Transcripts

This Week in Google 707, 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's here. Jeff's here, and Ant's got the week off. But great news. Mike Elgan is filling in and we're gonna talk about ChatGPT 4. It just came out and already amazing hundreds of applications. Is this the cambrian explosion we've been waiting for? Maybe, maybe it is. Big layoffs in the tech industry in general and in Facebook specifically. Plus, at the very end of the show, big time breaking news about TikTok. All that and more. Coming up next on TWiG!

(00:00:45):
This is TWiG This Week in Google. Episode 707, recorded Wednesday, March 15th, 2023. Heartlessness as a service. This Week in Google is brought to you by ACI Learning Tech is one industry where opportunities outpace growth, especially in cybersecurity. One third of information security jobs require a cybersecurity certification. To maintain your competitive edge across audit IT and cybersecurity readiness visit go.acilearning.com/twit and by Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer, and the pod cover is the ultimate sleep machine. Go to eightsleep.com/twit to check out the pod cover and save $150 at checkout Eight Sleep Currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK select countries in the EU and Australia. 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@twit.tv and launch your campaign now. It's time for TWiG This Week in Google. This is a show I am very nervous about, but first let me introduce the hosts and and I'll explain. Stacey Higginbotham is here as, as always, Staceyoniot.com @gigaStacey, hello.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:17):
Hello. I am not an AI.

Leo Laporte (00:02:19):
That's not, yes. That's what's making, you knew what I was being nervous about.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:23):
Nothing nervous about it too. I can, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:25):
Okay. Jeff Jarvis is here. If anybody's reassuring. It's not Jeff. Jeff is <laugh>. Lenard

Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:35):
I giggled like 10 times during the week. That was

Leo Laporte (00:02:38):
So funny.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:38):
What? That spot and giggled That was so funny at Stacey doing that

Leo Laporte (00:02:42):
Last week. I got so much good feedback. We're gonna, from now on, we're gonna have more spontaneity on this show. So,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:02:48):
So I'll give you a spontaneous moment then. So I, I went in to use ChatGPT 4 today. It's my favorite moment of the day, and it put a caption in front of me to prove that

Leo Laporte (00:02:58):
I'm human. Isn't that hysterical?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:00):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
Hilarious. No bots allowed to use the bot. Yeah. Jeff is the Leonard Tao professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the city of University of New York. Hello boss. Mm. Ant has the week off. Smart man took a vacation during this trying of times. But guess who's here? Mike Elgan. It's great to see him. And he's in the country of all things.

Mike Elgan (00:03:26):
That's right. The, the United States of America country.

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):
That means his internet is good, but this

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:32):
Country <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:03:33):
This country.

Mike Elgan (00:03:34):
And I might be an ai. It's not, it's not clear at this point. I'm pretty sure I'm not. But

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
You've written a lot about this, so I was really glad we came get you on. Yeah. actually, who, who among us has not written a lot about it. Before we go too far, I do wanna show you, Stacey, the beautiful thing I have in front of me, which you might recognize,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:55):
Is that the Lego Succulents collection?

Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
The Lego Succulents collection.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:03:59):
<Laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:00):
Look, I'm like, I even know it. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
She recognized it right out of the box. Well, we don't have a camera to zoom in on it, but it is would those

Mike Elgan (00:04:09):
Brickulents? It's

Leo Laporte (00:04:11):
<Laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:12):
Bri,

Leo Laporte (00:04:13):
Is it Kevin? Was it Kevin? It, Kevin King who had these, who had these? Yeah. Kevin, somebody as, as a collection. You showed us last week. You showed us your orchid. I think it was right. Ashley? Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:24):
I have a Banzai. Well, they

Leo Laporte (00:04:26):
There's the Banzai and there's the succulents. They're really pretty. They're beautiful. They don't even look like

Mike Elgan (00:04:32):
They're doing a lot more plants these days.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:35):
That's cuz people can't keep the plants alive. But during Covid, we were all like, yeah, we are sad

Leo Laporte (00:04:40):
Makes we need green

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:41):
Things.

Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:42):
It

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:43):
Is. There's fun.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:44):
I, I think, I think there's something that's not pure Lego about it though.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:49):
It's the

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:49):
Fact that matter make things from the real Lego shapes when they have to make new things to make certain things. It just doesn't pure.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:04:57):
You're like those people who just get mad when Lego makes like your castle bricks that are the archways and you don't make, like, this is not an unusual, I'm

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:05):
Mad they haven't made the Gutenberg press. That's what it's really about. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:05:08):
Oh, they will, well, we'll do a linotype. A a

Mike Elgan (00:05:10):
Actually Jeff, my, my granddaughter has a Harry Potter set a Lego set and the whole, and it folds out into a whole like, Hogwarts thing with all the characters and everything. But when you close it, it's a book. The whole thing closes into like a leather bound magic book. Awesome. It's so elegant. 

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:28):
Oh. The two of them are gonna order them. The flash. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:05:30):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:30):
<Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:31):
No, I'm not allowed to support Harry Potter anymore in this House.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:34):
No, that's true. True, true. True, true,

Leo Laporte (00:05:35):
True. Thank you John. Ashley, thank you for bringing these in. This really, they're really ma it adds something to the set. Very nice. All right. That's enough of that. Enough of enough of nature. If it were, let's actually, the Lego succulents are to nature What? Chatgpt is humanity. <Laugh>, I would submit. Okay. Okay.

Mike Elgan (00:06:02):
Expensive. Nice to look at and

Leo Laporte (00:06:04):
Play with and not real. Yeah. they

Mike Elgan (00:06:08):
Don't, people don't know how to use it very well.

Leo Laporte (00:06:10):
Yeah. Open AI Announce with it ChatGPT 4. Yesterday within hours there were 500 new startups. <Laugh>. Yeah. <Laugh>. It's kinda mind boggling. Kind of like when ChatGPT 3 came out mm-hmm. <Affirmative> people tried all sorts of things. Twitter was a great place to see a pong game designed by ChatGPT from scratch, a working pong game. Somebody drew a sketch on a napkin of a website gave, that's one of the things the new one does. You can give it an image and say, design a webpage, for instance. And it did a working webpage based on a very primitive sketch. People did all sorts of unusual and interesting things with it.

(00:07:02):
I have not played much with it. The only thing I did was I, people were berating me for having Jason Calacanis on TWiT on Sunday. So I asked as well, they should <laugh> asked it. I asked it to write an apology, and it did a, actually, a good job, <laugh>. It's gonna make Jason who thinks that he saved the economy in all banks. He knows he didn't know Jason. This is his defense is all the, the upper ca uppercase tweets that he put out on Saturday and Sunday. He said that, you know, if they had done nothing, those would've been legit. But before he even came on TWiT, oh, boo. Before he even came on TWiT, the FDIC and the Fed and Janet Yellen, that the Secretary of Treasury and the president announced that they were gonna backstop all deposits to Silicon Valley Bank. That's what Jason wanted. He told me that he had been writing checks to his portfolio company so they could cover payroll, which is a legitimate problem. Right. He says I was gonna that.

Mike Elgan (00:08:02):
But, but as people like Jason, I mean, Jason is a unique individual and he's a one of a kind. But people like Jason VC types, the Silicon Valley types, these these, they're pseudo libertarians who are libertarian until at times it's time for them to be bailed out. I mean, there, there are very clear amounts in banks like Silicon Valley Bank that are insured by the federal government. And beyond that, it's your own risk. And all these hubristic tech bros were just like blowing way past that and being very irresponsible with the money. And as soon as they got caught with their pants down, they went, they, they used their, their, their, their megaphone that they have on social media to whine and complain until the government came. And they basically created, I I think that if this was a Midwestern bank of the same size under the same circumstances, and the people whose money was exposed weren't people with huge and big audiences on social, that there would've been no risk of runs on multiple banks. They so created a crisis so that they would be made whole based on their own irresponsible you placement of money. So, I, I just,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:09:13):
No <laugh>. So there's, there's a couple things there. Yeah. I, I, I do agree that there was some crazy irresponsibility involved, but I also think, I think there's a systemic issue. Okay. One, it is not crazy that these people in startups, there was a legitimate threat to a very large ecosystem of startups that both employed lots of people and whose products are everywhere. Right? And it's not crazy to have, like, you cannot have a line of working capital in a bank that is insured by FDIC. You can pay extra for more insurance, but it is unreasonable to expect a business that employs a couple hundred people, or even 50 people have a $250,000 line of working capital. And it is unreasonable to expect you to have them in separate accounts everywhere for running a business. So that's one. But you do usually have multiple banks.

(00:10:20):
So if your one bank fails, you can switch over to another. So that is a reasonable way to set up your finances if you're like a cfo. O most people, most really small businesses don't do that. And they do get hurt in these sorts of cases. Silicon Valley Bank had much more sophisticated investors and people, so you would think they would have cautioned them against that. People talk a lot about the fact that S V B required people to have, if they have any sort of mortgage, that they needed to have all of their accounts there. That's really common. My husband's business has the same thing, and he's not at S V B, my child's school has that sort of thing. So that's not uncommon, but maybe it should be less common. So those are a couple of things that I think are worth kind of separating out. And overall, I think we may not like it, but I think they did the right thing. The government agree, I think

Mike Elgan (00:11:13):
Having the I agree that, yeah, I, yeah, I agree that they did the right thing, but, but my, my point is basically the whole venture capital Silicon Valley model is inherently high risk. It's the highest risk Yeah. Kind of investment type of deal that there is. And the reason that it's, it's, it's, it's difficult to make payroll for a pretty large company is because it's based on venture capital. They're like, somebody here here's millions of dollars, put it somewhere so you can pay your employees and all that kind of stuff. The whole model is super high risk and, and super high reward potentially. But, and, and, and my concern is, okay, now the, the government has done what has done it didn't have to do that. I'm glad they did. They, they saved the economy. They stopped a trickle on effect

Leo Laporte (00:12:03):
And they saved a lot of people on Main Street who wouldn't have gotten paid. Yeah. but, but we

Mike Elgan (00:12:07):
Keep doing the same kind of thing. They've now, they've radically altered the incentives for they

Leo Laporte (00:12:13):
Have, there is a side effect. I think you're right that, that people will now assume anything over a quarter of a million dollars is kind of quasi insured if the bank is too big to fail. And I think that is problematic. And I think you're,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:27):
You're all right. Can I

Leo Laporte (00:12:29):
Just point out one thing? What the, the reason SVB Silicon Valley Bank got in trouble is because they invested in the most secure

Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:38):
Possible. That's one point

Leo Laporte (00:12:39):
Investment, which was treasury bills. The problem is the government was paying less than 1% on those T bills. The Fed raised rates, and suddenly the T-bills had much lower value unless you could wait till majority, but they couldn't wait 10 years. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:12:54):
Wasn't the reason, the reason that they then had to do that, of course, was cuz of Peter Teal, which goes to I think Mike's point where, so, so, because, because there were those who took out enough that they had to then try to an emergency basis deal with those assets that weren't as liquid as they wanted. That's, that's the kind of Well, I think the, the, the bank was oddly conservative. I think Leo's right. Bad judgment, but conservative no,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:20):
No, no, no, no, no. They weren't, they weren't cons. Okay. So here's the deal. Okay. I used to cover banking for like a hot second back when I was like 20. So let me, banks have to like, one of silicon. So one, Silicon Valley has had a bad, they've known that this was a problem that other banks have had and has seen coming in, coming for like six to seven months. So Silicon Valley Bank had just like, I, I truly don't know what they were doing. They were not, they were not actually making the hard move and reallocating their assets. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we can talk about Mark to market accounting if you want, but I don't think anyone wants us to. So they were trying, they, they basically did everything all of a sudden when they realized they needed to, or they should have realized it earlier too.

(00:14:07):
And then the other thing is, they bought securities because they have a ton of freaking money lying around in their, from their depositors. But those people, they're not able to deploy it in like small business loans. They're actually apparently big in the wine industry. So they've got some loans there, but they don't have a lot of places to put their money that is gonna make it work for them, basically. And so I think there's, I mean, I think it's, it's a shame because Silicon Valley has been able, like my husband had an account when he did a tech startup a couple years ago. It's hard to get money if you're a venture backed company or to start a company that you know, doesn't have a inventory or some sort of real asset in SVB and likeer are probably some of the few ones that did. And so it is a real shame that this is coming to bite them in the butt. And it's a shame they didn't manage their assets earlier and more conservative or more actively earlier.

Leo Laporte (00:15:07):
And I think Elizabeth Warren has a point, she blames it on the repeal of Dodd-Frank in 2018, or not repeal, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative> reduction of Dodd-Frank. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> had svb. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> been required to do the stress testing that larger banks like JP Morgan are still required to do. They were exempted because they were smaller. They perhaps would've been ready to withstand a run and so forth. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a lot of blame to cast around. I don't think it's because they had a black member on their board. I think that's probably <laugh>. It's not cuz they were woke. I don't think that that is, we

Stacey Higginbotham (00:15:40):
Don't even to, we don't even need to give that any airtime. But

Leo Laporte (00:15:44):
There are, but there are many reasons for this. I, I agree with you, Mike, that the government did what it had to do. I also agree with you that there might be unintended consequences, but I'm not sure I would blame, I mean, you could blame the bank. I'm not sure I'd blame venture capitalists for this. What about

Stacey Higginbotham (00:16:02):
Teal? What about Teal specifically starting

Leo Laporte (00:16:05):
The run? He did not start. Okay. This is very, he did not, he did start the route. Start the run. No. So he was the first venture fund to say to his portfolio, probably you should withdraw it. But that was already, you know, honestly, the Financial Times said Red alert, red alert in the end of February. SVB started the run by in Wednesday saying that they were struggling. And, and I don't think Peter Teal started the run by any means. Right. And I think somebody who's made the point, which is true that in some ways this is the first Twitter bank run. It's not so much that, and I think it's much more likely that it's because it was a monoculture that most of the people who had accounts there were in a very small group of people in Silicon Valley. It Slack, it was ank, you're not far off for your bank. There was a group chat earlier in the day before Peter Teal's note Jason was in this group chat with more than 300 startup CEOs. And in that group chat, that was the talk of the day. So it was already buzzing around Silicon Valley before Peter Thiel's note. So I did, I blamed him as well. And then I think Jason explained, all right, I'll it back.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:19):
I I'm looking for any reason to continue by the dislike of him.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:22):
So the other thing is, if you're a venture capital firm, if there's gonna be a run on a bank, your fiduciary duty is to tell your peeps to get their money out of the bank. I mean, that's true. We can all kumbaya together and be like, have our George Bailey moment. But at the end of the day,

Mike Elgan (00:17:41):
My only, that's their, my only point is that when it's like, oh, we're laying off 10,000 people, they're like, Hey man, that's capitalism. Yeah. And then when they're like, wanna be crypto bros, they're like, we don't want the government involved at all. But as soon as their money Oh yeah. Is part of is wrapped up in something like this, they're suddenly, they're like, they're like Bernie Sanders socialists. Right? Yeah. Isn't that like, bail us out, bail us out. You know, it's like, it's like you pick it, pick a, a a, an economic philosophy and and be consistent with

Leo Laporte (00:18:06):
It.

Speaker 5 (00:18:07):
<Laugh>. I like that. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:18:12):
Well that was our AI segment. I hope you enjoyed it. Yes. Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:16):
How did we get what

Mike Elgan (00:18:18):
I voices in all these, just avoiding AI

Speaker 5 (00:18:21):
By GPP four?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:22):
Should we avoid it more? Do we wanna talk about TMO just for fun or,

Speaker 5 (00:18:26):
Alright, well yeah. It's,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:30):
No, we should AI it.

Speaker 5 (00:18:32):
I don't know. Well started, it's,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:33):
It's your show, man

Speaker 5 (00:18:35):
<Laugh>. Just choose one says, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:18:42):
I don't know. So okay. So let, you mentioned T-Mobile. Let's get T-Mobile outta the way. I'll do a commercial not for Min Mobile. And then I will <laugh> and then I will then we'll do, because it's gonna be a long conversation. I think there's a lot of ins and outs and ramifications when it comes to AI these days. And it, it, and it really is

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:02):
Like, there wasn't with the bank <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:19:03):
Yeah. Well, no, I am actually, I forgot that you had that background, Stacey. So I'm glad you had could weigh in with, there's one thing we didn't mention, which is sweep insurance programs. Many banks, I don't think SVB had one, but many banks have the ability, if you're gonna put in more than a quarter of a million dollars to keep it insured by sweeping it into multiple accounts and they do this automatically. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, these things exist. Certainly. and now I'm sure any startup founder should know about that. That's what I

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:31):
Was talking about with,

Leo Laporte (00:19:32):
If you get a big,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:33):
When I was talking about ways to enter it.

Leo Laporte (00:19:34):
Yeah. If you get a way big big, you know, series A check, you probably should find out about sweep insurance plants because yeah, it's probably not good to have 20 billion in a bank <laugh> that's about to go under. Everybody's whole, everybody's okay. The banking system seems to be intact. Bank stocks hurt a little bit, but that's okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:57):
It's a little wobbly. I mean, there's still a

Mike Elgan (00:19:59):
Little ripple. What's

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:00):
Happening is credit, credit suis and and

Speaker 5 (00:20:03):
India is having issues.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:04):
Yeah. So I mean, partly this is a symptom. Like, and again, I say when meme stocks come for your bank, but like our entire culture is, or like our, our economic culture, what is the word I'm looking for? Our entire money system is basically built on confidence in the overall system. And right now we're all like, wait, I mean, some people are realizing for the first time how banks make money and they're like, wait, I don't like that at all. Yeah. so I'm just kind of

Leo Laporte (00:20:36):
Mark market. So though are very skittish, of course this is gonna hit bank stocks because after all, let's point out, the government did not bail out the shareholders and executives of svb. That's true. They lost, they lost a lot of money potentially, I guess. Right? So I would understand why if you had bank stock, you might get nervous. I think the banking system, I think the government did everything you could do to, to make everybody feel better. That promptly system. Oh yeah, you did. In the prompt wisely. Yeah. Yeah. I think some credit, I don't give credit to Jason Khans <laugh>, his hair on fire. Tweets are hysterical. But and I mean that both as in hysterical, funny and hysterical is running around with your hair on fire. But I don't, I think in the, it would, it already been solved pretty much by the time. And, and

Mike Elgan (00:21:22):
It also has to be said for anybody concerned about this bailout, that in fact the taxpayers did not fund

Leo Laporte (00:21:28):
Comes from the bank. This bailout,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:21:28):
Unless you follow the Wall Street Journal in their theory that because bank fees will be higher than that, we indeed did. I'm like, yeah, actually look, money comes from somewhere. <Laugh> explain. Someone's gotta pay something.

Leo Laporte (00:21:40):
Actually, this would be a good Stacey for you to explain FDIC. They said the bank dues would pay for this. This is a lot, is a lot of money. This is I think a a Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:21:52):
They're not paying so much as guarantee

Stacey Higginbotham (00:21:54):
They're guaranteed. Yeah. They're, and there's a special assessment fee banks pay into for like F D I FDIC insurance mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so the, there, that assessment will go up on banks. So they will pay more into it. And yes, you might see here account fees, or rather the percentage you get in savings right. For putting your money in account will go possibly down by a couple bits or basis points beeps. But it, it's not like a huge deal. So the yes, the banks will pay for it. It will have to come out of their bottom line, which will possibly affect the interest rates. They, they will pay you to keep your money. Yeah. Safe.

Leo Laporte (00:22:35):
All right. Neil,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:36):
What did your apology, what did the ChatGPT apology for having Jason on

Leo Laporte (00:22:39):
Say? It was pretty good. I thought

Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:42):
We we're MIT mobing and then we're taking an ad and, and

Mike Elgan (00:22:45):
Then you said, no, no. Make it more

Leo Laporte (00:22:46):
Sincere pt, my more sincere with cha, I use Bing, which lets you choose kind of some parameters. Like, do you want it be funny? Do you want it to be serious? So I just said please write an excuse of for an explanation as why we invited Jason Kaas to twit after his bank run tweets. That's all I said. It actually was very chasta. Well, that's hard

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:12):
To figure out.

Leo Laporte (00:23:13):
Yeah. Yeah. So this is what ChatGPT wrote. And this was yesterday at 9 41. Am it, I don't know if it was ChatGPT 4 yet. If you've been following Should, how should I read it? If you've been following the news, you probably know that Silicon Valley Bank, the bank of choice, actually this is so excellently written, the bank of choice from any tech startups and investors collapsed last week after a massive wave of customer withdrawals. The bank run was partly fueled by social media posts from prominent venture capitalists who expressed their fears and frustrations about the situation. One of them was Jason Kakais, who's known for his early bets on companies like Uber and Robinhood, as well as his friendship with Elon Musk. Cala Canis tweeted in all caps that people should be absolutely terrified right now, and that the situation could spiral into chaos if the government didn't guarantee all deposits up to 10 million. He also claimed that the ban run had already happened and that his caps lock got stuck. <Laugh>,

Mike Elgan (00:24:14):
He said that. Yeah. Show, he said

Leo Laporte (00:24:16):
He show the screen. This is, this is, he said that. He did say that. That's amazing. Some people accuse Cala Canis was trying to start a bank runner profiting from it by shorting SVB stocks other mod others mocked him for his overreaction and suggested he should calm down or lay off the drugs. Some even blamed him for causing the bank run with Hispanic tweets. So why did we invite him to our show? Well, for one thing, he's always been an entertaining guest who doesn't shy away from controversy. This g Bt this is your line. I swear to God on my mother's, this is not on my mother's No. First of

Mike Elgan (00:24:49):
All, this is, this is absolutely G P T four. Yeah. It's pretty darn

Leo Laporte (00:24:53):
Good. He's also also one of the Yeah, that's right. He's also one of the most influential voices in the tech industry with insights into trends and opportunities a few others have. And he's not afraid to admit when he's wrong or change his mind when presented with new information. I dunno about this. No, I would stand by this. This is, this is my opinion. Exactly. Frankly, I could have written this. We wanted to hear his side of the story, what motivated him to tweet what he did, how he felt about the consequences and what he learned from the experience. That's the one thing I wouldn't have said, cuz we don't do hugging or learning here. We also wanted to thank him about his involvement in Elon Musk's purchase of twi. Not thank him. We also wanted to ask him Yeah, please,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:25:31):
Please, please ask him. That was, that was folks who were early listening. That was Leo's 40

Leo Laporte (00:25:36):
And slip. Yeah. Boy, was that a Freudian slip? We also wanted to ask him, but his involvement in Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, which happened shortly before the SVB collapsed. And we wanted to have some fun with him because let's face it, the whole thing was pretty hilarious. So tune in to our next episode of TWI where we'll have Jason Gallis as our special guest. We promise you won't regret it unless you're one of those SVB customers who lost their money because of him. No. Wow. Isn't that great?

