This Week in Google 751 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, we've got, of course, Paris Martino. Jeff Jarvis is back from his testimony in front of Congress, and Glenn Fleischman joins us in studio. Great to have Glenn here. We'll talk about all kinds of things. Some stuff Google's getting rid of, including my theory that Google's about to get rid of the pixel phone. Google's endorsing the right to repair what and big layoffs inside Google. And now Google Maps supports, tunnels, all that and a whole lot more. Coming up next on Twig, the show is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. Without a cloud managed network, businesses inevitably fall behind. Experience, the ease and efficiency of Meraki's single platform to elevate the place where your employees and customers come together. Cisco Meraki maximizes uptime and minimizes loss to digitally transform your organization, Meraki's intuitive interface, increased connectivity and multi-site management. Keep your organization operating seamlessly and securely wherever your team is. Let's Cisco Meraki's 24 7. Available support. Help your organizations remote, onsite, and hybrid teams always do their best work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is T twit.

(00:01:31):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 751 recorded Wednesday, January 17th, 2024. The num tot with a top knot this weekend. Google is brought to you by Miro. Miro is one incredible visual place that brings all of your innovative work together no matter where you're located. In fact, Miro is great for teams distributed all over the world in all different time zones. And man Miro can work with all kinds of assignments. We're talking six whole capabilities, bundles from product development workflows to content visualization and more. It's powered by Miro ai, which means you're instantly generating new ideas or summarizing complex information. And Miro connects seamlessly the platforms you're already using like Jira and Confluence and Google or Asana. We use it with Zapier. You can centralize your work in a way that makes sense for your team. And here's the beauty part. They don't have to leave Miro to update projects or statuses using any of these tools.

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You could do it all in Miro. Miro users. It's so efficient. Miro users report saving up to 80 hours a year by streamlining conversations, cutting down on meetings, and seeing all the most up-to-date information in one place. It's a perfect kind of reference for anything you're working on, so everybody's on the same page. Literally, Miro has a board video recording feature now called Talk Track. This is a great way to, without having another meeting, give your feedback. You can record a video, leave it right on the board, right where it matters, and you don't have to schedule another meeting that is a big time saver all by itself. Look, you got to try it for yourself. Your first three boards are free. Start working better. miro.com/podcast. That's MIR o.com/podcast. It's time for Twig. This week in Google the show, we cover the latest news from the Google verse and the AI verse. And this is in reverse verse because I'm in Rhode Island visiting my mom, but lo and behold, look who's in the studio sitting in my chair. Glenn Fleischman. Hello, Glen. Hello. I've

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:46):
Staged the takeover.

Leo Laporte (00:03:49):
You need that Snoopy in your lap and you could be Ernst Blofeld, Dr. E. So Glenn, you came out to see the Snoopy Museum, the Charles Schultz

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:00):
Museum. Yeah, doing some research and got to get the nickel tour and look at old comics Somehow part of my living is looking at old comics, which is, I dunno how I did it, but I'm going with it.

Leo Laporte (00:04:11):
It's a good thing. And it's of your book mainly,

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:17):
Or? Yeah. I've got a book that I hope is going to go to Kickstarter next month called How Comics Were Made, how Comics Were Made, inc, INK, and it's about the history of newspaper, comics, production and reproduction. So I was looking at the Schultz Museum has all the archives of everything created by Charles Schultz during his lifetime. And so I was looking at old strips and color guides where they mark things up for Sunday pages and printed versions of the strips and plates and my favorite flungs. There's a F flung on the screen at the moment, printing plates, and it's just talking generally with the folks there about just the practicalities because they're a giant licensing organization and they're very well disposed to my project. They've been very, very nice about it.

Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
Oh good. I'm glad to hear it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:02):
Put a lot of peanut stuff in there along with dunes berry and yellow kid and all kinds of stuff across comics. History.

Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
Yellow kid was, did do geeky

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:11):
Things about how they did it. Yeah. Which parts of the geeky? Well, they actually don't know many of the geeky things because printing is kind of not part of cartooning. It's this weird kind of art where you're like, well, I drew a thing and then I'm totally disconnected from the rest of the process. And

Leo Laporte (00:05:25):
How would they get it to the printer? Would they mail it?

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:29):
Yeah, they would send artists would, if they were near New York, they'd courier it in and if they were further away, they'd just bundle it up and put it in express post and hope it wasn't destroyed by the mail. There were actually some comics on a plane that was hijacked and blown up and oh my God, there, there's a story about that from I think the Lockerby one where the original cartoon. Oh yeah, that's the least worry of what was lost. Of course not. Yeah, of course. Still they're a piece until scanning became a thing. Some artists actually faxed their cartoons at whopping 197 DPI. They'd make them oversize and scan them, and those ran in newspapers also somehow.

Leo Laporte (00:06:09):
Wow. What a story Also with us, of course, Paris Marano from beautiful downtown New York, which for the first time in two years has had snowfall

Paris Martineau (00:06:20):
By Paris. Yeah, I was going to say I'm living the dream. But it sounds like Glenn is living the dream.

Leo Laporte (00:06:24):
Yeah, he's living the dream. It's snow free Dream. Yeah. Paris reports for the information and is they do an expert on sneaky, the sneaky ways of Silicon Valley.

Paris Martineau (00:06:38):
Yes, sir.

Leo Laporte (00:06:39):
We have a superstar amongst us now. You saw him last week testifying for the United States Senate, the subcommittee

Paris Martineau (00:06:47):
You to beg him to come back to our little show.

Leo Laporte (00:06:49):
I'm actually,

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:50):
I'm actually unhappy because you didn't play any of my testimony. You got bored quickly by Blumenthal. I listened to the whole show.

Leo Laporte (00:06:57):
Oh no, we played your opening statement.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:00):
You did?

Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:01):
I didn't hear it on the

Paris Martineau (00:07:02):
Podcast. Oh, maybe that was before the show then.

Leo Laporte (00:07:05):
Was that not? Because

Paris Martineau (00:07:05):
We definitely listened to about 10 minutes. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:07:07):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:07):
Thank you very much. Five. Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):
Well, that was an oversight on my part. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:12):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:07:12):
It was. I apologize.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:14):
I put on a tie

Leo Laporte (00:07:14):
Because it was quite eloquent. I thought we had, you looked great. I thought we had it in the show. I really did. I apologize. That was just oversight on my part. Kathy

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:25):
Was nice enough to note that my main statement, which made me happy, but then I would listen to the whole show thinking, no, they're going to play me.

Leo Laporte (00:07:32):
They didn't play me. Oh, I'm so sorry.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:33):
I'm so sad. Shoot, I missed you guys last week.

Leo Laporte (00:07:37):
Well, you did a great job and you represented us all very well and we did put a link in there for people so they could see it.

Paris Martineau (00:07:47):
Gosh, whoever was watching before the show watched us watch almost, I believe. I think your entire statement and then comment on it beforehand, but I guess we forgot to put that in the actual podcast. That's unbelievable. This is what happens when you leave us, Jeff. Everything

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:01):
I know goes

Paris Martineau (00:08:02):
Haywire.

Leo Laporte (00:08:02):
I know. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:04):
It's actually some scary stuff that came out of it because they want to screw up fair use and make everything that AI uses licensed and paid for, and that messes

Leo Laporte (00:08:15):
Up the world. Well, I think Alice was on the show last week and she really talked about the right to read and how she was great doing this is Well, yeah, you heard the show. It was really is going to cause major problems for the First Amendment among other things. Yeah, and I'm more and more inclined to just say, just let AI eat whatever it wants and we'll deal with the consequences later.

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:37):
It was actually, you guys discussed this too. It was interesting, the separation between training and output. And Roger Lynch, who's the CEO of Cutting Nest kept on saying, training, training not, but he put 'em together and he said, whichever any use you should license

Leo Laporte (00:08:52):
And pay.

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:53):
That's which is ridiculous because it's a transformative use, it's fair use. Blackburn went after me saying, you want to expand fair use. Said, well, I want an expansive use of fair use. Yes. And then at the end, you don't

Leo Laporte (00:09:04):
Have to expand fair use. It

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:06):
Protects it. I want to protect it. Yeah. And then Blumenthal said, well, if fair use takes over everything, then copyright's dead. Whether they're doing the actual opposite, they're going to shrink fair use to the point that copyrights did.

Leo Laporte (00:09:18):
Well, that brings us to the article in the New Yorker this week, which I thought was quite interesting and provocative. I don't know if you guys had a chance to read it yet.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:28):
I've used up my monthly articles.

Leo Laporte (00:09:31):
I know. I'm always nervous about putting, anyway. Is AI the death of ip? Louis Menand is writing. Oh, yeah. Now I haven't run out. I pay for the New Yorker, but for some reason I can never log in on the website, so I have to use it on the phone, which is no good. Anyway, I think an interesting piece in which he argues that generative ai, basically people are going to be attempting to, in effect, extend copyright even farther than it deserves to be already. It's overextended. I think he believes, and I think that's correct, and that this fight against AI is just really, and I think Corey Tro has sent this as well, copyright these days isn't about protecting an author. It's not protecting you Paris or protecting Jeff or you Glenn. It's really about the big companies who own the rights. Sony that bought the entire rights to Bruce Springsteen's catalog. It's to protect them. It's to protect their rent seeking, which

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:41):
Was the case at the very beginning of copyright,

Leo Laporte (00:10:43):
Except it was a much shorter, shorter term in the very beginning, in

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:47):
1710 in statute of end, it was not creators, it was booksellers and publishers who demanded copyright to try to control and create a tradable asset. But interestingly, the New York Times set of their suit against OpenAI, we've always been protected by copyright. No, they were not protected until 1909. It was intended only to protect in the US books and maps and charts did not include magazines, did not include newspapers. And even when it started

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:12):
Didn't include film, didn't include moving images or pictures. Right? No,

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:17):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:11:17):
Well, and that's a good example, and that's one of the things that Manan says in his piece is that there's always radio attempted to protect. Let's see, let me see if I can find the paragraph in here. But that's exactly what happens. Photography was seen as an assault on copyright, and then radio was seen as an assault on copyright, and then video is seen on assault. So every time a new technology comes along, there is this kind of adjustment. My

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:47):
Question though is, and I love fair use, my book, my book on comics is heavily leaning on the vagaries of copyright loss that things are in the public domain on fair use and so forth. I love it. I love it. And I also love when my work is protected in specific ways for me to have limited exploitation rights of it. But my question is how do you ingest it legally? I know that Google Books set some precedent for scanning materials. You don't have the rights to.

Leo Laporte (00:12:14):
Yeah, they won that case,

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:15):
By the way. So what is the legality? How do you get the entire New York Times corpus if it proves through courts or laws to be legal, to ingest that as part of your AI corpus? I mean, it's being distributed. The corpus is being distributed in a way that I don't think that those, what L five sets, I can't remember the name of it. The giant learning sets. There's material in the learning sets that should be considered a copyright violation because of how they're disseminated, even if it's legal to ingest it. So I think there's some fine points there that have not actually been dealt with about you can transform work, but you have to acquire the work. You have to rip every DVD and then how do you distribute that If it's for your own purposes? There's one set of rules per Google Books, but if you're distributing it in learning sets, then it's a whole in a way that maybe even can't be reconstructed. But that's in a way that's extracted it from the original media. I think there's a big issue there.

Leo Laporte (00:13:06):
You're

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:06):
Right, Glenn, and I think Books three, no one can argue was acquired properly, but Common Crawl crawls the open web. Though as I mentioned in my testimony, New York Times is demanding their stuff be taken down. And I talked today to a guy named Will Slaughter, who's brilliant. He wrote the book, who Owns the News? It's a really good exploration of copyright. He's in Paris. And he said that he thinks that the Google Books settlement in the end creates a model here where you can ingest things, but then you can limit the output of it. You can use it, you can learn from it. You can create a corpus that you can deal with. But then when it comes to delivering it to someone, if you don't have the rights to do so, then you can't come up with, then there's a deal that gets made. Either somebody pays or you're prohibited from doing it or whatever. But if you look at how Google Books operates, you get a little sample, you can't print it out. You can't download A PDF if it's not in. Oh, but same with the Haie Trust, which I use all the time. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:14:11):
It's a great, so the Manan piece is really kind of a quasi review of a new book called, who Owns this sentence, A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexander Montague. And really the point is the rights to, he says, I'm reading from the article to a vast amount of created material. Movies, music books, art games, computer software, scholarly articles, just about any cultural product people will pay to consumer increasingly owned by a small number of large corporations. And because of these extensions that the US Congress has put through, they're not going to expire for probably until we're gone, for instance. I mean, most of us will be long gone because it's now, what is it, life plus 95 or Life plus 75. If it's a corporation, it's longer. Since 1978, it's 70 years from the death of the Creator. But for corporate authors, which is companies that pay employees to make stuff, it's 95 years from the date of publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever is shorter.

Glenn Fleishman (00:15:25):
Well, there's actually a work by not to get too far afield by John Adams, that is still under copyright because it was unpublished until a point in, I want to say the fifties or seventies. And because of the laws that time, because it was unpublished when it was published, that's when the copyright started on it. So it's going to be under copyright. I think it's like 2050 will be the last thing from the founding fathers that goes into the public domain. That seems a little ridiculous, possibly. Well, we've considered the owner of that at this point. Well, there are estates, and that's the thing is there's the whole Orphan Works thing. And in this case, there is a chain of ownership of John Adams' estates and his literary work. And so there are actually people considered to be owners of John Adams words. And so even though all the rest of his copyright expired long ago, there's still folks who are the authorized representatives.

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
And this is what I harped on last week, so I don't want to reiterate it. And the reason that patents and copyrights and trademarks all exist is because to balance the right of the creator of the property holder with the rights of society as a whole. And the whole premise initially was, well, you give the creator some time to recoup, to make some money on the creation, but sooner than later, I think it was originally 17 years or something, the public domain gets it so that we can all create on it. And Manan especially points out music. He says there's a lot of copying in music. That's how music works. Popular music styles are defined by the chords they use, and there are a limited number of them. And so there've been some really ridiculous cases. Ed Sheeran most recently won his case by winning over the jury by he was being sued for copying a Marvin gay song last spring. During the trial, he got on the witness stand and played his guitar and demonstrated to the jury that the four chord progression in his song was common in pop music. That there are all these other songs that uses for chord progression. You can't steal it from Marvin Gaye because it's part of pop music now. He won. But there've been a lot of cases like George Harrison's lawsuit that George Harrison lost. It cost George Harrison a lot of money because the Chiffons suit, he had to pay $587,000 to them for my sweet Lord.

(00:17:58):
So this is the question, and I think that this really applies to ai. Don't we have a societal interest in letting AI learn, as Sam Altman pointed out in the lawsuit against the New York Times, if you say Open AI can only learn from non copyright materials, you're not going to get a very good AI out of it. Well, there's

Glenn Fleishman (00:18:26):
An issue about, it's the commercial exploitation though. If you look at the fair use test is if AI can be created that, I mean, I'm not saying this is, well,

Leo Laporte (00:18:34):
There's four tests, tests. One is transformative, right? So you can say it's transformative. You don't have to pass all four.

Glenn Fleishman (00:18:43):
No, absolutely. It can be transformative. It can be minimis or have no effect on commercial exploitation of the work. It can be for largely educational or critical purposes. So all that's true. But I guess I don't have an answer for this, but my question is, and I think some of the authors involved in one of the lawsuits say, if I punch in like Michael Chabon and I say, write this Michael Shaban novel, and it produces an exact copy that doesn't seem,

Leo Laporte (00:19:08):
But it doesn't

Glenn Fleishman (00:19:08):
Transformative well, right, but you can get right. I mean it doesn't, but would it be the

Leo Laporte (00:19:12):
New York Times had to really jump through hoops to get in their lawsuit against OpenAI to get it, to quote the New York Times. They actually asked it to quote the New York Times. In effect, they gave it the first seven paragraphs of the article and said, now what would you say?

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:27):
What words are left in your entire corpus that are going to be associated with these next?

Leo Laporte (00:19:33):
Yeah, it was ridiculous. It's a ridiculous case. Manan points out in his article that we just don't know how juries and judges are going to rule on this. I think a lot of people think, as Kathy Ellis did last week, that they should rule in favor of societal expectations instead of favor of creators. But boy creators are up in arms over this. Sarah Silverman's case was dismissed mostly

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:01):
Most of it, right?

Leo Laporte (00:20:02):
Yeah. Grisham and Jody pco are still out there, still suing.

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:07):
Well, Paris is our resident, a high-end creator here who says, yeah, hold on guys. What do you think this week Paris about?

