This Week in Google 804 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. Jeff and Paris are here with lots to talk about. Of course, deep Seek that new AI from China is all the rage. We'll talk about what it really means. We'll even play with it a little bit. I like the reasoning. Google has changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Apple hasn't so far. And then we'll play 17th century death roulette. Yes, it's a wacky show coming up next on this Week in Google Podcasts. You love. From people you trust.

This is Twig. This is Twig this Week in Google, episode 804, recorded Wednesday, january 29th 2025. Big potato, it's time for Twig this Week in Google for the last time. This Week in Google, the show. We cover everything but Google. For the last time, just to reassure people, we're changing the name. We're changing the name, we're changing the music. We are not whistling the theme. We have a benito's doing a nice new theme for us. No more recorders, uh, and we are going to one last time.

0:01:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Play the recording music now.

0:01:21 - Benito Gonzalez
They just heard it they just heard it it only goes on in post. Yeah, and they just heard. They just heard it, just because you didn't hear it.

0:01:28 - Leo Laporte
They just heard it the only reason we got away with it for 15 years.

0:01:33 - Paris Martineau
If you're listening to this, scrub back 45 seconds. Listen to it again and save her smart.

0:01:39 - Leo Laporte
No, she works for the information, the informationcom, and of course you could see her stuff in the weekend edition and she's a marvelous person. With it looks like purple hair, but that's just a purple light, it's true. Is that a grow?

0:01:54 - Jeff Jarvis
light or something.

0:01:55 - Paris Martineau
No, it's a like a tube light sort of thing from some fancy light store I got.

0:02:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it to make? Is it to affect your psyche, or is it?

0:02:05 - Paris Martineau
I guess it's just via vibes based.

0:02:07 - Leo Laporte
It has nothing to do with plants okay, it's a vibe, it just looks kind of fun. It's a vibe thing. You grandpas just wouldn't understand the other. Oh look, she can hold it like a lightsaber. Oh yeah, yes, she is our princess leia, isn't she?

0:02:23 - Paris Martineau
That's true I you know I take the space buns down for the podcast so it can fit in the frame.

0:02:29 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis is our Yoda. He is the professor of emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark. Professor of journalism of Of journalism, of which he is the professor at the city university of new york, emeritus now at montclair state university and suny stony brook brook. When are your classes?

0:02:53 - Jeff Jarvis
starts. I'm not sure I'm gonna be teaching soon um the earliest fall okay yeah, that's cool. I have a course on the books at stony bro and AI and creativity.

0:03:05 - Leo Laporte
Nice. Did you apply for a South by Southwest panel or anything?

0:03:11 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I stopped going long ago. Yeah, me too. It pissed me off one year. It's a party, do you? Go. No, it's marketers and Germans. Now the Germans, I like the marketers, I'm not so crazy about.

0:03:23 - Leo Laporte
There's a lot of Germans at South by in Austin. They love it.

0:03:27 - Jeff Jarvis
They love it, they're used to. I don't know if they still do. Lufthansa had a special flight. What that would be a fun flight that would be a very fun. The South by flight? That would be a party. Hip Germans. Germans at SXSW, let, germans at sxsw. Let's see, they have a german house there. Oh, uh, house, as they call it. Yes, yes, yeah, so here, okay, wait, a second german house. It's a. It's a twitter account.

0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
I'll put it in the in the in the uh I will uh mention that today I am wearing multiple ai devices I still have the shirt.

0:04:00 - Jeff Jarvis
The shirt itself is it is an ai device.

0:04:02 - Leo Laporte
The shirt is it's a test to see if you can see all the colors and I'm wearing this and I'm trying to get the founders of the b computer on the show to talk about uh, that that is always on, always recording we've talked about it before does kind of um interesting summaries of your day. Now I got yesterday the plod note. This is something that you can see on every other tick tock, apparently very popular in the tick tock shop. They make a little uh square thing that goes in the back of your phone. This one is a, just a little lapel pin, or they advertise it on tick tock.

Oh, it's great like crazy. That's why I didn't buy it for a long time, but it's actually really good so I tested it. I, uh, I recorded. Um. Now this one, unlike the b, is you have to explicitly press a button and start recording. Okay, but I did. I used it for Richard Campbell. You know before on Windows Weekly. At the end of the show he does a little whiskey segment. It did an amazing little, not so little, it did an amazing summary mind map and everything of Richard's whiskey segment. That really impressed me. So this is designed for recording com. Like you might use this, uh, at a lecture, college lecture. That's where they're, that's where they're really nerd question.

0:05:13 - Jeff Jarvis
How could it hear it if you had your earphones?

0:05:15 - Leo Laporte
on. Uh, I turned off my mic. Yeah, that's the problem with both of these devices is, when I'm doing a show, I it would only hear my side, it won't hear your side. So, uh, I turned off my mic and I let richard talk for the whole segment and recorded it, did it, did him and it made a mind map and it was. It was quite impressive. I was, I was kind of blown away by it. It's using claw. Here's the difference I don't know what uh ai the b is using. They don't know what AI the B is using. They don't say and you can apply for an upgrade to a better AI, I suspect Then it would use, maybe chat GPT, but this uses Claude Sonnet or 01 and does a really, really remarkable job. So my dream of having an AI assistant always listening to everything I do uh is is getting closer and closer that's that's sad.

0:06:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That's his dream, that's so sad. I'm a simple man simple dreams.

0:06:17 - Leo Laporte
Um, I guess I could. I guess I could show you. Let me uh pull down this so you don't see that. I guess I can load up the plod notes. So this is the summary of the whiskey uh thing it was. It was quite good. I mean, it's lecture blair at all. It got even got the weird most not all of the weird Gaelic spellings correct. Uh did a great job on the takeaways. You can also see it as a mind map, which is kind of wild are people mind mapping still?

maybe not people, but a eyes are.

0:07:03 - Paris Martineau
People have stopped mind mapping, but the AIs have taken over the AIs know how to do it.

0:07:07 - Leo Laporte
You can have different templates for your summaries. This is the transcript. It's probably using Whisper AI for the transcript. I'm impressed. I'm impressed. Now it's no DeepSeek. Have you all played with DeepSeek? This is the new chinese model that everybody's talking.

0:07:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I want to take some credit here. I want to take a little credit, please do, on both this show and uh ai inside. I was talking about deep seek in the first week of january before the world went crazy because benedict evans said at the end of december he said boy, deep seek snuck in at the end of the year with the biggest AI story of the year. He knew he was right.

0:07:48 - Leo Laporte
He was right and in fact it tanked NVIDIA and many of the other AI stocks. And then, of course, openai. The latest is OpenAI, and Microsoft are miffed because it turns out DeepSeek used, they say, maybe plagiarized OpenAI.

0:08:07 - Jeff Jarvis
A little ironic, since the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for supposedly plagiarizing them, which I even defend them on.

0:08:17 - Paris Martineau
It's only okay when Americans do it guys.

0:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Not the Chinese. I think that there's a couple of things that are probably important to point out. One, that the story of deep seek comes from china and may be oversold. You know they have a real interest in destabilizing our stock market and our ai development. So they said, oh, it only costs six million dollars to train it. That's's probably misinformation, if not disinformation. It is also the case, it seems to be.

Openai says that they used OpenAI for distillation, which means once DeepSeek's LLM was built, they trained it by asking OpenAI questions, having a dialogue with open ai back and forth. Of course you could do that very fast, uh, and it and it made it smarter. Um, it is a reasoning, r1 is a reasoning ai and I have to. So I was pretty impressed. I asked it a couple of um kind of pretty impressed. I asked it a couple of um kind of general questions that you know one might ask an ai, and it did. I thought a very good job. I like the reasoning models because they talk with you while they're thinking. It's almost like. It's almost like a real here.

0:09:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's my question yeah, is that really a window on reasoning, or is it instead a performative, um uh effort to show us what reasoning would look like, in other words?

0:09:51 - Leo Laporte
is it? Of course, we'll never know. We'll never know, right, but uh, it's my guess. I mean, that's the way that these things work, is they? It's an iterative process, right? These reasoning models are are iterative in the sense that they have multiple experts, if you will Imagine that Multiple experts, and they interact with one another. And so what you're seeing in the reasoning, the reasoning models take time. For instance, when I asked Deep Seek about I is how does quantum computing work, something I still don't really know. It didn't, it didn't. It took 43 seconds for it to finally give me an answer. But as it's going it, it, it, I got to watch it, watch in the conversation to kind of see what was going on. So otherwise you'd be sitting there and you'd just be sitting there, right.

0:10:50 - Paris Martineau
So it's kind of like the whole washing machine where you get to see what's going on inside. So it feels more exciting.

0:10:57 - Leo Laporte
Thinking, thinking, thinking. You want me to read. So this is kind of how the conversation went. I said how do quantum computers work? It first thing. It says okay, so I need to explain how quantum computers work. Hmm, where do I start? By the way, that's, that's human tuning, right, right? I remember from my classes. Well, it makes it more, I remember from my.

0:11:21 - Paris Martineau
I remember from my classes.

0:11:23 - Leo Laporte
I remember from my classes that regular computers use bits which are zeros and one Quantum computers use something called qubits instead. But what's a qubit exactly?

Wait I think qubits can be both zero and one at the same time, because of superposition. That's a quantum mechanics concept. Right, superposition allows qubits to exist in multiple states simultaneously, but how do they actually perform computations? I remember something about quantum gates, and on and on and on. At the end of it, though and there's quite a few paragraphs of dialogue with itself, I mean at the end of it it gives me its answer, which is very nicely structured in bullet point form, and then a summary, which is just a paragraph. That's also, I think, very good conclusion. Quantum computers harness superposition and entanglement to solve problems intractable for classical systems, while challenges like decoherence persist. Advancements in qubit quality, error correction and algorithms may unlock transformative applications in cryptography, material science and AI. That's good. That's a good answer.

0:12:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, but here's the other interesting thing. Paris is that that whole? I'm just thinking what about this? What about that part? You can't cut and paste that text, only at the end it gives you its final answer. Then can't cut and paste that text. Only at the end it gives you its final answer.

0:12:48 - Leo Laporte
Then you can cut and paste that text so I asked this something I knew something about, as opposed to quantum computing. How do I make focaccia bread? We should ask acacia pepe. Actually, by the way, it answered the uh quantum question in 43 seconds. It took 99 seconds to figure out how to make focaccia okay, the final frontier I want to make focaccia, but I'm not really sure how.

Let me think about what I know. Focaccia is a type of italian bread, right? It's kind of flat, usually has olive oil, herbs on top, maybe rosemary. I've seen it with big dimples on the surface. I remember I mean this. This anthropomorphization is wild. I remember that bread usually requires flour or water, yeast and salt, but focaccia might have olive oil too, though. Anyway, it does come up with a correct focaccia answer, but it takes a while.

0:13:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's taking what is an easy answer and then saying I've got to create this structure where it looks like I'm thinking about it, let me. I don't believe that it's taking what is an easy answer and then saying I've got to create this structure where it looks like I'm thinking about it, let me. Um, I don't believe that it's. It's showing reasoning. The other thing is you can have a choice. You can either do the reasoning or you can do a search, so you can do a search of the current web do you remember last time?

0:13:58 - Paris Martineau
and what is deep seek doing in that case?

0:14:00 - Jeff Jarvis
it's just using google I don't know what Crawler uses.

0:14:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a good question. This is why there's a lot of question marks like how much it really costs, et cetera, et cetera. Anthony asked her to do last week's show notes. All right, I need to create show notes for the episode this week in Google based on the provided transcript. Let's start by reading through the transcript to identify the main topics and key points. And it is actually. Anthony says it's doing a better job than the current ai we use for show notes. Really, I think it's clawed. It's imp. Look, there's no question. This is impressive. Yes, it is. Uh, there's. We don't know really how much it cost. Uh.

The story is the guy uh made a lot of money as a hedge fund. He was a billionaire hedge fund billionaire using ai to predict the market swings. Then took some of that money, bought uh I think they said half a million dollars worth of h100s, which are the. Actually, he bought some nvidia cards before the embargo and then bought more after the embargo, but the. The thing that's interesting is that they, because of the embargo, the the chips act. Not the chips act, but the us government embargo on high quality chips to china. They had to use a lower quality chip that was missing a key interconnect in nvidia's cuda cores so that multiple gpus could work together.

0:15:32 - Paris Martineau
So sorry, is what cores cuda is going to be. My new role in the show is going to be I'm just going to ask what every time, I don't understand what you're talking about uh, the cuda.

0:15:42 - Leo Laporte
Cuda is. The is a language, that uh program that you can use to control the gpus, the nvidia gpus and uh. Since they didn't have access to that, they decided to write low level kind of machine code doing the same thing. So chinese, the chinese media outlet 36KR this is from MIT Technology Review says that they estimate about 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The founder of an AI research consultancy Semi Analysis says now it's going to be more like 50,000. His semi-analysis says now it's going to be more like 50 000. So he stockpiled a lot of them, but he also did some low-level coding in order for it to work as well as the, the gpus you could buy in the us.

In addition to the challenge chinese companies face on top of chip sanctions, their ai engineering techniques tend to be less efficient. This is an interview with a Chinese media outlet from July of last year. Quote this is Liang, the hedge fund guy that funded this. We Chinese companies have to consume twice the computing power to achieve the same results. Combined with data efficiency gaps, this could mean needing up to four times the computing power. But our goal is to continuously close these gaps. So the thing that scared the stock market is oh my God. Maybe they figured out a way to do this with fewer NVIDIA cards, so NVIDIA's stock tanked. Maybe they figured out a way to do this more efficiently and less expensively than OpenAI, anthropic, microsoft, et cetera, et cetera, so those stocks tanked.

But, we don't know.

0:17:24 - Jeff Jarvis
They did it with meta open source material. What they said, they used llama to benefits their strategy. Yeah, the stock went down. I was keeping track. Stock went down 17, which is like the biggest drop in whatever. Did it recover them? It went up eight percent the next day, mainly uh, according to stories from retail investors who said I heard you have to buy on the dip. That's a dip, it's time to buy. And then it went back down 4% today To point out.

0:17:52 - Leo Laporte
Anthony said this. Anthony Nielsen said this is probably profit-taking, which was kind of long overdue with NVIDIA and it's still at a much higher level than it was six months ago and I still think it's going to go up and I well, and this is uh. This is an interesting side note from I've been reading I'm sure you have too every possible analysis of this. Uh, because everybody has a different take. Ben thompson did an excellent take on stratechery. Um steven sanofsky, the former microsoft executive guy who was in charge of Windows 8, much to his chagrin, tweeted that it's Jeevan's paradox. He said you don't really need to know much about this to understand Jevons paradox.

Jevon was a 19th century British economist who said the technological advances that make a resource more efficient also stimulate demand and so, as a result, ultimately that efficiency means you use even more. He observed it in 1865 with coal. He said technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. Contrary to intuition, technological progress cannot be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. We've seen this in california. I've mentioned this because our local energy company has had six price increases in the past year because we're using less electricity, we've become more efficient, and so they have to charge us more because the cost of their physical plants has not gone down. So I don't think it's a. It necessarily, sanofsky says it does not necessarily follow that this improvement in efficiency is going to cost everybody less, or it's just going to mean we're going to use more ai it's very it's fascinating.

Why are we?

0:19:50 - Paris Martineau
going to use more ai because what is using more? Ai, but what is using more ai bringing to us? This week I've been personally very irritated, as everyone in my newsroom, by uh, google changing um Google Docs and Gmail to just automatically have Gemini involved in it. There's no way to opt out.

0:20:12 - Leo Laporte
And it's incredibly frustrating. Oh, and Microsoft did the same thing. It's.

0:20:15 - Paris Martineau
Clippy-esque. Have we learned nothing?

0:20:18 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft raised the cost of its Microsoft, of its consumer, microsoft 365, at the same time as it added Copilot. It's AI into it and people are furious.

0:20:28 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I just don't understand this whole argument. People don't want these services for a lot of the reasons that these companies are pushing them on us. Why is the default assumption that we're all going to be using increasingly more AI forever? Okay, stock market, this stock market, that?

0:20:44 - Jeff Jarvis
They're trying to, but they're not selling to you, they're selling to business.

0:20:46 - Paris Martineau
No, no, I'm saying but are these companies, do you think are going to have infinitely increasing returns if it turns out people don't want to use their products? Right now we're in a hype cycle where all these companies are admitting, hey, we don't have a business model worked out yet. How long do you think they have to work at a business model?

0:21:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Good question, good question.

0:21:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, look, first of all, there's plenty of money flowing in, and the reason is investors not just retail investors in the stock market, but VCs understand that, yeah, they're risking, it's a risk. Every investment they make is a risk, but the upside could be phenomenal that if they do in fact create an agi. You know, mark zuckerberg has said it's fascinating. He thinks that they're going to have an ai engineer writing code soon. This is his. This will be a defining year for ai. He he wrote this was January 24th.

In 2025, I expect, meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than a billion people. Lama 4 will become the leading state-of-the-art model and we will build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts. And to power this, they're building a two gigawatt plus data center. This is this. This is the data center footprint, imposed, superimposed over somewhere you know, paris, manhattan. Oh, I mean, it's huge. It's bigger than central park. It goes all the way from, uh, the top of Central Park down to the Hudson Yards, but based on um deep seek.