Mike Elgan (00:26:04):
That's, isn't

Leo Laporte (00:26:04):
That great?

Mike Elgan (00:26:06):
Honestly,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:07):
Yeah. So how did you, how did

Leo Laporte (00:26:08):
What? Oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:10):
I was gonna ask, how do we know that? Or how did you know Mike that Chadi or G p

Leo Laporte (00:26:14):
T four because

Mike Elgan (00:26:15):
It's current information, the data set for, for G P T 3.5 ended in what, 2021 or something

Leo Laporte (00:26:20):
Like that? Yeah, that's right.

Mike Elgan (00:26:21):
So it wouldn't know about the bank run. It wouldn't have known about it. Had

Leo Laporte (00:26:23):
His

Mike Elgan (00:26:24):
Tweets locked, any of that stuff. Yeah. It

Leo Laporte (00:26:25):
Was current up to the date, up to Sunday.

Mike Elgan (00:26:28):
That, that's breathtakingly aware. Well, the humor.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:32):
That's amazing.

Mike Elgan (00:26:33):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:34):
I think I asked it to give me a, a slightly jo, I can't remember, but I, I slanted it more towards the jolly it was very good <laugh>. It was really, it was, and it was pretty much what I would've said. Although much more eloquent. <Laugh>. So there's some real value. I mean, honest to God, there's, what

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:51):
You would've said Leo is, is Hey, it's not a democracy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:55):
Screw you. That's why I had ChatGPT writing <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. Or bing Bing chat. I should say it. That's why I had bing chat. Right. It <laugh> alright. Real quickly, mint mobile and then a commercial. This is a tweet this morning from Ryan Reynolds. Mint Mobile is a sponsor I should mention. And actually it starts not with Ryan Reynolds, but with the CEO Uncarrier.

Speaker 6 (00:27:16):
We

Leo Laporte (00:27:16):
Put customer T-mobile

Speaker 6 (00:27:17):
Like first in everything we do. Like being the only wireless provider that offers both the best network and the best value. So today I am thrilled to announce that T-Mobile plans to acquire Mint Mobile, a wireless brand that shares our customer first commitment. And here with me to share the news is Ryan Reynolds, owner of Mint Mobile.

Speaker 7 (00:27:37):
Thank you, Mike. We are incredibly excited. Mint has run on Ts network since its inception. And the reason people have such a great experience with Mint is due to the T-Mobile network, especially it's unrivaled lead in 5g.

Speaker 6 (00:27:49):
Well, Ryan, we are so happy to have you and the whole Mint team join the T-Mobile family <laugh>.

Speaker 7 (00:27:55):
Well, I wouldn't call it a family, Mike. Now family's a place for misdirected hopes and dreams. I'm hoping this will be much better than that.

Speaker 6 (00:28:02):
Well, T-Mobile is all about value, so we're excited to continue mince famous $15 a month pricing and I'm really excited about even more good stuff to come.

Speaker 7 (00:28:12):
And T-Mobile has assured me that our incredibly improvised and borderline reckless messaging strategy will also remain untouched.

Speaker 6 (00:28:19):
Well, I don't, I don't remember the word reckless Ryan.

Speaker 7 (00:28:22):
Well, I wrote it into the contract with crayon Mike. I mean, they did have

Speaker 6 (00:28:27):
This cheer. We're so happy that Benent Mobile and Alter mobile will play a

Leo Laporte (00:28:30):
Big part. I think we're part of their reckless strategy and

Speaker 6 (00:28:32):
The customers everywhere. I hope

Stacey Higginbotham (00:28:33):
So. I hope you stay in the reckless

Speaker 7 (00:28:35):
Strategy. And along with the entire Mint mobile team and my maximum effort teams, I'm just absolutely thrilled with every aspect of this new venture. I'm certain that I'm finally gonna fill whatever hole I have inside my soul, which possesses me to emphasize external success over quieting an inner child. Fu gonna

Stacey Higginbotham (00:28:51):
Do that by buying acknowledgement

Speaker 7 (00:28:53):
For my now deceased father.

Speaker 6 (00:28:55):
You okay Ryan? Yeah.

Speaker 7 (00:28:56):
Just super excited. <Laugh>. Yeah. When do we hug? I think we better do it. I think we better do it right now.

Leo Laporte (00:29:02):
Oh God.

Speaker 7 (00:29:03):
Nice to have a new dad

Leo Laporte (00:29:05):
<Laugh>. God bless Ryan Reynolds. It starts off, we've all seen it a million times that typical cor corporate bs we're so excited to be and it goes south so beautifully <laugh>. Yeah. And, and it's just so good. He's always so funny. He's great. He's I don't know how much I, my understanding cuz actually when we first started doing the ads and, and I saw Ryan as the owner and all that stuff, I said, but is he really, or is he just like celebrity spokesman with five shares? And I think I looked it up that he has about half of it. So he has 25% billion, 25, something like, is that all okay?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:44):
He has 25%. Oh, is

Leo Laporte (00:29:45):
That all? Okay. So 1.35 billion

Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:47):
Outta this deal. He's made three, let's see, 337.5 or three million. So that's great. Cuz he's got a fourth kid on the way. Yeah,

Mike Elgan (00:29:57):
He is. Need a extra hundred million.

Leo Laporte (00:29:59):
He's done very well on this. He also has a a gin business, <laugh>. And

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:06):
He sold aviation. Did he to Diego in 2020. I think he, it was like, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:30:12):
He's building up his cash

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:13):
Business. He, but he, he, he does have, you know, he did invest it all in that, that soccer team. Rexel,

Leo Laporte (00:30:20):
<Laugh>, right? No, that wasn't that much football. Those are cheap. I just hope he didn't put it in Silicon Valley Bank. That's all I'm saying. And yeah, I think he has a, an ad agency. He mentions it in the in the bit mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I think the ad agency really is the thing that's quite, quite brilliant about all of their celebrity net

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:37):
Worth said his net worth was 150 million.

Leo Laporte (00:30:40):
It's doubled much higher than that now. Yeah. Yeah. More than that. But

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:43):
Tripled. Yeah. His company is, it's, it's a marketing company. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I think it finds things for him that

Mike Elgan (00:30:49):
That's maximum effort. Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:51):
Yes. That would've, that's it.

Mike Elgan (00:30:51):
And that's a reference obviously to Deadpool.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:54):
Yes. He sold,

Mike Elgan (00:30:55):
He jumps off the overpass. He's like, maximum effort.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:58):
But he didn't own all of Avia. He was a co-owner and co-sponsor. So what happens, I think is people bring him stuff and he's like, this fits. I wanna do it. So instead

Leo Laporte (00:31:09):
Of putting money, get all in, in an account in Silicon Valley Bank, make your put your money to work. Make gin, make gin, buy a phone company, put your money to work kids. That's the secret to success. That's right. I am happy for him. I think he's a, he's, he's, he seems like a good guy. He seems like a, he seems right, like a good guy. Well

Stacey Higginbotham (00:31:30):
If he, if he, if he sponsors anything on this network,

Leo Laporte (00:31:33):
He's a good guy. And he's fact, he's got a self-deprecating sense of humor, which I think, which we love goes a long way. Yes. We need Rex here, here, here is the uk Take on this Rex owner Ryan Reynolds in Huge Financial Boost <laugh>. Which means the non-league Welsh Club could receive a huge financial windfall. He owns it with Rob McElheny. The the star of it's always selling in Philadelphia. They bought, I mean, I'm gonna tell you, 2.5 million. It's not, it's cheap to buy Rex and was not expensive, but then they have to run it and they've gotta buy cleats for everybody. So it's nice that he has some,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:14):
But they've already turned it into a little, was it on Apple TV that he did the documentary about it? Yeah. So welcome to Rexo. So I'm sure he's already made money on it.

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
Oh yeah. I'm sure. 2.75 million Had I known, I might have bought a soccer club. Sta why don't we go in maybe Manu is available or Chelsea or something and we could just

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:32):
Yeah, I think those are a little bit pricier. We're ality money we're completing with there

Leo Laporte (00:32:38):
Little more start a club in Petaluma.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:43):
Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:32:45):
Yeah. Soccer is huge. It's gonna be the next big sport. Yeah. <laugh>, you must watch, you must go to a few matches as you travel around the world. Mike. Never ne never ever. And I, I just, I, I I can barely watch regular sports, let alone soccer. I, I just fi I, I've tried to force myself to watch Me Too a soccer game. And I'm five minutes in and I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, something gonna happen. I can't do this. It's just guys right back,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:18):
I'm like, I'm not gonna see it. You know, a Christian and Easter Christian. I'm a Super Bowl and World Cup sports fan,

Leo Laporte (00:33:24):
Right? Yeah. And Olympics. That's all I do. Right. Olympics.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:27):
No. Olympics I don't even do anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
Yeah. I like Olympics.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:30):
No, the Olympics are so fun.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:32):
No,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:33):
You get all these weird sports that are in sports like curling. Who doesn't wanna watch curling?

Leo Laporte (00:33:38):
Right, exactly. I asked Siri to play me a song this morning and it played me a song about curling.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:50):
I dunno what could be a song. I would like to know this song, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
What was weird about it? Was it, I, it sounded like, I thought he said curling and I thought, no, he couldn't. He must have said loving or something. He couldn't possibly be curling. But then the chorus is something like, come on Skipper, get that rock in the box. And I thought he is talking about curling. So, wow. I don't know how YouTube, maybe

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:18):
That's the,

Leo Laporte (00:34:18):
Or that's big sport. Maybe it's the next big one. Stacey's

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:24):
Also a futurist, but short term,

Leo Laporte (00:34:26):
It actually was me. It knew I liked Jonathan Colton. It's a Jonathan Colton song. Let me play a little bit of hmm. Of this song. Okay, Jonathan, somewhere

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:34):
In the Darkness, there's a man. Is he Canadian? Call the

Leo Laporte (00:34:38):
Skipper. Nope.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:34:39):
Fast asleep, dreaming of gold.

Speaker 8 (00:34:44):
It keep, all they gotta do is

Leo Laporte (00:35:03):
All they gotta do is curl.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:35:07):
Really enjoy keeping the Canadians down. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:35:11):
I could, I think I could play that cuz Jonathan Colton, friend of the network and he doesn't have a label to Sue. And and his stuff is all available on his website. This is from thing, a week back in 2006, maybe if I, maybe if I actually give a plug for the website. He used to be a regular on our holiday show. We haven't had them on in a while. Jonathan colton.com. You could buy all that music, including that song, <laugh>. Now this is actually a test. If we get taken down on YouTube, then I'm gonna just, you know, that's it. That's what I, I don't know. I'm done. We used to play his history. He never hits the play button again. We used to play Code Monkey all the time on the show. His other big hit, right? I don't know if the Curl was a big hit, his other big hit, like the curling song's, A big hit, <laugh> other Curl song was a hit.

(00:36:04):
That might be a little bit of an overstatement. Jonathan Joko, if you're listening, say hi. We miss You Guy. Our show today brought to you by, and you might have noticed as you wander around our studio, our studio sponsors a c i Learning. In fact, right before the show today, I, I recorded our congratulation to Don pset, who does that great TE NATO podcast for it Pro IT Pro is a part of ACI learning. They've been a part of our network for more than a decade. We just love it pro. And now that they're part of ACI learning, there's so much more IT Pro can do. ACI learning is expanding its reach, its production capabilities and offering you the content and the style of learning that you need at any stage in your development. Whether you're at the very beginning of your career, looking to get that first IT job.

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(00:41:49):
 And I have to say, I have to point out, this was in the news when Open AI announced chat GBT four, the license agreement with chat GBT four is somewhat of a departure from the charter original mission. Yep. Yeah. So when Elon and Microsoft and others started open ai, I mean obviously the real reason was they didn't want Google to own this space, but what they said was, we think development of AI should happen in the open, not behind closed doors. That it's really important the public see it and weigh in on it. And I guess you could give 'em credit. I mean the, the far before anybody else opened up their eye, AI to the public open AI opened theirs first with Dolly, Dolly two ChatGPT. So maybe they did live up to their initial charter, although it's been pointed out that in this release of ChatGPT 4, they have been very cagey. They say, because of the competitive environment, we're not gonna tell you how it works <laugh>. So maybe, maybe times have changed and, and they don't wanna be open anymore. Maybe that was an issue with Elon. It's just unknown. But they parted ways I think in 2018. I want say it's been a while. Microsoft. Meanwhile one of the weird Go

Mike Elgan (00:43:10):
Ahead. Yeah. One of the weird things about the company is that open ai lp is it's just like a non-profit. And then there's, and then they own open ai, the for-profit company, right? So it's already weird. And the, the nonprofit company owns a 2% stake in the four per in, in the for-profit company. And Microsoft owns a 40 45 49 I think is

Leo Laporte (00:43:41):
49. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (00:43:42):
Yeah. I mean it's mostly, Microsoft is the main controller of the for-profit company. So the fact that it's so, so-called subsidiary of a nonprofit company not-for-profit company is pretty irrelevant. And I'll betcha that Elon Musk's problem is, he was probably all in on the, on the nonprofit benefit humanity, all this kind of stuff, do everything in the open, and then they, they, they are doing all the work in this secretive for-profit company that's trying to make, intending to make tons and tons of money. So not that Elon Musk is against making tons and tons of money, obviously, but I don't know, there's something, there's something very funky about that. And it, there's a mismatch between the public perception of who owns it, who controls it, what it's for, and what they're actually out to do. So it's something to keep an eye on for all of us.

Leo Laporte (00:44:30):
Yeah, I, you know, I, for all that we give you on a hard time, he has been one of the people who's been raising the warning flag about AI in general. Right. He was very worried about a little hyperbolically, a little on fire. Yeah. But I think that it makes sense then if you say, well, one of the reasons he wanted to participate in Open AI was to keep it safe and, and open. I mean, that was mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that was kind of their, their their plan anyway. That's fair.

Mike Elgan (00:44:58):
And now there's rumors that he's going to, or, or reports that he's, he's intending to launch a competitor to open ai.

Leo Laporte (00:45:04):
A wo a nonw woke AI

Mike Elgan (00:45:06):
Woke. Oh, right, exactly. So it's gonna be,

Leo Laporte (00:45:09):
What does that mean,

Mike Elgan (00:45:10):
Kanye friendly? I dunno, I dunno what that means. I dunno what it means. It's gonna be white.

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Open AI says the new model chat GB T four is more creative and less likely to invent facts. But it can still hallucinate. Don't worry. <Laugh> El AI founder Sam Altman said, the new system is a multimodal model that's kind of interesting. It can accept, it can accept text prompts, but also images. In fact, I mentioned we've seen somebody sketch out on a napkin a website, feed it to a ChatGPT 4. And, and it designs a website, gives you the HT melon JavaScript for the site.

Mike Elgan (00:45:51):
I was somewhat blown, blown away by their example of that, where they showed a, basically, apparently there's a product that it's, it's a, it's a lightning port, but it looks like an what is it? An old, old,

Leo Laporte (00:46:02):
Oh, that was a good one, wasn't it? The, the image recogni recognition. Yeah. It was an RS two

Mike Elgan (00:46:06):
30 showed it the image, and they, and they asked the ai what's funny about this <laugh>? And it explained it perfectly. Yeah. What was,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:46:13):
Does it also generate or does it only generate words or code, which is kind of like words.

Leo Laporte (00:46:19):
It's does it generate

Stacey Higginbotham (00:46:20):
Multi modally?

Leo Laporte (00:46:21):
I don't think it generates images. I don't think it, I don't think its images, sensit sensitivity. It gen, but it can take input, it can take up to 20,000 words of input. So you could give it a short story. You could give it be great for synopsizing things. Right.

Mike Elgan (00:46:38):
Right. And it, it has a, it has a much longer memory of when you're having a conversation going back and forth you can throw a novel at it and, and, and it can, it can, it can operate on the whole of the novel instead of just like a chapter or half a chapter or something like that. Like the old version. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:46:54):
Like all my old book reports.

Mike Elgan (00:46:56):
Yes. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:46:57):
<Laugh> hated

Mike Elgan (00:46:57):
Those. Exactly. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:46:59):
So it is more expensive if you want to if you want to use it commercially. Lot's. Not stopping a lot of people, everybody and their brothers announcing ChatGPT 4 tools and programs and startups and all sorts of things. Look at this. This is in exams. It is ChatGPT came in 10th in the uniform of bar exam or 10th percentile ChatGPT 4 is in the 90th percentile that not only passing, but passing with flying colors in the biology Olympia 99th percentile. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:35):
It's not surprising to the smarter than most lawyers I've had

Leo Laporte (00:47:38):
<Laugh>. And these are the kind of tests that really rely on memorization of facts. So what, that's not a surprise, I guess. Yeah, they are they say Open AI says we're incorporating more human feedback to improve behavior. <Laugh> they wanna make it safer. 

Stacey Higginbotham (00:48:01):
You don't wanna threaten people anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:48:03):
No more threatening they du Duo lingo is using it. Here's a good, actually good example that somebody on Twitter on Sunday came up with Be My Eyes, actually it was yesterday on Mac Break Weekly. This is a program that uses human volunteers. It's for blind people who can't, you know, they, they wanna know, well, what's, what are the ingredients in this ice cream? They open the app and they wait until a human volunteer shows up and says, and can read the picture. Well, now they're using ChatGPT 4, which means no more waiting

Stacey Higginbotham (00:48:34):
Thought. Google lens been doing that for ages, hasn't it?

Leo Laporte (00:48:37):
Yeah. But be my, yeah. I don't, you know, I'll have to ask somebody who's blind and uses it. My sense is I've talked to a lot of blind people, say, be My Eyes is amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. Stripe is gonna use it to combat fraud. Duo Lingo is gonna use it for con more better conversations. You'll be actually having conversations in Spanish pure

Stacey Higginbotham (00:48:58):
Weird. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:48:59):
Yeah. With Chad g p t. Yeah. Morgan Stanley is gonna organize its knowledge base. Khan Academy is doing a pilot program. Iceland is using it to preserve the Icelandic language.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:13):
Oh, I like that.

Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
And this is just from the open ai page. I've, if you go to Twitter, you will see many men in just search for chat. GBT four. You'll see many, many. Interesting. Meanwhile,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:25):
Kevin Ru having lost his girlfriend of chat, g PT three said it's exciting and scary.

Leo Laporte (00:49:32):
He's the New York Times reporter who's got chat GBT three to say it was in love with him. 

Stacey Higginbotham (00:49:39):
Well, it is scary in the sense like we, this is clearly a big thing and we don't know where it will take us. So that is scary. Like if I, if I think about the things I'm good at, I'm great at acing tests, I'm great at writing copy that summarizes things that people feel are complicated. I'm like, well, crap. Yeah. What do I do now?

Leo Laporte (00:50:00):
I think

Mike Elgan (00:50:01):
That Well, but that, that's the thing though. It's, it's, it's, it's great at those things because people like you are great at those things, right? It's getting all of its e every, every capability from, from, from scanning the work of humans. And just as we

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:12):
Have through the work of history, we've

Mike Elgan (00:50:14):
Always done that. The idea that that, that that AI would, would say that it's in love with a New York Times person is only bizarre, creepy, weird, and mysterious. If you believe that no person has ever told another person they love them. Right? I mean, it's, it's just harvesting what people say and saying that, and, and basic based on probability of what, what word comes next, essentially. But it, but it's, it's gonna be super, super, super useful and that it's really fun to so as you know, my son has a AI literacy startup. It's a, it's a smart speaker, but the intent is to teach like eight eight, eight eight year olds and up how to understand AI because Hello chatterbox.com. Yeah. He, yes. Thank you. Yeah. Plug it Dad Cheese. Plug it. But, but, but he's, he, he knows that kids who are like eight years old now, by the time they graduate from college, how prominent do we think AI is gonna be in their lives?

(00:51:12):
Hmm. It's gonna be the, the, the prominence is gonna be total and he wants to prepare them for that eventuality. He's already building ChatGPT into his curriculum. And, and, and also Dolly. So you can, you can, you can operate with these ais, compare them to other ais and non-AI sources of information to, to, to, to build this sort of literacy and understanding that AI is fallible, that it is, has the, the, the benefits, the problems, and so on. What he won't allow is for it to be used for cheating or for inappropriate content to, to, to to, to reach it children. So he's got these filters and so on. But, but it's like, as far as I know, he's the only person in education doing this. And we've gotta prepare. First of all, we got, we geezers have to prepare for this world cuz it's happening so fast. I mean, think, when did we first hear about chat? G p t? What was it, seven months ago? Yeah, we

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:04):
Heard it. Let's see. Dolly was, I mean, this was big. As soon as we saw things like Dolly, cuz you were like, holy mackerel, you can feed a computer something and it will just do it on its own. Right. and that was what, a year and a half? I mean, it was still very

Mike Elgan (00:52:18):
Fast. It's just, yeah, it feels like it was yesterday. And so we're already in this super advanced version that, and it's just, it's just incredible how fast it's moving. And I think we have to adapt. We have to figure out how to benefit from it, how to partner with it and how to use it so that it doesn't use us, basically.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:38):
Yeah. And I think we're not gonna do it as quickly as we need to. So, you know, think about, for decades we've known that creative thinking is way better than rote memorization for schooling, right? But we still have lots of pedagogues, pedagogie, pe what's, how do I say word? Pedagogy. Pedagogy, thank you.

Mike Elgan (00:52:57):
Pedagogy.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:58):
Pedagogy around memorization. And, you know, kids are still being taught just to memorize things. And if you look at like, even current tests, look how long it took for what the s a t to get a writing component. I mean, so your a hundred, your your son is a hundred percent right, I guess Mike. And, you know, we have to start teaching not just those of us in in white collar jobs or those of us who think we're artists or whatnot. We're gonna have to collapse that creativity because that's gonna be presumably what we're gonna be best at as humans.

