TWiG 772 transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Paris Martineau is here from the information. Jeff Jarvis from CUNY. We will talk, of course, about Apple's AI event on Monday. I think they did quite a deft job of making it look like they weren't playing catch up. Speaking of catch up, joey Chestnut, the Nathan's hot dog eating championship in a scandal, plus Elon Musk, and why he'll never let you use your iPhone at Tesla, ever, ever, ever again. It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twig. This is Twig, episode 772, recorded Wednesday, june 12th 2024. The mystery bucket of gummies. It's time for Twig this week in giggles. No, I'm sorry, this week in general. No, I'm sorry this week in Google. There we go the show. We cover giggles, general stuff this week in general. No, I'm sorry, this week in Google. There we go the show. We cover giggles, general stuff and Google a little bit. Paris Martineau is here from the information. Hello Paris, hello, bonjour Paris.

0:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
It's great to have you Bonjour Leo, Bonjour Jeff.

0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
Jarvis is here. Yo, jeff, he speaks Jersey. Yo, jeff, he speaks. Jersey. Yo boss.

0:01:28 -  Paris Martineau
You got a problem with that.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, how you doing. Hey, he is the Emeritus Leonard Tow Professor for Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of Choral Works. No, of New York, of New York, pardon me. Hello. There you two. Hello, missed you all week long. Yeah, what do you think? So AI is one of the things we cover a lot on this show, a lot, and I think it's because it's currently the most interesting thing going on in tech. Uh, and there are many ai stories. But I was just curious if you, either of you, paid any attention to what apple announced on monday and what your thoughts were on it. I was waiting for you to tell me what was. Well, I'll tell you what to think. But, uh, paris, what about? What about you? What about you, paris?

0:02:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I think it'll be interesting. This will be probably when it rolls out most people's first interaction with chat, GPT or a large language model, and I think that that in and of itself is important and worth kind of taking a look at. I mean, I'm not certain that it's going to be transformative. I could be wrong, but I feel like people already are primed to not use personal assistants like Siri that often. But hey, maybe this could be the thing that makes the switch.

0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
One of the things Apple did that was interesting unlike both Google and Microsoft is they didn't promote the chat you know, the back and forth talk at all. In fact they didn't even say AI at all for the first hour and a half of the two hour event. But what they did do in the first hour and a half is show new features of iOS 18, mac OS 15, ipad OS and watch and TV OS that you know, anybody who knows what AI is up to would recognize as AI kind of things Inside, inside and then not a two-way, not the generative chat that we come to expect from open AI, but something in some respects more subtle and perhaps even more useful.

0:03:44 -  Paris Martineau
Like what Google's been doing all these years in a way.

0:03:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in fact, that's what Apple said at the very beginning. Well, after they did an ad for Apple TV+, tim Cook said we've been doing this all along and this is nothing new for us, but we wanted to show you some interesting things. But it is true, apple, before anyone else, put machine learning hardware into their chips, the Apple Silicon chips. They're way ahead of everybody else with that. Windows stuff is just coming along this week and they've done it for a long time. The thing I thought was. So I'll tell you what.

my basic takeaway, which I mentioned on Windows Weekly with Paul and Richard earlier today, is that this is the battle of the marketers we should be very clear about that this isn't necessarily talking about what's under the hood, or whether it's better or worse, or whether it's more or less secure and private, but clearly Apple won the battle of the marketers to the point where they rebranded artificial intelligence as Apple intelligence. It's still AI, but it's not artificial. It's Apple.

0:04:55 -  Paris Martineau
Well, it could be alphabet intelligence. Let's try that.

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
Too late it's true, too late, they blew it Too late.

So I think the only reason I say that is, none of this stuff is really available yet. It won't be till in fact, it won't even be when it ships iOS 18, for instance. In the fall It'll probably be the end of the year, early next year, before some of this even appears. But they focused very much on stuff you would do benefits to you and they did it in, I thought, a fairly clever way. Would do benefits to you and they did it and I thought a fairly clever way. For instance, one of the rumors we'd heard is apple was going to finally put a calculator on the ipad, which is hysterical. Yeah, right, right, that's exactly right. It's just oh, great, thank you. Um, let me see if I can find it, but what? How?

0:05:40 - Jeff Jarvis
had that not happened before, is my question. Everybody wants to know what was stopping them from putting a calculator on big iPhone Exactly, but they did something very clever.

0:05:52 - Leo Laporte
They did Let me see if I can pull it up the video, because it's very impressive. They started with the calculator, just like you know, and they said look bigger buttons. With the calculator, just like you know. And they said look bigger buttons. And we're all doing that, we're all. And then they said and there's a secret door here, and they pushed it and they showed us this video, which was a drawn, hand-drawn illustration of projectile motion and table tennis, where the calculations were handwritten but then you change a number and, just like on a spreadsheet, the other related numbers change. They even showed this slider, they showed how it could generate graphs from handwritten calculations and, furthermore, they said that just the answers will be in your handwriting, in your handwriting.

0:06:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait how.

0:06:47 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad you asked Apple Intelligence. That's how.

0:06:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, of course, that's how. Sorry, rookie, mistake here.

0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
What's hysterical is this is the Newton tried to do this 20 years, 30 years ago, but they actually are doing it now. So I think this is very interesting. They also showed how, in Notepad, you could take handwritten notes. It would clean them up slightly. It still looked like your handwriting. If you use generative AI, let me see if I can. I could find this somewhere. If you use generative, here's the cleaning up thing. If you use generative AI to insert something, see it's cleaning it up so you can read my handwriting, but it still looks like my handwriting.

I mean that's okay. You say, oh boy, but that actually is non-trivial. You can cut and paste into it in your handwriting. You can do spell check in your handwriting.

0:07:35 -  Paris Martineau
Have you seen my handwriting? I don't want my handwriting.

0:07:37 - Leo Laporte
You can move paragraphs and if you do generative AI, the text it generates will be in your handwriting. You cross out stuff. This is, I think, a really that's so interesting. So this is to Apple. What Apple AI is is not having a nice chat with a virtual assistant that doesn't sound anything like Scarlett Johansson. It's these kind of quality of life things. I think it was very smart. And again, I should mention, in my opinion, this is the battle of marketers and how you position it more than it is the actual underlying technology.

0:08:09 - Jeff Jarvis
But still, if you're going to get people to accept ai, this is a much better way to do it man, this makes me want to get an ipad to try this out, not because I think that I would like use it, just because I have kind of schizophrenic handwriting, in the sense that my handwriting at all times is a combination of, like an, all caps style handwriting plus cursive, plus lowercase so.

I'm curious as to what Apple would derive from that, because my ease could look a variety of different ways. Which one are they going to choose?

0:08:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, the proof will be in the pudding right. I suspect it's not going to be as great as it looks.

0:08:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I think that this is one of these things that you're going to want to wait and see, because it'll make some. I'm sure there are going to be mistakes. There's always mistakes or strange quirks with these technologies, and I think that this one will be really fun to watch.

0:09:08 - Leo Laporte
I 100 percent. Paris, have you ever played with a newton? No, like the atomic came out before you were born.

0:09:11 -  Paris Martineau
It was a 1993 held device video. I put a video of a demo it's pretty.

0:09:14 - Leo Laporte
It was trying to be way ahead this is what apple was trying to do with a newton way back when yeah, yeah, it's ironic. Um, I had many newtons and I really liked the. In fact, I was one of the few who thought this has a lot of promise. I even have a video clip somewhere of me saying you know, you pair this with a cell phone and maybe you have something here.

0:09:37 -  Paris Martineau
Glue them together, yeah.

0:09:39 - Leo Laporte
Guess that's kind of what they did. Where'd you paste that video?

