This Week in Google 756 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for twig this week in Google. Paris Martin oh is here. Jeff Jarvis is here. We have a very special guest. You'll remember her from a website Web three is going just great. She writes about crypto. She's an expert in all sorts of interesting things, including web design. Molly White is here. We will talk, of course, about cryptocurrency, about SPF I'll ask her who she thinks Satoshi Nakamoto is. We'll talk about the latest Google News. Yes, we even have a Google Change Log, a fun show coming up next with Molly White Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

This is twig. This is twig this week in Google, episode 756, recorded Wednesday, february 21st 2024. Good sort and be it on this week in Google is brought to you by Rocket Money. If I asked you how many subscriptions you have right now, would you be able to list them all and would you know how much you're paying on all of them Now? If you'd asked me that question, I would have confidently answered, but I would have been wrong. Until I started using Rocket Money, I had no idea. Rocket Money has literally saved me thousands of dollars by finding and canceling subscriptions that I've been paying for for years. Rocket Money, it's a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions. It also monitors your spending, and I use it for that. It helps lower your bills. Rocket Money now has more than 5 million users and has helped save its members an average of $720 a year more than $500 million half a billion dollars in canceled subscriptions. With Rocket Money, you can see all your subscriptions in one place. If you see something you don't want, you can cancel it with a tap. You never have to get on the phone with customer service. So stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoneycom slash twig. That's rocketmoneycom slash twig. Rocket Money rocketmoneycom slash twig.

It's time for twig this week in Google, the show. We cover the latest for going on in the world, except for everybody except Google, because Google's gotten less interesting over the years. So we've inherited the name. Paris Martino is here. She is from the information. See, that's a good name. It's always information. You could cover anything, it would always be information.

0:02:35 - Paris Martineau
That's true. I like how the title of this show kind of goes off the rails more and more. It's getting worse and worse. The longer you do it. It really just takes a nosedive as soon as you intro it.

0:02:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, the advertisers. If we say this week in Google, they go oh good. But if we say, well, it's not about Google, they go what? So I don't know. I don't really know where to go with this. Jeff Jarvis is also here. Have I retired?

0:02:59 - Jeff Jarvis
It doesn't take a nosedive Paris, it takes a flight, a fancy, a flight of new reasons. That's true.

0:03:04 - Paris Martineau
A beautiful spiral dive that gets 10 points.

0:03:08 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of spiral dives. He was the Lennartown professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Craig Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

0:03:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Now deorbiting what do you think you didn't sing in Paris?

0:03:26 - Paris Martineau
What do you think? I didn't?

0:03:28 - Jeff Jarvis
say anything.

0:03:28 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, I was reading the chat. Should I keep this?

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
laminated card, jeff, or we're going to replace it? No, I think we'd do something new. I would tear it up, but it's so nicely laminated.

0:03:39 - Speaker 6
It's laminated.

0:03:40 - Leo Laporte
I can't Now. We're very serious here because we have got a very important guest and I don't want her to get the wrong impression we started talking about. Web3 is going just great, Probably three years ago I don't know when you started it but Molly White, the creator, is here. Hello, Molly, Good to see you, Welcome.

0:04:02 - Molly White
Hello, thank you for having me.

0:04:04 - Leo Laporte
Brilliant site that basically chronicles the demise of crypto Web3, nfts. And you have this wonderful little dollar amount in the lower right of how much money has been burned in the Web3 debacle.

0:04:23 - Paris Martineau
I love the flame.

0:04:24 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that great it is it is.

0:04:26 - Molly White
Yeah, I worked hard on this.

0:04:28 - Leo Laporte
Are you? Do you have web design background?

0:04:32 - Molly White
Not really design, but I'm a web developer by sort of career history.

0:04:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because I know I remember you said anybody who wants to use this template. There are other people using that same template of kind of the scrolling history and all that. Right, I mean I think that's cool that you gave that away.

0:04:51 - Molly White
Yeah, there are a bunch of sort of spin off is going great websites that are not controlled by me which I was delighted by.

0:04:58 - Leo Laporte
What are like? What Like Boeing is going great, or what is it.

0:05:02 - Molly White
Twitter is going great. It was like the big one. Yeah, I think there was one for Reddit, maybe when they started to really like close down the API, but I think Twitter is really the big one.

0:05:14 - Leo Laporte
It's perfect for it. It's one of those things where the story is just mounted up Very nice. It's a franchise. Yeah, you got a franchise, but I did not know this. I went to Molly Whitenet, your website. I did not know that, for instance, you've been editing Wikipedia. I think it must have been since you were in grade school. It says for over 15 years.

0:05:37 - Molly White
Yeah, just about.

0:05:38 - Leo Laporte
I was like 13 when I started, oh my God, what was the impetus to start editing Wikipedia?

0:05:46 - Molly White
I learned that I could and I was just kind of that kind of kid that liked doing stuff like that. I'm going to mess with it and as soon as I realized I could, I was yeah, I was off to the races at that point.

0:05:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Under the. Did you tell your friends or hide this from your friends?

0:06:01 - Molly White
I don't know how soon I told them, but eventually they knew yeah, that was going to make me?

0:06:06 - Paris Martineau
Was it a big part of your identity as a child?

0:06:09 - Molly White
Bigger than you might expect. Yeah, I mean I didn't try to make it a big part of my identity, but people, like, as soon as they learned that I was editing Wikipedia in like high school, they got very excited about that, because a lot of people at that point didn't really know you could and they thought it was really fun that, like a high school kid was writing Wikipedia.

0:06:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you remember the first citation that you edited?

0:06:33 - Molly White
It was about unicycles, which is also an interest of mine at the time.

0:06:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, and as we all know, jeff Bezos' father was a famous unicyclist, so as we all know, as we all know what does. Yeah, you didn't know that. Maybe you want to get on his Wikipedia page and yeah, I should go update the page You're a notable unicyclist. It says on your Wikipedia user page that you are both an administrator and oversightor. What the hell is that?

0:07:04 - Molly White
Which one, the administrator or the administrator.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
I kind of get. Well, I don't know what, tell me, but what's an oversightor?

0:07:12 - Molly White
It's part of a group of people that are called functionaries on Wikipedia. That are people who have sort of the highest level of administrative tooling, I guess, and so oversightors have the capacity to sort of permanent not permanently, but very strongly hide information that's been put on Wikipedia that needs to be removed for legal reasons or things like that.

0:07:35 - Leo Laporte
So that's present very high, that's a job, that's a high title. Can I just thank you, because we don't get to thank the people behind. I mean, I've thanked. Jimmy Wales, but we don't normally get to thank the people who really are doing the day-to-day work on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the greatest thing ever. I donate to it every month. We use it like crazy and it's people like you kind of unsung volunteers. It's a miracle. It's a miracle, Let me ask you too. Yeah, I love it.

0:08:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, when you started, was that the time when librarians were still saying oh, beware of Wikipedia.

0:08:07 - Molly White
Oh yeah, I mean they still are. Even more than yes, but I would say they had more reason to back then too. It was definitely more nascent.

0:08:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't hear that much anymore. I think that Wikipedia is now a miracle of human knowledge and, with the obvious caveats, an incredibly trusted source.

0:08:29 - Molly White
I think, yeah, I think librarians and educators have gotten more understanding about it and they recommend to use it as, like you would any encyclopedia or that kind of tertiary source, look at the references section and cite from there that kind of thing.

0:08:47 - Jeff Jarvis
If I may, I'm curious now. So I say this with the highest honor Did your nerddom start with Wikipedia?

0:08:57 - Leo Laporte
Remember, we're all nerds here, so it's not an insult?

0:09:00 - Molly White
Oh no, it's a term I use for myself, yeah yeah, yeah.

0:09:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Did it start with technology or Wikipedia, Would you say? Where were you nerdy first?

0:09:11 - Molly White
That's a great question, probably with Wikipedia, honestly. Well, I mean, I always was the kid who wanted more time on the computer, so, and actually I was writing like sort of mini websites on Neopets before. Wikipedia oh yeah.

0:09:28 - Leo Laporte
I think maybe I had technology first. That's what I wanted, but it's between my Technically, that was my first HTML.

0:09:35 - Molly White
Exactly.

0:09:35 - Paris Martineau
On Neopets.

0:09:36 - Molly White
It was even my special Neopets. Yeah, a shocking number of people in my sort of like computer science class in college got their start on Neopets, so I think we have Neopets to thank for, like my generation of web developers.

0:09:52 - Leo Laporte
Actually, yeah, my daughter was into Neopets. It's still around, by the way.

0:09:57 - Molly White
So I heard they tried to get into crypto briefly.

0:09:59 - Paris Martineau
I should have chagrined over there for me, I think, because of crypto. I think it's the 25th anniversary this year.

0:10:05 - Leo Laporte
I guess next year yeah, counting down, get ready. Mirror 267 days we're almost as old as Neopets Twitter's. So anyway, molly, you are almost a visionary when it comes to a crypto and web through. When did you start? Web three is going just great.

0:10:28 - Molly White
It was in late 2021.

0:10:30 - Leo Laporte
It was like December 2021, I think it's when I first so people kind of knew that maybe web three was hyped by that point.

0:10:38 - Molly White
Boy, I didn't feel like it no there was a lot of life.

I felt like I was swimming upstream for a while with that website. But yeah, I mean it was. It was starting to get to the very inflated levels I would say. But things you know, we're still pretty high up there for a while. But actually, if you look at it, I almost like I looked back at the timing one time and one of my first tweets ever about crypto or web three was like almost perfectly the top of the crypto market. So I like I called it pretty closely.

0:11:11 - Leo Laporte
And it's been all downhill. It's your fault.

0:11:13 - Paris Martineau
Maybe some might blame you, I think, I think it might be has, Wow yeah you started it right in between the period of board a NFTs and Facebook changing to meta, which is really just, you know, the apex of web three.

0:11:29 - Molly White
Yeah, it was definitely. It was like I had finally gotten so sick of reading about it that I was like I have to do something.

0:11:36 - Leo Laporte
I love it. By the way, molly's Twitter handle is is also a geeky joke Molly's zero X, f, f, f, which, of course, is hex for white. Shouldn't it have one more F, though? No?

0:11:50 - Molly White
well, it could have six, or it can have three, since they repeat OK, I would three, just make it shorter.

0:11:56 - Leo Laporte
Let's make it simpler. Yeah, very nice. By the way, your timing is good because my, my good friend, kevin Rose, is 47 today. Happy birthday, kevin. And he got a nice big birthday present on February 16th. Kevin is the founder of the proof collective. Along with people and some other NFT folk, they created something called Moonbirds, which wasn't even like the first. There were board apes before them and there were what was the crypto punks. In fact, I remember Kevin was so proud that he owned some very valuable crypto punks. So a couple of years ago, he formed the proof collective and created Moonbirds, including mythics, oddities, eggs, grails and, as I remember, in the first I think it was a month he made $50 million, so much so that Kevin had to make a video saying wait, wait, we're going to use that money for good stuff. Anyway, I don't know what happened to Moonbirds, but I know what's happened to Kevin All those shmucks Because he just sold it to you, galab, the creators of the board apiak club. They won't say for how much. Oh God.

Do you have any idea, molly, how much he got for that, I wonder I don't know it's probably, by the way, like hashtag shady business.

0:13:26 - Speaker 6
Just in case you're wondering.

0:13:30 - Leo Laporte
Probably it was a fire sale. I can't imagine. Nfts are pretty much over, aren't they? Nobody's? Nobody thinks there's any value in these things anymore, right.

0:13:39 - Molly White
I mean you would be surprised at how much these, at least ostensibly, are trading for these days. There's some sort of blue chip NFT collections, like the board apis, for example, that still change hands for people's dollars yeah. Not, not at the levels that they once were Like. You probably won't hear about a million dollar board ape transaction anymore, but they're definitely still spending more money than you might expect.

0:14:06 - Leo Laporte
Just just so, people understand you're not buying anything at all except the nominal ownership of one of these low res cartoons.

0:14:17 - Paris Martineau
Hey Leo, that's a right clicker mentality. These things are worth a lot.

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
I am a right clicker, I'm an old yeah, what's. How much is 2.28 Eastworth nowadays? That's a lot. That's still money.

0:14:28 - Molly White
It's. Yeah, I mean that's pushing $10,000 these days, wow.

0:14:32 - Leo Laporte
That's the most valuable, of course, because he's got a cowboy hat, number 762.

0:14:38 - Molly White
I have to say I do think the moonbirds are cuter than the board apes.

0:14:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I will give them credit. The apes are vaguely racist, not a hard scale.

0:14:46 - Leo Laporte
I think you can make a decent case that the apes are a little bit racist, aren't they?

0:14:50 - Molly White
And there's I've certainly heard people made that kind of case yeah.

0:14:53 - Leo Laporte
There's Nazi symbolism in some of it, and it's it's a little anyway.

0:15:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Is Gary Vader Chuck still gung-ho as his, his want?

0:15:06 - Molly White
As far as I know he's, he's certainly still talking about it, but I don't know if it's his primary. I wonder he's a good friends with Kevin.

0:15:14 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if he was part of the proof collective. He might have been. It was a number of number of people. There is an art angle on this, right I mean. In fact, initially we thought maybe this would be a valuable way to support, kind of to be a patron of the arts, to support artists. I, I have a beautiful remember, the fail whale, probably before your time.

0:15:43 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I remember well when you were in kindergarten. Yeah, the fail whale looms large in my memory.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
Leah. So, okay, good, All right. So the fail whale was actually from a drawing by a great artist, Yi Ying Lu, and she had drawn it before. Twitter actually stole it. Basically she had drawn it before, but, and we have. She drew for us, my wife and me. She drew us one of these. We have it on our wall. We wanted to buy some others.

0:16:14 - Paris Martineau
And now she has a custom fail.

0:16:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, I can't remember if it's a fail, wait something from Yi Ying, but anyway, yes, she brought it to us. We had her on the show some years ago, but you can't buy her stuff physical anymore. We wanted to buy some more. You can only buy NFTs Now. Maybe she's changed her tune by now, but yeah, that's weird. But I would support her because she's a great artist and it's fun. But I would prefer to buy something I can hang on the wall. And printing out a moonbird and putting on the wall just doesn't have the same cashier you can buy one of those TVs that shows NFTs now, oh yeah, nftv, nftv.

Oh geez, that's our next million dollar business idea.

0:16:58 - Molly White
I don't know why I didn't go with that branding, because I've heard about the NFTVs but I've never heard the call of that, it's a missed opportunity.

0:17:06 - Leo Laporte
And I'm looking at when I go to the proof, collective proofxyz I see really exhibitions of I know it's not great art, but they're trying their best.

0:17:20 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm serious.

0:17:22 - Leo Laporte
This is a vision, a first solo exhibition by Otherworld. Anyway, happy birthday, Kevin. I hope you buy a very large birthday cake for yourself.

0:17:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Probably all he'll get for it.

0:17:36 - Molly White
I feel really it's like an NFT of a birthday cake.

0:17:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, that's right, let's not actually bake.

0:17:41 - Paris Martineau
Let's not bring this into the physical world.

0:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Molly, when are you going to do AI is going just greatcom.

0:17:49 - Molly White
I get asked that a lot. It's not on my to-do list but I do try to point people to there is a project called the AI Incident Database which is really quite valuable. Oh. I do love that. Yeah, it does sort of a similar thing. It doesn't have the sort of sarcastic editorializing that I put into my stuff, but it does a good job of capturing some of the going great of the AI world.

0:18:16 - Jeff Jarvis
So you both know of F Company.

0:18:19 - Molly White
Yes.

0:18:20 - Leo Laporte
By Pud Philip Kaplan.

0:18:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you know that Paris?

0:18:24 - Paris Martineau
No, what is F Company?

0:18:26 - Speaker 6
Oh, wow.

0:18:26 - Jeff Jarvis
This was a great website. Well, that's actually a TV show. We're going to have F Company. It's an F-T company. I would say it out loud.

0:18:33 - Leo Laporte
Spread it out, you know, in the vernacular of the streets F.

0:18:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Company was a show that Leo could probably show you a clip from, but we can reminisce about, but we won't go there. So it was the web. It was the 2000 crash all of the companies that just exploded.

0:18:53 - Paris Martineau
Oh, it's a parody of fast. No, it's not a parody, yeah.

0:18:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, the name was, but what it was made up of was memos from these companies, real memos.

0:19:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, actual foldings and layoffs.

0:19:06 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I love this, oh it was great.

0:19:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I have a mug somewhere here from F Company. I remember.

0:19:11 - Leo Laporte
Pud's telling me.

0:19:12 - Paris Martineau
That's great.

0:19:14 - Leo Laporte
That his goal in life was to create a series of sites like this, that he didn't have to do. Once he created it he didn't have to do anything, that all the content would be provided by people sending in memos, and so forth. It's interesting because F Company was started in 2000, during the bust, and went out of business in 2007, right about when Twitter started to ascend, and, in a way, pud was a genius, because isn't that, after all, what Facebook, twitter, reddit are is the next generation of you. Do all the work, we'll collect the money. Basically, speaking of which, reddit has signed a deal with an unknown AI entity for $60 million a year. We know the number because they're headed towards an IPO to ingest their content, our content. Oh, did I say their content, our content?

0:20:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Is there a furor over that?

0:20:11 - Leo Laporte
You know, I don't. No, there isn't. I think people don't yet really Haven't really ingested the notion, even with what happened to Twitter, that these companies are really just using you. Youtube does the same thing, right, and they highlight the people, all the people like it.

0:20:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Youtube shares revenue.

0:20:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, they highlight the hundred or so people who make money, but I could tell you, I mean, most of us on YouTube are not making a lot of money.