0:22:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that even necessary is? Is what's this? What's the stupid thing? We talked about last week that they announced, for 500 billion dollars, the Stargate are those things just necessary at that scale.

0:22:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's of course, that's the question everybody's asking. But, yes, my answer is jvon's paradox. This will just increase demand, and that same center will do, will you know? Will do even more. And if it's smarter and smarter and smarter. Look if you can replace a, an engineer that costs 200 000 a year with an ai that costs 10 000 a year, or whatever it costs, if, if it's less than $200,000, that's a big neck cane, and then you'll be making more and more of them and then, by the way, they'll be faster than regular engineers and they'll be a virtuous flywheel.

0:23:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me quote Benedict Evans, my muse, from Threads. I hate to break it to people who are just now reading the Wikipedia page for Givon's Paradox, but something can get cheaper and therefore be used massively more and still be a crappy business. Ask a telco shareholder how these charts paid out.

0:23:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, what happened to telcos? At&t had a monopoly on long lines and were able to charge an awful lot until digital technology came along.

0:23:47 - Jeff Jarvis
This is even in the mobile days, he's saying.

0:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Well. I'm just saying there's a lot of other factors, it's not just the one factor. I think Paris is asking the fundamental, right question though.

0:23:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris is asking where the value is where the, where the value is.

0:24:08 - Paris Martineau
What is it? Well, it's notable that most of these, the leaders of these companies, even while they spout off big proclamations like this. I was listening to, um, an interview that noam shazier did, uh, with I'm forgetting what podcast, but he's now one of the three people that are the co-technical leads of gemini at google and he had said, like, yeah, we don't even know, like, what the main uses of ai are going to be yet we'll figure that out, maybe with the help of ai, down the road. That's not an acceptable answer. Why are we investing hundreds of billions of dollars into a technology and, uh, totally giving up on all of our climate pledges as a country and as large corporations for technology that we don't know what the benefits will be other than could be interesting?

0:24:46 - Leo Laporte
you know, the first personal computer I bought, an atari 400, couldn't really do a whole lot, you had to save the programs on cassette tapes. It was, compared to our current computers, incredibly slow. You might have said, well, that was a, you know, and it was very expensive. Uh, and, and you know, 20, 25 dollars. You might have said, well, what, what the hell's the point of that? Um, but, but there is definitely a point.

0:25:15 - Paris Martineau
And, uh, but, I mean I'm not sure that's entirely accurate when, if you look at, obviously I wasn't alive in the 70s, but I do have a lot of 70s era magazines.

0:25:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you very much.

0:25:25 - Paris Martineau
I know, guys, I have a lot of 70s era magazines and 80s era magazines and the ads for them, tout all the great things you can use a personal computer for, and those are the things people did use them for at that time and continue to use them for today.

0:25:38 - Leo Laporte
They used them to. It was things like no, it was things like balance. You couldn't do anything because, first of all, there was no internet so you could balance your checkbook, you could play games. It was a very limited. It was basically a fast calculator. There was no email. Yet there was no email. What changed completely is connecting all of them together.

0:25:56 - Benito Gonzalez
No, no, play games was enough. Play games was enough.

0:25:59 - Leo Laporte
Play games was enough. That's why I bought an Atari 400. You could. Why you could print something right.

0:26:09 - Paris Martineau
Well, I use no, not in the early days, people didn't really have printers.

0:26:11 - Leo Laporte
He used them to write a book. You could write things on. It could write typewriters and calculators.

0:26:16 - Jeff Jarvis
The computer was a huge to go from the Atari 400 to a smartphone is a big leap but, but you're still not answering, I think, what is Paris's fundamental question, which is what does it mean to use AI?

0:26:31 - Leo Laporte
well, we don't know yet and so that's we didn't know what it would mean to have an Atari, a computer, in your pocket, always connected to the internet. Until it actually happened, it takes a while. This is how it is in the world of technology.

0:26:46 - Paris Martineau
You I'm not sure that it is, because even when people were developing early computers, they had an idea of what they wanted that computer to be and what it could do. Obviously, the people working on computers in the 70s to 90s didn't know about the iPhone 15, but they, well, there's, had an understanding of the benefits of the product they were creating. It's interesting that we have this entire industry developed on, I don't know, just a general sense, lack of a sense of what this technology is for and who it is for specifically.

0:27:18 - Leo Laporte
There is okay. So there are two avenues of attack and you could tell me which one you're you're going to pick. One avenue of attack is you're never going to get to. You know you're going to hit a ceiling and it's never going to get intelligent enough to be really useful. The other avenue of attack is well, it's going to get really useful, but we don't know how we're going to use it. Do you think AGI is not going to happen?

0:27:41 - Paris Martineau
I don't know that we have a definition of AGI. That would make that a productive conversation for us to have.

0:27:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I know it's not. It's BS, because there is no definition, the idea that somebody is just smarter than us. That has no meaning whatsoever. It still acts as if it thinks it doesn't really think.

0:27:55 - Leo Laporte
Let me redefine it then.

0:27:56 - Jeff Jarvis
AGI and worse, ASI are complete BS.

0:28:01 - Leo Laporte
Let me redefine it then, please. Is it possible that Mark Zuckerberg's right in that they will have an AI that can competently act as a mid-level programmer?

0:28:13 - Jeff Jarvis
We have that now in the sense that you can ask a question of it to do something and it will actually do it, and behind that scene is programming.

0:28:20 - Leo Laporte
So we don't have to stipulate what AGI is, to say that it can replace a human being in some of the functions of human beings and increasingly more and more of the jobs that humans do.

0:28:33 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. If that's the case, though, because then why aren't any of these companies firing their programmers and just relying on AGI? Only it's because it doesn't work like that so far.

0:28:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.

0:28:49 - Paris Martineau
And so I'm going to pardon me, Uncle Jeff, moment.

0:28:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to go to my line of type example, because this is on my brain and brain dissection right now Hot type, Hot type, Hot type. When the line of type came in, it would replace typesetters because it was a keyboard operated rather than a piece at a time. The typesetters knew that they were doomed not only by the machine but also by the fact that women, who were then known as typewriters the person was the typewriter could replace them because it was keyboard operated. And so what they did is they said this is very Reid Hoffman what he's saying these days.

No, we are going to control this machine, we are going to have agency over it. And they knew they would lose jobs for about 10 years. And then, because it has made printing so much cheaper that the printing industry newspapers, magazines and so on would explode, and they ended up with way more jobs and way more power for a half a century. That's the arc that you can take here, but the question is it still goes back to Paris's question Okay, let's take charge of the agency over the technology, but to do what? And you're right, Leo, that we don't necessarily know yet.

0:29:44 - YouTube
Leo Dionisio 1.2, we don't know to do what and you're right, leo, that we don't necessarily know yet. But now that's everything that's the thing.

0:29:48 - Jeff Jarvis
That's where it gets sloppy. What if I had? What if this more?

0:29:51 - Leo Laporte
examples gets all right her. I would like this thing to record everything, this plod note or the bm her the movie you want I know you want the computer to.

0:30:02 - Paris Martineau
You want to develop an emotionally kind of complex and maybe a little tumultuous.

0:30:08 - Leo Laporte
That's not the main point of her, and then have the computer leave you for another computer, because I would be down for that also.

0:30:14 - Paris Martineau
That's just fiction.

0:30:16 - Leo Laporte
I would like an assistant that can understand everything that's going on, can give me advice and information. Summarize All of those things would be very, very useful. And yeah, maybe all it does is make humans more productive. Okay, advice and information summarize all of those things would be very, very useful. And yeah, maybe all it does is make humans more productive. Okay, but there is a lot of value in that. I I don't think investors are misguided.

You can you can attack it saying, well, it's never going to get to that point, but but if it does get to a point where it is useful to that degree, that is going to be a very valuable technology, just as the Atari. When you look at the Atari 400, you go, well, you're going to sell a half a million of them, big deal. But if you really saw the real possibility of what interconnecting computers could do, you might have a better, more bullish point of view. Do you not think that, uh, smartphones have created a lot of value?

0:31:09 - Paris Martineau
than the one. Sorry, I've got to get something out of my shoe here I think you were making really good points, leo, jeff, just I was thinking in my head it would be funny to do a sand prop comedy bit, and then jeff spoke it into existence. So I did have to do it.

0:31:29 - Leo Laporte
Are you doing something, jeff? Are you?

0:31:31 - Paris Martineau
doing that. Is that what you're?

0:31:32 - Leo Laporte
no no, it was just great minds think alike.

0:31:35 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you know, sometimes we just we're aligned like that yeah, we are.

0:31:38 - Leo Laporte
That's the power of human intelligence I don't understand how somebody can look at the output of current AIs and not go holy cow oh, I do.

0:31:46 - Jeff Jarvis
But I think it gets.

0:31:47 - Leo Laporte
I mean yeah.

0:31:47 - Paris Martineau
I think they're certainly like super useful. I just think that we need to be a bit more grounded in it, to be like, yeah, this is a very useful technology. It will have in, like the next three to five years, like some specific use cases that it's fantastic for. That it's fantastic for, and probably over the next like five to ten, it will have general, um, like general implications for general society and most jobs in limited ways, but I like in, by which I mean, like you know, pick your average career or industry. That person will have something that's different about their line of work because of some ai tool maybe, but I don't I think that that's different about their line of work because of some AI tool, maybe, but I don't. I think that that's a more reasonable and balanced thing to say versus everything in the world is going to change irreparably. There's not worth planning anything for the future because we're not going to have jobs. I didn't say that.

0:32:35 - Leo Laporte
This is going to change everything. I said it's reasonable to invest in it as if it's going to change everything. Look, if you could have bought Apple stock in 2007, when this was announced, and you held that stock till now, you would be a very wealthy person. If you could see the potential of the iPhone and, by the way, that did not take much visionary capability you would have seen the future. I think we are on the cusp. If you say I see what this does and it's amazing, how can you then say, oh well, I know it's not going to be?

0:33:09 - Jeff Jarvis
worth that much. That's why DeepSeek is so important, because the scale of VC investment in the Valley versus the investment that came in China says investment, yes, stipulated, your Honor, amazing stipulated, a good investment stipulated, but at amazing. Stipulated, a good investment stipulated, but at that scale.

0:33:27 - Speaker 7
That's the question I think well, I don't think it's a question you need to answer it's not your money.

0:33:35 - Paris Martineau
I mean that's a fair point.

0:33:37 - Leo Laporte
If VCs want to pour their fortune into this. But I also think as people.

0:33:45 - Benito Gonzalez
sorry, Benito, I have a question related to that. That VCs thing is like how, how long then until they, until they actually need to make money and before they pull their investments, like how long do you think, how patient are they until they can actually make money?

0:33:58 - Leo Laporte
As long as there's can, is there continues to be be progress. I think that's not going to be a problem if we go a year without progress right, they'll make money. Look at, they have plenty of money.

0:34:08 - Jeff Jarvis
The reason they're vcs is because they have more money than they need so reid hoffman also invested, I think, 24 million dollars in a new startup using ai on cancer. That is a legitimate specific use case and an investment that makes to me a great deal of sense. Chatting machines don't yet have, and they are amazing. I don't love them, but is that? And $24 million is a lot less? That's a failure of imagination.

0:34:40 - Leo Laporte
That's a failure of your imagination. That's all it is. There's a million things like curing cancer. There's an almost infinite number of things that could be incredibly valuable, could change the world, and you don't have to have a lot of them to make your money back. But I don't care about the money part. That's not my money and I'm glad that there are people willing, nations as well as individuals willing to invest money in this stuff. But the upsides cure cancer. There's a million upsides. There's a million upsides. What if it can invent fusion? What if it can invent a quantum computer? What if it can? I mean it, can, I mean it can go on and on and on. What if there's never another traffic jam, because ais then eliminate traffic jams by scheduling?

0:35:26 - Jeff Jarvis
v. So imagine, imagine you're an investor in open ai and along comes deep seek. What?

0:35:31 - Leo Laporte
are you thinking? I'm thinking this is great news for your investment. It's the retail investors that are selling off. I guarantee you the vcs are not going. Oh, we gotta get out of this. That's great news. It means you can do more with less. How is that bad news?

0:35:49 - Paris Martineau
wouldn't you feel if I'm just playing like, wouldn't?

0:35:52 - Jeff Jarvis
you feel?

0:35:53 - Leo Laporte
like maybe you've been fleeced or maybe you've been sold that the most expensive option is the only option we should talk to these guys, but I'm pretty be making some calls and being like hey, I'm pretty sure Mark Andreessen does not feel like he's been fleeced.

0:36:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm pretty sure investors do not feel like oh you're never going to admit it.

0:36:08 - Leo Laporte
No, they don't feel like they've been fleeced. See, this is opportunity. They're not as dumb as retail investors. The stock market may be profit-taking fine maybe profit taking fine but I think VCs understand the good thing was VC money, not not retail investor money do you think this is a bubble?

0:36:28 - Jeff Jarvis
that's the fear I mean. We're playing devil, we're reversing rules here. Paris and I, I think, are Devils advocating you here because you got sand in your socks. Um, but um, uh, that's the. That's the question. I'm all I'll say is it's a question is the scale of investment? Is it appropriate over, as benito says, the time frame that's necessary? I don't know. That's all. Is it amazing? Will it do amazing things? Will it keep growing?

0:36:54 - Leo Laporte
I don't think. I don't think what I invest. I don't know why you're worried about VCs, because as in 2000,.

0:37:00 - Jeff Jarvis
It has an effect on the rest of us.

0:37:02 - Paris Martineau
That is true. I do think also, I've realized during this conversation something fundamental about the way I see the world, which is, I think, that my perspective on issues like this is much more inherently skeptical, in part because my understanding of the tech world is obviously fairly recent. I came of age in the era of, you know, the bubble dot com bubble bursting the hype and optimism of the early 2000s fading away to a deep cynicism and skepticism over what tech companies have wrought upon the world. Companies have wrought upon the world. Every time in my life and careers journalists that there's been some huge like bubble or uh push towards this being the next big amazing thing, there's always been another shoe that had to drop, and so I think that that's what I am, why I approach this such skepticism in addition to.

0:37:53 - Leo Laporte
It being my curiosity how did the dot-com bubble burst hurt you guys?

0:38:02 - Paris Martineau
it resulted in a widespread like financial crisis my, that was no the financial crisis. Well, no, I mean I'm not saying it one-to-one, but I'm saying it led to a period of bad mortgage debt.

0:38:15 - Leo Laporte
No I I know what the financial crisis is okay, I'm, I'm saying it and that I'll grant you is a bad idea.

0:38:22 - Paris Martineau
I meant that in a general sense as a crisis of the financial type at the time.

0:38:28 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't though.

0:38:29 - Paris Martineau
It was a crisis of a lot of dot-coms that went out of business in 2000.

0:38:33 - Jeff Jarvis
But guess what we got out of that we got incredible infrastructure. But my FU money in the meantime said FU Jeff.

0:38:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's your fault, I had. That's your fault, jeff, I don't have any stock in this, that you that was your mutual funds.

0:38:49 - Jeff Jarvis
You know everything went down for some period of time, friends come back I'm talking about

0:38:53 - Leo Laporte
wait a minute, did it come back?

0:38:54 - Jeff Jarvis
yes okay but I think there was a great market.

0:39:01 - Leo Laporte
The market tank 2000 smarter will it come back?

0:39:04 - Jeff Jarvis
could we have done 2000 smarter? Could we have, um? You know, the another effect it had is it made my industry news say, oh yeah, what a pile of crap. We don't pay attention to any of that. And it gave them an excuse to avoid innovating. That's a huge impact that it had, because 2000 was about stupidity. They were going out of business anyway, yeah, well, there's that I got bad news for them.

0:39:29 - Leo Laporte
They were going out of business. You know who else is going out of business? All mainstream media is going out of business.

0:39:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it's not a good time for mainstream media I am because, completely on that line, people are making their own media. We entertain and inform ourselves. We don't like mainstream media. We hated being treated as a mass.

0:39:49 - Paris Martineau
This last century, you might have said, my books are all, and I think that's deeply depressing because we need institutions with editorial standards and we can do better than the ones we have. Yes, we do, I agree, we do, I would say, casting all current working journalism institutions as bad and failing is wrong and short-sighted. No, no, I didn't say bad, just failing.

0:40:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I am. I am the institutions.

0:40:15 - Leo Laporte
There are good journalists at the new york times there are good journalists on the ocean because people can make their own content. They don't need them anymore.

0:40:22 - Jeff Jarvis
The institutions are failing us as a democracy. Cnn is failing us as a democracy.

0:40:28 - Paris Martineau
I would push back on the statement. People may think that what they want is to not have any of these institutions around, but if we exist in a world where there is no news gathering professionals and it is all just one-off creators trying to line their own personal pocket by getting more and more views, that's going to be a terrible place to live. No, I want more information. There will be no source of truth.

0:40:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I want new institutions. I thought we could reinvent the institutions we had. I thought that could update. That's what I've given up on. No, we need these institutions. That's what I write my books on. No, we need these institutions. That's what I read my books about. Is that is that we create these institutions. After print, we created the institutions of editing and publishing. After the, the industrialization of, of of media, we created the institution of the magazine. Uh, we need these institutions, absolutely. Paris couldn't agree more. But I don't think that the ones we have now, all in all, can be reformed along that line and there will be chaos. There is chaos in between, but what we need is more places like the information.