0:09:42 -  Paris Martineau
It's in the Discord. In the Discord you just got to scroll because they're so active in the discord they keep on.

0:09:49 - Leo Laporte
You know they push my stuff up with their newton cookies. Stop pushing his stuff up, man. Here's the newton message pad. Uh, demo from 1930, 1933. It practically is 1993. Here we'll go back that was that that was. There was a famous doonesbury cartoon for the newton showing its handwriting recognition. Here it is. So there, so uh, in which uh you, the uh user hand wrote how many newtons does it take to screw in a light bulb, to which the answer was farm, which kind of said it all about the Newton's handwriting recognition.

0:10:25 -  Paris Martineau
Let's see if we can scroll forward a little bit.

0:10:30 - Leo Laporte
One of the things that Newton did is watch when he scribbles it out, Just like we just saw on the on Apple notes.

0:10:34 -  Paris Martineau
Watch this, watch this now. This is funny.

0:10:38 - Leo Laporte
It turns it into text.

0:10:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I love how bad this person's handwriting is Right.

0:10:44 - Leo Laporte
And it doesn't it? The Newton sort of did it all right, but look, that was 30 years ago, right?

0:10:51 -  Paris Martineau
We've come a long way. It also had a different way to draw alphabets, right? Do you remember that?

0:10:54 - Leo Laporte
That was graffiti. That was for the Palm Pilot. The Newton used regular text. That's right, graffiti yeah.

That was the kind of insight that Jeff Hawkins at Palm had was oh no, no, you can't. The Roman alphabet is too ambiguous, you can't use the Roman alphabet. A computer won't be able to understand it. So he invented a slightly modified alphabet called graffiti. But hey, come ahead 30 years and we can actually do this finally, yeah, so in a apple's apple's living up to its, its promise. This tells you a lot about technology. It's takes longer than one thinks. I thought apple did a really uh good job and and, and I think it's an important lesson for us as we talk about ai, to understand that apple said don't show this, for instance. One of the issues with AI is image generation. Right, and getting in big trouble with generating images that are controversial or I'll put this in air quotes woke. So Apple is going to make an image generating program, not mid-journey, not stable diffusion, they call it image playground.

0:12:08 - Jeff Jarvis
But the images it generates are very cartoony, that's a limited use.

0:12:10 - Leo Laporte
They're emojis right well, it's not just emojis, it's also drawings, but they're very.

0:12:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, they're very this is the creepy mother image that they displayed during the keynote right uh, I don't remember the image of. I believe the text on the screen was like someone texting their mom and they're like oh yes, superhero, that was a memoji, yes, but they're also like this.

0:12:33 - Leo Laporte
This is a pair of dice. It looks more like a pencil sketch. I think they're hoping this will be safer. Tim cook, in an interview with the washington post, said look, we know it's not going to be a perfect. We know hallucinations will happen, but we think we will. I'll never promise you it won't, but we think we've done a very good job in making it safe.

0:12:53 -  Paris Martineau
By limiting it so much, by limiting it that it's far less useful.

0:12:55 - Leo Laporte
But that's the way. Well, is it yet less useful? I don't know.

0:12:59 -  Paris Martineau
I don't know. Yeah, if it's again, it's a creation tool. I think it is. I think there's all kinds of power there. I saw an amazing tool yesterday called Wave at the investment conference, where a really good comic book illustrator showed how he could train it on his own style, then draw a character and then it would improve it and then he could improve it in turn. That's the kind of power you want to have on on an ipad, because it could do it.

0:13:30 - Jeff Jarvis
There's nothing stopping, do either of you guys use an ipad yeah, I do I have them, what do you use it for nothing? Well, I know you have everything I ipad is um. I use it. What?

0:13:38 - Leo Laporte
do I use it for facetiming? Um, I think I I might use it. What do I use it for FaceTiming? I think I might use it more for notes. Now I have the iPad and the Apple Pencil. By the way, when you add that all up with the keyboard, you're spending laptop prices, thousands of dollars. Yeah, but that's Apple's kind of bizarro world laptop. It's its own operating system. It's different than macOS and for some reason they're maintaining these two tracks. But here's an advantage that apple does have unlike any other manufacturer, they're using the same chips in the iphone, ipad and mac. So, for instance, uh, when the game company ubisoft ships its new Assassin's Creed program it's a very popular video game it will ship it on iPad, iphone and Mac OS at the same time as it ships it on Windows, because it's one chip, it's basically one foundational system.

0:14:41 -  Paris Martineau
Even though the OS isn't the same.

0:14:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, the OS is only what we see. Underneath the hood is still the same technologies, so it's very easy to make it for all three.

0:14:50 -  Paris Martineau
So, leo, going to your point about marketing, I was puzzled because the day of WWDC, apple stock went down, I think almost 2%, and then in the next two days it's gone up something like 9%.

0:15:05 - Leo Laporte
Right.

0:15:05 -  Paris Martineau
It's like the market said. And then somebody the next two days it's gone up something like nine percent, right, it's like the market said. And then somebody said oh, I hadn't thought of that.

0:15:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder what caused that. Have you seen the speculation online that it's uh from? Someone said that it uh started to go up about a couple minutes after stratecheryery posted a positive thing about it, which I think is absolutely ridiculous.

0:15:29 - Leo Laporte
No, I even predicted this on Sunday, the day before the Apple announcement. On Twit you can go back and look at the tape I said this is a big challenge tomorrow for Apple. They have a very narrow road to hoe here. They don't want to look like they're just doing me to AI stuff right, which in fact they are. I mean they're just catching up with pixel and Google's Gemini and and and copilot. I mean they're just kind of basically catching up. You know the things they showed. For instance, creating text or correcting your text in your text editor is exactly what Microsoft does with Office and exactly what Google does with Google Docs. It's literally no different, probably even using the same LLMs. So they don't want to look like oh yeah, we can do that too. They want to look like they're innovating, but at the same time, they don't want to run the risk that Wall Street has punished Google for of being too risky, and I think they threaded that needle perfectly when Wall Street was watching. This is always the case and I even said this on Sunday the stock price will go down, because that's how it works you buy in the room or you sell on the news. The news is the Apple event. There's going to be a sell-off and we were watching during the Apple event. It would go down a little bit, then it would go up. It would go down a little bit and go up, but I did predict this is the Apple event right here, somewhere in here. I did predict that it would, in fact, be a huge boost to Apple and it was. It was their biggest day yesterday since 2022, and they had another big day today. They are now.

Market cap is $3.26 trillion, which beats everybody. It's the number one. They were, by the way, behind Microsoft and NVIDIA last week. Why were Microsoft and NVIDIA so high? Ai, ai. The market is booming for one thing only, you know. I don't know if it's the wisdom of the crowds or the foolhardiness of the crowds, but the market says oh no, the upside on AI is huge. You've got to do the AI thing. So Apple at first they looked at it and go, oh, come on, you're not doing chat BGPT 4.0. But look at what Google did on Google IO. Look at what OpenAI did at ChatGPT 4.0, where they're talking to the thing and it's talking back. And then look at what Apple did, which showed you real, concrete uses maybe somewhat trivial, but still genuinely valuable concrete uses for AI. And I think Apple, the market, is saying oh yeah, apple aced it, and I think I agree.

0:18:09 -  Paris Martineau
I think Apple did ace it, yeah, but the market also buys Apple's.

0:18:10 - Leo Laporte
BS pretty easily. Again, foolhardiness of the crowds as opposed to the wisdom of the crowds.

0:18:17 -  Paris Martineau
It is the house that hype built Right and they're excellent at it.

0:18:20 - Jeff Jarvis
The market loves nothing more than an event. That should have been a press release.

