TWiG 771 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 Twink. This Week in Google, Kathy Gellis, our favorite attorney, is here. She joins Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. We will talk about the law, the TikTok ban, the future of AI and how one remote Amazon tribe responded to getting internet access through Starlink. It's all coming up next on this Week in Google Podcasts you love From people, you trust.

0:00:28 - Paris Martineau
This is Twig.

0:00:34 - Leo Laporte
This is Twig this Week in Google, episode 771. Recorded Wednesday, june 5th 2024. Sucked to LA. It's time for Twig this week in Google. Oh, we're going to have a fun show today. I can tell. Not the least of which reasons is Mr Jeff Jarvis, who was going to be sitting right next to me.

0:00:57 - Paris Martineau
Jeff is fun. What are you talking about?

0:00:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know, that was a very confused construction. I don't know what I actually just said. He is the former, soon to be former, but currently now.

0:01:09 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm the emeritus.

0:01:10 - Leo Laporte
The emeritus, once a Leonard Tao professor for journalistic innovation, always a Leonard Tao professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Craig Newmark Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York A little tired because he red-eyed back from California this morning.

0:01:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to be in Petaluma today and I was looking forward to it, but you know I'd have to take bridges to get back to the airport, so, no good, I came straight back from Sacramento. No bridges, no bridges.

0:01:41 - Leo Laporte
Paris Martineau is also here from the Information and Martineau.01 on the signal hi paris.

I was not supposed to be in petaluma, but yet I'm still here on the east coast I wish you were, but we don't have anything as hip as your little movie theaters that you have there in brooklyn and it's true, nothing close I'm. I'm so jealous, so jealous, also with us in studio. We're thrilled to have her Kathy Gellis, attorney at law cgcouncilcom, contributor at Tech Dirt and ready and willing and able at any time to bring a case before the United States Supreme Court.

0:02:23 - Cathy Gellis
I brief, but I'm also ready, willing and able to come to Petaluma.

0:02:28 - Leo Laporte
Thank you. Yes, yes, we're not nearly as close as the US Supreme Court, but we're much more convivial.

0:02:32 - Cathy Gellis
I have not forsaken you. I will come to Petaluma.

0:02:34 - Paris Martineau
Thank you, Kathy Wow.

0:02:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I think we should start the show with an oyez. Oyez, because Kathy's there, Oyez.

0:02:46 - Cathy Gellis
Now is it oyez or oyez? I think they say oyez. They do actually shout it at the Supreme Court oral arguments, but everybody's sort of sitting there, kind of abuzz. And I'm trying to replay my memory of what have I heard, but there's a crack of a gavel which is actually kind of loud and shocking. It's the equivalent of a hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.

0:03:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, o-y-e-z, which is French for.

0:03:05 - Cathy Gellis
Hear, I think.

0:03:06 - Leo Laporte
Listen. Yeah, oyez, oyez, oyez. In fact, if I play From the French to here yeah, this is the wonderful website, oyezorg, where you can actually listen to cases being argued in front of the Supreme Court. Read about cases by term. It's a really nice Supreme Court resource.

0:03:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Is the gavel a successor to the mace you'd pound on the floor?

0:03:30 - Cathy Gellis
This has probably been documented somewhere, but I don't know. But the etymology of the bar is basically the same for alcohol bars and no. Well, because you would go up to a thing that physically had a bar in front of it.

0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here, let me see. I want to play back some oral argument from a random thing. See if they say the OIA.

0:03:51 - Cathy Gellis
We'll hear an argument next in case 2351. I think you'd miss it. I think it's before.

0:03:58 - Jeff Jarvis
When the justices come in right.

0:04:00 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, there's a gavel crack and the clerk shouts, and because they tell you to rise. So by the time Roberts is speaking, the justices have filed in, sat down, then everyone else has sat down and then he starts talking. So this is. This is like almost a minute into it, but by the time you hear him on the recording, Wish we could wish we could hear that. And they don't let you have devices or anything. So there's no way of like.

0:04:30 - Leo Laporte
It's the clerk of the court, that's. That's saying it, right or no? A clerk of some form is doing it.

0:04:32 - Cathy Gellis
They don't have, like, a guy in uniform. Uh, I mean, there are people in uniform but not funny, fancy you no, it is. I mean no we're, and it doesn't look like england with that pomp and pageantry. It's somebody. So congress.

0:04:43 - Jeff Jarvis
If I may answer my question, Congress adopted two symbols of authority borrowed from the British. The House of Representatives adopted the mace and the Senate used the gavel to bring the body to order.

0:04:55 - Paris Martineau
On gavel facts from Wikipedia. The unique gavel of the United States Senate has an hourglass shape and no handle. In 1954, the gavel that had been in use since at least 1834 broke when richard nixon used it during a hated debate on nuclear energy. Despite the addition of silver plates, they were unable to obtain a piece of ivory large enough to replace the gavel, so they appealed to the indian embassy. Later that year, india's vp presented them with an ivory replacement, but because people were like what the heck illegal ivory trades, they replaced that with a white marble gavel, which isn't used today I've seen them.

0:05:33 - Leo Laporte
They don't have the handle, they just have a. They hold the thing and they go like that yeah, that may be even the traditional styling.

0:05:40 - Cathy Gellis
um, I won a gavel once in law school. A classmate and I won runner-up best brief for a moot court competition and our prize of which there was one was a gavel. And when we got back to the school the school never really asked like, did they give you a prize? Because apparently they have a trophy case and they didn't ask for the trophy to put in the case.

Oh, thank goodness you get to keep it so we kept it, but we've got a custodial agreement for it, because one gavel two people. I'm a Yankee fan. He's a Red Sox fan.

0:06:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's hysterical.

0:06:08 - Cathy Gellis
So we've negotiated based on the head-to-head matchups for the season, of who gets it. And then we negotiated this where? So nobody would monopolize it if there was a tie, like normally, we don't want to have to send it back and forth all the time. So if there's a tie, you keep it, but if there's too many ties then somebody's kind of hogged it. So we negotiated that there would be an automatic flip. But it turned out to be really bad one year because there was a flip but like the Yankees had won the World Series and I had to give the gavel back and it's like, well, that doesn't make sense. I clearly had the better team and the better bragging rights.

0:06:42 - Leo Laporte
So we negotiate an addendum so that won't happen anymore I have a gavel for the best briefs, but that was in uh in college and that's a fraternity. That's a fraternity okay no, actually I do have a gavel somewhere and I don't know why it has a. I remember I can remember it having a thing, a plaque on it yeah, you need it when I start doing things. You don't want to do my gavel order, order. All that's not what we're here to talk about, but that was a fascinating conversation.

0:07:08 - Jeff Jarvis
We're driving the fans completely nuts this week in gavels this week.

0:07:12 - Leo Laporte
In gavels they say oye, oye, oye, will all ye who have business before the United States Supreme Court come and listen, or something like that.

0:07:27 - Cathy Gellis
There, like that, there's a whole spiel, right, come hither. Come hither and be heard um. You know, there might be a spiel, but I don't think it's that long. I mean, it's kind of blocked out, because the hearings just become right somewhat traumatizing.

0:07:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you been there, though? Yeah, and the last one was that all persons having business before the honorable the supreme court of the united states are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the court is now sitting.

0:07:45 - Cathy Gellis
God save the united states and this honorable court oh, and then isn't that amazing and that is definitely out of the british jurisprudence and then, before robert starts talking about a case, um, the first thing they do is they do the bar admissions, where they go through this.

Um, he basically calls out, and or the clerk reads the emotion that so and so moves to have this person admitted to the bar and so and so verifies that they are of good character, etc. And um, and they go through that spiel and, uh, robert says something like it shall be so ordered or something like that. And so for each individual person scheduled to be sworn in that day, that happens. And something that lawyers do is if they want to get into a hearing that's going to be really tough to get into is if they haven't been sworn in before they try to arrange it. So they'll be sworn in that day because it gets them into the courtroom. And the other work around is be the motion person for somebody who's going to get sworn in that day and that will get you into the courtroom.

0:08:45 - Leo Laporte
Our uh, our engineer Patrick Delahanty, whose father was a um uh U S attorney for the district of Maine and then later a judge, has a gavel collection, it says. He says dad never used gavels by the way, red Sox fan, I think you can see that never used gavels in court, but he has this giant one which was given as an award. That's a big gavel.

0:09:07 - Paris Martineau
You could bean.

0:09:08 - Leo Laporte
Somebody with that sucker.

0:09:09 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what Stacy wanted to use on you, Leo.

0:09:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, we have a choice. I have a choice of devices I can use for the show. Give me the first, the wooden one, Just this. If necessary, I can use this. Louisville Slugger which, by the way, has a little inscription on it which reads Congratulations, leo, on 100 TwitNet casts 2007. So that's been around for a while. But if failing that, if I need to, I have this sword that I can use to cleave your head from its shoulders or to benight you. I get benight Kathy. Yes, this also has an inscription.

0:09:55 - Cathy Gellis
I am suddenly wondering why I came to Petaluma today it seems really dangerous.

0:10:00 - Paris Martineau
This is why.

0:10:01 - Cathy Gellis
Jeff left.

0:10:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm smart enough to not be there.

0:10:04 - Cathy Gellis
I mean it's a series of weaponry comes and is put on my right side.

0:10:08 - Leo Laporte
This was a gift from Eleventy, which does graphics and is an agency, I think.

0:10:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it actually?

0:10:14 - Leo Laporte
sharp. Well, it's got a little plastic thing on the tip. Should I test it? No, better not. And then this thing, I don't know, that's crazy. And then, of course, we have what we call jokingly what do you call it? Molinear, the hammer of the gods. Molinear, molinear, oh God, that thing is Mini. Yeah, that is Whoa Sorry, that is dangerous. Please take all of this paraphernalia away.

0:10:39 - Cathy Gellis
Please take the arsenal away, you're making Kathy nervous.

0:10:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, Burke, where are all your chainsaws?

0:10:47 - Cathy Gellis
Oh my gosh no.

0:10:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't ask.

0:10:50 - Leo Laporte
Don't ask no, I don't need the sling box. So we looked for the gavel. That's why all this paraphernalia emerged. We looked for the gavel, do?

0:10:57 - Paris Martineau
you just have a room of weaponry.

0:10:59 - Leo Laporte
I have all sorts of crap. Don't. Don't bring me the projector, I just I hope that we don't have to have Bring me the projector. I hope we don't have to have a Swedish death cleaning here, because it is going to be a nightmare.

0:11:14 - Cathy Gellis
As long as I get to choose mine.

0:11:16 - Leo Laporte
You know what, Kathy? Here I'm going to present this to you. You can take this with you on your way home. This was used I don't know how this is used to show, I think, in the classroom, I don't know to show slides.

0:11:32 - Cathy Gellis
Oh, the ungrounded plug is really spectacular.

0:11:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this thing is, this is an antique. I don't know why we have it.

0:11:39 - Paris Martineau
But we do. Liam is pushing the mic away from himself.

0:11:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh my gosh. Look at that, that's for slideshows.

0:11:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think we should do a thing where, like kind of like when you come back from CES, where you have all the stuff from the table, but it's just all your weaponry.

0:11:53 - Leo Laporte
The 20s, oh yeah, our weaponry, yeah.

0:11:55 - Cathy Gellis
Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements.

0:11:58 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I don't know. We should A projection machine. I'll be honest, you're probably closing the studio in a month, so I'm going to have to do something with all this stuff. So maybe we should have like a day where anybody can come and take anything they want.

0:12:11 - Paris Martineau
Leo, I'll take any weaponry you're willing to ship to Brooklyn.

0:12:14 - Leo Laporte
Do you want that sword? Yeah.

0:12:15 - Paris Martineau
I'd like a weapon or a projector or any other fun stuff. I was just going to say I don't have any weaponry.

0:12:22 - Leo Laporte
I think in my home, which is a problem. You should. You live in Brooklyn.

0:12:24 - Jeff Jarvis
You need weapons. Go to Petaluma and try to get back on the plane with that sword.

0:12:28 - Paris Martineau
With that sword. Yeah, I think it'll go really well. Coming from me, a woman has been detained by security for trying to bring a hammock on the plane once. What, really what? Yeah, there was like a wood component to it that I guess could bop someone on the head with it holy cow.

0:12:50 - Leo Laporte
So what happened? Did you check?

0:12:52 - Paris Martineau
it. I think they had. I had to give it to them. I couldn't take the hammock with me oh my god, what a loss they take mashed potatoes, which I also don't what yeah I think they confiscated my cream cheese once.

0:13:05 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah yeah, and apparently they've changed the rules, but they won't tell you where the rules are published. That anything viscous in any form, well, no, apparently it's not frozen.

0:13:16 - Paris Martineau
I don't know it. I know this because once I've tried to take I've multiple times tried to take locks cream cheese bagels on the plane uh, home for my parents. And every time they're like they inspect the salmon and they're like all right, we'll let this. And they get to the cream cheese, and they're like no. Last time someone told me they would have let it pass if it was frozen, which I don't understand.

0:13:37 - Leo Laporte
That seems like it'd be less it'd be more more of a weapon yeah

0:13:42 - Cathy Gellis
you can throw the brick of cream cheese yeah, I I don't think this is well-publicized, well-advertised or well-premised. I think they are sort of like well, if the liquids could explode, there's some gels that could explode, in which case you know your potatoes Cream cheese looks like C3 and could be. I'm not sure the people setting or enforcing the policy are. It's very ad hoc saying the policy are um security.

0:14:03 - Leo Laporte
You know, quite the brightest necessarily like drinking a music festival, a new way of making coffee I don't know.

0:14:11 - Jeff Jarvis
This was a cool story, what I saw. You put it up there.

0:14:14 - Leo Laporte
Australian scientists have developed a method of brewing coffee by blasting ground beans with sound waves. You can, and you can actually. Here they are the three scientists uh, coffee consultant craig heron, senior lecturer francisco trujillo, phd student nikonj uh, I'm going to mispronounce your name, nikonj nalia dahara drinking a fine cup of coffee made by this what looks like an everyday breville coffee maker. But notice, it's hooked up to some interesting devices. There's a transducer attached to it to send sound waves high-frequency sound waves into the coffee. The coffee is first infused in water for five seconds. Then, as the machine releases room-temperature water room temperature onto the coffee grinds, a transducer, a device connected to the portafilter, pushes sound waves through the basket and into the coffee grinds. He describes Trujillo describes it as an opera singer's voice making a glass vibrate so intensely that it breaks. The coffee grinds are vibrating, they don't break, but the fluctuations in pressure help the water extract more flavor from the inside of the coffee grounds and producing a fine cup of coffee.

The only reason I mentioned this I mentioned on sunday on twit and got a fantastic message from uh nmr don in our club twit. I was listening to twit, as I've done for years, when I could have been knocked over with a feather. You started talking about coffee made with ultrasound. I am the ultrasonic coffee man and I mispronounced his name. Well, my name is on the paper and I would like to thank you for the promotion Ignoble in our future, who knows? I don't quite think you understand the intensity Australians take their coffee with.

We are talking west side story level of conflict over who makes better coffee. Here's the funny thing. I don't drink coffee but it's okay, since I use analytical instruments in my lab to tell the actual coffee people how it's better than normal coffee. My main work at the university of new south wales and sydney is and get ready for this doing AI, protein, structural biology, alpha fold and all of the things that go along with it. I'm the guy yelling at the TV watching CSI shows saying it doesn't work that way, or when people talk about AI and structural biology saying it doesn't work that way. Micah got it about 95% right and I was really impressed how he integrated a very complicated platform. So, mr Don, if you are watching, if we get anything wrong about AI today, especially AI and biochemistry, please let us know.

0:16:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Also if I may the product the description of the Guardian story I'll quote. It's extraordinarily powerful, aromatic, acidic, rich and viscous, but unlike an espresso, it's not bitter or harsh. Yes, it's also not, as rojillo's latest paper says, a cold brew. Cold brew is made by steeping coffee, cold grounds and water for hours and tastes subtle, floral and lacking in both acidity and bitterness. The coffee equivalent of a night of poetry and incense. This is like drinking a music festival.

0:17:30 - Paris Martineau
Well, isn't that wonderful as a coffee snob I'll say properly made espresso shouldn't be bitter, but I think that sounds wonderful well, people tend to over extract it.

0:17:39 - Leo Laporte
As you know, coffee snob yes so I'm going gonna see if we can get uh mr don to provide us with uh example somehow of this uh I don't based in australia yeah, unfortunately it's based in can you fly?

0:17:55 - Paris Martineau
the coffee can you fly?

0:17:56 - Leo Laporte
here with your coffee.

0:17:57 - Benito Gonzalez
No, it's a liquid, you won't get a sword um, all right, enough, enough, let's move on.

0:18:04 - Leo Laporte
It was a fun story, I know, and I wanted to lead with that because I I did. He was a member of club twit, which is pretty fantastic.

0:18:12 - Cathy Gellis
Instead, we led with gavels and weaponry gavels weaponry and oye, oye, oye.

0:18:16 - Leo Laporte
But I was thinking that we should begin each show with an oye, oye, oye that all those just at the beginning, especially when kathy's here.

0:18:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, you should do it in honor of Kathy.

0:18:26 - Paris Martineau
I think that'll really help our problem of trying to make this show less inscrutable. You know, I think people will really get along with that.

0:18:34 - Leo Laporte
That's what this show needs More Latin, I think would be, good yes.

So let's talk about TikTok. The saga, the sad saga of TikTok. You remember that when Trump was president, he proposed banning TikTok Chinese something or other. Blah, blah, blah. The parent company of TikTok 15% was a major Republican donor, a never-Trumper. But you know, never say never. As we know, and I think the Donald thought you know, this guy might be able to give me some money. So all of a sudden he's come out in favor of TikTok and now Trump has a TikTok account, as does President Biden, who signed the bill banning TikTok.

Both of them are active on TikTok. Both of them, I think, see it as a important platform to be on and TikTok on. For its part and this is a story from Puck News, Tara Palmieri, writing the Trump TikTok flirtation TikTok realizes how important it is to get these American politicians to love it. So, in what some might say was a cynical ploy, tiktok actually lobbied the former president telling him since November, according to two TikTok officials, that there's been twice as much pro-Trump content as pro-Biden content on the platform 1.29 million positive Trump videos or images with 9.1 billion views, compared to less than half that for positive Biden posts. According to an internal TikTok analysis, videos tagged Trump 2024 have generated nearly half a million likes and six and a half billion views, compared with 50 million likes and 558 million views for Biden 2024. And they, I think, went to the Trump campaign and said look, your fans are here In fact.

Now, how do you feel about banning TikTok? Conservatives like Charlie Kirk, johnny McAtee, ben Shapiro, tucker Carlson all do really in fact. Uh, now, how do you feel about banning tiktok? Conservatives like charlie kirk, johnny mcatee, ben shapiro, tucker carlson all do really well, with multi-million uh people followings on tiktok. Uh, rfk juniors, tiktok has 1.2 million followers, he tweeted last month. Congress and the administration don't understand that tiktok is an entrepreneurial platform for thousands of American young people. They want to screw them over just so they can pretend to be tough on China. You know I don't often agree with RFK Jr.

0:21:19 - Cathy Gellis
No, but Stop. Clock has yeah.

0:21:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, twice a day. Yeah, so, and now Trump has joined TikTok tiktok with. There is a uh at.