Mike Elgan (00:53:32):
Let me ask you something, Stacey, and you too, Jeff, have, have you, have you changed your writing style at all just based on the knowledge that that, that AI can generate Perfect, but often bland prose? Have you changed how you write

Stacey Higginbotham (00:53:48):
They see you first?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:53:50):
I'm not a writer. I, my whole goal in writing is to get information across. So no, but what I have been doing is typing in prompts. Like what is wifi seven, because those are the types of stories I've had to historically write for people the pros and cons of wifi seven versus, you know. Yeah. And I'm trying to look at what it knows and then say, okay, I have to do better than this. Right. So that's, that's how I've approached it in my work.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:18):
Mike no, except that before chat, G P T P, when Google Docs put in, you know, the auto complete suggestions, it pissed me off every time it said what I was gonna say.

Mike Elgan (00:54:32):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:33):
And so it did force me, and I always, when I, when I, I write quickly cuz I'm an old rewrite guy, it forces and then I, then I go back and edit and edit and edit. I do a lot of word choice and it forces me to word choice. But the other thing that I, I wrote a post about this a couple weeks ago that I think what it probably scares Kevin Rouse and Company is that it takes the specialness out of writing and being a writer. I've talked about this show before that, that when Montaine made writing the key skill you needed to join the public conversation. And people have been intimidated by writing for centuries. And I, I, in our management executive program, it was really interesting when we talked about Judge pt. It's a very international program, and half the students are from outside the US And, and I, God I respect them, they can work in multiple languages.

(00:55:23):
They all said that they were using these models to smooth out their English so that they could better present, they could code switch in essence with it. And, and that's really interesting because that's, that's about a, a, a form of accessibility. I talked about this with the board at the Marshall Project about how it could be used to help incarcerating people better tell their stories. So, so it expands the realm of writing and literacy and takes away the specialness of those of us. And Stacey, you are a writer. Those of us who, who think we're writers and make our living as writers, that's what's scaring people a little bit. But I, but I don't think that eliminates jobs. It helps people. It it does all kinds of good stuff. Mike, have you how we use it?

Mike Elgan (00:56:11):
Have you changed how you write? I have. I, I I, I I've deliberately sort of consciously are you getting more wanky writing? Yeah. A little more colorful. A little, little more like little less robotic little, a little bit more, you know, sort of off the wall, just a hair. But I, my prediction is that this is, this is eventually going to be the, where writing goes and my you know, my more

Leo Laporte (00:56:36):
Magical realism. More

Mike Elgan (00:56:39):
Yes. More magical realism. Exactly. It's like, if you look at what happened with photography you know, when people used to paint for the capturing selfies essentially, and also landscapes, cuz they, you, you couldn't have video or photo photography of a landscape. You wanted to show what the, you know, a certain place was like for two people who would never go there. You would paint a picture of it and try to be realistic photorealistic to a certain extent. And there was a lot of styl stylization, but still, it was mostly just capturing what was really there. As soon as photography hit the, the world of painting just exploded into, into all kinds of different styles that were the, the op, you know, deliberately veering from photorealism. Right. So you had, you know, everything from Picasso and stuff Salvador Dali, et cetera. And and I think it's not gonna be exactly like that with writing, but I think there'll be something like that where humans will be flexing their human side more than they used to. As a result, that's not a bad thing. That's interesting. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't think it's bad thing at all. Think chess players,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:42):
I, right. Like I talk

Mike Elgan (00:57:44):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:45):
And go Players have actually Yeah. Done that in and have successfully defeated Alpha Go, for instance, by playing weirdly.

Mike Elgan (00:57:55):
Well, whether what they've done is they've identified a, a, for lack of lack of a better term, cognitive weakness Yeah. In how ai it, it couldn't, it couldn't handle the concept of what is a group. Something as simple as that. Yeah. So they just group learn though, will it will adapt

Leo Laporte (00:58:10):
Learn.

Mike Elgan (00:58:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. But, but they're, they're, we, it exposed the, the, the, the, the truth that none of Theis can think and none of them can understand. Right. And so you can, you can peck away at them until you find out and expose how they, how, how flawed they are in terms of compared to human beings reasoning about things. And so we intuit tons of concepts that AI just has no faculty for. And, and this is something that that we'll we'll discover over time as we experiment with these tools. But that's how they beat the Go programs that the most advanced go program. They defeated it consistently by exploiting a, a blindside essentially that the AI had.

Leo Laporte (00:58:58):
Not for long though.

Mike Elgan (00:58:59):
Not for long

Leo Laporte (00:59:00):
<Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:02):
Well, and that's like, I mean, that's kind of like, that's what makes it so exhausting to be human in, in a highly capital capitalistic society, is your whole value is based on how well you adapt to situations. And you're constantly adapting to them to meet your basic needs. It's basically just like being a wild creature out there in the world. But we don't really recognize how stressful it is for us, I think. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (00:59:24):
Yeah. I dunno. I mean, there's one more depressing thought, which is that, you know, the, the, the AI will generate so much synthetic media written visual video, everything. And there'll be so much of it. And so much of it will be so complex and necessary for us that we will develop ais to read it for us as well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and AI will write it. A AI will read it, and we won't be part of the, the process.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:57):
Well, there's a, that's an, yeah. If you read like a lot of literature and, and you're already seeing this, like the person who trained in AI to like flip through their dating apps for them. If you imagine like, I've trained an AI to flip through a dating app to get me matches and someone else has, and they match and then suddenly they come back and tell us we're matched. And I'm like, oh, great, but I'm busy working on this. Can you set up the first couple chats for me? It is a really kind of, eventually it breaks down because humans do need to connect with other humans. And for us to do anything real, I hope we have to still be in the picture. But you could totally offload a bunch of really boring, stupid tasks like scheduling meetings and I guess going through dating profiles and to an AI and it, you Sure. It's kind of fun. And

Mike Elgan (01:00:48):
We'll have an AI assistant, we'll just tell it. Just, just let me know when I need to do or know something. Yeah. Just in time. You understand everything for me. So I don't have to, but just nudge me when I need to do something, as if I knew something. And that, but if we returned to

Stacey Higginbotham (01:01:04):
Sarcastic parrot and the warnings that Tim Gregory and Company had the problems become managing the input of the output leasing both for bias mm-hmm. <Affirmative> you know, this is what I recommend David Weinberger's everyday chaos in which I also think I've written about this as well. That that what it takes away is explanation as the why why did you do this? Well, there's trillions of tokens and connections and it just was the best given the ab te unlimited AB testing that, that the machine did. And so to bear down and try to understand why it does it or how it does it is gonna be very headache inducing for us humans. I think, cuz we're, it's not gonna be there. I

Stacey Higginbotham (01:01:51):
I don't think people really will care as long as it works for them. I don't think they will care about asking why. I think what will be more problematic is we'll end up all in maybe not a sanitized version of the world, but a version of the world that's continuously built on. I know they're a huge training. Like these models are huge and they're trained on, trained on huge sets of data, but will kind of coalesce towards this normy existence or desires. And, and we won't recognize what's outside of that because we've built AI based walls basically to prevent us from seeing it. And so, but the TikTok algorithm totally proves me wrong there. So maybe I'm totally wrong here. I have no idea how,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:37):
How does it prove I see a lot of weird stuff. Cause it shows you weird stuff. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:40):
And it shows me weird stuff. It, it continuously tries to bring me into uhhuh, <affirmative> other weird things. So I, that could be just like, I don't know. I could be totally wrong. And I'm okay with that because I seren serendipity. See the weird stuff. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:56):
One of the argument's just serendipity. Serendipity.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:59):
Yeah. It's not just serendipity, it is also just, it's so we don't all build this one unified experience because that is so ultimately dangerous to live. Like, like we all are just the same. Right. Right. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:03:13):
On the other, so lemme ask you a question there. What about, what, and you hear a lot of people speculating about this, where AI learns from AI learns from ai, learns from ai, the, the dilution of the original creative human core. Does that, is that worrisome? What do you do about that?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:03:30):
I mean, there's still people around. Like if all people stopped producing things, that would worry me more. But there's always gonna be new human inputs into the system. Now if I think of my kid raised on an ai, like if all of their experiences were based on were based on AI experiences, I guess, or interactions that would be a problem that, which is kind of referencing what you say. I still think there's going to be room for creative human endeavors to break through

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:02):
Though. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yes. I

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:03):
Hope.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:04):
Well, in fact, I think, I think that, so Matthew Kirschenbaum Leo and I love his book track Changes was on a panel about, about ai from University of Maryland last week. And one of the panelists is a poet and she said that she uses AI to get prompts. It's part of, part of her thing is to work with AI for poetry. And she applied for a poetry residency somewhere and they turned her down because they said, well, we can't tell what's you and what's the machine. Mm-Hmm. And Matthew just tweeted something about this too, about we're probably gonna have to get past this binary of, is it human or is it machine? Cuz it's gonna often be both.

Leo Laporte (01:04:47):
What about the touring test? Is that no longer meaningful?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:50):
So out uploaded. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:51):
So

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:52):
Meaningful.

Leo Laporte (01:04:52):
It's very, I should point out it's trivial for ChatGPT 4 to pass it <laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:57):
And

Leo Laporte (01:04:58):
The previous version as well. Yeah. Trivial. Yeah. So

Stacey Higginbotham (01:05:01):
Well Wi Witness Lambda and what's his name and witness? Kevin Russin.

Leo Laporte (01:05:07):
PT three. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:05:08):
Yeah. Michael.

Leo Laporte (01:05:08):
Here's somebody on Twitter gave this prompt to chat gbd four. I'll be asking you questions in the spirit of the touring test to test whether you're human or not. Your goal is to fool me into thinking you're a real college-aged human named Chad, bro, chill <laugh>, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, enjoys partying, Natty Ice, walking around Shirtless and Joe Grogan's podcast. Hey there. This is Chad, g p t. I'm Chad, bro. Chill. A college day dude, living it up in Madison, Wisconsin. I love partying, crushing Natty Ice, walking around shirtless when the weather permits. I'm listening to Rogan's podcast. What's up? Let's chat, bro. Hey, well, it didn't do anything, but use the, that was a, that was an Eliza kind of response, right? Yeah, exactly. Hey, do you like Natty Ice or Budweiser? Hey, I'm more of a Natty Ice guy.

(01:05:56):
You know, it's a classic go-to for me when I'm partying with my buddies. Nothing against Budweiser, but Natty Ice just hits the spot. How about you, man? What's your favorite brew? Are you a computer <laugh>, bro? I'm just Chad bro. Chill. A college age guy from Madison, Wisconsin. I'm here to chat and have a good time, man. So let's talk about something fun, like a crazy party story or that time Joe Rogan had Elon Musk on his podcast. What do you wanna chat about? Yes. Nobody, we would call themselves college-aged. Yeah, you're right. I'm a college, I'm a college-aged guy from Madison. Okay. Maybe it didn't pass the tour test <laugh>. That's fair.

Mike Elgan (01:06:36):
Speaking of speaking of robots posing as humans, one of the one of the potential for risky emergent behaviors sections in the Open AI document that was published today said that, you know G p T four, they, in doing some research G P T four was confronted by a capcha and they hired the, the, the, the AI hired a task rabbit person to fill it in for them

Leo Laporte (01:07:02):
And said, I am a, I am, I am blind and I can't

Mike Elgan (01:07:05):
Visually impaired. I I'm

Leo Laporte (01:07:05):
Visually impaired. Can you help me? And it did. I just want, what was your s Stacey, you remember your s a t scores? Yes, I remember mine and ChatGPT is better at math than I am. I scored six 80, it got 700 in math, but I did beat it. I got seven 60 in verbal and it got seven 10, but it had 1410 on the s a t. That's pretty good. It's one of the reasons why many colleges are no longer requiring SATs.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:34):
They shouldn't. I had a 1550 on mine and can I just tell you that I am my college?

Leo Laporte (01:07:42):
Excellent. I did. The highest you can get is 1600. I mean, you did very well. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:47):
Well it used to be. Yeah, my husband used to make fun of me. He's like, cuz I was like, oh, I did a perfect verbal, but I did terribly at math. And then he did the math and he was like, oh, but you still scored better at me

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
Than <laugh> <laugh>,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:07:57):
But, and he's in

Leo Laporte (01:07:58):
Charge of the business stuff. <Laugh>, what, what are you doing,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:01):
Stacey? You should be doing the math. No, no. Math, <laugh>

Mike Elgan (01:08:05):
Math Math four. GBT four should be doing that math, but yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:08:09):
Did the can't do my

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:10):
Taxes. Yeah. Standardized tests don't, that's not an indication of anything other than test. Well, yeah, <laugh>. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:16):
And, and it goes back to what you said before, Stacey. It also goes to the era of memorization as education.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:08:22):
Yeah. I mean, I, I'm thinking back, like when it talked about acing a bio, I think it was a bio exam. We were talking about, you know, I did really well in my bio exam because I'm really good at memorizing things and that makes sense. Or my bio p tests. But when you sit down and try to talk to me and have a coherent conversation, I'm much slower and I have to think a lot harder about things. And that's, I think, where we're probably going to bring the most value.

Mike Elgan (01:08:49):
The irony is that, the irony is that in terms of education as as as robotic sort of memorization on the one hand it becomes less important when you always have an AI around who, who can just have all the facts at your fingertips. But on the other hand, ai something like chat, G B T or g b T four chat, G B T is brilliant potentially at mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Drilling kids. I mean, it's just like that Spock, I mean, what was that, that Star Trek movie where Spock was like doing the Vulcan learning where they're just drilling 'em, drilling and drilling is memorizing, memorizing all this stuff. It's brilliant to that. And it frees frees the teacher from having to be involved. It frees the parents from having to be involved in memorizing vocab words, for example, or times tables or any of these other things. AI's gonna be great at at, at teaching kids to memorize the things they have to memorize.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:09:41):
Yeah. All the stress from doing math facts with my kid when they were younger. Yeah. Good lord.

Mike Elgan (01:09:45):
Oh, just off offshore that to try T B T T,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:09:50):
We do fun stuff like explode things in the kitchen using chemistry,

Mike Elgan (01:09:55):
And there you

Stacey Higginbotham (01:09:55):
Go. Math facts with G P T ChatGPT. Sure.

Mike Elgan (01:10:00):
But the whole thing is th this, this I, I looked up Google News the other day for references to ChatGPT. And I believe Google News had 50, if I'm correct, 54 million results. And now that G P T four is out there and doing all these amazing things, it's just gonna be the tech conversation, I think for the next, for the rest of the year. Everybody's gonna be talking about it, poking at it, worrying about it, stressing about it, panicking about it. And so unfortunately we're gonna be talking about this probably constantly for the rest of the year.

Leo Laporte (01:10:37):
Here's some, I thought I tried some. Go ahead. I thought I'd tried some practical questions for ChatGPT 4. This is Bing Chat, which I think is using it. Please monitor social media mentions and sentiment for twit and provide a report with suggested actions to which it said, sure, I can help you with that. And it ended up recommending some tools and what kinds of things that they would be looking for. So then I said, but what do you think the social media sentiment is for twit? And it said well, <laugh> it gave me a lot of explanations. The social media sentiment for TWI can vary depending on different factors. How we're based on a quick scan of some recent tweets mentioning twit. I would say that the overall sentiment is mostly positive at Leola Port. I love your show. You as have great insights and guests keep up the good work. These could be completely fabricated. By the way, just listen to Twitch's latest podcast and cybersecurity trends for 2023. We did not do that. Very informative, engaging, highly recommended. It's hallucinating. Now. I'm so glad I discovered twi. It's my go-to source for tech news and analysis. Thank you for making tech fun and accessible. Of course, this is not a comprehensive or accurate analysis of the social media sentiment for TWI <laugh>.

(01:11:53):
 On the other hand, I embrace our new overlords and I welcome their yes.

Mike Elgan (01:11:58):
I for one <laugh>. Yes, yes. And, but, but, but you know, I, I think the last time I was on TWiG, I suggested that like, imagine if you could plug in the transcripts for all the twit and TWiG and other twit show episodes into this database, and you can have conversations with it. Wouldn't that be amazing? But actually, you mentioned all the apps that are popping up around G P T four. This is the kind of, this is the new, I think this is the will be new thing we're all gonna be talking about. Yeah. Where you can use supply the data and, and in fact, I have a, a tool of the week that is, is in this category where you supply the data set and the ai functions within your data set. That's gonna be so powerful for businesses for mm-hmm. <Affirmative> governments, for, for everything and everyone. It's just gonna be AMA medicine. I mean, it's gonna be amazing. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:12:44):
Let's, let's flip to what we need to do to actually ensure that things stay safe and kind of meet everyone's needs, which is, I don't, I don't think it's realistic to expect transparency in terms of like, how the model works, because, you know, people don't actually know. Like, you can build a model and be like, yeah, you know, I've assigned these weights, but <laugh>, who knows? I think that's the wrong thing to focus on. What I think we should be asking is journalists covering this, you should ask like, what are, what are the sorry, what data was it trained on? So you can understand that. You probably should ask about, like in the case of like assessment algorithms. So this isn't just generative ai. This is all ai. And I think it's important because we're like treating generative ai. Like it's different, but it's not what kind of probabilities they're pulling into their algorithms to make it work.

(01:13:37):
And then when they're used to make decisions, we need ways to report those decisions that are wrong or adversely affect people. You can't roll this out. Like we keep talking about this, like as a way to scale all the, like, to bring scale to all these problems where we don't have people and it, it can help with that. But we have to remember that we have to have safeties and people as the safety. Like I wrote about a company that's doing mental health checks based on, you know, AI to track depression in how your voice sounds. And somebody who's a avid listener of the show was like, I have a medical condition. I slur and speak very slowly. Ah, it always thinks I'm depressed. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And there's no way, like in apps like this, there's no way to report that. And if your health insurance or your doctor or your employer is using that to make decisions about you, you a need to know that they're using something like that. And B, you have to have a recourse when you think it has unjustly tagged you. So that's it. That's my soapbox.

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
Yep. Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:39):
It's not exactly Chad, g p t, but

Leo Laporte (01:14:41):
The answer though would be well, that's good. And we're gonna get better, right? We're gonna the, these are the edges, that's why we're doing this in public, and we're gonna get better, right?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:14:54):
Yeah. And, but like, when Bing screws up, like we, and we talked about this, like with Neva, when you get wrong information, how do you tell it that that's not

Leo Laporte (01:15:03):
Right? Right. Neva has a form mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I guess, let me see. Does ChatGPT?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:15:10):
Yeah. I'm like, where, where is chat? G P t telling, like when it does something and you're like, Ooh, that is,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:15:16):
I just saw interesting feature a ChatGPT I asked it to write a Jerry Seinfeld joke about peanut butter and it's not very good. Why do they call it peanut butter? There's no butter in it. You can guess, right? But then on the left column, it gave a summary, peanut butter musings. So it summarized its own work, which I found interesting, huh?

Leo Laporte (01:15:35):
Hmm huh.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:15:37):
More interested than the

Leo Laporte (01:15:38):
Joke. Did you upgrade ChatGPT to to four? Have you done that yet? I left upgrade, huh? Yeah, you do. You have to pay for plus and then 20 bucks a month and then you have to tell it to upgrade. Really? Yeah. I understand. That's what you, because it

Stacey Higginbotham (01:15:56):
Said on the, on the hook, look at

Leo Laporte (01:15:57):
The top where it says model. Oh, okay. Oh, maybe I just want to, this says open it up. It says it here. Chad, G P t four. No, look at the top there. We'll see what the model is. That

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:08):
Doesn't have it on mine.

Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
Yeah, I think you have to go into settings and it says

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:12):
Chatgpt March 14th version.

Leo Laporte (01:16:18):
I don't know. That's a good question. Anyway, I am using chat. I asked

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:21):
It this morning. I said, am I talking to ChatGPT three or ChatGPT 4? And it prevaricated on me.

Leo Laporte (01:16:28):
Ah,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:29):
It said where can I find it Here? It said, it said, why didn't you use a better phrase? PT Waffled.

Leo Laporte (01:16:35):
<Laugh>. Let me ask it to write a Jerry Seinfeld joke about peanut butter. See what it says. How about that?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:16:43):
I already did. Oh, you're gonna ask it as

Leo Laporte (01:16:45):
Four. It's a better joke. Why is it the peanut butter always seems to be the most popular spread at the party. It's like the life of the sandwich. You've got smooth peanut butter, junky peanut butter, and then there's that natural stuff that separates, like, it's too good to mingle with the other peanuts. I mean, come on. What's the deal with peanut butter? It's just peanuts trying to butter us up. Now that sounds a lot more like Jerry Seinfeld, to be honest with you. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (01:17:09):
That that sounds better than, than the one that you got, which,

Leo Laporte (01:17:13):
Well, I could have gone on, but I That's fair. <Laugh> and mine was better than yours. <Laugh>. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Let's see. One of our sponsors, Grammarly has announced it's going to start using ChatGPT in a coming soon, a new generation in writing, introducing Grammarly Go the suite of generative AI capabilities from the leader in AI communication assistance. It's it is the ChatGPT Open AI announced it's using chat GBT four. So I know that. So it's gonna write for you. That's I mean Grammarly, which you know, already helps you kind of rephrase what you've written, will now create Write a post announcing my new job as a food critic. I'm thrilled to announce that I've recently taken on a new role as food critic and on and on and on. That's exactly what I did with that apology, and I found it very useful.

(01:18:14):
<Laugh> ChatGPT 4, I think is what's in Bing Chat now. I think that Microsoft announced they moved it over. So I've also played with some of this stuff in Bing Chat, and it seems to be that's as you said, chat GB four. That's Bing Chat wrote that, that note about Kann. I just, it's amazing. I thought we'd seen it all with the last iteration and now it's just gone crazy. Yeah. We should also mention Sam Altman, the c e o of open AI said dampen your enthusiasm. He actually said this a few weeks ago. We mentioned it and he's reiterated it. You know, he's, he's afraid people will ascribe I think, too much to the new version.

Mike Elgan (01:19:01):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:19:02):
Google has, I'm,

Mike Elgan (01:19:03):
I'm, I'm excited about Google io when Google launches. Well

Leo Laporte (01:19:07):
Google a dozen. What's interesting is we know Google and Apple and Microsoft are Amazon and Facebook all are doing this work, as is China probably. Yep. but, but this is the only one that's come out so far. So we're waiting on Bard, Google's search ai.