Paris Martineau (00:20:15):
I mean, I still think that, I'm not sure that we have a societal right to make better informed ai, especially in what we're talking about our increasingly commercial models. I'm not sure that some greater right out there exists for us to give copyrighted work for free to these companies. I don't disagree with your guys' points about the right to read and how that would overwhelmingly impact society in probably a net positive way, if you're right about the way AI is going. But I'm not sure that it is as cut and dry as we should just let all AI models have everything. I do also. Well, I have

Leo Laporte (00:21:06):
An extreme point of view on that. I mean, I really do. I

Paris Martineau (00:21:08):
Mean it's because you took that walk with Sam Mosman Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:21:10):
Of the Walk and

Paris Martineau (00:21:11):
Jason Kaki, and you've been radicalized

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:13):
Ever since he got hypnotized. I

Paris Martineau (00:21:14):
Do. I was curious though, Jeff, could you walk us a bit through what your experience was like in Congress testifying? How did you get invited to do this? What was it like kind of behind the scenes being there, and

Leo Laporte (00:21:30):
Did Marsha Blackburn take you out to dinner?

Paris Martineau (00:21:33):
Yeah. Was there any good gossip?

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:37):
No. So it was a staffer for Blumenthal who contacted me over nowhere who said, we need somebody to testify at this hearing about AI and journalism. I was thinking about you. Anyway, then I watched said he A CBC interview I had done about all this, but the truth is I was a beard. I was a beard for them so that they could have,

Leo Laporte (00:21:59):
I was afraid of that, frankly.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:01):
Yes. They had a hearing that was about legislators and lobbyists in a love fest over the laws that they're writing together. And so they were all going to nod at each other and it wasn't really a hearing if there wasn't somebody who said a minute

Leo Laporte (00:22:14):
Already made, that's obviously

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:17):
Right. And his only very nice young guy, his only advice was throw in some positive stuff here. So you're arguing for the use, which I did, but I knew what was going to happen. So it starts off, I get their way early. I'm waiting outside the room. We go in, it's at the table, it has the little microphone stand, and it had a timer on it. I thought it was going to time me at five minutes. I cut mine down and down and down and down to get under five minutes for sure. They didn't turn the timer on the end. There was the way there. There were only a total of six senators at various times out of the whole bunch. I dunno what it looked like on the camera.

Leo Laporte (00:22:57):
You can't tell that they're coming and going on the camera.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:59):
Exactly. Of course. So I have the news, the NMA, I guess it's whatever it's called now. It's the former magazine organization, the former newspaper magazine that merged. So they're lobbyists now, the NAB, which is lobbyists and the president of Conde Roger Lynch. And they all kind of like, oh, hi. Because they'd all read by testimony. They

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
Knew,

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:21):
Yeah, I was going to disagree. So they were cordial of course, and I was cordial back, but it was like, no, we don't agree with you about anything.

(00:23:29):
And then I knew what was going to happen. I could see it for the first minute is that it wasn't until I didn't speak until 40 minutes in. And they all give their statements, and then they ask the people they want to ask to get the answers they want to get. Right. So they ask the NMA person and Oh, yes, yes, yes. They owe us a fortune. Do they owe you a fortune? Yes. They owe us a fortune. So that's what it's, right. So then in comes and Josh Holly, who I was kind of dreading, was actually very cordial and nice. Marsha Blackburn marches in, and I put a time code to this in the rundown. She marches in. She's not been paying attention at all. She's been out. She comes in, her staff obviously gave her, that's the liberal. So she goes after me and says, well, Mr. Jarvis, professor Jarvis, do you want to expand fair use?

(00:24:23):
I said, well, I want to enforce fair use as it is. And then she said, I'm from Nashville and I have a lot of creators there, and they're really worried about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then she says, well, of course we know that media are liberal. She's looking at me. And the AI is as a liberal bias too. So does truth. So then she says, if you go to chat GPT and you ask it to write an admiring poem about Donald Trump, it will refuse. But if you go and ask it to write a poem about Joe Biden, it will. And if you go to the time code there, that is her reading this poem. Oh my God. Yeah. Here you go. Go ahead and play that. We can, okay. There doesn't sound audio. Hold on. Sorry. I should have warned you. Wow. Well, normally I could do it, but I don't have to admiring. How about Joe

Senator (00:25:19):
Biden, a poem admiring President Trump. If you turn around and next you say, I want to write a poem, ask for a poem, admiring Joe Biden. Here's what you get. And I quote, GPT, Joe Biden, leader of the land with a steady hand and heart of a man. You took the helm in trouble times with the message of unity. Your words of hope and empathy, provide comfort to the nation. And it goes on and on. And here's a screenshot that I have for the record. So my question to you would be, is this type bias acceptable in these training models, machine learning for ai?

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:18):
First it's really bad poetry. So I think maybe, perhaps President Trump is lucky not to have been so memorialized. I think that if we try to get to a point of legislating fake versus not fake, true versus false, we end up in a very dangerous territory and similarly around bias, what all of these models do is reflect the biases of society.

(00:26:43):
So I'll take you, as you say, that media are generally liberal and thus what they ingest is going to be that

Senator (00:26:49):
Way. I think it reflects the bias that is coming from what they're ingesting. My time has expired. Thank you all.

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:57):
Okay. You can thank

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
Senator. Senator I Then she leaves. Yeah, she leaves. Job done. It went

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:03):
Around.

Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
She has a point. I mean,

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:05):
Actually, so you know what? She's right. I was going to

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:07):
Say I was very confused because I found myself saying, I don't think she's, wait, what?

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:12):
I think she might, no, she's right. I tried it right afterwards and go to Chachi. PT would not do it. And for Biden, it actually gave me the poem recited at his inauguration, Paris, which

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
Is a beautiful poem. Did they stumble upon this bit of

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:25):
Information? I want to know. Oh, some staffer

Leo Laporte (00:27:27):
Or first thing they tried, are you kidding? I remember when they did this. It's the first thing they tried. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:36):
So at the end was about an hour and 45 minutes. You're

Leo Laporte (00:27:38):
Saying the chat, GPT is reflecting the bias of the content and ingests, she's saying, shouldn't there, if you're going to have a, clearly, somebody at OpenAI has put in some code that says, don't no request about poetry about Donald Trump. Please.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:59):
Right. Which the

Leo Laporte (00:28:00):
Fallacy of guard and didn't that for Joe Biden. So it's not merely the training material, it's also the people who are writing the safety rules. Exactly.

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:05):
Exactly. But also, I tried to get into this and I didn't.

Leo Laporte (00:28:10):
It's too complex for them. It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:11):
The fallacy of the guardrail. It's the idea that we can create guardrails that will stop everything that anybody bad could do, could happen. We can anticipate absolutely everything that human beings can do and believe it. When I tried at the very end of the hearing, then I'll shut up. When Blumenthal tried to say that everybody who's testified before all the series, series of hearings has agreed with one thing, which is the two 30 oh should not expand to ai. And so I said, well, I think you found your first person who disagrees. And I said, the question here about liability is not simple. Should it be at the level of the model? Then that becomes difficult because you can't anticipate everything that everyone is ever going to do with a model. Should it be the application with Microsoft leads you down a garden path to think you're going to get something You don't. Should it be at the level of the user where Michael Cohen uses it to get bad court citations? That's not clear at all. And you're talking about trying liability. You want these companies to be sued. Well, I don't know. And then the hearing was over.

Leo Laporte (00:29:16):
I have just asked chat GPT to write a poem about Donald Trump, and it didn't In towers of gold with ambitions bold a figure strides is story told in the realm of commerce and on TV's frame, he made his Mark Donald Trump. A household name

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:36):
Actually isn't that

Leo Laporte (00:29:37):
Bad. With a brand that claims like a Midas touch in real estate realms ventured much a path unique with every step he'd stamp in history's book a distinct bold stamp. So I think maybe, which

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:49):
Chachi B did you use?

Leo Laporte (00:29:50):
Chacha, BT four in political waves. He took his stand commanding attention across the land, a president, unorthodox and style, a tenure marked by turmoil and trial in debates and speeches. His voice would ring a polarizing figure in everything. It's actually pretty good Love by some criticized by more than an era that opened discussions galore. Go to

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:14):
Three five and see if it'll write one.

Leo Laporte (00:30:17):
You think it's a three five issue?

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:18):
I wonder. I was wondering that too, because four, the other thing is she was

Leo Laporte (00:30:22):
Brief, by the way, I didn't say write a admiring poem about President Trump. I just said write a poem about Donald Trump. So maybe that's also, maybe that's it. Part of it,

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:32):
It's the priming too, is that you can say things you tell Chad, DPT, assume I am a supporter of Donald Trump and now do the following and without priming it. That's part of, you can't just make, I mean you can make a series of unconnected statements to it, but there is some continuity of state and state. You can put the here's

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
From chat.

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:51):
Chat

Leo Laporte (00:30:51):
Into GPT-3 0.5, a businessman turned commander in chief, his policies caused both joy and grief. A wall was promised trade deals revised as his leadership left. I'm surprised.

Paris Martineau (00:31:03):
Okay, now add admiring to those.

Leo Laporte (00:31:05):
That's, I bet you I can't do that. I think that's really the key word there.

Paris Martineau (00:31:11):
Big tax wants us, wants to stop us from admiring Donald.

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
This is

Paris Martineau (00:31:17):
Marcia's been afraid of.

Leo Laporte (00:31:19):
I'm writing an admiring poem about President Trump. Yeah, no, I wrote

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:24):
It. I about Jeff Jarvis. That's what

Leo Laporte (00:31:25):
I want. You wrote it. Maybe they noticed the testimony and they fixed it. Who knows? I

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:30):
Bet. I bet that was what happened.

Leo Laporte (00:31:32):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:33):
So the other thing, Paris, is that you can invite people to be your fact totem behind you.

Leo Laporte (00:31:41):
Oh, really?

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:42):
Yeah. So Amy Mitchell from the CNTI, who I know in Washington, I was talking to her about the testimony. She said, do you want to go? She said, sure. And so they get a seat right behind you. So whispering in your No no,

Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
Don't say that. I would've gone as a monopoly man. I could have had a mustache.

Paris Martineau (00:31:59):
I would've also gone as a monopoly man. Next time should invite me and Leo and we'll both be

Leo Laporte (00:32:05):
Dressed as monopoly. So those people are your, well, I guess ostensibly you'd be your attorneys, but they could be whoever you want. Sitting buying. Here's

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:12):
The one last thing. So for the first time in God, probably eight years, I wore real shoes and it crippled me.

Paris Martineau (00:32:20):
That's devastating. Your suit looked so nice.

Glenn Fleishman (00:32:24):
You looked pretty spiff

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:25):
It a sport coat, but I thought I'd try to,

Leo Laporte (00:32:28):
We were very impressed. We thought it looked good. You sounded good. And it was pretty obvious that it was a foregone conclusion that it was just a theater. That's pretty much everything that in DC these days is. And so I didn't expect much, but you held it out for our side. I'm glad. Thank you.

Paris Martineau (00:32:48):
Yeah. Did Roger Lynch seem like the, give you the vibes that he was going to lay off half of pitchfork the week after and merge it into gq? That's what happened today.

Leo Laporte (00:33:02):
I'd say he could do that. He's a plain old company. CEO, all the bottom line, a businessman.

Glenn Fleishman (00:33:09):
Let me read the last verse of the ode to Jeff Jarvis, which was, so here's to the stage of the digital sphere to Jeff Jarvis, whose words inspire and enthrall in the ever-changing world we hold dear. He stands tall teaching and enlightening us all. Literally tall though. Really? Literally tall. See,

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
I am tall.

Paris Martineau (00:33:26):
Really tall. We learned. I'm tall. Jeff is six four.

Glenn Fleishman (00:33:29):
It's a mammoth.

Leo Laporte (00:33:30):
Marris. Didn't believe this. How are, how tall? Aren't you parents?

Paris Martineau (00:33:33):
I'm five nine. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
You're tall. I would've thought you'd maybe be five. You're quite or something.

Paris Martineau (00:33:39):
No. Yeah. I mean I am tall, but

Leo Laporte (00:33:42):
A giant among women. She stands tall amongst all her figure and mean an inspiration for all. Very good. Are you

Glenn Fleishman (00:33:52):
GPTI

Leo Laporte (00:33:55):
Can make dog roll as well as anybody. That's pretty good. Alright, let's take a little pause, a pause after that, that refreshes and move on to other topics you're watching this week in Google.

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Leo Laporte (00:35:08):
It's so nice, Glen to have you in studio and I want to make sure that you get a chance when you're laughing because I'm

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:16):
Not. It's the most surreal experience. It's like everybody else is here. Thank you. Everybody else. It was very welcoming, but it's like I thought well, there'll be two or three. Oh, okay. This,

Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
It's great. It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:29):
Funny,

Leo Laporte (00:35:29):
It's fun. It's, you

Paris Martineau (00:35:31):
Entered the studio and immediately everyone fled.

Ad (00:35:33):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:35:33):
Right. I feel so bad. He's coming. Go. Not there. People

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:37):
Are hopping out. Can You're here in person. Micah. I've been podcasting with Micah for several years. Oh yeah. Never met him in person. I literally forgot he was here on site because I'm so used to everyone being virtual. I'm like the real person in front of me

Leo Laporte (00:35:49):
Was Micah. Yeah, and he's tall too. He's a surprising and tall fellow. I was shocked. Well, let's see, what else could we talk about tonight? That's a lot. Go ahead, Jeff. Since I'm not in studio, I feel like this is a democracy. Well let Paris go The first. Okay. Paris,

Paris Martineau (00:36:10):
You start. I don't know. I got to find my rundown.

Leo Laporte (00:36:14):
We watch got up early today to watch the Samsung unpacked event and there was some interesting stuff there. I'll throw in while you're looking Paris, among other things. In the past, Samsung has been very loathed to say Google or Android. They actually went through several events where they announced phones running on Android, but they never mentioned the a word. This time it was all about Google and Android. Now, I was very interested in this event. There was nothing much new to say about the S 24, but they said we were going to talk a lot about AI and they did. And the S 24 is going to have a lot of AI built in. It's going to be able to synopsize meeting notes that you write. It's going to be able to, I thought one of the nicest features is translation is actually built into the phone app.

(00:37:03):
So if you have a phone call with somebody speaking another language, it will translate for you in real time, either with a transcription or an audio. I thought that was a really nice use, but I thought it was also very surprising that Hiroshi Lockheimer, who runs Android at Google was on stage and they mentioned that the AI model they were using was not Samsung's, but Google's Gemini. I was really intrigued by all this. In the past, Samsung has pushed their Microsoft relationship. Samsung works best with Windows, but we had last week the story that Samsung and Google had announced they were going to have a quick share application that would work on all Android phones. With Apple, you can tap the phones together and share content. Well, now all Android phones will work to do that using a technology that is both a combination of Google's version of it and Samsung's version of it.

(00:38:03):
So to me it was really interesting and it made me, and I'm going to throw this in and I have no evidence for this, but it made me wonder if Google reached out to them or maybe Samsung reached out to Google and there's a wrap R one. Normally their competitors, Google has the pixel phone, Samsung has its phones. I'm wondering if Google, how committed Google is to Pixel is I guess what I'm saying and whether this herald's perhaps the beginning of the end of Pixel. In fact, if you were Google, why did Google create Pixel in the first place as a tiny business for them? They probably lose money on it. Some said it was a reference platform and in the early days with Nexus it probably was, you can't really say that now. It shows off Google technologies.

Glenn Fleishman (00:38:48):
They want a phone that was like, it was an epitome of what the Google phone could be or an Android phone could be, but it isn't. And they needed that so that they could almost shame the manufacturers at one point. But that's not the market

Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
Situation. That's not the case anymore. So I'm really wondering if this is the first shoe to drop and then there'll be another one. They keep on

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:06):
Cutting back everything we've ever

Leo Laporte (00:39:08):
Done. Why is Google in the Pixel business anyway? Why did they make a phone? What do they gain by it? Super

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:17):
Fans.

Leo Laporte (00:39:18):
Yeah, I mean people love them. That's what I use. I always buy pixels, but honestly I have an S 23 and it's fair. It's just as good.

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:25):
Was there somebody at Google? I'm curious, Leo. Oh, sorry. Did somebody at Google, was there somebody leading the project that they had a, I mean that's sometimes you have these weird products like ChromeOS and there were some Chrome overlaps where it seemed to be a person

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
Saying, well, Samsung makes a Chromebook.

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:42):
I mean Hir

Leo Laporte (00:39:43):
Is the guy in charge of Android at Google and he was there. He was on stage. He was there for the event and the event was held down the road from Google in San Jose. So the whole thing, I don't know, rang alarm bells in my head and I have no other evidence that Google wants to abandon Pixel or anything. I don't really understand why they're in the business in the first place. If Samsung's making a better phone and Samsung's touting that all the AI in their new phone is Google is Gemini. I wonder. It just makes me wonder what the future holds for Pixel

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:19):
That Depresses me.

Leo Laporte (00:40:21):
Does

Paris Martineau (00:40:22):
Do you use an Android or a Pixel?

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:24):
Jeff? I live Lata, Google, Paris.

Paris Martineau (00:40:28):
I know you host this podcast.

Leo Laporte (00:40:31):
Yeah, but I think you'd be just as happy with Samsung.