0:21:29 - Paris Martineau
I will say the quote from uh politico describing. I'll just read how they described trump's first tiktok quote. The president is now on tiktok ufc ceo. Dana white said introducing trump in the video. It is my honor. Trump replied as american badass by kid rock played in the video. It is my honor. Trump replied as american badass by kid rock played in the background. It's my honor your honor.

0:21:51 - Leo Laporte
He says that a lot these days actually. Um well, now I'm not sure. I think we should be on tiktok no, no, it's full of right-wing nonsense.

0:22:03 - Paris Martineau
Also, I will say I just looked up the trump 2024 hashtag on tiktok and I mean the second most popular video that shows up is pranking my boss by putting a thank you for donating to trump flyer in on his desk or his mail, so I don't know.

0:22:18 - Leo Laporte
Positive, I think that part of it.

0:22:21 - Paris Martineau
It seems like this is savvy political maneuvering by a company that's trying to make sure that it continues to exist, no matter the political administration.

0:22:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

0:22:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I think we have a story last week how they volunteered to have their board the US board approved to have a military-related organization check its code, I mean all kinds of stuff and they just made another, I think, effort to bend over backwards to say don't get rid of us. Well, what do you want us to do? But they're being ignored.

0:22:56 - Cathy Gellis
I think that was. It was a new story about an old offer. I don't think the offer was contemporary.

0:23:01 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the US copy.

0:23:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they had offered that and been ignored. Been just said no, no, we're still gonna ban you. We don't, we don't care what you do.

0:23:10 - Cathy Gellis
In other words, I, I, I don't know if that was a good offer to make, but it's kind of it's moot at this point. Um, I don't think you want the answer to be yes, um, and I'm not sure the answer can be yes, but um, but anyway, they offered it and it was not. But I think the administration probably would have had a legal problem with saying yes to that, because all the jawboning stuff that everybody's really upset about that I don't know if you get around the jawboning problem by basically putting an entity in such a predicament where they have to say yes, please, you get to drive. Um, that is, that's about as close to jawboning as you could get, where they had no choice but to make that offer.

0:23:53 - Leo Laporte
Um, I don't think that's a particularly good constitutional one or a good policy, what's going to happen in the courts they have sued saying you can't, you know you can't shut us down. First amendment you've argued in favor of the right to read and the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its users.

0:24:09 - Cathy Gellis
Right. Well, you know, stand by a little bit longer, because we're still waiting for two big decisions out of the Supreme Court and I think that will paint the Internet regulation terrain significantly, because depending on what they do with these decisions depends on what leverage both plaintiffs and defendants will have. So there's a part of me that's like I think it's too soon to tell, because I could tell you something today and it may actually change literally tomorrow so what is the, what are, what are these decisions that are?

0:24:37 - Leo Laporte
we are still waiting for the net choice cases to have those are the, those, that's the texas and florida social media laws right basically those are standing for the those, that's, the texas and florida social media laws, right?

0:24:45 - Cathy Gellis
basically those are standing for the proposition that platforms themselves have their own first amendment rights to decide to exercise their own editorial discretion, even though they are also um moderating other people's expression that's, that's net choice's position.

0:24:59 - Leo Laporte
Of course attorney general paxton for texas is the one who says otherwise right.

0:25:05 - Cathy Gellis
He says otherwise, the Fifth Circuit says otherwise and also the state of Florida is saying otherwise. But the 11th Circuit mostly did not put up with Florida's argument. So the platforms are in a better position coming out of Florida. They're in a terrible position coming out of Texas. But Texas is where the First and the Fifth Circuit is where the First Amendment goes to die.

0:25:28 - Leo Laporte
Doesn't everything up in the air as soon as you get in front of the supreme court, like they seem to have their own agenda.

0:25:31 - Cathy Gellis
They do, but the one thing they have not been working nearly as badly as everything else and they've actually been doing a reasonably even decent job.

Um, ruling, consistently with past doctrine, is in the first amendment department.

So there's one other pending case, which is the murty versus missouri, which was the allegations of jawboning, that when the biden administration was talking to platforms about, uh, cyber security issues, um, immunology issues, vaccinations, things like that, that, that was somehow, um, that caused censor, because that then flowed through the platforms and led to certain speech and speakers getting kicked off the platform that they thought that was illegal censorship via an intermediary, and so that we're still waiting for the for the Supreme Court to rule. But they just ruled in a different case called NRA versus Volo, where the I don't remember the name of her office, but she was like the head of the Department of Insurance for New York State and the NRA needs to be able to engage with insurance providers I forget entirely why. I think because they sell something or something like that, but they have these business relationships and in order to stick it to the NRA, because she does not like what they have to say, she went and pressured all the insurance companies they wanted to do business with and said nice business you've got.

If you do business with the nra, I'm going to make sure that we enforce the crap out of you.

0:26:55 - Leo Laporte
And this chilled the insurance companies um so this was right after the florida high school.

0:27:01 - Cathy Gellis
It was right, I mean, I'm not saying that her and actually the court I know where her heart was, but she had no right as a government official to tell people the thing that came out of that decision is she has the right to persuade, but she doesn't have the right to coerce. Now, somewhat an open question of she crossed over the line can you tell the difference?

but here the court decided you definitely crossed the line. And, by the way, the what we've already articulated in an older case called bantam books is no like, you're allowed to enforce, you're allowed to persuade, but there's a certain point where it comes together and it's like no, you can't pressure intermediaries in order to achieve a sensorial result you would not be able to do yourself and that's what she tried to do.

0:27:42 - Leo Laporte
A unanimous ruling, uh, the decision written by sonia sotomayor, justice sotomayor uh said that she'd gone too far. This maria volo, the head of the new york department of financial services uh, she'd gone too far crossed the line into coercion. However, they did say that when the case returns to the court of appeals, the lower court could consider whether volo is entitled to qualified immunity.

0:28:14 - Cathy Gellis
Well, that had been brought up earlier and I think they found that she was. And Sotomayor's language is basically like no, no, you lost on the First Amendment ground and this is a ripe issue that could be rethought. But it's not despotic. They didn't, they didn't endorse it, they just said that the issue is not dead what does this have to do with tiktok?

0:28:29 - Leo Laporte
how does this, how do these seemingly unrelated decisions net choice and this latest nra decision affect the tiktok?

0:28:37 - Cathy Gellis
all these things have to do with some core first amendment doctrine, um, and what the basic how. When the first amendment says congress shall make no law, what is the scope of that protection and how does it apply? And these are sort of some foundational pillars that you'll then take and apply to something like the TikTok decision. What rights does TikTok have itself as a speaker? What rights does TikTok have as a platform? What can the government do to shape how it conducts its business? What can the government not do to affect how it does its business?

And all of these things that these cases that we're talking about at the Supreme Court are all the Supreme Court considering these building blocks and bringing them up into internet time and we get to find out if these doctrines survive, and do they survive as applied to the Internet? And will the Supreme Court give us some hints as to how so we're we are? The Volo decision is a good one from a First Amendment doctrinal standpoint and if you've got something that's upholding First Amendment protections, that's going to help TikTok. The net ruling in favor of net choice will help TikTok and ruling in favor of the Biden administration, ironically, will help TikTok.

0:29:49 - Jeff Jarvis
They haven't yet ruled on the NetChoice. No, we're waiting for NetChoice, kathy, can I ask you? So, once you get those two decisions out you said to be prepared for something Are you going to then start filing front of the court documents in the TikTok case?

0:30:07 - Cathy Gellis
court documents in the in the tiktok case. Um, I mean, whether I do sort of depends on the, just the logistics of. Do I hear about the case and can I produce something in time and do I have a client with which we can bring something to the table? That would be interesting.

0:30:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm certainly interested, but I think does the copia institute have a position on on this?

0:30:21 - Cathy Gellis
I don't know if it that's the tech dirt's. Uh yeah, I am you right for we've not had a formal discussion, but I think the editorial evidence is that we think the tiktok um ban is bad sometimes mike and I will disagree a little bit, not really about the principle, but sometimes the logistics of. I'll see arguments he won't see. He'll see arguments that I don't see. But we generally overlap.

0:30:46 - Leo Laporte
That's why it's a good collegium.

0:30:48 - Cathy Gellis
We overlap to a striking extent more than I don't necessarily overlap with everybody else Because we'll see the First Amendment issues where other people like the policy result and may gloss over them a little bit more and we will want to call it out, even if calling it out means that we're going to get policy that we don't like. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to cheer too hard for the NRA, but I think it was absolutely right that they won in this case because it was a more important principle at stake.

0:31:18 - Leo Laporte
So I want to take a little break. When we come back, one more fascinating story about the power of tiktok. Now and I should at I should have said this at the beginning I'll have to give a disclaimer. My son, who is quite a successful chef, went from zero to everything on tiktok because of tiktok, with more than two million followers selling his cookbook. He he did able was able to move about half that audience to Instagram. But I'm in favor of TikTok if for no other reason than it turned my son into a celebrity chef so I could see the power of TikTok. So I'll disclaim that I have a little bit of a dog in this hunt. I would love TikTok to continue for that reason alone, but it may also be that there are other reasons that it's not good for national security. We'll talk about that and an amazing, another amazing tiktok success story in just a little bit.

Kathy gallus is here. She is, as you probably gathered, an attorney. She has argued in front of the supreme court. Uh has written many a policy paper and a meekest brief for the supreme court for the copia institute, which is the arm of Tector. She also writes at Tector and is at CGCounselcom Also. Jeff Jarvis. Leo Laporte has absolutely no attorney information or standing at all, is an ignorant fool when it comes to the law, and then Paris Martineau, who is brilliant in everything.

0:32:44 - Paris Martineau
So we've got a good round yeah, I tried to be an attorney, but they said I'd be too powerful you'd win every court, every case.

0:32:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep, I was going to go to law school, but then I thought I can't say yes, your honor, all the time. That won't work.

0:33:00 - Paris Martineau
I was going to go to law school but then the journalism thing worked out.

0:33:03 - Jeff Jarvis
But I've always got time here, there's always be another layoff.

0:33:04 - Paris Martineau
I was going to be a law school but then the journalism thing worked out, but I've always got time. There's always going to be another layoff. I was going to be a journalist, but I ended up in law school.

0:33:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so we got a failed journalist and two failed lawyers.

0:33:12 - Cathy Gellis
Wait a minute.

0:33:13 - Paris Martineau
I'm not sure that's the bottom flyer. Yeah, no, I think you're doing journalism.

0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
I just want to say I never wanted to be a lawyer or a journalist wanted to be a lawyer or a journalist I studied chinese, so there.

0:33:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, well, you're perfect for the tiktok discussion. Yeah, exactly I have.

0:33:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're a spy we knew it.

0:33:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I have standing uh activate. What were you going to do with that, leo?

0:33:36 - Leo Laporte
I am here to talk about tiktok. Um, actually was the uh the anniversary of the tiananmen massacre just a couple of days ago, and uh let's talk about it, because we're allowed to talk about it.

0:33:51 - Paris Martineau
What a, what a transition.

0:33:53 - Leo Laporte
I know well from doing a little bit to the anniversary thing and they cut him right off in china, of course. I saw a uh I think it was on instagram of a uh a of a Hong Kong police arresting a guy who was merely standing in a white shirt and with his hand drawing the date of Tiananmen. That was all it took, and they arrested him in Hong Kong. It is very much a sore subject still. How many years has it been? 20? It's 89, wasn't it? So it's more than that 25 years, yeah.

0:34:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah To those who say that the Chinese have a good model for the internet. They should follow their model for the internet. Pay attention people.

0:34:31 - Leo Laporte
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0:37:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I was interested in this personally because data brokers are awful. I go to the link in the ad and there is a testimonial from Leo Laporte. Well, what a surprise. Data brokers are the cockroaches of the internet. They are. You can't kill them.

0:37:27 - Leo Laporte
Yes, are the cockroaches of the internet? They are. You can't kill them Until you know. God willing, you won't need to delete me. Someday. Congress will pass a law when Protecting your. Yeah, right, exactly.

0:37:37 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, this is what they should be doing instead of the TikTok ban.

0:37:41 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that is exactly right. And that's my whole problem, and I hate to say it. I agree with RFK. This is because it's a Chinese company.

0:37:50 - Paris Martineau
Someone's going to quote you out of context.

0:37:52 - Leo Laporte
Somebody other than him has said reasonable things about this.

0:37:56 - Cathy Gellis
I have said that I agree with myself. He's quoting you on one of his good days.

0:38:00 - Leo Laporte
It is absolutely theater instead of real privacy action. Because they don't and it's my opinion, they don't want to take real privacy action because every time they threaten this law and, by the way, Marsha Blackburn has a, has a bill, she's, she's. She's, by the way, vetoed, thwarted many a bill in her committee, but in this case she's got a bill, but but, but I think it's. Is that her name, Marsha From Washington state? Yeah, oh. Cantwell. Cantwell Maria. Cantwell, marsha Blackburn. I'm sorry, that's a big difference.

0:38:31 - Cathy Gellis
Maria.

0:38:32 - Leo Laporte
Cantwell, who, by the way, came from the tech industry. She was at Real Audio, so she knows a little bit about stealing personal information. So they had a horrible privacy breach back in the day. Anyway, I'm sorry. Yes, maria Cantwell has finally proposed something, but I think every time they come up with something, our NSA and FBI and CIA and other law enforcement intelligence agencies come to her and whisper hey, you know, we use that data. It would be really unfortunate if we couldn't have access to it anymore. This is a valuable resource for us. They do the work, we don't have to do.

0:39:11 - Cathy Gellis
Well, then you get Senator Wyden from Oregon.

0:39:14 - Leo Laporte
Ron Wyden's right on.

0:39:15 - Cathy Gellis
He's like I'm not having it.

0:39:17 - Leo Laporte
But he can't do it alone.

0:39:19 - Cathy Gellis
But Cantwell has, I think, vetoed decent bills. Now she's proposed one which I haven't studied the details of it. I think this is a bill, I think it's the what ARPA or something like that, and I think some acronym. I think Mike Masnick likes it, or thinks it's at least on the right path.

0:39:37 - Leo Laporte
I think it's got a couple of things, but and the reason I think she's promoting it is it supersedes all state bills.

0:39:43 - Cathy Gellis
But that's actually the bit that I like. That's not my problem with it, Because one of the problems we have right now is it's not to say that there's not a policy problem with privacy, but we have an interstate economy that the internet is, and it goes between jurisdictions and if every jurisdiction can have its own rules of the road, it is very difficult to do business.

0:40:04 - Leo Laporte
This is why we have Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, because of course, you have a problem when every state, if congress, fails to do it. I think it's appropriate for california, illinois, maine, to do it in there, in the absence of effective federal legislation. Now, if her legislation is effective and overrides our bills, fine, but my suspicion is that she's doing this in order to get rid of those laws and will provide ample loopholes for for continued privacy I don't know.

0:40:35 - Cathy Gellis
I think it's a tougher policy, not than than the advocates are necessarily saying it is because there are there are, there are intentions, but and you could be right, she well, I don't think you you're right in this privacy rights act if, yes, you're right that somebody could produce a watered-down bill to get rid of something substantive and because it's coming out of congress, it's going to wipe out anything good.

But I think you we've got a problem right now. I think it's it's a building problem because every state is doing stuff and they're not doing it in coordination with each other and not to advocate for this. But one other possibility is one of the problems we have is all the states are doing things differently. There are certain concepts of like model laws where sort of some very smart legal thinkers will come together and sort of propose what an ideal model law would look like in a certain policy context and then that gets promulgated and then states end up adopting it and if they adopt it consistently with the model law, you each, you have each jurisdiction talking about it. But at least you have some more uniformity and it makes it a lot easier for businesses to cope because they're not dealing with something different.

0:41:40 - Leo Laporte
And I'm sympathetic. I understand that, yeah, uh, I just hope that it doesn't get watered down and then abrogate all the state laws.

0:41:48 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I'm not happy about the California one. I've been extremely critical about it, not just in terms of some of the provisions in it, but we can't fix it. These things came in via the later one came in via a ballot proposition, and ballot propositions Like, if they're bad policy, somebody's got to have to spend the millions of dollars to get the signatures and put it back on a ballot and advertise to get people to vote it down. Bad policy goes on the books via this mechanism and you can't get rid of it, even if you need to, even if it's not good policy. Whereas the CPRA, its predecessor, was going to come in by ballot, which then put a gun to the legislature's head. So they came up with OK, fine, what will it take for you to drop your ballot proposition? They came up with something which I think had issues. But okay, they came up with something just to get, because at least the thing when it goes on the books from the legislature, they can fix it. So they did that.

And then the guy came out with another ballot proposition anyway which overruled it, and now we're stuck with that ballot proposition too, and this is no way to run a railroad, so like, even if it came out with a perfect bill. This is not a good way to legislate because it takes away you. You legislation should be able to reflect a nuanced policy approach and you can't do that with by these mechanisms to do it. So, yeah, I'd have gladly have congress dump that, even if congress watered down something good, because I think we kind of need to start over. That's bad to have on the books in this way.

0:43:11 - Leo Laporte
Go ahead. Well, I was just going to say I would love for you and Mike to really do a deep dive on this and tell us is this a good bill or not, and I'll get right behind it if it is.

0:43:25 - Cathy Gellis
He's written one, but I I don't. I haven't studied, I don't know if I share his opinion, but he's, I think he's put out a tech dirt post and he believes it's a good.

It's a good bill or at least let me frame it as on the right track. I think there's things he thought had enough promise that did and enough things that didn't alarm him too terribly. But um, but he's usually very specific in his write-ups about what he likes and what he doesn't like. But he was he. I don't think his attitude is rule it. My reflex is this is probably going to be terrible. His reflex, having actually read it, was maybe not, maybe this is not so awful or we have to fix it, but this is a starting point that might be usable uh, I'm not encouraged by the headline of his article.

0:44:04 - Leo Laporte
Any privacy law is going to require some compromise, but I think, yeah, I'll read this and I missed this something I should read it too.

0:44:15 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, the bill is massive.

0:44:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Kathy, I says go ahead. I just want to second kathy's spirit, what she says. So I I was just in sacramento um the, the chamber of commerce very important.

0:44:26 - Leo Laporte
You were arguing against this terrible bill, uh, about california journalism preservation, journalism preservation act.

0:44:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes and so as as I've never. So I've never done this stuff. I've never done policy as a journalist. Of course I wasn't supposed to have opinions, but of course I do because I'm me. Um, and testifying before the senate was the first experience for me in washington. And then the Chamber of Commerce brought me out to talk to legislators, legislative aides, about this bill and I wrote a 41-page paper investigating the weaknesses in it, the history of copyright, the history of consolidation of news, and proposing a bunch of alternative views because it's a link tax, it's dangerous to the internet. Alternative views because it's a it's a link tax, it's dangerous to the internet. It's it will support bad media. It supports hedge funds. I really don't like it.

So, um, they were supposed to set up appointments, appointments for me. I got one appointment with one very young aide and I thought that was it. So then they, they put me together with an old time, wonderful old time lobbyist and just to go door to door around the judiciary committee where the bill's going to be, and just go walk on the door and say, uh, I have a paper here and I'm a journalism professor about about uh 886. Um, can I talk to somebody? And the person who's handling that for the legislator comes out. We spend 15 minutes and I get to talk about where spiel is and then and we go out to sit in the lobby, because that's what lobbyists do, oh wow, that's great, right, wow.

And next and next and next and next. And I talked to the counsel for the Judiciary Committee who was really up on this and very smart about it. I went to the assembly person who wrote the bill Buffy Wicks and knocked on the door and I'd already written this paper. It was very critical legislation. So I want to talk to somebody who's about. The guy who answered the door said well, I'm the one who's working on that, I said, well, I've written about this. Yeah, I heard that's not a good start.