0:20:39 - Molly White
Or AI companies not already using Reddit's data? Yeah, I would have just assumed that that was a part of the big corpus that they all used.

0:20:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they, like Medium, turned off the robotstxt for AI companies. The AI companies say they're respected, but while they're right, You're probably right. What was it for the original training sets?

0:21:00 - Paris Martineau
Right yeah.

0:21:02 - Leo Laporte
So maybe Well.

0:21:03 - Paris Martineau
I do think it's important to know you're on a podcast with two AI accelerationists here. Leo and Jeff have been read.

0:21:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, there's no, there's kind of just one Okay.

0:21:13 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, you've been getting over there, I'm gonna be honest, I'm putting you in the bucket.

0:21:19 - Jeff Jarvis
I am no Andreessen, I still have my fingers.

0:21:22 - Paris Martineau
I am the sole person with a brain cell remaining here, whoa.

0:21:26 - Molly White
The doomer, as they call it, yeah.

0:21:29 - Leo Laporte
So Molly was a doomer, in fact. I thought the whole thing was just spicy auto correct For the longest time, and then I started creating little GPTs and stuff and I got one over and then, very famously, I went on a walk with an AI accelerator.

0:21:44 - Paris Martineau
You went on a walk with like Sam Oltman or something it wasn't anybody's face.

0:21:47 - Speaker 6
He won't tell us who it was, but you went on a walk and he came back, a changed man With a guy who was from San Francisco.

0:21:53 - Leo Laporte
It was absolutely an AI accelerator. I figured that out and he convinced me. Over this hour period, over this two mile walk, that Deutized Leo. That it's, you know, the thing that stays with me. I think about all the time he says the next 10 years are going to be really weird. He also.

0:22:12 - Paris Martineau
That is the thing that convinced you I could go with that Leo.

0:22:19 - Leo Laporte
But in a good way. He also said it's going to be like first contact with an alien species. Oh for Christ's sake.

0:22:30 - Paris Martineau
See.

0:22:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, I'm not the life of. Leo.

0:22:32 - Paris Martineau
It's now. Leo and Jeff both think that AI should have access to everything, and AI is right, I do think that's where she's been.

0:22:40 - Jeff Jarvis
See, she's the writer for the site and does one of the precious words used to trade the machine we got the answer she's actually.

0:22:48 - Paris Martineau
I don't think we should give this stuff away for free to mega corporations.

0:22:51 - Leo Laporte
See, here's the difference.

0:22:52 - Molly White
I mean, I've been writing Wikipedia for a long time. Yeah, you like giving it a round and you're the only copyright.

0:22:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I gear Paris.

0:23:01 - Paris Martineau
I'm not a copyright hag. I'm going to put that in my Twitter.

0:23:05 - Jeff Jarvis
That's so mean, joe Esposito.

0:23:07 - Leo Laporte
So mean I think you could make the case that Jeff and I are at the end of our creative ropes. I got books coming out, and so we care a little bit less than you younger people who have many years ahead of you and you will hope to make a living on your conscience.

0:23:29 - Jeff Jarvis
No, like Molly, we're generous. I'd like you, paris, behind the high paywall Famously ungenerous.

0:23:35 - Leo Laporte
Yes, as I move more and more of our stuff behind a paywall. Hey you just lose some shows out from the paywall.

We did it. Really, I dislike paywalls, I really do, and I it's funny because I'm also a utopianist I think Wikipedia is the best example of what the internet hath wrought. I mean, it's incredible. And yeah, there's mistakes and there's errors in Wikipedia. For a long time my Wikipedia article said I wrote for Hustler magazine Not true, but it's self-correcting. The people like Molly who put that energy in to make sure that content is good, there is an amazing gift. I mean, that's all volunteer work, right, molly?

0:24:23 - Molly White
You don't get paid to do that Right, that's correct.

0:24:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Did I tell you my Wikipedia story, what the student thought from it? No no. One day I'm walking down the hall at school, student comes out and we're excited and says Jeff, jeff, I just read on Wikipedia that you're polyamorous. Would you like to join a coven? Well, yeah. So I said no. Can you correct that for me, because I can't do it?

0:24:52 - Paris Martineau
That's very funny.

0:24:53 - Leo Laporte
I am always very I've never touched my Wikipedia page. I'm always very careful not to do that. I think I may be unique in that regard, because I think there are a lot of people who are especially politicians, who are going in there pretty regularly fixing their stuff up. Every once in a while you come across a page, you read it and it's that's definitely. The company wrote that.

0:25:16 - Paris Martineau
That's terrible. Yeah, I like when it has a little note up top that it's like.

0:25:20 - Molly White
this reads like the company wrote yeah, the shame banner that goes up there.

0:25:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, always read the talk section on any page that you have suspicion about, because people like Molly are very good at that Indicating. I wonder what they say here. It's a B class. I'm a B class in the.

0:25:44 - Molly White
A B class of writing is a B class.

0:25:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, I didn't write it so I don't take responsibility. A photograph should be included, Can? I send them a photograph. Look at that header though? What's the header here?

0:25:57 - Molly White
If you scroll down you've got kind of a salacious oh my goodness, oh, that's interesting.

0:26:08 - Leo Laporte
So there's a bait about sex scandals to go in here right Back in 2011. Yeah, by the way, if you're waiting for sex scandals about me, you got a long way to. I wish there were, but anyway, this is interesting. Huh, I actually haven't looked at this. Probably shouldn't look at it on here either, but no, I think this is. What's great about Wikipedia is and it works. How come it works when so much else is crap?

0:26:40 - Molly White
It's honestly such a good question. I don't think any of us know.

0:26:45 - Leo Laporte
And the other thing about it is there's a very small number of editors. Right, it's a small number of people keeping this afloat.

0:26:52 - Molly White
Very small in terms of people who edit regularly, but we get a lot of people right, but there are a lot of people who will edit once or fix a typo when they see it, and so there's a substantial amount of that as well.

0:27:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Do they love the teachers? Who bring classes in to do it. Students feel very empowered when they do it.

0:27:13 - Molly White
Yeah, some in college professors have started having students write Wikipedia articles for coursework and stuff like that too, which is really interesting.

0:27:23 - Leo Laporte
So you don't have any theories about why Wikipedia has survived.

0:27:30 - Molly White
I do. I mean, I think it helps that it's a non-profit. You know, a model like this I don't think would work well as a for-profit entity. You know people, I think it was partly timing, you know it emerged at a time where there was a need for something like this. And then you know, I think, that a project like this really sort of plays to people's sort of altruistic impulses, where you know people want to be able to help when they see something that's wrong or you know that's missing from an encyclopedia, and so it attracts people who have that kind of impulse and are really strongly motivated to keep it. You know this sort of beautiful resource that they want it to be. But yeah, I mean, I think it's really unique.

I think a lot of platforms have tried to emulate it and have really not had a very successful time of it. I remember when Twitter was debuting there I guess it was Used to be called Birdwatch, now it's Community Notes, I think and they were like, yeah, it's going to be just like Wikipedia and people are going to go out of their way to write good facts to fight off the bad facts. And I was like, oh, good luck. You know, now it's sort of become a. It works sometimes, but you see a lot of sort of missing pieces in there.

0:28:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, one of the sites I think about is Quora, which was, I thought, a really interesting idea. People ask questions and then answer them, and it's also volunteers. They're under kind of a salt from AI. Same with a stack. Quora has a bad how does Quora make money?

0:29:09 - Paris Martineau
Is it just ads?

0:29:11 - Leo Laporte
I think it's ads. It's just raised $75 million. From what, really?

0:29:18 - Molly White
Why? From Andreessen Horowitz? Nice, of course. Oh my gosh, andreessen.

0:29:22 - Paris Martineau
Horowitz, isn't there something better you could be doing with your money? No, this is.

0:29:26 - Leo Laporte
AI. This is their whole thing.

0:29:28 - Paris Martineau
I have a poll Poe is a chatbot For their AI chatbot.

0:29:32 - Leo Laporte
And the idea, of course, is Poe is taking all of the stuff that people contributed to Quora and turning it into a chatbot right.

0:29:41 - Paris Martineau
Poe will be the go-to chatbot for asking how is babby formed?

0:29:46 - Molly White
How do women get pregnant?

0:29:49 - Leo Laporte
That was Yahoo questions. Let's be fair, right, we've come a long way since then.

0:29:55 - Jeff Jarvis
So in 2005, I went to an event at Harvard with bloggers and the New York Times was there and Jimmy Wales got into it with Gill Abramson, then the managing editor of the paper. She said you don't understand how expensive it is to have a bagged up bureau. And Wales then said and I'm quoting this in my next book he said five years ago, if I sat here in front of this group or any other group and we discussed the exacto pedia Britannica which are the latest numbers I can find now, in 1996, they had a budget of 350 million. And if I said to you, I'm going to get together a whole bunch of people on the internet and we are going to write an exacto pedia that is going to kick butt on a second people Britannica you would have said that's crazy. How could you possibly do that? It would cost you millions and millions of dollars. It didn't cost millions and millions of dollars. We did it. I love that spirit.

0:30:43 - Paris Martineau
Pretty powerful and Jimmy.

0:30:45 - Leo Laporte
Wales has always said you know, I mean people said you could make a billion dollars a year if you'd take advertising.

0:30:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I remember Jason Calacana is yelling at him. Yeah Say, you should put ads you're wasting.

0:30:57 - Leo Laporte
So who wins now? I think in hindsight, Jason was the idiot and Jimmy was the bright guy by the way, not just in hindsight, not just at the time, even slight, had an article this month about Quora dying, because this is exactly what hasn't happened to Wikipedia Users are leaving, it's flooded with spam and bots and low quality stuff. Is it because Wikipedia exists that Quora couldn't, or is it because there's? They took ads, or is it just like?

0:31:33 - Paris Martineau
Quora is fundamentally very different than Wikipedia. Yeah, I don't think it's there in the same question, is it?

0:31:40 - Molly White
not just the existence of Wikipedia precludes something like Quora. I think they're two fairly different use cases, but yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely two different models there. I think one thing that helps when you're talking about volunteers is with Wikipedia, I don't feel like some big corporation is making money off of the work that I put into that, whereas with something like Quora or, you know, community notes on Twitter, it's like why am I doing this for free for a company that is profiting from my contributions, exactly.

0:32:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the other thing too is that aboutcom was really the first competitor, commercial competitor to Wikipedia.

0:32:21 - Leo Laporte
Same idea right, but also commercial yeah.

0:32:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, if people are asking questions, we're going to have the answers. Right Was the idea, so we had guides right and I can some full disclosure, as I consulted for them when the times bought.

0:32:31 - Leo Laporte
It was an SEO play right. The idea was it was absolutely, it was the first SEO play Yep, that's one of the times.

0:32:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Bought them was to learn SEO, and so it was trying to play that game. Others learned that from them. That created the content farms that ruined it for everybody. That was the Panda update to Google search.

0:32:49 - Leo Laporte
The first big update that our friend met cuts yeah, degraded all of that, whereas Wikipedia always stood apart.

0:32:57 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a different thing. It wasn't trying to play a game.

0:32:59 - Leo Laporte
Bless it, we're here with answers. It's. Somebody's got a, I don't know. Is there a documentary? Is there? I feel like this needs to bunch of books, yeah, because it's such a case study in what the internet could be. Yes, and there's an ask and there's somebody poses so many questions about why and how you get communities to do this. I think it also tells you that people are fundamentally good, that they will act.

0:33:29 - Jeff Jarvis
before I included my book, our Wikipedia, craigslist, reddit and WordPress yeah, our examples, I think, of the web done fairly right. Which book the web we weave coming out. This fall from basic books.

0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, as long as we're plugging, Molly Wood has a newsletter. Molly Wood Molly White. I used to work with Molly Wood, Molly White has a newsletter.

0:33:52 - Molly White
I get confused with her fairly regularly.

0:33:55 - Paris Martineau
I know Molly Well she's she's different Molly, molly Well, molly Wood and Molly.

0:34:03 - Leo Laporte
Molly Well was my favorite, though right, I love Molly Molly White's newsletter. I'm so sorry, is citation needed? And if you want to subscribe, please do by going to citation needednews.

0:34:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you been approached for a book on your site, Molly?

0:34:23 - Molly White
I have not.

0:34:24 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm surprised, I think. I think there's one in the. I think it's a fun one. Actually, I will start with F company and go through.

0:34:32 - Molly White
Oh, you mean on on web three is going just great. I see yeah yeah, yeah, I have been approached for a book. I'm at a couple of times, but I don't know. It didn't really speak to me. It didn't feel like I could sort of tell that there was going to be a flood of the crypto crash books which there have been, and I didn't necessarily feel like you know they're needed to be another one for me specifically.

0:34:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I think there's something bigger here. I think it's. I think it's about boys and their stupid ideas.

0:35:03 - Paris Martineau
I think that there's a great book on boys and their stupid ideas. Yeah, yeah, and also kind of the the cult of Silicon Valley ambition.

0:35:12 - Molly White
Yeah, yeah, I've written more broadly about that. You know I've written a little bit about some of the venture capital stuff, some of this weird like Silicon Valley ideology that has emerged but all in sort of shorter formats.

0:35:29 - Leo Laporte
Would you like to write a book?

0:35:32 - Molly White
I don't know it's a lot of work. I like I like the, the short form format, a lot, and I'm not sure Spoils a person. Yeah, I don't know if I would love to write a tweet recently about starting.

0:35:45 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if you're it was tongue in cheek, but you were quoting in the web about you should have your own blog and your own CMS and then but it looked like you were starting your first blog, right or no?

0:35:55 - Molly White
it's not my first blog, it's probably my 20th. Yeah, no, I've been working on a project to sort of do more of a if you know what like the posse approaches for the web post posts on your own site, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I've been working on a project to do a little bit more of that on my own website, to just call it, because I post in a lot of places but there isn't one good, like you know, unified place for it, and so I've been working on just a little project to tinker on in my spare time.

0:36:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Which of the social networks do you like best?

0:36:34 - Molly White
I like. I'm right now. I like Mastodon and Blue Sky a lot and I don't know if I like one more than the other at this point and they're very different. What would you say?

0:36:43 - Paris Martineau
what instances on Mastodon are you in and how would you describe the difference tonally between Mastodon and Blue Sky?

0:36:51 - Molly White
So I'm on the hacky-derm instance on Mastodon, which I think is the best one personally.

0:36:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, I might disagree with you. I certainly like Twitter and social, also know hacky-derm is very good, but the nice thing is you can follow Molly White on any, on any of them, right? You don't have to right. You don't have to be on any of them.

0:37:11 - Molly White
You don't have to join the hacky-derm one, but it is really nice.

0:37:14 - Leo Laporte
I think it's not as important, I think, because then then you get a certain personality from the people who are local, but you can still follow the rest. What makes hacky-derm good? Tell us why I should move everybody over to hacky-derm right now.

0:37:32 - Molly White
I think they've done well at moderation. It's a very sort of balanced approach. I think it attracts a lot of software people and I like software people on my timeline and I think a lot of them have really interesting things to say. You know a lot of like security folks who I always find very interesting. Even though that's not my own niche and I don't know, it just feels like a really friendly community to me, you know that's what I love about Mastodon you have that sense of a smaller community, but you can also follow people on every community.

0:38:05 - Leo Laporte
I think that's fantastic, and nobody owns it. Moderation's interesting because some sites are not well-moderated Right now. We're going through another one of those bad phases on Mastodon over the last few days where the smaller sites are letting spammers on and they're spam. I don't know if you guys experienced it, but I've had a swat about 30 or 40 spam accounts.

0:38:27 - Paris Martineau
You've had to swat them. You called the FBI.

0:38:31 - Leo Laporte
I called the FBI and sent it to their homes Exactly.

0:38:34 - Molly White
Only a handful. The only way. No, I just suspend their accounts.

0:38:38 - Jeff Jarvis
You're a powerful than you know. No, I just suspend their accounts. It's all.

0:38:42 - Leo Laporte
I do. Here's Molly on Hackyderm. It's Molly also XeroXFFF at Hackydermio, I'm proud to say I was already following yes, as was.

0:38:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I.

0:38:55 - Leo Laporte
Actually that's how I got it. I thought about getting Molly on the show. She followed me. I don't know why, but when I saw that I said, oh, maybe I can get her on the show. If I do that, oh, you do your own. Is it a show? Crypto critics corner? I guess show is the right word.

0:39:11 - Molly White
That's not mine. I was just a guest.

0:39:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're on it, okay.

0:39:14 - Molly White
Yes, yeah. It's a wonderful podcast, though, for anyone who's looking for more crypto skeptics in their life.

0:39:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you find any about the hurt feelings of the crypto boys in you? They must come to you and just say you just don't want to. It's more hurt wallets.

0:39:33 - Leo Laporte
I would guess than hurt feelings right.

0:39:36 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it depends on the month.

0:39:38 - Molly White
Yeah, I got a lot of that. I just don't understand it after two years or something like that my favorite one is well.

0:39:50 - Leo Laporte
the technology, though the underlying technology, is really good, and you're conflating what people are doing with it with blockchain. Blockchain is so much going for it Every time, I say no, it doesn't.

0:40:04 - Paris Martineau
The next 10 years are just going to be really weird. You don't get it? Hey, stop it. That's true.

0:40:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:40:14 - Molly White
Yeah, I get. Or the other one I love is it's still early, you have to get it some more time. It's been 15 years.