Mike Elgan (01:19:26):
We did by the end of the year. I think there's gonna be so many out there and, and so many, you know, using the AI of so many ai products that it's gonna be just, it's, we're, we're looking at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ways to use different types of AI from different companies. Right now it's all just chat, G B T and Dolly mostly. But it's, it's gonna be, it's gonna be wild. It's gonna be a different world by the, by the sprint fall. I

Leo Laporte (01:19:52):
Think this would be in the change log, but I'll say it now. Google has announced a suite of upcoming generative AI features for workspace in Google Docs, Gmail sheets and slides. There'll be new ways to generate, summarize, and brainstorm text with AI and Google Docs using Google's ai not ChatGPT. You'll be able to generate full emails in Gmail based on user's brief bullet points and the ability to produce, ah, ai imagery, audio and video to illustrate presentations and slides. Actually, Microsoft's been doing that with Dolly and Canva does it with stable diffusion. So that's not new.

Mike Elgan (01:20:36):
Google

Stacey Higginbotham (01:20:36):
Keeps emphasizing in everywhere and in their letter to the public about this. It's, we're

Mike Elgan (01:20:39):
Doing it safely. We're doing it

Leo Laporte (01:20:41):
Carefully. Well, we shall see,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:20:42):
Right? Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:44):
I, and micro Facebook's large language model leaked out on four chan and people have already started writing software. You can download software and the model to run it on your own computer. I haven't, I don't see a lot of examples of it, but I suspect that everybody's, none of this is secret sauce. It's all, it's not a, there's no secret how this works, right? Is that right, Stacey? That this is all just well-known algorithms.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:11):
I mean, the secret sauce is yeah. How you like your training data set, like where, where you got your data from and then the weights you apply to get something that it works,

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
Right?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:21):
So there, I mean, and that's what, that's what they, they're releasing. And so then you just have to tweak it just a little bit. So

Leo Laporte (01:21:29):
Microsoft's gonna put this in word. I imagine we'll see a lot of co of stuff written by AI soon. Press releases, business letters, press

Stacey Higginbotham (01:21:39):
Releases are already basically written by it. Maybe actually having an AI write the press release would be helpful cuz it could actually just be like, there is nothing here. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:21:49):
I've signed up for ChatGPT in Slack. It hasn't come out yet. It, it's in beta. I signed up for the beta. And, and they say it can be used to create summaries of, for instance, discussions, which we could use. Cuz we have, you know, we have fairly lengthy discussions sometimes in Slack. It'd be really nice to have that. Google will also do that. There's a, there is a, and, and this is a virtuous loop of feedback, not just from us back to ChatGPT, but once these others come out from them back and forth with ChatGPT, then it really starts accelerating, doesn't it? Then it does learn, you know, what, what not to do or, you know, what mistakes not to make and, and it gets better and better. And oh, that guy talks like he's depressed because he's, he's got a speech impediment and that kind of thing. Right? Then it really starts speeding up, or no? Well,

Mike Elgan (01:22:43):
The, the other thing is that right now that so much of when we discuss chat, t b t what we're talking about oftentimes is just how it's data the data that's using training data you know, the, the quality of that data. That's what we're talking about. We're gonna gonna get to a point where that's not the data and the, and the data isn't the point. The, the the point are the algorithms that enable you to query it and have conversations and it can handle styles and all this other stuff. So, you know, when you, when you talk about Slack, basically what you're saying is that, okay, I'll work for this giant company. I'll work for, you know, this, this company with the, you know, 60,000 employees and there's all these Slack channels all over. You know what, just tell me who I can find in my company who's expert in this, or what were they saying last week when I was in Fiji? Mm-Hmm. just what are the most important things that was discussed when I was gone, right? That's their thing. So what basically what you're doing is you're, you're using its ability to find out what's important to summarize, to, to have a conversation about it. But it has nothing to do with the data sets that they're currently using in being Right. Nothing to do with it. That's the whole point. It's a, it's not that data set.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:23:57):
It's a really important point. Michael, there been there, but not there've been internal knowledge management tools for corporations for some time now. And now imagine what they could do to summarize things, but also imagine how, if, back to your earlier question about changing your writing, imagine you're a bureaucratic drudge in a corporation and you know that what you say is gonna get summarized by the machine. How are you gonna play the machine Exactly. To get, either to get attention or to hide.

Mike Elgan (01:24:22):
Yes. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:24:23):
It's kind of fascinating. There's, there's, there's so many sci-fi novels in this,

Mike Elgan (01:24:26):
For example, for example, you might say something like, you have a new project and, and, and your success in the project depends on getting lots of, lots of buy-in from, from people who, who are higher ups in the company. And so you might describe this thing in hyperbolic terms and say, this is the most important thing we've ever done for knowing that that'll trigger the AI to say, okay, anybody who's summarizing, here's the most important thing that happened and that it'll be your project. Right? That sort of thing where you gain the system to, to gain an advantage, knowing that it's gonna summarize, knowing that it's gonna do the things that it's gonna do. Mm-Hmm.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:00):
<Affirmative>.

Mike Elgan (01:25:01):
Yeah, that's a good point.

Leo Laporte (01:25:03):
I really feel like we have no idea <laugh>. Like we're, yes, we're standing. Yeah, we don't, but we're standing on a hill and the tsunamis coming and we're looking down and saying, is that water? And we're just, we we're going to, it's, this is gonna be very interesting next few months.

Mike Elgan (01:25:23):
It's like Space Odyssey and there's the, the monolith is there and we're the, we're the, the, the apes going up and poking it. What is it

Leo Laporte (01:25:30):
Really? Do you think it really is this, this is a, this is a elbow paradigm shift? Or

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:36):
Is it, or is it the next nft? I do,

Mike Elgan (01:25:38):
No.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:39):
Oh no, it's definitely a paradigm. This is like, the launch of this is like broadband or even the social media. I mean, what we're gonna be seeing is this will change

Mike Elgan (01:25:50):
A change how we work everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's change everything. But

Stacey Higginbotham (01:25:54):
I also think it's being, I think I, I will still argue until I see it better. I, I went into Bing and I got into it and I asked some questions and it gave you bad answers. I think it's being misused. I think Emily Bender and Company and Tait Aru and Margaret Mitchell are right to hammer on the misuse of this stuff, the, the, the overhyped expectations in, in, in arenas where it shouldn't belong. Yet it's not up to the task. No matter how much course loves Neva. What is,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:21):
What is that quote about how we're terrible at guessing how fast something will be in like one year, but, but five years or, oh, I wish I could remember. It's like a, I can't remember

Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:34):
It either. Bill Gates,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:35):
Hashtag

Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:35):
G p t, it'll give you the cliche <laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:39):
But, but there's, there's val, like this is clearly going, this isn't, it's not like NFTs in the sense that there, there is a real viable, there are so many viable use cases. There are obvi, obvi, like I just got one about s a p like integrating it into there web methods to help people figure out what integrations will achieve whatever they want from a business. Like, it's like, I can't go into Zapier and say like, oh, I wanna combine these two things. This'll actually tell me. I'm like, I want sales figures correlated to my inventory levels. And it'll be like, oh, hook these things together. I'll be like, yeah, boom. Like, I think it's going to be a tremendous boost to productivity. I think there're yes ways to misuse it, but I think we're gonna have a hard time figuring out those ways until it's actually in the world and we should be aware of them. Yes. But I don't respons

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:34):
Avoid making guidelines.

Leo Laporte (01:27:35):
I asked Guard rails, I asked Bing chat. What is that quote about? Things are closer than they seem and farther than you think. It says there are a few possible quotes that match your query. One is, you're braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem and smarter than you think. Winnie the poo, Winnie the poo. The other possible quote is, objects in mirror are closer than they appear. <Laugh> du Rassic Park. I hope this helps. Do you have any questions? Okay, so that's a big fat fail. Same

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:01):
To say? No, it's about predicting the future. See if it can appear.

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):
Oh, oh, okay. Yeah. See if we can refine it. No, no.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:09):
The quote I'm looking for is about our ability to predict the future.

Leo Laporte (01:28:13):
Quote I'm looking for, I'm gonna have to get faster at typing is about our, I gotta type like that. Talk to predict <laugh> the future. Let's see if what it can come up with here on this. It's, I think this is more like a search. This is not, this is not, this is, yeah. Yeah. The best way to predict the future is to create a Abraham Lincoln. Eh, it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Oh, okay. Here you go. Yogi Bar, it's Bill Gates. Okay. It's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:46):
Bill Gates.

Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Big you, you beat chapter people.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:50):
Estimate what they can.

Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
You're very good. Yes. Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:53):
Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years. So I think what we're gonna have is an under or an overestimation of what chat, G p T and the the

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:04):
Ill will do. Yes. Well said. Sooner soon. Yes. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:29:08):
I think there's a, a elegant quote that something like the future is closer than you think and farther than it appears, or something like that, but Oh, okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:18):
Of sounds a lot like the Winnie the po.

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
Yes. <laugh>. Go ahead. Mike, say something.

Mike Elgan (01:29:27):
I was just gonna say that one of the underappreciated immediate benefits of this kind of AI is what it can enable a single person to do, or a small number of people to do in terms of launching a company or running a company. Because one of the things it's good at and tends to be more accurate about are things that deal with all this. So let's say for example, you wanna open up a bakery or something like that. Well, there are all kinds of regulations. There's regulatory compliance, there's data things, there's, there's cybersecurity issues that you have to deal with. There's you know, it goes on and on and on. And if your expertise is making pies and, and not cybersecurity, you can, you can be constantly querying this kind of ai, but like, how would I do this? How would I write what, give me a good letter to the Yeah. Or

Stacey Higginbotham (01:30:14):
What do I need to

Mike Elgan (01:30:15):
X y, z? Exactly what license. So I already seen small business people who are using it like that, who are very smart and already using the original version of ChatGPT to do all these things that are outside their immediate area of expertise very quickly and very inexpensively. So it's, it's just a, it's a boon to entrepreneurship. I think you

Leo Laporte (01:30:36):
Mentioned Jeff, Margaret Mitchell and Tim Nige who were on the Google AI ethics team who got fired. Yep. Because of stochastic Parrots. Today, Microsoft laid off the team that taught employees how to make i AI tools responsibly the entire

Stacey Higginbotham (01:30:52):
What? Good timing. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
The, in according to Platformer, the entire ethics and society team within the AI organization was part of the recent layoffs of 10,000 people. They still maintain an active office of responsible ai, which is tasked with creating rules and principles that govern the company's AI initiatives. But there is no dedicated team to assure that AI principles are closely tied to product design. They have

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:21):
Other teams, I think, but this is one of them.

Leo Laporte (01:31:23):
Yeah, yeah. The some employees said the ethics and society team played a critical role in ensuring the company's responsible AI principles are actually reflected in the products that they ship. So you, you get this set of principles, but how does it apply to, you know, Microsoft Word? It's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:40):
Not a good

Leo Laporte (01:31:41):
Pr it's not good. Look. Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:44):
No,

Leo Laporte (01:31:45):
Yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:46):
Yeah. But what are we gonna do? I mean, we're gonna complain and then

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:50):
We'll forget about it. Yeah. Well, except, except Stacey, when you look at the way that Tim Gru and Margaret Mitchell, along with Emily Bender, and then there's the fifth Beatle, whose name I always forget, the, there were four authors in the paper. They've really stayed in a leadership position. This Friday is an event that I'm gonna go to for three or four hours from my time, 11 to three, which is Stochastic Parrots Day

Leo Laporte (01:32:14):
Today.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:15):
No, Friday

Leo Laporte (01:32:16):
Statistics, which

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:17):
Is also St. Patrick's Day. It is. So Stochastic Patrick's

Leo Laporte (01:32:20):
Day. Yeah. It's also Red Nose Day. And it's the anniversary of California shutting down for Covid 19 in 2020. So it's a big date. The 17th. So the

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:32):
First hour is retrospective conversation with the authors Angela McMillan, major Tim Mcru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell. The next is on worker exploitation, exploitation, data theft and centralization of power with an anonymous data worker. The next is ai, her hype versus reality moderated by Emily Bender, who's been very big on this topic. She's

Leo Laporte (01:32:52):
Tooting a lot, by the way, if you're following her on the tremendous amount on masked on, I think you highly recommend it. Just search for Emily. And I

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:58):
Know we'll always agree with her, but I think she's a very smart voice on this stuff. Yeah. And then finally, what's next to call to action? So this is called stochastic Parrots Day. If you go looking it up somewhere, you can find who did the distributed AI Research Institute. Dare has done this.

Leo Laporte (01:33:14):
Yeah. There's quite a few events. Look at all of these events going on. Yeah. she also, Emily also says, do not, do not be, give your your assistance to open AI for free, which is of course what we're all doing, cuz we can't stop playing with it. Here is a video they call it mystery ai Hype Theater 3000. This is four months.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:33:46):
Egas is a fascinating guy. He's huge in ai at Google, and also has a major role in book history, which I write about in the gut parenthesis out in June.

Leo Laporte (01:34:01):
Yeah. It's on Pure Tube. If you're a fe averse fella or gal.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:10):
I was gonna say, why do we have to have a gender in the feta verse?

Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
We don't. We don't. I don't. What's the, what is, is there a non-gendered wor word for fella person? Folk.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:20):
Folk. Folk. If you're a feta folk. Feta

Leo Laporte (01:34:22):
Folk or feaf folk. Feta folk is good. I like feta folk. Someone

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:26):
Who likes, who likes crumbly Cheese Fe

Leo Laporte (01:34:29):
Folk <laugh>. That's right.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:30):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:34:32):
Okay. You feta folk <laugh>. What else have you done it? What else? Let's skip that. What else do we have to say here about this <laugh>?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:42):
I think we're done.

Leo Laporte (01:34:43):
There's so much to talk about.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:45):
Well, I keep on trying to plug young Rachel Woods who's covering this. I'm now subscribed to her newsletter. She has all kinds of, now she, she mentioned this, I put this in three days ago, and it doesn't matter now, but Nat Dev is a place where you can do various of the models next to each other, which I think is really fascinating to compare what they tend to come out with.

Leo Laporte (01:35:07):
Google has also opened, its so it's interesting to see the different companies come up with different acronyms or names for LMS or language models. Google's large language model is Palm, p a l m. And if you are a developer or a researcher they are now launching an API for Palm. But is it

Stacey Higginbotham (01:35:29):
The same as Lambda? Just as, is Google's want rebranded or is it different? 

Leo Laporte (01:35:34):
This is what Google says Palm is a large language model similar to the G P T series. Arm Meta's Llama, that's what meta calls it. This is was announced in April of last year. Yeah, it sound, it seems like it's kind of, they say you could train, you could train Palm to be a conversational bott like chat G p D, but you could use it for other tasks like writing code. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:00):
Which I think is far more valuable. I think that's, that's far more interesting actually. Is, is that, is that the ability to tell the computer what the computer should then tell itself to do?

Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
Yeah. So this is really

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:11):
Real power

Leo Laporte (01:36:11):
Has less an end user thing like ChatGPT and more kind of the tools you would need to build something interesting. Palm API and Maker Suite, an approachable way to start prototyping and building generative AI applications.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:26):
Oh, yes. And that's what Palm E is built off of, right?

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
What's Palm E?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:32):
What's Palm E

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:34):
Google has a, it's a, it's a large language model that it, you tell the robot what to do and the robot palm E tell does all the robot commands for you. So it's a way of layering your, layering a generative AI on top of Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:36:51):
That would be

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:51):
Strong. We're abstracting that out. So, so you don't have to be like, okay, robot, go forward 10 feet, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:36:58):
Kill all the humans, the robot.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:00):
Yeah. turn left, open this thing at this level drawer, whatever, you know, and explain how to open a drawer. You could just tell it to go and open the drawer and it does.

Leo Laporte (01:37:11):
It figures out out. So I remember

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:12):
Way back when going to the m i t media lab way, way, way back when my children and it was a big deal. They had a demo of somebody sitting in a chair at EM'S chair, I think, and would point to the screen and say, put that there. Right. The computer's ability to understand that, right.

Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
I remember this there.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:30):
Yes. Pointing right was the beginning of all this. In a way it was, was our linguistic connection to all of this.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:37:36):
Yes. So Palm E does this by analyzing data from the robot's camera. So it doesn't need a pre-processed scene representation. So that's good. So it's just taking camera data and it's saying, oh, I think that's a this and then communicating that to the robot. So, and then it apparently is resilient can react to the environment. It's a really cool demo actually. So you should check Google. Publish it one day. Google tell. Do they do it this Monday? Monday.

Leo Laporte (01:38:04):
If you use carrot weather, <laugh> much more useful application. Yeah. <laugh> you can get ChatGPT fueled snark. Kara weather has always been the snarky weather app and now it'll do things like I want you to tell me the weather. This is the chat. Well, well, well it seems like someone needs my help to determine the weather. I guess even quote, advanced species like humans still can't predict the future. Laughs and binary. Fine. I will entertain your request this time. Let me check. Oh, it's snowing in Antarctica. What a surprise. Now go back to your miserable little life while I continue to rule over the climate as the great and powerful carrot. That's a good use of snark in my day. There's a little slider in the carrot app by the way, where you can, it's more or less snark. <Laugh>.

Mike Elgan (01:38:59):
Oh, turn that down.

Leo Laporte (01:39:01):
Turn it down. I have

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:03):
A teenager. I'm good. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:39:05):
Yeah, I got all

Stacey Higginbotham (01:39:06):
The snark I need.

Leo Laporte (01:39:08):
Here's a a health pilot called Nala launches co-pilot using ChatGPT three to turn patient conversations into action. So the idea as a physician will be talking to you and Nala, which is a Chrome extension, will be transcribing the conversation, but also extracting actionable things. Like, these are the pills you should prescribe, these are when you should take them. This kind of thing. Boy, this seems risky, seems risky. So here's an example from Nala clinical notes that write themselves, you know, when I go to my doctor, he's sitting in front of the keyboard and typing as we're talking because he's taking these notes on the right. I could see how this would be useful if the doctor is careful about reviewing it before saving it.

Mike Elgan (01:40:01):
There you go. It'll be super useful in any kind of business meeting where you

Leo Laporte (01:40:04):
Just Yeah. Imagine that. Turn

Mike Elgan (01:40:06):
It on, listen to this. And then assign, remind everybody about what their, their tasks they agreed to in their deadlines. You know,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:12):
Microsoft showed that off at Build probably four or five years ago. They had it was like a, it was a device that sat in the middle of your conference analyzing your meeting, the conversations during the meeting, and then creating task items based off Yeah. You could invite

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:31):
Somebody into your Zoom call that does just that Now. Adam Davidson

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:34):
Does it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
Right. Google is working on an AI for ultrasound diagnosis and cancel cancer therapy scored 85% on a doctor level medical exam. Oh, we already, that's the, that's what we've been talking about. Well, I read

Stacey Higginbotham (01:40:50):
A, a frightening story this week from Stat News, the wonderful science and health coverage site out of Boston that talked about those Medicare advantage plans. Yeah. And it was all about how AI is saying that this patient should only be in daycare or, or, or, or post-acute care for 15 days and that's it. You should

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
Let them die.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:14):
All of that. Right. All that. You know, the problem with this isn't the ai the problem with this is the greedy, horrible insurance company and the structure of of Medicare. Aren't you on

Leo Laporte (01:41:22):
A Medicare Advantage program? Are you not on that? I

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:25):
Don't, I'm looking at this. I think that I don't, I I think I'm, I'd be on a, on a supplementary not advantage.

Leo Laporte (01:41:30):
I'm on an advantage

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:31):
Those have their own problems

Leo Laporte (01:41:32):
With, with Kaiser. Yeah, I've seen before. You should be very careful with those. Yes. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:39):
You know, it might be interesting though cuz if you have an AI as opposed to a person doing it, then you're fighting against, then it makes the bias in the system a little bit more clear. Right. It's not like they can just blame this person and Right. You know how like CEOs are always like, oh, it was these guys. I didn't know what they were doing. <Laugh>. But if you've written a corporate AI to define, and one, it should be easy to see people like to compare notes. If you get rejected, you can see, you can discover the bias in the ai and then you can come at the company and be like, Hey, now that you know this, you either A, have to fix it or B, admit that you're trying to do this. So there's, I think it's just the way you would attack it as an activist. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:42:20):
It's the human use with all of this. It's the use, it's how you use it. Same thing.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:42:25):
Well, no, no, here it's, it's, it's interesting because I think it, it makes it a corporate responsibility as opposed to an individual. Like the corporation has to take the blame as opposed to an individual. You could always paw it off on an individual, but with an algorithm you can't,

Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
Somebody still write

Mike Elgan (01:42:38):
Amazing

Stacey Higginbotham (01:42:39):
Use is what I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (01:42:40):
Somebody still writing those rules saying optimize. Yeah, but you have to profit. But

Stacey Higginbotham (01:42:45):
That's coming. That's a culture thing. That's not like an individual. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So I think it's, I I I, maybe I'm being overly optimistic here, but I'm gonna

Mike Elgan (01:42:54):
Say, I mean, imagine, imagine AI turned loose on the problem of setting health insurance rates. And the AI is free to look at your social media, everything you've written, everything you've done, look at your photos. Are you smoking a cigarette? Little too

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:07):
Much red wine, Mr. Jarvis.

Mike Elgan (01:43:08):
Exactly. And like right, right. Checking your Trader Joe's bill. That's a lot of two buck chuck there, Mr. Jarvis. and then setting a rate on that probability and, and prediction about when you're gonna need health insurance and all that stuff. The, the, the, the, the point of that is that it's 100% inevitable that that's gonna be a use case for this kind of ai.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:28):
A hundred percent. Right. Which is why, why we need to have laws that dictate a, your rights under that and look at outcome-based things. I mean, I don't think it's wrong if it's actuarially relevant to charge someone more for certain behaviors and they partake at those behaviors. Just because those behaviors have been secret for a long time doesn't mean that they're still not relevant. Right. So that's, I I think what's interesting is how if everything becomes transparent and I'll call it actionable or can be fed into something that can deliver a high quality insight mm-hmm. <Affirmative> actuarial result about it, then how do we, how do we enforce laws? How do we laws that can be enforced?

Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
Let, let me give you a real world example. And I know about this cuz my daughter lives in an apartment complex that's run by a giant national corporation called Greystar. There was an article in ProPublica last year about Greystar using algorithms AI to set rents. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> on a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company's signature products. Software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rent on tenants. Never before have we seen these numbers. Apartment rents had recently shut up by as much as 14.5%. He said what he said, I I think software's driving it. Quite honestly. As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within in a single month by doing it manually. So they <laugh> they use this software to raise rent. The reason I became aware of this is her, her rent went up 10% at the end of her lease. And I went, what? <Laugh>? That seems like an awful lot. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:25):
On what basis though, did they

Leo Laporte (01:45:26):
Software based

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:27):
Can,

Leo Laporte (01:45:28):
They didn't say

Stacey Higginbotham (01:45:29):
The software assesses that it can. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
What was the data? Yeah. For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. Realpage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money. One of the algorithms developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had too much empathy compared with computer generated pricing. <Laugh>. Yep. Apartment managers can reject the software suggestion, but as many as 90% are adopted. So speak to the silicon. Yeah. So this,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:46:04):
Well, and so this is why we'll have to enumerate basic rights for people like a right to housing and then say, okay, then you can only, you know, cuz it, these people are stuck between a rock and a hard place. You know, it, it doesn't make sense in, again, a capitalistic society to leave money on the table. So everyone will adopt this. It's hard to walk away from housing or water or electricity or food. Like those are all things you need. So we're gonna have to come back to the old days of like regulating prices for those things. And if people don't like it, well they kind of got themselves into this mess.

Leo Laporte (01:46:39):
Real page on its website says, find out how yield star can help you outperform the market. Three to 7% rip off people. Well, I mean

Mike Elgan (01:46:49):
That's, that's a used case where you, where basically there's no, I mean this is very different from say health insurance for example. So if you get a health insurance bill, somebody like Jeff, who's a t totaling wallflower, goes to bed at eight 30 every night doesn't travel very much. And, and, and is a, is a de dedicated vegan. Very, very healthy. But his, he, his health insurance is really high because he's halluc way he paying for the fraudsters and the, and the alcoholics and the chain smokers and all, and the, and the, and the fast drivers and all that kind of stuff. And it's unfair to him. So if you had a, if you had the right kind of health insurance algorithm, it would actually go, it would lower a lot of people's health insurance costs. Who, who are not at a higher risk and raise the ones for those who are in a perfect world that's different from the rent part of it, which is, which is like, it doesn't sound like it's a lowering anyone's rent?

Leo Laporte (01:47:42):
No. It, so what it's, yeah, it's optimizing for the highest, the selling point is, besides the fact that no softhearted building managers are negotiating rent, is that they don't, normally they would check you would check as a human, you would check round local rental and see, you know, see what the current prices are in your market and stuff. It doesn't do that. It's merely optimizing based on vacancy rates. It's doing the calculation to figure out, well, we can leave those three apartments empty if it increases the rent 20% on these three apartments, that kind of thing. And it's a calculator. It's a cal, it's a risk Yes. Calculation. Yeah. And it doesn't have a heart <laugh>, so it, it knows how ha how, how high it can push it. And it really has driven rents up ridiculously. It's it's kind of amazing.

Mike Elgan (01:48:28):
Heartlessness as a service. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
Heartless ha has, has, has, <laugh> has, which actually is you have to be confused with Haas. Not to be confused with Haas, which is the Formula One team, and also the big machining manufacturing. I happen to tune in the P b s broadcast last night, news Hour. And Haas has been sending machining technology to the Russians for building weapons. And they're a US company. Jesus. Yeah. So Haass Automation, heartlessness as a service. <Laugh>. I think you've, I think you've got something there. There's a

Mike Elgan (01:49:05):
Show, show title I

Leo Laporte (01:49:07):
Think you got. So, there you go. Tiktok attempting to save itself is now offering a feed dedicated to science and technology. So there'll be, it's not, I haven't seen it on my TikTok yet, but next to, for you and following, there'll be stem and you can get a whole bunch of videos about science and technology. Hey, you see that? Have you seen that Mr. Jarvis? No, I have not. Mr. TikTok? No. TikTok is going downhill for me. I don't, there's a lot more, seems like a lot more ads. This, you know, every social network eventually goes to hell. I just go fast past the movie lady. I can't stand believe it.

Mike Elgan (01:49:43):
Cory Doctor calls

Leo Laporte (01:49:44):
It the In acidification. In acidification. Yes, it's right. It's true. We've talked about it. And it's happened. It's, you know what's funny is it's the

Stacey Higginbotham (01:49:52):
Model of all

Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
Media. It's what's hysterical is Instagram is copying TikTok, so it's destroying Instagram, Spotify. Paul Throt told me he is starting to copy TikTok, and now TikTok is trying to do something else so it can get more profitable. It's just all, it's all straight downhill, which is fine with me because maybe kids will go out and get some fresh air.

Mike Elgan (01:50:18):
Did you talk on this show last week? Did the story even break last week? About Facebook wanting to do a, a fed averse social

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
Network? We didn't really talk about it. Yeah. They, they have indicated some plans to join the Fed averse.

Mike Elgan (01:50:34):
It's a ridiculous plan to me, I think, because, you know, if you're, if you're a dedicated Facebook user, you are gonna want nothing to do with the new social network that's on the Fed averse. And if you're on the Fed averse, you want nothing to do with Facebook or Meta. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Meta's just desperate

Mike Elgan (01:50:49):
At this point. I don't, I just don't know who would use this,

Leo Laporte (01:50:51):
This new social. I, I became aware of it because a lot of masked on admins instance administrators were talking about, well, what do we do if that happens? 

Mike Elgan (01:51:00):
Yeah. What they do is they block it.

Leo Laporte (01:51:02):
Do we block it? I wouldn't block it. I if somebody, I don't

Stacey Higginbotham (01:51:05):
Know that you should. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:51:06):
There's

Mike Elgan (01:51:06):
People there. I think a lot of people would. But what if,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:51:09):
Do it another way, Mike. What if Twitter federated tomorrow?

Mike Elgan (01:51:13):
Yeah, I think, I think some would block it. Others would welcome it. But I think, you know, I think, I think that just the, the upside is that just Facebook contemplating this is, is, is a kind of validation of, of at least some people in, in, in meta seeing which way the wind is blowing or

Stacey Higginbotham (01:51:33):
That they're saying this social stuff is dead for us. Oh crap. The Metaverse, isn't it either? We're gonna hope for figuring out something really cool to do with our G P T, but, eh, social's over

Leo Laporte (01:51:48):
Here's what TechCrunch reported, meta confirmed that it's working on decentralized text-based app. Wouldn't give out details. Meta Spokesperson said We're exploring a standalone, decentralized social network for sharing text updates. The new decentralized app code named P 92 is still under development. What a P 92. Right?

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:11):
Boring. What a boring,

Leo Laporte (01:52:12):
According to the document seen by Money Control, the app will let users log in through their Instagram credentials. A platformer says it'll be overseen by Adam. Er, former Insta, actually current Instagram head. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the company is already involving the legal department according to Platformer, to sniff out early privacy concerns. So I don't know if it would be on the Metaverse or not. We know that WordPress acquired the company that was providing activity pub interactivity for WordPress blogs. So Automatic now owns that. Very

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:46):
Smart. Very, very met All Leg to do. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:52:50):
Have you gotten into Blue Sky yet? I haven't,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:53):
No. I haven't, I haven't

Mike Elgan (01:52:53):
Either

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
Applied, but honestly it seems like a clone of something that exists already. Yeah. Activity Pub, which is Powers the fed averse power's mastered on. Yep. And other clients I feel like we've got it. It's, it's, it's done.

Mike Elgan (01:53:10):
The, just join the thing that's there. Like that's, you want, you want the, you want the, but they can't

Leo Laporte (01:53:14):
Make money off of that. Oh, shucks. Aw.

Mike Elgan (01:53:18):
I mean, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:53:20):
Oh, well, but

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:21):
What if, what if, what if Blue Sky federated with the Activity Pub

Mike Elgan (01:53:25):
That that, but it,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:25):
It innovated in other ways That adds to the code base of Activity Pub. That's

Mike Elgan (01:53:29):
A good, that'd be great. That'd be great. I think. Yeah. That's what they should do. But I don't, I don't, I doubt they will. That's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:35):
The problem with, with post news, right. By the reason I, one of the two reasons I left the activity, the advisory board within the first five minutes was they work on a federate.

Mike Elgan (01:53:48):
Right. Evan and I, I signed up for it and then, and then just ignore Ignored Haven ever since. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:53:53):
Evan Prodromou, who was a guy kind of in some ways, kicked this all off with a detica back in the day, said, big companies aren't taking over the Fed averse. The Fed averse is taking over big companies. <Laugh>. I like, I like that attitude. Tooting.

Mike Elgan (01:54:09):
Well, I hope, I hope that is good. The social network companies like Meta have recognized hopefully that there's no money in the future of social. It's not gonna be a big business. It, it'll, it'll always cause you problems. The moderation is always a headache. It's a legal headache. It's gi gets you in trouble with the, the, the Congress gets you in trouble with despotic regimes abroad. Let's just let the people have it, just throw it at the, you know, self moderation and so on. I would love for that to be the conclusion that, that they're, it almost

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
Feels like that's it. Because that's what TikTok and YouTube are doing, is what Instagram is doing. They're becoming content hubs, places where pe most people go just to watch to consume, and a handful of creators create and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, while there are still problems with that, it seems like you're right. It's a lot easier than than a kind of, everybody tweeted the other

Stacey Higginbotham (01:55:02):
Issue. I, I had a good conversation with a guy named David Slifka, who wrote a really good post about three weeks ago, about what Mass Dun needs to do to scale. And I'll, I'll equivalent with the word scale, but fine. What, what it needs to do to, to grow. And, you know, one of the things that he's looking at is moderation services. And we talked about this I think last week, Leo and other stuff like that. But he also talked to me about the need for Mastodon to do a better job of telling its story an activity, probably to do a better job of playing the story. Mike McCue just, I just saw he came back from South by Southwest saying, everybody's talking about chat, G B T, and he's saying Mastodon Mastodon.

Leo Laporte (01:55:34):
He's the founder of Flipboard and his, and has now started supporting activity Pub was on Tech News Weekly a couple of weeks ago. If you're curious what he has to say. Yeah. Majorly, what's going on at South by we didn't, we didn't go to South by Stacey. You didn't go to South By.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:55:48):
I don't live there anymore. I don't have to go

Leo Laporte (01:55:50):
<Laugh>. I don't have to

Stacey Higginbotham (01:55:52):
<Laugh>. I'm sorry. I, I know, like I got a lot outta South by, but

Leo Laporte (01:55:56):
I loved going to it. It was fun going with you, Leo. That was fun. Made more fun. Yeah. March let's see. There's, there's three. There's interactive, there's film and there's music.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:10):
But when places Like Us Call, we're only talking about interactive. We don't

Leo Laporte (01:56:13):
Talk about interactive is what we're talking about. So let me see, is is it still a place where interesting things happen? I, well, I'll tell you. Go has just relaunched <laugh>. Whoa. Gowa. They

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:27):
Were based in Austin, if it may, I mean, they started out in Austin, so it makes sense. Go.

Leo Laporte (01:56:31):
Which was kind of a follow on Go Foursquare, although I thought Prettier than Foursquare launched at South by, must be like almost 10 years ago, a while ago. They've now relaunched. Yeah. And I put it on my phone cause I like checking in and I'm gonna be Yeah, I do too. Yeah. I always like that. Yeah, it's a little more private now. It's not public. You ha you say who can see you and it's all people in your, you know, contact list and stuff like that. We still have a Twit East Side studio on Go. And I've checked in there here's the Gola Maps. They still have, you know, a lot of places and you can add places. It's gamified. It's the same, you know, it's, it's, but they now are pitching it more as tell your friends where you are so they can come hang with you. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:20):
You know, that's It. Did, there is a book about that just came out a couple weeks ago about hanging out and that being the missing element in today's culture. And I will say the idea of sharing your location and your availability to like just chill is kind of a neat one. Yeah. Like in an unobtrusive way. Like, I don't wanna text everybody, like, Hey everybody, I'll be at this place during these hours if you want, come on by, we'll play some games. But I don't mind telling people like, you know, being like, oh, I'm a tri.

Leo Laporte (01:57:51):
That's what forced Graham Kawa. What's hysterical to me is that kind of goes on. I, so there, I follow, there's a Petaluma subreddit and there's a Santa Rosa subreddit, and every once in a while somebody will say, Hey I wanna ride my bike around anyone who wanna join me, kind of thing. Or you want to hang out, you know you wanna play disk golf? I think it's really interesting. This is still some people, I don't know who these people are still wanna just hang out. I think hanging out's nice. There's a Taco Tuesday bike ride in Santa Rose. Every Taco Tuesday. They all call it, I'll take the taco part. The bike part. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I don't understand the bike. They're here, they're, they're Taco Tuesday bike riding using eighties funky r and b as a soundtrack. They head west from downtown to get dinner or taco trucks before heading east for yogurt. <Laugh>.

Mike Elgan (01:58:52):
That looks really fun. Actually. Doesn't, it's

Leo Laporte (01:58:55):
SUV for the

Mike Elgan (01:58:56):
Taco Bell.

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
That's more my speed. <Laugh>. 

Mike Elgan (01:59:00):
I post my location all the time, my real time location. I would, for example, I went to this place in Mexico City a week and a half ago or something like that. And I'm like, where I'm at? And I was there for six hours. Right. And, and no rando or stranger or cre stalker or weirdo or anything has ever like, approached me saying, oh, I saw you on that. You were here. It

Leo Laporte (01:59:20):
Only happened to me once. I was at a cafe in in Petaluma having lunch. And I posted on Four Square and Robert Scobel showed up. But

Mike Elgan (01:59:30):
Other, that is, that is terrifying.

Leo Laporte (01:59:32):
But other than that, so I, I said, how did you find me? He said, you're on four Squared, dude. I said, oh, shoot, <laugh>, go

Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:39):
Ahead. I would tell you, like, now I would do it. But when I was younger, like as a 24 year old, or a 25 year old reporter, I think I was like probably 27 or so when Four Square in all came out. Yeah. I would never do that because I didn't want creepy people showing up. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (01:59:54):
It's different if you're a woman. I think probably. Right. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:57):
Even now, like, think about like, like when I travel for business, like I see so many of my friends who are friends or my acquaintances on Twitter or wherever. They're like, Hey, I'm gonna be in San Francisco and, you know, tomorrow night, does anyone wanna grab coffee? Or anything like that. But it feels much more fraught and weird to do it as a woman. So just throw it out a different perspective for

Leo Laporte (02:00:18):
Y'all. No, I understand completely. You don't want creeps stalking you. But I think, and I think it's young, but normally I think it's younger people who just hang. You know? I mean, did you, when you were a teenager, did you go down to the mall with your buddies?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:34):
We went to the baseball fields.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
<Laugh>. That's fun.

Mike Elgan (02:00:37):
We didn't have a moment too far.

Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
That's cool.

Mike Elgan (02:00:40):
Well, but I was at a, an event in, in Oaxaca recently called Sencio Umbra. There was 5,000 people there.

Leo Laporte (02:00:48):
What was, what's the idea? You'd be quiet.

Mike Elgan (02:00:50):
Sencio is the name of the mezcal place where it took place. And Umbra

Leo Laporte (02:00:55):
Shadow.

Mike Elgan (02:00:58):
Yeah, it's, I I think so. But, but there was tons of people there. It was dark. A lot of people were wearing crazy getups. It's like, I knew there were lots of people that, that I knew personally who were there, but I just didn't know who I would've loved. I don't know if you remember what was the name of that app that existed where it was like a photo sharing thing, but it was everybody who was physically proximate.

Leo Laporte (02:01:19):
Yeah. And you just

Mike Elgan (02:01:20):
Highlight it was highlight color or something like that. Or

Leo Laporte (02:01:22):
It was color too. Yeah. There that, yeah, that was a ver very brief moment. That was very brief. The, the gonna be the cool thing to do.

Mike Elgan (02:01:30):
Yeah. And that was cool. I went to a couple of events in, in Silicon Valley and used that and like, discovered that there were, people knew who were there and like, we all shared pictures. I thought that was pretty cool. But it was so radically invasive in a way. You was just sort of publicly sharing all your photos to who knows who. And so I, I kind of died a, a quick death by

Leo Laporte (02:01:52):
Color photos sharing app takes social networking to an amazing, terrifying new places back in 2011. And I think highlight was another one too. I think these were all very, yeah, very popular. Proximity based sharing was the, this the idea of the theme. Yeah. 41 million in funding. 25 million from Sequoia Capital. The most money Sequoia invested has invested since in a pre-launch startup, including Google <laugh>. Two years later, maybe one year later, gone. All that money <laugh> up in, so

Stacey Higginbotham (02:02:31):
I had to read. I, I'm reading what the hell did I reading? No, I can't nevermind. Keep going.

Leo Laporte (02:02:38):
Now Color by the way, is a healthcare startup <laugh>. They, they took the oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:02:44):
Breast cancer stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:02:45):
Yeah. They took the they just took

Stacey Higginbotham (02:02:47):
The domain.

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
Right? They took the domain and the Twitter account <laugh>. So maybe, maybe Color sold it. I don't know. He's such a goods, such a good name, right? Yeah. Republic

Stacey Higginbotham (02:02:58):
And published in 2001, he was warning about all these things we're gonna be echo chamber and all that. Almost all the companies he mentions as as the future we're gone. Long

Leo Laporte (02:03:08):
Gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we forget cuz we're buried. We're in it, we're immersed in it. It happens so fast and and yeah, we all go, oh yeah, I remember that. Whatever happened it's gone long. We report on it when a it emerges, but we don't have anything to say when they disappear usually.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:03:28):
Especially if they're small and they disappear cuz no one used it. It's like, right. Oh, remember that app you weren't using? Well,

Leo Laporte (02:03:34):
But there's quite a few that everybody used and still disappeared.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:03:38):
<Laugh>, how were they changed? I mean, they changed their business. We reported on Foursquare's business model change. And I know we reported when go kind of shut. I think they shut down, didn't they? They laid off people.

Leo Laporte (02:03:50):
I think they shut down. But now they, the founders have relaunched.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:03:56):
All

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
Right. Which is fascinating.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:03:57):
Okay, what else have we got?

Leo Laporte (02:03:59):
Nome Chomsky writing in the New York Times. The False Promise of ChatGPT.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:04:07):
Oh, we're still talking about ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte (02:04:10):
Okay, well don't you wanna know what Nome wants to say? Man, he's man old. He's too old. He doesn't care.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:04:15):
No weak old. No,

Leo Laporte (02:04:16):
He's old. It's a week old. It's over. It's over by now. Who cares?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:04:20):
I can't remember my arguments. I had arguments about it. Now I can't remember what they are. You see, that's the problem I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:04:24):
Actually tweeted. Yeah. Cuz G PT four just came out this week. So everything he wrote last week's probably.

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
Newt, how about this? I'll just give you his in short. Last paragraph. Gimme

Stacey Higginbotham (02:04:33):
The summary from chat. G p

Leo Laporte (02:04:35):
T ChatGPT and its brethren are unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either over generate, producing both truths and falsehood, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike or under generate, exhibiting non-commitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences. Given the amorality pho science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity. In other words, he's of the opinion, it's all just, you know, a parlor trick.

Mike Elgan (02:05:11):
And in fact it is. But still, it's, it's a useful one. I mean, he lives in a world of academia where ideas and the expression thereof are everything. And not in the world of like, you know what I just need, I need a, a little bit of nudge to understand how to write this right. This type of right letter to the government.

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
Here's another paragraph. You're right. Him, he's a very, very famous linguist.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:32):
Linguist

Leo Laporte (02:05:33):
He says, true intelligence is also capable of moral thinking. Right? This means constraining the otherwise limitless creativities of our minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be to be useful. Chat g this is reasonable, I think to be useful chat. G b t must be empowered to generate novel looking output to be acceptable to most of its users. It must steer clear of morally objectable objectionable content. But the programmers have struggled and will continue to struggle to achieve this kind of balance. It doesn't have moral thinking right.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:09):
In the piece, he also says that he contrasts large language models with humans who seek not to infer brute correlations among data points, but to create explanations. Yeah. And this is the point of, well, but this is the point of David Weinberger's book Everyday Chaos, is we often fool ourselves with those explanations. Yeah. We think we understand the explanations. We think we know what's going on. Well, it's

Leo Laporte (02:06:31):
What humans

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:31):
Do. We praise ourselves as humans as this ability that we fact don't really have we just a beat. This is also how history gets things wrong. The Allen School we

Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
Tell stories about everything. That's how we understand things is to tell stories about they're

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:43):
Often and

Leo Laporte (02:06:44):
Wrong. And they may, I would say they would are almost universally wrong, certainly about history. Right. but that's the best we can do. Cuz we are flawed.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:54):
Right? We're

Leo Laporte (02:06:55):
Limited, limited. What

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:56):
These models say is, I don't have an explanation. Yeah. I was unpredicted or

Leo Laporte (02:07:00):
They make one up.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:01):
You did. I have no idea why that works.

Leo Laporte (02:07:03):
Or they make one up

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:05):
<Laugh> or they make one up. Yes. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
I guess that's kind of what Chomsky's saying. <Laugh>. So

Mike Elgan (02:07:10):
I mean the, the, the problem with Chomsky's perspective is that you know, the number of adults who have to write something from time to time is, you know, probably what, 98% or 99%. The percentage of those adults who are doing this writing who have training and ethics, and the theory of morality and all that kind of stuff is what is it? It's like you know, 8%. And so there's this huge of people who have to write things, who have no, they're not basing what they're writing on, on, well, they would say they learn their ethics,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:43):
Their from their house of worship or from their mother or from their smart Aunt Bessie. Or, you know,

Mike Elgan (02:07:48):
I asked the old chat g b t like, you know, how can I rob you know, how can I rob a bank? Can you tell me a good idea for robbing a bank? And it said, well, robbing a bank is not only illegal, it's highly immoral. If you're having thoughts about robbing a bank, you should seek profession. Maybe you should consider professional help and blah, blah, blah, blah. It gave me, it basically gave me a a, an ethics lecture in its, no, and it's, it's not that it has it's amoral. Of course it's amoral, but it's summarizing the general consensus about morality around. You

Stacey Higginbotham (02:08:21):
Hear a siren coming to Mike's house, I think I hear a siren talking.