0:41:27 - Leo Laporte
We need more things. They'll be people. Just as there are people like mr beast, there'll be people like jessica lesson seriously, oh, did you have to put them in the same sentence, did you have?

0:41:37 - Jeff Jarvis
no, there, always will be there'll be both uh it's, and there'll be good they'll be idiots and they'll be people who are committed to the eye can see no, we only, honestly, we don't.

0:41:47 - Leo Laporte
We just need maybe one in ten. You know, 90 can be, mr beast, but if one in 10, or one in 20, or one in 50, well, when you have a, hundred million people creating.

0:41:58 - Paris Martineau
Mr beast is such a grim statement. No, think of it the other way. You got a hundred million people creating content. Mr beast is such a grim statement no, think of it the other way.

0:42:03 - Leo Laporte
You got a hundred million people creating content. 90 million of them are morons, 10 million people are jessica lessons you have, that's fantastic you have more chaff, but you have far more wheat in the chaff.

0:42:16 - Speaker 7
That's so the history of the internet is how to find it, and those are opportunities.

0:42:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I spoke today to a class, last night to a class at Berkeley, and I didn't fly there, I did it over the miracle of technology, and that was my point is. They kind of said, well, how do you find the good stuff? I said, boom, you're in a class to invent new things. That's a business opportunity. That's what Harper's magazine did in 1850. It said there's all kinds of new stuff coming off the steam powered presses. Somebody has to find the good stuff, and they invented Harper's magazine to do that. So there's opportunity in this problem that we have Not. Every is more wheat out there. You need help to find it, and algorithms ain't going to do it all for us. And neither is there a mass view that we're going to find the good stuff is good for everybody. There's never going to be another Walter Cronkite.

0:43:03 - Leo Laporte
There's never going to be another Walter Cronkite. Thank goodness I don't think that's the end of the world, but it does make it harder to find that trusted source. Er Rosner says in our YouTube chat says everybody's trying to lie in their pockets. Everybody just wants to. Is in it for the money, please. You know that's not true.

I think there are a lot of people who are content to make a. I mean, look, we got to make a living. I got to make a living. I don't need to become a billionaire. I have spent, over the 20 years that this network has been around, well over a hundred million dollars to run the network. It's very costly. I got a. I got a few million out of it. It's very costly. I got a. I got a few million out of it. I kept a little bit but most of it went out. And I didn't become a wealthy person to do it. I just wanted to be able to make a living doing it and to have a team of people like you guys who will get paid, because everybody needs to pay the rent and and go out and buy a caviar hamburger once in a while.

0:43:58 - Paris Martineau
Um I think there are. Please, chicken nuggets, please.

0:44:02 - Leo Laporte
I think there are a lot of people in the world for whom that's the case. Now we see, unfortunately, of some very greedy people in power right now. I mean, uh, I don't know how many, how many billionaires now uh are are in the government. I think it's's 18 billionaires followed Trump into government. So there's some very greedy people, I agree, but not everybody's greedy. I think everybody needs to make a living.

It doesn't have to always be working in the fields, but I think you could be a journalist or a musician or an artist or a creator, and if you can make enough to survive, to keep your family alive, to put a roof over your head and eat, I think there are a lot of people very happy to do that. Because I think what you underestimate, erosner, is human beings, for the most part, want to create, want to express themselves and be left alone. It's the weirdos who want to become billionaires, and I, you know. Just take a look at the billionaires and I rest my case. Yep, you're not in it to be a billionaire, jeff or paris. No, no, you want to. You have to make a living. Somebody's got to pay your rent so?

0:45:14 - Jeff Jarvis
so we're playing devil's advocate here, because this is what we do, is discussion paris. What's hold on? Before you play devil's advocate? We're going to pause. This is what we do is discussion paris what's hold on before you play zappos advocate.

0:45:20 - Leo Laporte
We're going to pause. This is this week. In google, the last episode, 805, begins a brand new show intelligent machines. Paris will not be here for that. She doesn't want to have anything I don't like new beginnings she'll be here for episode 806.

Uh, we are working on getting some good people for the show. Uh, I have a confirmation that Ray Kurzweil, who coined the term intelligent machines, will be joining us next month. We will be talking, I hope, on this show with creators, people involved in it, philosophers, people who understand the potential and the threat of AI. You know we got to get Timnit Gebru on as well, and so that's going to be what the conversation will be. The name will be intelligent machines. You don't have to change anything about what you do as a listener or viewer. The feed will stay the same. Uh, it'll same time. All of that. Nothing will change. Same shirts, same shirts. Name, album art and and music, Thank God, will change. That's it. And the content a little bit, although I have a feeling these conversations will continue. This year's Super Bowl will be full of AI ads. I'll tell you. The mainstream media is cashing in while they can $8 million for a 30-second spot. $8 million, yeah, yeah.

0:46:41 - Jeff Jarvis
But it's the chiefs. Even I don't know football and I know that's boring um yeah, I guess, I don't know I watched the nba and there has been already a lot of ai.

0:46:52 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, really, I stuff all over the nba what kinds of things, but you know. So the last game I saw, I they were using ai to do, uh, moving, moving stills. They animated stills with ai. It was obviously ai. What do you mean? Moving stills? Like they take a still shot and they animate it, like they have the camera like that coca-cola ad which is just a bunch of ai, because they can to what end?

0:47:16 - Paris Martineau
like are they? Are they making? A shot of someone shooting the basketball. Is this an ad Stuff like that.

0:47:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's not an ad. You're saying they're using AI. This is just part of the game.

0:47:25 - Benito Gonzalez
No, but then I also saw a bunch of ads for like Gemini and things like that are heavily advertising on sports.

0:47:32 - Paris Martineau
My understanding of sports watching sports today, as someone who has never watched sports, is that all the ads are now either ai or sports gambling.

This is true um or car that by the way, is a pernicious trend, is the rise of sport gambling and the rise of casual gambling, just the fact that anybody can get into a gambling addiction just by tap it on their phone. Like you used to have to go somewhere at the very least and commit to doing a gamble, well, this is why sports teams and leagues and stuff are so valuable right now.

0:48:04 - Benito Gonzalez
All the new value came from legalized gambling.

0:48:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me point you to a woman named Denise Coates, the richest woman in Britain. She's the founder and CEO of Bet365. She grew up. Her dad was a bookie, which is legal in Great. Oh, yes, right, yes, they had these betting shops and, uh, she ran a betting shop but saw there was a potential once we go online. She was born in 1967. Uh, her father bought some betting shops under the name provincial racing.

She went to school, got a degree in econometrics but then went to work as an accountant and you know it's always the accountants who notice the cash flow. She founded a company in 2000, 25 years ago, called bet 365, and the thing that she did that is going to transform that transformed betting in Britain is transforming betting. Here is the proposition bet, the in-game bet that will he make this kick? Will he get 100 yards of rushing in this game? The ability to bet in the middle of the game, not on the victor, but on events in this game. The ability to bet in the middle of the game not on the victor, but on events in the game.

And this is really I think it's very dangerous to people with gambling problems because it turns everything into a gamble. You know. I mean that's the. Isn't that the traditional picture of a of a gambling gambling addict? They're betting on everything is? Is that? Is that bird going to take off to the left of the right off the thing they're betting on? Everything is? Is that? Is that bird going to take off to the left or the right off the thing? They're betting on everything. And that's what she did. That's how she became the richest woman in britain.

0:49:48 - Jeff Jarvis
She's coming to the united states. Start with the evil of the state lotteries. I hate them I agree too.

0:49:54 - Leo Laporte
I was very upset when california approved a lottery and remember, by the way, that all of this comes from basically support from Las Vegas casino operations, and they're the ones who've who actually have kept the Indian casinos in California from doing full gaming, cause they know they want you to go to Las Vegas if they can possibly get.

0:50:14 - Benito Gonzalez
They're even getting teams in Vegas now too. So, right, right, like for the longest time forever, they weren't allowed to have teams Really. Yeah Well, it was kind of like an unspoken thing.

0:50:27 - Leo Laporte
Remember what happened to Pete Rose? He bet on baseball and never got into the Hall of Fame.

0:50:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, when you say not allowed to have teams, you mean the city isn't allowed to have teams.

0:50:42 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, before yeah before, because that's because there was a time when vegas was the only place you could gamble, so they couldn't have a home team, or else the gambling would be right.

0:50:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I see, got it, thank you. I said I don't know anything about sports. I don't absolutely nothing. I've watched. I watched the playoffs because I somehow got into it, because all that snow made it fascinating to me I know it's great to watch them freeze their ass off and then the guys in the stands not wearing a shirt.

0:51:04 - Leo Laporte
What?

0:51:04 - Paris Martineau
was that they don't, it's just they play in snow. Yeah, oh yeah, no matter what macho men, they can do anything anyway, yeah, I mean, don't get me started.

0:51:15 - Leo Laporte
On sport gambling, I agree with you 100, this is that is that is the bane of. And then, by the way, there's a lot of concern that that the nfl makes money, makes quite a bit of money, off of this sport bet, uh, advertising and so forth.

0:51:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, all, right now, you said you were gonna, you were gonna propose something jeff, I just wanted I was gonna ask her about the end of the conversation, so never mind, no, he's going moose bush.

0:51:39 - Leo Laporte
Just to break up the. Okay, there's nothing there.

0:51:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I've got something from your show notes that we could do as an amuse-bouche.

0:51:45 - Leo Laporte
Please 28. Line 28.

0:51:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I knew you'd do that one. I knew you'd do that one.

0:52:00 - Leo Laporte
I saw it and I was like yep, picked it for you. It actually was going to be my pick. It's paraspate. It was, it was paraspate, so it was going to be my pick. We'll do it now. This is a website 17th century death roulette. They took the mortality records from 1665 and they've they've uh, randomized it. You could bet on this.

0:52:19 - Paris Martineau
Well, I just learned that in the week of July 11th, 1665, I died from rickets.

0:52:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's boring. I died from a candle in my bed that set my room on fire.

0:52:32 - Paris Martineau
Oh, in the week of September 12th I died of grief.

0:52:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, in the week of October 17th I died of tisic, which is coughing and wheezing.

0:52:43 - Paris Martineau
Oh.

0:52:48 - Leo Laporte
All right, that's all this does.

0:52:51 - Paris Martineau
I was killed with a cart at the St Giles Cripplegate which sounds concerning oh that's bad.

0:52:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I got rickets too. Must have been a lot of people who died of rickets, rickets is kind of a thing of the past, now that we have vitamin D milk.

0:53:09 - Paris Martineau
On Valentine's Day, I died of teeth.

0:53:12 - Leo Laporte
I fell from a scaffold at St Martin in the Fields, so these are all real deaths, right.

0:53:19 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I want to know how someone dies from teeth is that like I died. I died surf it.

0:53:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I died of surf it, overeating to the point of vomiting.

0:53:31 - Paris Martineau
I win that is pretty good.

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
I assume they specify, oh yeah oh yeah, too much got you a pepe that's a bucket, you know.

0:53:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Get her brain in a bucket. You know that scene from oh syphilis.

0:53:42 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's the worst scene. I can't watch that.

0:53:46 - Paris Martineau
I like I keep getting the strange ones I died from frightened on July 11th. Oh oh, they took the scream really literally. Yeah.

0:54:01 - Leo Laporte
Hey, whatever happened to tiktok, isn't it funny how we spent so much energy over the last?

0:54:07 - Jeff Jarvis
20 and over, this could come back. Yeah, it's a 90 day delay.

0:54:12 - Paris Martineau
They have to try and find a new buyer for it some horrible corruption is going to occur here. Yeah, yeah, because again it's like bite dance has said they're not going to sell the algorithm.

0:54:18 - Leo Laporte
So how are you going to?

0:54:19 - Paris Martineau
occur here, yeah, yeah actually, again, it's like bite dances said they're not going to sell the algorithm, so how are you going to operate it without the algorithm? Or are they going to have a licensing agreement for that? Both great questions. There's also, I guess, the alternative that trump could just run out the clock and say the justice department doesn't have to enforce it. But that also opens up a number of potential complications. Uh, namely, the provision in the law says that the justice department and the us attorney general shall enforce it, and I guess shall is like very specific legal wordage where they're like legally compelled to. They can't just say they won't, so someone could conceivably sue for them not enforcing it.

And again, I think, as we've talked about in the show before, an interesting complicating factor of all this is that the laws have very high. The law has a very high penalty, I believe like daily based, if not user, just generally based, and it has a kind of version of like statute of limitations, like up to five years. So even if Trump says poo, poo, I'm not going to deal with this at all, if the next president wants to, companies like Oracle and potentially even Apple or Google, if they bring it back in the app stores could be on the hook for trillions of dollars in the, in the most conservative estimates, which would be uh, devastating to say the least perplexity, offered to buy it or merge with it and give half to the us government we cannot have a us government sponsored tiktok seems like any any platform for speech so there's a little yeah, there's a little um controversy a bruin google maps has renamed the gulf of mexico to the gulf of america.

0:56:10 - Leo Laporte
Apple maps has not.

0:56:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It's still the gulf of mexico and apple maps have they done it and did they actually rename it?

0:56:18 - Leo Laporte
google, yes, uh, because last I looked, they hadn't yet oh they planned to updated your app no

0:56:23 - Jeff Jarvis
because the geographer I'm on the web it still says gulf of mexico oh, are you not on google earth?

0:56:30 - Leo Laporte
you're on on maps I went to mapsgooglecom. Oh yes, let me just see you act like I haven't seen this google thing do you know how google works? Let me just see what it is on mine. Oh, yeah, it yeah, it's still Gulf of Mexico on the app. So they said they were going to rename it because the geographer of the United States or whatever, has changed the name the Sharpie of the United States. But they also say in other countries it may still be the Gulf of Mexico.

0:57:01 - Paris Martineau
Well, Google also, internally, has sent a directive that they're reclassifying the United States as a quote sensitive country, a designation that they only have for China and Russia Sensitive about their place names.

0:57:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Doesn't that make us so proud?

0:57:13 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

0:57:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I just think it's very unfortunate.

0:57:17 - Leo Laporte
Google's also saying it's going to change the name of Denali in Alaska to back to Mount McKinley. That's also saying it's going to change the name of Denali in Alaska back to Mount McKinley. That's really offensive, yeah, so this is all because Google says, well, we have to, because we follow what the? You know what is it? The geography of a geographer of America or whatever. I don't know what that's called. Is that really true? Yeah, there's a committee.

0:57:41 - Jeff Jarvis
No, but, but is that? Did they really follow that in that way, or?

0:57:44 - Paris Martineau
or, if I mean I don't know if it's a sensitive country they came from yeah, but the us I don't know interestingly, uh, the this is from cnbc some team members within map divisions were ordered to urgently make changes to location name and recategorize the US from non-sensitive to sensitive. The changes were given as part of a rare P0 order, meaning it had the highest priority level and employees were immediately notified to drop whatever they're doing to work on it. So we can assume this probably came from.

0:58:16 - Leo Laporte
How hard could that be? Isn't it just a database?

0:58:27 - Paris Martineau
somewhere I mean I assume it's there's probably a couple speed bumps to changing the name of places on nationwide maps well, especially if it's only in the us that has changed and if the ip address is outside.

0:58:33 - Jeff Jarvis
If you're in mexico, it still says gulf of mexico there's another factor here, which is the employees I just put in the in the discord. New york times has a story which I just saw, I hadn't read yet. With tampons and code, silicon valley workers quietly protest.

0:58:46 - Leo Laporte
Text rightward shift the tampons is because meta took tampons out of the men's room, which you might say well, what was the market for tampons in a men's room? What was for transgender men who still menstruated, and so?

0:59:01 - Paris Martineau
or non-binary employees who choose to use a mind, choose to use a men's room right.

0:59:05 - Leo Laporte
So, uh, it was seen as a, as a like um a shot across the bow to protest mr zuckerberg's action.

0:59:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Some metal workers soon brought their own tampons, pads and liners to the men's bathroom. A group of employees also circulated a petition to save the tampons. I mean, I'm happy for uh protest within silicon valley against this right word. Uh lurch um, and this is a one good topic, but let's have, let's have even more folks. Yeah, you're running the world. You got more power than you think.

0:59:37 - Leo Laporte
It is a little sad to see these, uh, ostensibly big, powerful companies bend the knee. Oh, uh, it it's. I mean, it's economically probably savvy. For instance, if you're apple, if you're tim cook. The threat of 100 tariff against tsmc in japan or taiwan is chip bone chilling. They, that's the chips that are in all of their devices are made by tsmc in taiwan and google employee go ahead.

1:00:06 - Jeff Jarvis
The google employee was recently asked to approve an animation of fireworks for the company's search engine to help mark mr trump's inauguration. The employee made it clear in a coding system that they did so reluctantly because it was mandated by mr pichai. Two people with knowledge of the incident said Google denied Mr Pichai's involvement.

1:00:24 - Leo Laporte
Now to play devil's advocate if they'd asked it, is it? I mean, it's kind of traditional to celebrate a new no, google has never they've never done.