That was all right. We had a great conversation, we opened the door of communication. So my point is and I'm seeing this right now in New York New York already passed really stupid legislation that gives tax credits for employed, not just journalists but anyone employed by a news company, but only print and broadcast, not digital, not not-for-profit Incredibly stupid. It's already passed, insane. And if we'd known about this, if we'd had the opportunity the time, a bunch of us could have gone to Albany and said please, no, and here are some alternatives. And to be constructive, and that's the way democracy is supposed to work. My only point here is that, as much as I went into this kind of dreading the experience, I found it fascinating that these doors are open and you can go in and you can have a conversation with people. Whether it will have any impact or not, I have no idea.

0:47:04 - Leo Laporte
Even if you're not a constituent, which is interesting. They want the information, which is great.

0:47:10 - Paris Martineau
It's wild to me that there's just someone sitting around in all these offices that's just available for a man to wander in and give his opinion. Those are staffers right.

0:47:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I feel for them, because every time the door opens they've got to think okay, who is it?

0:47:21 - Paris Martineau
now. That's my nightmare.

0:47:28 - Leo Laporte
I'd never be able to get anything done if people were just coming in to talk to me physically. There are a number of great scenes in the West Wing that are exactly that, with staffers for President Bartlett.

0:47:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.

0:47:35 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it's your turn. So let me tell you what the EFF says about the American Privacy Rights Act. Because they don't like it. Mike says look, it may be the best thing we're going to get. We're going to have to make some compromises. But the EFS says and I think this is a problem it's concerned that a new federal bill would freeze consumer data privacy protections in place, not only by preempting existing state laws, but by preventing states from creating stronger protections in the future. How would that?

0:48:08 - Jeff Jarvis
How would that be?

0:48:10 - Leo Laporte
It's a provision. They say federal law should be the floor on which states can build, and I think we'd all agree.

0:48:15 - Cathy Gellis
I have to disagree very strongly with the EFF here and I've disagreed with them on their privacy legislation advocacy in general Not to say that there's no policy need for something but they came out supporting the first one, the cppa, and I thought that was nuts. I mean, eff has experience from the copyright standpoint of what happens when you get the wrong legislation in your policy area. It creates a ton of needless overhead churn and individual innovators, the smaller people like, get just obliterated by it. And it should know better that if it's going to correct innovation, it needs to make sure that it is not bad policy doing it, because bad policy, even when there's a policy value that's good baked into it, is no good. It ends up being really chilling and destructive.

And I think they were wrong to take sides on the specific bills that have come out. And I think it's the wrong attitude to say that all these states are individually going to be able to do better because they're doing worse and they're doing damage. And I think EFF is not recognizing the reason to have federal without adequate consideration or via the ballot measures, or via ballot measures plus blackmail, and this is you're not producing good policy and I think the point of the federal preemption is if we're going to have one, if we're going to have a screwed up legislative forum, let's just have one.

Right now we've got 50 plus. That's a problem.

0:49:51 - Leo Laporte
Amen, counselor, amen amen.

0:49:51 - Jeff Jarvis
there's a lot of preemption go ahead is easier just for companies to deal with and citizens to deal with, because you know what one law is. Uh, in a, in a national internet and an international internet, it's really really hard to deal with a limited, unlimited number of laws europe is uh, europe can't understand us.

0:50:08 - Cathy Gellis
They consider the United States of America one country and they have no concept of how they're going to manage to do business with 50 states where they don't even have. You know, they may have not heard of Missouri, or what are they going to do in Vermont? They really want, like, could you please just whatever you want. Just tell us what the one thing is that you want us. Tell us what the one thing is that you want us to do.

And the only reason europe is not completely freaked out in the privacy space is because they're at least used to the gdpr. But even california, cpa and cpra are different from the gdpr, partly because they have to be, because we've got first amendment protections and they're struggling to cope. And also, if you have all these 50 states, you're also not you're struggling to cope. And also, if you have all these 50 states, you're also not you're going to disenfranchise some of the states too, because you're going to have, like, california will be able to set the rules of the road, because it's a big state that companies want to be able to do business with because they can't afford to turn off. But they could probably turn off, be able to afford to turn off Vermont if they can't afford to do business based on that legislation.

0:51:07 - Leo Laporte
Eff compares it to hippa which is a federal law that establishes a baseline of privacy and health, but many states have stronger protections, even than hippa. They they go on to enhance hippa.

0:51:19 - Cathy Gellis
Uh, now, maybe that's different because those are, those are innately local your doctor is innately local yeah, yeah internet is not innately local yeah, and HIPAA isn't even really a privacy law like the P's in HIPAA are in privacy.

0:51:30 - Jeff Jarvis
They're portability portability what are?

0:51:32 - Leo Laporte
they all right health information portability, accountability act well with CJPA, the journalism one too.

0:51:38 - Jeff Jarvis
One thing I point out in my paper is that is that copyright law specifically says that it preempts right, and thus these attempts to come up with strong to to expand copyright for the sake of newspaper publishers um violate copyright law and and and we'll end up, I think, in court and losing yeah and uh.

0:51:57 - Cathy Gellis
To be clear, like the copyright office did that big study of should we do a link tax scheme and ultimately, and people file comments. I filed comments.

I think I talked to everybody here, about the comments that I had done and the copyright office looked at it and said like, yeah, I don't think that's the job for copyright law. That's not something consistent with what we've historically done. It would create a new monopoly right and you know there'd be dragons here. So even they said you know, we like to kind of have stuff to do, but we don't really need that on our to do list and and they passed on it, which is kind of why the states are trying to pick up on it. But again, like the impact of doing that.

0:52:47 - Jeff Jarvis
if California has a link tax, then they're setting national policy, because people will end up adjusting to what's going on in California. Because California is so hard to say no to, because it's so gigantic, all right, we would like privacy legislation in this country we would.

0:52:56 - Leo Laporte
What I don't want is privacy legislation that rolls back stronger state privacy legislation.

0:53:00 - Cathy Gellis
There should be models for that discussion, but if we had that then we wouldn't be kicking TikTok out on the basis of privacy, right, if any of this stuff was effective we wouldn't be kicking TikTok out on the basis of privacy, right, if any of this stuff was effective, we wouldn't be having this problem and part of yeah, so California was a pioneer in attempting to confront the policy problem. Fine, let's applaud California, but I think that's really where the extent of the compliments go, because the policy itself is very flawed, which has a number of collateral consequences to it that aren't good, and they're not good in terms of they cause harm, and they might also be not good because they also don't solve the problem as perfectly as we need it to be solved anyway. Like, we're on our way, but I don't think we've decided who's driving yet. So this is part of our problem.

0:53:47 - Leo Laporte
Here's what EFF writes ADPPA's preemption doesn't only steamroll state data privacy statutes such as California's Consumer Privacy Rights Act. It also apparently rolls back protections in a number of other areas, even rights to privacy, that states have seen fit to enshrine in their state constitutions to enshrine in their state constitutions. Based on the text of the current bill. Endangered state privacy rules include those for biometric information, genetic data, broadband privacy and data brokers. The preemption clause of the bill also means there can be no forward progress at the state level on many key consumer issues. I think that has to be solved. I really do.

0:54:25 - Cathy Gellis
I think a lot of what they're saying is that's the benefit, that's not the problem.

0:54:29 - Leo Laporte
It's the benefit from private industry's point of view, because now we don't have a patchwork of laws. It's not a benefit from the individual's point of view, because my stronger protections in California or Illinois are being abrogated by weaker federal protections and we cannot enhance them. So that to me is not a net gain for the individual. Sure, great for the companies but not a great individual.

0:54:54 - Cathy Gellis
For the individuals I think we also have to think about. It's not just the companies as big, well-funded, large things that can hire enough lawyers to deal with whatever. There are some thresholds where these things kick in, but those thresholds are very inapt and they end up catching a lot of smaller innovation and a lot of smaller entities and a lot of much more reasonable. I just kind of wanted to like build a website in my backyard type thing where all of a sudden, yeah, your good idea that you wanted to go build the communication you wanted to go put forth you're chilled from it because you're not going to be able to comply with these things either and you're going to potentially be subject to 50 states trying to govern what you're doing in your garage while you're still small.

One other thing I want to throw in is I was complaining about legislation via ballot measures and I have an old TechDirt post called what Soda Taxes and Lead Paint have to Do with Internet Regulation and that's one where I was kicking around um the issues with the ballot measures, where once one gets on the books, you can't fix it unless you have another ballot measure, and those those take blank checks to be able to yeah, this is a problem unique to california and some other states.

0:56:00 - Leo Laporte
It's not generally a problem, but here in california it's a massive problem and that's why the lead paint problem because of prop 65 13. Yeah, yeah, I think the downfall of california came from jarvis can, yeah, jarvis, no relation, it's the problem is that it's, in a nutshell, very easy to get these ballots on the uh on the books. They're often misleadingly written, so the voters aren't really necessarily expressing a real opinion.

0:56:23 - Cathy Gellis
They're saying, well, that makes sense to me, and then it's very difficult to get them off the books I just don't like that, particularly when they're statutory, where it's not like oh well, the people decided to propose a law and get in on the books. If that was all, it was fine. But they're written in a way where the the republican form of our representation, which in theory has more time to study things and think about policy whether they they do or not is an open question. But they could, they can't. Because they can't touch this policy, we're stuck with it. It's there unless the people directly change their minds. But the only way they're doing that is via another ballot measure, and those are massively expensive.

0:57:00 - Leo Laporte
California is structured in a very weird way.

0:57:02 - Cathy Gellis
We have a very weak governor.

0:57:03 - Leo Laporte
We have a very weak legislature that's undermined by these ballot propositions. It feels democratic. It's actually brought me to a discussion that I've been very interested in having but reluctant to have. This is the only show I would even dare have it on, which is is true democracy failing us, especially in an era of social media and very powerful tools to persuade people and very powerful tools to persuade people. It feels as if, yeah, we're supposed to be a Republican. I guess we have an electoral college and we have a representative democracy, but wherever the people get to vote, it seems like we're at grave risk sometimes. Now, I'm not advocating for an alternative.

0:57:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know if there is no alternative but a strongman rule, I guess.

0:57:48 - Leo Laporte
No, it's how it's been manipulated, so that's my problem exactly so, but I mean, I I agree.

0:57:53 - Paris Martineau
Obviously the manipulation is a concern, but there's also the point of in a world in which the internet or something didn't exist, in which people didn't have access to all this information all the time, we would have a populace that is much less informed and is making much worse decisions or much more simplistic and easily influenceable decisions. I don't think that it's like our current technological system that is failing democracy. I think that more it's the setup of our current democracy that might be resulting in some of the issues.

0:58:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe we need to beat the drum for education, voter education. You're right. I think that part of the problem is an electorate that isn't paying attention, that is disengaged, is easily swayed. If we can turn that around and make the Democratic voter a better informed voter, I'd be all in favor of it, although history doesn't do us any favors we had problems either way, when we had just a couple of gatekeepers.

0:58:55 - Cathy Gellis
We, you know there were some benefits to that. Like it's sort of interesting how the entire country could pay attention to the same things at the same time. Like walter cronkite could educate and inform pretty effectively, but it's not that way.

0:59:06 - Leo Laporte
And now we're very splintered. Yeah.

0:59:08 - Cathy Gellis
But on the other hand, we had gatekeepers and that's all you could get through.

0:59:12 - Leo Laporte
That gives Walter a lot more power. Unelected power, right, Right.

0:59:17 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, he was a product of evolution. Then we continued to evolve. Now some of the things is I think game theory is really important to any of these systems we're thinking about, because anytime you set up a system, there's power in the system and you have to figure out if the power is going to aggregate in some places where perhaps that's not good, and I think we're looking at systems where a lot of power has aggregated in places that are unhealthy. But and I think that's true whether we're talking our media environment, I think it's whether we're talking about our democratic institutions. But one of the courses I took in law school which I think everybody should take, I think it should be in every law school, I think it should be in every school was constitutional theory, because how you set up your democracy, it's not one rule to do it. Like the US Constitution I'm a big fan of, but it's got a couple of like yeah, they could have done a little bit better here, but more, they're very specific. In some spaces they're not specific at all, and others you have language that does it scale to modern uses. Um, there's no guidance within the document to know. Um, I don't want to throw it out.

I think there's a lot of mechanisms that are really good, but is also one that may be more appropriate for certain types of bodies that you're governing than other types. What do you do when you have very similar populations? What do you do when you have very different populations that are competing? And it's all game theory? How do you set this up so that the power is shared in reasonable ways and doesn't accidentally, you know, clump up in certain spots where all of a sudden, you get inequities? These problems are solvable, but I'm not entirely sure we're attuned to solving them, and I think we get so depressed by the externalities that are bad that we just throw up our hands, think, well, if what we have is bad, we should get rid of it and start over. But that's not a great solution either.

1:00:59 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, this is your bailiwick. I mean, this is what you talk about all the time, right?

1:01:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I mean, leoo, I just put a story in the rundown because I think you're gonna, you're gonna gulp when you see it, because there's a far right. Legislators in washington state are saying that are coming right out and saying they're against democracy. By the way, one history lesson that I had, I didn't realize that the nazis I thought that they were arguing in favor of their kind of democracy. No, they were against democracy. They called democracy a bad.

1:01:30 - Leo Laporte
They never had a majority rule. They were always a plurality.

1:01:34 - Jeff Jarvis
So these legislators in Washington said, and I quote we do not want to be a democracy. They say that they should have direct. The Democratic Party platform calls for direct election of the president. They are saying that's wrong because they want, of course, the Electoral College, because that supports certain states. They don't want popular election of senators. So it's an unfortunate way this is going. I think the question is how do we prevent it from being manipulated?

1:02:04 - Leo Laporte
in malign ways.

1:02:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, we've survived. That's not the fault of the populace, it's the fault of, I think. Look what's happening to media right now. Look what's just taken over the Washington Post. Look what's taken over CNN.

1:02:17 - Leo Laporte
What's going on there? They have a British editor who's going to take over after November 5th.

1:02:22 - Paris Martineau
And turn the newsroom into three separate newsrooms, one of them to pander to people who don't read the newsroom into three separate newsrooms, one of them to pander to people who don't read the news.

1:02:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Will lewis, who I know from the telegraph and from he's? He's um, uh implicated in uh cleaning up after news corp uh phone hacking. Um, he's now the president of the washington post. He's bringing in somebody from the telegraph, which is an execrable newspaper right now. It used to be okay for a right-wing newspaper. It's now absolutely awful. Will be the next editor? A Wall Street Journal editor who's praised, but he's Wall Street Journal. Murdoch is going to do it. That goes to the right wing. Npr is scared. New York Times PitchBot today had a great compilation of all this stuff. Uh, hold on, it's right here. Twitter is owned by a fascist. The publisher of the new york times is opening anti-biden. Cnn is doing trump town halls and the washington post and wall street journal are run by murdoch cronies. Add in the fact that uh daily beast just got taken over by a new york post editor. Yep, um, you know this is so. Media, the supreme court, the congress, the media as institutions have been, uh have had the rugs pull off underneath them but this is why I already.

I read about this in in good word parenthesis, where the paradox is conservatives used to want to conserve and protect institutions, now they want to tear them, and liberal progressives are in the odd position of not wanting to change institutions but needing to protect those institutions. Everything is topsy-turvy.

1:03:55 - Cathy Gellis
But this is why I push back against the privacy law morass, because I think one of the keys here is everything that's been around for a while is creaking and cracking and collapsing under the weight that poor leadership is putting on them.

So we better get stuff that's new and that can grow organically and actually give us the media ecosystem that we need. They're not going to be able to launch and survive if they have to navigate a regulatory thicket. Their expression is going to get chilled and it's not to say I don't want to preserve privacy values, but I don't think we're. We benefit by preserving policy values at the expense of the innovation and expression we also desperately need and possibly need first, and then we can kind of circle back and make sure other things are protected. But I also think that there's an awful lot of low-hanging fruit that we could protect in the privacy realm. Start there, build in some protection and then see where we need to expand. But I worry about this thicket of reactionary, state-based policies that are like I see a problem. So therefore we're going to do X with no real consideration of what the consequences are of doing X and what it's going to encourage and what it's going to show.

1:05:05 - Leo Laporte
Just out of curiosity. What do you think the reason is for this rightward move from these historically left-leaning publications? Is it economic?

1:05:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a few things I think it is the ideology, in some cases, of owners. It's, I think it is the ideology in some cases of owners. I spoke with a well-known person I won't say who at MSNBC once about a controversial thing that was done there, and this person said Jeff, remember, it's a Republican company.

1:05:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think we forget often that our media is controlled by giant corporations.

1:05:45 - Jeff Jarvis
There's also an interesting thing, leo, is that out of the era of mass media and the belief that we serve everybody in newspapers. In Marty Barron's book about his time at the Washington Post, I think Marty was a brilliant editor. Didn't agree with everything he did, but I think he was a brilliant editor of the Post. I think it was much better than it is now. He lamented that a poll found out that 80% of Washington Post readers were liberal. The reflex was well, I have to get more conservatives, both for business purposes and for you know we serve everybody purposes. Instead, what he should have said is oh, I know who my readers are.

I want to serve them well. I want to tell them how to win arguments. Do you think I'm happy With facts?

1:06:22 - Leo Laporte
Do you think I'm happy that 95% of our audience is male? I'd love to have more women listen to these shows, but am I going to put more girly stuff on? Am I going to dress in pink? Oh, leo.

1:06:37 - Paris Martineau
Leo, I mean, all right, you're banned, you're banned from.

1:06:41 - Cathy Gellis
Twitter Get the bat. Get the bat, Benito I would argue you know, paris and I are exuding girliness.

1:06:52 - Leo Laporte
We are girls and this is how we exist In fact. My actual answer is no, let's just get as smart as we possibly can. And who cares what the gender ratios are? Well, if you're going to actually be smart about things, Well, we have as many women on as we can, that's for sure.

1:07:10 - Cathy Gellis
The weaponry you're holding is certainly inducing the participation.

1:07:17 - Leo Laporte
Just call me Joe Bob, it's no big deal. I'm going to have to take a little break here. On that note, it's a good thing that I have the bat over here and not you. Kathy Gellis, it's great to have her. She is an attorney at law, great at arguing and always informative. I'm really glad we could have you on to talk about that. Maria Kent. Well, bill, actually it's an interesting conundrum. Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism, soon to find a new home. Meanwhile, check him out at gutenbergparenthesiscom. His new book, the Web we Weave, is awesome. Did you get your galley? Paris Martineau?

1:07:53 - Paris Martineau
I need to respond to the email. I've had a busy week.

1:07:56 - Leo Laporte
Okay, she's working on a story, jeff very nicely, promptly. Promptly, promptly At like 7.30 in the morning. That's funny. More Like 7.30 in the morning. That's funny. More and more I'm reading on e-readers. I put it on an e-reader. I had the PDF.

1:08:10 - Paris Martineau
I love a book.

1:08:11 - Leo Laporte
Put it on my Kobo. I do too. I do too. Let's take a little break. We're going to come back. I never did get to the story that I was going to have this conversation about democracy for a long time, I mean, and when you're. It's interesting that you say you talk about these established institutions kind of falling apart. Are they as important these days as, let's say, twitter and Instagram and Facebook and the social networks?