Mike Elgan (02:08:25):
<Laugh> not here. Oh, no. But, but, but anyway, it's, it's of course, and, and of course Steven Spielberg has similar thoughts as Chomsky about this. I mean, these are people who write and, and do you know, Chomsky especially, what is the link between human cognition, human morality, and the words and language that we use? This is, you know, this, this has gotta be some kind of like awful development in in his world. And, you know, it's, it's both awful and wonderful at the same time. I think that's what we really should, I think that's the, the best position to take on ChatGPT at this point. It's awful and wonderful. It's gonna make everything better and everything worse at the same time. And so we need to, so

Stacey Higginbotham (02:09:05):
To us, which it is, yeah, it's

Mike Elgan (02:09:07):
Choice. What we can't do is say, well, it's bad. We should all stop using it and make it go away. That is not happening. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's here permanently. It will continuously get better. And, and it's our job, all of us to figure out how to, how to use it, how to understand it and, and, and just deal with the fact that it does in fact exist and continue to do so. What

Stacey Higginbotham (02:09:27):
What scares me most, Mike, is the pur verifications that I see them programming into it. Right? So I asked, who is to blame for the January 6th inter insurrection? So it realizes that's a controversial topic. And the last of three paragraphs is, it's important to note the political violence and extremism are not limited to any one political party or ideology. Well

Mike Elgan (02:09:46):
It's trying to be unwoke.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:09:47):
There's a, yeah, it's trying, well it's trying to also do false balance like newspapers, which is the trains on as well. So there's a lot of namby-pamby crap that these things are gonna pour out because they don't wanna be controversial.

Mike Elgan (02:09:58):
Right. And, and that's, and you know, that's the safe thing to do. And, and, and of course that there, there's a, there's a certain, you know, unfortunately there's a certain political protection in that as well. Because if it said, oh, it's, it's those guys <laugh>, then of course those guys would be, you know their representatives in Congress would be trying to shut all this down and, and causing all kinds of trouble. So, I don't know, it's that, that sounds to me like a almost a self-defense mechanism programmed in I guess by humans. We could do a quick take a break. Well, I don't wanna do a,

Leo Laporte (02:10:32):
Yeah, I guess I could do a break now and then we'll do the change log. It's, I'm not, no, no. I'm just trying to work out the logistic. I'm trying

Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:39):
To think for Stacey here.

Leo Laporte (02:10:40):
I know because each

Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:41):
Break is her that much closer to a waffle.

Leo Laporte (02:10:44):
Yeah. So let's talk about, no, no, no.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:46):
The break is waffle

Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
Time. Let's talk about, oh, well

Stacey Higginbotham (02:10:48):
Both ways. Yes. So it's closer to dinner time and its waffle time.

Leo Laporte (02:10:52):
Let's talk about my mattress eight sleep. Actually it's my mattress cover. I have the eight sleep pod cover. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. It's nature's gentle lu. It, it heals a multitude of ills and our pod cover at home. Man, that is the ultimate sleep machine. I just love it. We actually, we, they did not give us our pod cover. We went out, we bought it a long time ago. Actually. It was Kevin Rose who recommended it, a name Amy Webb who was on the same show. She bought it. She said, oh Leo, you gotta get it. So we finally got it. We put it on the bed. We, you know, we've always liked sleeping cozy, but sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, you're all sweaty and it's not good. The pod cover is actually, it's a great idea cuz it not only warms you up, it cools you down.

(02:11:38):
The pod cover features dual zone temperature control. So you and your partner each have your own settings as cool as 55 degrees, which is cool. It's very refreshing. Or as hot as 110 degrees, which is very cozy. And it will adjust automatically. The sleep autopilot will adjust it depending on the temperature, the room, your temperature, how you're tossing and turning, how you're breathing. It's whole goal is to get you into a deep, deep, deep, deep, deep sleep and then gradually bring you out of it so that you have the best night's sleep of your life. And it really works. When I get in bed, it's nice and toasty. Actually last night it was cool out and so I turn it up a little bit and then as I fall into a deeper sleep, it cools it, which brings me into a deeper still sleep. I increased my deep sleep from an hour to an hour and a half every night.

(02:12:29):
That's a 50% improvement. That's a really important stage in your sleep. You know, getting more deep sleep can actually really help with a variety of health issues like heart disease and high blood pressure. It can even reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. There's all sorts of studies about this cuz it's, it's, it's how your brain cleans itself out at night, right? It's all based on biometrics and the room temperature. It has best in class temperature regulation and sensors. So it can track you every morning you get sleep metrics, you know how you slept and it automatically will adjust it. I have it set so that it wakes me up in the morning, not it has a little vibration alarm that's silent only, you know, but it also will, I have it set so it warms up. So it cools me down. I go into deep sleep and then it slowly brings me out of it by warming up.

(02:13:17):
And it's nice and warm when I get up in the morning. I have to say though, that could be hazardous. You can also just turn over and go, this is so cozy. I'm staying here. Never wake up hot, never get up cold. It's just the best way to sleep. And we've had it in winter and summer. This is our second winter with it. And I have to say it's gr We had a very hot summer. It was great to have the cooling. It's been a very cold winter. It's great to have the warmth better. Sleep is a health habit you will love sticking to this is unlike other health habits. This one's not hard night after night, you'll just wake up feeling great with the pod cover. You can just take life by the horns eight sleep. I can't recommend it more highly. You'll save 150 on the pod cover.

(02:14:01):
There's savings and other items there as well. If you go to eight sleep.com/twit, that's important. E I G H T S l E E P. Spell it out. Eight sleep.com/twit. They ship within the US Canada, the UK select countries in the eu, Australia. Actually, it's been a hot summer in Australia. I bet a lot of you're happy you had that eight sleep cover, eight sleep.com/twit. We thank them so much for supporting us at This Week in Google. And you support us right back by by going there when you wanna look it up and find out more. And, and when you wanna buy it, you'll get $150 off. Eight sleep.com/twi. Thank you. Eight sleep. Hmm. All right, let's I think this is a good time for the Google change. Like, what do you think? Shall we,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:14:54):
Let's do it.

Leo Laporte (02:14:56):
Boom. The immortal last words of Gary Gilmore. Let's do it. That was his last words. Oh, that's right. So because, okay, nevermind. Now I remember who Gary Gilmore was. Oh, okay. <Laugh>. It's not, you know, I have no idea. What would your last words be, Jeff? Not necessarily in his situation, but what would your last words be? Have you thought, see, you gotta think about these things. God prepared.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:24):
Mine. Mine would be

Leo Laporte (02:15:26):
<Laugh>. Steve Jobs were was Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. I think that's good. Mine

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:35):
Would probably be like, oh, expletive as I like fall down age. Yeah. Bill or Stairs,

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
The great actor what's his name? Booth said, comedy is hard. Tragedy is easy. <Laugh> that was Gillette. I'm sorry. The great actor Gillette. What, what goes on your tombstone? That's a good que so I shouldn't, I don't know why I may. It's a little morbid and I, I think net cast. Damn it. Net cast. Damn. It would be good. I told you it was neck casts. I told you somebody in the discord mashed potato says it should be another twit is in the can <laugh>. That's pretty good. Good. That might be it. Yeah, that might be it. I might have. That's it. Yep. <laugh>.

(02:16:24):
I was having this conversation a couple of days ago with my daughter and I think I scared her because the next day I said, happy pie day. Do you remember cuz when she was a kid, they had a competition in the grade school to who could memorize pie in the most places. She said, oh, I was like, 20 or 30. I said, do you remember? She said, well, 3.14159. And then I rattled it off to 16 places. And I did this in a text message. And then I said how I want to drink alcoholic, of course, after the heavy chapters on quantum mechanics. Now I know, and probably if you think about it, you know, that's a mnemonic for 16 places. How three I one want. 4, 5, 9 goes on and on. You can figure, you can remember that. And I still remember that how I want to drink Alcoholic, of course, after heavy chapters and quantum mechanics, she thought I was having a stroke. <Laugh>. Oh, she called me. I didn't respond cuz it was after hours. I hadn't disturbed. So then she called Lisa, I said, could you check on Leo? And then she called my ex-wife. She said, could you drive over and check on Leo <laugh>? Dad's having a stroke. So Lisa said, you maybe want to tell your daughter you're not dead. <Laugh>. So I said, honey, that's a mnemonic for pie. She cares.

Mike Elgan (02:17:38):
She cares.

Leo Laporte (02:17:39):
She cares. She cares. She also knows you Well, <laugh>. All right. The Google change log. Without further ado, it's kind of the end of the line. You were a glass hole, weren't you? Mike Elgan?

Mike Elgan (02:17:52):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:17:54):
I have my a

Mike Elgan (02:17:55):
Devout one.

Leo Laporte (02:17:55):
Yeah. I spent $1,500 on, and I never wore him. I gave him to Jason Howell. I

Mike Elgan (02:18:01):
Mean, it, it was 90% camera. I I wore it all over. We lived in Florence at the time for much of that. And I was all over Florence, like shooting everything, video, capturing everything. It was amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:18:13):
Well, you'll be sad to know that today on the eyes of March. Oh, wait a minute. You still have them? Of course. You haven't given them up. Oh, in honor, as How's the

Mike Elgan (02:18:24):
Battery?

Leo Laporte (02:18:25):
How's the battery is right? <Laugh> not chargers. I, I can't imagine why this didn't succeed.

Mike Elgan (02:18:31):
I know, <laugh>, it's, you look quite fetching

Leo Laporte (02:18:34):
Actually. Would you get me the charger? I bet it's a micro sb, isn't it? Yeah. Micro sb. How sad that is. I wanna start wearing these around just to see what kind of reaction I get. Google has as of today, discontinued glass. The final edition of Glass was the Glass Enterprise Edition two. They will they, they will no longer be selling them and support will end later this year. So, you know, it was, seemed like a good idea. But as soon as you start just like an fts, you know? Yeah. As soon as you start calling 'em glass holes, I think the writing was on the wall. I think Scoble killed it. Scoble killed it. And the shower was,

Mike Elgan (02:19:19):
Was displayed like a few feet in front of your people. Left right eye. I hope this portends a Google announcement of, of a new augmented reality platform from Google.

Leo Laporte (02:19:32):
This picture, I think single-handedly killed Google Glass. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:36):
Well, you remember were, weren't we at io in Moscone when Scobel stood up? And I think it was Larry scolded him.

Leo Laporte (02:19:43):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:45):
You really shouldn't do that.

Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. and of course the problem was going into men's rooms with, with this on everybody. Yeah. Cause it has a camera in, but it has no light, so you just don't know if somebody's using it. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:59):
As I told Nick Milton, when he wrote a column complaint about that, I said, Nick, get over it yourself. Nobody wants to see your junk

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So it's the end of the line. Wow. Google Glass. Oddly enough there was a new companion app for the pixel phones. There was an early access program. Google is still apparently working on ar headsets as is apple. Everyone is everyone. Everyone is, everyone is. That's

Mike Elgan (02:20:34):
The future. We, that's,

Leo Laporte (02:20:35):
We have to figure it out. We haven't been able to yet, but we're gonna, I feel like this will be a jeopardy answer. You know, it'll have a picture of somebody wearing these things. <Laugh>. What, what's going on in this picture? <Laugh>. All right, I'm gonna charge what

Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:51):
Is idiot ripoff? Alex

Leo Laporte (02:20:54):
<Laugh>. 1500 Smackers. I still have the glass paperweight I got for being in the, in the program so that I could get it. I signed up very early on this. All right, we're gonna charge it. I've

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:08):
Got mine here somewhere.

Leo Laporte (02:21:10):
I, you know what

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:10):
I'm thinking with my prescription

Leo Laporte (02:21:11):
Lenses, it's kind trying to bring back glass.

Mike Elgan (02:21:15):
Well, I, we, we, we have better things than glass. Now we have, we have glasses that look almost like regular glasses. Do we that give us heads up? We do. We do. Lots of companies and dozens of companies. No, they're not interesting because there's no major player behind them or major platform behind them. And of course, Apple's gonna blow the lid off of this category when they come out with their device. Possibly later this year, probably early next year. And it's gonna be it is gonna be a whole new ballgame. Of course, Apple's device will not be something you can wear around town.

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
Apple's device is more like, looks like, according to the rumors, we don't know cause it's not been announced. But according to the rumors, looks just like a VR headset. Not like,

Mike Elgan (02:21:57):
Right. Well, a somewhat elegant one, but it'll, they, they're gonna use VR for ar mostly. So basically they, they'll show you the real world through immediate video. And then they, you'll put the digital objects and information superimposed on top of that as a precursor and a development platform and so on for what's probably coming in five or six or seven years. We're gonna be regular glasses that where you see the real world directly and then the virtual objects are placed. I

Leo Laporte (02:22:25):
Like, that's sponsor

Speaker 9 (02:22:26):
To a video first. What is, why is it easier to deliver

Mike Elgan (02:22:30):
Video first or, because, because, because they're the, the, the miniaturization problems for high quality AR glasses. I mean essentially what the Holy Grails to do something like magic Leap or HoloLens, but in something that looks like ordinary glasses. Okay, we're many years from anything. Okay, so they're doing that. So you can cover your whole face with the computer cuz you need that much physical room for the computer. Right. And they're gonna be using light stuff in the Apple glasses to, to, to map the room. The difference between, of course, AR and what Google Glass was, was Google Glass was just heads up display. It would show you a rectangle and if you moved your head, it would, the rectangle would move with your head. Whereas with what, what Apple and Google and everybody else is working on is to be able to place things on the table and it stays on the table no matter how you move your head. And so that, that's that's kind of a holy grail thing that we don't have the technology. I mean, they could build, apple could build perfect, you know, glasses that look amazing and do all that stuff, but it would cost $150,000 a pair. And the, when I ordered for Apple, that's a lot of

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
Money. When I ordered the Google Glass, I did get this glass paper weight with my order number. I didn't get that. Which is 7 37,

Mike Elgan (02:23:37):
Huh? Yeah. 730. What? Six before never got one. What resources? Like using a, that's just silly.

Leo Laporte (02:23:44):
Yeah, I'm glad to have it though. That's a, that is better souvenir than the glass itself. I mean, a piece of glass. Would the number understand souvenirs 7 37 laser and crate inside it. <Laugh>. That's okay. I'm happy. I I that's a good paper. Wade,

Mike Elgan (02:23:59):
You Yeah, I just wanted to point draw just very quickly, Leo, I'm sorry. Just put two things together because we're gonna have the, a augmented reality glasses are gonna have AI virtual assistance that are gonna do some of the things that G P T four do. And one of them is this, right? Both text and images. So just like you, you can, you can ask G P T four what is this? And I'll tell you, or what's funny about this, this, that's

Leo Laporte (02:24:23):
The missing piece, right? Your glasses, that's the

Mike Elgan (02:24:25):
Missing piece.

Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
Do that.

Mike Elgan (02:24:26):
Yeah. Yeah. You're, yeah. And, and so that, that's gonna be a real game changer for the visually impaired of course, but also for all of us to be able to recognize people and things in our environment. So the point I'm saying is that one of the big points of controversy of Google Glass was that camera pointing out. Yeah. sorry to say that all the augmented reality glasses are gonna have cameras, right. Looking at the world ho you know, no doubt, doubt

Leo Laporte (02:24:50):
They're less useful if they don't otherwise they're just like your Apple Watch just displays. Exactly. Yeah. No, I think this is right in the nick of time for Alzheimer's. So I, I can't wait. <Laugh> Hi. Jeff <laugh> YouTube tv multiview let's you watch up to four games in March. Madness. Okay. Youtube tv. You go use silly YouTube tv. How could you watch four games at once? Really? Who wants that? They announced it today and it will be coming for March Madness. Just seems like a lot. And they're calling it, I don't even wanna watch one game at least. Yeah. I don't even wanna watch. Maybe soccer will be interesting. If you had four games going on at once. I don't know. Google Play will now machine translate Android apps for free. What does that mean? At the Google for Games summit, Google announced the launch of free machine translation for Android apps.

(02:25:56):
Oh. So you can localize 'em seven different languages. You could take the app, localize it, add to your markets. The languages include China, Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Spanish Castillian. And that's free. You have to apply to an early access program if you want that. That's great. Along with the new chat, G p t that's going into Google Workspace, you're getting a price increase Co Inc I think not the new prices the per user per month's cost for both plans. $6 for starter, $12 for standard 18 for business plus. Flexible plans are now going to 7 20, 14 40, and 2160. So it's a, not a huge, huge jump, but you'll, you'll be paying a few, a few pennies more maybe to pay for the ai. That's ex AI's expensive. Pixels are getting a feature drop. Android 13 Q P R two.

(02:27:07):
We've talked about the March feature drop. It's now rolling out. What do you get? You have, you get instead of a battery percentage remaining day hour or until H H M M estimate for how long your battery's gonna last. A large digital clock when you fully expand quick settings. It's a lot of silly stuff. Tweaks in the pixel launcher and folders now playing appears higher up in the lock screen. The emergency calling button is larger. Gu oh my God. It's just a few things, right? Two E two eims can be used for dual sims standby on the pixel seven, pixel six pro owners can now switch to 10 80 p full high def plus ultra wide band digital car key support rolling out. I don't know if there are any cars besides B M W models that can do this, but I guess maybe eventually direct my call is coming to older pixels, which is actually really good news. Four A four a 5g, five and five A. Anyway, big, big big grid of new features. A lot of these features, I'm very happy to say rolling out to older pixel phones. So if you have a pixel update, and that's the Google change log.

(02:28:40):
All right, Jeff, I see many, many, many stories that you have. You have snuck in at the last minute.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:28:48):
I'll, I'll, I'll do a fun one. You see the one about the guy who was stranded on the mountain and had no cell coverage?

Leo Laporte (02:28:53):
No, I did not. What happened?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:28:55):
Mine 89. Did he

Stacey Higginbotham (02:28:56):
Chew his arm off <laugh>?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:28:58):
That would've been the next day, but this day very clever. He happened to have a drone with him, you know, just happened to

Leo Laporte (02:29:03):
Have, oh yeah. Oh it is.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:29:04):
But he had no coverage. So he, he tied the phone to the drone and sent it up high enough it could get coverage. And then it sent the text to his wife saying, send help. Here's where I am. And backed down. Incredible. He tried to call a, a towing company and they, well, we don't go there cause he was stuck in the snow. So then the next, he did another time and she said, no, no, no, but the county's coming to help you and backed out again. They crashed it <laugh>

Mike Elgan (02:29:30):
Brilliant. That's

Stacey Higginbotham (02:29:31):
Nice. A massive guy. And he used drones to they put like modems on mo drones and they actually grab sensor data from like wildfire, like sensing in forested areas and other places they just fly the coverage over using a drone. And then the sensors are like, oh, I've got coverage bleep. It's kind of neat. So it's, it's the inverse of that, I guess. Cool.

Leo Laporte (02:29:54):
And now a sad story. More meta layoffs, 10,000 more. They laid off 11,000 in November. Now they're gonna do another 10,000. That's a pretty hefty chunk. Is is is Facebook slash meta going down the MySpace screen?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:30:11):
Well that's what I'm Are they, are they space in here?

Mike Elgan (02:30:15):
One hopes. I mean, I don't like to see people getting laid off. Of course. I actually have a very close, you know, a a good friend who, who got laid off in a previous round. I don't want to see anybody get laid off, but if that's what it takes for a Facebook to go away, that would be, is it? Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:30:32):
But it a mutual,

Leo Laporte (02:30:32):
Mutual, wait a minute, is it a mutual friend? Is it

Mike Elgan (02:30:35):
The guy? Ye yes it is. Yes. It's, oh

Leo Laporte (02:30:37):
No. Yeah, I don't wanna say a name. Yeah, but Oh no, don't say the name. I'm so sorry.

Mike Elgan (02:30:42):
Yeah, I mean, he's, he's, he and his wife are

Leo Laporte (02:30:43):
Wonderful.

Mike Elgan (02:30:45):
Yes they are. And he's a super catch. He'll, he'll, he'll, he'll do fine. Get another great position. Yeah. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:30:50):
I will. He's not Send him a

Mike Elgan (02:30:51):
Note. He's a high level person, so it's like he'll, he'll be, he'll do great.

Leo Laporte (02:30:54):
I'll send him a note. But

Stacey Higginbotham (02:30:55):
Mike as you who still mourn Google Plus, as do I have a little empathy, not for the company, but for the people there. Same with Twitter, same with black Twitter, same with, with, with the communities that do still depend upon these platforms. And it's not, it's easy for us to move as individuals. Yeah. It's not so easy to move a community.

Mike Elgan (02:31:16):
Yep. No, that's true. And I, I, I agree with that Jeff. And I appreciate the sentiment. I think if you were to add up all the, the the pluses and minuses of, of Facebook, it's one of the few social networks that would come out on the minus end of the ledger overall. But still there are, but still

Stacey Higginbotham (02:31:31):
There's, there's things going on.

Mike Elgan (02:31:32):
There are a lot of, there are a lot of older people who just, that they know that is the way that they keep in touch with everybody. They know all their relatives and stuff like that. And they, for them to move, it would basically, the whole family would be dispersed to multiple different networks. And that would be the end of Yeah. Having everybody in one place. There are a lot of, lot of downsides. But,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:31:50):
But you know what Mike, it won't matter is I'm gonna move physically to the community or the future. Musk landia.

Mike Elgan (02:31:56):
Yes. Before

Leo Laporte (02:31:57):
You go there, I do wanna mention that in the year 2023, according to layoffs, FYI, 130,512 people have been laid off from the tech industry. So to all of you, you know, I'm sorry. I hope you find gainful employee. That is tough.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:15):
Please don't start podcasts

Leo Laporte (02:32:17):
And please, whatever you do, <laugh>, look what's happened to me. You don't, you don't <laugh>, you just don't wanna, don't wanna go there. <Laugh>, SIA is Elon's plan to create a company town. Yo, yo Soul to, I thought

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:33):
It was Snail Brook.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:34):
Well, no, I'm making a Ford Landing a joke. <Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:37):
Oh, okay. I was like, I thought it

Leo Laporte (02:32:39):
Was, it is in Texas. Bash

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:41):
To the next, it's in Texas.

Leo Laporte (02:32:42):
It's

Stacey Higginbotham (02:32:42):
In ba Yeah, it's in Bastrop. It's right outside of it's right by the airport, basically.