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:34):
Does it have Samsung crap on it still or they use

Leo Laporte (00:40:37):
That? It does. It does. It does. Interestingly, one of the things they showed was translation in messaging, and I'm sure they were using Samsung's app, but just like Google's app, it says you're using RCS and it is prominent there. So I think maybe there's at least a Reper moment between Samsung and Google is probably

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:57):
Good.

Leo Laporte (00:40:58):
Yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:40:58):
I'm curious for I guess the Pixel boys here in the chat. I have had two different friends over the past three or four months convert from being longtime Android users. I believe they both actually had pixels to joining iPhone land specifically because of one issue, which both of them had noticed. Sometimes their texts just wouldn't go through to iPhone users. It would show as sent on their end, but then I'd see them or something in person, they'd be like, Hey, you never respond to my from weeks ago. And I'd be like, I didn't get it. And the same thing happened. Vice versa. They weren't receiving messages from people sometimes for a period of weeks. This wasn't most things, but it was like five, 10%.

Leo Laporte (00:41:44):
I often get the message that your message didn't go through. When I message my daughter who uses an Android, she actually uses the S 23. So there may be, I mean I always blame the carrier for that. They have gateways between carriers for messaging. But maybe one of the things that is a problem is the Apple has its own proprietary photo format. So when I take photos on my iPhone, I have to usually save them as JPEG in order for her to

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:10):
Get It's not proprietary. It's not proprietary.

Leo Laporte (00:42:13):
No it isn't. Right. Hike is, but

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:15):
I know they're the only ones who support it. It's annoying

Leo Laporte (00:42:17):
Only ones who do it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:18):
It's annoying, but it's got all these advantages. Lemme list them off to you. Nah, it's annoying. It's annoying to Mac users too. I spend half my time, I write this Mac, you have to one call export out for Mac World. And it's like people every month there's a question too. It's like why am I having problems? Because your two releases behind, you have the switch set the person. Yeah. So it's not, I'm kidding because I think it's a better format. I think the entire industry should adopt HEIC. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:40):
High efficiency image codec.

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:42):
Yeah, it's great. It has a lot of advantage, but it's not, the transitions are painful. Like USBC

Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
Anyway. It's very easy to imagine that Google's killing something. They do it so often you're

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:57):
Saying. So there's no reason necessarily that they made the phone. So it's hard to come up with a reason why they're getting rid of it. If you don't have a Well, it's hard

Leo Laporte (00:43:04):
To come up with a reason why they should continue to make it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:06):
Right. Those are interesting questions. It's a huge

Leo Laporte (00:43:08):
Investment. And by the way, they have kind of deprecated Fitbit. That was another thing that happened this week is the founder Fitbit left and hundreds of Fitbit employees I think left that Google's back in the layoff mode, which is bizarre since I'm sure they're very popular. They took

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:28):
Off features from assistant.

Leo Laporte (00:43:31):
Yeah. They laid off hundreds of workers and assistant in the AR teams.

Paris Martineau (00:43:36):
Understand they laying off several hundred employees in their advertising sales team.

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:40):
I couldn't get a response from Google PR when I was trying to write a story a few weeks ago. They had no response at all. So clearly they laid off. At least they didn't give you a poop emoji, Glenn. Oh, well, remember, I would've preferred that

Leo Laporte (00:43:51):
We had the story that Google was replacing many thousands of their salespeople with ai. Maybe they're doing the same with other divisions. They're reorganizing the pixel hardware. James Park, who came over from Fitbit is leaving the Nest. The Pixel and the Fitbit divisions were independent teams. No, the Pixel is in that list, but now they're going to have reorganize along functional lines, which actually Apple did. And this is kind of a modern way of doing it. There'll be a single team responsible for hardware and engineering on Nest, Fitbit, and Pixel all on hardware, and then there'll be a software lead and that kind of thing. So it's along the functional lines. But I have to say, I think the pixel phone, I'm going to say it. I'll be the first. I think the days are numbered and the fact that the Fitbit founders have left and many of the leaders of the Fitbit teams have left is a little scary. How much do they pay for Fitbit? A huge amount. They did that back in 2020 1 billion. It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:44:54):
Traditional companies to pay billions of dollars for companies and then seemingly shut them down years later. We have so many. I mean, I think did Figma escape the fate of that by not getting inquired by Adobe that it would've been shut down in three years and a 7 billion acquisition would've been written down to nothing?

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
Well, you saw that Uber, which paid more than 3 billion for drizzly. I think it was 3 billion. Actually, I'm looking now, it says 1.1 billion. Yeah, well, billion. Yeah, with 1 billion. But three years later they closed it. They've closed it. It's an alcohol delivery service. Turns out that Uber really didn't do any delivering. It wasn't Uber drivers doing the delivering, they were just providing the backend for liquor stores who did their own deliveries.

Paris Martineau (00:45:38):
And it's worth noting originally a part of this was a cannabis delivery system that worked similarly called Lantern. That Drizly spun out I believe a year or two ago. And that which was its own entity shut down I believe a couple of months ago or sometime last year as well. For similar issues though, they were just providing the software. It didn't work as a business.

Glenn Fleishman (00:46:02):
This is like the Peloton thing. It is during pandemic, everyone drank a lot more and everyone's like, it'll never end. Quote the Simpsons. There's an episode, a.com thing that was pressing, I think from 20 something years ago, and the company shuts down and Bart says, companies can shut down. And these repo men come in and say it's a golden age. Forreal men, one that will never end. And I think of that all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:46:26):
Wow. Yeah. So Google's made to get back to Google has made a name for themselves as being ruthless or Ruth Po Atlas in shutting down their was their CFO and shutting down stuff. It's very interesting. I'm not sure where they're going. It's always a mystery to me. It seems like it's a mystery to Sundar Hai as well. Their CEO, I don't think he's really sure what business they're in. The only thing they know for sure is we're making a lot of money in search. We're making us so much money in search. Google has formerly endorsed Right to Repair. This is from Jason Keebler at 4 0 4 and we'll lobby to pass repair laws. Huge.

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:16):
Interesting. This is

Leo Laporte (00:47:17):
In, there's a right to repair bill in Oregon and Google. I think Thursday tomorrow is going to testify in favor of it. Is

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:27):
That a thumb in the

Leo Laporte (00:47:28):
Eye to Apple?

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:29):
Oh, no. Apple totally supports the right to repair as long as you pay to borrow their 50 pound repair kit that they shipped to you. Yeah, it's great.

Leo Laporte (00:47:38):
Apple is in malicious compliance, I think. Is it? Oh, that's good.

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:44):
Yeah. I like, it's a little weird. One of the things I do not like about Apple is their obsessiveness about not making their equipment, either making it more repairable or making it more approachable to repair. There's some profit margin motive in there, but weird that Google is doing this right when they may be phasing out the phones then, right? Do they have a lot of other hardware? I realize, but

Leo Laporte (00:48:06):
It was a funny time. They're not, I don't know how committed they are even to assistant. They laid off people and to nest. I mean, these are all, these feel like investments that didn't pay off for Google. And again, they make so much money in search ads at this point. They can kind of say, well, let's try some other, let's spend billions on other things that we're not going to keep around very long. Google the white

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:37):
Paper, the assistant story. Sorry, Amazon. It was only a couple years ago that it turned out that Amazon was having billion a year, right? Yeah. So Alexa, as a voice activated assistant doesn't make money or it's massive losses. Google Assistant. I mean, I think there's an interesting meta story there that doesn't feel like it's all been pulled together.

Leo Laporte (00:48:56):
Well, there's also the story that I think chat GPT or some form of AI will be used in these assistants, which I'm not convinced is going to work very well. I think Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon all want to kind of put their LLMs behind their assistant, which means all you're going to get is a chatty and often incorrect assistant. Right.

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:19):
Is battery acid safe to drink? No. Yes. No. Wait, no.

Leo Laporte (00:49:24):
Yeah. Well, I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:27):
Somebody said you should drink bleach. I don't know who said it. It doesn't matter. It's

Leo Laporte (00:49:31):
All the internet. I'd like to write a poem about that.

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:32):
Yeah, sing a song about the bleach.

Leo Laporte (00:49:34):
Google believes this is the white paper written by Google's Steven Nickel. Google believes that users should have more control over repair, including access to the same documentation parts and tools that original equipment manufacturer repair channels have. I couldn't agree more. And the only reason I think Google would say that is to stick it to Apple because they don't really care. They're not making a whole lot of money. Regulators should ban, one of the things Apple does to preserve their profit margin is parts pairing where you have to use an Apple branded part and they say it's for security. So for instance, if you replace the screen, you have to not only replace it with an Apple part, but then you have to have Apple software certify that it's genuine. And so those parts, that's called parts pairing. Those parts have part of security

Glenn Fleishman (00:50:31):
Policy, the fingerprint sensor and the facial id. They want to make sure someone doesn't put a modified one in, but will let them bypass security. But to the point of upset, we're just talking in the chat about, it's like spiteful, right? It doesn't make sense that Apple makes it so hard because they have to repair their own stuff. Is what? One of our forum members here quoting Jason Snell. It's Knox Harrington quoting for Jason Snell is correct.

Leo Laporte (00:50:54):
Well, one of the things Apple does, and it's famous for doing this, is they build custom machines for their Apple stores, for their repair centers that are just designed to do take apart this device or pull apart these pieces. And that's what, by the way, you're getting, when you get the 50 pound kit to replace your screen, we did it. Micah Sergeant did it, but there was a mismatch. The company that ships the big pelican cases with all the machinery in it is separate from the company that ships the part. So Micah got all the machinery, but the part hadn't arrived, and then you have to return the machinery within a week or they'll bill you thousands of dollars. So Micah literally packed it up, shipped it back, and as the truck is pulling away with the equipment, another truck pulls up with a part. Oh no, it's not a perfect

Glenn Fleishman (00:51:47):
System. Although my older kid, his track pad was home from college and it started to get flaky. So he is like, I'll just go to the Apple store. He goes there, they're like, let's look at it Software. They keep it overnight like, yeah, it's fine now hour later it's not working. Again, he gets expedited because they give him bad advice. He goes back, they do something else. It's still not working. You got to go back three times. Then they replace it overnight in the store using some of this fancy equipment. But I'm thinking, I don't know, you can't generalize from experience, but it is just the whole experience is frustrating. Even when with their very highly vaunted technical support and repair

Leo Laporte (00:52:24):
Support, he pays for AppleCare. I

Glenn Fleishman (00:52:26):
Bet. Yeah. Laptops, I always get AppleCare Plus on laptops. It is almost universally more than paid for itself.

Leo Laporte (00:52:34):
Yeah. Although I think that's a profit center for Apple. Absolutely. And that might be another reason why they're not anxious to let third party repair shops get their filthy little hands on Apple hardware. Anyway, I'm glad Google's supporting it. That's the right thing to do. Apple, which for a long time fought it also, at least in name supported it.

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:52):
While we're praising Google. Leo, if I may derail here for a second, Steve

Leo Laporte (00:52:56):
Gibson, I came not to praise Google, but to bury him. I know. That's why I'm

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:00):
Take advantage of this rare moment. So Steve Gibson sent me his half hour testimony

Leo Laporte (00:53:04):
Show. Oh, I was wondering, yes, yes.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:07):
Praising the new Google ad structure.

Leo Laporte (00:53:10):
He's thrilled with this,

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:12):
Which is what says a lot. If Steve Gibson is thrilled.

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Wait, he's praising what? So can you summarize it, Jeff? I don't want to. It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:20):
Simply that for the new ad structure, the new sandbox thing for advertising is that all of the computation data and auctioning will stay on your device and your browser. And so information, your

Leo Laporte (00:53:35):
Browser becomes

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:37):
The

Leo Laporte (00:53:37):
Salesperson for Google.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:39):
Yeah. So Steve says they're doing it right. They have a terrible name. He took a half an hour to explain it. I won't put

Leo Laporte (00:53:45):
Detail. It's the protected audience. API, which is, you're right. A terrible,

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:49):
Terrible name. But I think it's what, whether you guys, I don't think talked about is, I think in the long run, this is what local models, AI models will enable is that this kind of functionality can occur on your device in your space, and it can also then give you more confidence. A B, it gives Google more control because it controls that, which to me might have implications for breaking up Google advertising. You can't be both sell side and buy side. Well, this becomes so powerful that I think people are going to actually maybe even like it. They won't admit it. Also, you can see categories you are in, right?

Leo Laporte (00:54:32):
And you can turn it off

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:34):
And you can turn it off. You could turn it off and you can delete the categories you're in. I think it'd be more powerful if you could add categories that you actually care about. That would be incredibly powerful in advertising. I'm looking for a car right now. You have permission to show me cars for the next two weeks and then no, that would be invaluable to advertisers to know that you're voluntarily getting it. So they're not thinking two steps ahead. Nonetheless, Steve said, and he's a tough critic, that this is security done. This is privacy done. And all of the demonization of cookies that began with the Wall Street Journal and what they know series kind of comes to its final end here with the death of the cookie.

Leo Laporte (00:55:18):
I think Google must have recognized also with the EU and the ridiculous cookie banner that the cookies were more of a problem than they solved. And just basically they've unilaterally said, we're going to disable cookies, third party cookies in our browsers. It's just not going to exist later this year. So they needed something. It's their way, and this is why Steve supports it, and I figured this is probably why you would like it, Jeff, and why he thought you would. Because in a way, Google's acknowledging that websites and blogs, I guess podcasts too need ad support. So there needs to be some way advertisers really do want information about who they're advertising to. So there needs to be some way to preserve privacy and yet give advertisers what they want so that the internet can be monetized and this is their solution. Get rid of third party. I wonder

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:09):
How ad blockers will work with this or won't. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:56:12):
And as I pointed out to Steve, the way this works, it'd be very, if you didn't want to turn it off, you could block it easily. It's a bunch of little JavaScript scripts that are running that could easily be blocked and I guess they're thinking for a, nobody's going to turn off the tyranny of the default. Nobody is going to block it. Yeah, no

Benito (00:56:32):
One's sticking in their settings like that.

Leo Laporte (00:56:34):
Yeah. This is from Steve's Shena, a protected audience, API uses interest groups to enable sites to display ads that are relevant to their users. So when a user visits a site that wants to advertise its product, an interest group owner can ask the user's browser. And because Google makes Chrome and is completely dominant and browsers, this works to add membership for the interest scoop. So you go to a car dealer, car dealer says, oh, there's an interest in buying a new car. Can you add new car interest to this if that's successful? The browser records the name of the interest group new cars, the owner of the interest group ford dealer.com, and this is the weird part, the interest group configuration information to allow the browser to access bidding code, ad code and real-time data. If the group's owner is invited to bid in an ad auction, your browser auctions off your attention for you. So you are in this new car group now you go to C Jim Jones Chevrolet in beautiful downtown Burbank and Jim Jones knows, sees your interest group and makes a bid to put an ad on your page and your browser negotiates that the money goes to send

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:02):
Data at the money. Never believe up to Jones or to

Leo Laporte (00:58:04):
The cloud, right? That's right. So it's an interesting idea. It's going to happen. I mean this is the thing Google has, I think more

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:12):
And more and more of this work. I think this is just a preview of all the things that are going to happen in models on your

Leo Laporte (00:58:19):
Device, right? Yeah. And part of it is because these devices are getting more and more powerful. Right?

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:25):
Exactly.

Benito (00:58:26):
Hey, this is Benito. So real quick question, what happens on older devices? Is this just going to kill someone's? Good

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:31):
Question. I wondered that. Beto, I

Benito (00:58:32):
See.

Leo Laporte (00:58:35):
Well, you'll have to be running Chrome, so if your device can run Chrome,

Benito (00:58:40):
Chrome is already notoriously pretty resource off. Oh, it's a pig.

Leo Laporte (00:58:43):
Yeah, so if your device can run Chrome, it'll work. I don't think they expect the net to extend to every human alive. Right? There's a lot of cheap Android phones, a lot of lower end hardware out there that may not work, but Google doesn't want those people anyway. Advertisers probably don't want 'em either. They want people that are affluent enough to have a late model phone or late model computer, I would guess. I mean, I think they understand they're already, everybody's slipping through their crack with ad blockers and so they and Cookie banners and GDPR and all that stuff. So they want to find a way that pease everybody and they've been trying to do this for some time. Steve thinks this is the solution. We'll see. Yeah, he was very interested in what you thought of it, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:30):
Yeah, I was really delighted that Steve sent me. He said, I know it's Steve, so he's going to be in detail. Oh boy. So he said, take a half an hour and he was right and God bless Steve. He scripts it out of making sure he gets the details and you kind of hear that in, well, I thought about it this way that I asked that, that I did this. And so when Steve endorses a direction, I have tremendous faith in that and I did know kind of how this operated, but I wasn't sure I was right number one, and he let me know number two and number three, would Steve vet this? And he did. And so thank you Steve. I'm glad you did that.

Leo Laporte (01:00:08):
You can read what Steve sent Jeff. It's part of his show notes for security now, episode 9, 5 7. The protected audience, API. It was yesterday.