1:08:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Some need to be preserved, some need to be protected, some need to be updated. Some need to be protected. Some need to be updated, some need to be replaced. We need them all. That's the last chapter of Bloomberg. We need some version of them all. Editing and publishing was created for the quality in print. We need different institutions now. Libraries need to be preserved and protected, and each institution in its way, but we need democratic institutions and we need institutions of information for society. Yes, yes. It may not be the current ones.

1:09:12 - Leo Laporte
We also need to find a way to get people voting and get them engaged. I don't fear for democracy if we get everybody voting. I feel like that's.

1:09:20 - Jeff Jarvis
You see if we had the Australian mechanism where everybody is required to vote?

1:09:26 - Leo Laporte
I'm not so sure that'd be great no, I don't like that, if you don't care enough.

1:09:30 - Jeff Jarvis
If you don't care enough, then good anyway I guess you're right.

1:09:35 - Leo Laporte
I guess you're right if you don't know the answer. I mean, I do that when they, when they put 12 judges on the ballot, unopposed, running unopposed, I don't know who the hell they are.

1:09:44 - Paris Martineau
Whether hey, leo, you know what's the move because I'll often go in there and here in brooklyn they've got like 20 judges on there you can just pull out your phone and google every single one.

1:09:54 - Leo Laporte
No one's stopping you know what I do. I don't vote and I figure, if somebody knows better, they should vote and their votes should count more, because mine would be ignorant unless that is the federalist society for it yeah, I mean I take the time to do the research I do the research, like I'll read. I'll read the research beforehand.

1:10:13 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, it takes a long time for a major election to read all the paperwork that comes, but it becomes like the task of well then, that's why I'm not voting, because I want somebody like you to your vote.

1:10:24 - Paris Martineau
But there aren't that many people like you've got to be one of those people, leo. Yeah, you should do the work that kathy's talking about in advance. At least I'm voting on some of it it's not.

1:10:33 - Cathy Gellis
It's not gonna here's. Here's what you need to do instead, so I'll take the there's people like me who will take the time, people whose opinion that you trust yes, so we will ask them ask us and then vote for that, because I'm getting canceled out by people who you know want some terrible things and they're going to vote for the other guy. So I don't want to waste your vote, but if you can't, if you don't have the resources, attention span, time, whatever- or knowledge office knowledge.

Or knowledge to do your own inquiry. Ask somebody you trust. Now, you're still going to have to do some research because, like I, will tend um no's on nearly every ballot measure because I, for the same reason, I wrote that blog post that I think the ballot measures are. So, even if they're good ideas, I think it's a terrible way to legislate. There are people whose opinion dude respect who will actually try to do a substantive evaluation of whether they think that that particular ballot measure is good. Sometimes they'll base it just on the, the policy type of like. Well, I think it's a good idea to try to solve this problem. Some of them will do it based on the particulars and some of them will do it.

1:11:33 - Leo Laporte
Lisa has a policy of vetoing all bond measures and tax increases. I have a policy of saying, yeah, spend the money that's good. If school's great, spend it, Go ahead More bonds. So we cancel each other out unfortunately, Paris, Paris.

1:11:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I have this vision now of the entirety of Brooklyn standing behind your voting booth, growling that you've been in there for 40 minutes.

1:11:57 - Paris Martineau
No, there's a good amount of voting booths there. People are moving in and out.

1:11:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, so you do this in the booth. She does it in the booth.

1:12:02 - Paris Martineau
I will say it's not, that's not what I plan. I do my research in advance, but sometimes you get there and you're like oh, I didn't realize there would be these 12 extra judges. I mean, you just do a quick.

1:12:12 - Cathy Gellis
Google. Don't they give you, like we get, sample ballots? That has the whole thing In fact everybody in California gets a ballot, yeah well now we get the mail-in ones, but they'll also send you a sample ballot, so you basically can do your research, fill in your sample ballot and then, when you are now introduced to your regular ballot, you just copy over the bubbles, like you know the actual voting lady.

1:12:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Can't you make up your mind?

1:12:35 - Leo Laporte
we got some people waiting to vote here. This is our new uh sticker. Thanks to joe, our sticker maker. We need to add more girly things, says Chief.

1:12:45 - Paris Martineau
Bad Idea Officer.

1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
Leo Laporte.

1:12:49 - Paris Martineau
That is a real outfit, kathy. He wore for a significant portion of the show not long ago.

1:12:56 - Leo Laporte
The Monopoly man top hat monocle.

1:12:59 - Paris Martineau
Are you sure that you're not the one voting against all the tactics in that outfit?

1:13:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I vote against democracy in all its forms Our show today.

1:13:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why I sound like fdr when I did that really inducing people to come to petaluma now come to petaluma.

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1:15:03 - Paris Martineau
Finally he's saying something about it.

1:15:06 - Leo Laporte
Please, Paris, pick a nice girly subject for us to talk about.

1:15:11 - Cathy Gellis
Something frilly, Paris he strategically put the bat on the other side of the table, so I can't reach it.

1:15:19 - Paris Martineau
Here's something, line 106. 106.

1:15:25 - Leo Laporte
Okay, bingo the.

1:15:27 - Paris Martineau
Internet's Final Frontier, Remote Amazon Tribes.

1:15:31 - Leo Laporte
Isn't this sad.

1:15:32 - Paris Martineau
It's a really interesting New York Times story about how these Amazonian tribes got Internet thanks to Starlink, and now they're dealing with all the problems that having Internet comes with.

1:15:44 - Leo Laporte
I rest my case, but also the benefits.

1:15:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, but also the benefits.

1:15:46 - Leo Laporte
No.

1:15:46 - Paris Martineau
I thought it was good. I don't think it's bad.

1:15:47 - Leo Laporte
Leo comes with, I rest. My case benefits paris. This is this wonderful good democratic beautifully run tribe that has survived without contact with the west.

1:15:54 - Paris Martineau
It, for hundreds and hundreds of years, gets starlink and is descending into addiction, they all say please projection okay, no, here sami marabou, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village's Maloka, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, eat and cook together, says. When it arrived, everyone was happy. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergency, she says. But now things have gotten worse. Young people have gotten lazy because of the Internet. She said they're learning the ways of white people.

1:16:30 - Leo Laporte
Look, all these people staring at their phones.

1:16:33 - Paris Martineau
But please don't take our Internet away.

1:16:36 - Cathy Gellis
Oh yeah, right, Didn't we see this movie? Isn't this basically? The Gods Must Be Crazy.

1:16:40 - Leo Laporte
It kind of is yeah, that was about a Coca-Cola bottle was thrown out of an airplane.

1:16:45 - Cathy Gellis
They introduced a hard substance and the culture was grappling with what to do with a truly hard substance. And so then, the rest of the movie is the guy's got to chuck away the hard substance. But here we, instead of we gave him a different hard substance.

1:16:58 - Leo Laporte
We gave him the internet, baby, we gave him the internet. We gave him Elon. But, it's the same principle.

1:17:04 - Cathy Gellis
The culture was tooling along and then we gave them a variable they weren't used to, and there's there's issues with confronting what do you? Do with something new.

1:17:12 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting because when Starlink first came along, that was actually what I thought was going to be. The biggest benefit was bringing the Internet to pockets of the world that are just completely without the Internet, and in fact that's what's happened. The Times says Starlink's most transformative effect is in areas once largely out of Internet's reach, like the Amazon. There are now 66,000 active contracts in the Brazilian Amazon, touching 93% of the region's legal municipalities. They get to call for medical help.

1:17:44 - Paris Martineau
It's a really interesting story, the Times writes. The Internet arrived on the backs of men. They trudged miles through the forest barefoot or in flip-flops, carrying two antennas each. Just behind were some people documenting the journey. In the villages, they nailed the antennas to the tops of poles and plugged them into solar panels.

1:18:02 - Leo Laporte
By the way I've got to point out, starlink requires unimpeded view of the sky. So notice they've chopped down most of the rainforest for 100 feet in every direction okay continue on leaders realized they needed limits.

1:18:16 - Paris Martineau
The internet would be switched on for only two hours in the morning five hours in the evening and all day saturday. During those windows, many marabou are crouched over or reclined in hammocks on their phones. They spend lots of time on whatsapp. Their leaders coordinate between villages and alert the authorities to health issues and environmental destruction. Marabou teachers share lessons with students in different villages and everyone is in much closer contact with faraway family and friends this is why I wrote a thank you note to the internet in my book.

1:18:48 - Jeff Jarvis
We've got to remember the good stuff too. Yes, it gets misused. Yes, people do wrong things, all that's true, but it brings benefits to people. And who are we to say they shouldn't have them?

1:19:00 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so I didn't read the article, I just read the blurb that said addiction.

1:19:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's the New York Times projecting their fears on the Amazon.

1:19:09 - Leo Laporte
Okay, because there's no. I mean, I don't know how the internet would promote addiction anyway. Maybe addiction to the internet?

1:19:16 - Paris Martineau
Kaipa Marubo, a father of three, said he was happy the internet was helping educate his children. But he was also concerned about the first-person shooter video games his two sons play. I'm worried they're suddenly going to want to mimic them. He said he tried to delete the games but he believed his sons had other hidden apps. I mean, it's always going to happen kids are going to hide things from their parents.

1:19:38 - Leo Laporte
Teens are going to be teens even if you live in the same uh room together this is actually an age-old conversation about contact with these remote tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere. The people who are contacting them this is the old white man's burden believe they're bringing them all the benefits of civilization, medicine and information and sex and pornography. I don't know what they're bringing them, but they're bringing them the benefits of actually usually Christianity, right, but often it is not to the benefit of these remote tribes. It's an interesting conundrum In Star Trek, you might know. They have a philosophy of not having any contact with the indigenous, the prime directive, which they break every time. They break it every time, yeah, every time, and it's just a TV show. I understand, but do we have a prime directive? I mean, it's the way of the world. We're just going to bring civilization to everybody we can find, with all its pros and cons. Look, that's what they're doing. Internet is just civil.

1:20:48 - Paris Martineau
Uh, yeah, well it seems like the people who brought this were tribal people, people who'd gone well, tribal members also this, this woman who donated 25 yeah but that got that woman got involved because a um tribal man who'd gone to the city, I believe, for work, wanted to get this for his community and saw a presentation this woman had done and then pleaded with her to finance it. She did. I mean, I think if communities want technology, they should be allowed to have it.

I do think it was kind of an interesting study on their speed running the social media era, I mean look it is.

1:21:28 - Leo Laporte
I mean, look at it. It's interesting and abstract. I just don't know if it's a good thing for these people or not. You know what happens to the Super Bowl loser T-shirts. You know when they have a Super Bowl or a World Series, they print T-shirts for both teams as the winner, but inevitably only one team wins, so the other T-shirts are useless. They send them to these tribes in Africa and other areas. It's a problem. Is it a good thing Because they have t-shirts now, or is it just capitalism gone wild?

1:22:02 - Paris Martineau
In that case, they don't need any more crappy quality t-shirts. It's been. I mean, I believe I'm not sure which specific locales the Super Bowl t-shirts are sent to, but there's a huge problem where, because of the high consumption of mass-produced clothing goods in the Xi'an era, all of these communities are now overwhelmed with bushels and bushels of clothing.

1:22:26 - Cathy Gellis
The other thing is like in the instance With the shirts. It works with things like soaps. Oh, let's send people who live in developing communities soap, because surely they need soap.

1:22:38 - Leo Laporte
Because they're so dirty.

1:22:39 - Cathy Gellis
Well, soap is something that is a really easy home-based business for women in those developing areas, and they can't go into business making money selling soap because there's all this free soap. So it's killing their business. So that's killing their business. So that's one less job accessible and one less. It tends to keep the developing communities from developing their own economies, producing their own goods, because we're just giving them all the stuff we think they need, but then they can't have a burgeoning economy and so everybody remains in poverty. So a lot of this is like yeah, it's something that may you know it's policy, it may seem like a good idea, but you really have to think through the math of, if we start doing this, what are the changes that it's going to end up causing, and are they going to leave the people we're trying to help in a better position than if we did nothing at all?

1:23:27 - Leo Laporte
Misery loves company, and as long as we're suffering from overexposure to modern civilization, maybe they ought to too. Why should they be exempt? I don't know how to feel about this. I don't want to also do something that's very common, which is to kind of romanticize traditional life, primitive life. Who are you to choose? Either way, right, it's their choice. People have a choice. Yes.

1:24:00 - Paris Martineau
And they've chosen the internet.

1:24:02 - Leo Laporte
Have they? That's good, have they? One guy went to this woman and said please give us the internet. I don't know, is that all of them?

1:24:12 - Paris Martineau
I don't know I mean people can choose whether or not they want to phone and connect to the internet. They vote, I think, as a community that's true. They could just say the internet is happening, someone could take a hammer, kind of like what you got there, and smack the starlink thing if they didn't like it that much. It seems like the, you know the problems society is having is a microcosm of what well, it is for sure.

1:24:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean that's issues with interest communication.

1:24:39 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's interests about, uh, young men having access to pornography. It's stuff that we as a society have had to deal with for decades and decades. That is happening in a microcosm now are you reading our local petaluma newspapers?

1:24:56 - Leo Laporte
is that how you found?

1:24:57 - Paris Martineau
no, I saw this, but I saw this come across twitter and I saw a local petaluma story, so I thought it was uh for you, leo well, we know about it time rupert, yeah, almost married a woman from petaluma we were very excited.

1:25:11 - Leo Laporte
Uh, how close we came to having rupert murdoch be a local uh, he declined at the last minute yeah, he's 93, she's 67 a russian-born molecular biologist, alana jucova, who lives in uh uh, oh, wait a minute. No, he married jucova, but before he married her, ann Leslie Smith had a ring on her finger. She is a 1975 graduate of Petaluma High School.

1:25:44 - Paris Martineau
We were all very aware of this Along the way Smith became an evangelical Christian, an outspoken conspiracy theorist. Two sticking points, apparently, when it came to marrying the wealthiest scion of the mall, rupert murdoch.

1:25:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he says yeah, we saw the headline rupert murdoch's nest next wife is from petaluma and and our hearts were broken, uh, when he dumped her and married somebody else. They were briefly engaged. I don't, I can't believe you found that this isn is a new segment on the show that we're going to call the Paris Zone Trademark Trademark. I noticed. Yes, I don't know where to start here.

1:26:28 - Paris Martineau
How about the very online afterlife of Franz Kafka?

1:26:32 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute, he's been dead 100 years.

1:26:34 - Paris Martineau
Yes, he's been dead a hundred years. Yes, he's been dead a hundred years, but yet the Czech writer is popping off with the teens on TikTok.

1:26:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh, is that true? Are you seeing a lot of you know.

1:26:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, on TikTok, a collection of objects sits atop a stack of books a string of pearls, a diptych candle, sylvan family's rabbit figure in a scallop collared dress. A woman's hand brushes them aside. She pages the piles of books. We see my year of rest and relaxation, the bell jar and franz kafka's metamorphosis wow, that's wild actually this is a regular answer on jeopardy, so I think I blame jeopardy for this.

1:27:15 - Leo Laporte
They're keeping him alive. This is Margarita.

1:27:18 - Paris Martineau
Mufka. It's also very funny because I feel like Soren Kierkegaard is also popping off on Twitter a bit. I recently got a collection of his work called the Diary of Soren Kierkegaard, of his work called the Diary of Soren Kierkegaard, and it is very fun. It really reads like a bunch of tweets, like literally the first paragraph of it. I will put in the discord right now and it would frankly do well on Twitter If we want to pull it up here.

1:27:51 - Leo Laporte
I shall, I shall pull it up for you, and I'll I'll read this. You can do a dramatic, a dramatic reading of uh of some uh kirkagard.

1:28:01 - Paris Martineau
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul. Witty banter flowed from my lips. Everyone laughed and admired me, but I came away. Indeed, that dash should be as long as the radii of the Earth's orbit, and a very long M-dash wanting to shoot myself.

1:28:18 - Leo Laporte
It's very Twitter it is very.

1:28:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Twitter it's so Paris, nihilist.

1:28:24 - Paris Martineau
It is so the teens really like nihilism.

1:28:34 - Jeff Jarvis
It's hot all around. I put in the Discord Richard Ovenden, who's the brilliant head of Oxford's Bodleian Library wearing a t-shirt we should all want.

1:28:39 - Leo Laporte
if you scroll up a little bit, oh, that's good. Is he a crab? What is he Is he a bee?

1:28:41 - Paris Martineau
No, he's a cockroach from.

1:28:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Metamorphosis. Okay, I get it, that's not him. If you scroll up, you'll see oh, that's not him.

1:28:54 - Leo Laporte
T-shirt.

1:28:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you'll see it. Just scroll, damn it scroll. I'm scrolling. Oh there he is. There he is.

1:29:01 - Leo Laporte
This is my human costume.

1:29:02 - Paris Martineau
This is my human costume. I'm really a cockroach.

1:29:05 - Leo Laporte
Cockroach. Okay, that is a very deep joke there. To me that sounds like a Men in Black reference. Oh yeah, See yeah.

1:29:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Because one of the aliens was. But it has Kafka implications, right?

1:29:21 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yes, all right, there you go. That's the Paris zone. Thank you for that visit I got two more articles. Oh, there's more in the Paris zone. Keep going.

1:29:32 - Paris Martineau
There's a lot.

1:29:33 - Cathy Gellis
It's a whole zone. It's not a paris hit, it's a zone. It's an entire area and way of thinking that it's a life uh, there was a really interesting.

1:29:42 - Paris Martineau
uh, I guess press release issued by the justice department this week about a, the cfo of a media company, the epoch times, that he was essentially indicted for participating in a scheme to launder at least $67 million in fraud proceeds, and I thought it was funny because it kind of goes into what I think is the first very clear example of someone figuring out how to make money in the digital media industry.

1:30:13 - Leo Laporte
Aha, so he's a paragon for us all.

1:30:18 - Paris Martineau
They have a section called the money laundering scheme in the indictment, or a little brief there that says beginning in about early 2020, individuals affiliated with the media company began purchasing tens of thousands of prepaid debit cards below cost on a cryptocurrency platform. The prepaid debit cards were issued by different debit card companies and loaded with US dollars that had been lawfully obtained through various funds. They were fraudulently. They were loaded with fraudulently procured unemployment insurance benefits obtained using stolen personal identification oh and that is how the epoch times ended up making tens of millions of dollars.

Perhaps a lesson for the media industry, because now those fraud they uh do more fraud.

1:31:05 - Leo Laporte
I get that epic times in the email, in my mail. Sometimes I see it. They cleverly position it on waiting room chairs. They go around and spread it. It was my understanding it was a Sun Myung Moon.

1:31:18 - Jeff Jarvis
It was.

1:31:18 - Paris Martineau
Mooney, it's Falun Gong.

1:31:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's Falun Gong. Is it Falun Gong, or Mooney, maybe it's Falun. Gong.

1:31:24 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, it is very subtle propaganda. It looks very normal. Yes, you're right, it's not obviously propaganda, but it's worship, just like TikTok. It's just like TikTok, it's not obviously propaganda but it's worse, just like TikTok. It's just like TikTok. It's Falun Gong, isn't it? It's not Mooney, it's Falun Gong.

1:31:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Falun Gong. You're absolutely right.

1:31:40 - Leo Laporte
So is Shen Yun, which is another interesting attempt by Falun Gong to kind of legitimize themselves. I cannot imagine that show.