0:18:25 - Leo Laporte
Yes, microsoft loves nothing more than an event that should have been a press release. Yes, my microsoft, by the way, had a little bit of a boost from the apple event too, because I think people said, oh, they're using open ai, they're using chat gpt, they're going to be using microsoft azure. But see again, apple did it very smart, I think, wisely, even though elon elon's reaction was really out of control. But Apple said if you ask Siri something and she doesn't have like, if you ask Siri to tell your kid a bedtime story, siri will say you know what would be good at this Chat GPT? And then says would you like me to ask chat GPT? And then, unless you affirmatively say yes, it won't send it to open ai. Furthermore, apple says we're anonymizing it. There's no ip address information going to open ai and they are not using anything. You send it for their own generation. So they've got to deal with open ai, I think, to do that. So in effect, they're sanitizing OpenAI and getting the same result back as ChatGPT 4.0.

0:19:30 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm curious is there an option to say actually I want all of my Siri requests to go to OpenAI and ChatGPT, or do you have to? So there's going to be that stop gap in every You're going to go to Siri first.

0:19:42 - Leo Laporte
I think eventually you'll be able to choose models. Right now it's only OpenAI, but we know they are talking with google about gemini, um and maybe they'll have a switch. That's it. But I think they want you to do siri first, and this is what apple said whenever we can, we're going to answer your ai requests on device with our models on device not, by the way, not anybody else's models, our models on device. If we don, by the way, not anybody else's models, our models on device. If we don't think we can do it on device you need, you don't have enough horsepower and, by the way, they say this requires the current iPhone or later. You can't do this on an iPhone 14. If we can't do it on device, we will send it to our private cloud running Macintoshes, running our processors, privately. It does not go out in the regular world. It's encrypted in transit. You know all of this is a lot of hand-waving. Maybe it's not as secure and private as they say, but this is what they're promising. So it'll privately go out to our servers where we'll handle the request that has to be done in the cloud and then send it back to your phone privately.

This didn't stop Elon Musk from, really from, really like losing it ballistic. Uh he, he. As soon as this was during the apple event, he said if apple sends uh stuff up to gpt, we are going to ban iphones at our company. Here's the's the tweet. It is patently absurd that Apple isn't smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security and privacy. Apple has no clue what's actually going on. Once they hand your data over to OpenAI, they're selling you down the river. And then, in a subsequent tweet if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation. And finally, visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the doors, where they'll be stored in a Faraday cage.

0:21:38 -  Paris Martineau
No, in microwaves, all microwaves.

0:21:41 - Leo Laporte
No, completely losing it First of all, they're not building chat.

0:21:46 - Leo Laporte
GPT into the iPhone. At the operating system level it is not there at all. You have to. It'll offer it and you can use it. By the way, I can do that right now with my iPhone, as you've seen me do, by pressing the action button and running ChatGPT's own app. It's available on the iPhone, as is Google's Gemini Plus or Ultra, I think. So I don't think. I think Elon's just being Elon.

0:22:13 -  Paris Martineau
Why did he drop the suit against OpenAI?

0:22:15 - Leo Laporte
That's a very good question. I do not know To avoid discovery Because at the same time he's going ballistic against OpenAI.

0:22:22 -  Paris Martineau
He's dropping the suit against them.

0:22:23 - Leo Laporte
Benito says, and I think he's right tomorrow was discovery. Oh, thank you, benito a lot of lawsuits do not survive, discovery especially a lot of elon lawsuits so let me find the, the story I bookmarked on this, because I think it talks about the timing um most.

0:22:42 - Jeff Jarvis
This is from the ap. Most legal experts said musk's claims centered around allegations of a breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices were unlikely to succeed in court yeah, it wasn't a strong case because there was no written contract.

0:22:59 - Leo Laporte
He's. He's saying they violated their agreement not to be for profit, etc. Etc. But but I think what he was really worried about and, by the way, sam Altman produced these, his text messages and so forth, back and forth with Sam Altman saying just give me the company, I'll run it, and things like that. And oh, it's going to cost billions of dollars. Remember we read those text messages a couple of months ago. The hearing was scheduled for today. He withdrew his lawsuit yesterday.

Hearing was scheduled for Wednesdaynesday in san francisco, in which the judge was going to consider whether the case should be dismissed, as requested by the defendants open ai, altman and brockman.

0:23:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that actually I guess that's interesting right.

0:23:37 - Leo Laporte
He did not want to be embarrassed by a dismissal, you think?

0:23:40 - Jeff Jarvis
so, yeah, he dismissed the case without prejudice, which means he could refile it at another time. So it's kind of a I'm going to take my toys and go home.

0:23:48 - Leo Laporte
It's more like you can't fire me, I quit. Yeah, he fired the suit. Filed the suit in February. I think that. Yeah, I think most legal experts I heard said it's no case. This is not. This is silly. This is, you know, a nuisance. It's Elon. Anyway, uh, from the AI, you know, desk, I think Apple's announcement was cagey, uh, well-timed and very cleverly targeted to walk that line between oh, we're just copying everybody else and we've actually got AI, which they do, but is there anything?

0:24:28 -  Paris Martineau
that's that changing.

0:24:29 - Leo Laporte
No, it's not Nothing, no, except. Oh well, here's the thing, and Fast Company pointed this out. What's really the whole point is that, as Oprah said, a billion phones in your pockets, y'all. It's that Apple has such penetration with their iPhones that it's suddenly putting the hands of some sort in the hands of people who've been hearing about this but haven't really tried it Normal people.

0:24:58 -  Paris Martineau
But will they know that they are using AI?

0:25:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think you know, use that notepad. You'll go, wow, that was cool, I mean it's pretty amazing. But I think Apple would say it doesn't really matter if they know if we are doing a better making, a better product that serves people better, it gives them the things they need, Then then that's all that we ask for. I think it'll.

0:25:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I would say in the vast majority of cases, like in the cases we're describing, with Apple using artificial intelligence to power ancillary products, like you know, turning your handwriting into a font or whatever Someone doesn't need to know how that is happening, they just need to enjoy it. I think it gets a little bit more different when you're talking about like a large language model that's going like a generative AI.

0:25:47 - Leo Laporte
But that's a distinction that we know but regular people don't know or care about.

0:25:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and I think that this is part of the reason why it's good that the integration of chat GPT requires a user to say yes, send that query to chat GPT. Even if they don't know that that's AI, they'll know that it's something that's not Siri, and that's all that matters.

0:26:09 - Leo Laporte
I think it'll be attractive to people. They'll feel like because Apple's built up over years this trust with people, trust that Google once had and has pretty much frittered away, trust that Microsoft never had. They have all this trust and people will say, oh yeah, if I'm going to use AI, I'm going to do it this way, I'm going to do the Apple way. I think that's what the stock market is saying is. This is a very smooth, elegant play for Apple for the mindset of people, and it avoids all of the AI stories which we're about to tell about. You know, simple tasks showing complete reasoning breakdown and state-of-the-art large language models and all of that stuff.

0:26:53 -  Paris Martineau
You know it's not going to come up the AI leo-ometer you walk on the beach here, my beach walk guy.

0:27:01 - Leo Laporte
No, apple does not say ever, say Ai or imply anything like it.

0:27:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Very smart do they say apple general general intelligence?

0:27:12 - Leo Laporte
no, they say apple intelligence and, and you know, when you say apple intelligence, it makes it by the way. This is why steve jobs named the company apple. It's kind of homey and friendly and down you know what could go wrong.

0:27:23 - Jeff Jarvis
It's Apple. Yeah, it's an Apple. It comes from a tree. Who would distrust that?