0:40:23 - Leo Laporte
I have to say one thing about pyramids it's a start yeah, yeah. Pyramid schemes. It can never be too early. It's too late, almost always by the time you hear about it, so don't do it, that's all. Do you think? Who do you think? Satoshi, nakamoto, nakamoto, what is it Nakatomi? No, that's a Nakamoto. We had it the first time. What is Satoshi? Do you think that Craig Wright is really Satoshi?

0:40:51 - Molly White
No, Absolutely not. That's ridiculous.

0:40:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:40:56 - Paris Martineau
I actually have an answer to this, which is for the long, like God. This is probably a year or two ago. Everyone at the information or at least all the reporters started getting the same weird email from someone being like, in all caps Like I know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, I know who he is. Like I might have gotten the same. Listen, I'm sure you did, because we also then got it on signal. You got LinkedIn messages and you clicked through. It was like I've put together all the clues.

0:41:24 - Speaker 6
Oh God.

0:41:26 - Paris Martineau
It's Elon Musk. Who else was in San Francisco at this time? They both use double spaces at the end of their pyramid Period. Clues are all there, people.

0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
And if you add, I definitely got that same email.

0:41:44 - Paris Martineau
It was a doozy. It really entertained me for quite a few weeks Wow.

0:41:49 - Leo Laporte
Wow, we don't know who Satoshi is, but I think. Well, first of all, if Craig Wright were Satoshi, he's right now in a in a. He's suing somebody for libel, Is it, or I don't know? There's a court case.

0:42:01 - Molly White
There's a there are a lot of court cases going on with Craig Wright, but I think he's actually being sued right now he's being sued, okay, and he has Dorsey by Jack Dorsey. What it's like. Yeah, it's a group that's funded by Jack Dorsey, among other people, that's suing Craig Wright because he keeps Craig Wright keeps filing basically IP lawsuits against Bitcoin developers and Jack Dorsey and all these people are really fed up with him basically scaring away the Bitcoiners or the Bitcoin developers.

0:42:31 - Leo Laporte
This is the trial going on in England right now, and the thing is, wright could easily if he were Satoshi it'd be easy to prove you're Satoshi just move a fraction of a Bitcoin from one of those debt accounts.

0:42:43 - Molly White
Well, he claims that he destroyed the hard drives. Oh, isn't that convenient. It's very convenient. Yes, there's a lot of convenient explanations in this trial.

0:42:55 - Leo Laporte
The fact that there is so much money in those early Bitcoin accounts, presumably controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto. If that's a person or group or what and they haven't been moved, they're worth billions. Does that imply that it was a person is gone or that they're sitting on it waiting for the waiting for it to go up, or what?

0:43:18 - Molly White
It depends who you ask, but personally I think there's a reasonable chance that he's dead and that's why the money hasn't moved.

0:43:27 - Paris Martineau
Or also, I mean, if those accounts had any sizeable movement, like if someone suddenly started selling the Bitcoins in those accounts, bitcoin's worth would crash.

0:43:39 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's an interesting point yeah, it's 1.1 million Bitcoins, worth about well depends on the time of day, but about 30 to $40 billion. I don't know if I were Satoshi Nakamoto. If I'm some guy, he has to be some sort of cryptographer, mathematician. That's pretty sophisticated stuff. If I'm that person, you might just say well, I'll cash in right now and buy an island. That's what I'd do I mean? So what Right? What does he care if it crashes? You think he has some sort of vested interest in it succeeding, I don't know.

0:44:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, have you read Chris Texan's book Molly.

0:44:28 - Molly White
I have. I wrote a review of it. Actually, what?

0:44:31 - Jeff Jarvis
you had, what did you think?

0:44:33 - Molly White
I did not enjoy it.

0:44:35 - Leo Laporte
Tell us first of all what it is and who he is, and all of that, chris Dixon.

0:44:40 - Molly White
Yeah, so Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

He does a lot of their crypto investing and there has been a lot of it, and he recently wrote a book called Read Right Own, which is basically laying out his philosophy and his belief that there have been two eras of the web thus far.

There was the read era, in the sort of earlier days, and then the right era with the advent of social media and things like that that have made it easier for more people to post online. And his theory is that the third era of the web will be the own era, which will be enabled by blockchain technology. And so he writes this manifesto kind of on how blockchains will somehow become the future of the web and enable all of these wonderful things that we currently are not able to do. And it's sort of half this I don't know sort of revisionist history of the web in my opinion and sort of screed against big tech and a lot of the same tech companies that Andreessen Horowitz has funded. And then it's a half you know this very hand wavy vision of what blockchains could enable around. You know paying artists better and you know creating communities around interests and fair AI and all these different things like that. But I can't stand about that, sorry, no, continue.

0:46:17 - Jeff Jarvis
What I can't stand about that is that I just want we should be going away from everything being behind paywalls, unless, of course, it's Paris is writing to more open world and so that the whole blockchain NFT argument is everybody can own something they can sell it right, and it's the beginnings of copyright that turned everything into a tradable asset, rather than the joy we had on the Internet of doing like you would look at media doing things where other people sharing learning, all that nice kind of crunchy, wonderful stuff.

Those guys want to just put a wall around everything.

0:46:58 - Molly White
It's also fascinating because Dixon gives some sort of lip service towards the open web. You know he speaks positively of Wikipedia, he you know he talks about things like that. And then he speaks about blockchains being sort of this future version of the web. So it's, it's. There's a lot of right. Yeah, there's a lot of that in the book where it's like I don't get from A to B here, Like how are you drawing this conclusion? I?

0:47:27 - Leo Laporte
think there's also some suspicion, like with Marcus Streason's weird manifesto a few months ago. There's always some suspicion that these guys have all these investments in these technologies, that anything they say is is conditioned by their their own, you know, interest, financial interest in its success. But they're absolutely yeah, but, but I'll play. I'll play Chris Dixon for this episode. What about the vast number of unbanked people in developing nations for whom, you know, fiat currency isn't, isn't a good choice.

0:48:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Banks aren't available. Well, when I was in Nigeria, I know there's M-Pace.

0:48:11 - Leo Laporte
But, but it doesn't. Doesn't a decentralized blockchain ledger system kind of benefit them Somehow? Hand waving?

0:48:22 - Molly White
My biggest how.

0:48:24 - Leo Laporte
I'm waving Chris's hands.

0:48:27 - Molly White
Oh that makes sense.

Sorry, I mean, I think the biggest problem with that argument is that when you say, okay, here's an unbanked community, we're going to solve problems for them by giving them crypto, that's not the same thing as giving them banking, and what they need is banking, and a lot of the services that you get in crypto are these sort of weird approximations of banking that don't actually have the benefits that you need.

So like a good example is you know people think about banks, they think about savings accounts, but you know it's really important that banks extend credit to people, and when people don't have access to that, crypto is not really giving it to them, because in crypto, lending is pretty much always over collateralized, which means that you have to have more assets than you're borrowing, and that's not really something that is solving problems for unbanked communities, who typically need more assets than they have. So you know, when you say, okay, we're going to give them crypto lending, you know that's that's basically solving a problem that they they typically don't have. They don't usually have piles of Bitcoin sitting around that they can take out loans against.

0:49:38 - Jeff Jarvis
But in my rate that there's also a transaction cost that would, that has gotten worse yeah.

0:49:43 - Molly White
I mean, it depends very much on the, on the blockchain, but there are very high transaction costs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it depends, but yeah, the transaction costs are huge. You know the security ramifications are huge. You typically have to spend a lot of money to get you know into crypto to do whatever it is that you want and then back out of crypto because no one accepts. You know, bitcoin or Ethereum for a gallon of milk. There's privacy concerns, I mean, you know I can really go on, but you know, I think when we talk about solving issues for unbanked communities, it's it's a much better idea to look at the actual problems that they have and the reasons why they're unbanked and then go about addressing those problems, rather than starting with saying you know, I've got this blockchain company and I need to figure out what to do with it, which I think is how a lot of the industry has gone about things.

0:50:42 - Leo Laporte
What about Sam Altman and Worldcoin?

0:50:44 - Molly White
I thought that was oh my goodness, she's size.

0:50:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you have? To say that to the poor person.

0:50:50 - Leo Laporte
So, for those that don't remember, we talked about it Altman is the spear, is sending the sphere around. That you give them your an orb, that you give them your iris reading and he gives you some Worldcoin, which is a cryptocurrency, and then it sounds like an old timey curse.

0:51:08 - Paris Martineau
You give the orb your eye and you receive money in return Profit.

0:51:14 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, but it's, it's some. That's what's so interesting about all of this is somehow all hand waiving Lee interspersed with universal basic income and unbanked communities, and we're going to solve the world's problems. And oh, by the way, ai is going to mean infinite wealth, so we don't have to worry. And it's, it's what? Uh, unfortunately, jeff keeps calling test creole. Uh, we, I've got to get a better acronym. Maybe Molly would. Molly White couldn't create a better acronym than test for us.

0:51:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a different crowd, right? Is it different crowd? I feel like there's all their old buddies I feel like they are, but but it, but it kind of advanced, oh um the world coin is a part of that boys became AI boys, but not all of them they're they're cousins.

0:52:05 - Molly White
Molly, would you disagree here that, in the terms of the the Venn diagram of all these people, I think there are people in the test creole movements who are crypto bros and who are AI people, um, but I don't know if they're necessarily completely overlapping circles.

0:52:20 - Leo Laporte
There's an intersection in the Venn diagrams, but they're not a hundred percent. This is worse.

0:52:25 - Jeff Jarvis
It came off it came off Molly's tongue with test creole Just came off. I know, I know Okay all right okay.

0:52:32 - Paris Martineau
Test, creole, we can get up, we can get a choir.

0:52:36 - Leo Laporte
What does it stand for?

0:52:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Transhumanism, uh, extoprianism, uh, singletarianism or whatever you say that, uh, uh, uh.

0:52:48 - Paris Martineau
TESC Cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and long term we skipped the R, but yeah rationalism and then, and then long termism.

0:53:01 - Leo Laporte
I liked just making him do that every few months. It's good.

0:53:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh. The other thing is that Emil Torres, uh, and. And Tim Nick Ebru, who came up with the acronym. That is also a chronology of it. One led to, the next led to, the next led to the next.

0:53:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that may be more accurate than saying there's, they're the same. That's just that they, uh, they evolved from one to the next, they evolved and and what.

0:53:24 - Jeff Jarvis
what Emil we should want to have on the show um is is really really good at is explaining, uh, how it really is. Uh, utilitarianism and eugenics that's what makes this so scary. That's scary.

0:53:39 - Leo Laporte
These people, the eugenics word is scary Very.

0:53:42 - Jeff Jarvis
And it's, and he, he, they I'm sorry, emil's they. Uh, they are very convincing and and Emil was a long termist then saw the light and said, oh my God, what is this crap? And really has reported on it and dug into it Um and um.

0:54:02 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, what about let's actually let's take a little time out because, uh, I forgot to do that, but if we were to have ads, they'd go here. Um, we're, you're watching this week Google, uh, jeff Jarvis, paris Martino and our very, very special guest, molly White. Uh, of the web three is going just great. Her website, molly whitenet. Um, we were talking I want I we didn't completely get off of world coin, and then I want to talk about SPF. So there are currently, according to world coinorg, 3.5 million people who have scanned their irises in the orb Shmucks.

0:54:45 - Paris Martineau
Is your, are your eyes in the orb Leo.

0:54:47 - Leo Laporte
No, my eyes are not in the orb.

0:54:49 - Paris Martineau
That's actually really surprising to me. If you would have had some of the large sum of money. I would have bet that your eyes were in the orb.

0:54:55 - Leo Laporte
If I had been at. The most of the orb eyes are over. There's some in South America they. This is a very nice map.

0:55:01 - Paris Martineau
They. They don't know not a lot of. How have they brought you? Is it just one or are there multiple? That's where they tested.

0:55:07 - Molly White
A lot of the original software was in developing countries.

0:55:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I'm not done, though I like doing this.

0:55:16 - Paris Martineau
That's you know that's that's another orb. That's for the money.

0:55:22 - Speaker 6
That's where the eyeballs are.

0:55:23 - Molly White
That's where the eyeballs are.

0:55:24 - Leo Laporte
There's the orb. Is it all a scam? Yeah, I mean yes.

0:55:35 - Molly White
I don't think world coin. The convenient thing about world coin is they haven't actually said what they're trying to do yet, and so it's hard to say, well, they haven't done it because they haven't actually said what it is that they're doing.

0:55:46 - Leo Laporte
Here's what they say on their website. See if you can figure this out. World coin is designed to become the world's largest digital identity and financial network. Giving ownership to everyone. World coin aims to provide universal access to the global economy, no matter your country or background is that a place for every human to benefit in the age of AI. Well, I'm in Finally.

0:56:15 - Molly White
I've been following world coin for a while now and I think it's really interesting sort of how their messaging has shifted over the last handful of years, because they started out by saying, oh, we're going to solve these like crypto problems.

They were super focused on cryptocurrency and what's called the civil problem, which is where it's really hard to know for sure that there's only one unique person in a network, because it's so easy to just make a hundred crypto wallets and then you can have a hundred of so-called you in the network.

So that used to be what they talked up all the time when crypto was really big, but then crypto started to be kind of passe and now they're all about AI and they are talking about how you know they're going to be all these problems that AI is going to create that world coin will solve by providing this sort of universal basic income adjacent thing to people. And they've very much been able to play on the AI hype to try to market world coin, while also, you know Sam Altman is, you know, playing to both sides here where he is sort of creating the problem with AI, and you know his various efforts over in open AI world while then selling the solution to this problem, he says, is going to be requiring universal basic income in the form of, apparently, a cryptocurrency where you get your retina scant.

0:57:37 - Leo Laporte
There's a certain synergy to creating the problem and solving the problem.

0:57:42 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what journals do.

0:57:43 - Leo Laporte
Then solving the problem. There has been a blade I just saw an article in Wired about. Actually was an interview with Andy Greenberg, who's just written a book about or actually not just this a couple of years ago.

0:57:55 - Paris Martineau
He's always writing a book, yeah.

0:57:58 - Leo Laporte
This, but his point is that crypto is not as anonymous as people often think.

0:58:05 - Paris Martineau
I mean it's, yeah, you can very clearly track all the transactions. That's kind of the whole point.

0:58:11 - Speaker 6
Yeah.

0:58:13 - Molly White
Yeah, I mean depends. It's one of those things where, depending on who you ask and how you ask it, people will argue that it's both very anonymous and also not anonymous at all, and somehow those two things can both be true at the same time it's anonymous until you want to get your money out. Right or in, or in.

0:58:32 - Leo Laporte
But if you, if you just let it float around, it's just a number, it's until you actually try to access. But that's what I've got. You know I happen to have eight Bitcoin in a wallet I can't access. Yeah, it's probably pretty anonymous.

0:58:48 - Molly White
I was just having this kind of argument with some Monero people because the Monero community, that Monero is a privacy coin and so they try to be much more anonymous than Bitcoin even tries to be. And recently law enforcement body claimed that they had traced some Monero. And then all these people in the Monero community were like no, no, no, they didn't trace it. Monero is. You know, the privacy of Monero is completely uncellied. It's just that he tried to cash out and that was where he went wrong, and it was like well as long as you don't try to use the money, you're perfectly safe.

0:59:28 - Leo Laporte
Now, meanwhile, again creating the problem and solving the problem. Sam Altman and world coin have this idea for a world ID which is a universal proof of personhood. All you need is this human. I would like to try to cross a border with this passport.

0:59:50 - Paris Martineau
They immediately tackle you and bring you to it Very interested in what happens.

0:59:56 - Leo Laporte
Do you get a lot of arguments, Molly, with these people? I'm surprised that you even waste your energy on that.

1:00:03 - Molly White
I mostly don't. It's one of those things where, like, people want to argue the same thing over and over again and I don't have boundless energy for that, but everyone's been a while, I give in.

1:00:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's hard Do you get tired of it. What's up? Are you tired of the topic yet? Do you see a day when you just say enough?

1:00:23 - Molly White
Not really. I find it pretty fascinating and I find the the pattern really fascinating of like hype in the technology world and playing on, you know, lay people's lack of understanding of technology, and so I think that is sort of that helps me have an enduring interest in it, even if some of the specifics are less interesting or changing underneath me.

1:00:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that a difference between web one and web three? Is the web one took VC's money and web three takes real people's money?

1:00:57 - Molly White
I think probably web two takes VC's money as well. But yeah, I mean, a lot of it's about the funding model and you know that's something Chris Dixon was sort of talking up in his book is how you can use crypto to really bootstrap projects in a way that people used to have to take venture money or you know some other source of funding, and he speaks about that like it's a good thing, but he sort of ignores the fact that losses also are impacting individuals in ways that they don't necessarily when it comes from VC. So you know he he was speaking of, like the helium project, which he doesn't disclose, but Andre St Horowitz is an investor in Again my problem with all of this?

Yeah, Right and how you know helium is created. You know they claim that they're creating this network through these sort of router type devices that people put in their homes, but he fails to mention that all of these people spent all this money on these devices, being told that you know you'll be able to use them to mine this cryptocurrency token and it'll pay for itself, and then you'll have this thing in the corner of your house that's just generating money for you, which people were very excited about, and then, of course, the token price tanked and people had put all this money into these pieces of hardware that they have no use for at this point, and it's those people who lost a lot of money, not Andre St Horowitz.

1:02:26 - Leo Laporte
I think Stacy, our our the predecessor to Paris as host on the show, had a helium router, right, Jeff, and she was at Bainbridge Island, so she had a lot of ship traffic going by and so they would. They would attach to her helium router, but this was all before the currency tank, so I wonder if she.

1:02:47 - Molly White
Well, and also the. The network that they were trying to bootstrap was for something called Lora WAN, which is a low energy sort of internet of things Long range, low energy, wild wired, wide area network.