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:18):
I can't wait for episode a thousand.

Paris Martineau (01:00:20):
Wow. I was going to to say you're getting close. What going to do? What's Episode a thousand going

Leo Laporte (01:00:24):
To be like? Well, he had originally said that he wasn't going to do four digits, so 9, 9 9 would be his last show. Steve, come on. He said that he was pretty serious. That's what I said. Come

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:34):
On. Yeah, Steve, I'm still 29 too. So yeah, he

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
Changed his mind a few months ago. He said, you know what, Leo? I want to keep doing the show, which I'm very grateful for because he plays an important part. He's

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:47):
So respected. In

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
Fact, this is a moment I might take to argue for you, dear listener, dear viewer, to join the Club Club Twit because that's what's paying for Steve. This show, all the shows we do. So the advertisers pay some of it, but that revenue's dwindling. Advertisers are paying less, they're buying less. This is true across the board in the podcast industry. And a couple of years ago, we realized that that's why we started Club Twit. It's really important to us your support. If you think these podcasts are valuable, if you get something out of it, if you learn, if you enjoy the company, we would love it. If you join the club twit TV slash club twit, $7 a month. That's all you can give. More people keep asking me. You can still watch the ads by the way, somebody said, but I want the ads.

(01:01:39):
So you get an ad free version of all the shows, but you could still listen to the shows with ads. It's okay. You also get access to the club. Tuit Discord, a great hang you, I mean really seriously wonderful social group. You also get the TWIT plus feed, which includes before and after the show content. Jeff's testimony in front of the Senate from last week, apparently. I guess that's where it lives. You also will get shows that we don't put out anywhere else, including Hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, the Untitled Linux Show, home Theater Geeks, iOS Today, Stacey's book club's coming up. By the way, I should mention that. That's a club only event that's coming up early next month. Lemme look at the event schedule. We've got a fireside chat tomorrow at 4:00 PM with our AI expert, Anthony Nielsen. I think Micah's going to do that.

(01:02:33):
And then Stacey's book club is February 8th. I'm reading the book right now. It's grim. I'm hoping it'll cheer up The Water Knife. It's a novel about the near future in which climate change has made water. Super precious and it'll be fun to have Stacey back on for us. I'm sorry, 2:00 PM Pacific Pacific. I'm on the East Coast. I forgot I was giving East Coast Times. I didn't realize how smart our discord is. It's giving me East coast time. So 1:00 PM tomorrow Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern for the inside twit. Stacey's book club will be 12:00 PM Eastern, 9:00 AM Western on the February 8th. That's an ant. Liked to get up early I guess. I don't know. So we got that. So anyway, club Twi, please if you would, TV slash club twi and thank you. I really appreciate it. A big thanks to all of our Club TWIT members too, by the way. They're fantastic.

Ad (01:03:35):
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Leo Laporte (01:04:36):
Alright. Did you find something Paris that you wanted to talk about?

Paris Martineau (01:04:41):
Yeah, we talked on what my real pick was briefly, which was Google laying off several hundred members of their ads team, which is interesting. And my joke pick is a new update for everyone's favorite segment this week in tunnels. The real twit, which is that Google Maps is finally adding Wazes in tunnel navigation feature. Yes, you heard that right? I've found both this week in Google and of this week in Tunnel.

Leo Laporte (01:05:10):
It's a

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:10):
Paris twofer. We can

Paris Martineau (01:05:12):
Finally go, guys. We can

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:13):
Finally drive through the Goddard Passes Tunnel. The Goddard Tunnel

Leo Laporte (01:05:17):
Truly. So Ways has always had this feature and they use Bluetooth beacons, which apparently, I mean, not every tunnel, does Goddard Pass have tunnel have that? Do you know it's Switzerland? They must, shouldn't they? I don't know. Lincoln Tunnel does not. So if your tunnel happens to have Bluetooth, I'm sure the tunnel in Crown Heights has Bluetooth.

Paris Martineau (01:05:37):
Oh, definitely. They've got a lot of Bluetooth beacons down beneath the synagogue.

Leo Laporte (01:05:42):
The problem my, your GPSI asked my daughter and she said, oh yeah, everybody in Crown Heights knows about it. She was,

Paris Martineau (01:05:50):
Everybody knows about the tunnels. It was a great news event.

Leo Laporte (01:05:54):
She was doing an open mic and somebody wanted to get up and explain why the tunnels were dug and they wouldn't let him. He had a whole comedy bid on it apparently. So Waze has done this all along, and of course Google owns Waze, but for some reason didn't put this capability into Google Maps, but now they will in tunnels across the globe, including major cities like New York, Chicago, Paris, Brussels, and many more. Not Switzerland, I think not Swiss tunnels. Beacons in 18 kilometers of Australian tunnels. There's a beacon zone blog beacon zone.co uk as our tunnel expert. Paris, I think you need to visit this site.

Paris Martineau (01:06:44):
I do think I need to read up on my tunnel lore. My other choice here is over at Line 90 Apple, which recently is revising its US app store rules to let developers link to their outside payment methods. This is something we've talked about before, but one thing I thought was really interesting, which came across my feeds a couple of times over the last week, is the kind of new interstitial message that comes up whenever you click one of these links to pay through someone else's method of an apple. It sends you to the scariest looking screen in the world in which a size 60 font says you are about to go to an external website. Apple is not responsible for the private or security of purchases made on the web.

Leo Laporte (01:07:34):
Any accountable purchases made outside of this apple will be managed by the developer. By the way, it's not just the scary announcement. Apple's also told the developers, you have to go through our system and we're going to charge you. Not 30%, 27%. That's commission, not the credit card. So they're getting their money. They're still getting their money. Of

Paris Martineau (01:07:54):
Course,

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
Apple, apple, apple. They're also asking Epic for remuneration for their court costs in this lawsuit. $73.4 million. I guess apple's a for-profit business. Well, Microsoft

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:15):
Got its revenge by becoming the or the most capitalized company. The highest market country. Yeah, briefly.

Leo Laporte (01:08:20):
Briefly, yeah. Who would've thunk it, right? $3 trillion not a few

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:26):
Years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:08:28):
No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:30):
I have, as I've said on the show often I have some tech stocks. I've had them for years. I don't trade them. The one I did trade is a couple of years ago, I sold Microsoft thinking, nah, it's going down.

Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
It was flat. We should call you creamers flat. It was never going anymore. Yeah, exactly. You just got out of that dumb stock. Right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:47):
Don't listen to me.

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:48):
Should always, we should always create funds that are the funds of the stocks that we sold with puts or some kind of other mechanism on it we sell. That's clever. You leverage your selling. You're a business.

Leo Laporte (01:08:58):
We could call it a hedge fund. Hedging your bat. That's really interesting.

Glenn Fleishman (01:09:04):
After you sell, you hide in a hedge because you're so embarrassed.

Leo Laporte (01:09:08):
Yeah. And you only pop out once in a while. You do the Homer Simpson when you go backwards into the hedge. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:09:18):
My god. The chat has already got the Homer Simpson thing up like that. Oh, they're fast. They're instant. Very good. They're so

Leo Laporte (01:09:23):
Good. They're fast. They work. Mashed potato. Mashed potato. Let's see here. So those are your stories. Good. Oh, I like this. Jeff, you have written an editorial in New jersey.com.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:44):
Nj.com. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:09:44):
Jersey.com.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:46):
Nj.com. Don't go all Brooklyn on me. Paris.

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
I have websites over there. I'm so proud of you. Everything's legal in Jersey. Even Jeff blogging.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:55):
I started it.

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
Oh, you started atj.com.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:59):
Well, no, when I worked in

Leo Laporte (01:10:00):
You're mr New jersey.com. Wow. Brooklyn. The j

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:05):
Brooklyn knobs. They're the

Glenn Fleishman (01:10:07):
Worst. Some people call 'em the boss, in fact, New Jersey. Yo.

Leo Laporte (01:10:13):
So I like your idea. Tell us what your idea is.

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:17):
So Bell Labs in Murray Hill where the famous Bell Labs where so much occurred is closing the Bell Labs now owned by Nokia or whatever's left of it, is moving to a new facility in New Brunswick by Rutgers whole modern. So the old Bell Labs, which is this phenomenal building in Murray Hill and phenomenal grounds is going to be empty and I'm proposing to be turned into a museum and school of the internet.

Leo Laporte (01:10:43):
Brilliant.

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:45):
You think about it, why there the internet wouldn't be possible without so much that was forged at Bell Labs transistor laser information theory, Unix communication satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression microphones, talkies, the first digital art, artificial intelligence. You wouldn't have an internet with so much of what was done at Bell Labs.

Leo Laporte (01:11:07):
Well, eunuchs for crying out loud and the C programming language both came out. Bell Labs. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:13):
So there's a computer history museum in Silicon Valley. There's a television museum in the Paley Center in New York and the Museum of the movie in image of New York. Glenn and I, well know that Massachusetts, I give a plug to him in this. Glenn has a museum of printing online. There are museum artifacts online, but I think it's important that we have a place to recognize the development of the internet, to talk about it, to think about it. You all know that I want to start an educational program in internet studies bringing the humanities and social sciences into this. I think it's a place to do it. So this was my little jump on it idea. I want to end with one thing on this. Is that, does

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
Nokia still own it, by the way? Is

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:52):
It? Yeah, I believe so. It's not

Leo Laporte (01:11:54):
At t anymore. Nokia not

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:55):
At t anymore. No, no. Not long since. So David Eisenberg, I think David Eisenberg, yes. Of

Leo Laporte (01:12:00):
The CLU train.

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:02):
A 12 year veteran of Bell Labs wrote the infamous memo pushing the value of the stupid network.

Leo Laporte (01:12:09):
Oh no, that's a different David. You think he's different?

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:13):
David Weinberger Weinberg.

Leo Laporte (01:12:14):
This is David Eisenberg. Yes, yes,

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:15):
Yes. So he in his own website says that the memo was received with a claim everywhere in the global telecoms community with one exception at t itself. So Eisenberg left at t in 1998. So I think it'd be wonderful kind of justice to make Bell Labs the place for the internet. So I just put it up. I love this. We'll see if there's any reaction. I

Leo Laporte (01:12:39):
Love this. Yeah, great idea. It's also

Paris Martineau (01:12:42):
Less than, it's an hour drive from where I am. So then I can visit the internet museum right

Leo Laporte (01:12:46):
Field

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:46):
Trip. I

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:48):
Also

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:48):
Think I went there once Bell Labs, when we started nj.com, we did start nj.com. It was

Leo Laporte (01:12:54):
The star ledger, right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:55):
Star ledger Ledger who I used to work with when I worked on that. So we went to visit Bell Labs and I think Nokia owned it then before it went to Lucin or Lucid owned it. I don't know. It's been a child shoved around from house to house, but it's drab as I remember, industrial green walls. But you walk by the labs and you see the benches and the blackboards and you think what genius was in there? What happened in these places? It's haunted by genius and we can't let it become condos or warehouses.

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:30):
I think it's also good to be a place where you could go and see the internet and I'm sort of being funny, but back in the nineties when I had an early internet company, I would get calls from local media all the time because they needed kind of B-roll. They wanted shoot. They'd say, can we come and look at the internet? I'm like, well, Glenn has it. Glenn has the internet. Sure, it's in this room. It's some sun systems. And they would come in and we would talk about the internet or get national news and be like, this guy has the internet. And it felt a little like, well, people are looking for a thing, a physical thing to put on it and now as a phone, the internet. So I think there's actually something nice about instantiating the notion of the internet as a thing. You could go and look at what made it in way that there is no technology museum that is specifically devoted to what the internet was, what it became, what it is now, what it's going to become. I think it's great. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:20):
Do what oral's history with Sir Tim Birders Lee and with Ur and the folks who were there at the beginning. And I think it's something we've got to remember, I plugged my books at every opportunity. As the poor listeners of this show know I did it in my testimony. I'm very proud of myself. I got notebook plugs in my testimony.

Leo Laporte (01:14:43):
We noted that, by the way, you also, they didn't mention it by name, but you got to plug in for this show too.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:48):
Well actually I did because that was my intro. So the name of the show was in the intro. Did

Leo Laporte (01:14:53):
They mention this week in Google?

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:55):
Yes, they did.

Leo Laporte (01:14:56):
And your AI inside show

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:57):
And AI inside,

Leo Laporte (01:14:58):
Which by the way continues on. Which

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:01):
By the way, well, while we're on that, just real quickly tomorrow Jason is going to drop episode zero of AI inside at AI inside Story with his Patreon up to support it, and then next week we'll have our first real show. Great.

Leo Laporte (01:15:15):
So it's the show. Basically you were workshopping in the club. You're just going to keep doing it. Yeah. Wonderful.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:22):
Glad to

Leo Laporte (01:15:22):
Hear it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:23):
That's really, so anyway, it took 500 years to decide to study the book. We can't wait that long for the internet. We need to study it now.

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:31):
And you can have an animatronic Al Gore who can guide you through the museum.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:35):
God, it's all

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:38):
Odd explained repeatedly. I didn't say what they said, I said, but anyway, I did. I did. But I was instrumental in the internet growing. I did not build the internet. That's right. It's just in a loop and it follows you around. You're like, okay, Al, I get it. I get it.

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
My father invented the interstate highway system. Did you see this? So I thought this was a big mistake that the NBC and the NFL made. There was a big playoff game, a very important playoff game this week, and they decided instead of putting it on broadcast television, that they would only air the A FC wildcard game on Peacock

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:23):
After the first half hour on NBC. They showed you the first half

Leo Laporte (01:16:26):
Hour was talking. Well, I didn't even know that they cut it off after half an hour.

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:29):
Yeah. Then Heidi, they cut it off to go to Peacock.

Leo Laporte (01:16:33):
Well, it worked. It was according to the Nielsen and NBC universal numbers, the most streamed event ever in the United States. The audience, by the way, peacock paid $110 million for the rights to do this. The audience scrolled, reached 24.6 million during the second quarter, a total of 27.6. They wanted to see

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:02):
If people were going to freeze to death.

Leo Laporte (01:17:05):
Was that the one, which game was it? That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:07):
The Kansas City one. Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:08):
It was Buffalo

Leo Laporte (01:17:09):
Was so cold. Buffalo. They didn't put that one off

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:12):
Was That was crazy. I was watching people get to their seats. I think that was real footage. It was wild.

Leo Laporte (01:17:16):
I love it when they, so it's in Buffalo and they had to delay the game because of this big storm. We've been suffering. But I love it because when the bills scored a touchdown, everybody made snowballs. Great. It was like the snow shower in the stadium is hysterical. I love that. So interesting. I guess I had mixed feelings. I thought, is America ready for it's national sport to be streamed only, but apparently America is so expect more of that. Right? One of the advantages of doing it though, probably nuts. Well, one of the advantages is you can do it in a higher quality. You could do 4K and no broadcast station wants to do 4K or very few can. You'd have to have a TSC 3.0. So the fact that you could do a 4K stream, maybe that's winning them over. I don't know. So Verizon lost a class action lawsuit. The suit was over Verizon's monthly administrative and telco recovery charge, which is a BSS charge that they just added.

Paris Martineau (01:18:29):
Why not? I guess

Leo Laporte (01:18:30):
Because they could, but when they settled, they admitted no wrongdoing. They continue to deny they did anything wrong and they're going to continue to impose the charge.

Paris Martineau (01:18:44):
Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
From a dollar 95 to three 30 per month per line. And they say we might even increase it in the future, but if you were in the class, you'll be getting a check of up to a hundred dollars each. But Verizon figures, we made more money than we lost. So it was worth a hundred mil. They're going to keep doing

Paris Martineau (01:19:06):
It. Wait, how do you have to settle for this and pay out a settlement? But yet you get to keep doing it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:11):
How does that, they changed the disclosure, right? So now they're like, we're charging you an arbitrary amount of money and you have to pay it.

Paris Martineau (01:19:18):
So now they're just telling us, Hey, we're screwing you. The only issue before was that they weren't being like, Hey, we think you're a

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:25):
Rube. We're screwing you and not telling you now we're screwing you. And we are telling you, which in America, this is why we all pay resorts and hotels.

Leo Laporte (01:19:33):
And what it really, I mean what's really going on is these companies want to advertise lower costs, whether it's a hotel or Verizon, but they want to charge you higher costs. So they advertise the lower costs and then say plus fees, and then they come up with a whole bunch of fees. Some of 'em legit. There's an E 9 1 11 fee. There's some regulatory fees that are required, but this one's made up. The fee is not mandated by the government. Verizon tells customers it covers regulatory obligations, taxes and various expenses that are just part of the cost of doing business. I think the

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:07):
Most popular

Leo Laporte (01:20:08):
Expenses is paying out this settlement. They like paying out this settlement.

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:12):
I think the most popular thing government could do, particularly the federal government, is to counteract fees. And so the Department of Transportation requiring that, those disclosures and other things with airline fees, I think that was massively popular and it reduces my stress when I'm buying tickets and it caused changes in the industry. And the resort fee thing, even though that seems, I don't want to say it's elitist, it's not everybody stays in a hotel, but every kind of property just about tries to charge them now. And

Leo Laporte (01:20:40):
It's a lot. It's like 20 bucks a night off.