0:27:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so, anyway, I think that's the big news in AI this week and if you contrast it to Microsoft, google and OpenAI's announcements in roughly the same time frame, this is what Apple does so well, right? Nobody says, oh, you know, before the iPod there were plenty of MP3 players. Or oh, before the iPhone, there were plenty of smartphones. They don't remember the predecessors. They remember. I mean, there were tablets before iPad, there were PCs before Mac. Apple is not an innovator in that regard. They don't. The Vision Pro isn't even the first crappy head computer. They wait and then they think in their mind and I think they're probably right in many cases. Do it right. It's not always this. They're suave. They're suave, that's the word.

0:28:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, one side note. What do you guys think about apple's announcement with regards to the redesign of the home screen and all the weird wacky things you can do with it, because I think that's a little less suave. I think that steve jobs would roll in his grave if he could see any of these today well, it's pretty funny because, as you well know, this is stuff Android's been doing for years, oh yeah.

0:28:48 - Leo Laporte
This is like, in fact, if you were an Android user and I said hey, you know what you can do. You can arrange your icons now on the iPhone and even leave gaps. They go, and we couldn't do it for years. We couldn't do it. Oh, hey, you know what else we can do. We can make all our icons all the same color.

0:29:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh-huh, people aren't really going to remember all of that, I think if you're an iphone user, you'll be glad, because it then opens up people making choices that are bad or having bad taste, as people are wont to do, which I think is part of the distinction of what you had between iPhone and Android for a while.

0:29:41 - Leo Laporte
Everybody in the iPhone world was locked into one look an android for a while is everybody in iphone world was locked into one. Look. It's very famously why apple has never allowed us to have our own uh watch faces on the apple watch, because they say you don't have any taste, let us, we'll. We'll do it for you, that's always been their attitude.

You're right, uh, and you know. Now you can have and frankly, the examples they showed in the and were ugly as sin, like a yellow phone, phone screen is not to me particularly appealing. But yeah, you can do it. I I don't know, I don't, I don't have anything to say about that. That's just if you, if you care about all that stuff, watch mac break weekly ios.

0:30:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Today we have we have shows we're intruding on someone else's well, I just.

0:30:25 - Leo Laporte
It's like uh, if you're an like, if you're into the Apple ecosystem, you care a lot about this. Everybody else is like I'm sorry, what? You've got a life. You had an announcement you actually recorded an announcement announcing that you can move the icons. Wow, it must have been a slow day at the Apple farm. I think Apple is very smart and they have very cleverly positioned themselves not to look like they were playing catch-up, right, but that they are right there. They are leaders in AI. This is what they've done historically, every single time Clever. They're clever, if nothing else, and I really the reason I said it up front, I really believe it is this is all just marketing. At this point, they haven't produced anything we can try.

0:31:21 -  Paris Martineau
I think if Google had announced absolutely everything, Apple did the exact same way, everybody would have yawned and said well, Google's lost their mojo, they just aren't doing much.

0:31:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

0:31:31 -  Paris Martineau
It's not marketing so much also as marketing past reputation.

0:31:34 - Leo Laporte
But also remember that Apple did it in a very slick, pre-produced hour and a half two hour event with fancy transitions, and you know everything was just as, as is usually the case with apple, perfectly, you know, precisely, uh, aesthetically honed. And google famously, I mean yeah just throws a bunch of spaghetti against the wall saying what do you think now I hadn't you like me? Now let me take a little break. It's kind of like Marcus versus Walmart.

It is. That's a good way to put it, and I think in many ways it is very much like retail. It's just marketing, it's just a different color on the same widget Our show today. We'll take a little break, come back. We want to get Paris out of here in a couple hours, so we can't do our usual five hour program today I will say this is actually misinformation.

0:32:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Next week I have a hard out. Today. I can go as long as we want oh, that's my fault.

0:32:32 - Leo Laporte
Hallelujah we got as much time as we want, let's strap in.

0:32:36 - Jeff Jarvis
We got a 24-hour pod go get ready.

0:32:39 -  Paris Martineau
It's the hope you have nowhere to be gorilla.

0:32:41 - Leo Laporte
Gorilla this week in Endless. Our show today. Thank you, this is good to know. Paris Next week. I'll be brief. And also, of course, jeff Jarvis Good to have you both. Our show today brought to you by.

0:32:54 -  Paris Martineau
He's also here Also this guy, I don't know what his deal is Bad.

0:32:59 - Leo Laporte
Kenny never leaves. No, Jeff, this is as much your show as anybody's. This is the Jeff Jarvis show, really.

0:33:07 -  Paris Martineau
No, no no, no, no, no. You know, I was just thinking. I want to say it again. I've said it before. I was just thinking, honest to God 10 minutes ago, how damned happy I am that Paris is on this.

0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
Isn't she fantastic Not to denigrate Gina Trapani or Stacey Higginbotham.

0:33:24 -  Paris Martineau
We've always had great Her predecessors. Paris stepped in and just did a wonderful job of making fun of Gramps.

0:33:32 - Leo Laporte
If there's one thing I think I do pretty well, it's picking hosts, and of course, I do it with a lot of help from our team, but including Lisa, who's brilliant said Paris absolutely. Let's get Paris on.

0:33:47 -  Paris Martineau
Because Paris brings real expertise, real reporting and a great personality. Yeah, Paris is the best With a sense of nihilistic irony.

0:33:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I was thinking. Really, what this podcast needed is a deep nihilism and a fear of the unknown and known.

0:34:07 - Leo Laporte
You're the Nietzsche of podcasting. I think that's great.

0:34:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what people tell me.

0:34:15 - Leo Laporte
What is it? Whatever podcast is too long, as long as it doesn't kill you. It makes you stronger, or something I don't know?

0:34:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's definitely what they said that about. I think he said that didn't he. Whatever podcast doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, or something I don't know. Yeah, that's definitely what they said that about. I think he said that didn't he. Whatever podcast doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

0:34:30 - Leo Laporte
Makes you stronger.

0:34:31 -  Paris Martineau
Somebody's got to make an impersonating Nietzsche podcast.

0:34:36 - Leo Laporte
That would be kind of great Wow, if anybody, it'd be Paris, it'd be really good, it'd be you. Mm-hmm you, yeah, where was it? Oh yes, our show today. We do have a cheerful nihilism sticker already from joe. Thank you, joe, it's all pointless says paris, so let's go play skeeball. I think that's very good.

0:34:58 -  Paris Martineau
I like it it's the perfect image too.

0:35:00 - Leo Laporte
It's yeah, she looks like she's thinking about skeeball but, but about to mock somebody.

0:35:07 -  Paris Martineau
Yes.

0:35:09 - Leo Laporte
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what else is going?

0:38:22 -  Paris Martineau
on more. There was a very good paper that came out, uh this week that that looked mathematically at why hallucination is inevitable. It is impossible to get rid of it. It cannot calculate to that level, and I think that's, you know, really important. A we hate the word hallucination, it's anthropomorphic. But B this LLM should never be used where you need reliable data. I just happened to be this week, so now that I'm an old guy, I had to do my Medicare and with my wife I was well. How many digits is the Medicare number? I asked Google and the answer came right up 12. Yeah, guess what that was? Ai speaking right below it's wrong.

0:39:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow.

0:39:07 -  Paris Martineau
Wrong.

0:39:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Where did it get that from?

0:39:11 -  Paris Martineau
It just, it just wrong.

0:39:14 - Leo Laporte
Where did it get that from? Uh, it just, it just. Well, let me read to you from the abstract. This is from the paper alice in wonderland's simple tasks showing complete reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art large language models. It comes out of the university of bristol's school of electrical and electronic that's a different paper, but go ahead. Oh, it's not that, it's not the one you were talking about it.

0:39:32 -  Paris Martineau
It's one of them.