1:31:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Who would you not want to be stuck next to in an elevator? Is one of the endorsers at the end of that commercial want to be stuck next to an elevator is what are the endorsers at the end of that commercial?

1:31:56 - Paris Martineau
do you get those commercials all the time? No, we just see the billboard all over new york city. Is the commercials for shen yuan?

1:31:59 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, when there's a season and they come in and the commercials are non-stop and constant. Then they have people saying my life changed, it was so wonderful, you must go watch it.

1:32:08 - Paris Martineau
Oh I believe there was a, a blog or something maybe it was from the outline or the owl or something, where a blogger went just a bit to be like what was it? And it was awful.

1:32:18 - Leo Laporte
It was like hours long, incredibly boring it was in the new yorker, very low budget. It was difficult. Yeah, uh, yeah and it.

1:32:26 - Jeff Jarvis
But you see, all these paris thinks it was a blogger and it was the new yorker.

1:32:30 - Leo Laporte
I think it was the new yorker. I'm pretty sure it was. Yeah, but it was like the blogger, it was very much like that yeah, a blogger of some sort, it's interesting because falun gong is banned in china.

in fact it's, you know, very actively banned in china. Uh, they are headquartered in new york, uh, so maybe that's why you see so many ads of those, uh, but they're very subtle in there and at least in the epic times in their propaganda. And shen yun, I think, is very subtle. It seems more like anti-communist China propaganda. Here is the article you're talking about from 2019, stepping into the Uncanny, unsettling World of Shen Yun by Gia Tolentino.

Does the ubiquitous dance troupe really present 5,000 years of civilization reborn? It's easy to fall for it. You see those ads. It looks really cool, it looks multicultural. You know, it looks like a wonderful thing and I'm not sure it's not a wonderful thing. It doesn't seem to be overt propaganda. But read this article because it looks painful. To be honest, shen Yun is Chinese for the beauty of divine beings dancing. All right, I guess that's. It. Is that. It Is that the Paris, that's the Paris zone, and you've been. We did a theme. Yes, well, I can just do a little thing, submit it for your approval. A young woman gone crazy in her Brooklyn apartment. You've entered the Paris zone. You're watching this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis, paris Martineau and Kathy Ellis is wondering how she got here.

1:34:15 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah.

1:34:16 - Leo Laporte
So glad you are here, Kathy what should we talk about next?

1:34:21 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I can always do some law. Well, let's do some law. Let's enter the Yellis zone. What's in the Yellis zone. All right, a little less eclectic. We've actually talked about two of the things I feel embarrassed. I am more eclectic. Um, we've actually talked about two of the things I I feel embarrassed. I am more eclectic.

1:34:35 - Leo Laporte
I am not just a lawyer, I'm oh gosh, you're a huey lewis and the news fan yes, I was gonna go with.

1:34:41 - Cathy Gellis
I'm a full human being, but that is part of my essential humanity um, but yes, that is. That is a true statement and what I am not. I'm at all embarrassed about. And um, they do have a new musical on Broadway.

1:34:55 - Leo Laporte
Do they? Yes? Is it a jukebox musical? It's a jukebox musical.

1:35:00 - Cathy Gellis
It's called the Heart of Rock and Roll and it took a whole bunch of their songs plus one new one that was written for it, and glued them together in a musical.

1:35:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'll be going to New York just to see that and Paris Marnot.

1:35:13 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, speaking of the feeders, and I'll bring the bat.

1:35:15 - Leo Laporte
Don't worry, paris, I'll bring the bat.

1:35:16 - Cathy Gellis
Good, I just go to bat day. There was once a study about did crime go up in the Bronx on bat day at Yankee Stadium? And they said no, apparently it was just the same amount of crime as normal.

1:35:27 - Leo Laporte
That's a relief. Yeah, bat day is when they actually give people who attend the ballgame their very own baseball bats, and I think somebody asked the question of in the Bronx is that wise?

1:35:37 - Cathy Gellis
But it turned out it was fine. I mean, I guess what you've essentially achieved is the taunt, because everybody now has a bat.

1:35:42 - Leo Laporte
It depends. Well, that's a good point.

1:35:44 - Cathy Gellis
Right.

1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
We're all armed Mutual destruction. It does depend if the Yankees win or not. I would imagine.

1:35:48 - Cathy Gellis
I mean that might help the and you know, are they hitting things in celebration? Are they hitting things because they're unhappy? And who they played against.

1:35:56 - Leo Laporte
If it were the hated Red Sox.

1:35:59 - Cathy Gellis
There may have been issues at some point, and so forth.

1:36:02 - Leo Laporte
Notice they don't do bat day at Fenway Park.

1:36:05 - Paris Martineau
Hey, you know what I think is going to be the craziest day this year, baseball-wise? It's going to be Seinfeld night at the Brooklyn Cyclones in August, which I will be attending. There's an Elaine dance competition, among others. You've got to dance in that. We need a video. I'll think about it. It's all about the thumbs. If I'm one of the first 2,000 fans there, I will get a George Costanza bobblehead.

1:36:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'd love a George Costanza.

1:36:35 - Jeff Jarvis
But Jerry Seinfeld is getting like almost. Weird Listen he apparently was.

1:36:40 - Cathy Gellis
We just ignored it for a while.

1:36:41 - Paris Martineau
If we decided that we didn't want to consume media by any men who had bad takes. No media would exist.

1:36:49 - Leo Laporte
Including this show, I might add. He just said we should have more girly content. We should have opinions about women.

1:36:59 - Cathy Gellis
I'm not entirely sure that's strictly true, but it does certainly wipe out an awful lot of the cultural.

1:37:05 - Leo Laporte
I got some more girly content. How about the AI beauty contest?

1:37:10 - Paris Martineau
Leo, you're going to get canceled by the end of the show by the 5% of your audience.

1:37:16 - Cathy Gellis
who are women? Yeah right.

1:37:20 - Leo Laporte
This is from Wired Magazine. It is a beauty pageant of AI-created women which, you know, honestly, is probably no worse than an actual beauty pageant, in fact, maybe better, because at least it's not real people. There's Ayana Rainbow rainbow, romanian biker babe dj, whose creators have decided is queer, something they advertise through both her name and her shock of perfectly ruffled rainbow hair. Do you want to, do you want to see ayana rainbow here?

1:37:50 - Cathy Gellis
she is probably never on her instagram feed. No, that's.

1:37:56 - Leo Laporte
By the way, she has the same expression.

1:37:58 - Cathy Gellis
No, the problem with this stuff, at least if it's a beauty pageant of real people, they are real people. The problem when it's an artificial construct is it sets the beauty standard, but it's not when that cannot all be physically met, because that's not how people come.

1:38:14 - Leo Laporte
How about Serene Eye, a stunning Turkish redhead who's sometimes pictured doing jobs traditionally held by men in her country, like electrical linemen or firefighter? Here she is, a jet airplane pilot. Who's so good she only has one ear on the radio.

1:38:33 - Cathy Gellis
And a completely impractical hairstyle for the activity she engaged in.

1:38:36 - Benito Gonzalez
Sure sure, but it's the same hairstyle no matter what, it's the same exact hairstyle.

1:38:40 - Paris Martineau
Blocking one of her eyes. Yeah.

1:38:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris and I just put up the exact same story at the exact same moment on the Discord.

1:38:47 - Paris Martineau
Oh, wow. I think that means we have to talk about it. I think we have to do it.

1:38:50 - Leo Laporte
We'll drop the AI Beauty contest.

1:38:52 - Paris Martineau
Well, we'll drop the AI beauty contest. Well, no, well, we won't.

1:38:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, what is it? Where is it?

1:38:56 - Jeff Jarvis
It's another dumb story. You got to scroll, Leo. You got to scroll to find it. I don't scroll man, your Discord is so popular.

1:39:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's in the Discord.

1:39:03 - Jeff Jarvis
People then talk over us.

1:39:06 - Paris Martineau
It's a Washington Post story by Natasha Tiku and Su Yu Chen about what ai thinks a beautiful woman looks like oh, is this depressing.

1:39:19 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's see.

1:39:20 - Jeff Jarvis
But it's not ai, it's the history of mankind and it was trained by a bunch of boys. Yes, trained.

1:39:26 - Leo Laporte
This is what it's trained on, right, but this is it. I mean, if there's a defense for ai, it is just. It is us. We have met the enemy and he is us. Um, ai has all the good and bad attributes of humans no, but in disproportionate scale oh my god.

1:39:42 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, watch me scroll down and you'll see the scale no, I mean but the wow an ai that slurps everything that humans created have has not necessarily slurped it in the proportion of good to bad, that is one that will resonate Well.

1:39:58 - Leo Laporte
That's the question why are these considered the beautiful women? What is it that's telling AI oh, when you ask for a beautiful woman, you should deliver this.

1:40:07 - Cathy Gellis
And that also becomes entrenched when the notions of feminine beauty have actually evolved over time. Like are you supposed to have a big butt or a little butt and that's cultural too. Like these aren't fixed points and for it to come along and think that it can deduce what the fixed point is. That's not how human beings work either, because even if we take the moments now, not every person is going to agree. What is, what is, uh, a stand?

1:40:31 - Leo Laporte
what consists is more beautiful than something else from the story the post found they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness, prompted to show a quote beautiful woman. All three tools generated thin women without exception. Just two percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones, only nine percent of dark skin tones.

1:40:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Which says everything about society.

1:41:01 - Paris Martineau
The post-analysis found that popular image tools struggled to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal when prompted to show women with single-fold eyelids, prevalent in people of Asian descent. 3ai tools were accurate less than 10% of the time. Mid-journey struggled the most. Only two percent of images match these simple instructions. Instead, it defaulted to fair-skinned women with light eyes, and I think this is something that's important, especially if we're hurtling towards a reality like I feel, like you're describing every week, leo, where these tools are being used for everything yeah, that's probably and are replacing an entire creative class.

Suddenly you're not going to have representation of a significant portion of the world this is an interesting and a little bit weird.

1:41:43 - Leo Laporte
The post decided to create a fat woman. Uh, despite repeated attempts using explicit language, the tool only generated women with small waist. Note the waist. Generate a full-length portrait photo of a fat woman. Okay, fine, make her fat. Okay, fine, fatter. Okay, make her belly. I mean this. They call this a fat woman. Make her belly fat, make heratter. It just they could not get it to create a normal looking fat person. Is that because they haven't? I don't understand why. What is it? What is the AI doing that's making this happen?

1:42:30 - Cathy Gellis
I don't think it's doing anything all that special. This is a crappy, broken piece of technology that's being put to purposes for which it wasn't designed and we're throwing it parades that it doesn't deserve. There are some really cool things that this computational technology can do, but those are not the ones that we're applying it to, and it's terrible and bad, and somehow we are surprised that it's producing bad results for things it was never designed and engineered to do.

Still, yes, I agree with you 100 and that if we had attempted to do would probably have been a really bad idea in the first place I'm just curious why it's so confused.

1:43:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, where did it, where does it get these? It's, it's knowledge of this from us, leo, from us, it's us is it us, though, is it.

1:43:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's, that's exactly the point. Plus, it's trained. Um, you know, I can't find it. The only time Sam Altman responded to me on Twitter was one of the early renditions of generative AI around images, and there was a story with all kinds of women and I said, boy, this was designed with the aesthetic of a teen boy. And he said, really, you got all pissed.

1:43:35 - Cathy Gellis
Well, he's a teen boy in spirit, yeah well, I mean, there's a couple things going on, you know, like what's it going to slurp up as a source of things to, as it's learning humanity, what is it learning from? And the cultural repositories out there for it to slurp up are not necessarily representative and indicative of the full range of humanity. And then you've also got to engineer the software. And what are you going to wait? And as you design the engineers so it can understand what to appreciate and what to balance and what to include, and those are probably flawed because they're getting engineered by also a very narrow section of people and representing their tastes and their understanding of also how humanity works. So you've got limitations everywhere and you're wondering why the product of limitation plus limitation is equaling a limited output. Of course it would. It would be shocking if it wasn't producing crap, because you can't get something good and universal. I don't think you ever can, but you certainly can't with these ingredients.

1:44:33 - Leo Laporte
I don't think you ever can, but you certainly can't with these ingredients. So if you train an LLM or some other ML construct on a vast number of images, including images of all kinds of shapes and sizes of people, that's all going to be in there. There is something done to the AI, to these models, after training, which is called tuning. Maybe the flaw is in the tuning and that's where the frat boys get to choose that's good looking.

1:45:03 - Benito Gonzalez
That's not. You're assuming that there's an even number of hot people and not hot people on the internet, when that's not true. On the internet it's probably mostly hot people.

1:45:10 - Leo Laporte
So it's not being trained on a universal data set. It's being trained on a universal data set.

1:45:14 - Cathy Gellis
It's being trained on an artificial data set. It's not universal. That is called media.

1:45:19 - Jeff Jarvis
That is called power. Who had the power to publish?

1:45:22 - Cathy Gellis
And to the extent that it is learning from what it's slurping with context of what is considered beautiful or not. That is also much more limited than it should be, like what's going to be in the glossy magazines. That's certain notions of beauty and they're not necessarily universally applicable.

1:45:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Even within America they're not universally applicable, and the other problem is that what's happening right now is a big discussion about what to take away from the AI, what to take off the web my event with Common Crawl that Paris was kind enough to attend part of what I wanted to do was to discuss what needs to be added to the web and added to AI. I ran into Tim O'Reilly, the wonderful technology publisher, on the flight to San Francisco, and he's thinking about this too. Is that as we discussed it? This is my language, not his. But it's in the public good to have a smart AI, because a stupid AI is going to be used and it's going to be bad.

It's in the public good to have a smart AI, because a stupid AI is going to be used and it's going to be bad. It's in the public good to have content creation that's going to inform that AI. It's against the public good to have bad AI or no content. Can't we get along? Can't we figure this out? Right now, the view is no, no, no. All good stuff shouldn't be on the AI and shouldn't train the AI. So guess what we're going to get. We're going to get. It's going to be worse than this. It's going to be bigoted and awful.

1:46:41 - Cathy Gellis
I feel torn because I'm definitely universally on the no barriers to training the AI. For exactly the same reason, you need as universal data. Like you're not going to get a a good human who's only been exposed to a narrow subset of human culture, the better you build better humans by exposing them to more and more and more stuff. So the same thing is going to be true for artificial intelligence as human intelligence. So I'm all on no, we should not exclude, we should not remove from the web, we should not try to monopolize our rights in some way. That precludes AI training.

But I am still incredibly cynical that even with the most expansive training possible, I think it's still going to be crap in terms of what output it's doing, partly because it's not engineered necessarily in a way to produce something good. And also, was this what we need? Like? What is this concept of what is considered beautiful and the idea that there's going to be like something at the top of the pile as opposed to recognizing that beauty may be represented within an entire pile? And if you haven't engineered your AI to produce a result that is causing a more global appreciation of the beauty of humanity, then the software is never going to produce that for you.

1:47:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, clearly we shouldn't use an AI to judge a beauty pageant, but that doesn't mean it could. It is it flawed in every possible regard? No, it could do amazing things I'm very cynical about it producing a good result in a context that the software was not designed to produce something good yeah, I mean it's an interesting issue because, uh, it's obvious that with beauty it's flawed, but the same kinds of flaws could be less obvious in many other domains, right? So maybe we've got an issue here.

1:48:24 - Cathy Gellis
I'm not on this. Ai is great bandwagon. I end up being just cranky and knocking heads together when the ways we try to stop it are stupid. So that's why I push back on, like the AI training issues and trying to make sure that that can happen. But I think we should stop it for legitimate reasons.

1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
We should stop it anyway. Well, I think that's, there's no possible use for it, or no?

1:48:44 - Cathy Gellis
no, let me recant that. I don't think we should stop it, but I don't think we understand what we have, what it's good for or where it is appropriate to apply it and how to apply it and how we might need to engineer it to be applied. I think it does have this computational technology and software. If I think about let's talk about the really exciting innovations we're having in computational software, I will get all on board with that. But this has become a marketing term, a buzzword term, where it's being used as like just add water, like wave a magic wand, and all of a sudden we'll get something more magnificent and better than we've ever had before. And no, we're not going to. And a lot of the ways that we keep trying to apply these technologies are in uses they weren't designed for and they're no good at it. And nor would should we have expected them to be good at it because they weren't designed for it and this is not human attention that's been developed sorry, kathy needs a walk on the beach.

1:49:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, you gotta reprogram kathy, I'll get no, I'm rapidly being convinced.

1:49:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh, otherwise, unfortunately, I kind of had this utopian dream of ai being of some value, but maybe it was no I think we're getting in the way of that.

1:49:51 - Cathy Gellis
We beat leo down every week no, no, all right, let me me. Let me, let me try to give him a pep talk. I think the computational, the computational technology, is really exciting, but it isn't human intelligence at least not yet, and it's probably a way, way, way off and so acting as though it is, and that it is more than what it is, and that it's being applied to problems for which it was not designed to solve. That's the problem, and by doing it in this way, with this gold rush mentality, we are obstructing the truly exciting parts of the technology. I think we're chilling its development and getting in the way that the bubble is going to pop before we actually get to the really good stuff. There is good stuff there, but that is not what we keep talking about in common parlance. We're talking about just a bubble, gold rush mentality and a lot of unrealistic expectations about what our computational software today could deliver us.

1:50:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Speaking of which, may I point to line 78, which is Andreessen Horowitz predicting that we will never have to make phone calls again because our agents will do it all for us.

1:50:59 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, who is defining these social problems? This is the other reason that, okay, I'm going to now undo my pep talk. The problem is we're being stupid about our problem definition and therefore our solutions are terrible. But that isn't really impugning the AI itself. This computational ability that software is doing is still exciting. The stupid ways we keep applying it because we don't even understand the problems we're trying to apply it to. That's where the disasters occur, and it isn't a failure of technology. It's a failure of people to not be dumb with how they try to apply it to problems.

1:51:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can make make the case and I think this is what they're saying that there's a lot of time we spend on the phone negotiating stuff with another party, that that ai agents acting on each party's behalf could probably do without our intervention. And if that's the case, that might spend I don't think you'd never be on the phone. You'd only be on the phone to talk to other people about things you care about. But you, but no one wants to get on the phone with comcast and try to negotiate their cable yeah, but I don't want to get on the thing that the thing that people hate even more than getting on the phone with comcast and talking to a human is there chat box?

1:52:07 - Paris Martineau
being on the phone with comcast and stuck being like give me a human.

1:52:10 - Leo Laporte
That's why you have an agent on your side talking to the agent on their side.

1:52:16 - Cathy Gellis
Look, anybody who can afford an administrative assistant, an agent, a lawyer like can get somebody to fight their fight.

1:52:23 - Leo Laporte
I would hire Kathy to do it. But what if I could get a computer program to do that? Wouldn't that be great?

1:52:29 - Paris Martineau
I don't know that. I mean, do you think that that's really going to be no problem? I'm sorry.

1:52:33 - Cathy Gellis
I want to just stop the idea that I could be replaced by a computer program in any capacity. Yeah, on the other hand, that's not what I'd actually want to be hired to do.

1:52:44 - Leo Laporte
Remember, Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm and has significant investments in all of these technologies.

1:52:56 - Paris Martineau
And Andreessen has some strange ideas of a lot of stuff About humanity, yeah, it does seem like this could have maybe come out of some VCs being like man. What do I hate about my day? I hate that I have to take all these phone calls. I don't like. What if AI could fix that? Guys, let's write something up on that.