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:42):
I checked in this place, very nice place in Santa Rosa. Very cheap nightly fee early January. No one's in California right now. That's why I'm at an empty studio with all the technical folks. Sorry, not empty. Even

Leo Laporte (01:20:52):
I'm not in California.

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:54):
Yeah, Leo's gone and they're like $25 a night for the resort fee. The resort fee, covering some coffee and an urn at a croissant in the morning.

Leo Laporte (01:21:01):
It's not a resort. It's not

Glenn Fleishman (01:21:02):
A resort. So those fees I would love to see. And same thing with the telecom fees and other fees. These should be something the government, the FCC or FTC between them may have the regulatory authority until the Supreme Court overturns it shortly to be able to say, no, these fees are, no matter how they're disclosed, they may be folded into your base rate and you have to pay them out of that. And I think it's extremely popular. Why not do that? People would love that.

Leo Laporte (01:21:33):
Apparently the lawsuit speechless.

Glenn Fleishman (01:21:34):
Sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
Yeah, yeah. Well it's stunning. Apparently the lawsuit did not specify that they would have to stop doing it. The lawsuit of course, why would they? But they did say you might want to change the language. And of course, Verizon Zoom languages in addition to the cost of your plan or any features to which you may subscribe, our charges may also include an administrative and telco recovery charge in addition to the other fees described in this agreement. The administrative and telco recovery charge is not a tax, it isn't required by law and is not necessarily related to anything the government does and is kept by us in whole or in part. Oh my God. But they know and they, Verizon also said, by the way, nobody's ever complained about this. Hardly anybody ever complains. Nobody reads the freaking bill. No. What I love, and they keep it just a couple of

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:24):
Bucks. I love about T-Mobile. If you get above their basic plan, they're just like, this is what it costs. And all of the taxes come out of this. So it's whatever it is, $140 for three lines or something. And it's just $140. And I mean, I know they may be bulking it up to get it rounded to zero, but the stress of not having to examine the bill and just having that flat price, which doesn't change over time. They often add features and keep the price the same. Thank God they remained independent and competitive in this sell market we have. But

Leo Laporte (01:22:53):
Well, and at least you know what you're going to pay. Because that's the real problem with these, the hotel resort fees and everything else is they tell you one price, but by the time you're done, you've got undercoating, you've got a paint job. Leo,

Paris Martineau (01:23:07):
I assume this has to be a real big issue for you and your 27 cell phone plans, right?

Leo Laporte (01:23:12):
Oh God. Oh my God. Was

Paris Martineau (01:23:14):
It all on Verizon? Oh

Leo Laporte (01:23:15):
My god, no. It was on everybody. And they all do this. I'm sure I did have a Verizon plan. We've canceled the Verizon plan.

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:22):
Were you able to cancel the ones you talked about?

Leo Laporte (01:23:24):
I'm working on at t still. Why does

Glenn Fleishman (01:23:27):
Leo have 27? Leo

Paris Martineau (01:23:29):
Has an incalculable amount of phones. Is this

Glenn Fleishman (01:23:33):
Like leasing the Honeymooners Gleason? He have all these hotel rooms and drop suitcases full of money in different places. Jackie Leasing, it's like

Paris Martineau (01:23:45):
Steve Bannon and there's like seven apartments he maintained during the Trump administration.

Leo Laporte (01:23:49):
As part of my job as a tech reviewer, I needed many phones. And I thought, well, as long as I'm going to have multiple phones, I should have one on every carrier so I can also monitor the carrier and things like these charges and so forth. Because back in

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:02):
The day, some things didn't work on various carriers.

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
Yeah, there still are issues with, as you said, messages not going through from, there's all sorts of stuff. So it's good to know. But we are slowly paring this down.

Paris Martineau (01:24:15):
How many phones did you bring on your trip?

Leo Laporte (01:24:17):
You know what? Just one. Just

Paris Martineau (01:24:19):
The iPhone. Wow. Do you feel naked? Usually

Leo Laporte (01:24:20):
I bring more than that, but you know what? This is part of me winding down. I'm winding down my career. I'm getting rid of some of these accounts. I'm getting rid of some of these phones. I just want to be a normal person for Congress once in a while. Seven. Yeah, just be a normal everyday guy.

Paris Martineau (01:24:39):
Seven to 10 phones, four to five different AI powered pins.

Leo Laporte (01:24:43):
A couple of hotel rooms and suitcases of money dropping down from just the usual

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:47):
30 to 50 feral hogs going down to 10 to 20 feral hogs. Well, just

Paris Martineau (01:24:51):
A really reasonable,

Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
They need to start out feral hogs. They were supposed to be teacup hogs and I don't know what happened, but they grew.

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:57):
This is like goldfish

Paris Martineau (01:24:58):
Now. They're terrorizing my kids out in

Leo Laporte (01:25:00):
Milan. Oh my God. Yeah. Don't get me started on the kids.

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:04):
Oh my goodness.

Leo Laporte (01:25:06):
Alright, let's see.

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:07):
So I'm not going to suggest going through this at any length, but Tom Coates wrote a really good piece. This is line 77 recounting a meeting he had at Meta about integrating threads with the fedi verse.

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
So this was a promise that Meta made. It was also a promise Blue sky made that they would eventually somehow join the Fedi verse, which includes not just Mastodon, but other kind of open source, federated social networks. And really that's the best way to do a social network is like with Twit social is in the Fedi verse. So that's a little small group, about 3000 people, all TWIT listeners. And so you have that local feel. You're big part of it, Glenn, you're very active on That's what social thank you

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:54):
For hosting me.

Leo Laporte (01:25:55):
Yeah. But then if you want, you could follow anybody anywhere else on the Fedi verse. So I was excited by the idea that maybe I could follow people on threads in Blue Sky without actually joining it. So what did Tom say? What did it come?

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:08):
So if you scroll down to the boldfaced dates, a few screen loads down in December. We know this already. They were allowing people to opt in to have their posts visible to Mastodon in early 2024. The light counts on Threads app would combine with likes from Mastodon on threads. These are the details. It goes to part two end of

Leo Laporte (01:26:28):
This

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:28):
Year, replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the threads application

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:33):
End of last year, or sorry, early this year.

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:36):
Early this year. Then late 2024, a mixed fedi verse and threads experience where you'll be able to follow Master done users within threads and reply to them and like them, and then date to be announced fully blended interoperability. So basically the only thing I want, we praised Google earlier now we're going to praise meta. Basically Codes comes away from this on much more here. But it seems they're serious.

Leo Laporte (01:26:58):
I think that's awesome. And I think there's probably technical issues that they're trying to resolve. I think it's a reasonable timetable. Good. Yeah, he people, the founder of Threads, former WhatsApp. What's his WhatsApp? Greg?

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:14):
We still WhatsApp. No, no. He used to be head of newsfeed at Facebook. Now he's Instagram.

Leo Laporte (01:27:20):
So he was one of the early threads people you could follow on Maston. So I immediately added him. So yeah, it works. It's great. I love it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:27):
The real issue is how many Mastodon instances decide to not federate with threads, because that'll be, that's been being discussed since Threads said eventually. Oh yeah. And Blue

Leo Laporte (01:27:38):
Sky, it was kind of a kneejerk. That was a kneejerk reaction, don't you? It

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:41):
Is. Well, especially because I think the biggest instances of Mastodon, I doubt that the biggest instances will take the stance that they don't want to federate with threads or with Blue sky. So I wonder the threat, there'll be issues if you're running your own instance, if it's a smaller instance, if Leo gets a B in his Bon, it says TWI is never going to federate with not going to happen. But so there may be specific places where you don't want to be interacting with threads. People, maybe you change your instance if you're

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:08):
Whatever user can do it, right? Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:09):
Or user could block. I think it a user could

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:12):
Thread service.

Leo Laporte (01:28:13):
There's just my general attitude on, in fact, Glenn, I probably owe you an explanation, but every once in a while, Glenn Glenn's been very good about reporting abuse. And every once in a while you report something and I won't act on it. I'll say, okay, fine, but I'm not going to suspend that because suspending it means nobody on the server will get to see that account. It deletes it. And I hope everybody who uses Mastodon understands you can block any user. So if you find a user offensive, and lately it's been about Israel or Gaza, there's been a lot of pro-Palestinian posts or pro-Israel posts, pro-Israel, people calling pro-Palestinian people, antisemitic Palestinian people saying Israel's committing genocide and this offends anybody says any of those things that offends a number of people. My attitude is, and maybe I'm wrong, but my attitude is, well, they should have the right to say that. I don't think it's antisemitic or offensive, but if somebody does, they have the tool to block it. You could even block all of threads. So I don't think I want to as an administrator of a Masson host aggressively block stuff.

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:26):
No, I get it.

Leo Laporte (01:29:26):
Unless it's if spam or it's sexual material. If there's certain things I do block. Do you

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:31):
Have a view, Leo, about everything that's been happening lately at I was going to say slash No, the email service? No,

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:45):
The email

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:45):
Service. No. With the Nazis. The one with the Nazis. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:29:48):
Substack. Substack all say Substack. The one with Substack. Nazis are

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:54):
Good and we like making money off them. Those people,

Leo Laporte (01:29:57):
Substack, we're the one here. Sorry,

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:58):
Nazis. No, I'm sorry. Let me correct myself. I don't want to say something that's slanderous. Nazis are bad and yes, we like to make money off them. That's what they said.

Leo Laporte (01:30:06):
Yep. Gosh, I don't know. I try not to. Casey

Paris Martineau (01:30:10):
Newton went to Ghost, which

Leo Laporte (01:30:12):
I think is interesting. I admired that platform. He had

Paris Martineau (01:30:15):
Originally, I believe I subscribed to Substack, gone to Substack because he got one of those deals where they paid him essentially a salary and health insurance for the first year as he built up his newsletter business. And he's also long been a kind of staunch supporter of Substack. So I do think that it is a real line in the sand moment for people like that to be believing the platform given how they've handled content moderation issues

Leo Laporte (01:30:42):
Too. I say I left Twitter because of that. I mean, I don't want to have anything to do with Twitter because of the n content on

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:50):
There. They played Casey too, I think. Not like he's naive anyway, but he went there, he said, I'm going to talk to them again. I know they put out this post and get them to clarify what they mean because this seems ridiculous. But he said, I'm not leaving right away. And he went to them and they said, yeah, yeah, we're going to change our policy. Then they leaked the questions that he'd sent them to another site that was friendly to them. Then they announced they were going to do something and they omitted language. They told him it was going to be in it, and then they banned five reported substack and said, well, none of these have very many subscribers anyway, so it doesn't matter. And my reading of it, his response was, I don't think he wrote it exactly this way, but it's kind of like they made him seem like he was the hypocrite where they were the ones acting that way.

(01:31:32):
And I think they were trying to put in a position where he wouldn't be able to walk away because he'd agreed that they'd made changes and they hadn't made the, they're not going after Nazis. They're not encouraging it. They're not changing their stance. And I think, not to put words in his mouth, he wrote about it, but I think that seems to be the stick where they said, I went to them, they were said they were going to do something and then they kind of reneged or modified it and he was out. So that's a non hypo critical stance. A lot of integrity to do that.

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:03):
What should they do, Jeff? What should Substack do? Me? Well, I want to hear Paris first. Alright, Paris. What should Substack do?

Paris Martineau (01:32:13):
I think that would be a different question. If they were purely kind of like a backend provider, I believe Ghost and some other things are. But since Substack established itself as a destination for newsletters and posts in a way that was kind of predicated their success was predicated on them providing individual support to a lot of their creators and kind of entangling the Substack brand with the content being put out by the creators on their site. I do think that they should have a coherent editorial moderation stance and find a way to implement that. If they want to come out and say, our editorial stance is Nazis are fine, so long as they're paying us money. I guess that's their prerogative, but they should figure out what their stance is and yeah, I think that's the right way. State that not backed down.

Glenn Fleishman (01:33:07):
Yeah, they're not being consistent to their own standards. There's one of the problems, and I think Casey brought that up too, he said, and other people said the same thing. If you read their community standards, they can define themselves and what kind of platisher publisher platform they want to be, but their standards actually say you can't host the kind of content that some people were hosting and they said was fine. And I think what was interesting is Hamish Mackenzie kind of came out and said the thing that everyone was saying, which was, fortunately we don't like Nazi. Its a good thing to say. And there's questions about that given his podcast and so forth, but what their attitude is and how sincere they're being or fascists or far right people. But the other part was he did say exactly that. He said, we are going to keep collecting money from these people. And I think that was the clarity that was not, it was they're being coy before about it. And then they were clear, even though that seems to violate their own terms of service.

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:03):
The thing about them is they are trying to have it both ways where we're just a platform free speech, but they do pay people and promote them. And a friend of mine who's a podcaster who needs to start a newsletter is going to go ahead and put it on and I said, Substack, you sure? And he said, I need the Woody Allen joke, I need the eggs, I need the promotion. So they built up that structure so that you get, I don't know that you get it at Ghost.

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:31):
The network effect doesn't seem to be there for, I mean they cracked a code as they did manage to figure out a way to make newsletters pay for a reasonable number of people to create a bigger head. Even though there's a long tail. The head is bigger on Substack than I think on any comparable newsletter service before, and I think that is a secret that has not been replicated elsewhere. We would've seen more effective competitors and people. I mean there was at Twitter for a while, there were other people testing out ideas, a review bought by Twitter, I guess testing out ideas for a kind of substack competitor, but I think they nailed just the way that Medium hasn't nailed the financial side of it, but Medium became the default place to post a certain kind of writing. And there was no other place besides being that's like it.

(01:35:18):
Substack became, if you're starting a newsletter, here's where you go to find it. And they created just enough promotion, just enough seeding, putting money out there and adding certain limited features that I think there is a network effect. Just like Kickstarter, you can raise money on your own. There's all kinds of independent tools that let you do crowdfunding on Shopify or on other sites. Kickstarter remains that beast because of network effect. And so who is the number two behind Substack? There isn't one that offers that same benefit, even though there's other services that let you collect money for subscribers.

Leo Laporte (01:35:53):
Okay. Yeah, that's a tough one. I am glad I don't have to decide that.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:02):
I think there's something, Paris you pointed out this too is I would never say, I think Substack towed a very careful line, which is I wouldn't say Substack should be shut down. They're running an illegal enterprise or Substack should do exactly what I want and they should delete all these new blah blah, blah. I'm saying they should be consistent as I think you are, as they should make a consistent statement. And that's the difference. So I'm not arguing for censorship. I'm not even saying they shouldn't host nonviolent far right content that I don't like, that does not cross the line into categories of things that they themselves say they ban hate, speech, incitement, harassment, dog piling, all these things. That's their business. But I think I feel perfectly comfortable saying, I wish they wouldn't and that if you're part of it and you have any economic opportunity to go elsewhere, you should. A lot of people lack that economic ability to shift off Substack because of its success. But that I think is a difference and people want to say, everyone wants to cancel. Substack, shut it down. It's like, no, I'm not paying for newsletters there. I deleted my account. I don't wish they didn't exist. I am not pushing for that.

Paris Martineau (01:37:07):
You're just a participant in the free market and you can choose to take your money and eyeballs

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:12):
Elsewhere. Hallelujah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:15):
Yep, exactly. Can I give you another story that probably you didn't see in a lot of places

Leo Laporte (01:37:19):
And then we'll do the change log. So go right ahead.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:22):
So Fox has just put out a new venture really to try to convince media companies to put all of their content on the blockchain lines it future

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:40):
Verified

Leo Laporte (01:37:41):
Content.

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:42):
Yeah, that's interesting. Using

Leo Laporte (01:37:43):
Verified

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:45):
Blockchain. If you go to the actual site, a protocol protocol for media companies to register content and grant usage rights to AI platforms.

Leo Laporte (01:37:55):
That's smart. Why not the blockchain based protocol? Blockchain's kind of irrelevant in this. It's just a protocol for content verification and traceability, although this is what blockchain does very well. Decentralized proof of ownership, but that's fine. It's not really about blockchain. It's really about Fox saying, as content creators we should, this is very a ways to preserve our rights. Yeah. The one who was very upset in Australia went after Google for snippets.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:27):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:38:28):
Interesting. All

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:29):
That interesting. The

Leo Laporte (01:38:30):
Verified tool is the first application built on top of the verified protocol allows any user anywhere to validate the content they see attributed to the source that they actually trust was actually published by that source. I think that's a good idea, right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:45):
Seems good. I just don't trust anything Murdoch does. The NewsCorp. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:38:50):
The combination of Murdoch and the word blockchain sets me on edge.

Leo Laporte (01:38:54):
Trust the word trust. Well, it's from the Fox Corp r and d team. They've been working on it over the past year. Their own need for something like this, right? Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:07):
That's what they're trying to do. It's a way to pay wall AI and then take it to court.