0:39:32 - Leo Laporte
No, but go ahead, it's a good one and I think in the abstract I've learned that in these scientific papers the abstract is sufficient for me. I can't really go much beyond that as soon as I see the equations I'm out, I'm out.

Claims of excelling in different functions and tasks rely on measurements taken across various sets of standardized benchmarks showing high scores for such models. We've all seen it in the news. You know it could pass the LSATs and you know it's better than a lawyer that kind of thing. We demonstrate in this paper a dramatic breakdown of function and reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models trained at the largest available scales, which claim strong function. The art models trained at the largest available scales, which claim strong function using a simple, short, conventional common sense problem formulated in concise natural language easily solved by humans. But the breakdown is dramatic as models also express strong overconfidence in their wrong solutions by often providing nonsensical reasoning-like explanations.

Let me see if I should find the problem. This is the Alice in Wonderland problem. It actually isn't that easy and I'll let you solve this for us. Okay, this is the basic Alice problem. Alice has, let's say, n is a number. Okay, these are. We're going to use variables. Alice has N brothers. She also has N brothers. She also has M sisters. How many sisters does Alice's brother have? Okay, let's say Alice has seven brothers M plus or M plus one. Alice had. Let's say I'll put numbers in Alice has seven brothers.

0:41:09 -  Paris Martineau
Let's presume that Alice uses the she her pronouns yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true Right Brothers and sisters and so forth.

0:41:15 - Leo Laporte
Alice has seven brothers, has four sisters. How many sisters does Alice's brother have and you said it exactly right N plus one, right. Yeah. Or M plus one the number of sisters plus one. Yeah, because you have to add Alice into that. That seems pretty simple, but it's amazing how poorly the models did on this. And then, as if that weren't enough, they even have some more complicated ones which actually I thought were a little beyond me. They have Alice Plus and so forth, so this isn't the one you were talking about.

0:41:51 -  Paris Martineau
So I think that's great. There's another one that's like this. It says this says by employing specifically we define a formal world where hallucination is defined as inconsistencies between a computable llm and a computable ground truth function. By employing results from learning theory, we show that llms cannot learn all the computable functions and will therefore always hallucinate.

0:42:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, this is by jiweiju sanjay jane and mohan uh kankan hali, from wherever they're, from the thing I think about this is interesting is the practical implication section of the paper, which they go through and list the following implications for AI practitioners, given what their study found, which is that all LLMs will hallucinate. The first implication is that all LLMs will hallucinate, and the second is without guardrails and fences, LLMs cannot be used for critical decision making. This is a direct corollary of the conclusion above. They write the purpose of guardrails and fences is to ensure that they operate within expectation and never deviate into harmful realities. They're absolutely necessary since all LLMs will hallucinate. The next one is without human control, LLMs cannot be used automatically in any safety critical decision making, in any safety-critical decision-making, which is something I feel like we've heard a lot from regulators and people who speak and research about the subject. It goes on to say conclude that research on LLM safety boundaries is crucial in ensuring sustainable development of LLMs. So they also I see our discussion last week.

0:43:30 - Leo Laporte
They also talk about some mitigations. For instance, we've talked before about rag. They say retrieval augmentation, which uses relevant external documents to ground llms, can help reduce knowledge gap and reduce hallucinations. Uh, you can also use prompts to improve knowledge, recall and reasoning. There are ways, in other words, to, to improve the result, and I I found that myself and at the same time, when I use rag, I don't automatically assume that the answer I'm getting back is accurate but?

0:44:01 -  Paris Martineau
but the guardrails, as we discussed last week, in my view can never, for this exact same reason, can never work fully, because you cannot anticipate just as it cannot compute every possibility, you cannot anticipate every possibility to guard against uh, especially because the.

0:44:16 - Leo Laporte
The bad stuff is going to come from humans so they claim and I I don't have, I don't claim the ability to judge a proof that, uh, hallucinations are inevitable and it's a mathematical proof, so it's a mathematical proof. Yeah, I'll have to take their word for it. They say any computable llm will hallucinate, inevitably hallucinate.

0:44:42 -  Paris Martineau
So uh this is also it. It they go ahead.

0:44:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I was there. There's also an interesting section in here about in defense of llms and hallucinations which begins although we've shown that llms will inevitably hallucinate, this does not undermine their tremendous value in enhancing productivity. Moreover, hallucination itself should not be viewed entirely negatively. First, the decision of an llm to use an llm is fundamentally a trade-off between precision and efficiency, which is largely determined by the application. It kind of goes on and they say. Moreover, it's crucial to recognize that LLMs are continuously evolving. Over time, we anticipate the nature of hallucinations will be better understood by human researchers and users. And finally, this last point I thought was interesting is hallucination is not entirely detrimental In art, literature and design the unintentional and unpredictable outcomes from an llm could inspire human creators and I think that is a

0:45:37 - Leo Laporte
reasonable point yeah, yeah, I've, I've said, I've said it many times humans make errors too. If you ask, I mean if you go down into the gas station not you leo how do I get to pittsburgh?

I've never made an error you're, you may well get some mistake. I know I've given out wrong directions in the past by accident. Humans make more mistakes, possibly even than LLMs. But that doesn't mean we say we'll never talk to a human, never ask a human for an answer. They're going to hallucinate. They're going to make mistakes. So I just think the mistake we make is not that that we assume they don't hallucinate, but that somehow, because it's a computer, we give it more. This is what stochastic parents was all about. We give it more weight difference.

0:46:21 -  Paris Martineau
Here's the difference the, the lm, does not know how to. It doesn't know that it doesn't know because it doesn't know anything. Yeah, and if that skill could, if it could be taught the skill of not knowing and admitting that, that'd be great. But that presumes that it can be taught the skill of knowing and it doesn't know anything.

0:46:44 - Leo Laporte
I think you're mistaken in this line of thought. It assumes somehow that we.

0:46:49 -  Paris Martineau
It's pretty catchy, though, isn't?

0:46:50 - Leo Laporte
it. Yeah, I like it. But it assumes somehow that we know whether we're right or wrong, or we know we're knowing we admit at times when we don't. That's the difference. No, that's not true. Ask Donald Trump if he's ever lied.

0:47:04 -  Paris Martineau
No, no, no. But have you ever seen an LLM say I don't know.

0:47:07 - Leo Laporte
No. Have you ever seen Donald Trump say I don't know? Well, but he's no LLM. But I'm just pointing out, humans do the same thing, yeah yeah, yeah, yes, but humans understand what their words mean.

0:47:19 - Jeff Jarvis
That they're forming sentences Doesn't matter, and understand the meaning they're communicating.

0:47:22 -  Paris Martineau
We think we do. Well, we have the skill of saying we don't know. Sometimes.

0:47:28 - Leo Laporte
So your argument is very tautological. You're saying somehow we're better because we're human and they're not.

0:47:34 -  Paris Martineau
No, no no, no, no, I wouldn't say that at all. I would say it's a different, we're judging it on our standards and it's different. There is a skill of knowing when to say I don't know, and the LLMs don't have that skill.

0:47:46 - Leo Laporte
That's not true either. By the way, Can they be taught that skill?

LLMs often say I don't know Well when the guardrail's in there and says I don't have current knowledge or I'm not built to do that. I think you're guilty of anthropomorphizing, and I think the real problem here is assuming that the human thought process is somehow magical and better than a thought process that all we can say is well, it's probabilistic, and we don't know that we don't do exactly the same thing. We probably are completely stochastic ourselves. So I think that it's a mistake to ascribe some magical ability to humans just because we think we understand how we work.