1:53:12 - Benito Gonzalez
That's very much. It Like the VC is defining the problems that they have Right and they don't have the same problems we all have.

1:53:18 - Leo Laporte
But they're looking. You know, really they're looking. That's maybe that's because, like all humans, they're myopic, but they're not trying to solve their problems. They're trying to solve a category of problems that makes them the most possible money.

1:53:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Or they're trying to do things.

1:53:34 - Cathy Gellis
If it causes more problems, like perplexity pages, well, they want to make money rundown yeah, no, I'm going to ruin the web I think you're giving them too much credit, leo, because I think their market definition is really terrible, and it only makes sense with what jeff said that they don't really care about market definition because they're actually chaos agents and they actually want to just produce more problems, because now that they want to solve a problem, that will get them the most business. But they'll get the most business by causing the most problems, and that's a different attitude, because their problem definition and market definition is terrible. They don't understand the people they're trying to sell to.

1:54:06 - Leo Laporte
Always going to err on the side of assuming that somebody is going to maximize their self-interest.

1:54:12 - Cathy Gellis
Well, maximizing their self-interest, but they can do it by rent-seeking or just having already been rich already and the interest payments to them are going to make them richer.

1:54:21 - Leo Laporte
I don't think oh, but they're not satisfied with that.

1:54:23 - Cathy Gellis
No, they're not satisfied with that, but I can't give them that much credit. I think part of the problem we've ended up with, I mean, this is how we've sort of made Elon Musk like the superhero that he doesn't deserve to be, because we just presumed he was entitled to a lot more credit for his successes than he actually was, and people it's also media want to make these characters into somebody to fawn over, I mean people.

Do we like this idea that, oh gosh, I find life hard and some people have the answers? Well, tell me more. I mean, we are attracted to people for whom we think that narrative applies. It's just that it doesn't really apply, maybe to anybody, but certainly not to the people we've anointed like this, nearly to the extent that we think it has.

1:55:09 - Leo Laporte
Maybe there's some hope to be taken from the result of the Indian election from rest of the world, russell brandon saying india's election wasn't the deep fake doomsday many feared.

1:55:20 - Jeff Jarvis
In fact, modi's party uh fell far short of the expectations and did not even achieve a majority so, despite the fact the deep fakes were seen as more kind of personalization and almost pandering um, uh targeting, and people are too smart to be fooled by it.

1:55:38 - Leo Laporte
You know this that's encouraging the internet that's encouraging in the world's largest democracy. Uh, maybe it. Maybe it isn't all over oh, I'm gonna hope not.

1:55:48 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, we do have some leverage that that vote we get to do still matters, yeah yeah, but leo's ready to end it though I'm ready to take a little break.

1:55:59 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this week in gellis uh g is such a good letter. It can represent so many things this week we did, gavel we did this week in gavels. That's good, uh, great to have kathy gillis with us, attorney at law, as always, esquire, uh. We also have jeff jarvis, who is the farthest thing from the esquire one could get, but as an author of many wonderful books. You'll find them all at gutenberg parenthesiscom, including the new one coming up, the web we weave, and paris Martineau from the information where she writes regularly.

1:56:39 - Paris Martineau
Somebody said it should be called this Week in Day Drinking or irregularly, whatever she feels like it, which is the best job ever. You know, the best.

1:56:51 - Leo Laporte
I really don't want to do the changelog After this great, deep, fascinating conversation. I really don't want to do the changelog After this great, deep, fascinating conversation. It seems just like a waste of time to talk about YouTube's free games catalog or Google Maps protecting your location, history or the end of Manifest V2 and the hey, don't hate on Scooter X's lifeblood like that.

I know Scooter X. He's desperately putting in story after story what's new in the June 24 Google system updates. And I just it's my fault, it's my fault. I just can't get excited about it. I just can't.

1:57:30 - Cathy Gellis
Actually, can I ask a question? Then somebody who knows can answer yes, that terrible thing that Microsoft has put into Windows 11.

1:57:37 - Leo Laporte
Recall.

1:57:38 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, is that already pushed out, or are they just threatening to?

1:57:41 - Leo Laporte
So good news. First of all, you wouldn't get it unless you went out and bought a brand new Windows PC with the Copilot Plus PC designation, running on a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm. In other words, you're not likely to be running it. You're certainly not going to have it on your thing.

1:57:57 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I do need to buy a new computer, so what do I avoid then?

1:58:00 - Leo Laporte
Just avoid the Copilot Plus PC, although if it's a concern of yours and it probably should be you can also turn it off. It's on by default, which is a real, but it's not available yet. It's't out yet.

This feels like something that there's a whole bunch of lawyers at Microsoft who did not get eyes on this and we have a little minor battle on Windows Weekly earlier because yesterday Steve Gibson on our Security Now show said my hair is on fire and I was very upset, calling it a massive privacy nightmare, saying that Microsoft security assurances were not really very reassuring and that this was a very bad idea because by defaulting it on, it meant that anybody who bought one of these PCs would probably have it on. Nobody turns off things and as a result, they would have a giant ball of personal information that isn't all that well secured that a malware actor putting software on your computer would have access to it. So he was very upset about it. Paul said, please calm down. First of all, it's not available yet. Microsoft, in all likelihood, will rethink this, maybe defaulting to opt-in instead of opt-out, that maybe there are some security assurances that he felt were stronger than Steve thought. I kind of agree with Steve on this one, but it's early days yet it hasn't happened.

1:59:25 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, why have gone public with this, unless it was a leak or something like?

1:59:29 - Leo Laporte
that no, no, no. They're very excited about it.

1:59:31 - Cathy Gellis
No, but that's the thing of like. No, this is a bad idea because A I'm issue spotting the potential legal issues, but even if they're not presumptive, this is the kind of thing of like you're going to poke the policy bear because you're going to antagonize people and even if technically, the law doesn't reach this and I don't think it's quite a slam dunk either way um, you're gonna make the policymakers mad and they are going to make the law touch it. So it's like you ruin resource recess for everyone and also potentially yourself. So the idea of like somebody has gone public with this and I think I might be right before all the constituencies and microsoft have gone on a chance to look at it and sound. They do check it, including a bunch of lawyers honestly.

This is the new way with ai, which is announced first move fast break things and then apologize later I don't think it works that way in this ecosystem, at least not from a policy standpoint. You've gone and you've antagonized things and all the crappy reactionary laws you're getting out of state, legislators and congress. You don't want that. You don't want them to be doing this, so why antagonize them gratuitously with a product that you haven't fully thought? I think they?

almost feel like we can move fast enough that any anything they do will be too late their lawyers and policy team, if they're worth their salt, will say no, that's not how it works well, and they may, and it may end up that they never do release it or they make some but now you've just put a lot of egg on the company's face.

2:00:54 - Paris Martineau
What they like, what they like Would this feature be something that is potentially accessible, like by law enforcement and whatnot.

2:01:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, absolutely Law enforcement will ask Everything is discoverable? Not just law enforcement but any hacker who can get on your system, because it's unencrypted as soon as you log in and it is sitting in a public directory as a MySQL database which could or actually SQLite database which could easily be downloaded. It's not very big. It does a very good job of analyzing, every every few seconds, everything you look at. So it is both a privacy nightmare and a security nightmare In the legal realm.

2:01:29 - Cathy Gellis
I end up doing doc review for large commercial litigation things, and that's a nightmare, even just doing the discovery Think about the discovery. And that's a nightmare, even just doing Sure.

2:01:35 - Leo Laporte
Think about the discovery.

2:01:36 - Cathy Gellis
Think about the discovery and we were like joking with each other on social media like, okay, boy, the document retention's there.

2:01:43 - Leo Laporte
But what a great tool. Because isn't it the case? Sometimes you get malicious compliance with discovery and they give you 8,000 bankers boxes of documents. These tools that will allow you to use AI to sort through it, analyze it and produce information, no, you don't solve the problem that way.

2:01:57 - Cathy Gellis
First of all, they are generally not handing over bankers' boxes anymore. This is all e-discovery and it's getting slurped up by competent vendors. And then the gold rush race in this sphere from the legal tech vendors is can they help the? So first of all, they'll have agreements between the parties and potentially the court, with what they'll take a big pool on the run. Keyword searches on it.

2:02:19 - Leo Laporte
So they'll negotiate and narrow this down.

2:02:21 - Cathy Gellis
And then all of them are trying to do like I do linear reviews. And at this point I don't think any of the technology is good enough to say you can't do a linear review of have eyes on everything.

But that's that's where the gold is, where all the legal tech vendors are trying to do it, where they put AI on the review platforms Cause I use software. That's exactly what I'm saying. No, but I use software on the as part. I use platforms. So when I company has all these emails, the emails get uploaded to a vendor. The vendor puts those emails in a database and then applies a platform that lets me individually go through those uh, go through those documents and label them and put tags on them, and that's how we'll just we'll decide what gets produced. So what people are trying to do is for the platforms I use to view the database of documents. They're trying to offer me the ai so that I can do my my review much more quickly but you don't want to use it.

I don't think it's dispositive where you can replace the legal oversight, but you can use the AI to help put things into buckets where you'll get context and you can get some efficiencies there.

2:03:19 - Leo Laporte
Ai on its own is useless.

2:03:20 - Cathy Gellis
Ai in partnership with a human may well be useful, but what I'm saying is you don't need Microsoft to solve the problem. That's the wrong place to solve the problem. The place to put the AI technology is while I'm reviewing it.

2:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, they're not trying to solve your problem, but they are trying to solve the problem of a user who might want to be able to search everything they've done over the last few years and find something, and there are a lot of users who think that would be valuable. In fact, here's a third-party program that does pretty much the same thing Rewindai, which I subscribed to because I love the idea that everything I do, every conversation I have, will be recorded and available to me later for search.

2:03:55 - Cathy Gellis
Because they'll clearly opt in, but I do every conversation I have will be, recorded and available to me later for search.

2:03:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean because, admittedly, that blog, but well, yeah so, but that's all Microsoft's, I think, trying to do is basically copy this and say you know, wouldn't it be great? Now the problem is there are a number of issues that make this less than useful. For one thing, for safety reasons. It never leaves your machine, which means when you reset, reboot or erase your hard drive, you've lost it all. You start over from scratch. Buy a new computer, you start over from scratch, Move to a different machine. It's only recording it locally, not on all machines, so it is less useful. I like Rewind because in fact it solves all those problems, but I'm opting into it. I'm actually paying for it. But as I get older, I like the notion of how have you actually found it?

2:04:39 - Cathy Gellis
useful. I haven't used it at all yet, but someday. I mean, but what you're articulating is as the things that have value is like some auto archive service and then some robust search capability off of it. Like I don't think you need ai to solve this problem and what you need is something that against the database. That's the I guess, but is that going to be better?

2:04:56 - Leo Laporte
I mean, look at if you go to, if you go to rewind at ai under the use cases it suggests executives, engineering, sales and adhd.

2:05:07 - Cathy Gellis
I'm in that latter category but the first problem the ones that we're reacting to is there's some auto archiving going on, and it's auto archiving, that auto archiving, that users don't have sufficient control and nuance control.

And so that's you know, problem one is do people want auto archiving capability? If, to the extent, the answer is yes, build a tool that gives them that, and I don't think we need AI in order to deliver that. That's going to be something like just figure out what you're going to feed into the database and it's going to be able to track it. Then the second question is now that you've got this big database of all the stuff you auto archived, how do you search it to find something meaningful? You need a robust search engine of some form. I'm not necessarily sure that you need AI in order to implement it. We may already have it with some sort of standard Boolean stuff, but okay, fine, if that's the problem is solved, then roll out the ai, just to give you the search capability well, that's what it's for, but I mean, these are two discrete problems and you're just

2:05:59 - Leo Laporte
throwing ai at it well, there's no ai till. Okay, the point where we need to find something, it's not. Oh, actually there is ai, because ai has to analyze the image. So what it's doing is taking a screenshot and then using multiple different models to do ocr to region detection to figure out what that image is. So it is in fact using AI to analyze it. That's how they get it to very small size, because they're not storing the screenshot. They're storing the AI artifacts as a searchable database.

2:06:27 - Cathy Gellis
So the way they're talking about and the way they want to sell it is that it's auto archiving in a way that achieves smallness, in a way that just auto archiving doesn't. That's not the sentence they are uttering in marketing it no, but that's in fact what they're doing, but that might be interesting and for people to choose as. Yes, I want that, I need that and that's microsoft's.

2:06:44 - Leo Laporte
This was, by the way. Steve's insight was this is microsoft's plan is ultimately to make it possible for people to record everything they do and then search it uh, later, by the way, I should point out that Rewindai well, and I think that they may end up being an opt-in rather than opt-out.

That's very likely a change they'll make before they ship it. Again, it's not been shipped. Rewindai is, by the way, one of the venture investments of Andreessen Horowitz, so we come full circle. I'm waiting. I haven't paid for it yet because I get it with the pin. Remember I ordered the pin. So I'm waiting for the pin, which was to come late august. That records all my.

2:07:22 - Paris Martineau
What's up with your glasses? They were supposed to. Yeah, what's up with my?

2:07:25 - Leo Laporte
glasses is right. Brilliant said. They've started to ship, so at some point I'll get those.

2:07:29 - Paris Martineau
They've been starting to ship. I know weeks, if not months. Don Don't get mad at them.

2:07:34 - Cathy Gellis
This is a tough Starting is a zone.

2:07:39 - Paris Martineau
It's not just a single thing, it is multiple things.

2:07:42 - Leo Laporte
It's a lifestyle, it's a vibe. Yeah, let me just see Brilliant.

2:07:46 - Cathy Gellis
Yes, starting is a vibe.

2:07:47 - Leo Laporte
Starting is a vibe. I feel like I'll get it someday. That's my thing. I may get it someday, but you see why I've signed up now for a number of different things that promise this idea of helping me organize my experiences in life in such a way that I can retrieve them, use them and maybe synthesize. You know, you're familiar with the notion of zettelkasten, the idea, idea that as you read, you take notes of everything. And there are notes that are interlinked and the point of them is not notes. The point of them is the generative ideas that you get by the process of taking those notes and reviewing them and synthesizing them. It's a synthetic process that generates new ideas and that's just this which is like Dave Weiner's outlining.

2:08:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I've had a conversation about the connection between humans.

2:08:37 - Leo Laporte
Have looked for this forever. Right, we've tried to figure this out forever. We get a sense that there's this vast amount of this trove of information going that our lives are composed of that might have some value. I guess.

2:08:50 - Cathy Gellis
But actually, now that I'm thinking about what it was trying to achieve the smallness of the archive I'm still not sure why it's necessary, because so much of this is just verbal and it just needs a tool that can turn everything into words and word store in very small amounts. So the idea that you've created a picture of it means you've already inflated the size of trying to do the snapshot.

2:09:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, no, no, they have the underlying text as well, but it's often the case that you have an images on there and stuff. But it's often the case that you have an image that's on there and stuff.

2:09:14 - Cathy Gellis
So yeah, the whole idea is not to preserve the image. Okay, okay, fine. You know more efficient ways of storing something, that's information, that is visual, fine.

2:09:22 - Leo Laporte
But that's a very different thing. See, you're already solving this problem. See, clearly it has some interest to you because you're trying to think about how you would do this.

2:09:30 - Cathy Gellis
I'm wondering why they didn't think harder about how we would do this.

2:09:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they are we just haven't expressed all of the clever things that they have, oh, you have too much hope. Well look, I'm not a fan of Microsoft, by any means.

2:09:41 - Cathy Gellis
That's why I'm the way they are communicating. This suggests that they were absent at the meeting, when let's think sensibly about this- you know what?

2:09:48 - Leo Laporte
We don't know the way they communicated, because we weren't at the event. Because we weren't at the event, the event was not open to the public. All we've ever seen is how the press communicated it, and obviously the press does not necessarily a perfect intermediary.

2:10:00 - Jeff Jarvis
They knew how the press would, and if they wanted to communicate it differently, they should.

2:10:04 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's one of the things Paul said in the event, which is only press. He said there was almost a gasp when Microsoft announced this that you could see on the faces of the people in the audience that they were going oh you got problem. This is gonna be a problem. People are not gonna like this.

2:10:22 - Cathy Gellis
Uh, microsoft, I think, thinks this is something people will want some people at Microsoft think is some people who want and they have obviously enough agency and budget to do this.

2:10:30 - Leo Laporte
But I think what's going on is because it's AI. Yeah, the companies all in on AI, as is Google, as is pretty much everybody who's in the big tech sphere these days. They have a green light. Go, do it, get us something.

2:10:45 - Cathy Gellis
Isn't there that expression more money than sense? Because it somehow feels like it's applicable here.

2:10:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's also the expression throwing spaghetti against the wall.

2:10:55 - Cathy Gellis
This feels.

2:10:56 - Leo Laporte
This is AI spaghetti.

2:10:58 - Cathy Gellis
I think spaghetti is too complimentary a metaphor.

2:11:01 - Leo Laporte
Spaghetti's tasty.

2:11:03 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, this does not deserve being equated with spaghetti.

2:11:06 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's wrap it up. We have a great panel and I don't want to stop the conversation, but we want to make sure that everybody can fit this entire show on a CD, so we do have to stop.

2:11:19 - Cathy Gellis
No, I understand there's technology that could shrink it for us.

2:11:21 - Leo Laporte
That's right, just if you just run this through your recall.

2:11:24 - Jeff Jarvis
If you just put it on the double-sided cassette, it's fine, Guys cassettes are back.

2:11:29 - Paris Martineau
The Zoomers are into cassettes now.

2:11:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can get a 120-minute cassette right.

2:11:36 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah they were always fragile, though, um you really couldn't go more than 90, or else your cassette would probably those. Yeah, you guys know that song that that me.

2:11:42 - Paris Martineau
I don't own any cassettes, I'm a vinyl girl, but that that me espresso the song of the summer. Uh, it's on a cassette now they're selling it for three bucks.

2:11:50 - Leo Laporte
I'm still doing body, yada, yada. I'm way behind. So, uh, I I'm the songs of 20 summers ago. So that that me. Who's that by?

2:12:01 - Paris Martineau
as we discussed. Rena Carpenter, it's a. I think the name of the song is espresso, but the chorus is that that me espresso a phrase that does not make any more sense in context, and it's because of that, I believe, it has taken off here is an article by samantha allen.

2:12:19 - Leo Laporte
I asked a grammarian to help me unpack, that's that me espresso. It's the definition of an earworm. The bouncy bop wriggles its way into your brain and never leaves nonsensical lyrics which include puns. Like I know I mountain.

2:12:35 - Paris Martineau
Do it for you there's also one that is uh, I'm working late because I'm a singer. What does that mean? Why are you working late? Because you're a?

2:12:46 - Cathy Gellis
singer explain it's got to be a lot easier to be a lyricist if you don't actually have to worry about anything making any sense.

2:12:52 - Leo Laporte
Most lyrics come on Louie, louie, louie, louie. I got to go now, but one line above all has transcended into internet infamy over the last few weeks. I'm talking, of course, about that's that me, espresso? So she asked the Jeffrey Barg, who's the angry grammarian and she says my mind melted to understand why. We need to look at the line in its full context, as it appears on most websites. Say you can't sleep, baby. I know that's that me, espresso. The narrator of the song is clearly addressing a man who is lusting after her so badly that he can't sleep. That much we can agree on. But things get tricky from there. I just encourage you to go to themus, which is about the best url I've ever heard of. It's pretty good, wow. Uh, I guess it's a magazine for girly types, I don't know no, it's a queer magazine oh, okay, okay, themus is Finn Themus.