Yeah yeah, she was a Luran fan. But they found I think the helium company discovered that there wasn't really that much demand for it and so, despite the company being valued at like over a billion dollars, they were getting like a thousand dollars of fees from people who are actually using the Lora WAN network. So they had to do this like last minute pivot to they call it 5G but it's not actually 5G. It's like this really weird sort of scamception type of thing.

1:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, you know anybody's been in the technology business for any length of time. I've seen a lot of things like this coming. It's not always malicious or malintent or greed or or a ripoff, sometimes it's just it didn't work. Seemed like a good idea at the time. You know, I think they were using Stacey's internet connection, so she's not only paying for the hardware but for internet connection. When she was on the show, she I think she was of the opinion she was making money, but I suspect she's not making money, yeah, but it was it was a little play, it was a small amount of money.

She was more interested in the technology of the Lora WAN technology. All right, we got some stories. Molly, if you want to stick around, we could. You, we can get your comments and all sorts of things, Would you? Would you like to join in From the UK?

1:04:23 - Jeff Jarvis
the phone book. This is such an old fart story.

1:04:28 - Leo Laporte
I said the phone book is going the way of the fax machine. Of course this is from the Daily Mail, but it is not already no British telecom behind there, british telecom, for 150 years has been delivering a phone book to its customers. This is the original.

1:04:47 - Paris Martineau
What are people going to rip to show that they're very?

1:04:50 - Leo Laporte
strong. This is. This is. This is the one that came to people's door this week. This is from Glasgow South. Our look at this final edition. Hold on to it forever. Our last book has landed at your door. 18 million of them Will be handed out all over the UK, but then that's it.

1:05:15 - Jeff Jarvis
So I asked students oftentimes how many of them have used yellow pages and surprised more than I would have thought I've used yellow pages. Have you.

1:05:23 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:05:24 - Leo Laporte
For actually looking stuff up.

1:05:26 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, oh Paper yellow pages.

1:05:28 - Leo Laporte
I don't remember what it was, but yeah paper, yellow pages.

1:05:30 - Paris Martineau
I remember having to go through it all the time as a child and teen Wow.

1:05:35 - Molly White
Yeah, they were definitely still a thing when I was a kid.

1:05:38 - Leo Laporte
I can remember I use whitepagescom all the time. Well, that was the funniest thing. There actually is a company called Yellow Pages and they tried to move to the web Like, oh yeah, that's what I'll do. I'm looking for the phone number of business. I'm going to go to yellowpagescom and look it up.

1:05:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I hate to say it, but when I started local sites with Advance back in 2004, 2005, we thought, as a company, yellow pages is going to be it. We wasted a huge amount of money developing yellow pages software. Oh my God, we were trying to get the directories and trying to get the directories and the oh my God, because it was a beautiful business. Right, you had to be there. Right, if you butcher down the street was there and you're not there, you're going to suffer.

1:06:23 - Leo Laporte
And you pay to be in it. So it was a fear cell to all these guys. Yeah, and you could buy a display. You could buy bigger or littler. Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:06:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And we could sell you a little art.

1:06:33 - Leo Laporte
Another thing Google has ruined for the world. If it weren't for Google, we'd still have yellow pages. Rap Probably. Probably AI would even. No, it'll give you a little hallucinator.

1:06:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Well it's basically I'm writing about the California Journalism Preservation Act and it's basically if the yellow pages had tried to get back at Google, that's what it would be it's newspapers trying to get back. Yeah.

1:07:04 - Leo Laporte
You ruined. You ruined our business model. Eric Canada thought it'd be a good idea to put a chat bot on their website so you know you could. You could ask it about fairs, book, book stuff, already book stuff and things like that.

A fella named Jake Moffat is sad. His grandmother passed. He wanted to fly to Toronto to be there for the funeral. He went to Eric Canada's website to book a flight from Vancouver and he didn't understand it. There are every airline has a bereavement rate. So he asked the chat bot explain the bereavement rate. The chat bot went oh yeah. So he said. The chat bot said book the flight right now, as long as you ask for a refund within 90 days, we'll give you the money back. Well, it turns out, eric Canada, that way. They made that up. The chat bot made that up. Eric Canada's policy explicitly says you have, you can only get the refund before the flight's booked, not after. Moffat followed the request for months he tried to get Eric Canada to give him the refund. He even had a screenshot, smart man, of the chat bot.

1:08:18 - Molly White
Telling him I'm totally planned ahead. That's what I was really surprised about getting this.

1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
Maybe he was a little suspicious, I don't know. He did a screenshot.

1:08:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Because Eric Canada is a jerk airline, so he couldn't believe that they were going to do this.

1:08:31 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure it says. Eric Canada argued that because the chat bot's response elsewhere linked to a page with the actual bereavement travel policy, moffat should have known bereavement rates could not be requested retroactively. So the best air Canada would do is promise an update to the chat bot. We'll fix that and give him a $200 coupon. They blamed the chat bot.

1:08:55 - Jeff Jarvis
They said it's not our problem, the chat bot, they're the one who screwed up.

1:08:59 - Leo Laporte
Eric Canada said the chat bot is a separate legal entity that's responsible for its own actions. The court Throw him through the shot, it was worth it. Court said no, in fact that's not true and you're liable, and Eric Canada did in fact give him a refund, and that's that they were forced to by the court.

1:09:25 - Molly White
Yeah, I wonder what would have happened if he had convinced, like the chat bot, to give him a plane or something like what they have made him. Honor that too.

1:09:34 - Paris Martineau
Like that chat bot that was working for the car dealership right. That essentially kept making deals to sell a Tesla for $1 or something.

1:09:45 - Jeff Jarvis
No, give backs right.

1:09:47 - Molly White
Yeah, no, give backs. I hope everyone's screenshot of that and they can bring it to court.

1:09:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the advice screenshot everything. If a chat bot tells you, screenshot it. Yeah, this is the. This is the story of car dealership that added an AI chat bot to its site. Was a Chevrolet dealership. And this is the story from business insider Katie Natopoulos, writing. A car dealership added an AI chat bot to its site. Then all hell broke loose.

1:10:21 - Molly White
Is this the one that was writing code for people?

1:10:23 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

1:10:24 - Molly White
Yes.

1:10:24 - Paris Martineau
Yes, yes.

1:10:28 - Leo Laporte
They asked for Python code because he was powered by chat GPT so it can write Python code. Somebody bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for a dollar, by the way not legally binding, it turns out.

1:10:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh what's interesting here is is is the debate over responsibility, because you have legislation in California being proposed saying that the model must be responsible for everything bad done with it. Then the next question is is the application layer? Is it? Is it air Canada making a bad application or is it the Schmuck lawyer who used it for his citations? And it's a really interesting discussion about who's responsible and who is the author.

1:11:09 - Leo Laporte
In the lawyers case, the lawyer was the one who got fine, not chat GPT.

1:11:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, because the judge said when I covered it, you should have said the technology is not at fault here. Right, straight out Right, though I would argue that Microsoft was at fault for giving the lawyer the impression that he was going to get credible answers from it, as one would a search engine.

1:11:36 - Leo Laporte
Have you seen?

1:11:37 - Paris Martineau
search engines are never wrong.

1:11:39 - Leo Laporte
By the way, you were mentioning Sam Almond. Am I misreading that? Is he asked? Is he trying to raise $7 trillion dollars?

1:11:48 - Molly White
I think he may have upped it to eight. That's evil. I don't know if you were serious.

1:11:55 - Leo Laporte
This is to create AI chips. Yes. Trillion with a T.

1:12:02 - Speaker 6
Trillion.

1:12:03 - Leo Laporte
Okay, fine.

1:12:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Softbank is going for 100 million to work on chips. Yeah.

1:12:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's expensive, I acknowledge that, but it seems like an awful lot of money.

1:12:14 - Jeff Jarvis
It's. The hubris is just incredible.

1:12:17 - Paris Martineau
It's the power.

1:12:18 - Leo Laporte
Was he joking?

1:12:18 - Paris Martineau
Chat GPT prompts.

1:12:20 - Leo Laporte
Was it, was it. Was it tongue and cheek.

1:12:24 - Paris Martineau
I don't think so.

1:12:26 - Jeff Jarvis
What is that?

1:12:27 - Molly White
I think he joked about making it eight after people Bawked at seven, but I think seven was legitimately what he was asking for.

1:12:37 - Leo Laporte
Unless the Wall Street Journal is lying. Sam Altman seeks trillions of dollars to reshape the business of chips and AI. Of course UAE has some money. Seven trillion, though, that must be over 30 years. I mean, what is that? What is the defense budget? The United States is not that high. That's a lot of money, kids, all right. How about Sora? This is their new open AI's new video from text. Now, I have to say, the videos I'm going to show you were generated by Sora without modification, according to the website, but they have not released the model. Still pretty impressive. This is the text prompt A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street, filmed with warm, glowing, neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, long red dress and black boots, and carries a black purse where sunglasses red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually, as street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights many pedestrians walk about. This looks about right, although there is a certain AI I heard her arms too long.

Yeah, look at this hand.

1:13:46 - Jeff Jarvis
They are pretty long, everybody's moving at the exact same speed. That hand is weird.

1:13:51 - Molly White
I also did you guys see, I think her arm is stretching. She walks so, but it's clearly right now it's AI.

1:14:00 - Paris Martineau
One of these examples was a stylish colorful bird pecking about and someone's like, yeah, this looks good, but if you also look at, I think it was like Getty or something, which is one of the sources.

1:14:11 - Speaker 6
You'll find a they have.

1:14:12 - Paris Martineau
that's that bird they're like there is a photo that is like that bird exactly on Getty. So I think I'm curious, once they release more information about this model, how much of this is like existing content that they've just kind of animated in some way.

1:14:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, notice, there is a bug of some kind. I don't know if it's the Getty watermark, but there's something in the lower right hand corner that is changing around. So maybe it is the Getty watermark. Still, this is, or maybe that's, sora, I don't know. I guess it's in all of them, some of it's, you know, hallucinatory there's a guy doing something. I think physically impossible.

1:14:50 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a dog that goes from window to window in a way you just couldn't.

1:14:53 - Molly White
Well, and this guy that has like three legs.

1:14:56 - Leo Laporte
And you can't. I don't know of any treadmills that go that direction.

1:15:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Back. Well, it could, it could create, it's a creation machine.

1:15:05 - Paris Martineau
It could have it says weakness, sora sometimes creates physically implausible.

1:15:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That is a weakness, Never the less a good post saying that, that, that, that, yeah, this, these, these pups were looking at all. There's three, there's four, there's five. It changes by the second.

1:15:23 - Leo Laporte
It's going to get very world over the next weird over the next 10 years.

1:15:26 - Paris Martineau
I told you that it's true, it's true 10 years, 10 minutes, 10 days.

1:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis
It can't solve for time or space or causality, Cause it doesn't so when they're, when they're arguing that oh my God, I saw the stories. Oh, my God. Agi is just three weeks in the way now. I think it's what he actually said. Three months away it doesn't. It's not a real world model. That's the weakness of this. It has no sense of fact and text. It has no sense of reality here.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Archeologists discover a generic plastic chair in the desert, excavating and dust.

1:16:00 - Paris Martineau
Why is it hovering? It's moving. They're really concerning it's really creepy.

1:16:06 - Leo Laporte
It's really creepy, but you know what I want to see a movie made with all these clips. I think there would be some really somebody's going to in Hollywood's going to do this at some point. Just wild, weird. This is the world we're moving into. I don't need a micro dose, I can yeah. It's true.

1:16:27 - Paris Martineau
Oh, this is haunting.

1:16:29 - Leo Laporte
So this grandmother with neatly combed gray hair stands behind a colorful birthday cake with numerous candles at a wood dining room table. Expression is one of pure joy and happiness. The happy glow in her eyes. She leans forward and glows out the candles.

1:16:44 - Paris Martineau
This video- feels like you're on acid. Yeah, all of it does.

1:16:48 - Speaker 6
Doesn't it all feel that way? She's got doll eyes.

1:16:52 - Paris Martineau
Of course she's got doll eyes. It's just like sweaty.

1:16:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Sweaty, sweaty, grandma, all of this stuff had been positioned as a creativity machine, We'd be wild period the fact that they tried to make it act as if it could do anything real.

1:17:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, it is early days, it is.

1:17:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It's amazing.

1:17:10 - Molly White
I like watching the girl on the left.

1:17:11 - Leo Laporte
Try to figure out how to clap.

1:17:14 - Molly White
Yeah, the hands and the pants.

1:17:17 - Paris Martineau
They're so creepy.

1:17:19 - Leo Laporte
They're so creepy. You know, this is. The cake is so short. Everything looks normal until you kind of move closely.

1:17:27 - Jeff Jarvis
She has no breath. She's trying to blow out a candle. She blows but nothing happens to the candle it has no sense of causality.

1:17:34 - Leo Laporte
I did, like the one of that's a California, a footage of California doing the gold rush.

1:17:40 - Jeff Jarvis
It looks like drywall.

1:17:42 - Leo Laporte
I'd be fooled by that, to be honest. Maybe it's because I'm an idiot, I don't know, but I you know, you could say I colorize things. It's an impossible shot.

1:17:51 - Molly White
I think one of the scariest things about this technology.

1:17:54 - Leo Laporte
They had drones back then, didn't they?

1:17:56 - Paris Martineau
That's true. Yeah, they had drones back then. Laos, You're right, but only in black and white. Go ahead.

1:18:02 - Leo Laporte
Molly Sorry.

1:18:04 - Molly White
I was just saying. I think one of the scariest things about the technology is not necessarily what it can produce, but the fact that it now introduces so much doubt into any video that you see. You know, I think we've seen that to some extent with AI generated, you know, still images, where now people will see images and they'll have to sort of double take and go is that AI or is that, you know, actually something that happened in real life? And that's what I really worry about with the video stuff as well, as, like now, everyone's going to look at a video with that sort of piece of doubt in their mind, wondering, you know, is this something I can trust or not?

1:18:39 - Leo Laporte
I think that's already happened, right. But I mean, should we stop it because of that? I mean that's not a reason to stop it.

1:18:46 - Molly White
No, not necessarily, but I think that you know it's one of those things that we have to just be really cautious now about things that once were generally seen, as you know, a trustworthy source, you know. But I mean, I think if people can learn to be cautious about just believing everything they see, that's going to be a good thing. But I have some doubt as to whether or not you know an average people will actually learn that.

1:19:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I feel like this is a bit. New institutions will have to create new institutions. The in the Gutenberg parenthesis.

1:19:19 - Leo Laporte
I haven't plugged it for a few weeks. That's not the solution.

1:19:22 - Jeff Jarvis
in the Gutenberg parenthesis I told the story of the first alleged call for censorship by Niccolò Perotti in 1470. And he saw a shoddy translation of Pliny. He said to the Pope you got to do something. And what he was really asking for is not censorship at all, he was asking. He was anticipating the creation of the institutions of editing and publishing. Oh that kind of institution come as the yeah, as these needs arise, they come, and right now those institutions are inadequate to the scale of speech.

1:19:52 - Leo Laporte
Well, molly is an expert in something more modern the institution of Wikipedia and the editing policies which is an example of an institution that was invented with an opportunity to deal with that I mean don't, don't, don't you all the time, molly, deal with false Uh information in Wikipedia, of course, yeah, absolutely.

That's one of the chief things, right? Um, here's an interesting article that got a lot of people sent to me, uh, from a site called house freshcom. This is a website, like many websites, that specializes in reviews, in this case, of air purifiers. The article, though, is interesting how Google is killing independent sites like ours, and I would say it's Google, it's not Google, I would say it's companies creating, now, with the aid of AI, uh, artificial content, and that's to follow on with what you're saying, molly. That's really we're going to be. We're in the midst of getting flooded. We got flooded with spam. We came up with some ways to deal with it, but spam never went away. That was a drip from the faucet compared to the tsunami, the flood of garbage information that is going to start to persist on the internet.

1:21:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, I talked to somebody. Yeah, Go ahead. I talked to somebody who was at one of those companies that, uh, that used AI and was known for it I won't say who and they said you don't understand, Jeff. We're in a war over reviews, which is triply ridiculous, because I would think that a review of all things would be a human opinion, but it's not. It's this junk. It's this junk. I get the SEO. It's all about air purifiers. Yep, yeah.

1:21:35 - Leo Laporte
Giselle Navarro and Danny Ashton from housefreshcom provide a bunch of examples. They say big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations. You can't trust Google heats it too.

1:21:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Google doesn't want this junk. They want to have decent search results.

1:21:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, in fact, they don't know what to do. What they talk about is how Google, realizing there was a lot of you know kind of phony we tested 83 air purifiers and here's the best set up some standards for this, like there have to. You have to mention a lab, you have to mention the products, you have to show pictures of the testing, and so forth. So the problem is immediately these phony sites. They're actually, they're not phony sites, they're better. House and gardens, they're well known sites, better. Just said, okay, fine, and they and they filled it up with that kind of content and Google said, oh, okay, I guess it's real.

1:22:31 - Jeff Jarvis
It's just like aboutcom. It's the same exact story. Yes, is it about? Did wonderful work, it was really good, and then the content farms ruined it for everybody. Same thing with Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed had really fun viral stuff. Then others learned the same trick there was no barrier to entry and then they ruined it for everybody, including Buzzfeed, who today had to sell half their business.

1:22:52 - Leo Laporte
They mentioned Buzzfeed in this article.