0:48:30 -  Paris Martineau
You're over-reading me. I'm not saying it's magical, I'm not saying it's even superior. I'm just saying that the reason this paper, what resonated with this paper for me, is that it doesn't know how to say. It doesn't know, and that's the logical conundrum that LLM builders are then stuck in. It is built to finish every sentence and to please us in the process of doing so.

0:48:57 - Leo Laporte
I don't think that's necessarily true.

0:48:59 - Benito Gonzalez
I think the problem here is that AI and human intelligence. This is a difference in kind, not in scale.

0:49:04 -  Paris Martineau
Yes, yes, yes, well said.

0:49:06 - Benito Gonzalez
So it's not like anyone is smarter. They just have different abilities, different skill sets, different, completely different, like I wouldn't say, I would never say that an LLM is going to be like a human or a human is ever going to be like an LLM Like this is.

0:49:19 -  Paris Martineau
Right, which is why AGI is BS. It's a different state of mind, great.

0:49:26 - Leo Laporte
Let me see. Do you know my?

0:49:28 - Jeff Jarvis
birthday. Leo is angrily typing.

0:49:35 - Leo Laporte
So I just asked chat gpt if it knew my birthday. It says I don't have your birthday noted down. Would you like to share it with me, which I take as an admission that I don't know. Do you know?

0:49:46 -  Paris Martineau
let me see give me a question uh is it? You know how to say you don't know will it be warm on my birthday?

0:49:52 - Leo Laporte
there you go. Will it be warm on my birthday? This is uh 4-0. By the way, I don't have your birthday information, so I can't check the weather for that specific day. I don't know. I think that's an, I don't know. I'm sorry, I hate to tell you and I don't think that's.

0:50:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean I don't. I think that it's incorrect to say that LLMs are capable of saying I don't know. They often do say that.

0:50:23 - Leo Laporte
That's what I think too, but I think that.

0:50:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It that, but responding with I do not know that information does not mean that a system as a whole is capable of having an understanding of what it does and does not know. That is a skill that even some humans have significant issue.

0:50:41 - Leo Laporte
Yes, if you ask me, can I get to the Triborough Bridge from the Bronx Expressway? If sometimes I might say I don't know. But I might also say, yeah, take a left on 4th Avenue and go four blocks and turn right, and I may not know that I don't know. I know I've given people directions incorrectly and only realized it later. Does that mean that I am somehow not human?

0:51:07 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's normal To err is to human To err is human.

0:51:12 - Leo Laporte
To answer correctly is ai. Um, all right, let's see we did. We talk about recall last week and we mentioned that microsoft completely backpedaled on that I don't think we talked about how they backpedaled but we did talk about reap yeah, they have. They have now said okay, it'll be opt-in.

0:51:38 -  Paris Martineau
Couldn't they have seen I mean anybody in the PR department to figure out? Are you sure we don't want to?

0:51:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is kind of my point is that Apple may not have better technology, but they sure have a better PR department. Yeah, they really are better at marketing. And this is where Microsoft, I think, is just lost. The lost the thread of all this. Um oh well, are you ready for immersive phone calls?

0:52:06 -  Paris Martineau
oh god, what is that? No, isn't the immersive is sound? Well, let let me. I don't know what it means. Here's what.

0:52:13 - Leo Laporte
Reuters says Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark made a phone call using new technology called immersive audio and video that improves the quality of a call with three-dimensional sound, making interactions more lifelike. The company said on Monday you see.

0:52:30 -  Paris Martineau
No, I want to hear. If I'm talking to you, I want to hear you. I don't want to hear the train going by.

0:52:34 - Leo Laporte
Current smartphone calls, Jeff, are monophonic, which compresses audio elements together and makes sound flatter and less detailed, but the new technology will bring 3D audio where a caller will hear everything as if they were there with the other person. Jenny Lukander, president of Nokia, said it's the biggest leap forward in the live voice calling experience since the introduction of monophonic telephony audio used in smartphones and PCs today. Pekka called Stefan Lindström, Finland's ambassador of digitalization and new technologies. They made the call. Here's the more important thing using a regular smartphone over a public 5G network, Is Nokia still?

0:53:23 -  Paris Martineau
a phone company.

0:53:25 - Leo Laporte
No, they don't even make phones anymore. They have sold off the brand to HMD, which makes all Nokia phones. I don't even know the point of this article. It's so silly. A vast majority of smartphones have at least two microphones with which this technology can be implemented by transmitting in real time the spatial characteristics of a call. So phones could do it.

0:53:48 - Jeff Jarvis
This reads to me are you guys familiar with the term? A beat sweetener.

0:53:53 - Leo Laporte
No, what's a beat sweetener. I like it.

0:53:55 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like a sort of story that beat reporters. Beat reporters are people who cover like a specific company or industry. You typically are going to have to publish regularly. Not everything you publish is going to be a scoop or a big exclusive or a story. Sometimes you do beat sweeteners.

It's what Maggie Habman is accused of doing with trump well, it's I mean in this case rewriting a press release right yeah, in the pejorative sense, might be rewriting a press release or doing a story that a source has maybe handed you information on. You don't think it's the most newsworthy, but it's not harming anybody. Like to have a puffy piece out. This reads to me like a beat.

0:54:32 - Leo Laporte
It's a beat sweetener for sure by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm. The technology, she writes, is part of the upcoming 5G advanced standard and Nokia aims to get licensing opportunities with the technology, which would likely take a few years to be available widely Beat sweetener.

0:54:49 - Benito Gonzalez
Look, I'm going to have a dissenting opinion. Here You've got two ears right.

0:54:56 - Jeff Jarvis
No, and when I'm talking to somebody on, how can you hear from 3D then?

0:54:58 - Benito Gonzalez
I would rather hear someone better than see somebody on a telephone call.

0:55:03 -  Paris Martineau
Really what is defined better? Okay, so like when Leo got his Ray-Ban glasses.

0:55:08 - Benito Gonzalez
Like the audio that came out it sounded like it was in the room. It sounded good. Yeah, it was good If I was on a phone call and the conversation sounded like the person was in front of me. That is better than seeing the person in front of me. Okay, wait a question, have you guys?

0:55:20 - Jeff Jarvis
had the calls over an iPhone using FaceTime audio.

0:55:27 - Leo Laporte
I know what you're saying. I feel like that the audio is crystalline clear, I feel like that.

0:55:30 - Jeff Jarvis
the audio is crystalline clear and in a way that sometimes is distracting, because I can hear every movement of my editor typing.

0:55:42 - Leo Laporte
I'm like I don't need to hear that while I'm on a call. This goes back to the history of telephony. Calls were first, you know, considered they tried to figure out what is the least quality we can send down the line and still be intelligible. Because, you know, even though it wasn't bits at the time, it was analog signals. They really needed to economize in how much data they sent down the line and they determined that what is an equivalent of seven? No, it's four bit. And they determined that what is an equivalent of seven? No, it's four bit.

Four bit audio it's very low quality audio was still intelligible and so the specification for the phone system, going back to the 20s, was this very, very low quality. And even though these constraints disappeared over time and it's possible, we went digital and was possible to have much better quality calls, just, I think, kind of inertia kept these calls at the equivalent of a four bit audio. And so all apple has done uh, with facetime audio and other call, others do it with wi-fi calling is say, you know you could have eight or even 16 bits of audio data. It would sound so much better. 16-bit is CD-quality audio. 8-bit sounds a little scratchy, 4-bit is terrible.

But, 3D, but you know how does?

0:57:06 -  Paris Martineau
Well? No, I know people who take it very seriously, and Benito is a sound guy. What is it about Def? Define?

0:57:14 - Benito Gonzalez
3d audio for me well, spatial audio that not super important to me, like uh, it's really more about quality yeah all right, yeah, yeah, and I I think that nobody's against having higher quality phone calls.