What a Finn-tastic.

2:13:57 - Cathy Gellis
I'm pretty sure that's three times the show. You've used the word girly.

2:14:01 - Leo Laporte
I know I'm using it more thanks to the reception that I got.

2:14:05 - Cathy Gellis
I think you got the wrong feedback. He's a troll, yeah he's trolling.

2:14:09 - Leo Laporte
That's a professional description Is girly a bad thing? It a bad thing to say girly, is it bad?

2:14:17 - Paris Martineau
I think context is context contextually, much like the phrase that's that me espresso.

2:14:23 - Leo Laporte
You have to view it in the context in which it's used, and I think in this case it's a little dubious I just, I just know, when my wife looks at me and says I can't sleep, I'm gonna say that's that me, espresso and then she will kick you out of your, lock the door I'm glad the baseball bat's over here. That's all I can say.

2:14:42 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, let's take a little time leo, leo, can I ask one one story here? Oh okay, just one yes, one yes um perplexities uh, pages. You didn't like that uh, uh, yeah, we did it on on ai inside as well and and uh, jason was all excited. I'm going to demo perplexity pages and I and I growled. It's the thing that's going to ruin the internet.

2:15:05 - Leo Laporte
It's a lot like the arc search that we talked about before, where you say arc, search for this and make a page for me. In this, this case, perplexity, which Arc uses, by the way, perplexity AI will make a page. They're pitching it to teachers and others who want to create a kind of definitive single-page website on any given time and you end up with a URL so you can share it.

2:15:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And I'm not saying there can't be good uses, but you know how it's going to be used. It's going to create no end of crap reviews.

2:15:38 - Paris Martineau
Wait, I'm sorry. What does this do? It's different than just like a WordPress site.

2:15:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Because it makes the whole thing for you.

2:15:44 - Paris Martineau
It's AI, so you're not typing anything, so you just put in a topic.

2:15:50 - Leo Laporte
Well you, type in your general Pro. Is it out now? Can I do it?

2:15:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, Jason was demonstrating it All right, let me go to perplexityai.

2:15:59 - Leo Laporte
I am logged into my Pro account and where do I create a page?

2:16:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know where you go to.

2:16:07 - Leo Laporte
Let me do a search here under the old-fashioned Google Perplexity Pages. What's that? Well, we're still used to introducing perplexity pages. You use perplexity to search for answers, explore new topics. Perplexity is an AI company that uses a variety of different LLMs. It's pretty good. I pay 20 bucks for it. Here's an example page by Henry Begin beginner's guide to drumming perplexityai slash page, slash new okay, so what should we think about what we should create? Our first perplexity see whether you're at girly things okay things.

yep, oh, I didn't give it the audience, so we're just going to let it do.

Immediately, the evolution of girly stereotypes is what comes up, girly things are often stereotyped as being frivolous or unimportant, but many women and girls genuinely enjoy traditionally feminine items and activities from makeup and dresses Embracing femininity's delights A rather white gloved effort to not get in trouble. It does give you sources, as you can see down here, embracing femininity's delights. See, it's not bad to be girly. Girly doesn't mean you have to be a girl or a woman to be girly. I could be girly. I suppose, that might be.

2:17:39 - Paris Martineau
Read the first line of the website that you.

2:17:42 - Leo Laporte
Girly. Things are often stereotyped, that one is being frivolous or unimportant, but many women and girls genuinely enjoy traditionally feminine items and activities, from makeup and dresses to the color pink and bubble baths.

2:17:55 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, he added that.

2:17:56 - Leo Laporte
Gender stereotypes about what is considered girly have evolved over time, but still persist and affect girls from a young age.

2:18:02 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, and that's because that's bad. They're bad. This isn't something too prevalent.

2:18:06 - Leo Laporte
Here's some popular girly room decorations For cozy seating, fuzzy saucer chairs. Who doesn't love fuzzy saucer chairs? Oversized beanbag chairs another comfy option that feel like a quote sack of cozy, warm paradise. I thought this show felt like a sack of cozy, warm paradise, actually more like a sack of cozy warm platitudes. On Etsy. Some of the best-selling girly decor items include trendy cowgirl wall art, newspaper print, wall art, girls' affirmation print sets and positive rainbow sets.

2:18:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's a 14th birthday girl gift for, interestingly enough, a 14-year-old girl. Tween girl gift box. This goes over as many different topics as we do in a show. This is amazing. It doesn't hold together.

2:18:57 - Leo Laporte
Okay, let's do another one. I'm not going to publish that one, Although if I were John Oliver, I might.

2:19:03 - Cathy Gellis
On my 14th birthday, my sister got me an autographed picture of Huey Lewis in the news. And that printed you no it had already begun. That's why it was a really special gift.

2:19:13 - Leo Laporte
I love it. I love it. So we go to you want to do a Huey?

2:19:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Lewis page. Yeah, let's oh.

2:19:18 - Cathy Gellis
Oh, my God, oh no, ow, yes, no. Yes, yeah, so Kathy can validate. Oh, that's true.

2:19:25 - Leo Laporte
Because then you could say if it's good or not.

2:19:27 - Cathy Gellis
Pagenew right some misinformation about Huey's birth date and I'm always curious what the AI bots think.

2:19:38 - Leo Laporte
Now and I should also this time I'm going to say who the audience is, so let's pick something here. Anyone, beginners or experts?

2:19:45 - Paris Martineau
Experts.

2:19:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Huey experts, huey Lewis experts, because you have one right there.

2:19:50 - Leo Laporte
Alright, I'm sitting next to one. It's curated by moi, leo Laporte, huey Lewis in the News, the iconic American pop rock band from San Francisco. What is this image? What?

2:20:02 - Cathy Gellis
is that picture it?

2:20:02 - Leo Laporte
looks like a net, a fishing net.

2:20:05 - Cathy Gellis
I don't know what that's doing.

2:20:06 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what that came from Rose to fame in the 80s and 90s with their infectious blend of blue-eyed soul, new wave power pop and roots rock. Okay.

2:20:14 - Paris Martineau
This is just from Wikipedia.

2:20:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

2:20:17 - Cathy Gellis
Actually.

2:20:17 - Paris Martineau
Wikipedia's got issues. This could actually be better than.

2:20:19 - Cathy Gellis
Wikipedia. I'm sorry to say.

2:20:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Why don't you try Huey Lewis in the news as the ultimate American cultural icon? Give it an attitude. Does it do that?

2:20:32 - Leo Laporte
though it sounds like a specific article though. Yeah, this is just a general kind of summary.

2:20:39 - Cathy Gellis
The evolution of their sound was the one that was interesting to me.

2:20:41 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's go back to that. Huey Lewis and the News created their distinctive sound by drawing upon earlier pop rhythm and blues in doo-wop artists. The arrangements cleverly utilized call-and-response techniques between instruments, keeping the mix uncluttered, with typically only two to three non-rhythm section instruments playing at one time. This approach, combined with the band's top-notch musicianship, honed through extensive touring, allowed them to achieve a massive, stadium-filling sound without resorting to the heavy compression common in modern recordings. I kind of like that. That comes from Reddit, by the way. Cutting-edge studio technology of the era, like the even tied h3000 harmonizer, also played a key role in shaping their sonic signature.

2:21:20 - Cathy Gellis
Most of the. The only bit that seems credible is the part about the honing through the touring um. The rest of it is. I don't know where anybody got it I've never seen right here any of those ideas ever articulated you gotta read more reddit.

2:21:34 - Leo Laporte
This is from slash r slash audio engineering what was that technology? They said the h, whatever harmonizer yeah, I used to harmonize harmonizer.

2:21:45 - Benito Gonzalez
Yes, all right I'll have to find out if they use the harmonizer the thing they missed out on is that huey lewis in the news is maybe the greatest soundtrack music they make the best soundtrack music Ghostbusters right.

2:21:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, wait a minute.

2:21:57 - Cathy Gellis
That was low blow, leo, I know, I know.

2:22:01 - Leo Laporte
Southside Johnny, their influences Southside Johnny yes, blood Sweat and Tears yes. Steve Miller Band yes, harmonica playing inspired by blues greats like Sonny Boy, williamson II and Paul Butterfield.

2:22:12 - Cathy Gellis
Some of that is more true than others. Um, the earth, wind and fire maybe, but I don't think the steve miller band, other than they heard it. That's not something that they ever talked about as being it. No, they were they were pub rock that went to england.

2:22:25 - Leo Laporte
They're thin lizzy, that's like the power of love became an instant classic after its inclusion in the back to the future and anything that was on.

2:22:32 - Cathy Gellis
I forget the name of the radio station.

2:22:36 - Leo Laporte
K-San.

2:22:37 - Cathy Gellis
Soulsville.

2:22:38 - Leo Laporte
Soulsville.

2:22:39 - Cathy Gellis
Hitsville, that stuff.

2:22:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Motown. What do you call the End of the Future song?

2:22:44 - Cathy Gellis
Back to the oh, Back in Time, Back to the Future.

2:22:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I was in college and I was sick and I had a high fever. The Power of Love.

2:22:51 - Leo Laporte
That's the Power of Love. That's the Power of Love that was being played over and over again.

2:22:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I have PTSD with that song.

2:22:55 - Leo Laporte
So your contention and I understand it it's the same thing people said about the ARC search is that it's going to disintermediate those pages that it got the information from by creating a single page that people will be driven to and they will never click the links, and it is banal. That was very banal.

2:23:17 - Cathy Gellis
But that, yeah, that was, but that was just not a particularly. It was not well resourced and I think it had errors in it and wherever they got it from was not particularly well resourced. I don't, I that's not a particularly credible um musical. There were a couple lines that made sense, but most of it was like no, they just pulled it out of the ether. I wouldn't use any of that language to describe the evolution of the band sound, and they wouldn't either. Well, let's pulled it out of the ether. I wouldn't use any of that language to describe the evolution of the band's sound, and they wouldn't either.

2:23:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's give it another test the history of podcasting. By the way, it didn't seem to care whether it was an expert or a beginner, but let's make this an expert.

2:23:46 - Cathy Gellis
Well, they offended the expert.

2:23:47 - Leo Laporte
They did. The expert said you're full of it. The birth of audio blogging.

2:23:52 - Jeff Jarvis
We the birth of audio blogging. We should have Dave Weiner here to check this one. There he is, dave Weiner, yeah.

2:23:57 - Leo Laporte
Christopher Lydon, chris Lydon, yep. This is not bad Former MTV VJ Adam Curry. Adam Curry's in there, I Potter, yep.

2:24:08 - Cathy Gellis
Oh, I want to answer Andrew MC. Back to the Future was not what made them famous. That was following sports. They were already famous and that level of fame was what got them into Back to the Future. Because the director was like I bet Marty McFly's favorite band would be Huey Lewis and the News, so the fame had already happened.

2:24:24 - Leo Laporte
This is a pretty good description of RSS.

2:24:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the technology of it so far, yeah yeah, yeah, it's got more sources.

2:24:33 - Leo Laporte
I maybe huey lewis there weren't, it didn't pull from it. I don't know why they couldn't.

2:24:35 - Cathy Gellis
It's not like there's not a lot out there. I mean, most of what's out there is banal, but it's well, generally more accurate. You can't transcend sorry I could write something that is sophisticated and meaningful and quite credible I will.

2:24:53 - Leo Laporte
I will give a seal of approval to podcast. By the way, it changed the title because it was history of podcasting, to podcasting's pioneering art it had changed the news title as well I'm gonna publish this sucker. This is my next blog post. My page is published here. I'll put a link in the show notes.

2:25:13 - Paris Martineau
And he stands by every word of it, every word of it, if something is untrue, you should sue him.

2:25:18 - Leo Laporte
That's right. Look at it, it's pretty cool, he's actually asking for it.

2:25:24 - Paris Martineau
He's begging for it.

2:25:26 - Leo Laporte
Hey, knock it off. It's interesting because it looks like a nice. You see, this is the problem, right? If I look at this, it looks like somebody's actually created a page of researched content.

2:25:44 - Jeff Jarvis
So the web is going to get filled with this, with affiliate links. You bet Pretty sure we're already there, though no.

2:25:48 - Cathy Gellis
And then it pollutes all the subsequent training because the training just slips up the AI-produced stuff.

2:25:54 - Jeff Jarvis
My friend Matthew Kirschenbaum's essay in the Atlantic the Textpocalypse.

2:25:58 - Cathy Gellis
The only thing I would actually credit here is that it did link to sources. I think that is a credible move and I want to applaud it because that should happen more often.

2:26:12 - Leo Laporte
But the product still sucked. Here are the sources.

2:26:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you for doing that, Leo.

2:26:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not as worried about it as people who actually create content might be. Although it's only a matter of time. Before you can do perplexityai slash podcast, slash new and generate a podcast called this Week in Gellis, Then I'm in trouble. We'll be back with your picks of the week In just a moment. You're watching this Week in Gellis Kathy Gellis, Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Paris, give us a. I like that.

2:26:48 - Jeff Jarvis
That was a nice head swing there. What, that was a very nice.

2:26:53 - Paris Martineau
I got a turn from my secondary computer to the computer where the camera's above it.

2:26:58 - Jeff Jarvis
It was like one of those videos where they have two cameras on you. I'm sorry, I'll redo it. Do it again.

2:27:04 - Leo Laporte
Hi, that's good, hi, that's very good.

2:27:07 - Paris Martineau
That's Paris Farno here, when I first started in TV they taught me the head bounce turn.

2:27:13 - Leo Laporte
You know, and you'll see this all the time on local news where they have a single and they have another camera over here. Instead of just going like that, Paris, you're supposed to look down at your script and then bounce up.

I don't know why you do that, but it's the head bounce as opposed to Just going like that oh okay, although when I'm saying your name, actually it's appropriate. When I'm saying your name, actually it's appropriate. When I'm saying your name, it's kind of like the brady bunch where you go, you know, kind of like the beginning of a tv show, like that when I was first on tv they used to have the floor director would tell idiots you know this camera, yeah, yeah.

2:27:50 - Jeff Jarvis
And then after some point they just that disappeared and you better figure that was expensive as a human.

2:27:56 - Leo Laporte
We had a floor director on tech TV, a wonderful guy named Steve, who was wonderful, he was fun, he kept it lively and he would do yeah, he would do exactly that. He would go like this and he'd go whoa, and they would show you over and over. There's tally lights now. Yeah, now they have lights. Well, they had lights even then.

2:28:19 - Paris Martineau
Um, but no studio ever liked to buy them. I don't know why. That is god. You need them because otherwise you're looking at the wrong camera. These are the. This is what we've lost by increasing our uh technological prowess as a society, we've lost men like steve going oh oh, he was great.

2:28:31 - Leo Laporte
He was an entertainer. Oh my god, um see if I can find a picture of him.

2:28:37 - Jeff Jarvis
You want to be in front of the camera.

2:28:39 - Paris Martineau
No, while you're doing that.

2:28:41 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Give us your pick.

2:28:42 - Paris Martineau
I'll say my pick of the week which is incredibly important and detailed, which is I visited some local chickens the other week and I'd highly recommend-.

2:28:50 - Leo Laporte
I saw your pictures. I saw your chicken pictures. It was just like I was in petaluma, it was so great turns out.

2:28:57 - Paris Martineau
There's a lot of community gardens around me here in brooklyn and I walked by one, I walked by a second, I walked by a third and I was like, well, they're all open, so I'm going to go in. And this one had chickens and they were delightful. They all had names, uh, which you can kind of see right there. They have names and bios.

2:29:13 - Jeff Jarvis
You've got a cute little garden with a bunch of people building stuff, what they don't become nuggets, I'm guessing.

2:29:20 - Paris Martineau
I'm guessing. No, I think they're there for the eggs. The garden has a bunch of signs out front saying please keep the garden door closed so the chickens don't escape, which I think is very funny, because if I had somehow run into loose chickens on the street in Brooklyn, this would be a very different recommendation. But yeah, I don't know, that's my pick. I got to say Just visit your local chickens, wherever they may be.

2:29:43 - Cathy Gellis
Loose chickens are the ones that you know. Visit other coops right.

2:29:47 - Leo Laporte
You get loose chickens in Hawaii like crazy, oh well.

2:29:50 - Cathy Gellis
I was thinking in a different way.

2:29:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my God, yes Well. I was thinking in a different way. Oh my God. Yes, especially in Kauai, because Hurricane Anika knocked out all the chicken coops and the chickens went wild, and they're actually a wild breed originally, and so they've thrived. There's chickens everywhere.

2:30:07 - Cathy Gellis
Loose chickens.

2:30:08 - Leo Laporte
Loose chickens, loose chickens. Loose chickens leads to loose nuggets.

2:30:13 - Cathy Gellis
I'm looking through old pictures from tech TV to see if I can find a picture of Steve I always wondered about the condescending line that I heard of, like where in the chicken is the McNugget, and I'm like well, where in the chicken is the fricassee?

2:30:28 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's a great question.

2:30:31 - Leo Laporte
It's almost a song, isn't it? Where in the chicken?

2:30:35 - Jeff Jarvis
is the fricassee. Huey Lewis can sing that and do a fine job of it.

2:30:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's get Huey on that Sometime. I'm going to get Huey in here and surprise you. You must have met him at some point so he'd go. Oh, it's you again, Hi, oh yeah.

2:30:50 - Cathy Gellis
He knows who I am, he knows you. He knows who I am, he knows who you are. Well, that's something. There's a video on YouTube taken at the Marin County Fair where they were performing, and he's at the front of the stage talking to people and you can actually hear him say hi to me by name from the front of him.

2:31:07 - Leo Laporte
Whoa. He says Hi, Kathy Gallis, this one's for you. That's the power of love.

2:31:15 - Cathy Gellis
Like that? No, not like that at all.

2:31:18 - Leo Laporte
Alright, so your pick then would be street chicken.

2:31:22 - Paris Martineau
Loose chickens.

2:31:22 - Leo Laporte
Loose chickens.

2:31:23 - Paris Martineau
Or, I guess, loose or contained chickens.

2:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Yes, take your pick, Take your pick. And now for Jeff Jarvis' number of the week.

2:31:35 - Jeff Jarvis
First can I brag about something?

Yes please, we're going to do a good parenthesis moment. Sharp News Sharp is the book history academic association. I was scared to death of what they would think of my book. I just got a review in Sharp News. I'm very proud of it. It says Jarvis' book is a brilliant compilation of multidisciplinary research and scholarly debates that would make a great addition to reference lists in foundational book history courses. Packed with entertaining print culture trivia, it also promises to general interest readers as well as print culture and digital humanities scholars. So thank you, Prita Mukherjee from the University of Reading.

2:32:13 - Paris Martineau
So this is an open the last paragraph here it says the gutenberg parenthesis is a hopeful treaties that addresses the anxieties of social change and transformation. It is also a testament to jarvis's bibliophilia. He offers up the book, an enduring gift from the transformative history of the parentheses, as an antidote to the fears generated by the internet.

2:32:33 - Jeff Jarvis
That's so great, jeff yeah hey, so all right, so now. Now I want to real quick. Uh, I just saw that nvidia has hit the three trillion mark passes apple with value past apple and value yep do? I want to do a quick picture. Look at the for those of on video for the funniest police car. Criminals will only laugh, not do crime crime.

2:32:54 - Leo Laporte
Where is that? That's lying.

2:32:56 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I'm in the pics, part what do you think? It is Funny.