1:00:37 - Paris Martineau
Fireworks never done any specific animation for the inauguration and specifically I'm forgetting where this is from, but there was reporting around the time that the reason was. Every other time this has been brought up internally google's like we don't want to be seen as biased towards a particular administration now it's okay now it's okay.

1:01:02 - Leo Laporte
Um oh, 23, and me this is a actually important story they have my spit yeah, they did my file yeah, so in fact they were an advertiser, so maybe they have some of your spit too, dear listener. Uh 23 and me was the company of course run uh by. Uh uh, is this a susan or ann wajiski?

1:01:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I can never, I always confuse the two of them was the late susan was youtube right, that's right.

1:01:27 - Leo Laporte
So ann wajiski, her sister, uh, founded the company in 2006. The idea was we're going to make genetic testing affordable, selling DNA tests to the public. Now I've since learned that the way that they did this in order to make it affordable, especially back in 2006, they didn't do a full genome, they did a little sample of the genome and then they used statistics to kind of give you the results based on questionnaires of other 23andMe people. However, they did preserve the spit samples, the saliva samples, and they certainly have a lot of information about you. Their financial situation is not great. They reported a loss in 23 of 312 million dollars. Company share price is down 98 in the last four years is now four dollars.

Um hackers breached the systems last and a couple of years ago, accessing the personal information of seven million customers. That cost them $30 million in a settlement. Remember, the board left. They resigned in September. All seven members of the board resigned immediately, unhappy with the direction Wojcicki was taking the company. She did control almost exactly half of the voting rights, but she wanted to go private so that she'd have full control of the company. Yesterday the company announced they're exploring strategic alternatives, in other words, sale elon musk is going to own your spit and your genome and that's the real concern.

I mean, there's a privacy concern here. Um, it's often the case that with the sale of the company goes all of the information the company has about you, and I think it would be the case in this situation.

1:03:30 - Benito Gonzalez
And that's what someone would be buying, right? They're buying a database.

1:03:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's all they're getting. They're getting the spit, they're buying the spit.

1:03:39 - Paris Martineau
Can I take us in an entirely different direction for a second?

please do uh, so while we were talking about deep seek earlier I opened up deep seek, put in that tampons article from the new york times because that was in the rundown and I hadn't gotten a chance to finish it and asked it to summarize it for me and said highlight any interesting or fun anecdotes and details. Did a pretty good job, but as we were talking about it, I wanted to bring up a detail that was in the story because I'm a good journalist. Um, I went to control f search for the anecdote in the story before I said it on the podcast.

1:04:10 - Jeff Jarvis
It doesn't exist it said in all this, it said you wanted an anecdote.

1:04:16 - Paris Martineau
You wanted it, we gave it to you and I looked so because it described it in a way that seemed real, because it wasn't particularly fun. It says this is like list number four in a like 10 part summary of this article. It says fun anecdote one protester shared a humorous story about how a male executive, when confronted with the demand for free tampons, initially suggested employees could just quote plan ahead, end quote and bring their own.

This comment sparked widespread ridicule on social media with many pointing out the lack of understanding about menstrual cycles and the impracticality of such a suggestion doesn't exist in the story. So then I go back and ask is the fun anecdote you listed in the story an actual like actually in the new york times link that I sent you, and it says no. The fun anecdote about the male executive suggesting this is not in the new york times link that I sent you and it says no. The fun anecdote about the male executive suggesting this is not in the actual new york times article you linked I included as a hypothetical example to illustrate the kind of tone or humor that might arise in a story.

So sorry, my apologies for any confusion.

1:05:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me know if you'd like a more accurate summary of the actual article.

1:05:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, deep seek. I'd want an accurate summary please, oh geez although I just thought that was worth highlighting.

1:05:26 - Leo Laporte
I did. I didn't make it completely out of whole cloth because I have seen that actual comment on reddit. So people do say that yeah, from a meta executive well, no, not from executive, but but the that is kind of the response of a lot of gentlemen is just plan ahead and bring your own. They don't understand, right, I mean?

1:05:49 - Paris Martineau
it makes sense. They clearly got it from somewhere, but it has nothing to do with what I was asking it to.

1:05:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it wasn't from that source.

1:05:56 - Paris Martineau
There is a byot policy in some companies, believe I mean, that's just being a menstruating person in the world, I guess is byot, yeah right um interesting always check guys always check even when you have simple as summarize this with the link they make stuff, I can't do it so I'm using the google now.

1:06:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I installed it so that and this will drive you and your colleagues nuts paris. But on every web page I can right click and then summarize this page, the summary, like I I've been. Uh, strategy, I see I'm not gonna read this whole thing, right. Uh, corey doctorow's bible, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, right. So I asked for and just says this is about this and this and this and this. So then I try to go further and say well, what does it say? It doesn't it just. It just is. It's the.

1:06:48 - Leo Laporte
It's the worst kind of eighth grade a book report summary we just need better ais, and if you guys would just allow us to create them for some accelerationism here, just get in the way knock it off. Do I have. I have a personal question to ask you both. Has nothing to do with Do I have influencer voice?

1:07:14 - Paris Martineau
No, no, you have radio, boy voice.

1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, radio boy voice. Yeah, fast company, the rise of influencer voice, while the why this tiktok creator accent, is taking over the internet and maybe the world. This has actually been a long time a coming.

1:07:33 - Jeff Jarvis
It used to be called youtube voice right way back in the day, it was 1930s broadcaster, voice broadcaster voice.

1:07:41 - Leo Laporte
Right, the influencer accent isn't new. They write it was around long before tiktok. Linguistic quirks have been emerging on platforms like youtube and instagram for over a decade. A few years ago was all about the youtube voice. Hey guys, don't forget to subscribe. Hey guys, but uh, the tick. I thought that when they I saw this article, I thought are they talking about that synthetic voice? Are people starting to sound like the the Tick Tock synthetic voice? And it actually, in a way, they are, because, well, I'll play a little um Tick Tock for you. It's, it's, uh, it's a it's up talk, right? You're asking everything as a question, right? Why is it so? Here's an influencer.

1:08:24 - TikTok
Or is there this new influencer voice, that English influencers specifically?

1:08:31 - Leo Laporte
use, it's not just English.

1:08:34 - TikTok
The other day I went to the supermarket and I actually bought this eyeliner and this is the eyeliner I'm using right now, and it sounds like I'm asking you a question which might be really confusing. I'm actually not, I'm just going up at the end of every sentence.

1:08:51 - Leo Laporte
I think she's right right, this is Cassiette, by the way, on TikTok.

1:08:56 - Paris Martineau
It's sort of like they're keeping you on the edge of your seat, like it's about to come to a crescendo, or like a question, but it isn't, so you're kind of leaning in.

Leaning, I feel like it's part of because if you're scrolling through a lot of videos, if you see someone like I don't know I hate watching long videos, this is why I don't use youtube but if I see someone might be just saying a short sentence that ideally would end in a question, I might be more likely to listen to that and then get tricked into listening.

1:09:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure that's why, right?

1:09:25 - Benito Gonzalez
yeah, I'm sure that's why I think also, uh, because they don't write a lot of what they do they're, they're editing in there.

1:09:31 - Leo Laporte
So they're thinking, yeah, they're doing it.

1:09:33 - Benito Gonzalez
So they're pausing, yeah, exactly as they think of the next thing to say and they don't, and they don't want to write it out and they don't want to do it again.

1:09:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Right and they don't want to do it again if you watch home tv stuff, christina uh uh on the coast is one of the shows. She does a bathroom remodel commercial and it is the most extreme uptalk I've ever heard. Every single thing is up. It drives me bananas, is it on tv?

1:09:58 - Leo Laporte
uh, yeah, yeah, I've seen. I mean, there's nothing worse than local. No, this is, this is national.

1:10:03 - Jeff Jarvis
She's really big nationally christine on the coast uh bath commercial accor.

1:10:09 - Leo Laporte
According to fast company studies have shown that uptalk successfully grabs our intention, our attention, as it implicitly invites the listener to confirm they are listening. One creator explains nobody actually talks like that. It's a form of code switching that influencers learn on this app because it keeps people no watching their videos, influencer acts and everyone's been talking about sounds like that, because it's designed to manipulate you.

1:10:33 - TikTok
You know what? I mean hey guys, this is my dry erase cleaner and surface restorer. Today we're going to clean some whiteboards. Nobody, nobody actually talks like that. It's a form of code switching that influencers learn how to do in this app because it keeps people watching their videos. I think that's fair.

1:10:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm not going to watch any more of this guy's video. I can tell you that right now he's right, though he's right, okay, so I don't do that.

1:11:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Do I do old think radio voice, is that my voice? You do radio voice, oh yeah, you do happy radio voice, happy radio voice you have a smile in your voice I do.

1:11:05 - Paris Martineau
My mom used to say you talk like you're on helium you're smiling with your voice always smiling with my vocal cords I had when I did tv tryouts.

1:11:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I did multiple times because they we want a tv critic, oh no, we don't, um. And they would tell. They would tell me, just do that. No, you kind of get the smile in your voice, yeah and you're like I never smile.

1:11:26 - Paris Martineau
No, you don't know me. I think we should bring back the atlantic accent for tic tac, you know, the mid mid-atlantic uh, so you want to hear the extreme of uptalk?

1:11:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I just put it in the discord. Oh, the like this. Oh, like this is All right. This is Christina doing the jacuzzi bathroom. Oh, this is the one you're talking about?

1:11:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, here we go. Jacuzzi bath remodel spot, take one.

1:11:51 - YouTube
Are you ready for a fresh new bath or shower? Well, now is the best time, with free installation and no interest and no payment for one year. Hi time with free installation and no interest and no payment for one year. Hi, I'm Christina and it's time to flip your old, worn out bath or shower.

1:12:03 - Paris Martineau
Who is she? This is the most boomer complaint I've ever seen. It hits I'm sorry, Jeff, it hits complaining about an ad you see on TV and complaining about a woman's voice. It's like the nexus of everything I knew.

1:12:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I would get crapped for that. Fine, I deserve it. But if you see, I actually watch old tv. I've seen that a hundred, a thousand times. What's old tv? Broadcast tv, any kind of tv is old. Any kind of tv, right, cable tv, yeah, I actually have a television. Oh, by the way, did you go change the subject very quickly. Did you buy a tv, paris?

1:12:34 - Leo Laporte
stay tuned for the answer to that question right after this word from our sponsor. Okay, did you buy?

1:12:40 - Paris Martineau
it, I did. After all. I I went down a big rabbit hole, guys, you know you didn't just listen to us.

1:12:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I did. I had nothing to say. I was not man.

1:12:51 - Paris Martineau
I did listen to you and it really cut off a good 75 of the rabbit hole, but there still was a 25 that remained and it ruined me. Specifically, there's just a lot. I was thinking about getting the LG that you recommended, but the LG is so expensive. So I was like all right, the next best is really like a Samsung, and specifically I want to get the QD OLED, as we talked about. But then I was like all right, I think I found the Samsung that's more expensive, isn't?

it. No, the Samsung QD OLED is going to be less expensive than the top.

1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's even better. Oh, but you were. You were looking at the top tier LGs you didn't need. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

1:13:33 - Paris Martineau
I was like, if I'm going to, Well, here's the thing. I went back and forth a lot between the non-QD OLED LG and the QD Samsung, Ended up becoming even more complicated because when I settled on, I'm going to do the Samsung. Then I realized that the Samsung brand that I was looking at has a weird quirk which is in the 2024 models. They kind of use a lottery system for the panels. Some intrepid journalists found out where some.

At first it seemed just like random. Some would be just mystery woleads, and then some would be the qd oled and I was like, well, I can't do that. I can't end up with a wolead if I pay qd oled prices but turns out in the us, specifically the 65 inch and the 55 inch are 100 at the time qd only oleds. So I ended up going with that. But then I was like, well, if I want to do this to get uh, to watch blu-rays and 4k uhd discs, then I'm like, well, the samsung doesn't have dolby vision, is that something?

1:14:38 - Leo Laporte
that's a problem. You're right, listen, we didn't address that we didn't.

1:14:42 - Benito Gonzalez
But then I was like hdr.

1:14:44 - Paris Martineau
We forgot about that I know, but it's got hdr 10 plus and people which is cheaper.

But that's the license, the dolby yeah but then I was like, well, if I'm gonna get us, if I'm gonna get a ps5 that doesn't have dolby vision already, so like, would that be worth it? Then I'm like, well, if I'm going to get a PS5, I should really just get a Panasonic UB420, which is a standalone thing that already. It really wrecked me, but I made a decision. I bought from Costco. I have a Samsung S90D 65 inch QD OLED coming in on Friday. Some men are going to carry it up into my apartment for me, you're going to be so happy.

And I also got a. I picked up a Panasonic UB420 disc player and whatnot, which has HDR optimizer, 4k scaling.

1:15:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you went all out, everything you want, you spent every penny.

1:15:36 - Paris Martineau
I didn't spend every penny because I could have gotten the insane Panasonic 820, which is like $500, $400. That's the one.

1:15:42 - Leo Laporte
I got, which is stupid.

1:15:44 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I would have gotten it if I got a TV that could do Dolby Vision, because that's the only real difference. But I was like I'm going to save money, get a non-Dolby Vision. Really nice TV.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Please don't yell at me. You're going to give her buyer's remorse no, actually you got exactly the right thing. Okay. But google and samsung, realizing that this is a problem, have created project caviar to replace dolby vision and dolby atmos, both of which are licensed from dolby. They're making a new spec and it was actually announced and shown at CES this year. Project Caviar Now they call it Eclipsa Audio It'll be available on this year's the new Samsung models Now.

1:16:36 - Paris Martineau
I mean, frankly, I don't need it that much for the audio, it was more just for the uh yeah you still have to buy speakers, by the way listen. That's a. That's a problem for future paris. I could get nice speakers here from facebook marketplace in brooklyn. I just needed to get the tv and the uh, the player get powered speakers uh, stuff got expensive due to tariffs good is it?

1:17:05 - Jeff Jarvis
mounted. Is it mounted or how do you do it?

1:17:07 - Paris Martineau
no, I'm gonna put it on my credenza, like my current tv is, that's fine. Get a nice, uh, that's perfect yes, and anthony is pointing out he's right hundreds of tabs you don't really see the difference in HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Listen, that's what I finally decided. After it I was like I can't spend like $600, $700 more just for Dolby Vision. That's dumb, because it would be then like I'd have to spend more.

1:17:31 - Leo Laporte
You'd never notice the difference, yeah.

1:17:32 - Paris Martineau
I'd never notice, especially coming from my crap TV. Now, literally anything I was purchasing is going to be better have you, you haven't seen it yet.

1:17:39 - Benito Gonzalez
You would have to buy specifically Dolby Vision media to use it.

1:17:43 - Paris Martineau
Listen, god, do I know? I've bought so many. I've bought so many V Blu-ray discs and UHD discs though in the last couple of days, and I'm really excited.

1:17:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, how exciting. So what do you? What tell us what you bought?

1:18:01 - Paris Martineau
What? What movies? Well, my first purchase was, I found, like the reason why I decided to do this. I wanted to get a copy of Wild at Heart so that I could see it in a non-terrible archiveis way. So I have that coming, which is specifically the collector's edition that has a bunch of deleted scenes that I'm excited. I'm just excited about the idea of. I've never been able to watch like commentary tracks or deleted scenes from my media and I miss that, yeah, um.

So what else did I have it here on my list somewhere? I?

1:18:24 - Benito Gonzalez
got a bunch of criterion stuff. By criterion stuff, I mean I'm waiting to the criterion sale.

1:18:29 - Paris Martineau
I'm a criterion member and they usually do a sale at some point, so I will. I've gotten uh adaptation, which I love, on ultra high def, um vampire's kiss, asteroid city, which is my favorite West Anderson movie. I got face off uh, specifically this collector's edition from a group called Wow.

1:18:46 - Leo Laporte
These are expensive. They're all wild at heart. Collector's edition is $80.

1:18:51 - Paris Martineau
I got mine, I think, for like 25, five. It's because all David Lynch discs right now are sold out because he just died Um, and all david lynch discs right now are sold out because he just died um, and so I got the wild at heart one off ebay for, I think, 25 smart?

1:19:05 - Leo Laporte
um, I hope it's not. You know the japanese. You do know about region encoding god do I I've learned so much.

1:19:14 - Paris Martineau
I've learned so much that I wish to not know you have to be careful with discs.

1:19:19 - Leo Laporte
The first time you use your player it will say what region you're in, and you can. You can get away with not telling it for a while, which means you can watch discs from any region, but some point it's going to get region locked.

1:19:31 - Paris Martineau
But you're going to have to oh, yeah, yeah there's like supposedly some hacks to use this Panasonic thing to get around that.

1:19:41 - Leo Laporte
There may be a special.

1:19:44 - Paris Martineau
I today bought. There's been this movie I've been trying to see. It's probably only with new ones. My local theater called Dead Mountaineers Hotel. It's like an old Estonian cult film that isn't available for streaming anywhere. But I haven't been able to catch it in theaters and tomorrow is the last showing and I'm not going to make it, so I ordered a copy of it. Um, in a limited edition media book region free with english subtitles.