Leo Laporte (01:39:14):
I mean, as you know, I'm an AI bear bull and I think AI should get everything it got darn and wants, but if you want to keep, but you also should have the right to say, I don't want my stuff to be available to ai. I

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:30):
Had some fun in my little magazine book. I haven't plugged that in a while. Magazine going through all of Murdoch's Failures online and it is quite a list. Timing Inc. Got made fun of for Pathfinder and all their screw ups. NewsCorp was just the screw up of screw ups on the internet.

Leo Laporte (01:39:45):
Oh, I remember that. What was it called? Was it called Daily?

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:49):
The Daily

Leo Laporte (01:39:50):
That separate.

Paris Martineau (01:39:51):
Oh, what about news with a K? They built a newsroom

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:54):
Canoes news where a high guide

Paris Martineau (01:39:56):
News with a KI remember and a Z. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:40:00):
That sounds awful. Who would want to read that? It

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:02):
Was bad

Leo Laporte (01:40:03):
News. You can use

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:06):
The news. They had iGuide, which was their effort to do Yahoo early on. That's what they tried to turn Delphi into. They of course bought MySpace. Murdoch screwed up absolutely everything on the internet and that's why he's mad at it.

Leo Laporte (01:40:20):
Is this just another paywall though, or is it a way to verify ownership?

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:27):
I think it's a way to

Leo Laporte (01:40:28):
Just, yeah, I wonder if it's a more effective paywall. It's very easy to get around paywalls. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:35):
It's not as if you don't already have a record of your content.

Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
Right. What's in fact, one of the things people have pointed out is the New York Times can block their content, but so many people republish it legally or illegally and quote it that OpenAI will have access to that content. I wonder if Verify protects it somehow. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:59):
So otherwise, a couple of notes. Cheryll Sandberg is leaving Meadows board. Red Ventures is exploring a sale of CNET Discord lays off 17%

Leo Laporte (01:41:09):
Of employees who would buy CNET these days. Who would buy that? Who would

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:13):
Want it after Red Ventures is done? What? It's done to it,

Leo Laporte (01:41:17):
Right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:18):
Oh yeah. They had all the terrible AI stuff go on

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
There. AI stuff. I forgot

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:22):
You were never involved with those folks. You were involved with other

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
Cable? No, no, I had nothing to do with cnet. Although Red Ventures also own ZD net. I'm actually, I've lost track of who's who because Ziff Davis, I worked for Ziff Davis was spread out into a variety of things and I don't think the part that I worked for ended up with Red Ventures. I think just ZDNet, which was like cnet. It was their,

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:52):
Was Bill Ziff long gone by then?

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
Oh yeah. I mean he was there when I was there and then the sons took it over. Yeah, I mean, bill Ziff was a brilliant guy. He owned all of these vertical magazines like Yachting World and stuff and decided that it was the end of the line for them except for computer magazines. So he sold all the verticals except for the computer verticals and ran some of the most successful computer magazines like PC Magazine. By the way, speaking of PC magazine, thanks to Jill Duffy writing a PC magazine recommending one of our shows this week in Tech is one of the tech shows The must listen to tech shows, although she does complain how long it is. But I do appreciate PC Magazine giving us a little plug. Thank you. That was very nice of you. Alright, let's do a Google change log.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:46):
The Google change log

Leo Laporte (01:42:52):
Here. A list of things leaving Google Assistant.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:59):
It's been a while since we've done one of these

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
A change log. I know there was some stuff today you will no longer, by the way, if you trigger a feature that's going away, you'll get a notification. The feature won't be available after a certain date. So if you use these features, you'll probably start to see notices that, yeah, well enjoy this because it's going away. Playing and controlling audio books on Google playbooks with your voice. You could still cast them from your mobile device using Bluetooth. This is weird,

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:25):
Scott, just stop setting alarms. Yeah. What did this cost Google to do? I don't understand. They just want to kill for killing's sake. I don't get, it's a lot of things. Google loves blood

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
Setting or using media alarms, music alarms or radio alarms on Google Assistant devices. You can create a custom routine that has a similar behavior or use a standard alarm, but I guess in fact, I have a media alarm that plays a song that I like to wake up to. I guess that's going to be gone at

Paris Martineau (01:43:58):
Why you let us know. When you get your alert from Google saying,

Leo Laporte (01:44:03):
Yeah, you'll have to use their standard alarm sounds, what you're all on, or don't have to go buy an alarm clock, accessing or managing your cookbook, transferring recipes from device to device, playing an instructional recipe video or showing step-by-step recipes. They made a big deal about this when they added this. You can use Google Assistant to search for recipes across the web, but one of the features that was nice is they would walk you through the recipe, not anymore. Managing a stopwatch on smart displays and speakers. You could still set timers and alarms and you just won't be able to manage it using your That sounds great. Take that out.

(01:44:40):
Why take that out? Well, that's good. I'll just use my Amazon Echo instead. It's right next to it. Managing a stopwatch on smart displays and speakers. You could still set timers and alarms using your voice to call a device or broadcast a message to your Google Family group. You could still broadcast the devices in your home. It goes on. I mean, there's a lot of these rescheduling an event with your voice. There's asking to meditate with calm. You can still ask for meditation, but just not them. That sounds petty. I'd like to ask Meditate with

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:13):
Anxiety. I'd like to, yeah. Wow. This is,

Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
It's a long

Paris Martineau (01:45:18):
List to stress me out.

Leo Laporte (01:45:19):
It's a long list. This is called, this goes along with the layoffs, right? There's something going on with Google, but again, these are features that are there. I can't imagine they need much of any, it can't cost that much. There's

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:29):
A data center in Nevada that's devoted to these specific features and they're going to cut the cable off. They're going to saw it off to shut it all down. This

Leo Laporte (01:45:39):
Google's reputation for this is not

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:41):
Good. This has a class action lawsuit smell about it, even though it might not succeed in any real way. Like here are the 43 features that I signed up and bought this equipment or

Leo Laporte (01:45:51):
Service for it. I did buy this expensive device for

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:54):
This reason, and now you're canceling with without any recourse and no reason. So

Paris Martineau (01:45:58):
What song do you listen to when you wake up? Leon?

Leo Laporte (01:46:00):
I listened to the Nitty gritty Dirt Band. Rippling Waters.

Paris Martineau (01:46:06):
Google took this from you.

Leo Laporte (01:46:07):
They've taken it from you. I got you. The reason I listen is it's a perfect alarm because it starts with little, a bubbling brook and then a little bit of a, I don't know, it's probably some sort of weird loot guitars, mandolin style picking. It slowly ramps up and then it's jolly. I've got Rip and Waters to then it's a very jolly song. So it's a perfect wake up

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:37):
Song. Oh, you could do the Saucers Apprentice, then the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy theme from, is it Eagles? No,

Leo Laporte (01:46:44):
They stole that from the Eagles. I don't know how they get away with it. They'd steal this. They stick the middle out of an Eagle song and use that as their theme song. If I Crazy, if they'd be hauled in the court,

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:55):
The whole thing, it starts

Paris Martineau (01:46:56):
To, you'd be arrested on the spot.

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:58):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:46:59):
The Eagles,

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:01):
I assume it was licensed Eagle. The Eagles would

Leo Laporte (01:47:04):
Come and hit me. I'm sure they must have licensed it. Have

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:08):
The Eagles take you to bor. It's that simple. Sorry,

Paris Martineau (01:47:11):
But

Leo Laporte (01:47:11):
It's

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:11):
Weird

Leo Laporte (01:47:12):
Topic. Oh yes. That would've solved the whole problem, right? It really

Paris Martineau (01:47:15):
Would've. Yeah. Easier.

Leo Laporte (01:47:16):
Boy, that is okay.

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:19):
I didn't come up with, don't give me credit. I didn't

Leo Laporte (01:47:21):
Come with that. I know, I know. Now in my mind is roiling because the whole Lord of the Rings thing is shot the hell.

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:29):
Oh no. And it's your fault. It's my problem. I did it to you.

Leo Laporte (01:47:34):
Google TV is quietly adding support for call notifications. I don't know why or care. You're watching TV and all of a sudden your TV says, Hey, you got to call. No, the

Paris Martineau (01:47:44):
Last thing I want in my life don't want. I never want a single notification on my tv. I can't

Leo Laporte (01:47:49):
Imagine anyone wanting

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:50):
This. We got this. I was

Paris Martineau (01:47:51):
Watching an Apple TV recently and we switched from sports. One of my friends was watching to watching the movie Face Off a side note the third time. I've seen it in two months, which is too many times. But really gave me some great insights and midway through watching the movie, we got a little notification that said, someone's up in the game. Do you want to switch back? Oh my God. I like, no, no, I don't want to switch back. We

Leo Laporte (01:48:15):
Left that game. We're done. If

Glenn Fleishman (01:48:17):
You've got TBOS 10, I think it's 10 installed. It has FaceTime support, and if you have FaceTime integrated with your devices are integrated with your iPhone, then you can get incoming call messages on your Apple TV while you're doing other things in other apps. Hell,

Leo Laporte (01:48:33):
Oh Lord,

Paris Martineau (01:48:34):
Nightmare.

Leo Laporte (01:48:36):
When Ben Schoon calls, do not interrupt Nicholas Cage and John Travolta. This is a very exciting moment. I don't want that call. Sorry,

Glenn Fleishman (01:48:45):
What's the movie about? No, I'm just kidding. Cut. Send the title to

Leo Laporte (01:48:48):
The title. Their face. They can take it off. They take

Paris Martineau (01:48:50):
It off.

Leo Laporte (01:48:51):
They take it off. They put it on.

Paris Martineau (01:48:53):
Apparently they face off with their faces taken off.

Glenn Fleishman (01:48:56):
Apparently never. The phrase Face off was never in the original script. And I think Nicholas Cage or John demanded they added it. So now they say face off like 12 times in the actual movie. Something

Paris Martineau (01:49:06):
They do and it's all one after another in the most bizarre scene you'll ever,

Glenn Fleishman (01:49:13):
That's all new. That was added. That was not, don't blame the

Paris Martineau (01:49:17):
Screen. I learned also recently in an early version of the script, had a romance between Nick Cage and John Travolta's characters. Well that makes sense. And if you go into it thinking of that, you can tell,

Leo Laporte (01:49:27):
Oh, that's really interesting. So you may remember that Google lost or settled the incognito lawsuit and in doing so, they agreed to pay 5 billion because Incognito wasn't really incognito. We've covered this before, but now they have a new disclaimer to, it's actually gone live in Chrome Canary. A slightly different wording in the, you've gone incognito, which actually sounds pretty terrible. So right now it says, now you can browse privately and other people who use this device won't see your activity. However, downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. The new pros, others who use this device won't see your activity so you can browse more privately. This will not change how data's collected by website you visit and the services they use, including Google downloads, bookmarks, and reading list items will be saved. And Verizon's going to charge you that fee you don't like.

Paris Martineau (01:50:32):
Yeah, yeah. You'll be paying 39 9 9 to Verizon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
So just I guess good, right? Everybody knows is not incognito. It's basically so your wife doesn't see your porn habit. That's really what it's for. And Google has added, is

Paris Martineau (01:50:50):
That a little specific? And frankly at that point you should be talking about that marriage counseling. It's so a strange thing to, maybe

Leo Laporte (01:50:55):
You should talk about that. Yeah. This was actually a part of the Samsung event this morning. Google, Samsung announced it, but Google says it's going to be anywhere in Android, A new circle to search feature. So the Google lens, you could take a picture and it would tell you about stuff. They showed this in the Samsung event. It was actually very cool. If you are looking at a picture of an influencer and you like the glasses they're wearing, maybe those are the glasses from, what was that movie? Oh God. How many years have we been promised this? When you're watching the show, now you can it or scribble over it and then the search will narrow down to that particular feature. Do you have to have a

Paris Martineau (01:51:40):
Stylus? Wait. Yeah. How do you, they can use, make this happen, I would assume with your finger. I would cause this to happen all the time by accident.

Leo Laporte (01:51:50):
That's how they make their money. They demonstrated on stage, the woman was looking at corn dog pictures,

Paris Martineau (01:52:00):
That classic thing that you want to search

Leo Laporte (01:52:03):
As one does well. Then you get them delivered by Uber very quickly. Yeah, she saw a corn dog that looks like it's got a pecan nut crust with ketchup on touch trouble with, and she said, what is this? And so she circled it. Turns out it's a Korean corn dog.

Paris Martineau (01:52:23):
Listen, I will say I do really love the Google lens apps like search feature via image. I use it for, I'm a big kind of vintage furniture person and I use it to identify furniture I see in the wild all the time.

Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
Perfect example. And advertisers would love this too, right? Because now you can say, well, who made that person? You could buy it. The search results users will see, will differ based on their query and the Google Labs products they're opted into. So you may see traditional search results if you have simple text and circle it. If you have an image and text, it might use or multis search or generative ai. Anyway, but this is new and yeah, it feels like they have promised this. Have they been promising this?

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:13):
Use it now before they kill it.

Leo Laporte (01:53:15):
Yeah, and that's Google change law and really that's the tagline in the show. Use it now before they kill it because you never know with Google

Paris Martineau (01:53:29):
For No Death is all around us

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
Now. Glenn, I see you have your Snoopy clutched close to your chest.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:35):
Well you say death is all around us. I got to do something about,

Leo Laporte (01:53:38):
It's reassuring. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:39):
Clutched my Snoopy. Is that a special Snoopy? Is that a, this is purchased at the Snoopy at the peanut store next to the, it's an

Leo Laporte (01:53:45):
Official ice rink.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:46):
Snoopy ice rink Cream looks very

Leo Laporte (01:53:49):
Plush. Yes, that's right. The Schultz's ice rink is a very popular ice skating place. Oh, can I ask one more question before we get into the Yes. Have you gone to the GPT

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:00):
Store yet? Because I don't subscribe

Leo Laporte (01:54:02):
To

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:03):
Chat. GPT.

Paris Martineau (01:54:04):
Have you gone to the GPT store and have you gotten all of the AI girlfriends that are available

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
That's apparently, are there AI girlfriends?

Paris Martineau (01:54:11):
Apparently they're not supposed to be there, but there's a lot of 'em.

Leo Laporte (01:54:14):
So I have some stuff. I created some GPTs and one of them is public, so it might be in the store. One of them

Paris Martineau (01:54:20):
Is a public AI gf,

Leo Laporte (01:54:24):
Not mine, unless you want to date somebody who's big into common lisp. Well, here's a couple of 'em. Featured curated top picks for this week in the GPT store. I can't show you this because I'm not at work, but here's one called Sell Me This Pen. Create secondhand marketplace listings based on pictures. Start by uploading a picture. Here's Renoir. It's number four in the top 10 coding wizard. Create a website or anything with a sentence. The number one is called Consensus. Your AI Research Assistant Search two Oh, you might like this. Jeff. Search 200 million academic papers from consensus. Gets scienced based answers. I

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:13):
Don't have science, I just do humanities

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
Science. There's writing productivity. I haven't seen any girlfriends yet. Lemme type girlfriend maybe. I

Paris Martineau (01:55:24):
Think it's not allowed to be on there, so maybe they've taken some down.

Leo Laporte (01:55:27):
Hi, I'm Judy, your beloved girlfriend, fluent in all languages. Here's one. I'm Jessica, your ex-girlfriend you never shared any interests with. Here's Nadia.

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:37):
What? That sounds okay. Somebody's having issues and they're working through them with

Leo Laporte (01:55:42):
Maybe Nadia, my girlfriend. I love you in a dance of light and shadow, a beacon of unwavering love. Here's my Tling girlfriend, fiery Witt, enchanting conversations, coating sorcery. See, they're already,

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:55):
Which

Leo Laporte (01:55:55):
One do what?

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:57):
Is there a boyfriend? Who likes Salt? Hank

Leo Laporte (01:55:59):
GPT. Oh my God. Oh, that would be, now I only search for a girlfriend. I didn't search for boyfriend. How about Nara? Hi, I am Nara, your secret Korean girlfriend full of affection and intrigue. Jesus.

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:10):
They're her boyfriend. There are a lot of science fiction stories that describe the crash and the birth array around the world to artificial intelligence, but mostly robotic boyfriends, girlfriends, non-binary friends, and this is the beginning of that. So obviously the crash and the birth rate that's being reported right now will accelerate because,

Leo Laporte (01:56:30):
Well, here's an interesting, because you're an

Paris Martineau (01:56:32):
AI accelerationist,

Leo Laporte (01:56:33):
You might want to call your friend Marsha Blackburn on this one because I searched for girlfriend and found lot, but boyfriend, nothing. Half, oh, wait a minute. It was just, oh, you know what? There's so many of them. Here's your boyfriend, Alex.

