out what the expensive wine is and what the cheap
Ant Pruitt (02:34:17):
One is. Right. And as, as you know just because you hand me a $200 bottle of wine, I may not think it tastes like a $200 bottle of wine. It may taste like crap to me. Yeah. But yet that $10, you
Leo Laporte (02:34:31):
Do that all the time.
Ant Pruitt (02:34:32):
Be phenomenal.
Leo Laporte (02:34:33):
In fact, a lot of reason
Ant Pruitt (02:34:34):
Chuck's fame
Leo Laporte (02:34:35):
Came from this. Yeah. Two buck chuck. Yeah. There's a lot of research, frankly, that people are heavily influenced by the price. And if they don't know the price and they taste the wine and they're honest, it's very often not the most expensive wine or even that expensive wine that wins that. Well
Ant Pruitt (02:34:52):
This one, this, this one will surprise you that that particular episode.
Leo Laporte (02:34:55):
Does Kevin have a good day? Does he have a good taste? Budds? Is he
Ant Pruitt (02:34:59):
Reliable? Yes. He, he, he was the stuff that he said, he, he's got some experience. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:35:05):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I want, I can't wait. I can't wait to watch this. This is album, this YouTube, this just drinking YouTube. This was from Bon Upe T Magazine,
Ant Pruitt (02:35:12):
Bon Up Tea featuring Andre Mack. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:35:15):
Nice.
Ant Pruitt (02:35:15):
Or nice sommelier.
Leo Laporte (02:35:17):
There he is. Sommelier tries to, oh, look at it. So he's like their How's sommelier? That's cool. That's really cool. And of course you, you do didn't do it this time. He usually tell us about your website, aunt pruit.com and all those fine prints available for sale and let's give you
Ant Pruitt (02:35:37):
A approved.com/prince. I haven't been able to get out and shoot something else that I'm wanted to put up for Princes. Let's see where, take
Leo Laporte (02:35:43):
Yet rainy day pictures. There's not much else to
Ant Pruitt (02:35:45):
Do. All his dagum, rain and mud and muck and hasn't been appealing to me, but there's still some prints out there for people to check out if they're interested in putting them up on their walls, on their friend's walls and their favorite bar or what have
Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
You. He's also an
Ant Pruitt (02:35:59):
Stunt.
Leo Laporte (02:36:00):
And hands on photography is his show. Twitter tv slash hop. Who's coming up? What you doing in the future here?
Ant Pruitt (02:36:08):
Well, I was gonna talk about macro photography, but I just saw a story earlier today that may make me address that story. Cause it's just
Leo Laporte (02:36:18):
Sort of, I saw you featured in in a story about getting skin tone, right?
Ant Pruitt (02:36:24):
Yes. Mr. Taka Armstrong over at ior he wanted to do a test for looking at the iPhone and the Google Pixel phones. It's a good piece. Just smartphones in general, how they handle skin tones for everybody. Not just people like color, but also white people and in various different scenarios where the lighting was really good to where the RA lighting was pretty crap. It was not a fun task, <laugh>. But but yeah, we got, we got a lot of good information out of it. It was myself featured as well as wine back. Now people that listen and watch all about Android, they know both of those names because Juan and Taka have been on the TWIT network a time or three.