So. So here is the example with better homes and gardens. Better homes and gardens never mentioned conducting tests prior to the Google product review update, july of last of 2022. You can see clearly and they have the screen captures always do the screen captures, kids on July 6. There were no mentions of air purifiers being tested by July 26. The day before the announcement of the Google update, they say, oh yeah, we tested 38. And then, with photos, which all are credited to somebody named Harry War, talk on multiple sites. It turns out these are all sites run by your favorite Meredith Jeff and Meredith Dot, dash, dot, dash, meredith, they call him now the owner of what's left of timing and what's left of Meredith.

1:23:49 - Jeff Jarvis
So Dot dash Meredith hired a guy by the way, which is also the successor company to, about dot com, and it goes full circle.

1:23:58 - Leo Laporte
It goes full circle. They hired this guy, Harry, to take these pictures and it appears. Look at all the places it appears health people, better homes and gardens, the spruce pets real simple. These are all basically websites pretending they did the testing, but they have. The tests are all from the same place with the same people. Wow, here's real simple. Here's people, Megan. Look at the matching with all credited to Harry War talk.

1:24:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, real simple, and people are in the same company.

1:24:30 - Leo Laporte
The other thing is all that this is not advertising.

1:24:32 - Jeff Jarvis
This is all affiliate revenue, yeah.

1:24:35 - Leo Laporte
And incidentally, house freshcom Same thing they say, but we actually test. But they say at the very top it's affiliate. The way we pay for this is affiliate revenue.

1:24:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder what's happened to the New York Times site to wire cut? Wire cutter. Yeah.

1:24:48 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I you know. I think there is a point that there is considerable pressure on these companies, especially since it's private equity companies that have bought up these companies and now need to pay off this huge debt they incurred to buy these companies. But there's pressure to generate income.

1:25:07 - Jeff Jarvis
They're ruining the web and the internet for all of us. There's a lot of crap and it's got to get worse, and so that's what I you know people talk about. Ai was going to ruin Google and and chatbots. I don't think that's the issue. I think that the issue is the web is getting ruined and Google gets blamed for it. Google searches are as good as they used to be. That's because of this junk. So what happens to be able to, um, to change that?

1:25:32 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, in 2020, popular science was sold to a private equity firm, north equity LLC. This is also from the house fresh article. A year later, they introduced a new arm of their business that runs all the media brands they acquired and they they stopped printing a magazine. They've started putting up websites with phony reviews.

1:25:55 - Jeff Jarvis
See that same thing right, yeah.

1:25:58 - Leo Laporte
Now the problem is and I think this is legitimate from house fresh is legitimate complaint. I think they're wrong saying Google is the problem, but it is hurting sites that actually do testing, that are independent sites. They just don't show up. They don't have the Google food that real simple and people magazine and better homes and gardens and popular science have, so they're not going to show up on those on those brands and that tells us a signal to Google.

1:26:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it must be okay, they clicked on, it Is that is that how Google is enough.

1:26:27 - Leo Laporte
So if you search for best air purifier for pet hair, uh, you're going to find all of those sites, but you're not going to find house freshcom. What do we?

1:26:36 - Jeff Jarvis
find, let's look for it.

1:26:37 - Paris Martineau
Let me see what first comes up. First is a sponsored thing, but the first organic one is better homes and gardens.

1:26:44 - Speaker 6
There you go.

1:26:46 - Paris Martineau
One of the real simple spruce dash Meredith reddit Reddit Good.

1:26:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's good, buzzfeed, buzzfeed.

1:26:53 - Molly White
I read the article, though. They talk about how Reddit's getting brought into this too, because now people are spamming reviews and things like that on Reddit.

1:27:01 - Leo Laporte
I've noticed that on Reddit. You really it's terrible. You can really tell to uh, certainly when somebody goes in there, science of the list. So it's very sad.

1:27:12 - Jeff Jarvis
It is. It's our web and and they're messing it up. Well, there's business opportunities here. There's finding new ways to do things. I mean?

1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
what is Google's responsibility? Which are how does Google solve this, can they?

1:27:25 - Paris Martineau
I mean it's less a Google problem than more media. I mean, jeff can talk about this much more eloquent, wrote a whole book about this, but you know that media have for a long time relied on advertising revenue and that the bottom is not only fallen out of that, but it is like crumbled away, and so all of these companies are searching for something to fill that gap.

1:27:47 - Leo Laporte
We should have. You know, matt cuts for a long time. Was that Google? He's been on the show many times in charge of fighting spam, fighting, uh, you know, click farms and things like that. Um, I'm sure there's some. There are people at Google, maybe Danny Sullivan's doing it, I don't know. There's still people at Google who are doing that. But uh, it's gotta be hard with a tsunami of crap. No effort, clickbait. It's very hard.

1:28:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and and, but I think that's the um I I'm going to do my other thing by other book. Thank you for the plug there.

1:28:17 - Paris Martineau
Uh, paris in magazine I talk about listen, we gotta get the trifecta.

1:28:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I got him here, I'll have. I'll have galleys, the next one soon, um, jeff Jarvis $7 trillion in royalties just seven copies, People, seven copies, and it made me look good.

Um, when media exploded with mechanization and industrialization in the mid 19th century, Harper's was invented to solve this. Harper's said there's a little, there's all this new stuff out there. We got to find the good stuff for you and I think that there'll be ways that people will be verified as actual product testers and there'll be ways that somebody will go out there and do the work to say, uh, the new consumer, maybe consumer reports would say we test it and we know those who actually do and we'll certify the certifiers. That'd be an opportunity for them.

1:29:07 - Leo Laporte
Molly, I think this is a business. Your eyeball. Yeah.

1:29:11 - Paris Martineau
I think if we scan their eyeballs, this would all go away.

1:29:16 - Leo Laporte
Uh, walmart's buying Visio, the well-known television brand. Uh, the Walmart's probably the number one uh company selling Visio TVs. We've recommended them for years. Why is Walmart buying them for the ad business?

1:29:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Amazing huh.

1:29:31 - Leo Laporte
Of course, $2.3 billion. They don't care about the TVs. Walmart has their own house brand. But but the the? When you buy a Visio TV, it's cheap, right?

1:29:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Because I won't buy them anymore. Because of this, because it's spies on you.

1:29:47 - Leo Laporte
It's got a camera in it. It knows what you're watching when you're watching. It knows if there's anybody in the room. It uses its microphones to figure out what you're watching and it's so valuable. Walmart said yeah, that's worth $2.3 billion to us. We believe we believe Visio's customer centric operating system provides great viewing experiences at attractive price points, said Seth Delaer, executive vice president and chief revenue officer of Walmart. We also believe it enables a profitable advertising business that is rapidly scaling.

1:30:28 - Jeff Jarvis
At least they admit it right In house advertising. I'm surprised I don't hear that as a as a genre.

1:30:34 - Leo Laporte
It can offer. Once we acquire our Visio, we'll be able to offer quote, innovative television and in-home entertainment and media experiences. Media experience. It's going to be innovative when you see those ads popping up on your screen. You're just trying to watch TV, man, I just. It's like they're saying the quiet part out loud. I don't. They're not even hiding it, they are.

1:31:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I bought one for my father and then I returned it because I couldn't get it to. It was good. It was insisted on giving me all its junk.

1:31:07 - Paris Martineau
Even I, for years, have been trying to buy a new TV because I have I don't know some crap TV that a roommate roommate left an apartment once, but I don't know. I'm like I will shell out good money for a TV, but I don't want it to have spyware, I don't really want it to be internet connected and there aren't really any options for that. You want a computer monitor, then Parris. I know, although it sucks, they won't sell.

1:31:30 - Jeff Jarvis
You know they won't, but they won't sell smart.

1:31:31 - Paris Martineau
TVs, but they will sell me like a 55 inch computer monitor?

1:31:34 - Leo Laporte
Well they do, at thousands of dollars, Much more expensive than a TV. I know that's great. I guess that changes the substance.

1:31:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Why don't you? I do want to connect it because I want to stream things, Parris, Because I can connect something to it to stream no no, here's how it works the.

1:31:45 - Paris Martineau
TV itself does not need to stream.

1:31:47 - Speaker 6
Do not connect the TV to the internet my Roku and Amazon or.

1:31:48 - Paris Martineau
Apple TV, that's right.

1:31:52 - Leo Laporte
Let Roku spy on you. You don't need Visio and Roku spying on you.

1:31:56 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I'm going to choose one to three companies to spy on me for any viewing activity and no more.

1:32:04 - Leo Laporte
I mean really, if you don't most TVs, you don't have to connect them. They'll complain, but every once in a while you connect them. If you want to update firmware or whatever, They'll complain, but you don't have to connect them. And, just as you say, let the Apple TV and this is where Chromecast I hope Apple doesn't, it doesn't go down this path too far. They already have started putting advertising on their stores and so forth, but there's a big opportunity for them to say look, we'll be the place you can stream this stuff from safely, without they try to pretend they're doing that. But I, you know my Apple TV. I don't want to see any Major League Soccer, but there's constant ads for Major League Soccer because they own it. So I don't know. That's what Philip K Dick wrote about many years ago ads on every surface of everywhere.

1:32:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Molly, do you have a TV?

1:32:56 - Molly White
I do.

1:32:58 - Leo Laporte
Not exactly good for productivity. Do you watch the TV?

1:33:01 - Paris Martineau
When is the last time you watched a TV on a TV. I'd like to pose a different question to the chat.

1:33:10 - Molly White
I turn on my TV like once a month Same.

1:33:14 - Leo Laporte
That's how you get productive. Meanwhile, I'm watching TV five, six hours every single night. Youtube is now. Youtube TV is now the number one streamer, in case you had any doubts about that.

1:33:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Speaking of TVs and how the business operates now 12 months straight, according to Nielsen.

1:33:38 - Leo Laporte
That's beating. What Netflix? Everybody? Yep, that's YouTube, tv, youtube. So that's the thing you do, you're watching, and I think it's because of you young people. It's all your fault.

1:33:53 - Jeff Jarvis
You kids, you're riddling on networks. We used to have three places.

1:33:58 - Leo Laporte
We used to have petticoat junction in my mother's car. But no, you had to watch Marquez Brownlee and Mr Beast, the Twitter TV. The Twitter TV, by the way. Congratulations to Marquez Brownlee, because in the YouTube official blog, celebrating, crowing that they are the number one streamer, they have a big ass picture of Marquez Brownlee Next to a Cybertruck. Next to a Cybertruck. Wow, anyway, nice work if you can get it. Congratulations, marquez. But that doesn't surprise me. We saw this coming. I mean, I, you know, I would. When Henry, 10 years ago, was in high school and his and his buddies came over, they didn't watch TV, they had YouTube running, all you know, all in the background, auto-playing in the background all the time, and that's why he's a terrorist.

1:34:48 - Paris Martineau
And now Salt Hank makes how much for YouTube videos.

1:34:51 - Leo Laporte
You know, kid, you're right, my son, you don't know this well, marley important context is that Leo's son is a TikTok influencer food influencer called. Salt Hank. He's much bigger than I than I ever was.

1:35:04 - Paris Martineau
We famously received tens of thousands of dollars for promoting a Cheetos brand, duster.

1:35:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, Paris. The guy who was impressed with Salt Hank is not the same guy who thought I was a 90 year old.

1:35:19 - Paris Martineau
No, two different guys that guy, the guy who thought this is a bit that started before we started recording the show, which is a different guy I was seeing. I sent a photo of the podcast the other week when we had Micah on and he goes oh, leo, the port, I loved him. And then sees the photo of Jeff and is like and is that Noam Chomsky? I was like no, no, no no.

You know different guy and the guy who didn't know either of you but knew Salt Hank Sounds like an opening streak, though, yeah.

1:35:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I will say Noam Chomsky.

1:35:59 - Leo Laporte
Now, it's not bad to be compared to Noam Chomsky. Honestly, he's grumpy as hell.

1:36:04 - Paris Martineau
He's 95 years old.

1:36:07 - Leo Laporte
Listen, he looks just like you, jeff. I don't know what you're, she's. Look at him. There he is. He looks barely alive.

1:36:13 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, he looks like you, I'm so Paris, paris, I'm sorry.

1:36:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Listen to this guy please, oh Lord, oh, that depresses me so much more than I'll use the Wikipedia picture because you look that's a little bit better. He doesn't look quite so but that's from 40 years ago.

1:36:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's pretty old. That's not that old.

1:36:51 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, you're a young spry spring chicken.

1:36:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I really like this Pierce Morgan interview with Noam Chomsky. This was from last year.

1:37:02 - Molly White
It looks like Jiman.

1:37:05 - Paris Martineau
He looks like someone put one of those AI age filters on that photo of Jack Dorsey.

1:37:10 - Leo Laporte
So for those who don't know, noam Chomsky brilliant linguist, semi-autistic, early AI, pioneer, brilliant.

1:37:18 - Paris Martineau
Jeff.

1:37:20 - Leo Laporte
And grumpy, even grumpy, and grumpy. And the father, monologuistics and a good old lefty like from the old days, the old times. All right, I got a couple of fun things and then we're going to wrap it up, because we've gone on for a whole hour and a half and I feel like that's just what you don't like us anymore, wow. I don't want Molly to think that this show goes on and on, but then you're not being honest. But it does, it does.

1:37:54 - Paris Martineau
It regularly goes on and on.

1:37:57 - Molly White
I was prepared for three hours Were you looking? Oh, yes, Correct.

1:38:02 - Paris Martineau
Thank you, Benito.

1:38:03 - Leo Laporte
Benito is doing his job. Maybe we try to tell guests not don't tell them that, please, because they'll never. This was a great page I found I was going to make it a Leo's pick, but I'll show it to you now. It's a page of untranslatable words that are in one language, and one of the words on here is in fact throws me, alfdorch.

1:38:25 - Jeff Jarvis
It's doch, it's down there on the list, Doch, and if you there it is, it means no, you are wrong, and I am right in one word. Oh, what a great word.

1:38:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's really good Doch.

1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
Say it for me, jeff, because Jeff speaks German, doch Doch.

1:38:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Sort of Doch. So you say something and then you say Doch, and it reverses what you just said.

1:38:46 - Leo Laporte
There's a lot of oh, it's like sarcasm.

1:38:50 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, that's. Germans are not going to go to sarcasm. It's what passes for sarcasm.

1:38:56 - Leo Laporte
It's just weird. German In Germany. There's a lot of German on this. There's some Hebrew, I don't know it's, I don't know. Here's another German one To paint the devil on the wall.

1:39:07 - Jeff Jarvis
The trefle und die Wandmallen.

1:39:10 - Computer
I was looking through this yesterday I was looking at the Filipino words and it's pretty good like for the Filipino words.

1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a user contributed. So yeah, here's one frequently used in Portugal by young people Sextu, it has Fridayd. It has Fridayd 0815. Something very low quality. That's German. German, it's Deutsch. Ja, verummen.

1:39:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Verummen, verummen. No, you can't get the umlaut. Verummen, umlaut.

1:39:43 - Leo Laporte
To fail at something, to screw something up, to lose something or screw someone over, and what does it mean?

1:39:48 - Molly White
I like the little note underneath that says on occasion by middle-aged folks. Yeah, no one could ever.

1:39:58 - Leo Laporte
It's good to know.

1:39:59 - Paris Martineau
It's good to know you can't even scroll back up a little bit. Sorry. This one says expression used on occasion by mostly people who have been politically interested in the sixties, which is just such a specific description.

1:40:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a public of our former Yubelperse Yubelperse. The audience was full of cheering Persians, cheering Persians.

1:40:24 - Paris Martineau
A Klakur, a person who has been paid to applaud or cheer for someone. Yeah, you've heard of.

1:40:28 - Leo Laporte
Klax right when they would bring in phony audience members to applaud. I actually know you never heard the word Klax. I've never heard Klax. Oh, that's a useful word. It happens all the time. It happens. At Apple events, the front five rows Always filled with employees who will leap to the big.

Klakurs, they're Klax. They're Klakurs but Klakur, or is the French Klakur? But the funny thing is this appeared in 1967 when the Shah of Iran visited Berlin and had intelligence agents cheer at the road and be the protestors. I kind of remember that, actually. So he yeah, anyway, stucka. No, let's not do that one Not. Here's one from the UK. They're amazing, not as green as cabbage looking.

1:41:17 - Paris Martineau
That was a really good accent. I do not.

1:41:21 - Jeff Jarvis
You got to retake Not as green as a cabbage looking.

1:41:25 - Leo Laporte
I marry Poppins. No, it's green as cabbage, looking Not to be it's got worse every time.

1:41:34 - Molly White
We're like bouncing around varieties of the fake English accents Alter. Used by young people.

1:41:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, young people use this All one. Yeah, I was like dude, okay, anyway, this is.

1:41:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought it was kind of fun.

1:41:52 - Leo Laporte
It's like. It's like like boober. Every language has words, often slang, that don't mean anything in other languages. Here's one for me. This is used frequently in Sweden by everybody he does to not have the energy or will to do something. That's me All on the show now. Yeah, the energy or the will to continue. Thank you very much. We're to pause for a moment. You're watching this week in Google our special guest, Molly White. So nice to have Molly White on. Molly Whitenet is her website and you should absolutely subscribe. You can find the link there actually to her newsletter. Is it a free newsletter?

1:42:38 - Molly White
Yes, it is. No paywalls.

1:42:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, citation needed. Well, you should start charging for that.

1:42:45 - Molly White
Well, people can pay for it if they want to, but that's a sort of pay as you want type of oh, this is good.

1:42:53 - Leo Laporte
She conflates effective altruism with effective accelerationism into effective obfuscation Beautiful, really. I do want to ask her about the SPF in just a bit, but we shall continue in a moment. Jeff Jarvis also here, and the wonderful Paris Martin on twig. We continue on with our guest Molly White. Did you follow I imagine you did with interest the rise and fall of Samuel Bankman Freed?