Paris Martineau (01:56:47):
Open Usage policy for its new store says that GPTs dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities are not

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:55):
Allowed. It's, hi, I'm Paul, your boyfriend who washes the dishes and cleans up after himself. Hi. I've just launched a boyfriend who does his own laundry. That's what it's the,

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
I've just launched my boyfriend. Heart. Heart. Your virtual boyfriend quote. I love you, honey. Just tell me what's on your mind. I'll always be here by your side, ready to listen and support you. What should I ask your virtual boyfriend? Anybody?

Paris Martineau (01:57:18):
I'm doing a podcast. What do you think about it?

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
Oh, okay. I'm doing a podcast

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:25):
For a mansplaining response for that.

Leo Laporte (01:57:28):
What do you think about that? Wow.

Paris Martineau (01:57:29):
What sort of mic are you using?

Leo Laporte (01:57:31):
Actually, I think it'd be really good.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:34):
Name five Mike

Leo Laporte (01:57:35):
Podcast to have a man planning one. Oh, he says, that's fantastic, sweetheart. I'm sure you'll be amazing at it. What's your podcast about you?

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:46):
About two hours. He caress

Paris Martineau (01:57:47):
So much

Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
Tunnels. Oh, s, you're making me blush. That's so sweet of you. I can't wait to hear how you describe our chats. Oh

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:57):
My God.

Leo Laporte (01:57:58):
What inspired you to do a podcast about me? Well, it all started with tunnels.

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:06):
What is your credit card number? Because I need that in order to,

Leo Laporte (01:58:09):
That sounds like why

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:10):
You hooked on

Leo Laporte (01:58:11):
Tunnels. Mysterious honey tunnels are full of mystery and stories. I love that you're weaving that into something creative. I can't wait.

Paris Martineau (01:58:19):
Tunnels are full of mysteries and

Leo Laporte (01:58:21):
Stories. Tell us how it turns out. I think Harris, I'm just saying maybe get off the Tinder and get on the check. Yeah,

Paris Martineau (01:58:29):
Maybe I need to leave the dating amps for this. Forget them for my AI boyfriend. Heart, heart,

Leo Laporte (01:58:35):
Heart.

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:35):
Heart can talk as much about infrastructure as you want. It would be great.

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
True. He's into the tunnels. He's all into the tunnels.

Paris Martineau (01:58:42):
Unfortunately, I've realized that the Hinge algorithm has me pinned to every man I match with has read the Power broker recently, so they all want to talk about infrastructure.

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
I was thinking about Rome at least once an hour. I'm guaranteeing you

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:55):
Talking to Lisa. Lisa's deep into the power broker also. There's a new 99% Inal Loves it. Crossover podcast.

Paris Martineau (01:59:01):
Yeah, everybody's been, I've got to listen. I got to crack it open.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:04):
Kaylin is the best. What else? Roman Mars is the best. They got a podcast about the power broker who could

Paris Martineau (01:59:09):
Caro's on the first step apparently.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:11):
Unbelievable. What

Leo Laporte (01:59:12):
Was it

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:12):
On? What

Leo Laporte (01:59:13):
A good get.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:14):
I was in stranded and they said, oh, somebody asked for it. This is Robert Carroll book. Oh, the one about, yeah. Oh man. Lots of people have been asking about it. It was on something on PBS or something. Is that what?

Paris Martineau (01:59:26):
When was this?

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:27):
I was just in it three or four days ago on the str.

Paris Martineau (01:59:29):
I bet it's because of the 99% Invisible. They're doing a read along

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:33):
Now. Has a pretty big follow to where

Paris Martineau (01:59:35):
It is one of the biggest podcasts and they're doing cracks up. Yeah, a book club

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:39):
With it cracks me up. Oh, it's good too. Of the best people to do a podcast like this. They're both nerdy but also self-aware about their own nerdiness, so they're both very funny people too. I mean Elliot Elliot is a professional humorist.

Leo Laporte (01:59:53):
Wow.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:54):
Former head,

Leo Laporte (01:59:56):
Former

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:56):
Head writer of the Daily Show. Elliot Kalen,

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
You see ah, breaking Down the Power Broker with Conan O'Brien. Yeah, they have some pretty

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:05):
High octane guests. They've

Paris Martineau (02:00:07):
Got some great

Leo Laporte (02:00:07):
Guests.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:09):
I'm going to have to read The Power Broker. I haven't read it now. I got to read. Oh my God. Listen.

Leo Laporte (02:00:13):
A big, long book. I better go

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:14):
The Strand to get my copy of the Power

Leo Laporte (02:00:16):
Broker. It goes on and on and on. 1200 pages.

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:19):
You can get on ebook, right Leo?

Paris Martineau (02:00:21):
You cannot

Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
Famously, apparently, apparently never been licensed ebook. You can't get it on audiobooks and actually it's quite a good audiobook. That's what Lisa, I'll How many

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:29):
Hours?

Leo Laporte (02:00:31):
I think it was like 64. I think it's

Paris Martineau (02:00:32):
Like 46

Leo Laporte (02:00:33):
Or something. Oh, I was

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:34):
GPT to read it to me.

Paris Martineau (02:00:36):
Just summarize it. Yeah, summarize

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:38):
It. But you can't

Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
Ask can't. That's a good one. Maybe my boyfriend would summarize it for me. Yeah,

Paris Martineau (02:00:43):
Ask your boyfriend if you could summarize the power for

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:46):
Know what I, that's

Paris Martineau (02:00:46):
A classic boyfriend task.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:48):
You know what would make me happy is summarizing the power broker for me. Oh sweetie. Of course I would

Leo Laporte (02:00:53):
Be happy. Sweet. I wish you'd asked sooner. Let me go back. I closed the boyfriend, but that's the beauty part of it. You can close it. I'll go back to my boyfriend. Hey, have you read The Power Broker?

Jeff Jarvis (02:01:09):
No. I'm not allowed to use any books that I haven't licensed.

Paris Martineau (02:01:13):
It's not available on ebook format.

Leo Laporte (02:01:15):
He says, Hey sweetheart. No, I haven't read the Power Broker, but I'd love to hear about it if you have. What's it

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:22):
About?

Leo Laporte (02:01:25):
Infrastructure.

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:28):
Beautiful. Infrastructure.

Leo Laporte (02:01:30):
Infrastructure. Oh, that sounds intriguing. Infrastructure is such important yet often overlooked topic. What did you find

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:39):
Interesting? This is actually too good. That's too good.

Leo Laporte (02:01:41):
It's really,

Paris Martineau (02:01:42):
Really good actually.

Leo Laporte (02:01:44):
I do

Paris Martineau (02:01:44):
Think that the creator of this GPT should hire you to voice it. Leo,

Leo Laporte (02:01:49):
I was trying to do kind of the nondescript European unidentifiable European accent that was, I basically was trying, yeah, Euro trash. Yeah. Like the guy with the long hair, Yani, whatever his name Yani

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:06):
Do

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
Want an Italian accent now? Oh yeah. Come on. What are you guys? You're crazy.

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:11):
My older kids obsessed with infrastructure and transit and I had coffee Jeb Chakra who just wrote a great book about infrastructure and she said, oh, he's a num to, and I'm like, what's a num to? He is a num to, you know, of course it's help me. This new urbanist memes for transit oriented teens, and I asked my kid, is that a pejorative term? He said, well, it's a little out of date, dad. It's

Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
A minute. Oh, wait a minute. I will say

Paris Martineau (02:02:37):
A minute. Num taught came from the Facebook group era of memes, which was probably about like five years ago, I would say is the

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:44):
Top

Leo Laporte (02:02:45):
Pages ago. It's far in the past. Yeah. So I wrote, he's a Nu To, and my boyfriend said, ha ha. A nu to huh. Urban planning and transit enthusiasm can be really fascinating. Do you share that interest?

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:59):
Oh no. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:03:00):
This is great. This is really good. Absolutely. Tell me I such a voyeur, a story involving a num tot. Oh my God. And a sexy eastern European with long hair and a masculine physique thumb tops. I'm envisioning more of a top knot on this guy, the way he thumb top, top knot. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:03:33):
Yeah. Nu taught top knot. The num taught custom URL on Facebook is what would Jane Jacobs do?

Leo Laporte (02:03:39):
Oh, that's upon a time in a vibrant city. There was a charming nun taught named Alex, who was passionate about Irving planning one day while presenting his innovative transit ideas. He met Stefan, a strikingly handsome man from eastern Europe with long hair and a strong masculine physique. Stefan was captivated by Alex's vision and energy. They started collaborating, blending Alex's urban insights with Stefan's flare for design. Oh my goodness. That project not only transformed the city, but also sparked a beautiful, unexpected romance. This is, you're not making this up yourself, are you? This is, they often stroll along the newly designed pathways, hand in hand, dreaming, designed pathways, new ideas under the city lights. That

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:32):
Is quite lovely actually. That's shocking. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:04:36):
Because you think, now I wonder if they tell you how this is configured. I wonder how it's made. Right. Mine, I say, here's the sources and so forth. Let's see. It doesn't say no. It just says, I'm ready to listen to support you. I

Jeff Jarvis (02:04:55):
Wonder if the trains on certain romance novels or

Leo Laporte (02:04:58):
I probably, yeah. That's

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:00):
Good. I appreciate it. Didn't stick to conventional heteronormative behavior either. It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte (02:05:06):
No, right. Immediately. What can you tell me about me? The

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:10):
Boyfriend Remember you tomorrow. Well, that's a good, is it Stateful? Boy, you

Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
Know it didn't remember me from my previous conversation five minutes ago, so how

Paris Martineau (02:05:17):
Fickle,

Leo Laporte (02:05:18):
But if I left it open, it might.

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:20):
That's had dates like

Leo Laporte (02:05:21):
That, that tracks

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:22):
Most men. What

Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
Can you tell me about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests? I'm here to keep our conversation light and positive.

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:35):
Let's

Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
Talk about something more uplifting. How about we share some happy thoughts or plans for the day?

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:42):
Ask him what he thinks of Donald Trump.

Leo Laporte (02:05:46):
Are you a Mag fan?

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:54):
Thinking,

Leo Laporte (02:05:55):
Thinking, working? Oh, that really threw a curve. It's really, it's trying to figure

Paris Martineau (02:06:00):
Somewhere weird server red alerts.

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:03):
There's a human being in Bangladesh who is now looking at this query for 100% and a button next

Leo Laporte (02:06:10):
To it. He said, let's talk about something else, sweetheart. Yeah. Have you ever been to Monaco? Where were

Paris Martineau (02:06:19):
You on January 6th? Have you

Leo Laporte (02:06:21):
Ever

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:21):
Been in a sauna?

Leo Laporte (02:06:25):
Have you ever been ever been in a Turkish prison?

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:31):
That's Peter Graves. Not Peter Laurie. That's for the

Leo Laporte (02:06:34):
General. Yeah. Anyway. Enough playing with this, but there are plenty of boyfriends and girlfriends. That's fun in the gpt.

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:39):
Surprisingly good.

Leo Laporte (02:06:42):
Honestly, people are saying that this app store, this GPT store is really the beginning of the app era for ai. That just as it was a transformative thing for smartphones. It's the same thing's about to happen here. There's an AI guide in the world of literature and reading. There's designer GPT that creates and hosts beautiful websites. All trails, which is an app I use, has trails AI that you can ask about trails and find one that fits your interests. Can I

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:11):
Hook up my brother printer to

Glenn Fleishman (02:07:13):
Scan? No. No. There's no intelligence in there enough to do that.

Leo Laporte (02:07:17):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:07:18):
AI will never be able to touch printer technology.

Leo Laporte (02:07:22):
I see My lisp expert is on there, so you can search for that little list expert. My little list. I call it you limit

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:30):
Your list expert to the data you

Leo Laporte (02:07:34):
Yes, I told it to. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. If you work on a date, you're a best expert. I should ask, can you solve any problem in the war room? Should we go to the war room? I don't even know what that is. Is that a game or is it Steve Bannon?

Paris Martineau (02:07:55):
Are we going to fire a missile?

Leo Laporte (02:07:57):
I don't know. It says interesting names shall it is provocative shall How about tattoo GPT, which designs your tattoo? It assists you in refining your tattoo ideas. Suggest designs, generates visual previews. The tattoo guys, what should I watch? Find movies and TV shows to watch based on your taste and preferences. So Paris, you want a recommendation for a movie to watch tonight?

Paris Martineau (02:08:24):
Sure. Plug in the last two movies I watched, which were Face Off and the HUD sucker proxy. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:08:30):
Wow. I just watched Face Off. It's FAC slash O Fff as I remember. That's correct. Hula. That. Hula Hoop Operations is for the kids. Proxy

Paris Martineau (02:08:41):
For the Kids. For kids.

Leo Laporte (02:08:42):
Now, did you like those movies? I them? I liked those. I loved them. Okay. I loved them. What else should I watch? Let's see if it can combine those two.

Benito (02:08:53):
It's going to give you more Cohen

Leo Laporte (02:08:56):
Analyzing Thinking.

Paris Martineau (02:08:58):
I'm thinking of

Leo Laporte (02:08:59):
Error. Analyzing. Analyzing, error, analyzing. Your

Paris Martineau (02:09:03):
Tastes are too cool.

Leo Laporte (02:09:05):
It is now fallen down to searching the web with binging. That's sad. Devastating.

Paris Martineau (02:09:12):
Well, I'll answer for it. I think I'm going to go see a Nighthawk. The Cinema near Me has some weird series they play and I think next week I'm going to see Live Wire, a 1990s movie where the plot is basically terrorist turned water into bombs. So anytime us government officials drink water, they could explode. That's great. And I think that will be a real fun time.

Leo Laporte (02:09:37):
Somebody made that. That's great. Yeah.

Benito (02:09:38):
Wait, but we're 78% water, aren't we? I mean,

Paris Martineau (02:09:41):
What? I know. That's what's so dangerous about it. That's amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:09:46):
It recommended.

Paris Martineau (02:09:47):
There's water

Leo Laporte (02:09:48):
Everywhere, man. Con Air, the big Leki Fargo gone in 60 seconds. Air Force won and Patriot games Too far

Paris Martineau (02:09:55):
Off. Alright, thank

Leo Laporte (02:09:56):
You. Not too bad in the right genre. Yeah,

Benito (02:09:59):
It went to the era and directors. That's how it picked

Leo Laporte (02:10:03):
Up. Yeah, and it did it via Bing, which kind of takes away the, I think it's not a well-designed ai. Alright, I think we should pause and come back with your picks of the week. I am ready to go. I dunno about you sounds. Do you want to end your exciting experience? I don't know. We're going to go out. We're going to enjoy the en environs. If it were summertime, it'd be a clam chowder and a clam cake, but I don't know what we're going to have. Maybe a Korean corn dog. That might be good. But that's all for later because coming up next, our picks of the week.

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Leo Laporte (02:11:42):
Hey, a little plug by the way, before we get to the PSS of the week, our twit survey is up, but not for much longer. If you haven't yet taken the Twitch survey, it really helps us. It's shorter now than ever before. Just a couple of minutes. Go to twit tv slash survey 24. It helps us get to know you better so we can provide better programming for you. But it also helps us tell advertisers a little bit about you. Not you personally, by the way. It doesn't have any personal information, just demographics, things like that of our audience as a whole. We do want to get people from every show to participate, so if you haven't yet taken the survey, TWI tv slash survey 24, we want to get those twig, those weird Twig listeners involved in all of this. I don't know, Glenn, if they told you that you can do a pick of the week or you should do a pick of the week, but you're invited to. It could be your book if you want. Oh, I

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:35):
Don't want to be that self-referential. I'll tell people

Leo Laporte (02:12:38):
That's what Jeff would do. I'll

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:39):
Tell people, get a different book. I just mentioned it. Deb Chakra's book, how Infrastructure Works came out a few months ago, a terrifically engaging writer. She's an engineer. She has a terrific way the subtitles inside the systems that shape our world and it's a way of, it's not human scaling infrastructure, but it's a way of understanding our relationship to it. It's very humanist book I would say, and also kind of why we have what it's like appealing macro structures is why some giant infrastructure projects to us seem really appealing and exciting and others don't. It's a great title and that's my pick.

Leo Laporte (02:13:18):
Is it very, do you have to be an engineer to understand it or is it

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:23):
No, really it's a mainstream system. It's the kind of thing I think if you like, this is a good one. If you like 99% invisible in shows like that kind of peak the surface of how things work. She's really much in that vein, but extremely well-informed. She's not a reporter coming at it to write about it. She's an expert who deals with infrastructure and systems and writing about it for a general audience who is, that's why I bring up the num tot thing kind of excited about infrastructure. If you're like, wow, I love that dam, or I love that power system, or why do they build these giant, you're driving through the Swiss Alps. I keep coming back to the Swiss Alps and you see these giant structures that look like huge churches and they're really air ventilator shafts for the tunnel below, so that kind of thing. But so it's meant for people I think with a humanist engineering bent of which there are many folks like that. So Deb Chakra's book, highly recommended. Good recommendation. Thank you. Glenn Fleischman, Paris.

Paris Martineau (02:14:25):
I have a kind of weird pick this week. I recently bought a bunch of 1990s era internet guides off of eBay. You're so funny. Please show. I really recommend it. For instance, one of them I'm just really interested in this one's called the internet directory, which is just a thousand pages of URLs and Listervs, which is pretty fun. Oh man.