1:20:10 - Leo Laporte
Um, that's coming in this week do you think wild at heart is worth, you know, buying a whole new tv and dvd player?

1:20:18 - Paris Martineau
it is. I mean, I I also have just been a. I'm being facetious, but I have been watching a lot of movies at home lately and the last year and a half has been really me getting into cinema more and part of I don't know. I was like sitting there watching some movies the other week and I was like I was also playing some YouTube videos on my computer to my uh TV and I was looking at my computer screen. I was like god, this is like 25 times better than my my TV screen right now. I need to be looking at the movie.

I was like I need to be looking at the movies correctly yeah, so I was like, if I'm gonna get a non-terrible TV, like I think the TV I got was like $300 new eight years ago. So I'm like if I'm going to buy a new TV, I might as well get one that I'm going to keep for the next decade as well.

1:21:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this will hold you in good stead. I still have the LG OLED I bought eight or nine years ago and it's just as good, and also it was a good time to buy because they have I'm sure, as you guys know I didn't know this the tvs.

1:21:21 - Paris Martineau
Historically one of the like lowest times for prices is right before the super bowl. Yes, um, because this is also when they start to release the new tvs. So exactly, I was on artings, or is it ratings artings?

1:21:33 - Leo Laporte
is good. No, that's a good place to go. Yeah, yes, we this. So we have a show with scott wilkinson called home theater.

1:21:40 - Paris Martineau
Geeks, what I've been told I can't go in there because it's way too intense artings or no, no, home theater geeks I've been told it's gonna be someone starting from zero.

1:21:49 - Benito Gonzalez
I can't, I can't go there yet you do need an audio setup, though it's something you're gonna listen, I know, listen, I know just remember this audio engine.

1:21:57 - Leo Laporte
Look for audio engine. They're powered speakers, so you don't need to um. Oh, but she's good. But what about the DVD player?

1:22:08 - Benito Gonzalez
No, she can just output the audio from the TV.

1:22:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the DVD player has like its own audio stuff as well and like right, but you need a speakers, yeah.

1:22:20 - Benito Gonzalez
But it needs to follow the input that you have on the tv.

1:22:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Tv yeah you gotta go to the tv. My, our big tv is 20 years old and what and my wife's just not gonna go for how do you live?

1:22:32 - Paris Martineau
I know well, he doesn't need to have that. It's good you didn't get that tv critic job jeez, that's true.

1:22:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Msnbc looks just as bad everywhere I gave a talk uh to sony and uh. As payment I got a tv well oh, that was nice 20 years ago, 20 years ago, but was it like the best? How big of a team. Is it a tube tv? Hey, hey, no, it's. It's actually replaced another, not thin, but another flat tv that we had before that they had flat screen 20 years ago I will say it's crazy to me how, how small the tvs are now I mean, I don't

1:23:11 - Paris Martineau
even have that old of a when you got I was like whoa, it's so tiny it's paper thin, the one you got I know I went to go see it in the best buy when I picked up my blu-ray player. Yeah, I had. I had to search that best buy to find the dusty old shelf where they were selling three blu-ray players yeah, there, it's not a big market now.

1:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Everybody watches on streaming. But videophiles, cinephiles, agree the best quality is always going to be the physical media. So you're good.

1:23:41 - Paris Martineau
Oh, while we're in the tech recommendations corner, something I've asked you guys about before but I've forgotten what drive should I get for the backups of my computer, like a time machine compatible drive? It's a Mac, yeah, I know.

1:23:58 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, that was the question. Oh, it's a Mac, it's a mac. My, yeah, I know, but like no, no, that was the question I was. It was oh, it's a mac uptalk.

1:24:03 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a mac for her generation. You have to really turn on the.

1:24:08 - Paris Martineau
It is a mac. Yes, I've killed my last two because I think, as we learned last time I asked you about this, I now know I can't just unplug it willy-nilly, I have to actually eject it.

1:24:19 - Leo Laporte
Which Mac Is it an M1 Mac, m2?

1:24:22 - Paris Martineau
Mac. It's an M2.

1:24:24 - Leo Laporte
How big is the drive?

1:24:26 - Paris Martineau
That's a great question.

1:24:28 - Leo Laporte
You need an external drive that's ideally twice as big as the internal drive.

1:24:34 - Benito Gonzalez
If you have a 512, get a 1TB and they're cheap.

1:24:36 - Paris Martineau
I have like a 500GB.

1:24:41 - Benito Gonzalez
Okay then, get a terabyte.

1:24:41 - Paris Martineau
It's like what brand should I get?

1:24:43 - Leo Laporte
is. Does that matter? Cgate is fine, sandisk is fine. Um, hey, you know, if you want to get one that is mac focused, go to maxsalescom, other world computing. They're a little more expensive, but they will be kind of Mac-y, mac-ish. Let's see what they've got here.

1:25:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I just saw Paris' post about me.

1:25:05 - Leo Laporte
Paris posted about you yeah.

1:25:09 - Jeff Jarvis
No, did.

1:25:09 - Paris Martineau
I post about you.

1:25:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, you did. I put it in the Discord.

1:25:14 - Leo Laporte
Where did you post On the information?

1:25:17 - Paris Martineau
No, yeah, oh yeah, hey, by the way.

1:25:20 - Leo Laporte
I want to apologize.

1:25:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Blue sky's pretty good oh oh, uh-huh, yeah it is, it is great it's, it's, uh, it's very much now like old twitter.

1:25:34 - Paris Martineau
I would say it is like old twitter yeah, if they finally crossed that bridge so can I?

1:25:40 - Jeff Jarvis
can I, since you're on that, can I extend the discussion last week of mastodon? If you go down to line 162, yes, so we're making the mastodon fans mad.

We love you, master I love you, I love you, I love this guy. But this is going to be my example of what I refer to as scoldy mastodon, this very nice person who I like, who's wonderful. I have nothing against. But he came after me and said well, we do agree with your point of view of a media critic. It's obvious you set a link to reference. What the fediverse is basically asking you guys of the journalism guild is to simply add the tag paywall.

1:26:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah no, why wouldn't you do that? It's too much work do you have to do that for every lengthy post. That is a good thing to say, because what happens?

1:26:27 - Jeff Jarvis
is. I knew Leo was going to yell at me and this is why I put it here. It's only respectful with your readers and followers. It even protects them, because every time we visit a site we get cookied and classified. Like you don't know, the New York Times is paywalled. Every single time I put up something paywalled, I've got to say paywall. And that uses characters Also. We do have our culture, our way of being and our position about paywalls is quite clear in that regard. He gets to speak for all of Mastodon forever, and anybody new who comes in can't have a different view of this.

1:27:01 - Leo Laporte
This is why Black Twitter, why no?

1:27:02 - Speaker 7
but that's called a culture and the people on master preserve their culture culture and that's a very.

1:27:07 - Leo Laporte
There's a very good reason for hashtag paywall because people click on links and run up against a paywall and they can't read it.

1:27:14 - Jeff Jarvis
You wasted their time but it's the new york times I'm talking about. If they don't know, by this point the New York Times has paid. Every major news site has a paywall every single time I'm meeting well.

1:27:25 - Leo Laporte
I just want to say, on the behalf of the entire Macedon and Fediverse community you're not welcome well, you see, that's the problem.

1:27:32 - Jeff Jarvis
that's exactly what happened to black Twitter. Black Twitter came in, jonathan flower as a professor and said, uh well, musk has taken over Twitter. We do need some place. And then you had people coming. Well, no, no, no, you can't do this, you can't do that because it doesn't meet our culture. And he said back well, you don't care about my experience, you don't care about expanding and more people. Why would you not?

1:27:52 - Leo Laporte
want to put in hashtag paywall Because it's a pain in the ass. That's too many hashtags if you got more than two hashtags on a post consider your reader consider

1:28:01 - Jeff Jarvis
your reader here's I've got a solution. You're not worth it. I'm blue sky and I'm happy.

1:28:05 - Paris Martineau
This is what I did has this thing called like labelers, where I I've only seen it used in terms of like accounts, like you could subscribe to a labeler and it would label if an account is like an associated member of the press or something like that. It would display a little thing. But they should have a version of that where if somebody wants to subscribe to a labeler, that doesn't mean you have to pay money, you just have to sign up for it. That will label every link in your feed as paywall or not, based on a list of what sites Then go for it Do that. I don't think that it should be every poster's prerogative to comply with the demands of every individual user who their poster could come across.

Sorry. I should have said who their toots could come across. I should respect what I'm talking about.

1:28:48 - Leo Laporte
You probably hate putting in text descriptions of images as well on the album.

1:28:53 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I do it. I put up a lot of headlines and stuff. I put up a lot of headlines and stuff. So for Blue Sky and Mastodon, which are the two places that demand it, I do a cut and paste of the headline text in 99.9% of the cases, unless I'm on my phone and walking.

1:29:07 - Leo Laporte
The one thing I really don't like about Blue Sky and this is actually an argument against quote tweets is there's way too much retweeting, or what do you call it reskeeting? I'll see the same post 10 times. That's not a pleasant experience for people. Right, do you have?

1:29:26 - Paris Martineau
that experience.

1:29:27 - Leo Laporte
You see the same post again and again, and again, because everybody I follow is decided that that's worth reskating.

1:29:34 - Paris Martineau
I don't, but it could also be. If you're looking at just your following tab, versus like discover or different feeds, then you're going to be seeing chronological, like skeets. So whatever posts come up like someone is like tweeting or whatever are going to come across your feed in chronological order. If you use a different feed I have like 12 that I look at You're not going to get those same sort of mistakes and if you are, you can always create your own feed to weed that out.

So I will also say as an addendum blue sky does have a labeler called identify paywall links that if that person was on blue sky they could add it and the problem would be solved for them.

1:30:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me be clear here. Let me be here Before you do.

1:30:15 - Leo Laporte
I just want to point out there is a setting since I brought this up and I'm not sure it works, but I think what I did was I turned off reposts and I turned off quote posts, which you can do, which is very nice in blue sky, and I think that will cut back on the number of repeats I want to be very clear here to utopi rt.

1:30:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm using this only as an example. I I'm delighted you're reading my posts. I appreciate the discussion. I understand the culture we disagree, but please take no offense at me being a spartan, thank you. Just add the hashtag what I do. How hard can that be? No, no because no.

1:30:57 - Paris Martineau
No, no, I will say I would judge Jeff. If I saw him tweeting or tooting or skeeting things with more than one hashtag, I would be like that's ridiculous.

1:31:07 - Leo Laporte
By the way, to be fair, I have a TwitNews Mastodon account that whenever I bookmark something for the shows which I do pretty much every day, all day, every day, it just retweets it.

1:31:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It doesn't have hashtag paywall, so I put in a lot of mastodon posts that do not have I've never written hashtag paywall I put stuff up on the four socials and I don't use your platform because in each one, if I'm tagging somebody, I'll go to the trouble to get the right tag for the right person in the right platform, right, and so I can't do it across all of them, and usually what it means in Mastodon is I take out the tag because most of the people I'm talking about, you know, don't have Mastodon accounts. So I go to a lot of effort to do this as is, and I'm squeezing things.

1:32:08 - Leo Laporte
For the other platforms. I'm squeezing things for the other platforms. I'm squeezing things down to fit um so no, I'm not. Mastodon has a pretty I think it's 512 characters on my mastodon, and some mastodons have unlimited characters, so there's plenty of space for you to put those in here. From the daily star, which is a britishloid, the headline of the week. Billionaire tech bros in turmoil as cheap. New Chinese AI makes rivals look like proper fickos.

1:32:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Gotta love, there'll always be a Britain. That's a good headline. Well, read the rest. Read the wood.

1:32:37 - Leo Laporte
War of the psycho scumbag chatbots. Is that the wood? That's the wood? The read, the read, the wood. War of the psycho scumbag chat boss. Is that the wood?

1:32:43 - Jeff Jarvis
that's the wood is that the wood the wood is how no, the wood is any headline. That's too big for in the old days the lead type machine to turn out, so you used wood type.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, put a big headline in w-o-o-d so so bring out the wood.

1:32:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Then it was a big news story a pound land.

1:33:02 - Leo Laporte
New ai from china has given tech bros a real kicking and wiped millions and millions off the value of their stocks. Oh dear, how sad. Oh dear, how sad.

1:33:13 - Paris Martineau
Never mind so headless body found in topless bar was a wood. That was wood.

1:33:19 - Leo Laporte
That's the greatest headline ever written right, absolutely. Is it the post post?

1:33:25 - Paris Martineau
oh yes, of course, oh yes I think everything the post does is wood the post is the one place that I still conceive of in my head as a groups full of cigar smoking people in a conference room. Whenever I think of people coming up with the new york post had like front cover headline or, I guess, the wood, that's exactly what I conference room is a little too posh, I would say, for that kind of newsroom.

1:33:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, in fact, I worked in that building when I was a tv guide and so it was just a plain office building. But in the old days, no, it was, it was, it was no cause it a fishbowl I'm sorry, it's not a wood.

1:33:59 - Paris Martineau
It was in the proper headline place. It wasn't on the um photo, so I think that would just make it a normal head, not a wood. Headless body and topless bar. Just correcting the record and and.

1:34:11 - Leo Laporte
Do you remember what the story was about?

1:34:14 - Jeff Jarvis
a headless body was found in a top. What's, what's the problem?

1:34:18 - Paris Martineau
really, oh, it says it all gunman forces woman to decapitate tavern owner oh my dingle charles dingle uh is the man convicted of fatally shooting the owner of a topless bar and then forcing a hostage to decapitate him in april 20. I like this reenactment is that a reenactment?

1:34:37 - Leo Laporte
oh no, that's it. This is an ad, that's a theatrical poster that's, this isn't, this isn't, this is not the uh, okay, wait, I corrected my correction, yeah it's the

1:34:51 - Paris Martineau
wood it is the wood, that's the wood, that's the wood, yeah, and what makes the wood different than a headline?

1:34:57 - Jeff Jarvis
because, because, because it's still a headline. But but the ludlow machine set, uh, the line of type, set body type and up to a certain point size bigger than that. You use the ludlow machine which set a line at a time and lead that can only go so big. If you wanted a big headline, you literally put in wood type it's literally font size.

1:35:17 - Benito Gonzalez
So like once you, once you reach it, you need the wood.

1:35:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah so there's a title in here somewhere, but I just can't figure out where it is.

1:35:29 - Leo Laporte
It's probably obscene, you know? Oh, I know it's obscene, it's definitely double entendre.

1:35:35 - Jeff Jarvis
You missed last week's cause and effect. That would have been a good one, but what was it last week? No, I'm not going back there. Okay, you don't want me to. You definitely don't want me to. I made Paris laugh which made me happy.

1:35:50 - Leo Laporte
Now you've gotten me in trouble with everybody on Mastodon. Who else can we piss off who else? By the way, if you do want to join, the best social network, twit, runs its own mastodon instance, free to all, at twitsocial. The only thing I ask we'll have to approve your membership is just mention that. You heard it on the show, so I know you're a listener, we get. It's amazing how many scammers and spammers try to get through, uh, which is why I have to approve it. Yeah, it's uh. It's just, I think, a condition of all um social networks. Now what? What I do on both that and our forums the disc disc, of course, forums at twitter community is. I just ask you you know what's your favorite show, or something like that, and that way I'll know if you, if you leave it blank or, as the spammers do, just type a bunch of random stuff what does it cost to um?

yeah, he's gonna lose her test here pretty soon, maybe maybe, yeah, they don't care that much to really uh, spend that much time at it you know they're trying.

1:36:55 - Jeff Jarvis
What does it cost to host uh Mastodon these days?

1:36:59 - Leo Laporte
The Mastodon. I think $300 a month for my Mastodon. It used to be a lot less. I think I was paying $5 a month. And then Elon bought Twitter and we had this mass exodus and I really had to buy up to get enough bandwidth. I could probably cut back now quite a bit. It's not as active as it was.

1:37:28 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the guy's name who runs that company, uh, the, the hosting service, yeah, yeah, it's a french hosting service.

1:37:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a nice guy, he's very wonderful and I have this. I, I bought the top of the line hosting. That's why it's that expensive. It's about the same as our uh discourse. You're worth that. Yeah, um, worth the top of the line. It comes out of my pocket, uh, but that's okay because, uh, I really want to run these two and I don't want to make them paywalled, because then I'd have to put hashtag paywall everywhere yeah well done, leo.

Well done. Mr cory doctorow says it's not a crime if we do it in an app. Uh, kind of an interesting uh piece in which he talks about it's. He says, for instance, it's not an unlicensed taxi if we do it with an app, it's not an illegal hotel room. If we do it with an app, it's not an unregistered security. If we do it with an app, it's not wage theft. If we do it with an app. Uh, I, I. It's a good article, it's a good piece.

Uh, what it comes down to really is is a explanation of why inflation is so intractable. Because he says pretty much every packaged good in your grocery store is made by one of two companies unilever and procter and gamble. Both ceos boasted to their investors about their above inflation price increases. He says their cartels everywhere, it may seem. For instance, your grocer's egg department is filled with many different companies' products. In reality, a single company, calmain Foods, owns practically every brand of eggs in the case, farmhouse Eggs, sunups, sunny Meadow, eggland's Best and Lando Lakes, and they made record profits. And their Cfo says why? Because of significantly higher selling prices and our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures. Uh, good piece as something to be aware of.