1:43:22 - Molly White
I did with strong interest.

1:43:25 - Leo Laporte
Is he a perfect example of a crypto bro and the crypto culture, or is he just a plain old grifter who found a great grift?

1:43:37 - Molly White
I would say the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think he's very emblematic of the last couple of years in the crypto world, where people were trusting a lot of these larger than life personalities with a lot of money and investing in people like Sam Bankman Freed and then discovering that it was sort of all a house of cards. Someone pulled out the bottom card. Things started to go really badly. So you know they've been. Sam Bankman Freed is certainly the most high profile example, but you know he's one in a long line of people who are facing investigations or charges for activity over the past couple of years. So I think it's quite emblematic of the space.

1:44:28 - Leo Laporte
Is he? I wonder, though, is he a scapegoat? Or I mean, he clearly is a criminal, but it seems like he wasn't doing much different from a lot of people, or was he?

1:44:39 - Molly White
Well, I mean, a crime is still a crime, even if a lot of people are committing it.

1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, I live in the US Trump and everybody's speaking to you.

1:44:50 - Paris Martineau
He doesn't believe any tech boys can commit crimes.

1:44:53 - Leo Laporte
No, SPF was clearly. I mean, they were taking money from their own, from a fund from people, and investing it without their permission, right?

1:45:03 - Molly White
Yeah, they were taking customer money that was supposed to just be held as if it was in an account on their behalf and they were using it for all kinds of things. I mean investments, but real estate and all kinds of things like that for his dad and mom and yeah.

Yeah, but I think it, I think it's really telling that I think a lot of people in the crypto world have sort of just forgotten that, like you, can commit crimes, that that things are illegal. Right, because you're right that the activities that he was engaging in were really common in the crypto world and continue to be really common in the crypto world, but there's just been so little enforcement that I think people believe they could sort of do whatever they wanted and get away with it, and I mean a lot of them have Well, that's it.

1:45:47 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that what happens? You kind of because I'm I don't know, but I don't think SPF was kind of going, let me see how I can rip these people off. I think he probably, I'm guessing was genuinely thinking well, this is what you do, right, I've got this fund of cash or the desperation that comes.

1:46:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I saw it with Robert Maxwell, the rubber baron of the Daily News and the Daily Mail. Once they things start going south, they think, well, I'll just borrow some from this Right and it'll all come back. I know this is going to come back and they're their own personal Ponzi scheme.

1:46:20 - Molly White
Then yeah, and to hear Sam McMuffin free tell it, I mean he says that he basically viewed the Alameda research account, which is, or the, the FTX account, as like an infinite amount of money that he could just dip into, and so it was never going to be a problem. They could always pay it back. And then of course, it turned out that they couldn't, but he would, you know, at least in his telling he was so disconnected from the reality of the financial situation of the company that he didn't really realize that he was spending customer money. Whether or not you believe that is a different question.

1:46:56 - Leo Laporte
I personally don't put a lot of stock into no it's a very convenient fiction story.

1:47:02 - Speaker 2
Yeah, although I think it's kind of credible that you know.

1:47:05 - Leo Laporte
A lot of these guys think well, crypto is just going up, up, up, so whatever I borrow, I'm going to make people money. It's the same kind of foolish thought of you know give me $100,000. I want to go down and I'm going to win in the roulette table and double, double the money and I'll get all my money back. If you just give me a little more. Every gambler does, you know, every gambling addict does that. Just give me a little more and I can make it all back. By the way, Jeff the movie is out.

Good news. Jarvis and Chomsky twins. Only their mother can tell them apart. Tell them apart. Thank you, joe Esposito. Oh, joe Esposito, add it again. I don't know. What do I ever do to you, joe? I don't know.

1:47:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know.

1:47:51 - Leo Laporte
We've got to give Molly access to the discord because there's so much wild stuff goes on in there. Yeah, I don't. Did you? Did you watch the trial? Did you go to the trial, did you? Did you see it? See, I don't have any direct experience of looking in his eyes and hearing him tell. Tell us that, whether that was him lying or or believing it, he could be a victim. He could be yet another victim of the crypto craze.

1:48:17 - Molly White
I don't think he was. I did go to the trial. Actually, I hadn't originally planned to, but when I learned that he was going to testify I decided to fly down. Fantastic.

1:48:28 - Leo Laporte
I got to see it. Tell us about it. Tell us about it Must have been a circus.

1:48:35 - Molly White
It was a circus it was. I mean, the line out the door at the courthouse was incredible, because only the first like 21 people get into the courtroom and there's no press passes or anything, so it's just whoever gets there first, and so people would line up at like one in the morning the night before outside the courthouse to go see, to sit in the courtroom. But everyone else got put into these like overflow rooms where you could still see it on the TV and stuff like that, so it wasn't like you didn't get in at all.

You didn't get in the courtroom itself, you were watched in an overflow or yeah, so they had these overflow rooms where people could sit and see it on the TV, because they don't they don't televise federal court trials or anything like that, right, but yeah it was. It was quite an experience just watching him try to explain what had happened to a jury in a convincing way. I think people are pretty unanimously agreed that he probably was doing it against the advice of his lawyers, because it didn't go very well and I don't think anyone really expected it to.

1:49:42 - Leo Laporte
Is it your family. He knew what he was doing when he took the money from FTX to put it in Alameda Research.

1:49:48 - Molly White
Yeah, I think so. He knew is he illegal he?

1:49:50 - Leo Laporte
knew, is taking investor money and using it.

1:49:53 - Molly White
Yeah, I mean he was. There were so many cases where he was clearly aware that things were going wrong.

1:50:01 - Leo Laporte
Where the money was gone. He was telling people don't talk about it, you know right.

1:50:06 - Molly White
Yeah, yeah, delete your messages and things like that, and so, yeah, I really don't think it's. It's true that he just didn't realize and he, you know, oops, made a little mistake and $8 billion is gone.

1:50:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I understand, because of his investment, they may get it all back.

1:50:23 - Molly White
Yeah, because of the anthropic investment which they had invested in this AI company called Anthropic. And so, yeah, I think there is the possibility that people will get at least a substantial amount of their money back, if not a full recovery, although the bankruptcy has been unbelievably expensive to this point just the amount that the lawyers are charging and the amount of time has been just incredible to watch. But, yeah, I mean, I think I think, out of the crypto bankruptcies, the FTX creditors are looking a little bit more promising as far as recovery compared to some of the others, and the anthropic investment definitely has a part to play in that.

1:51:03 - Leo Laporte
So Anthropic. There's a little Google tie in here, because these were people working at Google on AI who were very concerned about safety and didn't feel that Google was paying enough attention to safety, and so they kind of split off.

1:51:18 - Jeff Jarvis
But in that, in that test real way though I was going to say they're the affected after us.

1:51:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, which Sam.

1:51:23 - Molly White
Bankman Fried was as well, isn't that?

1:51:25 - Leo Laporte
ironic. Yeah, oh, I'm not. I'm not. In fact, my, my insider friend in AI said oh, those guys were jerks.

1:51:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh, of course, your insider friend Sam Altman.

1:51:38 - Jeff Jarvis
He said they were so worried about your rock, they needed one company. So you keep probing and finding out who was.

1:51:45 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I've got to keep you know. I got, I got a list of notes going here and we're eventually going to go through every AI list, do you?

1:51:50 - Jeff Jarvis
have the? Do you have the post-its on the wall and the red lines between?

1:51:54 - Paris Martineau
them. Yep, it's pretty hard to keep them contained on the side that can't be captured by my camera.

1:51:58 - Leo Laporte
He was apparently inside at Google when this all happened and he said Anthropa will never be as good as the clue as Gemini or as there's a clue, go ahead.

1:52:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Write them down, go ahead.

1:52:10 - Leo Laporte
Professor Plum in the library. He also said that you really open AI is going to be better because they're not as worried about safety and the Anthropics Claude which, by the way, we use Claude all the time here for show notes and all sorts of stuff. We like Claude, but it's much more safe, he said anyway, so not as good. They have raised $450 million from us since, since last May from Google and Saras Force no, I'm sorry, that was in May. In August, $100 million from two agent telecoms Amazon gave him $4 billion, $2 billion more from Google. This month Menlo Ventures gave Anthropics $750 million. They have. In the last year Anthropics has raised $7.3 billion in five funding deals. Now see, web 3 is going just great.

1:53:04 - Molly White
Yeah, it's good work if you can get it.

1:53:08 - Leo Laporte
It just show. I mean, there is definitely a gold rush mentality with AI. Everybody would like to hop on the AI train and I guess, can you still put money into open AI? Probably not. Microsoft sewn that all up, so you got to find somebody else.

1:53:21 - Molly White
Well, it's weird, the somehow the world coin price has started to become a weird like synthetic version of an open AI stock where it follows Sam.

1:53:31 - Speaker 6
Allman.

1:53:33 - Molly White
Yeah, it's very bizarre to watch.

1:53:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, interesting.

1:53:39 - Paris Martineau
So it all leads back to world coin.

1:53:41 - Leo Laporte
There is an irony, though, that SPF's investors may in fact get their money back, even though SPF kind of stole it, because the things he invested in are doing so well.

1:53:54 - Molly White
Well, one specific thing.

1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
One, okay, one. Well, you know, you only have to have one hit, right.

1:54:02 - Jeff Jarvis
And if AI turns out to be the next site that Molly starts, then the value may be short no-transcript.

1:54:14 - Molly White
I can kill it right now.

1:54:16 - Leo Laporte
Credit to the information. They were the ones who figured out that Anthropa got the money for Menlo Ventures by the way. Yeah, in fact, great coverage. I learned everything about this stuff from the information. We have such a fantastic team on OpenAI and its associates. Sam Bagman, for you put $500 million into Anthropa in 2022. Opm but Well, yeah, but it's People's money. Yeah, somebody's money Old people's money is not what OPM is Other people's money.

1:54:56 - Jeff Jarvis
There's all gnomes' money. How dare they take it away from gnomes? Jeff finally found somebody older than him. Hey. Hey.

1:55:06 - Leo Laporte
Actually, anthropa is valued at what is it? $15 billion. So his little investment there with OPM old people's money, my payoff. That's interesting. I didn't know that, molly, that's very interesting. Boy. If you've got red thread going here, you might want to tie another thing.

1:55:30 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I've always got red thread going.

1:55:32 - Leo Laporte
Wow, let's move back to Washington DC, where things don't move quite so fast. However, the Senate now has more than 60 votes for COSA Kids Online Safety Act, so there's a path to passage.

1:55:50 - Paris Martineau
It's got kids and safety in the name, so it's got to be good. What could be wrong?

1:55:55 - Molly White
If.

1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
Marsha Blackburn and Dick Blumenthal love it. Well. What could possibly be wrong? Fortunately, the house is so fractured, divisive and ineffective. They don't even have a bill.

1:56:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, in this case, it's a way to get trans people so the house could come behind it.

1:56:12 - Leo Laporte
Because that's really going to be the impact of it. We had a great conversation about COSA over the weekend and one of the people on the show, sir Sonnel Weissman, who works for a right-leaning think tank in DC called R Street, has written a very good piece at R Streetorg about COSA and why it's such a terrible idea, and that's one of them is that it will really be bad for LGBTQ kids because they won't be able to get the information.

1:56:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Isn't R Street a little more libertarian than right-leaning? I think Our friend Shoshana is there.

1:56:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, libertarian, I don't know In the old days, can you?

1:56:50 - Paris Martineau
describe libertarian as right-leaning In the old days. Well see, that's the thing.

1:56:54 - Leo Laporte
In the old days it was conservative, but now it was like crypto-republican, but now it seems almost lefty. It's crypto-republican now. It's crypto-republican, but it's lefty now because, well, we've fallen so far. On the other side, COSA violates the First Amendment rights of children and adults because in order to do age verification, which COSA mandates, you have to ask everybody, not just the kids. Yeah, you want to care about privacy.

1:57:20 - Jeff Jarvis
All you freaks out there on the Internet, then COSA is bad for you.

1:57:24 - Leo Laporte
Shoshana's main point was it's unconstitutional, and I think I asked I said well then, why would members of Congress attempt to pass a law?

1:57:35 - Molly White
that's obviously blatantly yeah she laughs too, one of their favorite pastimes. She laughs too I don't.

1:57:42 - Leo Laporte
What's so funny about that? It seems like if you're a lawmaker, you shouldn't attempt to pass unconstitutional laws.

1:57:49 - Jeff Jarvis
As long as you get the votes and the contributions, then who cares what happens later it's true.

1:57:53 - Leo Laporte
So it's really theater. They don't expect as long as.

1:57:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Tom Lehrer said of Werner von Braun I send the rockets up, it's not my business where they come down.

1:58:01 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's theater. Have you ever seen a congressional hearing?

1:58:06 - Speaker 6
on tech it's theater. Oh my God, is it theater.

1:58:08 - Paris Martineau
It's a boogie theater Sigh.

1:58:13 - Leo Laporte
What was? I just was reading something.

1:58:18 - Paris Martineau
The news probably.

1:58:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there you go. Who am I? What am I doing here?

1:58:24 - Paris Martineau
Leo, you've suffered a big fall.

1:58:27 - Speaker 2
It's okay You're on a podcast right now I can raise my hands.

1:58:35 - Leo Laporte
I think we can take a break and come back with our picks of the week is what I think. Did I do the change log? Wait a minute, I didn't. No, you didn't do the AI corner either.

1:58:44 - Paris Martineau
Well, we kind of Do we want to take a look at the change log right now?

1:58:48 - Leo Laporte
Leo, this whole show has been the AI corner. Yeah, look at the change log, leo.

1:58:51 - Paris Martineau
Yeah take a look at the change log. You've got so much to do in there.

1:58:55 - Leo Laporte
Is there anything in there? Well, there is one big story in the change log. I know you've all been waiting for this. Google has changed the size of its sign-in page.

1:59:08 - Paris Martineau
Wait, wait, wait. You can't be telling me about something that's changed until we've heard a certain Play the Play the tone.

1:59:17 - Speaker 6
The Google Change Log.

1:59:22 - Paris Martineau
From the Verge. Come on, guys. How am I keeping this?

1:59:24 - Speaker 6
on the rails. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, richard Lawler.

1:59:27 - Leo Laporte
Tradition, writing Tradition, meet the new Google sign-in page. There you have it. This is where this is what the change log has come to. That's it. It rolls out today. Get excited, everybody. Actually, I'm pissed off. I don't like this because I already been bombarded every time I go to a site with Google sign, with Google sign, with Google sign, with Google. Now it's going to be even bigger. No, I don't like that.

1:59:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Get off my front porch kids.

2:00:02 - Leo Laporte
Thank you. Thank you, Joe, for the Leo. I just fell off the seat and I can't quite figure out what's going on. Image. All right, there's still other stuff from the change log. It's actually not my change log, it's Scooter X's change log. Scooter X.

2:00:20 - Paris Martineau
That's true. The change log presented by Scooter X.

2:00:24 - Leo Laporte
Get ready. In Europe, they are about to raise really raise the cost of your Nest Aware subscription, which makes me worry that they're going to do the same in the US as well. In some cases as much as doubling the cost of the subscription for your Hello Doorbell or your Nest Hub. This is a you know. Amazon said we lose a lot of money on these Amazon Echos. I imagine Google's in the same boat, so maybe they're trying to make a little extra dough before they fold it all. Maybe the folding is coming sooner than not. Inventory of the Nest Hub, the Nest MIDI and the Nest Audio. Little puck is running low, oh really.

2:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, next on the chopping block.

2:01:19 - Leo Laporte
This is from 9 to 5 Google. Maybe they just stopped making them. What do you think it's true also, not just on Google's own store, but on other retailers? What's Google going to be left with? Well, and I thought that they were going to take that. Maybe the hope, the best hope. Last best hope for Google's assistant was adding Gemini, their LLM, but maybe they don't plan to do that. Is there anything else?

2:01:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Google put out a it's open source version of Gemini called Gemma. Oh, it's so cute, Line 68.

2:02:02 - Leo Laporte
So cute that's news Nice Waze is rolling out alerts for speed bumps. Wow, thank.

2:02:10 - Paris Martineau
God.

2:02:13 - Jeff Jarvis
You know what I hate? I hate when some schmuck in New Jersey puts up Pothole ahead. Well, no shirt, that's New Jersey.

2:02:22 - Paris Martineau
That's New Jersey culture.

2:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, but I do have to think that this Waze update is for people like us. Jeff, waze starts rolling out alert for speed bumps and sharp turns. Watch out, we don't want to take a tumble. We don't want to take a tumble. There's a sharp turn ahead.

2:02:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Turn the wheel like this. Got to move it every little hand like an old person.

2:02:47 - Leo Laporte
Actually, my car does that. My car will actually say uneven surface ahead. I don't know how does it go? Well, it's probably getting it from Google, probably right. And this is actually kind of bad news for not just Google but Apple and maybe some other people as well. The FDA stands against using smartwatches to monitor blood glucose levels. Here has been a race to get blood glucose, noninvasive blood glucose measuring into watches.

Not accurate. Wearable devices that measure blood glucose levels without piercing the skin can result in inaccurate measurements. Fda emphasizes there are currently no devices capable of doing that without breaking the skin. Well, we know that, but this is on the FDA's website.

2:03:39 - Jeff Jarvis
If you adjust your insulin wrongly?