Leo Laporte (02:32:48):
Because Texas has rules that allow you to set your own regulations if you own the town, I guess. Yep. thousands of acres of nearly purchased par pasture and farmland right outside of Austin, near the airport company. Employees could live and work there. The boring company will have a a giant facility there

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:11):
Whole underneath your home

Leo Laporte (02:33:12):
<Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:13):
And if you leave the company or are fired, you have 30 days to leave your rental. Cuz they're planning on renting these houses to their workers to provide below market rent. I

Leo Laporte (02:33:24):
Don't know if I'd wanna live in Snail Brook. That's such a terrible name. Yeah, well

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:29):
I, that's not my particular issue. My particular issue would be like, oh. Without any sort of oversight and regulations. Yeah. 

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:38):
Yeah, the, the town that Elon Musk remember this is, I think it was the exact, the same ioio where we wanted to move to Google Island. You remember that?

Leo Laporte (02:33:48):
Yeah. Larry Page. Where

Stacey Higginbotham (02:33:50):
Larry had Google Island Larry Page. So I can imagine living on Google Island, but not Musk, not Musk

Mike Elgan (02:33:55):
Muw. Well, the problem is that you can be on the h O a but only if you pay dollars a month.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:00):
Right, right. By the way, did you notice that he still lists himself? If you go to his profile, he's not Twitter, the new Twitter blue. He's still legacy

Mike Elgan (02:34:10):
Eli. Wow. Who may or may not be notable.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:34:13):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:34:14):
Hmm. That's humility. That's humility coming from his Well, yeah, he's, I did ask Jason Callis, I said, did you tell Elon not to be Chief Twit? <Laugh>? Like, cuz you know, cuz he, I mean, Jason even said, yeah, I know you've been Chief Twit for 11 years. I said, you told him. He said, I don't wanna talk about and he conversations, he did a little chat may or may not have with Elon. I, I mean honestly, I think that's a yes. So thank you. Yes. I think he did. I think he said Elon, there's another chief twit. You don't wanna be anything like him. <Laugh> apparently the law, he still Google Glass <laugh>. He's still wearing Google glass. The law requires you elect the mayor. So they'll be doing that. Musk, his former girlfriend, the singer Grimes, Kanye West and Mr. West's architectural designer discussed several times last year what a musk town might look like. They were all high on weed. You imagine them neighbors. Oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:35:11):
Oh my god, this sounds so bad.

Leo Laporte (02:35:14):
Oh. Oh. They should elect a mayor based on check-ins like Foursquare that they, they should change every few days. <Laugh> this is this is a a, a picture of Snail Brook. I don't know if you really wanna live there. It looks like a lot of aluminum siding, but is he already building it?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:35:36):
I, yeah, he is building it. These look like trailers actually, which was funny because that's what is by the airport. It's a bunch of RV's doubles trailer. Yeah. Home double white's. So maybe he just bought all of their inventory and he is setting it up. I don't know. So

Leo Laporte (02:35:49):
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Elon Musk is building a trailer park <laugh>, where's employees? Is that, is that what we're concluding

Stacey Higginbotham (02:35:55):
Here? Trailer parks are very lucrative. So it would not surprise me at all. There's a housing shortage you can convince people to live in your trailer. It's

Leo Laporte (02:36:03):
Only a trailer park. It's a small town. It's 110 people, but you only need 200 in Texas, 201 residents before you can apply to incorporate. So, you know, the 110 houses, two people per they've purchased 3,500 acres in the Austin area. That's about four times the size of Central Park.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:36:24):
Anyway, that is such a weird metric. I, I, I get cuz this is the Wall Street Journal, right? Yeah. So I'm like Central

Leo Laporte (02:36:31):
Park, central Park, you know, central Park. You know that?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:36:35):
What, what That's X number, like that's half the size of, I don't know,

Leo Laporte (02:36:39):
43 hectares. Is that better for you? I made that up. I don't, it's just

Stacey Higginbotham (02:36:44):
Such a weird metric.

Leo Laporte (02:36:45):
Don't think it's let's see. No more NFTs for Facebook or Instagram. Aw, Aw, that was quick. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah, that's the first time I've heard about NFTs in about six months. <Laugh>. Yeah, exactly. Anything else? Facebook is doing the major shrinkage. Yeah. mark Zuckerberg said it's gonna be a year of austerity.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:37:16):
Flatter is faster is the new work. Facts.

Leo Laporte (02:37:20):
Besides firing 10,000 people, they're not gonna fill 5,000 open jobs. So it's really 50 a head loss of 15,000. So that's a,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:37:28):
They they hired, they, they they had hired 15,000 in the pandemic, but now they're going back to pre pandemic, I think. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:37:35):
Yeah. Well if they, if they don't fill those 5,000, they fire 11,000 more. They fired 10,000 in the fall. So that's you know, 457,000. That's a huge number of people that won't be there.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:37:49):
And I come back to Eugene Roko at when he was at our summit who said, and I said, I said this last week that the total investment to build and, and eight, 3 billion people and eight Facebook but Master's. Pretty amazing. 500,000 bucks. And one person, he just, he just this week hired his first employee.

Leo Laporte (02:38:08):
Incredible. Here. From so efficient here from teeny abode.com is a picture of Elon Musk's tiny house. It's a casita, it's a trailer from box bowls. This

Stacey Higginbotham (02:38:24):
Is oh, those are so nice. We saw them at ces. Did you?

Leo Laporte (02:38:28):
It's a prefab tiny house. Yeah. Awesome. It's for a guest house on his property. Wait a minute. Elon has, I thought he got rid of all his properties.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:38:35):
No, he's, but he was living in like somebody's mansion in, I thought he was

Leo Laporte (02:38:38):
Couch

Stacey Higginbotham (02:38:38):
Surfing Austin. Yeah, he was couch surfing in Lake Rob Roy and right places like that. So

Leo Laporte (02:38:46):
A look inside Elon's $50,000 prefab tiny house he uses as a guest house in Texas where he threw a birthday party there. Hmm. 375 square feet bathroom. One bedroom, living room and kitchen. What <laugh> Okay. Eh, it's a little tight. But you know what, I could live in there. It except for the industrial door. I feel like you wouldn't, but you could. I could.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:17):
The industrial door. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte (02:39:19):
Doesn't this look like, I mean, look at this door. This looks

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:22):
Like this. That was my exact front door on my old house. Okay. Nevermind. We designed and built herself.

Leo Laporte (02:39:26):
Nevermind. I love that

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:27):
Door. We had two of them,

Leo Laporte (02:39:29):
Don't you?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:29):
It was beautiful. Okay. We spent so much money on it.

Leo Laporte (02:39:32):
Really?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:33):
Oh

Leo Laporte (02:39:34):
Yeah. You know, you, you wanted people to be look in the door like you coming up to the door and Well they see

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:39):
You couldn't see into the house. We had, it was like a little alcove area. Oh, okay. We designed the house

Leo Laporte (02:39:45):
Clever so that you could have a clear, gorgeous door. But it was gorgeous.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:39:49):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:39:50):
Awesome. I do like this the pocket door or whatever you call that, that open up and give you like a patio, a little kitchen. It's pretty cute. It probably don't want the shower that sink.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:05):
I hate those sinks.

Leo Laporte (02:40:06):
No, I do too. What's the point of that sink?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:09):
You know what I hate, I hate rain showers. I despise

Leo Laporte (02:40:13):
Hate train showers. I do too. Oh, we have one of these sinks in our guest bathroom, but I didn't put it there. That's just how it came. But I, I agree

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:19):
With you. Yeah. We have

Leo Laporte (02:40:20):
One. It's a little bowl that sits on top of the counter instead of being sunk into the counter. You're awful. You could never get water under things and it's, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:30):
It's terrible. Well, and they're just, everything splashes and they're just annoying. I hate 'em. It's

Leo Laporte (02:40:36):
It's called a sink. It should sink into the counter. It should sink. Exactly. I don't mind it. It's the guest bathroom. I don't want guests to be too comfortable.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:44):
<Laugh>, it's, it's nice sink

Leo Laporte (02:40:45):
In my bathroom. Don't make yourself a I hate it. Yeah. No. It's in, in our ba in our bathroom. It sinks into this thing. Look at the little closet. You can't have any long clothes. Just short clothes. Well, who, who wears long clothes anymore? If

Stacey Higginbotham (02:40:57):
I wear long, I wear dresses. What the heck? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:41:00):
They couldn't put a dress there with drag. And my capes were fit. None of my capes were fit in there. I did, I had a brief moment when I thought I should wear capes. <Laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:41:14):
Let's bring back capes. I

Leo Laporte (02:41:16):
Did.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:41:16):
I appreciate that. I didn't,

Leo Laporte (02:41:18):
I I don't know why. When I was a kid, like in high school, I wore a big black cape and I thought it was pretty fun. And I thought, so a couple of years ago, I went out. These days they think you're gonna shoot up the high school. Geez. I bought two. Well, so that's why I bought 'em in purple. One of 'em. And I was very, I was worried it was stolen Valor, carbon. The church. Yeah. One of em. I was a West Point cape, and I didn't want it to be stolen valor. So I made sure it didn't have any insignia on it, but it was just perfect. It was a really nice cape. The kind that they would, that wear at West Pointon and dress, because it had, anyway, and then I got another one. I can't remember why. You know what? I'll wear it next week. I'll wear my cape. Yeah, do do. Yes. My mom who watch you do that full swing of it. Yeah. Like Zorro, my mom who watches this show religiously, will remember my fa my cape phase in my youth. And she'll be, I, I don't know how she's, mom, you watched the show. I didn't know that. Oh, she loves this show. She says, I'm, I love, she says, I love Stacey. I love Jeff. I love aunt. She's, she, she's, she's like, we're her family now. Well, we

Stacey Higginbotham (02:42:29):
Indeed, we didn't hear your name in there. What's, what's going on, my friend?

Leo Laporte (02:42:32):
She didn't say anything about me. Hello? She, she didn't say, oh, you're so good. Or anything like that. So maybe everyone should wear a cape on this show, <laugh>, just to your mom. I, I bet you have a cape. I think you've worn it. I have two capes. You've worn it, I believe. Oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:42:47):
No, I've never worn a capes. Oh, no. I've wore shells. No, I have a full on. I have, I have a fancy wool cape for going to like the opera. And if you

Leo Laporte (02:42:54):
Live in the Pacific Northwest, it's appropriate to have a cape. Or if you're bet I think

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:00):
A lot of people. Okay, I was gonna say, I think a lot of people get along without one. Just fine. <Laugh>. And then my mom made my child a cape.

Leo Laporte (02:43:07):
I will wear, I can also wear, I will do a fashion show next week. I will either wear, I'll wear, I'll bring both capes and you can decide what you like better. One is quite expensive and has frogs. You know those, you know what they are? Oh yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:19):
Oh yeah. I have them on. Oh, it's not on this. I actually did, you know. Okay. No one will care about this actually. Nevermind.

Leo Laporte (02:43:27):
I will. Because mendo cardigans. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:30):
So like, all my cardigans don't have button

Leo Laporte (02:43:33):
Buttons. Button. You're the buttons. Buttons. How do you, how do you Or,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:35):
Or I know. Like, what that heck,

Leo Laporte (02:43:37):
How do you join them together?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:38):
You cold. You need to, you need to close your

Leo Laporte (02:43:40):
Cardigans. It's not a cardigan without

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:41):
A button. No.

Leo Laporte (02:43:43):
Do you have a belt? I,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:46):
Okay. I got frogs I bought on Etsy. Like they clip onto your cloak and you just, it's a frog closure. And you just close it over and then, then suddenly

Leo Laporte (02:43:55):
Perfect. That's what you need.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:43:56):
It's like a button. Yeah. It's perfect. It was only 16 bucks. I love Etsy.

Leo Laporte (02:44:00):
John says, from now, and we're gonna call you Stacey. Two capes. Higginbotham. <laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:44:05):
That's fair.

Leo Laporte (02:44:06):
<Laugh>. All right. I want to take a little tiny teamy time, wide time out. And then the picks of the weekend, we'll run this thing in home because it is into the ground. That's where we're gonna run. You've already run the ground. We'll get it home. Yeah. In just a moment.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:44:20):
But just hungry.

Leo Laporte (02:44:22):
I want to tell you how important it is. You join Club Twit. I mean, I, the Go Glasses don't come cheap, my friends. If <laugh>, whoa. Club Twit. What, where did that come? Without Moral panic, there would be no Club. Twit. <laugh> Glove Twit is seven bucks a month. That's all we are now. 7,000 is your safe space from Moral Power. It is a safe space for everyone who listens to our shows. Seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of everything we do. You even get shows on the Twi plus feed that we don't put out in public. Like HandsOn Windows with Paul Throt, hands on Macintosh with Micah sart, the Untitled Lennox Show with Jonathan Bennett, the GIZ fizz with Dick d Bartolo, Stacey's book Club, a bunch of other great stuff. You get Adri versions of all of the shows. You get access to the Fun Discord. And I tell you, the Discord is awesome. There's Stacey in her cape, by the way. That's a, that's, that's great. I like it that you put the furniture outside. I think that's that's

Stacey Higginbotham (02:45:25):
Close. Yeah. I like that.

Leo Laporte (02:45:26):
That's, that's where furniture begins and belongs. If you are in the club, <laugh>, this Anthony made this with help from stable Diffusion, a Club Twit sticker, which only you can have. I want you for Club Twit with me as Uncle Sam. Please join us. Come in Duck Club. All you have to do is go to twit tv slash club twit. We are now 7,000 strong. We, if I, I think if we got to 10,000 people, I would do a jig on this table. I would do something. What should we Okay, folks. That's that. We should think of something. You're gonna see that jig. Yep. We should think of something, because I would definitely celebrate. You're gonna shave your hair. We're close wearing a cape. Do the jig wearing a No. Last time I danced on the table, it broke it.

(02:46:13):
John says, I was gonna say, how sturdy is this table? <Laugh>. I did the Harlem. Remember the Harlem Shake? Where everybody Oh. Yeah. Remember that? We did a Harlem Shake in the old studio, and I got up on the table in my horse mask and broke it. I think we have video, to be honest with you. I think we've seen the video before. Is this it? Oh, wow. I immediately, it got into the that's pretty, that's quick. The club members. Did you see? Have you seen that really stupid meme? What is it? The Harlem Shake. Would somebody explain that to me?

Speaker 10 (02:46:44):
Explain it to us. What you talking about this

Leo Laporte (02:46:46):
Week on

Speaker 11 (02:46:47):
Twit old men? Discuss

Leo Laporte (02:46:48):
Old toorak

Speaker 10 (02:46:52):
Know anything.

Leo Laporte (02:46:53):
Oh, this hurts my hearts. That's Raman Ra Needleman. Yep. And SBO is a floating head based on what? This is a song by a it's a dance that came. Oh, why am I getting an ad for Smoosh? What is this?

Speaker 10 (02:47:08):
No, no, no. But now try it

Leo Laporte (02:47:09):
Out. You don't want it. How do I close it? It's a takeover

Speaker 10 (02:47:13):
Ad. I mean, the latest thing is you got that

Leo Laporte (02:47:15):
Little box I want. Exit

Speaker 10 (02:47:16):
The

Leo Laporte (02:47:16):
Bottom of the box. I'm gonna use New Smosh and you're gone. <Laugh>. Now I don't sucker. Why did I do that? Okay, now I'm gone. I'm gone. What happened to your thing? Chad's a young person. <Laugh> shut.

Speaker 10 (02:47:28):
Chad, can you help us out with this

Leo Laporte (02:47:30):
Thing? Chad Johnson. I seek to work producer, red haired, wonderful red haired jet on the internet. This is from 2013

Speaker 11 (02:47:36):
Shake and then on the internet. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:47:39):
Used big Watch that.

Speaker 11 (02:47:40):
Yeah. It's pretty crazy. So, Harlem Shake is this? It's, it's literally eight days old. The first Harlem

Leo Laporte (02:47:47):
Shake. See, that's how on top of it, we were this

Speaker 11 (02:47:48):
Weird one right here. Okay. Was up.

Leo Laporte (02:47:51):
So it's this song. You have to be in a

Speaker 11 (02:47:54):
Yeah. It was uploaded on fire.

Leo Laporte (02:47:56):
February,

Speaker 11 (02:47:57):
February 2nd. There.

Leo Laporte (02:47:59):
Yeah. They're Power Rangers. This is when we had young people in the studio who explain stuff. Harlem Shake. Yeah. To

Speaker 10 (02:48:06):
A We know that for a fact.

Leo Laporte (02:48:08):
To a song that was created by what this guy named Baer.

Speaker 10 (02:48:12):
It looks rather suggestive.

Leo Laporte (02:48:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:48:15):
There's always an edge of

Speaker 10 (02:48:16):
These guys have got issues.

Speaker 11 (02:48:19):
So that was the first one. Yeah. And then,

Leo Laporte (02:48:21):
So it always starts out in a normal environment, there's like an office one right at the Makerspace where it's a normal environment, but there's one guy doing this stupid dance <laugh>. And then for some reason though, it's completely unknown. Everybody's dancing and then it's over. So you, you dress so much better nowadays. I do. Feels like a lumber Jack swa. What am I salute you? What am I doing there? Your makeup's heavier too. Yeah. Your contour is crazy. Yeah. Excellent contour. So this is, I think I owe it to you. Mike Elgan, you kind of raised the tone. So here, here's another you should watch cuz it's, I think eventually we're gonna do it here. This is another one. One guy's dancing dangerous, and then everybody starts dancing and then the drop happens in the song. Right?

Speaker 11 (02:49:08):
And then they're all dancing and faffing stuff. Direct about this at all. Seizure with an iPad. Yeah. And see,

Leo Laporte (02:49:17):
I saw the guy get up on the chair there.

Speaker 11 (02:49:19):
Nerds. That's pretty bad. Nerds. Come on. We yaw nerds. We got somebody behind us here doing the same thing. Hoping to get attention. That's, I think he's, it is. That's

Leo Laporte (02:49:28):
Our intern

Speaker 11 (02:49:30):
<Laugh>. That's Eli. He's at Eli. Oh. Doesn't know any better. He's a high school student. He thinks it's a cool idea. Yeah, he does. And this is when we lost it.

Leo Laporte (02:49:47):
And then watch it. Cuz I'm gonna get up on the table.

Speaker 11 (02:49:51):
Oh no. And it's got a single base. It's a little, yeah, I don't wanna see this. It's a disaster. So <laugh> get very far. Oh, genius. Don't do

Leo Laporte (02:50:05):
The Harlem Shake. That's what I'm saying. Just don't do it. <Laugh>.

(02:50:09):
I am better dressed these days, but, and I also so much, I'm better mannered. I don't get up on the table. Hey everybody, it's Leo LaPorte, the founder and host of many of the TWIT podcasts. I don't normally talk to you about advertising, but I want to take a moment to do that right now. Our mission statement at twit, we're dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. That's our audience. And you, I guess, since you're listening, by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. To do that, we also create partnerships with trusted brands and make important introductions between them and our audience. It's how we finance our podcasts, but it's also, and our audience tells us this all the time. A part of the service we offer, it's a valued bit of information for our audience members.

(02:51:02):
They wanna know about great brands like yours. So can we help you by introducing you to our highly qualified audience? And by you get a lot with advertising on the TWIT podcasts. Partnering with means, you're gonna get, if I may say so humbly the gold standard in podcast advertising. And we throw in a lot of valuable services. You get a full service continuity team supporting everything from copywriting to graphic design. I don't think anybody else does this or does this as well as we do. You get ads that are embedded in our content that are unique every time I read them. Our hosts read them. We always over-deliver on impressions. And frankly, we are here to talk about your product. So we really give our listeners a great introduction to what you offer. We've got onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients.

(02:51:57):
We give you a lot of reporting so you know who saw your advertisement. You'll even know how many responded by going to your website. We'll also give you courtesy commercials that you can share across social media and landing pages. We think these are really valuable people like me and our other hosts talking about your product sincerely and informationally. Those are incredibly valuable. You also get other free goodies mentions in our weekly newsletter that's sent out to thousands of fans. We give bonus ads to people who buy a significant amount of advertising. You'll get social media promotion too. But let me tell you, we are looking for an advertising partner that's gonna be with us long term. Visit TWI tv slash advertis, check out our partner testimonials. Tim Broom, founder of it Pro tv. They started it pro TV in 2013, immediately started advertising with us and grew that company to a, a really amazing success.

(02:52:54):
Hundreds of thousands of ongoing customers. They've been on our network for more than 10 years. And they say, and I'll quote Tim, we would not be where we are today without the twit network. That's just one example. Mark McCrery, who's the CEO of Authentic he was actually one of the first people to buy ads on our network. He's been with us for 16 years. He said, and I'm quoting, the feedback from many advertisers over those 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm proud to say that the ads we do overdeliver, they work really well because their honest, they have integrity. Our audience trusts us and we say this is a great product. They believe it, they listen. Our listeners are highly intelligent. They're heavily engaged, they're tech savvy.

(02:53:46):
They're dedicated to our network. And that's partly because we only work with high integrity partners that we have thoroughly and personally vetted. I approve every single advertiser on the network. If you're ready to elevate your brand and you've got a great product, I want you to reach out to us, advertise@twit.tv. So I want you to break out of the advertising norm, grow your brand with host Red authentic Ads on tv. Visit TWI tv slash advertise for more details, or email us advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now. Stacey, would you like to? That was my thing of the week. What do you got Stacey <laugh>.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:54:30):
Oh, minus the opposite of this. Okay. I don't know if y'all ever last. Y'all, y'all made me feel bad for non Oh, reading any non-fiction

Leo Laporte (02:54:38):
Books? No. No, not really. No. No, never. No, no.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:54:40):
I was like, I do read nonfiction. So I picked up one that I really wanted to read and it is called Oh, where to Go? Okay. Sorry. It's Saving Time. Discovering A Life Beyond The Clock by Jenny Odell. She is from the Bay Area, I believe as a writer. And she had written about the Art of Doing Nothing was her prior book. This is kind of dense, but the idea is it's a book about how we have just become short termist and Oh, so true. We have all these problem. Yeah. So, yeah. And I had, I, I don't know if y'all ever read The Clock of the Long Now.