0:57:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a little gimmicky to try and call it 3D or pitch it like it's some huge leap.

0:57:35 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, the way I saw it, was like when I tried on Leo's metaglasses and how like it was actually kind of striking how good the audio was and it sounded like it was in the room and that's sort of what I was thinking.

0:57:44 - Leo Laporte
You could do a lot just by giving it full frequency. You know, I misstated. It wasn't 4-bit audio, it was 3.4 kilohertz. The bass could only go down to 3 hertz, 300 hertz, so you didn't really have any. It was, as you know, phone call sounds like this because it's all mid range, but that was enough for intelligibility. They did the least amount of bandwidth for intelligibility. Add a little bass, add a little treble, you know, add a little bit of maybe even stereo and it's going to sound. Stereo makes it sound 3d in some respects because you have kind of more of a sound stage. I don't, I don't know how you would do 3d audio with two microphones. I guess you could simulate it. Video games have 3d audio, right, benito yeah, there's already a bunch of yeah did you, did you in the day, buy a quadraphonic system?

no, I avoided that. I think I was just a little too young for quadraphonics, although our good friend bob heil, the late bob heil, who's uh did our ham nation show for a decade and is a ham radio guru is also sound and he created the quadraphonic sound for the who's Quadrophenia. He was the guy who gave I don't know Roger Daltrey a joystick so he could go like this Did you have a quadraphonic system, jeff?

0:59:09 - Jeff Jarvis
No, what's quadraphonic?

0:59:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, so remember, uh, it was a single source, right, it was monophonic. And then we got stereos, high fidelity stereos, with two speakers left and right, thinking being you only have two ears, that should be enough. Um, but then somebody said you know, if you had four speakers, you could have the sound come from behind you.

0:59:29 - Jeff Jarvis
And what if you had 16 speakers?

0:59:33 -  Paris Martineau
huh well, that's kind of what we're doing, uh, these days quadraphonic is sectaphonic yeah, it's, it's actually back, but at the same time we go to one speaker, things right, sonos or right, I mean the apple. Those apple speakers are very expensive. They're all one, one speaker.

0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
They're a single speaker. They claim oh no, but we can use imaging to make it sound like it's more full, or whatever.

0:59:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Do the Apple speakers do that funny thing that Sonos makes you do, where it plays that weird wobbly noise? No, they don't. You have to kind of move your phone up and down like you're praying to some sort of god.

1:00:09 - Leo Laporte
No, they do it all automatically. They don't have any. I think you don't have to really do that, but so does I always like to.

1:00:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's kind of yeah, it's good.

1:00:17 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean we are. It really depends on the room. The room is going to affect their 3d sound more than anything.

1:00:22 - Leo Laporte
So apple claims, uh, because they have microphones in these devices that they are always listening and always tuning for the room as you move around. Who knows, it's all just marketing. Four-channel sound began in the late 60s at the Eastman School of Music. The first quadraphonic recordings were often offered to the American consumer by Vanguard Records in June 1969. Even though it was called Vanguard Records, they were on reel-to-reel tape. In fact, most quadraphonic recordings were on reel-to-reel tape. In fact, most quadraphonic recordings were on reel-to-reel tape in eight, in eight track, uh, four speakers and a joystick I had.

1:01:02 -  Paris Martineau
I had my. My neighbor in my dorm at northwestern glenn glassman had quadraphonic in his little dorm, a single, his single dorm room.

1:01:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, and I'm sure you could hear it, oh.

1:01:15 -  Paris Martineau
God, he blasted all the time, Actually, you know and Benito.

1:01:19 - Leo Laporte
it's interesting that you, benito's our technical director and our producer, he and an audio guy, music musician. But it's interesting that we've always at Twit said that the most important thing is audio. Even though we do video. The video can be less than perfect, as it was earlier with you, paris, but if the audio is bad, it doesn't matter. Bad audio will kill whatever you're doing, even with perfect video, but bad video will not kill a show. As long as the audio is good, we can put up with it so in br they call themselves sound nazis.

1:01:58 - Jeff Jarvis
They are I am such a uh sound freak when it comes to audio because I listen to a lot of podcasts and, I guess, shows and things like that. My biggest pet peeve is when a podcast I love has like a guest on, especially for like multiple episodes, and you can hear that they're using airpods as they're like I can tell the sound and I can't listen to it. It drives me up the wall. I'm like just send them a 20 mic.

1:02:21 - Leo Laporte
Guys, come on now you know why we send people.

1:02:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh listen now, I know yeah, it makes a difference.

1:02:29 - Leo Laporte
Uh, and sometimes we do have people on zoom. For whatever reason, the quality is not great. Benito will testify to this. It drives me nuts. Yep, I turn off my mic and I scream and yell.

1:02:43 -  Paris Martineau
Well, or the real way to torture Leo, which I did many times, was to be in a hotel somewhere in Germany.

1:02:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh God, Notice, I don't complain about you being yellow, the slowest audio in the world. I complain about the audio being terrible.

1:02:56 -  Paris Martineau
Yes, exactly as the audio goes, then we're going to give up. Goodbye, jeff, goodbye.

1:03:01 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, though I'm a little bit less, I do more like the. I think video has become more and more important to me, and when you see somebody like alex lindsey, who gets great audio and great video, that probably is the the best way to go, if you can right um it also changes the character of our conversation, the fact that we can see each other absolutely, and this is why I actually really like zoom now, because it's much better.

We use a small screen a little behind the scenes we have, uh, instead of using a zoom call, well, I guess you would. In a regular Zoom call you'd see everybody too, right, but we use Zoom ISO. What we used to do is we'd have a different call for everybody Back in the day. Jeff, you were on one computer.

1:03:47 -  Paris Martineau
Skype.

1:03:47 - Leo Laporte
I was on another Skype it would be Skype, but everybody was on a different computer. I was on another Skype. It would be Skype, but everybody was on a different computer. And that was because I wanted to isolate the sound of each person. So I could fix it, if I had to, that it wasn't all mixed down together. But we now use something called Zoom ISO, which is a single Zoom call so you can see everybody, but we still get isolated sound from each person, although we don't use it. Apparently that was last year. I was so upset. Last year I was informed oh, we haven't had isolated soundtracks in in years. Leo, we got rid of this, you thought you were really doing something there.

1:04:22 - Jeff Jarvis
What?

1:04:23 - Leo Laporte
that's the foundational principle of everything I stand for. Oh well, who, who?

1:04:30 -  Paris Martineau
wants to tell them.

1:04:32 - Leo Laporte
I think it was very much like that. It was like, well, you see, and it came up because we had a show I can't remember what it was, but one of the people on the show there was a lot of bad audio, they were low, I think and I said, well, just mix their track up. And they said, well, yeah, Boss, they're all mixed together. Now I said when did that happen? Oh, years ago. I said what See, I have this illusion, which they try to preserve, that I am in control of what's happening here. I am not. So how about? Mike Lynch cleared? This was a big story.

Yeah, hewlett Packard bought a advertising company called Autonomy for $11 billion in 2011. Shortly thereafter, hewlett Packard realized this company was worthless. They wrote it off on their taxes and so forth. The company was Autonomy was known for software that could extract information from unstructured sources like phone calls, email or video. It was the largest ever takeover of a British technology business. The CEO made half a billion dollars from the sale. A year later, hp wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion and then sued. In fact, us prosecutors brought charges against the CEO, accusing him of inflating the value of the firm, using backdated agreements to mislead about the company's sales.

1:06:14 -  Paris Martineau
Didn't they force cases?