2:03:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you could kill yourself or put yourself in a coma or all sorts of things. Yeah, so the FDA does have authorized, obviously, continuous blood glucose monitors. I've used them, but nothing yet in the watch they say just don't. I think this is for now. You know, obviously Apple or Google would try to get FDA approval before they sell something like this, but for now, do not buy or use smartwatches or smart rings that claim to measure blood glucose levels. Hmm.

And you know it is. You know, maybe it's something that they can't, can't be done. They've tried. Remember, google had the contact lens, the verily moon shot that would measure your blood glucose levels. They discontinued it, I think, probably because it wasn't working. That's the Google change log. I got nothing. Thank you very much. Scooter X is Google change log. I don't know what we do with that, just scooter, all right. Look, there is a bunch of stuff that you guys have put in here. So, gemma, you, we mentioned that, do you?

2:04:48 - Speaker 6
want to go any farther with that.

2:04:50 - Leo Laporte
No no, no, no.

2:04:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I think they're interested that Google is trying to open source too. So you now have.

2:04:56 - Leo Laporte
They have to because Facebook's doing it with llama.

2:04:58 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, I think it's pretty funny that the did. You guys are big AI boys here. Did you guys experience the chat GPT hallucination?

2:05:09 - Leo Laporte
I didn't. I must have used it last night at the right times, because it apparently got very sleepy and started really wonky.

2:05:16 - Paris Martineau
I mean all of those days.

2:05:17 - Leo Laporte
Did you see some examples, cause I'd love to see what it looked like 78.

2:05:23 - Paris Martineau
Rats. Sorry that that's a different one, actually sorry.

2:05:27 - Speaker 2
I just saw a gibberish. That's a very a different hallucination.

2:05:32 - Paris Martineau
This is from Mitterney, don't look at that.

2:05:34 - Leo Laporte
This is from Mitterney.

2:05:35 - Paris Martineau
Don't look. Close your eyes, children. Close your eyes, you're a child.

2:05:41 - Leo Laporte
This is Mitterney imagery of a rat member that somehow got into a well-known peer reviewed science science journal I think it's worth noting that the member in question is larger than the rat.

2:05:58 - Jeff Jarvis
It's going off the page. It goes to the sky. It's a happy rat. It should have, Even though it's cut in half After this, this fewer it didn't get withdrawn.

2:06:10 - Speaker 6
I hope so. But, it's not the member.

2:06:14 - Jeff Jarvis
But the paper.

2:06:17 - Paris Martineau
The member's still at large.

2:06:23 - Leo Laporte
Do we have any chat? Gpt hallucination examples from last night. Do they know, do they say why it happened?

2:06:32 - Molly White
I do think it's really interesting that this must mean that apparently somewhere there's like a knob they can turn that. Somehow, hallucinations got cranked up to 11.

2:06:45 - Leo Laporte
Here's an example from Sean McGuire on X.

2:06:56 - Paris Martineau
Of note Keta type requires an vita lampara paja punto to clear off fire of the photo setting waves nesting product muy deeply, as though a man under an admin color somber it and he responds are you having a stroke? Some of what you're saying makes no sense, or aren't?

2:07:14 - Leo Laporte
proper words. Let me encyclopease me. There's more Wunderender T articulations hungry for.

2:07:23 - Paris Martineau
Smile face emoji. It's like someone trying to pretend they're speaking English.

2:07:28 - Leo Laporte
And then so chat. Gpt says whoops. I really apologize if my last response came through as unclear or se siente like it drifted into some nonsensical wording. Sometimes, in the creative process of keeping the intertwined spanglish vibrant, the cogs and la tecla might get a bit whimsical. Just gracias for your understanding. I'll ensure we're being as crystal clear como low from now on. So wow.

2:07:54 - Paris Martineau
A quote from below. Would it glad your clickly is to grape turned tooth over a mind ocean Jell-O type or submarine, else K Kin Sierras. He died in tow what?

2:08:07 - Speaker 6
Oh, my God.

2:08:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually it is run by human beings. There in Mexico City they had too much tequila.

2:08:13 - Speaker 6
And then here's one.

2:08:17 - Leo Laporte
This is something about music Walt's for Debbie in the legendary Sunday at the Village Vanguard, enjoy the stages of ether in music time and the response with extra grand, grand closes. And then it just types happy listening. Over and over, and over and over again. Enjoy the content at home or on big watches, always in the perspective, with a tailor nose and living the. And then, oh Lord.

2:08:47 - Paris Martineau
This is one that just says it's you, it's here, it is and it can be, and it will be, and it is and it must be, it is and it shall be and it could be.

2:08:57 - Molly White
I think he's that I got an official general intelligence this is a existential crisis.

2:09:02 - Speaker 6
Oh, I don't want to be here.

2:09:04 - Leo Laporte
This is test real. What we don't know, and I have to say this, is we don't know what the prompt was, and it could easily open AI.

2:09:11 - Paris Martineau
Open AI acknowledged this issue and it's status status dashboard at the time first said it was quote investigating reports of unexpected responses from chat GPT. On Tuesday it later updated to say that the issue has been identified and was being monitored and then on Wednesday had updates that all systems were again running normally.

2:09:32 - Leo Laporte
Here's one with the actual prompt. I might ask myself what are the different types of gel nail like builder gel, etc. Absolutely the gel nail world as we extend. So he offers a lot of variety. Let's dive into some of the most different types of gel you'll encounter.

It's a gel like like manicure nails, yeah like manicure nails, and I think it's just mixing English with Spanish on this one, so maybe that's just a little. You know, little hitch and it's get along. These things happen, apparently even happen in chat GPT enterprise. Here's another post from a promise bender on Twitter Chat GPT enterprise.

2:10:19 - Speaker 6
It's suggested agenda for the meeting.

2:10:25 - Leo Laporte
Coinage of the meeting and docket conflict six minutes off the gathering vindicate the things to be seen as center most for the meat. Number two develop goosing and walk our crank. Go, slide the flux and trick from the first telling till now being thankful for the outfetched needlework on the eaves for the novial pith.

2:10:49 - Speaker 6
Number three.

2:10:49 - Molly White
I would listen to a podcast.

2:10:54 - Leo Laporte
This is blame After the book.

2:10:57 - Speaker 6
after the books, any concrete scaries and the sigh of hitches with a primal house on the list for the layoff and gavel vaulting.

2:11:05 - Leo Laporte
Number four four asking and tough ship fire lining. Grab no anyone in sleeves, lids and day tilters and the off book for getting or grid scale into the working Number six time to check To chat GBT.

2:11:22 - Jeff Jarvis
This makes just as much sense as anything else.

2:11:27 - Molly White
And somehow the grammar is like basically correct. It's words are wrong. You know, they got like the sentence structure more or less the cadence.

2:11:34 - Paris Martineau
the cadence is right.

2:11:36 - Leo Laporte
It's almost like that def the combobulator script where the guy just kind of made up words. Here's the final synopsis from chat GBT. Tweaking this agenda should be keen after each overarch and can be retconned as a novel in sewing for the real trades, offering the foremost bond and long leg out the tauted push for the primo, for the grand tour. This overlooks a mule tier for PM skill and crossing the T's. Sorry, it's so hard to do this with a straight face for a hotch Tope, hotch loop that's big on the in the each and every which law peened for the eon tones and for the per loose. It's a fern tick. The swede for the are yet and a Godom are in the wowing. This shelving, yet proper like the past, will be a dekin in seeing through the lab dose and the four taped. This is a good day's anger and can sediment your rink in the big day in the role of the cut of the bins for a furry match at the call of the door. Good Thorpe and Viathan.

2:12:46 - Molly White
Good Thorpe and Viathan I want more sign off specifically in that and Viathan.

2:12:58 - Paris Martineau
This is. You know it's gonna be 10 weird years. That's genius.

2:13:02 - Leo Laporte
I swear to God that's better than Lewis Carroll. That's amazing.

2:13:08 - Molly White
The future is now.

2:13:10 - Leo Laporte
Wow, good, thorpe Action oils and the next meeting's point black. Let's Skype out the line of the new skiffs and purdude amount up for the up and joining and the take twos for the next meeting. I really love it. All right, we actually, you know, remember last week when we were doing the obituaries? Oh, that's true. Yep, jeff asked chat GBT Molly for his obituary and it because I'm so old.

2:13:38 - Jeff Jarvis
It's coming in a minute, it couldn't do it.

2:13:41 - Speaker 2
You got a good six years left before you turn 100.

2:13:43 - Paris Martineau
So I asked it on the air live and it gave me six paragraphs.

2:13:47 - Leo Laporte
We thought maybe we'd have AI Leo read you my obituary. Please no crying. That's a tough one.

2:13:55 - Speaker 6
After all, I'm just an AI, but if I had to, I'd say he's been a real trailblazer in the world.

2:14:02 - Paris Martineau
My God, oh it's great.

2:14:04 - Speaker 6
He's always been passionate about sharing his knowledge with others, and his dedication to his craft is truly inspiring. And let's not forget his legendary sense of humor he's always been able to make us laugh Even when the news is grim. Oh, here's to you May your jokes never Nobody's crying.

2:14:23 - Paris Martineau
I love that there's one blonde woman in the audience.

2:14:28 - Leo Laporte
And I wish he had said it. He left it out. Good sort and Fiat. We'll be back with our picks of the week. Oh Lord. Wow, I'm glad you brought that up. I hadn't seen any of these. These are amazing.

2:14:46 - Jeff Jarvis
So now you want that same. Can you get the same program to now read this stuff?

2:14:51 - Paris Martineau
Oh, out loud in front of the AI. Yeah, in front of your AI yeah.

2:14:57 - Speaker 6
Oh.

2:14:57 - Leo Laporte
Anthony. He is the keeper of the AI. Here's a, here's plain text you can get from futurism. It does this as the good work of a web of art for the country, a mouse of science, an easy draw of a sad few and finally the global house of art Just in one job, in the total rest, the development of such an entire real than land of time, as the depth of the computer, as a complex character, the education of these designed, important to them, computer talents is a great average or one room spot for the word of a single part, the elite of its machine, or talk is the book of life and the shared essence of the self of a family is the white coat of the dove. Stand in the computer as the most important culture of success, and it is just an understatement as we often say good sort and viet on.

2:16:01 - Paris Martineau
Good sort and viet on.

2:16:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to make that a saying. That's a saying from now on, absolutely, it's an apostrophe in viet on it's vie apostrophe and something else. Viet yeah, yeah.

2:16:16 - Paris Martineau
Viet on.

2:16:19 - Leo Laporte
Good sort and viet on Let us. I don't know if they. I don't know if they warned you, molly, we like to do pics at the end of the show. I'll give you a minute to think of something. Could be anything A book, a play, a music, a musical piece of an NFT that you really like. Cryptocurrency, you know everyone should buy a website, anything like that. Just think about it. Meanwhile, paris Martino, who has been All right.

2:16:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we're going deep. It might be a bit more than a minute because we're going into some deep TikTok lore here. I came across the other week I love that A TikTok from this young woman. We'll play a little bit of it. This woman talks about something kind of interesting.

2:17:04 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's, let's listen to she have an aim.

2:17:07 - Speaker 8
What's the say Maddie Hart soccer, maddie Hart soccer, what's? A piece of trauma that you have. That's funny. It has to actually be funny. I'll go first. My dad abandoned my family when I was five years old. That is a wife and four kids. He abandoned us and then pursued amateur break dancing.

2:17:26 - Paris Martineau
He got really good. He like blew up. This is essentially the gist of it. He's a famous amateur break dancer.

2:17:34 - Speaker 6
Wow. You got to follow your dreams.

2:17:38 - Molly White
Is that him on a?

2:17:39 - Speaker 8
shirt. I think it is he has a name which is Benny Hanna.

2:17:44 - Paris Martineau
They've got a couple of break dancing videos in there. He competed, I believe, in the break dancing Olympics. A lot of different stuff. This goes very viral. She talks about how he kind of abandoned her old family, wouldn't pay for medical bills. Then if you scroll down on that Twitter thread, you have right there the dad responds in a 10 minute and 33 second video, while he's wearing a Bitcoin button up shirt.

Essentially, he says one not only normal divorce. I've been a bunch of money in child support, totally fine. I'd like you to skip to about six minutes and 30 seconds.

2:18:20 - Leo Laporte
It's a long response. He says break dancing was just a hobby. All right, let's go on to sit. Wait a minute.

2:18:26 - Paris Martineau
So then he break dances to prove the point. This ends up being very thematically right, I separated in 2004 and divorced in 2005.

2:18:35 - Computer
I took up break dancing, entirely by accident, in 2012. As one does Oops, as one does, yeah, oops. I then just kept doing it. I'm now age 66. Now some of you might be wondering can he still break dance at age 66?

2:18:52 - Speaker 6
He's reading his stuff. Nobody's wondering that buddy.

2:18:54 - Paris Martineau
Nobody's wondering it.

2:18:55 - Speaker 6
Nobody's wondering it, he just broke.

2:18:57 - Paris Martineau
He's standing at the size of the Bitcoin. Look the size of the Bitcoin flag. Oh my, he's standing at Bitcoin flag and an American flag.

2:19:05 - Leo Laporte
Here's what everybody's been looking for on TikTok A 66 year old guy in front of an American flag and a Bitcoin flag Sort of break dancing.

2:19:15 - Paris Martineau
He'll get there, he'll spin eventually, there he goes. That's the one. Well, you know so this has been captivating my attention ever since, because I think a 10 minute reply video is a certain level of internet deranged to try and dunk on your daughter for saying that you abandoned her. That's so terrible.

Then people start looking into him a bit more Once she responds is like I don't think his claims are accurate whatever. Then people start digging into his past. Turns out he's a big time right wing influencer Of course he is. He is a right wing culture warrior who writes blog posts but actual US history and complains about the wokes on a Dinesh D'Souza podcast. And not only is he internet conservative, he apparently was a speech writer for Reagan Bush and Doyle William F Buckley wrote the introduction to his campus memoir. Oh my.

2:20:12 - Speaker 6
God, he's an.

2:20:13 - Paris Martineau
OG. Member of the Heritage Foundation and Christian Coalition.

2:20:17 - Leo Laporte
This guy is padding his resume. This isn't real. Is it Really? Let me hear all of these. Is this what the guy said? This is what people have found out about.

2:20:27 - Paris Martineau
This is what people have found out by looking him up online Moly moly, I do feel like he might have created.

2:20:32 - Leo Laporte
I just thought it was a beautiful little internet tale. Wow, okay, tiktoker, I hope that she is getting over the trauma, because clearly that is traumatic that is the worst. Then have your dad come back 10 minutes worth of BS in front of a Bitcoin flag.

2:20:49 - Paris Martineau
At one point she shows some text messages from him one of which I believe is something to the effect of hey Mads competing in the Olympic breakdancing competition today. Was it your birthday recently? Oh my God.

2:21:03 - Leo Laporte
You know what, though? Not everything belongs on social media.

2:21:08 - Paris Martineau
No, definitely not. This has just been the rabbit hole I've been living in for the past couple of days, so I thought I'd share it with you guys.

2:21:14 - Leo Laporte
Thanks, now we're in it.

2:21:18 - Paris Martineau
There are two different breakdancing breaks in the 10 minute video.

2:21:21 - Speaker 6
There's more.

2:21:22 - Paris Martineau
Yes, there's another time where he breaks to breakdancing. Enjoy your own leisure.

2:21:28 - Leo Laporte
There's some nutty people in the world. That's all I know. Honestly, sometimes I really wish I didn't know. I kind of wish I just grew up in my own. I want to just walk in the garden and not ugh. Well, I guess I don't know. Should I share this pic with you, why not? This is more my cup of tea. I think Molly might be more into this as well. These are fonts, typefaces that are actually mathematical theorems, problems or programs. I'll give you an example. This is a Sudoku font. Oh godly.

2:22:07 - Jeff Jarvis
You should know it. Leo likes Sudoku that you generate. He has no life.

2:22:12 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. Is that boring? No, it is Cool. Now, this is a Sudoku and as you solve the problem, it's a real Sudoku, the computer generated. As you solve the problem, it's going to spell out Paris is cool.

2:22:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, kind of that's like seeing stars in the sky, but how is it spelling it out?

2:22:34 - Molly White
Like one of those magic eye things.

2:22:37 - Leo Laporte
You see the highlighted squares when those what they left out was what they have in common.

2:22:42 - Paris Martineau
I mean you could draw a letter on any of these.

2:22:44 - Molly White
It's a real, but look at all the things they didn't include. I think the numbers are in order. Oh, they're in order. It's a real Sudoku font. Okay, it's very cool.

2:22:53 - Leo Laporte
There's more. There's more, god, this is boring. There's more.

2:22:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I like fonts. There's more. Okay. Now apparently generates a new page.

2:23:02 - Leo Laporte
It generates a new page, for I can't get back because I have to click this link again, because it generates a new page every time. So it's not just Sudoku. I know you don't like Sudoku, it's here's mazes. You could solve mazes, here's it. How about a Tetris font?

2:23:21 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I like the Tetris.

2:23:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so it's spelling out text right now. But let's say Jeff is old you almost spelled it Jeff. Jeff is old. So now these are actually. This is playing Tetris. It's playing the game to spell out Kind of what do you mean? Kind of it's doing the rules. Man, look, I've written Tetris solving code. This is the real deal, man, jeff is old.

2:23:50 - Speaker 2
Don't you think that's so much? I do think that's pretty good.

2:23:54 - Leo Laporte
Don't you think that's cool, eric domainorg, e, r, I, k, d, e, m, a, I N E. It's, it's. They actually wrote a paper, fun with fonts, algorithmic typography and they've got a whole bunch of fonts that are algorithmic. It's actually really, I think, very interesting, but, like I said, I knew that you'd hate it, so I think it's very cool yeah.