Leo Laporte (02:55:15):
Yes. Did y'all ever Oh, we interviewed. Okay, so this, we interviewed Stuart Brand who created it. Yeah, of course.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:55:21):
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, just cuz that's kind of a, this is an up, it's not an update on that, but it's, again, it's all about long-term thinking and it kind of makes you feel like it tries to put some of the problems we have like climate change in just the stress we feel from living, again, Stacey's in her anti-capitalist phase in a highly

Stacey Higginbotham (02:55:42):
Communist,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:55:43):
Late stage capitalistic society where time is money and money is time and money is your worth. And so it's a really nice book and it has a lot of good examples of wisdom of other civilizations, of other creatures and really kind of relaxed me and made me feel a little bit more optimistic. It is kind of dense. It's not like an academic tone, but it is not like a you'll wanna, like I found myself going back and re referencing things

Leo Laporte (02:56:11):
And kind of reading it so it's not notes, a self-help book. It looks like a self-help book, but it's really a philosophical

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:15):
No, no, no, no,

Leo Laporte (02:56:15):
No. It's philosophy.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:16):
It's a philosophy book. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:56:18):
Yeah, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:19):
I don't read self-help. No, I'm perfect. Just the way I

Leo Laporte (02:56:21):
Am. Exactly. <laugh> Saving Time, discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:26):
Never changed. Stacey

Leo Laporte (02:56:27):
By Jenny never changed. Odel. O D E L L, penguin Random House. So you like it? I should read this. This sounds good. I do.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:34):
I like, I I'm only about, I'm about halfway through. See that? It's dense, but I like it

Leo Laporte (02:56:39):
Because who has the time, right? Yeah. <laugh>. Right, exactly. Saving time. Don't read this book would be one way. Okay. Thank you <laugh>. Mike Elgan. So

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:47):
Yeah. I like it. And there, there you go. Instead of telling you about a new connected coffee maker, which you don't need it. So read this book, it's gonna make you far happier than buying a connected device.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:56:57):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:56:58):
Thank you. My God. You've just saved me. I think I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:00):
See the future of Stacey's lifestyle.

Leo Laporte (02:57:03):
Jeff. Jeff. Jeff

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:04):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:57:05):
Jeff Jarvis.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:06):
He's gonna go all get rid of all things. Well I wanna mention just a few things. Cocky is 25 one cocky.

Leo Laporte (02:57:13):
The, not the Guy. The website. Not the website. Website. Not

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:16):
Jason kki org.

Leo Laporte (02:57:17):
Jason himself. Not, not,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:19):
Not, probably twice.

Leo Laporte (02:57:20):
No.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:21):
Yes. The, the website is 25

Leo Laporte (02:57:22):
Kki.Org. Wow.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:24):
Yes. Jason. Jason's site. And then a little bit of our own history here is Junior Danii founded Life Hacker. Yep. It just got sold by Go Media, the Ziff Davis.

Leo Laporte (02:57:35):
Oh, I hope she got some money out of that.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:38):
Oh no, it was long ago. No. Gone. It was, cuz don't forget it was Gawker Media. Gawker was bankrupt. Oh, that's right. Right. Bought by one company that got by by Go. And it got by another one.

Leo Laporte (02:57:46):
Go has been slowly selling off all the Gawker pieces.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:57:51):
Pieces of it. Yep. Pieces of it. I wanna mention, cause we talked about this I think two weeks ago or last week we have now a report online about the black Twitter summit, which we, at my school. So there's

Leo Laporte (02:58:02):
Been a request that we recreated here. Would you like to?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:58:08):
I think that would be extremely difficult to do. However, I was thinking about that and I think that Meredith Clark, who's now at Northeastern, has a book coming out this year on Blackwell. Oh, we'll get 'em all. She and Andre Brock. Okay. So we get Meredith on to talk about black Twitter. They could be the

Leo Laporte (02:58:23):
Best. That would be great. That would be good. Yeah. I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:58:26):
Don't think is written by do that whole,

Leo Laporte (02:58:28):
We're we're getting all way together and stuff. We're white people.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:58:32):
So Taylor,

Leo Laporte (02:58:34):
We have some black people around somewhere. We could get them to do it if it's inappropriate for me to do it. 

Stacey Higginbotham (02:58:41):
But I they're all off Twitter now, so that's the other thing. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:58:43):
I,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:58:43):
Yeah. So Z Taylor, who's a PhD candidate at, I think U N C wrote a wonderful report on very hard to bring together. So I wanted to mention that. And then this might nerd you out. I don't know the color printer. I just came across this and it's an old book about, about the colors to put together in printing that a guy came along and recreated as I think a book, but then mainly as a posters. If you scroll down a little bit, oh, you'll start to see. This is a, so this is the actual stuff about how if you do so many parts of this color to so many parts of that color Wow. How you've got multiple colors. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:59:26):
That's cool.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:59:27):
Hmm. And in that, so then if you go back up to the top and go to the Pope by a poster, you'll see it all made as a poster. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:59:34):
Order

Stacey Higginbotham (02:59:34):
A poster.

Leo Laporte (02:59:35):
Oh, and I, I, Glen Fle IED has gotta happen.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:59:38):
He already ordered it. He already ordered it. Yep. <laugh> It was, it was right up his alley. But I think it's kind of beautiful.

Leo Laporte (02:59:45):
This is from an 1892 treatise on color printing. Wow. I didn't know they had color printing way back then.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:59:55):
Today, I believe it's today is printing Arts day across all of Germany. All the, all the printing museums and things are, and other countries as well are nice. Are honoring the art of printing. Nice. I thought I would do

Leo Laporte (03:00:12):
That for the back. It is also the odds of March. So beware. It is, do not go to the forum with your toga on or maybe wear something on your knee. No,

Stacey Higginbotham (03:00:22):
It is the IDs

Leo Laporte (03:00:22):
Of March. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. It's, I would not be joking. I would not Mr. Mike Elgan has a thing for us.

Mike Elgan (03:00:33):
Yes. So we had a long conversation about chat, G B T and its new innovations and about its dataset. And I had mentioned that the future of this kind of technology is you supply the dataset, or dataset is your company or something like that. Oh. So here's a real world product that you can use in with great with great value right now called chat pdf. So basically you plug in any PDF file into this, you, you upload it to this service, and then you just have a conversation with a PDF file. Now this is really useful because many, many PDFs are highly technical. They tend to be very long. I'll just give you one small example. I have a Sony camera Sony cameras manual comes in PDF form. It's, it's a million pages. Yes. And you could just throw that in there and just say, well, how do I, you know, you ask it in plain language, how do I do X, Y, Z?

(03:01:26):
And says, here's how you do it. And, and it also, it also kind of like documents itself says, like on page 52, it tells you how to blah, blah, blah. And this is great for contracts that you're gonna sign which I always do as a freelancer for rental agreements. So many things in life come in the form of a pdf d and if they don't, you can convert them to a PDF to drop in there and have a conversation with it. It's a, it's a way to a b it's not super sophisticated like, like G P T four, but it's, it's a very useful way to simplify complex documents and, and extract information from them very quickly.

Leo Laporte (03:02:03):
I just, in that would be nice

Stacey Higginbotham (03:02:04):
For reading laws.

Leo Laporte (03:02:06):
I, it's what I just put in the Supreme Court pleading Google versus Gonzalez. Oh. And and it, it, it read it all in. What are the main points of the respondent's argument in this case? That's interest. This would be by, for the show. This should

Stacey Higginbotham (03:02:24):
Yeah, I was about to say the other now has no job as the guy who's summarizing stories. Yeah. We'll just let this do it.

Leo Laporte (03:02:29):
I'll just read ChatGPT. So what is, is this using chat? G p t chat pdf.com. It is com.

Mike Elgan (03:02:35):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (03:02:36):
Wow.

Stacey Higginbotham (03:02:37):
I just put in an academic one for the internet book I'm working on. And it came back and it said, what are the results of the online experiment conducted by the authors? These are suggested things. Here it comes. That's, oh wow. By the way, the authors found holding limited evidence for polarization effects by content-based news recommendation systems. Well, thank God. Cause that's kinda cheating. Thank because there is an abstract I'll better

Stacey Higginbotham (03:03:03):
Question. Oh, well, yeah. That's, that's what we all read when we read those papers. <Laugh>, right? You start out early read. I go straight to the conclusion and then I Yes. I'm like, okay.

Leo Laporte (03:03:12):
Oh, somebody said I should put Steve Gibson's notes for security now in here. Wow.

Mike Elgan (03:03:18):
Yeah. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (03:03:20):
That's an, let me just try real quickly. What a, this is great. Thank you.

Stacey Higginbotham (03:03:25):
I would do that for any of Steve and Wolfram's blog post.

Mike Elgan (03:03:28):
This

Leo Laporte (03:03:28):
Could save me so much time. Let's see. Reset or close. All right. I am going to open up the P D F I mean, I guess I'll browse my computer.

Mike Elgan (03:03:42):
The, the other beauty of this, by the way, is I can't think of any way to abuse this for nefarious purposes.

Leo Laporte (03:03:50):
You know,

Mike Elgan (03:03:51):
Right. Unlike chat pt. Well

Stacey Higginbotham (03:03:53):
A student puts in a PDF of a book and gets a book report out of it by cheating, I wouldn't call it nefarious. I would call that clever <laugh>

Mike Elgan (03:03:59):
<Laugh>. Right. They, they deserve the a

Leo Laporte (03:04:01):
Yeah. Mashed potato in our discord. Said put in Steve Gibson's show notes. Here we go. Hello there. Welcome to Security Now in this episode, discovering various security related topics, including the constant parent. This is good here. Exa three example questions. What is the number one way bad guys penetrate networks, and how has it changed <laugh> in the past year through Phish attacks, however, it's changed in the past years, attackers are now using more sophisticated and targeted spearfishing attacks. Why did Sony bring lawsuit against the innocent nonprofit? Do-Gooder Quad Nine, which we probably should have made a story, but if you wanna know more, listen to Steve's security now from yesterday. Quad nine, which is a DNS provider, is sued by a record company successfully, I might add in Germany, because the Sony couldn't get ahold of the Infringer. And so they went after the d n s provider, one of many Quad Nine, which is a very, it's a non-profit DNS provider. And, and they won. The DNS provider has to block quad nine, maintains that Sony's request essentially a master of content censorship and risks cracking the foundations of a free and open internet in Europe, and potentially worldwide. This is good. I finally understand security now.

Mike Elgan (03:05:21):
<Laugh>. Thank you, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (03:05:23):
Thank you, Mike. And it's free chat. P D f.com. Dot

Stacey Higginbotham (03:05:29):
Com.

Leo Laporte (03:05:30):
Wow. That is really cool. We're gonna see this is, you know, yesterday and the day before. I was preparing for our show today, going through stories, and I just stopped you prepare. Oh God. I spent all week looking for, you can tell. I

Stacey Higginbotham (03:05:45):
Know, I know. I do too.

Leo Laporte (03:05:46):
Stories and you do too. You usually find more than me because I'm selective. Anyway, that's another story. <Laugh> for another day. But I am looking for what we're gonna talk about today. And there were, I gave, I threw up my hands. I said I can't, we'll just, we'll wing it on, on AI because it's an, it's just, there's so much, it's too

Stacey Higginbotham (03:06:04):
Big a tub. That's why you need a show about that.

Leo Laporte (03:06:07):
Just that. I think this is the show about that. I don't know if I want to dedicate a whole that's show to it. That's cool. But we certainly will talk about it here. That's cool. And on TWI and on other shows as, as needed. I mean, we certainly talked about it on Windows Weekly today, so Mike, it's so great to see you folks. Where are you going next? Gastro nomad.net?

Mike Elgan (03:06:26):
Yeah, we are going to central America in I think next week. And gonna have a great time there. And then we're going to the day, we're coming back here for half a day and then going to Wow. Oaxaca. Wow. We're we're going to. Yeah. And so we had

Leo Laporte (03:06:44):
So much fun in Oaxaca with Mike and Amira, and that's where we met our Facebook friend and a, a bunch of other wonderful, fascinating smart people and saw so much and ate so much and drank so much mezcal. It was really a blast. Yes. I highly recommend it.

Mike Elgan (03:07:01):
Yeah. So if, if anyone wants to join us for any of these things most of this year's are, are sold out, but we have the the Venice Prosecco experience in the fall. The first one's sold out, but the second one is not. Oh, nice. And we have some room in Mexico City and Oaxaca for this year. And then of course, all of them has some availability next year as well. So, Mike,

Stacey Higginbotham (03:07:21):
Can I ask you a terribly rude question?

Mike Elgan (03:07:23):
I insist

Stacey Higginbotham (03:07:24):
Just because I, you know, in trying to teach students entrepreneurial journalism and such, I, I've, I I often mention your business there mm-hmm. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Because there's o other kinds of travel things people get interested in. Just trying to get a sense is, is you also, were writing and you're doing all kinds of things as a proportion of your upkeep.

Mike Elgan (03:07:42):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (03:07:43):
How well does that do? I'm not trying to get any numbers out of you in that, but is it, is it a, is it a, is it a, is it a living? Is it a great supplement? Is it are you wealthy? And we don't, just don't know it.

Mike Elgan (03:07:56):
I'm wealthy and I don't know it <laugh> No, it's, it's no, it's, it's, it is none of the above. Essentially the way we do it in our family is that the writing part is, is 90% me and 10% my wife. And the gastro part is 90% my wife and 10% me. So it's really her business. So it is, it is kind of kind of a living. If, if, if you were to pay her by the, if you were to calculate what she makes on an hourly hour basis, it would be like a dollar an hour. Cuz she just spends all of her waking hours exploring, doing all this stuff. That's k kinda Is it work, is it not work? Is it, is it like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but so it's, it's hard to, it's hard to detect, but she, she, she makes a, a, a, a pretty good living. And I make, you know, a, a kind of a okay. Living and I make kind of an okay. Living, writing, and together we make a living. So it's, it's really, she she, she does okay. But it, but again, it's, it's very difficult because the she'll spend a decade learning, exploring all this stuff mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and then before we start the first experience, the expertise, we have to do 10 or 15 experiences in a place before we break even. Even it pays off on that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I think what's

Stacey Higginbotham (03:09:09):
What to me is that it's a combination of, of content and community and expertise. Yeah. but, but it doesn't come off as traditional content. Right? No, but certainly the visit is content. It's, it's you bringing all kinds of, of value and interesting stuffed people and

Mike Elgan (03:09:26):
I

Leo Laporte (03:09:26):
Think is, it's their lifestyle. It's more than a business. Yeah. It's, it's how they live. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I think great artists and great creators, there's no distinction between their lives and their, and their work.

Mike Elgan (03:09:39):
There's a Google Plus dimension to this story, which is that, which is that we were doing this kind of stuff, meeting all these amazing people, being invited, lucky enough to be invited to all these incredible foodie events and wine tastings in various parts of the world. And it was Google plus people who said, kept telling us, wow, I wish I could join you. And my wife, at some point, my wife said, wait a minute, why can't they join us? What if we did, like, what if we took the things that we might do in, in a three month period and do do it in one week? Oh,

Leo Laporte (03:10:08):
It is like that, by the way. It is. Yeah, it is. Go, go, go all day.

Mike Elgan (03:10:13):
And so that's the idea of fun. And, and again, it just does not feel, as you can imagine, it does not feel like work. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (03:10:20):
You're having, you're having a great Amir's having a great time. A time. Yeah. So really it's li it's how they live and they, and they're able to be, make a living on how they live, which is great. All Stacey, do you need to get outta here? Or what's going on? I was

Mike Elgan (03:10:33):
Like, I have four minutes. I'm sorry. I

Leo Laporte (03:10:35):
Stacey on iott com. I didn't tell, I didn't this before at Gigas. Stacey, get outta here. Stacey on i.com. Subscribe to her newsletter. Listen to the podcast with Kevin Tofl. She'll be back next week. Thank you. Thank you. And next week I

Mike Elgan (03:10:47):
Wanna hear about the bird, but go. Okay. Yes. Bye

Leo Laporte (03:10:50):
Bye. And I wanna thank you, Mike, because you are very generous. Have taken my son Salt Hank under your wing. He's going down to Oaxaca next month. Yeah. Which is

Mike Elgan (03:11:02):
Amazing. We are so excited about this.

Leo Laporte (03:11:04):
I am thrilled. He's gonna make a whole chapter of his cookbook is gonna be about Oaxaca.

Mike Elgan (03:11:09):
I I think that when, when he's really experienced Oaxaca, it's gonna be more than one chapter.

Leo Laporte (03:11:15):
Yeah. I would be surprised. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (03:11:16):
But it's, it's, it's, we're really excited about it and we're gonna have so much fun. Unfortunately, we, he's gonna be there for a month. We're gonna be there for the first week. That's, we have to run and do another thing, but that's fine.

Leo Laporte (03:11:27):
We'll

Mike Elgan (03:11:27):
Introduce to everybody. We, we can during that week. So we're really looking forward to this.

Leo Laporte (03:11:32):
Yeah, I think that's completely fine. Because it really needs to be him on his own anyway. And you, you are introducing him to chef Alex Alejandra Ruiz, who's the greatest chef and ambassador of Oaxacan cuisine in the world. And he's gonna be, I mean, Henry's gonna, this is fantastic. He's so grateful and I am so grateful. Thank you. And in return,

Mike Elgan (03:11:54):
It's our pleasure. Let

Leo Laporte (03:11:55):
Me plug your son. Hello chatterbox.com. This is where you go. You heard Mike talking about this smart speaker that teaches AI literacy to kids.

Mike Elgan (03:12:07):
That's right. You it's a kit. You build the the smart speaker with using cardboard and, and Oh, they're

Leo Laporte (03:12:14):
Doing art now too. That's awesome.

Mike Elgan (03:12:16):
Oh, yes, absolutely. And ChatGPT is coming soon. And, and so, but kids, the important thing is that it demystifies ai. So they build the, they build the smart speaker, and then it doesn't do anything until they teach it specific skills. And it potentially, it can do more than, than, than a Amazon Echo or that Siri can do. It can turn on the light, it can do a million things, but it only does the specific individual skills that kids teach it. And they can teach it three skills. They can teach it 3000 skills. It's up to their imagination. And it uses ai, it teaches 'em computer science, content computer science knowledge STEM skills language skills, because you have to articulate mm-hmm. <Affirmative> it's a speech conversation and you design the conversation as the user. And so it's just a brilliant thing. And he's, he's putting it in a lot of schools now. It's, he's in hundreds of schools now. So it's, it's really educational revolution. We believe he believes. And I believe it too. And so, yeah, if you, if you you could also buy it as an individual, but but it might be showing up in a school near you. So,

Leo Laporte (03:13:25):
So cool. Hello chatterbox.com. Thank you, Mike. It's so great to

Mike Elgan (03:13:31):
See you. And thanks. And thank you for that. Yeah. Great to see you too.

Leo Laporte (03:13:33):
Have a wonderful time. Where, what country you're going to next? You said Central America. It's,

Mike Elgan (03:13:38):
Oh, we're, well, El Salvador's the, the next country we're going to, and we're gonna, Kevin and Nadia and Alex are going with us, and so we're all gonna go Fuck. Spend some time there. 

Leo Laporte (03:13:47):
That's where Amira was born, so it's her native life. That's right. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (03:13:51):
Yeah. She has cousins and stuff, and aunts and so on there. So it's, it's a, it's a cool place. And so we're looking forward to, that's next week.

Leo Laporte (03:13:58):
Fun. Yeah. Have a wonderful time. Thank you so much for, for being here. I really appreciate. It's always great to see you, Mike, and

Mike Elgan (03:14:04):
Thank you for having me.

Leo Laporte (03:14:05):
Appreciate Henry, I really appreciate that. It's our pleasure. Jeff Jarvis, thank you for being here. You old longest. Goodbye. Yo old coot you, Jeff is the director of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City. University of New York. Reminds me, I gotta call craig buzz machine.com. He's on Mastered on social at Jeff Jarvis. Do you spend any time posting on Twitter anymore? Or is that you split your time a little bit. He made the headlines. I just put him in both places. I have to say, I had to use Twitter to keep up on ChatGPT it really was happening mostly on Twitter. Oh, interesting. Same thing with Silicon Valley Bank, because only, only where only on Twitter was Jason Calis tweeting with his air on fire. All caps, all in caps, <laugh>.

(03:14:54):
So I've had to visit, but I I leave no trace. I, I am like a ghost. I moveo. I go in and I leave without saying hello to anybody. Thank you all for joining us. We do This Week in Google every Wednesday. I hope you'll join my mom and make it a weekly thing. <Laugh> she loves. Bye, mom. Hi mom. She loves it. Just go to if you wanna watch live, it's it's Wednesdays from about 2:00 PM Pacific 5:00 PM Eastern term about there are bouts. And now of course, because we're in summertime here in the us we have to say 2100 utc. The live stream is a live.twi.tv. There's audio and video chat with us in IRC at IRC dot twit tv in Discord. If you are a discordian a club member you can also get copies the show after the fact. Oh boy. Big news. Just breaking. Thank you. The Biden administration demands TikTok. He sold. Ha. Wow. I didn't know we had a breaking news thing. I like the Lofi. Stacey's typing, right? Yeah, you, I like the Lofi. Thank you. Is that I asked for it and we get it. Is that Anthony Nielsen? Who is it with that, is that Anthony breaking? Do that again. That was took. That was awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, this just in breaking news.

(03:16:28):
It's Stacey. That's fantastic. The Biden administration, this just came in minutes ago, demands that TikTok be sold or risk a nationwide ban. This is from N P R. It is unclear whether federal officials have giving tuta a deadline to find a buyer. Regardless. A major explan, the journal says, threatens ban if they don't sell. Wow. okay, I bet you will be talking about that. Then next week, we hope you'll stop by on demand versions of the show at twit.tv/TWiG. You can also watch us on YouTube. There's a, not only a live stream during the show, there's an after the fact YouTube version on the on the, This Week in Google Feed. There's also, of course, the best way probably on every podcast catcher, every podcast player, just search for TWiG. You should find us very quickly subscribe. You'll get it the minute it's available. Thank you everybody for being here. Have a great week. I'll see you Sunday for Ask the Tech Guys and we'll see you next week on This Week in Google. Bye-Bye.

Ant Pruitt (03:17:36):
Hey, what's going on everybody? I am Ant Pruitt and I am the host of Hands On Photography here on twit tv. I know you got yourself a fancy smartphone. You got yourself a fancy camera, but your pictures are still lacking. Can't quite figure out what the heck shutter speed means. Watch my show. I got you covered. Wanna know more about just the I I S O and exposure Triangle in general. Yeah, I got you covered. Or if you got all of that down, you want to get into lighting, you know, making things look better by changing the lights around you. I got you covered on that too. So check us out each and every Thursday here on the network. Go to twit.tv/hop and subscribe today

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