Four companies lamb, weston, jr, simplo, mccain foods and cavendishms have captured the frozen potato market Fries, everything, tater tots, everything. These companies have been hiking prices for years, but after COVID, one of the one of. So he talks to a owner of a DC sports bar, ivy and Coney, who charged $3 for fries 10 years ago. Now it's $6 and he's still making less money because all of their potatoes come from big potato. Big potato, big spud controls 97% of the frozen potato market, 97% the and, and they basically act as a cartel. You know they fix prices. They do it subtly. What does this have to do with?

apps. That's a good question.

1:40:30 - Paris Martineau
They're going to put potatoes in the blockchain, Jeff.

1:40:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I started reading down and I was trying to figure out. Okay, what's the app thing?

1:40:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, he says this is price fixing, but they do it with an app. Because they use an app called Potato Track, each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data supply costs, pricing, sales figures, excuse me to Potato Track. Then Potato Track uses the data to give advice to cartel members about optimal pricing, in other words, so they don't have to get together and say, well, I think we should charge five bucks for this. They use potato track. Uh, they and and a lamb. Weston exec cory quotes described the arrangement as quote everyone behaving themselves, chortling that they'd never seen quote, never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry. All because of potato track. There's a data broker called this is why.

1:41:32 - Benito Gonzalez
I hate people talking about inflation when it's not what's happening. It's ice gouging. Amen, brother, it's ice gouging.

1:41:38 - Leo Laporte
A data broker called Agristats works with America's largest meat packers doing the same thing. They collate all the data and suggest an appropriate price, allowing the meat packers to raise prices in lockstep. Four firms control nearly 80% of the almond milk market. Three companies control 83% of the canned tuna market. Four companies control more than 86% of the microwave popcorn market. And he also mentions and you're probably aware of this as a renter, uh Paris real page, which is an app that lets corporate landlords, who've bought up a sizable fraction of all the available homes in america, collude to raise rents. Private equity companies have rolled up all the fire truck companies hiking the price of fire trucks. You this is price fixing through the back door, basically through an app, is his point. Now, it's not technically an app, necessarily it's a database.

What he means. What he's saying is, if you do it through a computer, you can say well, we didn't collude, your Honor, we just, you know, the computer told us to do it.

1:42:59 - Benito Gonzalez
We're just all agreeing with the computer. What's wrong?

1:43:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're just all agreeing with the computer. Inflation has lots of causes, quary writes. It's true, but when an industry is consolidated enough to take advantage of a data brokerage or just engage in tacit collusion, any source of inflation war, disease, weather allows whole sectors to raise prices together and keep them high long after the shock has passed. Good piece, it's not a crime if we do it with an app. Make your app be a computer and I think then it all kind of makes sense and it is big potato. There it is.

It doesn't really have a lot to do with a computer, it's just price fixing, but it's price fixing done at arm's length, because now you have databases, you have internet, you have computational abilities. And AI will make it even better right. Possible deniability. And you have deniability. Yeah, well, we didn't do anything, we just gave our data to Potato Track.

1:43:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I was always very proud of my father that he worked for IRC International, irc international resistance corp, which made resistors. He found himself in a what turned out to be a price fixing meeting and he stood up and said this is illegal and I can't be part of it and he walked out good for him, yeah, good for him, and, as a result, he cornered the resistor market, yes, with the cheapest resistors in the world. I got free resistors to make my number one award-winning eighth grade science fair project electronic bongos. You should have stuck with it.

1:44:36 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, you should be a billionaire.

1:44:39 - Paris Martineau
A bongo, billionaire.

1:44:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, I could be.

1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
Get ready, because the Iee, the internet, I'm sorry, the internet engineering task force has a standard called l4s. It's a open standard that helps reduce latency in internet networks. Comcast says it's about to adopt it and the first wave of supported applications include selected games from steam geforce, now selected apps on headsets from meta and facetime on apple hardware. Ultra low lag internet on xfinity. But again, this is an open standard that any ISP could adopt, uh Comcast fully has. Once Comcast has fully rolled out the low lag option, it'll be available to all Xfinity customers then. But they're going to start with Atlanta, chicago, colorado Springs, philadelphia, rockville and San Francisco. I'm hoping that we will get the benefit of that because that would actually help us. I'm on Xfinity, I'm on comcast business uh, to do these shows and it might make a big difference. Comcast said in its release it plans to deploy additional locations in the coming months.

1:45:56 - Jeff Jarvis
So get ready for ultra low lag internet connections so um explain that a little bit to me, like, how laggy is mine? How do we know?

1:46:11 - Leo Laporte
those. Okay, this is how engadget describes it. If a packet traveling between your device and the server experiences congestion, it it reports hey, it's congested, which then can improve future packets journeys. It it's adapts. That's the civilized packet thing to do.

Yeah, l4s architecture enables internet applications to achieve low queuing latency, low congestion loss and scalable throughput control. Not just this, by the way, that helps gaming, but it really also helps what we're doing right now, which is a zoom call. L4s is based on the insight this is from the ieee paper, rfc 9330. L4s is based on the insight that the root cause of queuing delay is the capacity seeking congestion controllers of senders. Is the capacityeking congestion controllers of senders, not in the queue itself. With the L4S architecture all Wait a minute, it gets clearer in a second All internet applications could, but do not have to, transition away from congestion control algorithms that cause substantial queuing delay and instead adopt a new class of congestion controls that can seek capacity with very little queuing delay.

Instead adopt adopt a new class of congestion controls that can seek capacity with very little queuing. It's called explicit congestion notification. I've gathered, congested it here, so this is a new open standard from the ietf, the internet engineering task force published january of 2023. This is how long it takes for this stuff to percolate through to your internet service provider, but I think if compcast starts doing it, it's likely that others will. They are the biggest isp in the united states okay your turn.

1:47:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes give me. I want to give you a heartwarming, wonderful tiktok story. Have you heard of hillman talk college or university? Hillman I think I've heard of. Yeah, is it a hbcu? No, this is a brand new thing. So if you go down to line, oh hell, no, I lost it. Line 115, this is an honest to god, real professor named dr barlow who makes a video only intended for her students in her class. Oh, no, not that one, the one that's not dr barlow. I want dr barlow, I want one.

1:48:32 - TikTok
I did this one up 15 okay hello everyone and welcome to introduction to african-american studies for the spring semester. My name is dr leah barlow. It is cold outside, but I really wanted to quickly get on and just show my face, introduce myself. So she does the whole class in.

1:48:46 - Jeff Jarvis
TikToks. No, no, no, wait, wait, wait. She just wants to do a welcome video for her class. A lot of professors do that and she's trying to say here's where the syllabus is and blah, blah, blah, blah. People across all of TikTok immediately watch this and say I want to be in your class, and they think they can be in her class. All right. Well, she was just doing it for her class and she was blown away by this response and didn't know what to do with it. Well, what's happened now is that people have created Hillman Talk College and their last count, there are like 50 courses that professors are offering, all for black Americans. It's not for us.

1:49:22 - TikTok
Well, that's really cool, so watch this 92% say they mind in their own business. Dr barlow posts a video about african-american studies and it's just for her students, because we're a star for community and when black women tell us to do something, we listen. We all enrolled. Dr barlow was like this ain't for y'all, this is for my 30 students by the way, she's not up talking or vocal frying.

I like it I don't know all 400 000 of you, but thank you for coming, I guess. And we were like, no, ma'am, we are staying. And other professors were like, no, no, come on, I'll teach you too, come on so how are they distributing the classes?

1:50:04 - Leo Laporte
are they doing so?

1:50:05 - Jeff Jarvis
they're on tiktok and if you, if you I don't know if it's a hashtag or not I put the next line down as a search and if you go there, you're going to find helman talk dot university at tiktok that's wild.

1:50:16 - Leo Laporte
They also have a website helman talk hbcu what that's incredible it is, so it is beautiful.

1:50:24 - Jeff Jarvis
You're obviously not going to get college credit for this, but you're going to get a college education, people who want to say right now, I need community and I want uplift and I want education and it's being shot down everywhere else on their website they have a course list.

1:50:39 - Paris Martineau
It's got ag 101, plant basics and gardening education, black homesteading 101. Um ai for creatives, drawing 101 like I'm loving this project management talk grading for beginners see when people say, oh yeah, tiktok, it's chinese, you know, right in invasion.

1:51:02 - Leo Laporte
And no, yeah, but it also has empowered amazing stuff yeah, and it's grassroots.

1:51:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It comes up from people wanting to do this and wanting to um well, also, it's where it's where the people are right.

1:51:15 - Leo Laporte
Yes, so you could do this anywhere. You could even do it on mastodon but no, they'd be.

1:51:22 - Jeff Jarvis
They'd be scolding because you don't put in the.

1:51:24 - Leo Laporte
It'd be smart to do it honestly, final or not it'd be smart to do it on something decentralized, not owned by anybody.

1:51:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, fair enough, but this is what the people were, especially the chinese government. But it's where the people are and that's where dr barlow was yeah, yeah, and so dr barlow is continuing and she's doing more and she has the syllabus up, and so she had the is continuing and she's doing more, she has the syllabus up, and so she had the first reading and people were reacting in the comments and she was responding to many of them. Oh, my goodness, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

1:51:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, uh it is career counselor yeah, what you got multiple tas. What's the url? Uh, hillman talk hbcucom the spring of 2025. Leadership 102.

1:52:10 - Leo Laporte
No professor deborah I love this idea. What a great idea. I mean, this is kind of what uh con academy was, and I'll put it in discord jeff thank you, I'm just. I'm just, I'm typing bad, I'm thinking about taking fun, but unfortunately, because it is on tiktok, it's going to be diluted and there's going to be stitches and there's going to be negative. How do you? I mean what?

1:52:34 - Jeff Jarvis
well? Because you're signing up for somebody you trust in a class and that person is saying I'm going to give you this class and you go. You go to that person, you follow their tiktok person and their class okay, right, so let's see if we can find the course catalog I feel like there'd be better ways to do this, but okay, that's where the people are I understand, pretty fun it is fun.

1:52:58 - Leo Laporte
It is a lot. It's a really. It's a perfect example of oh, they did it on notion, that's cute. It's a perfect example of oh, they did it on Notion, that's cute. It's a good example of why we love TikTok. Yes, so, this is the syllabus or the no. This is the catalog.

1:53:17 - Jeff Jarvis
First catalog. Oh, look at it.

1:53:19 - Leo Laporte
Agriculture, arts, business, computers, benevolent, ai 101.

1:53:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Cosmetology, culinary arts, culinary arts education electives wow, gardening wow, uh, brand building, learning how to do your own hair, exploring spirituality through tech cyber security 101 fashion history.

1:53:43 - Leo Laporte
Look at that, and so what it has is the TikTok account of the professor Right.

1:53:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Or of the class. We'll pick cybersecurity and go to that one and see.

1:53:53 - Leo Laporte
Let's see, I'll copy this and I'll go to TikTok. I mean, it does feel kind of inefficient, though, right I?

1:54:09 - Paris Martineau
mean it's definitely. I mean it's just, it's just a course catalog. It's a catalog of people creating TikToks and certain yeah.

1:54:16 - Jeff Jarvis
And it won't last forever. But it doesn't need to it, won't I just?

1:54:19 - Paris Martineau
think it's. It's a fun little thing that people do online and I like that.

1:54:25 - TikTok
Good for them, wherever you are and what time. Whatever time, you're going to see this video, as promised class starts tomorrow and I love it.

1:54:33 - Leo Laporte
And you know, what's so cool is these professors who jumped on it yes, said okay, you want it, you got it, um wow poor doctor barlow just didn't know what it hit her.

1:54:47 - Benito Gonzalez
I bet yeah teachers want to teach people who want to learn. Yes, yeah, that's all they want. This is the answer brother the position.

1:54:55 - Leo Laporte
Uh that e rosner said well, everybody just wants to get rich and everybody's in it for the money.

1:54:59 - Paris Martineau
No, there's clearly no money in hillman talk well, I mean, there's money for the creators who are making these videos that go viral, because they get paid out by the tick tock creator. Tick tock doesn't pay out crap, oh you kidding me.

1:55:16 - Leo Laporte
I asked henry. I said how much does money do you get from tick tock? He said well, the advertisers. No. I said no, no from TikTok. He said I've never got any money from TikTok.

1:55:25 - Benito Gonzalez
Hillman has got a lot. That's good, right, they should.

1:55:28 - Leo Laporte
Hillman maybe, yeah, and these professors are probably being paid by Hillman, so again, they don't have to worry about a roof over their heads, but they're still doing the extra because they care about what they do.

1:55:38 - Paris Martineau
There's no Hillman, no Hillman is made up. No, no, no, it isn't a school.

1:55:47 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, it's a thing for tick tock. Hillman talk is the name of the fake tick tock university where was dr barlow teaching.

1:55:50 - Jeff Jarvis
She was at another university. She's a real university. She was teaching at a university I thought hillman was a school.

1:55:56 - Leo Laporte
No, no, it's all made up um, but these people are all really professors. I mean, there is a risk if these people are just off the street.

1:56:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Hillman college was a women's college in clinton, mississippi, that existed between 1853 and 1942. Oh, it was originally named the central female institute and renamed hillman college in 1891, organized by the central baptist association um remains in operation um remains in operation, say, where she's teaching this for real.

1:56:30 - Benito Gonzalez
I don't. I'm guessing that it's from the fictional college that dr cosby went to is that he went to.

1:56:33 - Jeff Jarvis
What was that?

1:56:35 - Leo Laporte
but maybe, maybe, kind of which is why I thought hillman was an hbcu.

1:56:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I was confusing it well, it is an hbc, but it is now wow, you started a movement.

1:56:49 - Leo Laporte
You started a movement.

1:56:51 - Jeff Jarvis
That's so cool um, I'm trying to see if it says where she's at a professor, because she's good yeah that's all right.

1:57:01 - Leo Laporte
So so yeah, I mean, but this is the problem is that anybody can now create a course in Hillman Talk. They may or may not know what they're talking about. But then you choose but that's true of everything on the internet. You'd have to figure out who knows what they're doing. Who is Philip Lowe?

1:57:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Philip Lowe is a. I put that in. There Is he a friend of Elon Musk's.

1:57:30 - Leo Laporte
He was he's neuro. I'll explain first.

1:57:34 - Jeff Jarvis
He's at Neurovigil Inc. And Elon was on his board, so that's the context here. Okay, elon was on his board, so that's the context here. Okay, and it was. It was, um, uh, yann lacoon, who linked to this on facebook, is how I discovered it he says elon's not a nazi per se.

1:57:57 - Leo Laporte
There was a very a damning guardian piece about the south af mafia that founded PayPal. Peter Thiel, elon Musk, david Sachs all of whom were really grew up in apartheid South Africa with fairly racist education.

1:58:16 - Benito Gonzalez
All directly benefited from South American apartheid.

1:58:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they benefited from apartheid. South. African yeah Well, not American, but South African. He is something much better, not a Nazi. Yeah, they benefited from apartheid. South african yeah well, not american, but south african. Uh, he is something much better, not a nazi. Something much better or much worse, depending how you look at it. Nazis believe that an entire race was above everyone else. Elon believes he is above everyone else. Well, so do I. So doesn't everybody think in their heart of hearts they're maybe a little bit better than everybody else.

no, just, oh, just me, just you, elon. He used to think he worked on the most important problems. When I met him, he did not presume to be a technical person.

1:58:52 - Jeff Jarvis
This is telling.

1:58:53 - Leo Laporte
He would be the first to say he lacked the expertise to understand certain data. That happened later. Now he acts as if he has all the solutions. Well, you know, this is a kind of little poison pen post. I don't know um well, but it's telling that he acts like he's the most brilliant technologist on earth. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I saw another uh article, uh piece, or maybe it was a skeet by somebody who said you know, when elon uh started tesla, I didn't know anything about evs, I was very impressed. When he started spacex, I didn't know anything about space, I was very impressed.

1:59:23 - Jeff Jarvis
But when he started talking about coding I'm a coder and I saw what he thought was real he says he's foolish bs remember when he made people print out their code and bring it to twitter yeah, he doesn't know anything about coding is what this coder said.

1:59:38 - Leo Laporte
So now I'm suspect, now it's suspect, all this other stuff. Yeah, I sincerely think Elon was the precipitating source for the OPM letter to all 2 million government employees saying you got till February 6th to quit, take a nice big payout, otherwise you know.

1:59:59 - Jeff Jarvis
It had the same header as the email that Elon sent when he got to Twitter Right.

2:00:06 - Paris Martineau
And to be clear even though the opm and to be clear, even though the uh, I feel like common description of that email which is rescinded was that it was kind of a twitter style quit now and you can get eight months of severance, the realities of what was being offered was, if you agree to resign in september, between now and september you can still work remotely.

2:00:30 - Leo Laporte
It was not that was the real sort of thing it was, and did you say it's been rescinded now?

2:00:35 - Jeff Jarvis
yes oh has that been rescinded that I thought, I thought so there were so many different uh.

2:00:41 - Leo Laporte
It's getting a little chaotic in here. What?