I knew you'd like it, molly. Look at this. This is coin sliding. You slide the coin. I just I don't know. I think it's kind of neat. Lots of them in here. Jeff, pick of the week.

2:24:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, what do we choose from here? We should mention, just just for the heck of it, the People Magazine is 50 years old and it's now owned by Dot and Dot dash Meredith to put the junk out of the world. That's one.

2:24:43 - Paris Martineau
We could do a German one. You're referred to as dead people magazine 50 years old.

2:24:48 - Leo Laporte
50 years old.

2:24:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Possibly be true. E W is more than 30 years old now, Jeff we're getting old.

2:24:55 - Leo Laporte
There we are. Cover of the first People Magazine March 4, 1974 was actress Mia Farrow from the Great Gatsby. Did you ever work for people?

2:25:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, I was the TV critic of people.

2:25:09 - Paris Martineau
So you know where you were in the first to learn more about this.

2:25:14 - Jeff Jarvis
You'd have to read magazine magazine which is nice and short. It's about your length, Leo.

2:25:18 - Paris Martineau
Pocket size. Yeah, fun fact.

2:25:24 - Leo Laporte
All right, that's one, that's one, that's one you can have as many as you want.

2:25:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, you got a choice. Do you want fondue, wars or chocolate? 3d printer.

2:25:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it depends if you want a savory or sweet, savory or sweet kids.

2:25:39 - Paris Martineau
Okay, it's dessert time so chocolate, chocolate, it is 3D chocolate.

2:25:44 - Leo Laporte
One more it's called the cocoa press. This is the kind of thing back in the day Leo would have bought. I want this now, today.

2:25:53 - Paris Martineau
He buy one, but then make a fun little thing and mail it.

2:25:57 - Leo Laporte
They've been developing it for 10 years. Break free from the mold, oh my God. Oh, it's 1500 bucks, but what is it used to print? What's the film?

2:26:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It's you buy this chocolate and you put it in there and you have to wait. It's in the story. I think you have to wait like 15 minutes for it to get in enough.

2:26:19 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's not bad. 3d printers take a long time. Oh, look at that. That's all I live in. A little boat. There's a boat, where's a boat? Let's see.

2:26:29 - Molly White
Oh, there's like a little white chocolate tugboat.

2:26:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow yeah, and the in the video and the prior what.

2:26:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, here, yeah, so cute, oh, and you can eat it. That's a little waxy fondue. It's a little waxy. You've tasted it Waxy.

2:26:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, so you get this, you get this tube of chocolate and then you put it in there and you have to wait like 20 minutes. Then it gets warm.

2:26:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh, look, he's eating his chocolate cup that he printed. Oh, look at that With his chocolate printer.

2:27:06 - Paris Martineau
I'm so glad we chose this the bow is the standard print that comes out to check that your printer is working oh yeah, there it is and you can eat it.

2:27:16 - Leo Laporte
You can eat your mistakes.

2:27:18 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, one more. Since I'm being accused of being the old guy, I want you to know that I am hip.

2:27:25 - Leo Laporte
Look at his kind of phone. Did you dial that?

2:27:28 - Jeff Jarvis
phone. Brandon, Look at Molly. Look at Molly. I want you to know that you young ins are bringing this back.

2:27:40 - Paris Martineau
Totally true. I have legitimately for year, like the last two years, been thinking about starting a collection of you have some that look cool. I bet you have some Princess model John would you?

2:27:53 - Leo Laporte
get me the phone that you brought me. The way I met Jammer B John Selenina, our studio manager, one day, many years ago, oh, many, many. By the way, just to be clear, Jeff and I are the same age we're both.

2:28:12 - Paris Martineau
We're both old.

2:28:13 - Leo Laporte
Okay, he's not older than me. We're both old. We're both the little older a little, not much. You're in the same ballpark, actually. What's weird is we? So we're going to. We were trying to think of what we should do because twit 1000 is coming, which is basically the 20th anniversary of 12. Wow, and. Leo, this is the time for our 24 hour stream, I think we should do it so back when I was first starting out, this was what phones looked like, kids, you would just listen to get me central, get me rewrite, get me rewrite Right.

Jeff, remember that you would have to do this because it wasn't a dial, so you'd have to do this like three times, four times. It was different things for depending on a party line or. But to get central, you do that. Can I talk to Jeff Jarvis? That Jarvis with a J Jarvis, anyway, thank you, john. John brought me this. In fact I think I wrote it on the bottom, yeah.

2:29:17 - Speaker 6
From Jammer B. Did you write?

2:29:20 - Leo Laporte
that. Did I write that? Did you write that? All right, so I like corded phones Old phones are coming back. I think corded phones are great. Wait, that means you've got to get on the right.

2:29:32 - Molly White
I had a rotary phone up until like Did you? Yeah, how did you? I mean not me personally, my family.

2:29:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh oh, it was your actual phone.

2:29:41 - Molly White
Yeah, wow, yeah Not that young, so how? Long ago I was. It was at some point I had a babysitter who my parents were worried wouldn't know how to operate the rotary phone, and so that's when we lost it.

2:29:59 - Leo Laporte
That's hysterical. Yeah, I think so. Those, those, what was it called? It wasn't DTMF, the the clicks. The phone company at some point said you know, we're not going to interpret that anymore. You're going to have to send dial tone down, dtmf down, but the pulse, that's what it was right, the pulse is. So you may remember when you dialed zero go ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, you would send that many pulses out.

2:30:24 - Jeff Jarvis
That's just why so you're, you're both way too young for a princess model. Oh, I wish I had a princess phone.

2:30:30 - Leo Laporte
You know what I want. You know what that is.

2:30:32 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't know what that is.

2:30:33 - Molly White
I know what that is oh.

2:30:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. It's the first one you have to get in your collection. Oh, oh, oh, leo, find a princess model.

2:30:40 - Paris Martineau
I'm. I was thinking the first one would be one of those Garfield phones that keeps washing up on, I think, the coast of France or Britain.

2:30:47 - Leo Laporte
What, what? Wait a minute. What Do you not know?

2:30:49 - Paris Martineau
about this. Oh what. What's that all?

2:30:51 - Leo Laporte
What Search Garfield phone washing up Did a ship carrying cargo.

2:31:00 - Paris Martineau
This has been a mystery forever. There had been since the 1980s. Bright orange fragments of this Garfield novelty phone had been washing up on the coastline in Brittany, france, for years. They couldn't figure out how or why or what was going on, but apparently France info, I think it, publicized something. They eventually, I think, found that there was a shipping container somewhere off the coast that burst open and was leaking phones, garfield phones but I want one of the Garfield phones.

2:31:36 - Leo Laporte
You know, think of all the kids waiting for their Garfield phone, and it never came.

2:31:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Or I'll put it in the discord there is. This is the other one you might want.

2:31:47 - Paris Martineau
Okay, great, this is my history here I'm going to do this now Is the sports illustrated sneaker phone.

2:31:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, the football phone.

2:31:55 - Leo Laporte
You need the famous time magazine Football phone yeah.

2:31:59 - Molly White
Does the sneaker phone have a speaker phone? Hold on, I'm putting you on sneaker. Sneaker. I'm putting you on sneaker. I love it.

2:32:07 - Speaker 6
Well played, well played.

2:32:12 - Leo Laporte
What was the name of the phone? This is the classic phone. It was very, very art deco. The dial was underneath You'd stand up and you'd stand up. You know like what I'm talking about. It's very modern. Yeah, I wish I could find one of those. That would be cool.

2:32:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It'd be like things you'd see at the World's Fair. It's the vintage. Hold on, I found one.

2:32:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're good, you're going into the discord right now. Google is fantastic. Here we go. How did you?

2:32:43 - Jeff Jarvis
find that so fast? I just want you to send us a phone with dial on bottom.

2:32:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh okay, oh yeah, this is it the Ericsson. Oh, you can still buy them. Oh, that's a great looking phone. One space age. Yeah, that is a great looking stuff Really. On the bottom that's oh, this one's. No, it's a dial, I thought it was buttons.

2:33:10 - Paris Martineau
See, this is going to be post problematic for my idea with these phones. I want to mount them on a wall kind of in a display, I don't really know.

2:33:18 - Leo Laporte
You got to use them Paris.

2:33:19 - Molly White
Can't get like a little I cannot use.

2:33:22 - Paris Martineau
I cannot use dozens of land. You have to do exactly what I'm going to put you on sneaker.

2:33:30 - Jeff Jarvis
You have to use them you have to, Jessica.

2:33:33 - Leo Laporte
Jessica, we could talk about the story in a moment, but I've got to put you on sneak.

2:33:38 - Paris Martineau
I've got to put you on sneaker. Hold on, molly, you're talking to me, talking to me through a phone that's been washed up on the shore of Brittany, france, for 30 years.

2:33:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that was always the other one. Here's the other one. Oh, this is your, your, your, your going to. You're going to prevail over this one, leo.

2:33:57 - Leo Laporte
Okay.

2:33:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Hold on a second. He's putting it in the discord.

2:33:59 - Leo Laporte
Right now, this is the Erico phone. Now the vintage creme. Oh yes, donut phone, the donut phone. Gorgeous.

2:34:09 - Paris Martineau
That is really gorgeous, the yellow one up there, the blue one.

2:34:14 - Leo Laporte
Which would you get the cream? I like the cream color, it looks like a purse.

2:34:19 - Paris Martineau
I think I would get either the blue one or the slightly more yellow one, because I think those are colors that would fit with my current apartment aesthetic.

2:34:30 - Leo Laporte
After all, that's important.

2:34:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So kids? The other thing about phones back in the day is you didn't own them. It's like cable boxes you had to rent them from the, from the telephone company.

2:34:39 - Leo Laporte
What's nice, these are actual Western electric phones.

2:34:42 - Jeff Jarvis
You paid every month a fee to rent the phone, adding up to a hundred times more than the phone cost. You were not allowed to put anything else on the phone line, so modems were extremely controversial and were for a while in some places illegal because you couldn't hook anything else into the phone system.

2:35:01 - Leo Laporte
How about this one, paris? It doubles as a handbag, or is it?

2:35:07 - Speaker 2
for putting in your handbag. I thought it was a bag purse.

2:35:09 - Paris Martineau
It's a handbag size.

2:35:13 - Molly White
I wonder if they just think it looks like a handbag.

2:35:14 - Leo Laporte
Maybe that's it, because I don't see anywhere you'd put anything. Wait a minute it's called the handbag phone, Handbag phone.

2:35:20 - Paris Martineau
Oh cause it's shaped like that.

2:35:22 - Leo Laporte
Maybe just the shape, cause it would be fun if it were actual handbag. Great idea, all right, molly, I've given you a lot of time to think of a pick of the week. Do you have anything for us?

2:35:37 - Molly White
Yeah, I was going to point to the Wikipedia article on the lamest edit wars.

2:35:47 - Leo Laporte
Were you part of this lamest edit war.

2:35:51 - Molly White
It's a list of them, so I don't think I've been a part of any of them.

2:35:56 - Paris Martineau
I think it's really funny. The disclaimer up top says this page contains in bold material that is kept because it is considered humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken serious.

2:36:08 - Molly White
We like to warn people before we get too crazy.

2:36:11 - Jeff Jarvis
No irony on Wikipedia.

2:36:15 - Molly White
My favorite one is towards the bottom, where people were edit warring, which is really just when you're editing back and forth between versions of a page over whether or not we could call the tiger the world's most powerful cat.

2:36:33 - Leo Laporte
These are hysterical, the things people fight over the Bee Gees. Are they a British or Australian group? Freddie Mercury what's his true ancestry? Jennifer Aniston, is she American or American born? She Greek, american, english American, greek and English American. She need all those prefixes. So Copernicus, pg, woodhouse, werner Herzog, saladin, all of these have been edit war subject matter. Which one is your favorite here? The?

2:37:07 - Molly White
tiger.

2:37:08 - Leo Laporte
The tiger.

2:37:09 - Molly White
It's towards the bottom.

2:37:12 - Leo Laporte
Is the tiger the most? Well, that's a really good question. Is the tiger the most powerful cat?

2:37:19 - Molly White
Complete with accusations that people were tiger fanboys. A revert war with the tiger he led to arguments about how tigers would match up versus bears and crocodiles.

2:37:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh my, Complete with another revert war about the inclusion of a YouTube video showing a tiger fighting a crocodile. Wow, wow, I love it. Well, thank you for the work you do, by the way, not just on Wikipedia, but a web three is going great On your newsletter. Everything that you do. We are so glad to be able to talk to you. We've been fans of yours forever, molly, so thank you.

2:37:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you for your followers.

2:38:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, followers and fans. Molly White is a list of all of the wonderful things you can do. She speaks regularly, she gives talks and lectures, so maybe consider for that. You can read her newsletter. It's free, which is really great, and you can support her work directly if you want. You have a, you have a Patreon, or you can just send her money. Just send her money.

2:38:27 - Molly White
Send her money. I have her newsletter send me money, yeah Slip cash under my door.

2:38:34 - Leo Laporte
Slip some cash under her door.

2:38:37 - Paris Martineau
Send her an old phone, yeah.

2:38:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Bear us, bear us. I found it for you. You can get the Garfield phone, you can buy one.

2:38:43 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I did see. That's what I'm doing after this. I've got to queue that.

2:38:47 - Molly White
I kind of want that sneaker phone now. I think that yeah.

2:38:51 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I've been thinking for years. I'm on the verge of going being a collector of old phones, and now is the time.

2:38:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, we've really we tapped something here. Yeah, oh, it's only $195.

2:39:04 - Paris Martineau
Holy cow, I gotta look for some. I gotta look for some better. I'm fine with being untested. It doesn't need to work.

2:39:10 - Molly White
You can start collecting the parts that wash up and assemble your own.

2:39:14 - Leo Laporte
Just you know it'd be almost cheaper to go to the north of France and just collect Wait.

2:39:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Parts.

2:39:20 - Leo Laporte
You need to do the water, just wait, here comes a phone. I think you could have a phone collection in your house. You don't have to wire them up.

2:39:29 - Paris Martineau
No, definitely, I've thought about it. I will display them on a wall.

2:39:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a shelf.

2:39:35 - Leo Laporte
You did a shelf. Yeah. Paris Marneau writes for the information. Are you working on a big story right now?

2:39:42 - Paris Martineau
I published something last week that I forgot to put in the rundown when you talked about it next week. Oh shoot.

2:39:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, we will. We'll talk about it next week. You can also send her a tip now, have you? Yet I keep trying on Signal to be using my username instead of my phone number.

2:40:00 - Paris Martineau
You have to be in the Beta.

2:40:02 - Leo Laporte
Pro it's a Beta. Yeah, so we're still giving out our phone number 267-797-8655. But soon.

2:40:10 - Paris Martineau
And you know, there may have been some twig listeners that reached out over the last week with helpful tips, and for that I thank you. You know who you are.

2:40:18 - Speaker 6
What are?

2:40:18 - Leo Laporte
you looking for? What kind of what, would you know? You want some real skull-duggery. You want a big skull-duggery.

2:40:23 - Paris Martineau
I mean yeah, startups doing shady things, unreported major moves, you know.

2:40:32 - Speaker 6
Oh, I like that you think it's interesting. Yep.

2:40:35 - Leo Laporte
Let me know about it Long walks with AI accelerations, yeah.

2:40:41 - Paris Martineau
If you had eyes on Leo during his long walk.

2:40:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, we definitely want that. We'll pay you with a phone, that's true, there's a Scooby-Doo phone. I saw in there, or there's a Kermit the Frog phone. It could be yours there's lots of phones in our.

2:40:56 - Leo Laporte
Discord. Jeff Jarvis is the director of the Townight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark. Craig Craig Newmark Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Soon to be de-orbited, and but he's going to land in another place, but he's going to orbit again. Yeah.

2:41:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Over and around a new planet. How?

2:41:21 - Leo Laporte
exciting. Well, thank you for being here. Molly White, Jeff Jarvis.

2:41:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Yay, thank you, molly.

2:41:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's so great to have you, paris Martin, though. Thanks, molly, thanks to all of you who joined us Always, thank you. Paris. So this is why you are a club-tweet member, right? Because of great shows like this one. If you want to, well, if you hated this show, forget I said that. But if you want to support any of our shows, just do it out of charity. Just if you hated it, we need it, she's her pity.

2:41:46 - Paris Martineau
So you need things to hate. Hating is an essential part of life. Pay for the shows so you can hate it more.

2:41:53 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely. $7 a month is worth it, isn't it For just that feeling of, oh, I hate this show? Go to twittv slash club-tweet. You will get ad-free versions of this show and all the shows we do. You'll get access to the Discord, which is a great amount of fun, as you probably noticed. You also get special stuff we don't put out in public. We appreciate your support. It's what keeps us going. Twittv slash club-tweet. We do this show every Wednesday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern. That's 2200 UTC. I say that because you can watch us do it live. You don't have to, but if you want to, youtubecom slash twit, we go live when the show begins. We turn off the stream when the show's over. You couldn't get on-demand versions of the show at the website. Twittv slash twig. You can, of course, watch it on youtube. There's a youtube channel dedicated to this week in google. Best thing to do, though get yourself your favorite podcast client. We like pocketcasts, but google has one. Actually, google doesn't have one anymore.

2:42:58 - Speaker 6
Google used to have one, apple has one.

2:43:01 - Leo Laporte
That's right. Why did it? What Subscribe Just not in google podcasts? That way, you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. Thanks for being here, everyone, thanks to our wonderful panel. As I always say at the end of every show, and I've said for the last 15 years, good forp and v it on.