Leo Laporte (02:37:07):
Nice. Nice. Anne is also the manager of our club twit community and has done a great job putting together events. Stacy's tomorrow I will join you at 9:00 AM for Stacey's book Club <laugh> Project. Hail, hail Mary. Yeah, UN bathed. Unwed 9:00 AM Yeah. Pacific. That's noon. Eastern is 1,819. I don't know. Sometime in Eastern in U T C. And then it's too early for Leo. It's too early. Even just talking about it. I can't do it. 4:00 PM Much better time next Thursday for an inside twit with Lisa and me. Wintu Dao, the host of all about Android will be on the ninth at 9:00 AM and as I mentioned earlier, Daniel Suarez at 11:00 AM in the club. Twit Discord. That'll be for folks, folks,
Ant Pruitt (02:37:56):
For our members that are interested in these events, I get asked, you know, here and there about the timing. There's like, is that specific time or is that my time zone? Well, we do have that. I believe it's Unicode inside of the,
Leo Laporte (02:38:10):
It's on your, it's in your time zone Discord transport. And
Ant Pruitt (02:38:13):
It should show Yeah, yeah. Right. It shit show in your time zone. But
Leo Laporte (02:38:17):
If Discord doesn't know what, what time it is, then no one does. So yeah, discord should fix that for you automatically. But 9:00 AM East is Pacific. When I say it out loud, I'm saying our time, which is 9:00 AM Pacific, right? That's what I always say. Noon Eastern and 1700 UTC so that people know. Thank you everybody. Stacey, go have a wonderful meal. So jealous. I will. Yay. Tell
Ant Pruitt (02:38:43):
Us all
Leo Laporte (02:38:43):
About it. Stacy, on i.com at Giga. Stacy, she's also of course co-host with Kevin Tofl of the IOT podcast. Great show this week. All about stuff they saw at ces. And Stacy was on TWIT this week and she was wonderful too. So you can catch that as well. If you don't get enough Stacy in your life tomorrow 9:00 AM Pacific. It was like, this week is your week. It is your week. It's Stacy All Stacy all the time. Jeff Jarvis, he is our resident expert on all things media and of course he's a professor of journalism somewhere. I have the card here somewhere. It's all right. It's all right. It says no, I have to tell, I'll tell you all buddy. He is z Directer of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmar graduate School of Journalism, as is a city University of New York. Thank you, sir. At Jeff Jarvis and his new book.
Jeff Jarvis (02:39:39):
And I meet with the marketing people at Bloomsbury next week. So if you're ever gonna pre-order the book now, it'd be a
Leo Laporte (02:39:44):
Great time to do it because as soon as they get ahold of it, they're gonna double the price. Btt, l y
Jeff Jarvis (02:39:50):
Wow. Look at all your friends
Leo Laporte (02:39:51):
Slash buy Gutenberg. If as if Gutenberg was for sale, the age of print and its lessons for the age of the internet. So, oh, I like, I like the cover design. You went on. Isn't that nice? I do too. Operations, yeah. The Gutenberg parenthesis. And we know some very beautiful fonts inside. Thanks. We have to. Glenn Fleischman.
Jeff Jarvis (02:40:13):
Glenn Fleischman. We have Doves.
Leo Laporte (02:40:16):
Is that the one that guy threw off the bridge? Yep.
Jeff Jarvis (02:40:19):
Yeah. Yeah. This is the one. It's a great story. <Laugh>. And then the other, the, the body type. The story is that the designer of it was arrested by Hitler because of his font.
Leo Laporte (02:40:28):
Wow. Tank faces have such an interesting
Jeff Jarvis (02:40:31):
They do. It's, that's
Leo Laporte (02:40:33):
The next one story. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you Aunt Pruitt. Twit do tv slash hop. Thank you all for joining us. We do the wonderful This Week in Google Show, which has nothing to do with Google every Wednesday, roundabout 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 utc. That's, I only mention that if you wanna watch live@live.twi.tv, there's streaming audio and video there all day long and all night long. If you're watching live chat, live at irc, do twi.tv. That's our IRC chat room. But you can just use your web browser to go there. If you can also if you're in the club, chat in the Discord after the fact, our ad supported versions of the show available@twit.tv slash TWiG. There's a YouTube channel This Week in Google Channel on YouTube. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available. I thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back next week. I hope you will too for This Week in Google. Bye-Bye. Bye bye. Byebye, everybody say goodbye to the Jeff Jarvis portrait hanging over aunt.
Speaker 19 (02:41:39):
If you are looking for a midweek update on the weeks tech news, I gotta tell you, you gotta check out Tech News Weekly. See, it's all kind of built in there with the title. You get to learn about the news in tech that matters. Every Thursday, Jason Howell and I talk to the people making and breaking the tech news, get their insights and their interesting stories. It's a great show to check out TWIT TV slash tnw.