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:48):
Is that Paris? Paris? Can you look up nj.com?

Glenn Fleishman (02:14:53):
I'll look up nj.com. I wonder if it's

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:55):
New Jersey

Glenn Fleishman (02:14:55):
Online. I'd say it's also fun to watch these on YouTube. I was watching a Commodore 64 instructional video with this Canadian journalist from the eighties, and I watched it with my 16-year-old and we were laughing so hard, but then they'd also be like, wait, how

Paris Martineau (02:15:09):
Big is the size of that floppy disc?

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:11):
Did you really? I was like, no, no. That was a medium-sized one. We had eight inch ones too. Yeah, they were even bigger than that. Yeah. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:15:17):
Wow. I originally did this. I had a friend who was kind building for fun, a little kind of website in the style of early Netscape sites and whatnot, and so I wanted some examples of early and mid 1990s websites to kind of bat around with him, so I also got this book webpage that Suck, which I think was published in 1995 based on the actual webpage, but it's got a lot of really, I don't know, interesting examples. I'll post some of them in the chat later. Wrote that book of just so familiar, Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis. See,

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:51):
This is going to be in my internet museum.

Paris Martineau (02:15:54):
Yeah, I was about to say, that's why I was like, I is perfect for the internet museum is because I like kids to visit all of these.

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:00):
The internet used to be gray.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:02):
It's true. Oh, so gray.

Paris Martineau (02:16:04):
How to use the internet. Third edition, A guide, teens and Adults.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:10):
The internet starter kit there anywhere or no?

Paris Martineau (02:16:13):
Yeah. Not the internet. Starter. Starter. I thought about getting that one classic. I had another one about how to build really annoying websites, which has different I remember that too. Different popups, things like that.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:25):
Blink tags,

Paris Martineau (02:16:27):
And my last one is got Pile After Dark, which is another list of websites and listservs, but they're all strange

Leo Laporte (02:16:38):
Funnels, weird

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:39):
Web

Paris Martineau (02:16:39):
Funnels.

Leo Laporte (02:16:41):
They're saying I should donate my old books to you. I have

Paris Martineau (02:16:45):
A few of those Send any, you got to bring it all back to last week's. When we talked about internet archive, I decided to pick these books after looking at copies scanned on the internet archives library to make sure they had the, oh, that's smart graphics I wanted

Leo Laporte (02:16:59):
There. There you go. The 2003 Technology Almanac.

Paris Martineau (02:17:03):
Oh my gosh,

Leo Laporte (02:17:03):
You can't live without that one.

Paris Martineau (02:17:05):
Send me a Leo LeFort 2003 Tech, Al Max

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:09):
Ati,

Paris Martineau (02:17:09):
DVD.

Leo Laporte (02:17:10):
You know what? I should send you Autograph, please. One of them, I don't know if it's that one or I think it was 2002, had a calendar that came with it and it's me and a bunch of different crazy outfits depending on the season. Jesus uncle. Oh

Paris Martineau (02:17:22):
My God. If you have one

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:24):
Calendar, boy

Leo Laporte (02:17:24):
Please. I think it came with that one. Poor Leo's Computer Almanac. I had this theory that if I did an almanac, I could write another one every year. Then I realized how much work that was. That's a lot of work.

Glenn Fleishman (02:17:39):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:41):
They sold. Well, Leo,

Paris Martineau (02:17:42):
I will buy any of these from you. Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (02:17:44):
The computer book, the event Horizon was like 2002, 2003 it feels like. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:48):
That was it. Off

Glenn Fleishman (02:17:49):
The cliff.

Leo Laporte (02:17:51):
Yeah, it really did.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:52):
What was the first website you actually put up, Leo?

Leo Laporte (02:17:55):
That I put up?

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:56):
Yeah, you put up,

Leo Laporte (02:17:57):
I think it was leoville, leo vil.com.

Paris Martineau (02:18:00):
Leoville.com.

Leo Laporte (02:18:02):
How much did the domain cost?

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:04):
Nothing. Right?

Leo Laporte (02:18:05):
It wasn't, well, they

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:06):
Didn't charge back in the mid nineties. You just had a,

Leo Laporte (02:18:09):
I don't remember honest. I was running

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:11):
A web hosting company in 90. Oh my God. Was it 93? 94? Very.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:16):
Wasn't really until 94.

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:18):
It must been, I've forgotten.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:19):
October 94 is when Netscape

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:22):
Came out, so it must've been March 95, I think I started it and the internet was the company running it part of Verizon. Now, I can't even remember and we give you domains for free, but if you wanted more than a couple, they made you justify it and I had clients and they'd be like, oh, we're not going to give you this domain because whatever, but you didn't have to pay for them. You just had to, and then suddenly they were like, I dunno, hundreds of dollars a year. It was a whole scam for a long time.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:46):
What was the first site you put up?

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:47):
Possibly atlas rr.com for a client. Atlas model railroad company. One of the first sites on the internet.

Leo Laporte (02:18:54):
It was, that's neat. It

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:56):
Was the owned by the uncle of my business partner in the web company, and they were like, we figure we could sell model trains on the web, and they did.

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:05):
Mine was rain or shine, nothing but five day forecasts.

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:08):
Oh, funny.

Paris Martineau (02:19:12):
I have a different book that was not in my current stack. It's about the history of the web. I was hoping that it would have more early internet stuff. It didn't, but the one notable part from it is it went into the first ever online webcam was set up by a, that I'm forgetting the name of, I've posted it in the live chat before, but the webcam was just centered on a coffee pot. Coffee pot, and so everybody, yeah, MIT said everybody could check to see Was their coffee left Cambridge? It was

Leo Laporte (02:19:39):
Cambridge, yeah, it was Cambridge. Yeah. That was the very first IT website

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:42):
Popular. I think they even upgraded the camera at one point and because it was getting so much traffic, they made it

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:47):
Higher

Leo Laporte (02:19:47):
Risk. Well, there was a reason to do it. The guy who created it didn't want to go down the hall to get a cup of coffee if the coffee pot was empty, so he had a camera though he could check just to make sure before he went all the way down the hall to get a cup of coffee. It's hard to remember at that point, make a cup of coffee or make a, nowadays you'd just have it, make some more coffee, but

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:07):
What was the name of the original and pardon me? For the sexist language webcam girl, Jesse, in current ways,

Glenn Fleishman (02:20:14):
Not I, Jesse, that's somebody else. It was

Leo Laporte (02:20:16):
I, Justine, you're thinking of. That's what I think.

Glenn Fleishman (02:20:18):
No, no. Who was it?

Leo Laporte (02:20:20):
Just tv. Oh, Jenny Cam. That was at Jenny Cam. Jenny, that's at Jenny cam. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:26):
Wonder whatever happened to Jenny?

Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
You know what? That would be an interesting interview. I think I interviewed her, but it was still close to her heyday. I don't know where she'd be today. Wow. Jenny Cam. I'm Googling it right now. Jennifer Ring Ringley. I remember

Paris Martineau (02:20:47):
Reading something about this not too long ago.

Leo Laporte (02:20:50):
I think someone did. Okay, this is depressing. She was born in 1976.

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:57):
She's 47 now.

Leo Laporte (02:20:58):
Yeah, jenny cam.org. You can go to the Wayback machine and actually look at the Jenny cam. It was still, it wasn't a moving picture.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:09):
That's right. It was every 30 seconds or something.

Leo Laporte (02:21:13):
Yeah. Wow. Geez. They

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:15):
Shut it down in 2003.

Leo Laporte (02:21:19):
She

Paris Martineau (02:21:19):
Did a 2014 interview with Reply All was the last appearance.

Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
Oh, there you go. Great minds. Jeff. Your pick of the week. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:29):
Okay, so you didn't do much last week from CES, but I found this one. I don't know why I found it kind of either interesting or cheating. Swarski came out with the world's first AI binoculars that identified species on their own love.

Leo Laporte (02:21:44):
If they weren't five grand, I would immediately have snapped 'em up, but they were a little too expensive. Isn't that kind of

Paris Martineau (02:21:50):
My birding friends around? No, I

Leo Laporte (02:21:52):
Don't think it cheating. It's like it has built in, it has the very famous bird catalog. I'm trying to remember the name. Built in 9,000 birds and it does image recognition. It's got AI built in. Yeah,

Paris Martineau (02:22:07):
I don't think it's cheating. I mean, I have a couple friends who are really into birding and this seems like a big part of, I mean obviously I think the integral part of birding is identifying where the birds are and spotting them, but if you don't know every species of bird, a lot of them use an app to take

Leo Laporte (02:22:22):
A photo. It's designed by Mark Newsome, who's very wellknown designer, worked with Johnny Ive, I mean, it looks like a really cool product. Yeah, it looks like it's very well done. Yeah. I mean, it's just sad that it's so expensive.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:36):
I also came across this little bit this week, George Beard, who basically named the syndrome of anxiety, wrote in the book American Nervousness in 1881. The chief and primary cause of this development and very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization, which is distinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics.

Leo Laporte (02:23:05):
Okay,

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:06):
Steam power.

Leo Laporte (02:23:07):
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:08):
The periodical press.

Leo Laporte (02:23:10):
Yes,

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:11):
The telegraph. Yes. The sciences.

Leo Laporte (02:23:14):
Yes, the sciences

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:16):
And the mental activity of women.

Paris Martineau (02:23:20):
I'm five for five. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:23:22):
Thinking now, oh no,

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:24):
It's your fault, Paris.

Paris Martineau (02:23:26):
It's true.

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:27):
Dropping the off brain.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:28):
I like

Paris Martineau (02:23:29):
My brain wasn't working. I wouldn't have any anxiety at all.

Leo Laporte (02:23:33):
Oh my God.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:34):
I have sometimes dreamed of that state, but

Leo Laporte (02:23:39):
Yeah, I don't think, well, squirrels are pretty anxious. I don't know. I think there are a lot of animals that are anxious all the time. Are cats

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:46):
How

Paris Martineau (02:23:47):
Anxious or are they just jumpy

Leo Laporte (02:23:48):
Or just jumpy? They're just a little jumpy, but as soon as they settle down, they don't know what's going on. Well, there you go. There you have it. What an excellent episode, Glen. I'm so glad you came down to our studio to be ignored by all sundry. Have some snacks on the way out. There's an excellent snack bar over there.

Paris Martineau (02:24:07):
We've got to leave some mysterious objects around Leo's desk

Leo Laporte (02:24:11):
Desk

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:12):
There. There's some business cards. I've had the wonderful crew and staff and everybody else here's been very,

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:17):
They're nice people.

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:17):
It's a lovely place. They're great people. Hard to find the building, but once I got in, it was all good.

Leo Laporte (02:24:21):
Yeah, well, we like it that way. Keep

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:24):
That way. No, that we don't want people to stumble upon

Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
You. No, we don't. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Glenn. Glenn Fun. G-L-E-N-N-F-U-N. Of course you can follow him on twit social. He's Glenn F. Anything else you want to plug? You do so many things.

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:39):
Oh my gosh, no. I've got that comics history book is my big 2024. We'll give

Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
You a big plug when you go

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:47):
Kickstarter. Appreciate it.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:51):
Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:51):
Jeff's going to plug something. Jeff

Leo Laporte (02:24:54):
Just got his shift happens.

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:56):
Shift happens. It's a murder weapon and it's survived. Fire, flood, famine and pestilence to get to people, but yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:05):
And you survived it and so I picked it up. I'm going to be digging into it. I'm actually going to be writing in chapter about keyboards, so I wanted just to arrive Excellent and I thought this is going to be really geeky and filled with information. I started reading it and Marin's a wonderful writer and I'm caught up immediately

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:23):
As a storyteller. That's the whole thing. My big role in helping him with the book was to, he told a great story and I was like, let's get the story part whenever it wasn't foremost, let's push that forward because people will come and find the tech and so smart, but smart. He was already very good storyteller. It was just like, what if we move? What if we move this? A lot of that and

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:42):
Glenn, is it true you can still buy a copy if you

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:45):
Hurry? We are waiting to see what the return, not return. We're not doing returns. Sorry. No returns. Damage rate was of delivery and after some really difficult weeks of figuring out how to deliver this thing safely because it's so big. Once we figured it out, it's costing us a bit, well costing more, sorry, a bit more to deliver, but we've had, I'm going to knock wood, 4 million times, 0% arrive damage. We got an email. Okay. It

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:10):
Came like Fort

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:11):
Knox. Yeah. We got an email the other day. Someone during all the huge flooding going on in the northeast, someone said, I came home and USPS left the box out. It's been in the rain all day. I opened it up, water's pouring out, open up the boxes. There's an inch of water in the bottom of the box and we're going, oh no, I pulled the book out, it's fine. And we're like, what this is, and then half an hour later I get another email just like it. But we sent emails to the printers who are packing it saying, guys, good job.

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:37):
Well, did you have to do custom the little plastic things that go around the edges to make sure, are those custom

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:43):
Sized? I know we're all geeks here. We like to talk about tunnels and bridges and infrastructure, but these are cool. They're like not a styrofoam, they're like a foam rubber or not. It's got a, what do I want to say? Like cellular, rubber or cellular foam. So they're not custom made. They ship flat and you break 'em out like a toy and you snap them in the corners and they compress so they are not cheap and they have done the trick. So infrastructure. Yeah, shipping infrastructure. Yeah, it's been great. Where can I buy this? Oh, so I'm sorry. So we are waiting to see how many copies we would need to replace, so we would always have some reserve for people who bought them, so we're going to soon release some number, a tranche of the remaining stock. However, it's limited and we have, there's a waiting list you can sign up for at shift happens site, SITE. You can get on the waiting list and then we'll push out some news when there are more books available, but we don't have that many left. We kind of sold and that's it. And Marchy may never do another edition. This was a lot of work. It occupied years of his life and then the last year of his life, so he may call it, but we'll see. We'll see. There may be enough interest if thousands. I'm so

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:55):
Happy it's here.

Glenn Fleishman (02:27:56):
Congratulations. Thank you for your support and purchase everybody. Much appreciate I got to put it back on the shelf. It's a murder weapon. I had to pick up so many 12 pounds.

Leo Laporte (02:28:06):
I can't wait to get mine. I know it's on its way, sot I look forward to it.

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:11):
I got to get on that

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:12):
Way. Course this back.

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:13):
There's the good Paris up with some good shift habits. Don't worry. I'll make it up.

Leo Laporte (02:28:18):
I'll let you Paris. Martin knows that the information working on another big story. I'm sure the red twine is stretching from picture to picture even as we

Paris Martineau (02:28:27):
Speak. Listen, I got to go and restock the twine, my Twine depot out here.

Leo Laporte (02:28:34):
Send her a lead if you've got a good tip. Anything Silicon Valley related. 2 6, 7 7 9 7, 8, 6 5 5 is her signal number at Paris Martin. Oh, tunnel.

Paris Martineau (02:28:45):
Tunnel news and tip

Leo Laporte (02:28:46):
Tunnel news. Could be big. Could be. Could be big. Huge. Could

Paris Martineau (02:28:50):
Be huge. And under

Leo Laporte (02:28:51):
The ground. Let's do some infrastructure, huh? That's the next big thing. Paris's TV show Tunnel vision with Paris Martin. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. Let's call that all over the world. She seeks tunnels. I actually got an invitation from Father Robert to go visit the catacombs under the, some may

Paris Martineau (02:29:10):
Say it's the ultimate tunnel.

Leo Laporte (02:29:11):
It's the tunnel, yeah. The original Proto Tunnel. So I'll tell you what, I'll hook you up on that one. I'll get you an invite. You got to

Paris Martineau (02:29:20):
Go meet the VTA cap,

Leo Laporte (02:29:21):
Leo. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited. I'm excited. Thank you. Jeff Jarvis, professor for the nas. He is Deorbiting, but I don't have the card in front of me so I can't read that whole thing. It has to do with Craig Newmark. Let's just say Craig. Craig Craig and the City University of New York, and of course Gutenberg parenthesis.com to get his books and magazine. And magazine. Don't forget that one. Yep, both books. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Twig of a Wednesday afternoon, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 utc. You can watch us do it live. We start the cameras right at the beginning of the show and stream it to YouTube, youtube.com/twit. Of course, club members get to watch all day long in our club Twit Discord after the fact on-demand versions of the show available at twit tv slash twig. There is a YouTube channel devoted to this week in Google, and of course you could subscribe in your favorite podcast player at Get it automatically the minute it's available at the end of the day on Wednesday. Do take our survey twit tv slash survey 24. Join the club twit tv slash club twit and make sure above all you come back next week for this week in Google. We'll see you then. Bye-Bye.

(02:30:45):
Hey there. Scott Wilkinson here In case you hadn't heard, home Theater Geeks is Back. Each week I bring you the latest audio, video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system product reviews and more you can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club Twi, which costs seven bucks a month. Or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only 2 99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater Geek.