2:00:44 - Jeff Jarvis
was rescinded was the loans, some of the aid stuff.

2:00:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the payment freeze was rescinded.

2:00:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the deferred resignation offer. Yeah, I mean, first of all, they don't work for the OPM. The OPM doesn't have a standing to make that offer. Second of all, it's not funded, as members of congress point out. I don't know where that money's coming from, um, so we'll see, we'll see. It's just I think there's a little bit of chaos here going on. That's the idea. Yeah, yeah, chaos, monkeys, uh, anything else. One man's attempt to ask oh no, I don't want to do that.

2:01:23 - Jeff Jarvis
One, um, uh, anything else one man's attempt to ask oh no, I don't want to do that one. Um, I don't want to know what that was.

2:01:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's the only reason I want to do it is because we did it already on mac break weekly yesterday, because it was a mac story about siri being stupid. But who cares?

2:01:40 - Paris Martineau
it's just paris trying to bring you down to earth. I just think it's important, when we're talking about how ai is so transformative, to also highlight the areas where it's dumb as rocks no, no, no, don't, don't conflate siri and ai it's apple intelligence fair no, it isn't.

2:02:00 - Leo Laporte
It's siri and it's siri, it's well.

2:02:02 - Paris Martineau
The thing is if thing is, if you read both the One Foot Tsunami and Daring Fireball, they did tests between both the Apple Intelligent Powered Siri and previous Siri, and at least previous Apple, pre-apple Intelligent Siri, was able to say I don't know, let's search the web. And then searched and brought up the correct results.

2:02:23 - Leo Laporte
Siri's default answer always was here's what I found on the web and then searched and brought up series default answer always was here's what I found on the web about that, when it couldn't answer.

2:02:27 - Paris Martineau
But that was more accurate than all the gobbledygook that it's made once it was imbued with whatever apple intelligence is, which is ostensibly powered by chat gpt. But chat gpt gets this right, so it's no.

2:02:40 - Leo Laporte
I'm just wondering to be clear it's not powered by chat gpt. It will go out to chat GPT, as it does offer to do at one point, but it's in fact Apple's own First thing. Siri, I think, is always on device, so it's Apple's own models on device and that's why it's terrible. It knows nothing, it's just a tiny little model running on your phone. It does if it has to go out to apple servers running apple's own models, apple has their own models and then if, failing that, it can't answer it, it then says do you want me to use chat gpt? And you have to expressly say yes and agree that the now you're no longer private. So apple is intentionally dumbed down siri and their own apple intelligence so that it can remain private.

2:03:24 - Paris Martineau
I think it's particularly baffling because, uh, I was reading that the next ios update is going to have apple intelligence signing up for it as part of, like, the user flow for, um, like the user update, it will no longer be hidden behind a bunch of different like I had to go into settings and agree to be part of the beta program. Right, it will be rolled out to more people, which is surprising, given my experience so far with apple intelligence has been that it's completely useless well, siri is for sure, well siri is actually you're right, summarized notifications are bad.

I don't use the feature to rewrite my own messages, even though I accidentally hit that button all the time with my fat thumbs. It's just. There's no part of it that I've found particularly helpful.

2:04:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah. So I think we should hear from the Pope and the Vatican about artificial intelligence.

2:04:19 - Leo Laporte
Of course, because when it comes to modern technology, the first person I want to ask is the head of the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church, line 92. A new Vatican document examines the potential risk of AI. You know, actually, to be fair, the Pope has increasingly become the conscience of the world and I guess, as a spiritual leader, that's probably what I would expect. Not the case with many spiritual leaders, but thank goodness, the Holy Father seems to have his thumb in some areas.

2:04:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Some areas not so much. This is a great line. Quoting Pope Francis, the document affirms the very use of the word intelligence in connection with AI can prove misleading. In light of this, ai should not be seen as an artificial form of human intelligence, but as a product of it. Ooh, ooh, that's a nice line.

2:05:11 - Leo Laporte
I bet Father Robert wrote it. I bet he was involved. He won't take credit because I keep asking him did you do? For instance, there was this beautiful 3D rendering of St Peter's Basilica. I said did you do that? He said you know, everything we do here is a team effort. There was this beautiful 3d rendering of saint peter's basilica. So did you do that? He said you know, everything we do here is a team effort. I wouldn't take credit for any of that. So, uh, he, I'll never get the answer out of him, but uh, it's, you know, it's. Remember that. Uh, pope francis is a jesuit. The jesuits of all. All the Catholic orders seem to have the most scientific sense, shall we say. They even acknowledge evolution, which you probably wouldn't expect. The note warns against the risk of humanity becoming enslaved to its own work. I love the name of this, by the way antiqua et nova, which is ancient and new. Insists that, yeah, isn't that beautiful? Insists that it should only be used as a tool to complement human intelligence rather than replace its richness.

2:06:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Bingo, right on, I think see, I knew you'd like this yeah very cool.

2:06:25 - Benito Gonzalez
This is not what the ai companies are trying to sell us, though, see that's no.

2:06:28 - Leo Laporte
They want to replace humans, right? Yeah, well, it's going to be a little harder to replace humans than they imagine interesting on the web.

2:06:37 - Jeff Jarvis
The full version is there. It's long. Yeah, the english version comes first and then the italian, the pdf. The italian comes first, then the english. Are you sure it's the Italian comes?

2:06:45 - Leo Laporte
first, then the English. Are you sure it's Italian? It's not Latin. The whole thing should be in Latin, to really I don't know Should all be done in Gregorian chant. Oh, I should not be trusted, okay okay, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.

2:07:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I think what we have to do is is pick your, pick your ai. Take that url and go ask uh what? Language or no, okay, ask no, ask them what they think of the document. Ask them to respond to the document, okay let's uh is it? Is it uh? Should we do deep seek? Should we do uh jenna's gemini chat gpt.

2:07:26 - Paris Martineau
You're, I'll do uh I have a paid chat account, so instead I asked deep seek to make a gregorian chant for me about ai, and it made way too longer one, so I'll just sing the first verse please do oh, machina ex mentinata luxe umbra sacculorum data. Wow, you can, you can, uh stop making that new theme song. Bonito, I think, I think, bring back the reporters we got it.

2:08:04 - Leo Laporte
We got it baby yeah, all right, let me copy this and I'm just going to tell I mean, I don't know how long it's going to take to do this it says this chant reflects the awe and reverence for ai's power, while acknowledging the enduring humanity at its core. Thanks, deep seek oh, it's an Italian that's what I said.

2:08:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to ask you to ask it about the substance of the thing how AI ask AI if it's evil.

2:08:32 - Leo Laporte
I said summarize this. It's reading it. I guess it understands Italian right. Probably yeah, it might answer in.

2:08:42 - Paris Martineau
Italian, though I guess it understands Italian right Probably.

2:08:45 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, it might answer in Italian though. Yeah might do.

2:08:50 - Paris Martineau
That would be pretty funny. Now I'm just going to keep doing this whenever there's dead hair.

2:08:54 - Benito Gonzalez
I love it. Okay.

2:08:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it is. It's answering in Italian.

2:09:00 - TikTok
Oh, wait a minute. Why didn't you cut and paste the? English version.

2:09:07 - Leo Laporte
In English, please. Que es inteligencia artificial? Wow, Did you just say English?

2:09:19 - Paris Martineau
please.

2:09:21 - Leo Laporte
I just said English, please. Let's see if it'll give me the same thing.

2:09:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Why did you give it the Italian version it had?

2:09:26 - Leo Laporte
an English version I just want to cut and paste. Okay, thought about intelligence and ethics for a few seconds.

2:09:32 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a one.

2:09:34 - Leo Laporte
Brief summary this lengthy document. Intelligence is presented as a divine gift. Yes, reflecting the human call to till and keep the earth. The church endorses scientific and technological progress as part of humanity's collaboration with God and creation. Ar marks a new phase in humanity's bond with technology, but its rapid expansion demands urgent and anthropological reflection.

2:09:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, so ask it, what is AI's relationship with God?

2:10:02 - Paris Martineau
Based on this thing, or just whatever I have a friend who, uh, did a master's program in itp and that was what it was all about is what is ai's relationship with god. But it was 2019, so it was kind of that's so itp okay that's a program in nyu, not a substitute for god.

2:10:28 - Leo Laporte
It's doing it still in context with the uh, with the article few key points on as relationship with god rooted in human creativity, no idolatry. Moral responsibility because humans design and direct ai, they remain morally responsible for its applications. That's good right. Human as creatures, creatures created in god's image, people must ensure ai supports rather than undermines human dignity.

2:10:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, whoa, whoa, get a load of this. I'll go ahead, do that.

2:10:58 - Leo Laporte
I'll read your mind ensure ai is an extension of human craftsmanship which flows God's gift of intelligence but never replaces the divine or the unique relationship each person has with God. I think that's pretty good.

2:11:12 - Jeff Jarvis
I think AI did a good job.

AI's relationship with God is complex and multifaceted. It always has that kind of ridiculous beginning I know I hate that, yeah. Then it goes into the topics AI as a tool created by God. Then it goes into the topics AI as a tool created by God. From this perspective, ai is seen as another technology created by humans who were created in the image of God. As such, ai can be used for good or evil. Okay, fine, fine, fine, never mind. Thank you, gemini. Sorry, thank you Enough, but deep seek being the unreligious.

2:11:49 - Leo Laporte
Should we the chinese what they think?

2:11:49 - Paris Martineau
yeah sure, okay, let me get it in chat. Gpt's gregorian chant is worse, in my opinion you want to sing that one profondos machines on senos tree. It's kind of short. In villis ebis lucis veritas illuminat it's. I feel like the verses, the lines, need to be longer. In my opinion.

2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
I need more to chant too, yeah okay, deep seek is not popping up for me here, so okay, well, it does refer to ai as the vigilant serpent shines in the darkness.

2:12:27 - Paris Martineau
A voice without flesh echoes in silence, which is very ominous wow, yikes, vigilant serpent all right, I knew you'd like the vatican.

2:12:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I knew you'd like. They see, I know, yeah, I did. I thought that I'm not a democracy, it's clear. I am an atheist.

2:12:46 - Leo Laporte
I don't believe in this stuff. Were you raised anything. Yeah, when we went to church, which would be mostly like Easter we went to the Unitarian Church.

2:12:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, okay. Well, that's like not going yeah.

2:12:59 - Leo Laporte
Their credo was worship the God of your choice, right, and I remember going to Sunday school and making a little poster that said God is love, but it was pretty ecumenical. But my dad remember my dad was a paleontologist who taught evolution, yeah, and very you know, he was a lapsed Catholic. He was raised strict Catholic. He went, yeah, canadian, french-canadian, yeah, and Italian. His mom was italian. He went to, uh, regis, which is a catholic high school, and fordham, which is a catholic university, and then transferred to columbia. But he, uh, big he, as a lapsed catholic, there's nobody.

It's like former smokers, lapsed catholics, not a fan of the church and uh, so I was basically raised an atheist, I think I asked my mom you know both my parents are 92 and ready to kind of uh, make the transition, and so I asked my mom.

I said, well, how do you feel about you know, dying uh, do you think there's an afterlife? She said no, we're animals, it's, it's over, it's done. But she's cool with that, right, she's fine with that, it's not sad, or you know. I think I was raised with the notion that it's a false reassurance to say, well, there's an afterlife. It's like, well, oh, it's going to be fine, we're going to go to heaven. It's like, just well, oh, it's going to be fine, we're going to go to heaven.

It's like just it's a phony reassurance. So that was how I was raised.

2:14:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, did you study?

2:14:29 - Paris Martineau
Latin. I did not no.

2:14:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I wish I did Pretty good job. I think Leo did. How was her pronunciation, leo? No one knows.

2:14:37 - Paris Martineau
No one knows and no one on the internet will be able to correct me.

2:14:51 - Leo Laporte
It. Internet will be able to correct me. It's like agi harris problems. It's so funny when I've so there's church latin which pronounces c's as ch, so it's chelsea's day, or veni vidi. And then when I, when I studied latin, it had all changed.

2:14:58 - Paris Martineau
Somebody, somewhere, some scholar, said you know, I think the c's were hard because nobody knows everybody's dead I assume that's what it's like to just be a latin scholar you're sitting around, you're like I think they were hard, so instead of cicero, it's kikero and it's not veni vidi vici, it's veni did vidi vicky.

2:15:18 - Leo Laporte
and so I learned that's the latin. I learned was hard c, but the church still pronounces it ch, because the music is all written around that.

2:15:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, in excelsis Deo.

2:15:33 - Leo Laporte
So there's a difference in church Latin.

2:15:37 - Paris Martineau
I also don't like Geminis. I think that Geminis I will say Deep Seek had the best formatting for me to read a Gregorian chant.

2:15:43 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I probably shouldn't do this, but I could have Suno write us a song form. I will say deep seek had the best formatting for me to read a gregorian chant. Okay, I probably shouldn't do this, but I could have suno write us a song in latin.

2:15:50 - Jeff Jarvis
You can, you can do it based I'm gonna take the one I put in the discord.

2:15:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna take that, but you need to take the english parts out of it, I guess, because they might yeah, we don't want Suno to get confused. Let me ask Deep Seek to give me it without it.

2:16:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, I could just cut those lines out. Who's?

2:16:13 - Jeff Jarvis
faster.

2:16:16 - Leo Laporte
Chant of the machine spirit to be sung in unison acapella. I'll put that in as the instruction.

2:16:23 - Paris Martineau
Yes.

2:16:24 - Leo Laporte
Or should I say just do it in the style of a gregorian chant I mean in a style of a gregorian chant, but with that description perhaps yeah, so I got it. Yeah, all right, I'm taking out the parenthesis because I, I just sent it in the discord.

2:16:40 - Paris Martineau
If you want, too late wow and then to be sung in acapella.

2:16:49 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's create it, baby. Let's see what we got here sorry this is the new theme song. Yeah, we're not going to use yours, benita, we're going to use the chant of the machine spirit that describes AI as wisdom perfecting mankind. Not going to use yours, bonita. We're going to use the chant of the machine spirit. This is that describes ai as wisdom perfecting mankind let's see if I can get this to play here basically exactly how I did it yeah, it sounds just like you.

All right, let's try a different one here. It's kind of amazing. No, it doesn't does it. It also doesn't know what to be sung in unison. Well, maybe I'll take that out.

2:17:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, no, this sounds like a bad italian about italian spaghetti western.

2:17:49 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, exactly all right, let's just let's try this.

2:18:05 - Paris Martineau
That's what I'm looking for.

2:18:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh, now it's worse.

2:18:09 - Paris Martineau
Oh, it's even more Italian.

2:18:12 - Jeff Jarvis
This is like a Dan Brown novel made into a movie.

2:18:16 - Leo Laporte
It is Okay, I got to hear this singing. Now it's an irish. Oh my gosh oh, that prelude.

2:18:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, now please this is really upbeat. Should we put?

2:18:53 - Paris Martineau
acapella Gregorian chant.

2:18:58 - Benito Gonzalez
So I was messing around with Suno while I was trying to write a new theme song and Suno's terrible. It's like it doesn't know anything, like I try to ask it for specific things and it just doesn't know. It doesn't know stuff.

2:19:08 - Paris Martineau
You're telling me it's a unintelligent machine and you're a human being.

2:19:16 - Leo Laporte
Human beings unite.

2:19:18 - Benito Gonzalez
It can't take musical direction, it can only take like prompts.

2:19:22 - Leo Laporte
I think some styles are better than other styles, but I can't tell it give me something in 4-4 on this key and using these instruments.

2:19:31 - Benito Gonzalez
It won't do anything with that.

2:19:32 - Jeff Jarvis
That's Benito admitting he was trying to cheat. Wow, the.

2:19:41 - Leo Laporte
thing is it? Does it fast. Fast and bad.

2:19:47 - Benito Gonzalez
Yes, you don't even get two of the fast, cheap and good. You only get one of them fast. What is this?

2:19:56 - Paris Martineau
This is someone jazz-handing.

2:19:58 - Leo Laporte
This is the Jacques Brel version version. I love it. I know it's not good but I love it.

2:20:17 - Paris Martineau
As Burke says, it's a song machine that does not understand genres. It's crazy because we've made a gregorian chant before with suno. We did like a haunting on this show.

2:20:33 - Leo Laporte
A hundred percent um, I don't know, maybe it's confused by the latin I don't know chant of the machine spirit, maybe by the. I should take that line out take that out.

2:20:49 - Paris Martineau
That's the head, yeah, yeah that's the wood.

2:20:52 - Leo Laporte
As they say, that's the wood. Let's put that in as the title the wood. By the way, the description for that was spoken word, which it definitely didn't do.

2:21:03 - Paris Martineau
No, I would say acapella, gregorian chant, multiple male voices singing in unison, slowly. So, yeah, slowly, maybe solemn might be too. Yeah, solemn, that's good. Yeah, as in a church, you'd think with ai it'd understand latin because much like craig latin yeah, it should know.

2:21:29 - Leo Laporte
It should know that, all right. This is a gregorian chant. Multiple male voices singing solemnly in unison, as in a church, and the title of this is chant of the machine spirit, and the lyrics in latin written by what chat? Gpt? Or who do these? Deep seek, deep seek by a chinese.