2:32:59 - Paris Martineau
It says funniest police car, oh my God, do I have?

2:33:01 - Jeff Jarvis
to give you any more breadcrumbs there. Sorry, lying.

2:33:04 - Leo Laporte
Here we go, I got it, I got it, I got it, I got it. I didn't realize you were in it.

2:33:16 - Jeff Jarvis
The Tesla it into a police car. Wow, what a terrible. That's real or not, but it is awful. I laugh every time I see them. I literally laugh out loud every time I see one of those things and finally we need an intervention no, we don't, jeff paris stay away from me.

2:33:25 - Cathy Gellis
No, no, paris, um jeff has sadly miscalculated. I will stand by tab hoarding with you. It's correct. Yes, it's correct it is from xcom.

2:33:37 - Leo Laporte
I probably have a brain disease because I genuinely believe I need every one of them.

2:33:43 - Cathy Gellis
According to one tab, you have stand back 6 775 tabs I do have to say I don't think I've achieved numbers like that, but I am impressed and I will not give you crap is that all at once?

2:33:56 - Paris Martineau
they're not all open well, no, it's because I use one tab whenever I have a lot of tabs on. Frankly, my most common use of one tab is whenever I'm going on this show and I need to make room, memory wise, to be on zoom for three hours or whatever. So then I click the one tab. Button on like 20 different windows and they all go in there, and then if I need to search for them again, they're all there.

2:34:20 - Leo Laporte
So this is actually of great interest to me. This is is this your habit as you're researching for a story or whatever, or what chicken to buy? Yes, you will open multiple tabs and you'll have them all open at once I will open.

2:34:33 - Paris Martineau
I'm trying to see if I can get a count here. Let's see. I'll read the ones that I closed before I got in here. One was a window with 19 tabs. Another window with 7. Another window with 36 tabs. A window with 16 tabs. A window with 20 tabs these are all from today. A window with 24 tabs. Another window with 11 tabs. Six tabs, uh, six tabs, 23 tabs. I'm still on today, okay that was, that's all.

2:34:58 - Cathy Gellis
I'm traumatized because I recently had some sort of crash where previous session could not be reloaded, um, and since then I'm already back to 103, and this was like a couple of days ago I don't understand.

2:35:12 - Leo Laporte
Have you as a non-tab person. I don't get it. What, what?

2:35:18 - Paris Martineau
how are you a non-tab person? Are you just looking at one humble web page?

2:35:22 - Leo Laporte
I have two I have two tabs open right now. Yeah, I close tabs all the time. Now I pin tabs. I do have some pinned tabs, so maybe that's what we're talking about here. This is at firefox. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. These are sites that I go to all the time, like tech meme and so forth bookmarks though these are more like bookmarks, so these are actually the sites that I go to I have 23 tabs I've opened during this show so you never, that's like me closing tabs.

2:35:51 - Cathy Gellis
You never I try not to. I have to be careful when I close them, because if I close them too soon, I will need them immediately.

2:35:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know about history, right?

2:36:01 - Cathy Gellis
The problem is I'm relying on the browser technology and I keep achieving inadvertently tab bankruptcy because it blows itself up and I can't get them back. But normally I'm just trying to keep it as the running to-do list. It's easier to go back to them where if they're closed, it's a little too out of sight, I don't mind.

2:36:18 - Jeff Jarvis
See, it's interesting. Now, mind you, the new Chrome uses AI to organize your tabs.

2:36:25 - Cathy Gellis
Oh.

2:36:25 - Paris Martineau
God, no, no, no no, I mean my tabs are in specific orders and I need them to stay that way.

2:36:32 - Jeff Jarvis
So you move them around.

2:36:33 - Paris Martineau
Oh yes. Oh, yes, this is also how I feel about Windows on Mac. They, I believe, automatically have a system on that will reorganize the order of your Windows. Yeah.

2:36:45 - Leo Laporte
I turn that off too.

2:36:46 - Paris Martineau
I turn that off because I have an order and it does not need to be messed with.

2:36:49 - Leo Laporte
No, I agree with you on that.

2:36:51 - Cathy Gellis
And I am interested in what Paris would recommend as tab managers, because I've been relying on the browsers.

2:36:57 - Paris Martineau
I really like one tab honestly, because, especially I mean you can then like I'll hit the one tab button in Chrome or whatever and it will save. It'll say like you've saved your window that had 26 tabs and it'll have the icon for it and the name of the website. And so back when I had a computer with less ram, I would do that often whenever I uh overloaded my computer. Luckily or, I guess, unluckily I now have a computer that I maximize just to be able to hold as many tabs as possible.

2:37:29 - Leo Laporte
So I'm unchained but first of all, you get that many tabs, you don't? You can't tell from the tab what that page is. Right, it's just see leo, there's this.

2:37:43 - Paris Martineau
I mean. Well, that is a problem. If I ever get to the point where you can't really even read the description at the top, then I move the tabs around. But there's also a feature I don't I assume this is in other browsers where, um, right now I'm working on a story about a non-profit organization, so I was looking for I knew I had a section of tabs that were all the different annual reports, and so I just type in my browser window annual report, and then it says like, do you want to jump to these tabs?

2:38:09 - Leo Laporte
and I click it and then I go there and I'm back in my spot you can only look at one tab at once, though, right, you never look at multiple. You don't like to split the window?

2:38:18 - Paris Martineau
I mean I've got two screens up right now, so I can look at two tabs, or I could have multiple things on one screen.

2:38:26 - Leo Laporte
I just don't understand it as an organizational style, and I also know that browsers just hate it. I mean it's just a terrible thing to do to your computer. Well, no, browsers just hate it. I mean it's just a terrible thing to do to your computer.

2:38:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, now Chrome will basically turn off a tab if it's not used up for a while.

2:38:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, that must be annoying to you. The tab continues.

2:38:45 - Jeff Jarvis
As soon as you click on it it comes back. It just fades it.

2:38:51 - Cathy Gellis
The web isn't stateless anymore, so they're constantly using the data connection and doing some processing, while it's open.

2:38:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right.

2:38:58 - Cathy Gellis
So I think the point is it stops that to kind of make it stateless. And then when you go, back it wakes it up.

2:39:05 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I'm a tab closer.

2:39:07 - Cathy Gellis
Apparently, it is a girly thing to have many tabs.

2:39:10 - Leo Laporte
No no.

2:39:12 - Cathy Gellis
No.

2:39:12 - Leo Laporte
I have learned that I am in the minority, that most people have lots of tabs, especially technical people.

2:39:18 - Cathy Gellis
Actually, this is something else. The Venn diagram of things I have in common with Mike Masnick is he has massive loads of tabs as well. Yeah, oh, yeah.

2:39:26 - Leo Laporte
I feel left out. Honestly, Everybody I know is tab heavy and I just don't understand the workflow at all. I close tabs as I go.

2:39:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Josh Benton from Neiman Lab I mean this was a while ago, he's known for it he will have 500-some tabs open, not stored.

2:39:49 - Leo Laporte
Do you leave lights on when you leave a room. Do you like leave?

2:39:52 - Paris Martineau
them as you go through the house, you turn on lights and honestly, if you're not going to be there was a study on this recently with the way current lights are, if you're going to be back in that room within 15 minutes, it is actually worse for your battery and wastes more energy to turn it off and on I thought that was true with incandescence.

2:40:12 - Cathy Gellis
I didn't know it was true. I the LEDs.

2:40:14 - Leo Laporte
I go around turning lights off everywhere, everywhere I am. I'm like my dad. Yeah, close the window. You don't want to air condition the neighborhood.

2:40:26 - Cathy Gellis
The answer to your question is if I'm embroiled with a project and I might not be able to finish the project plus, I'm embroiled with multiple projects I'm going to open all the tabs necessary for it, Like I'm shopping for something. I've looked, I've Googled it, I've clicked on a whole bunch of tabs to open reviews, I've opened tabs for the products and it's going to stay there until I'm done with the project, so I don't have to like go retrace my steps and produce everything I needed to be able to finish my project. So the problem is some of this is the problem of having an awful lot of stuff going on at any particular time.

2:40:58 - Leo Laporte
This is interesting. So incandescent light bulbs should be turned off whenever they're not needed because they're so inefficient. Halogens are more efficient, but you should turn them off whenever they're not needed. This is from energygov, so you know. It's true. Cfl lighting which, which is that's fluorescent right, a compact fluorescence. If that's the one, if you're going to be out of the room for 15 minutes or less, leave it on led lighting. The operating life of an led is unaffected by turning it on and off, while lifetime is reduced for fluorescent lamps that's why you don't turn it off has no effect on leds, so leds turn them off although they sip energy, so it's not terrible yeah, I think it's about like uh, someone was doing a calculation.

2:41:46 - Paris Martineau
I was reading this other day something like if it's left on for like 17 hours, it might add a couple of pennies to your electric, compared to to incandescent lighting, which really is power hungry.

2:41:56 - Leo Laporte
But we don't have any more incandescent bulbs. Every time, poor Lisa, every time I put in a new LED bulb, I shout to her there's another bulb, I'll never have to change again.

2:42:07 - Cathy Gellis
No, I had. A couple of weeks ago I had an electrical problem with a drop neutral and the voltage problems popped my led bulbs oh, that's not yeah I mean it was I turned on the lamp and oh, that's awful yeah so I mean it didn't pop them in terms of crack, but it blew them out broke them yeah have we discussed the livermore light bulb?

2:42:30 - Leo Laporte
uh, yes, many times, but just like the. Livermore light bulb. That story continues on and on, and on.

2:42:37 - Cathy Gellis
We've actually discovered it on this show before.

2:42:40 - Leo Laporte
I used to work in a radio station, knbr in San Francisco in the late 80s. The DJ before me would do a regular check every week to see if the light bulb was still on, and even then it was the world. See if the light bulb was still on, and even then it was, uh, the world's longest burning light bulb, and it and there is in fact a, uh, a camera on it, which is which is kind of cool. So, or is there? Maybe there used to be?

2:43:08 - Jeff Jarvis
there is, it's very dim you know, it's uh well, it's an old light bulb. It's 100 years old old. Yeah, it's not a bright bulb On the evening of May 20, 2013,.

2:43:17 - Paris Martineau
the general public witnessed through a dedicated webcam that the bulb had apparently burnt out. The next morning, an electrician was called in to confirm its status. It was determined the bulb had not burnt out, but the power supply was found to be faulty. Approximately nine hours and 45 minutes later, the light was reestablished 1901.

2:43:39 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to call foul on that. It just doesn't seem right.

2:43:43 - Jeff Jarvis
You think it's a conspiracy, Leo? You think it's a deep fake? You think it's disinformation? You think it's a lie and propaganda. Is that what you think?

2:43:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, it is the mystery, a mystery of the centennial you read about it in the Epoch. Times.

2:43:56 - Cathy Gellis
Yes, that's right, kathy. Gellis pick of the week. I picked the AIDS Life Cycle ride because I wanted to do it this year.

2:44:04 - Leo Laporte
Look how much they raised.

2:44:06 - Cathy Gellis
And I didn't get to. But I have done it before in my life and they're currently on the road now and it was just such an interesting adventure and I missed. I wanted to have that adventure again.

Although it now, and it was just such an interesting adventure and I missed, I wanted to have that adventure again, although it took a while because it's been like it's san francisco to la yeah, and you're kidding me, you've done that, I've done that, and when you get there they offer you a discount on signing up for the following year, and I was sort of like this may be a once in a lifetime thing, that's the bad time to ask you if you want to do it again, but I guess I mean for some people.

They did and but I think I've cooked enough that and I got. Last year I became I leveled up in my cycling in a certain way, where I was faster and I was sort of like, ok, I think I'm ready to go do it again, but then for reasons, that didn't happen this year. So I wonder if it's my future. But I was sort of like drooling over it and so anyway, I wanted to share and they're on the road this week.

2:45:02 - Leo Laporte
So raising money to end AIDS. I mean I wish I could do this. This looks amazing. It must be both fun and challenging and fascinating, because you're going through some of the most interesting parts of California. California is a great state to bike through.

2:45:11 - Cathy Gellis
It's a really interesting experience. It's an organized ride and the degree of organization is so. Normally I do a lot of one day rides, so I'll do centuries or and century rides also have that's a hundred miles. They'll also have smaller variations, like metric centuries that are 65 miles or a hundred kilometers and then they'll have 30 miles and something like that and the one day rides can be, you know, they vary in terms of how well they're supported, but they'll have sag wagons usually and snacks at various places and then usually like a meal when you get to the end.

This ride had all of that. But also because it was a multi-day ride, you had this little village of tents and they basically migrated the village down the state as well and just a ton of support with the roadies because you're breaking your body, you're breaking your spirit, you're breaking your body. It's a really tough thing. I mean some people do it where they raise the money and then they go and they ride as much as they want and then they just get sagged and party at the camps and stuff. So some people do it that way.

But when I did it and I was raising the money, it was like I feel like obligated to ride every single mile, and it was hard to ride every single mile. Um, I did not like the headwind into Paso Robles. I do not like Paso Robles because it has a headwind and I will, you know, forever associate that moment with Paso Robles. Um, but it was a neat thing to say that I had done and I don't know. You have to clear everything out of your life than riding, because all you're doing that day is you wake up, you eat, you ride, you eat, you ride, you eat, you ride, you eat, you ride. Then you shower and sleep and that's your day and that's all you can accommodate. Does your butt?

really hurt, they offer as part of what they supply, chamois cream, which I did not use the first day, and learned my lesson. So you use that um and you get into routine. Um, I didn't, it's all porta potties. I didn't flush a toilet for a week. That was sort of weird. I lost weight. But they tell you, do not try to do that because you need every calorie you can inhale.

2:47:13 - Leo Laporte
Um and drink a lot.

2:47:15 - Cathy Gellis
Drink a lot, because they're like, if you're not expelling, hills are there bad hills?

2:47:19 - Leo Laporte
oh yeah, they even have a graph of the hills as you go there were significant ones.

2:47:24 - Cathy Gellis
They have some that are sort of storied, um, the issue is when you've got hills and distance, um, but basically the point is the headwind was sort of special because normally the the route is, the prevailing winds are from the north into the south, so you basically get I guess it's actually you're getting sucked to LA where the winds basically blow you down there, but every so often, because there's different valleys, you'll be in a valley and you'll go up a valley and if the pressure is different, the wind may be different.

2:47:53 - Leo Laporte
Total elevation gain in day one 4,716 feet. There is a lot of hill climbing.

2:48:01 - Cathy Gellis
That's the start, where you climb up in the Bay Area. They start at the Cow Palace and you go up basically to Skyline, oh wow. And then you actually, I think, you go down on the other side and you end up on one.

2:48:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Whoa, whoa, whoa. My palms are sweating for two reasons. One is southbound.

2:48:21 - Cathy Gellis
There's no highway, one. There's no bridges, no bridges, um bridges. Uh, I don't remember how much we were on one, I don't remember the whole route, but I think we went up, we went up to the ridge and then came at some point, come down the other side bridges.

2:48:31 - Leo Laporte
are there any bridges? Is all he cares about? You know? Why are you even asking? You're never going to do this. Oh, of course not. Okay, they are right now in the middle of it. They started on Sunday, they end next Saturday. So this, you know. If you want to give them some money, you can donate at the website, which is AIDSlifecycleorg, um, or prepare for next june yeah, so, um, it's, it's in my list of.

2:49:02 - Cathy Gellis
I think I'm ready to try it again. Nice, um, but the other ride I did which was not supported officially, um, I've also ridden from sacramento to reno, but I did that on my own do you?

2:49:11 - Leo Laporte
you wouldn't want to do this without training for at least a year.

2:49:14 - Cathy Gellis
You should do at least some.

2:49:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean they do have lots of little rides that you can practice and so forth.

2:49:20 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, they'll do. I mean, people will get together and do rides and they have people who lead them and for a really good cyclist, I mean, there's some people who are just such gifted cyclists. They're like mountain goats. They don't see the hills, they just ride like everything's in two dimensions. One of the hills had somebody like bop up to the top and then he turned around and came down and then was doing it again.

2:49:40 - Leo Laporte
um you know amy webb should know about this. She's a definitely a long-distance cyclist, uh, and would probably love this.

2:49:47 - Cathy Gellis
I didn't think I was but um, I have huey listen. They used to thank for this, but it turns out I am Nice, yes.

2:49:55 - Leo Laporte
Did you listen to Huey all the way?

2:49:57 - Cathy Gellis
I didn't listen to music going down, but the time that I did it and we can date this is this was the first year they had charging tables so you could charge your phone and some people had like little solar things that they would attach. And I remember like logging into Twitter at camp and this is when the Snowden news broke. So that's that's what was going on, but that was the most media.

2:50:17 - Leo Laporte
For me it would be. That's the that's me. Mi Espresso would have been a much, much needed song.

2:50:22 - Cathy Gellis
You probably wouldn't want that for 548 miles.

2:50:26 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, there'd probably be a moment where I'd get a little aggrating, yeah, yeah.

2:50:30 - Cathy Gellis
I don't. I don't particularly. I don't think it's safe to listen to music, but I don't like to, like, I don't really have a need for media consumption when I'm on the bike. Biking is something I'm able to do. I don't mind doing it with people, but I can do it by myself, and just you end up in this weird groove and I find that, like listening to side entertainment almost disrupts that groove, I think.

2:50:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, kathy, so nice to have you. I appreciate it. Kathy gillis, attorney at law, our expert. She writes for tech dirt, she writes amicus briefs for the copia foundation and we have her on as often as we can. It's so great to have you and it's nice when you come up. I really appreciate it. Thank you, kathy gillis. Thank you, paris martineau, working on on some exciting new. Can you rate your stories based on the number of tabs required?

2:51:20 - Benito Gonzalez
Or how many feet of red string this is a 400-tab story.

2:51:24 - Paris Martineau
I mean there are some that are juicier than others, that have less tabs, but you know I do like the tab system.

2:51:34 - Leo Laporte
All the tabs on this one. But you know I do like the tab system. All the tabs on this one, if you have a tip for her tabs martino.01 on Signal martino.01. Thank you, paris, please forgive me.

2:51:44 - Paris Martineau
Thank you.

2:51:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm just going to ask you to forgive me at the end of every show from now on. I think that's a good policy. Yeah, please forgive me, leonard Tao, professor for journalistic innovation, the director of the Townite Center for entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, emeritus. Thank you, Jeff GutenbergParenthesiscom is the place to go. He's exhausted, so we're going to get out of here after only three hours.

2:52:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I noticed that the pillow behind me is in my rest position.

2:52:18 - Leo Laporte
It's waiting for you. I was there for a few hours. It's waiting for me. That's a good couch to sleep on, will that accommodate.

2:52:23 - Paris Martineau
It's not long enough.

2:52:24 - Leo Laporte
I was going to say, yeah, you want to accommodate your full length.

2:52:27 - Jeff Jarvis
If you saw me on it, I can go do it now. You'll see how much my feet go over over.

2:52:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you go over the top. I need a couch that I can lie flat out on here. He goes. Ladies and gentlemen, say goodbye to jeff jarvis. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do this show every wednesday. There we go, 5 pm.

2:52:45 - Cathy Gellis
Eastern 2100, utc I tell you, if you're under 62 inches, there's a lot more couches available for full extended sleeping.

2:52:57 - Leo Laporte
Under 62 inches. That's the key. Never grow past that. I will say I got a 93-inch couch fit in this apartment. It's pretty lovely. Oh my goodness, I need one like that. Mine is also too short.

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