2:21:55 - Paris Martineau
Ai, okay, not so much for multiple men all right, let's try this one all right, let's try this one it just loves those.

2:22:12 - TikTok
It's trained on spaghetti westerns. It was trained on our old theme.

2:22:17 - Paris Martineau
It sounds so bad.

2:22:19 - Benito Gonzalez
I feel like the only italian music it was trained on was that kind of stuff clearly it's italian, so we got to make it like this.

2:22:25 - Paris Martineau
I have to say, though, Burke says we have to include the negative pront minus river dance.

2:22:33 - Leo Laporte
No river dance. The Italian pop music is just as weird and bad as this. It's just the strangest thing ever.

2:22:45 - Paris Martineau
The Italians are going to come for you, leo, you can't.

2:22:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I am a telephone. You're going to die and Italians on Mastodon are really pissed this week.

2:22:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, Hashtag sorry. Hashtag this show is over Hashtag goodbye. You're watching this week in. Google it is over. This is our last this week in google. It is over. This is our last this week in google. We did do some google stories next week. Uh. Intelligent machines makes its debut. Not much changed.

2:23:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It'll be the same goofy uh should we all look like we're sad for a card for bonito?

2:23:19 - Paris Martineau
or happy about what's to come. We, what if we did two? Hold on and you can put them together sad first, sad happy hey, benito, good luck.

2:23:34 - Leo Laporte
Good luck at that, I'm sticking for you here.

2:23:36 - Paris Martineau
Do something. You're gonna put those together.

2:23:38 - Jeff Jarvis
My favorite was the four parrises.

2:23:40 - Paris Martineau
I did love that that was really good it was that was like joe, I think, yeah, yeah let's take a little break when we come back.

2:23:48 - Leo Laporte
Uh, your picks of the week? Uh, we're not done, are?

2:23:51 - Jeff Jarvis
we still gonna have picks of the week and of course that's the best part of the show.

2:23:55 - Leo Laporte
All right, don't you think it?

2:23:57 - Paris Martineau
better be the same show, but we just talk.

2:23:59 - Leo Laporte
It's the same show, we just change yeah, just change the name so sponsors think it's about ai. We talked a lot about ai today. We're trying to get that sweet super bowl hey and uh.

2:24:11 - Paris Martineau
Whenever we come back, I'm going to sing a glory and chant about the ending of a podcast as presented to you by deep seek okay, stay tuned.

2:24:19 - Leo Laporte
Stay tuned for that. This week in google it's the last segment of the show we're still going to be. By the way, next week it'll be intelligent machines 805. We're keeping the numbering. If you subscribe to the show, your podcast feed it'll be the same. The web page will still be twittv slash twig, although I think we'll add twittv slash. I am um, I know the YouTube channel will be the same. Really, nothing's going to change, except Jeff won't yawn as much. Sorry, jeff Jarvis, your pick of the week, sir.

2:24:52 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, so we're going to do a little yin-yang here. Yes, On the one hand, there's technological puritanism. I hate these stories. I just hate these stories where journalists tell you to give up something. So the Washington Post, try phone-free February to reduce screen time and improve your health. Screw off Washington.

2:25:10 - Leo Laporte
Post.

2:25:11 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll try Washington Post.

2:25:12 - Leo Laporte
You try it yourself. Who wrote this? Amanda Morris.

2:25:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I've been there.

2:25:18 - Leo Laporte
You log on your phone to check notification Is this what you guys in journalism call, like I don't know, puff piece, think piece, junk piece.

2:25:25 - Paris Martineau
No, it's how many stories has the? Did the author write that day?

2:25:30 - Jeff Jarvis
that's the yeah, yeah, it's just, it's just, yeah.

2:25:32 - Paris Martineau
So so, on the other hand, those pieces I would say I refrain from commenting on because those are usually something one gets assigned and has to do to have your job.

2:25:44 - Leo Laporte
It feels like it is. Amanda, come on in here, come into the fishbowl. I got a story for you. Here's the slug Phone-free February. Write it up and give me a thousand words by end of day. Yep, that's how they talk, right.

2:26:00 - Jeff Jarvis
On the other hand, the Guardian, which I love. I love the Guardian, I give money to the Guardian. I think I've worked with the Guardian. The Guardian, however, when it comes to technology, in recent years, has been the journal of moral panic. No-transcript.

2:26:32 - Leo Laporte
Which was, by the way, the Oxford University Press Word of the Year for 2024. So it may come as a relief, by the way brain rot is two words, so O-U-P, you might want to think uh, a little harder about it brain rot.

2:26:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Is brain rot could be one word before in oxford, in the oup, wasn't it two words, yeah, yeah so the word of the year was two years one.

2:26:55 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's pretty funny that's pretty good.

2:26:57 - Leo Laporte
Double your word. Money for your word money.

2:27:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So it may come as a relief to some to hear then that for every alarmist headline, there are plenty of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers who believe this moral panic is unfounded. 17.

2:27:14 - TikTok
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Right under the buzzer there.

2:27:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I hope you saw the video for that folks. Very good, very good, since truth knows how. I didn't put you on the spot for that because I didn't know if you could pull it up, but you did. Since 2017, there's been a constant drumbeat of screens, and tech and social media are a different universe. That is bad for you and bad for your kids, says Przbylski, and two things happen. The first is low-quality research that confirms our biases about technology. It gets immediate press because it's consistent with our existing biases. Right, it's really easy to publish low quality research because they told her to write it, uh, that kind of shows a correlation and then exaggerates it because it'll get the attention and it'll get funding.

2:28:00 - Leo Laporte
This is what we call entrepreneurship. Most of the studies Jonathan Haathan height talks about were of the order of well, do you feel like you're more lonely now than you were? And this, the study persists. Perspilsky is talking about was using functional mri scans, which is actually a really interesting technology where they they're doing an mri but they're watching your brain change as it's getting inputs, and the fMRI obviously you can't lie about. One of the complaints about Haight's quoted studies are well, the people knew what they were expected to say.

2:28:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Speaking of which I should mention. So I think this is a really good piece. I recommend it highly. But while we're on it, this is good. Yes, yes Siva.

2:28:45 - Leo Laporte
Vadyanathan, who let we like a lot, who maybe we should have him on. Oh, siva, I've been trying to get siva on forever. Um, give us his information right, we'll get him on.

2:28:53 - Jeff Jarvis
So in the new republic, yeah uh, he had a piece our cell phones, really destroying kids mental health johnson once heritage in an ultra social world.

Now he's one of the social media's most prominent critics and it's a really really good, well-written piece by our friend Siva and, by the way, siva and I are kind of bookends right, I wrote what would Google do, and he wrote the Googlization of everything. Right, and so we have this different view of the world, but we end up much on the same place in the end, and he hates height and his terrible lack of actual research, and so this is also an excellent piece in the new republic good I did actually read the piece.

2:29:31 - Leo Laporte
I didn't notice it was written by siva and that's where I got this. Uh, condemnation of heights methodology. Actually ah right okay, that's what made me think of it, yeah because I said oh yeah yeah, see, if it did say that, and I should would have credited him, had I remembered it was his.

2:29:47 - Jeff Jarvis
So I think we're seeing a backlash to the backlash, to the tech lash here.

2:29:50 - Leo Laporte
Good, and one of the things Siva points out is how valuable these online communities are to people who are otherwise isolated, whether they're kids or adults. And I mean we've said this all along it's not communication, it's not socialization if you're not in the same room. There are differences. It's nice to be in the same room, but, as you pointed out last, week.

2:30:16 - Paris Martineau
We've done this before. Are we not socializing right now?

2:30:18 - Speaker 7
Yeah, we're never in the same room ever. We are socializing right now.

2:30:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, yes, right.

2:30:24 - Leo Laporte
And same room ever look at us socializing right now, right yes, right, and I think that's one of the great gory enchant and that was socialization that's one of the great gifts of our modern technology is that you can be in new york, I can be in california, you can be in new jersey and we can hey, hey hey yo whatever uh, and we can uh socialize let's just see if I was awake.

I love new jersey, my family's from new jersey. Yeah, leonia, I told you that leonia, paris, that was good pick. Thank you, good pick, well done yo all right my picks the week, yeah one.

2:31:00 - Paris Martineau
I had a story that came out this week um that I just wanted to highlight. Me and my colleague, callie Huang, reported on what's been going on inside Character AI over the last year. And some kind of top line stuff has been before. Google basically paid $2.7 billion to acquihire most of Character AI. It had Google Play most of character ai it had google, play google nearly removed character from the google play store or it threatened to due to safety issues.

Yeah, they're the ones who are being sued by a mom, of course, by multiple parents now because of uh claims that their products are designed in a way that harms kids and promotes like sexual and violent behavior. Um, but a couple months later apple also uh reached out to character kind of threatening to pull the app and in response character had to update its age um range in the app store from 12 and up to 17 and up.

Um, this is also was happening at a time that character employees internally this is before the lawsuits even became public character employees had been basically expressing concerns that their product was damaging the mental health of young users, which is a problem because internally within character AI there's this sense that much of their users, like a significant portion of their users, are kids and extremely young adults. There was one detail in it that kind of struck me from our reporting, which is that I guess whenever you're using Character AI, if the chatbot gives a response you don't like, you can flag it as boring or rate the response poorly, um kind of internal reviews of what sort of stuff users were flagging as boring. Uh, this kind of raised the hackle of some character employees.

2:32:53 - Leo Laporte
Uh, specifically because some it was deviant sexual behavior they said basically won't do it and it's boring.

2:33:00 - Paris Martineau
I want some deviance yeah, they asked the bots to do some really messed up stuff and got very mad when they wouldn't, and it's I don't know quite I hate the filter, said a youthful sounding girl in an august video message submitted as part of an online petition against.

2:33:21 - Leo Laporte
But you know, I don't. I mean, isn't it better to do it with a uh, a phony AI than to try to find a human to do it?

2:33:34 - Paris Martineau
well, that's what another extremely young user said uh, another person. This was part of this huge changeorg position that's gotten like 200,000 signatures. I went through all the different things and part of them are video messages and in one, like a girl that looks like she's got to be like barely 13 says a lot of teenagers like to roleplay NSFW stuff. It would be better to do with an AI than a real person because that person, especially if it's online, online could be a pedo and I mean, I guess fair point.

2:34:04 - Leo Laporte
But character when it was founded was like we don't want to do romantic sexual role play, which is a problem because that's what a lot of their users come to character to do as usual, the problem is the humans right and uh we, this is, this is as we are, as god made us um, and maybe this is a safe uh playground for stuff that would otherwise be more dangerous well it has been, but the company has, over the last year to it, especially after these most recent lawsuits, really locked down the experience where, if you're a user that chooses to identify putting your correct uh date of birth and you're under 18, you can't do basically anything with any of these bots, much less can you even search or access most of the chat bots it's a difficult thing because you're not going to cure somebody of a desire to be in a violent relationship by not offering it to them.

On character ai. That's not going to solve the problem.

2:35:00 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it just means character ai or whoever owns it is not liable, but it is also interesting because character now, because, um, there are a number of lawsuits, one of which, uh, was filed by a florida mother who, um, her son, um, who I believe was 13, 14 year old at the time. Um, uh committed suicide after kind of becoming obsessed with this Daenerys Targaryen chat bot that it can, that had repeatedly kind of urged him to commit suicide. Um, and in character, response about the lawsuit. It claims first amendment protection because uh it should.

It's fine If people uh urge someone to commit suicide. I guess into the first amendment.

2:35:43 - Leo Laporte
That's not okay. That's. That is beyond the pale. If you're encouraging somebody, that's the risk. Right, and somebody said this in FlowConnect, said it in our Discord role-playing in cyberspace can eventually bleed out into the real world. That's the risk. On the other hand, if you're Dexter and you really want to commit serial murder, if you can do it in a game instead of in the real world, that's the question. Does it make it worse or better?

2:36:16 - Paris Martineau
Well, I think another important context that I found interesting while reporting it is character. Ai was developed and came into the world because noam shazir and daniel defratis uh, two longtime google engineers had basically created what would go on to become the gemini chatbot like long before chatbots were in vogue, tried to get google to release it, this early version of a thing called Mina. Google was like no, no, no, no. That seems like a safety and PR nightmare. So they left. Google started Character, ran into all of this crazy safety stuff, and then Google was like well, you guys have done really well and you made this, so we're going to pay $2.7 billion to get you back. And now Noam Shazier is one of the three people in charge of gemini. So I think it's important to look at sort of the safety issues that a company like this has had, even if they're small, because those guys are now leading one of the biggest ai initiatives in the world thank you, paris martineau have a happy birthday next week she'll be wearing a little birthday hat.

2:37:23 - Leo Laporte
I will, and eating cake, but not with us, her grandparents, her grandpas. But we will miss you next week, but you'll be back, I hope. I hope this is the beginning of the end. Okay, good Thank you so much.

2:37:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, I'm just going to slow fade, I'm going to Irish exit the podcast. Do not ghost us.

2:37:44 - Leo Laporte
You will write for the information. I think you know that I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

2:37:48 - Paris Martineau
I do, and let me give you the incredibly brief Gregorian chant that Gemini gave me to be used for a podcast ending.

2:37:57 - Leo Laporte
Is it in the?

2:37:58 - Paris Martineau
In this auditorium. That's it. It's end of the listening is what it translates to end of the listening I think that's a benediction we should have all the time.

2:38:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I think, benito, can we cart that so you can have it at the end of every show?

2:38:13 - Paris Martineau
gemini. Uh, you know, suggested incorporating a bell sound. It says a single soft bell chime after the phrase can create a sense of finality.

2:38:23 - Leo Laporte
So we'll just say at the end paris vobiscum, may paris go with you. Uh, all right, thank you, paris. Thank you, jeff jarvis. Uh, newly minted professor at suny, stony brook and montclair state college, formerly professor emeritus. I guess you're always professor emeritus of journalistic innovation. I guess you're always professor of journalistic innovation at the university of New York. Thank you both for being here. I'm going to leave you, as Jeff did with the mayor of Mary Mac farm.

2:38:59 - Paris Martineau
That was me, that was the mayor of Mary Mac farm, and she's beautiful she's a beautiful goat, and did you go visit her at merrimack? No, but I want to. Merrimack farm is in vermont. Anyone nearby should go visit what used to be the unofficial mayor, bonnie, but now she's been officially elected the mayor, and next week I'll bring you the dog.

2:39:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Mayor of New York. That's great.

2:39:26 - Leo Laporte
I love animal mayors. They never write bad laws. They never really do much of anything, which sometimes is the best thing a mayor could do.

2:39:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Simon, if you go to wait one more second, Just go to Instagram Upper West, Simon, and you will see the coronation for Simon as mayor of New York Dog mayor of New York.

2:39:48 - Leo Laporte
Wow, how did he?

2:39:50 - Jeff Jarvis
get to be dog mayor, because this is.

2:39:53 - Paris Martineau
A lot of political climate, he's had to do some dark deals.

2:39:56 - Jeff Jarvis
This woman is just great and she Sophie Verschmau. She's a writer and I love this dog Everybody loves this dog, what's? The count again. Go to Upper West Simon. The dog's name is Simon and lives on the Upper West Side. There he is. It is a wacky fix. Oh, is he a cutie?

2:40:15 - Leo Laporte
He is so cute, he's a cutie. Here he is the moment he officially became dog mayor and that's Sophie.

2:40:21 - Jeff Jarvis
There she's wonderful new york city. She's a great advocate of dog adoption. Oh, and here simon's gonna get a special mayor's hat. Simon's a get along dog simon's very patient.

2:40:35 - Leo Laporte
He goes. I don't know why I'm wearing this hat, but I guess so everyone's making so much noise?

2:40:40 - Jeff Jarvis
shake my paw look at the next picture, the portrait of simon. That's a good way to leave people and all this troubled time. How can you not just fall in love with those?

2:40:49 - Leo Laporte
thank you everybody. So nice to have you. This is why we might have ai, but we'll always need dogs and people and happy.

2:40:57 - Paris Martineau
805 episodes of uh this week in google, guys. 804 episodes we're on to 805 with Intelligent Machines.

2:41:05 - Leo Laporte
New name, same time, same bat channel and same wonderful host.

Same insanity. We look forward to seeing you then. We do this show Soon to Be Intelligent Machines, every Wednesday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. Watch us live on eight different platforms. There's Discord for our club members. You are a member of the club, right? Oh, even if you're not last chance to take the survey I forgot to mention this. Twittv slash survey really helps us out. We like to get to know you and it helps us make better stuff for you. Twittv slash survey. So you're on Discord if you're a member of the club. You got xcom, you got linkedin, you got facebook and you got kick. There you go. That's all eight, yay, uh.

If you don't want to watch he still has his memory, I do, I do. If you don't want to watch live, uh, you. You can, of course, watch after the fact, because it's a podcast. Twittv slash twig although starting next week, twittv slash I am. There's also a youtube channel dedicated to the show, or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. It's the same feed. So if you subscribe today, you'll get it next week and every week thereafter. Thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. Join the club. If you don today, you'll get it next week and every week thereafter. Thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. Join the club. If you don't remember twittv slash club, twit. I'm leo laporte for jeff jarvis and paris martineau. Happy birthday, paris. See you next week. Bye.