1:06:15 - Leo Laporte
to extradite him too. Yeah, they got him into the US. That's right. That's right. He was extradited after a UK judge ruled in favor of HP in a similar civil fraud case in 2022. Hp is seeking a reported $4 billion in that case. Lynch, who was a former U government advisor, sat on the boards of the bbc in the british library. He was held on house arrest in the us, went on trial in march, was acquitted last week entirely the cfo is in prison.

1:06:49 -  Paris Martineau
I think yeah, he said it wasn't my fault.

1:06:51 - Leo Laporte
I may have been the ceo, but I had no idea what was going on.

1:06:56 - Jeff Jarvis
It wasn't my idea we were doing all this fraud. Meanwhile, the cfo was uh convicted of fraud. That evidence at trial says. The doj? Uh demonstrated that for more than two years prior to the sale, the cFO used sophisticated accounting methods to falsely inflate Autonomy's revenues to make it appear that it was growing when it was not. Specifically, the CFO used backdated contracts, round trips, channel stuffing and other forms of accounting fraud to fraudulently inflate their publicly reported revenues by as much as 15% one year other year and 21 the next lynch's defense hinged on two points.

1:07:40 - Leo Laporte
One, I don't know what was going on I was just a ceo and two, it was hp's job to determine if we were worth what they were paying for. It. Not our fault, man Dude diligence, have you heard?

of that. Yeah, they overpaid they should, I think his attorney said the verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP's well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch. Well see, you were inept, you should have known it was fraudulent. Anyway, he's off the hook and so that's a follow-up on a story we've been covering literally for 13 years.

1:08:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Unbelievable, uh good news is interesting because I feel like right now we're in this period where we've been seeing a lot of similar cases. Uh, come up in the startup scene of startups that had been acquired or were trying to be acquired being investigated and sometimes having their executives convicted for doing the same sort of fraud, and people often like to frame it as if this is a side effect of the latest crazy money period in the venture capital industry, when you know people have been doing fraud forever.

1:08:56 - Leo Laporte
Let me take a break and then I will talk about a very clever trial tactic that Google just successfully used. It was good thinking up there in the Google land. But first a word from our sponsor. You're watching this Week in Google with jeff jarvis and paris martineau. Jeff is. Jeff is not yellow today, so I'm happy no, he's a stark white he's just deathly pale, yeah I'm just.

1:09:22 -  Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's what I am. I'm a ghost. I don't exist. My I, I. You put my fingers through my head, but I I fake it, are you?

1:09:30 - Leo Laporte
coming back. I heard before the show. I heard you talking sub rosa. You said you might be coming back out to sacramento to testify again to the assembly.

1:09:39 -  Paris Martineau
There's some talk. Maybe last time I just went around door-to-door, um, this time the, the bad legislation which just got worse, um, is coming up. Uh, here's a funny little aside before you go to your break. So this is, this is the legislation trying to get the platforms to pay for news, uh, even just to read it, to access it.

It's a reading tax, but I'll leave my rant aside the journalism preservation act, and so it was presumed to just be um google and meta. The meta said we're taking news out, we're doing what we did in Canada. If this passes, the current bill specifies hold on, let me get it real quickly here specifies that it refers to any company with over this amount of revenue and over this many users and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, except any firm that earns at least half its revenue from quote the manufacturing and sales of company-branded devices and hardware to consumers. Ergo, apple has not only good marketers, it has damn good lobbyists.

1:10:47 - Leo Laporte
Wow, because Apple has a very vigorous news organization. They have many hundreds of journalists working there, some of them who used to work for us, and they have Apple News, which they make a lot of money on. Wow, that's very interesting.

1:11:01 -  Paris Martineau
They just got excluded from this bad bill, wow.

1:11:06 - Jeff Jarvis
One final thing before you go to your break. Since we're talking about flights, go to your break. Uh, since we're talking about flights, a twit, a twig listener added me and jeff on blue sky this week, asking has a date been picked for the twig meetup in new york? Um, later this summer?

1:11:22 - Leo Laporte
no date has been picked uh, but uh, I have mentioned this before. Uh, lisa and I are going to go on a on a cruise to view the autumn foliage from New York to Montreal. The boat leaves September 9th, so we figure that week of Memorial Day I'm not Memorial Labor Day probably maybe the 7th we will have a meetup. Joe, our street photographer in the Discord in the club, has said he wants to put together a photo walk, which would be so much fun. He's got a great itinerary the high line, do the high line, yeah, actually. Uh, yeah, I should um pull up his itinerary anyway. Uh, no date has been set.

1:12:04 -  Paris Martineau
I guess I should get to work and do that said, said person said he wanted to do to uh reserve a flight from florida. Oh my god. So what would be? I mean we're not worth it.

1:12:13 - Leo Laporte
I want to have you and Mary Jo Foley and a bunch of other you know twit people join us. What would be a good day? Is it too early to say what a good day would be in early September? Does it matter what day of the Let me check.

1:12:29 -  Paris Martineau
My Wednesdays are always bad for me because I podcast. Oh yeah, we can't do it. We'd have to do it on a Thursday. Yeah, we've got this whole thing called a podcast.

1:12:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, so we're leaving on a Monday. How about Thursday?

1:12:45 -  Paris Martineau
I don't know when we're flying out. You're going to hear the 4th to the 9th.

1:12:53 - Leo Laporte
That's what I have in my calendar. I don't know when we're going to fly out, I figure maybe we should do this on the 6th.

1:12:55 -  Paris Martineau
How's the 6th for you? Friday?

1:12:56 - Jeff Jarvis
the 6th A Friday Is Friday, good it's reasonable.

1:12:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, All right. Well, it's not written in stone, but put September 6th down. Plan to be in New York. New York, We'll find a venue we can hang out and Joe will take us on a photo walk.

1:13:16 -  Paris Martineau
Does will take us on a photo walk. Does that work for you, Joe? Anyway, we'll consult with all the stakeholders. There's a place in Midtown that's a German half-brow imitation.

1:13:23 - Leo Laporte
Did they spank you? I hear that in the half-brows.

1:13:30 -  Paris Martineau
Look at Paris's curled lip In Germany the half-brows.

1:13:35 - Leo Laporte
Frankly, my curled lip was at the word Midtown, not the German half-brow she would rather be spanked than go to Midtown.

1:13:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Listen, I'll go there for you guys. Just if we're doing a photo walk, it might not be the most photogenic place.

1:13:48 - Leo Laporte
This is the world-famous half-brow in Las Vegas where they will spank you while you're eating as a half brow. I just want to just show you this and if there is spanking involved, I wonder if I could require. I don't know if I maybe could say if you're a club member, you'll get to know he's leaning over everything. Oh, she's asking him to brace oh my god, this seems like such a bad idea.

1:14:17 - Jeff Jarvis
She's so clinical about it. Is she going to hit him hard? She's really asking him to brace? Why is?

1:14:23 - Leo Laporte
he smiling oh no she's winding up, oh he's happy he gave her a. Yeah, I flimed her.

1:14:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, that's what he came for. Oh, now his friend is.

1:14:38 - Leo Laporte
Ja, come for the Hofbrau, the Wienerschnitzel. Stay for the schpenking. This is just weird. I don't know, maybe it's just this Las Vegas Hofbrau, but it's quite famous for Seems like something Germans would do, I don't know. A little paddling, that'll be a paddling for you.

1:15:02 -  Paris Martineau
You know what's better than getting a swift.

1:15:06 - Leo Laporte
That was hard.

1:15:06 - Jeff Jarvis
You couldn't hear that.

1:15:08 - Leo Laporte
Jesus, it's turning bright red. You know what's better than getting a swift paddle to the tush, getting a fast mail account? This episode of this week in google is brought to you by fast mail. I ask this question all the time about people would call the radio show and say I'm on AOL mail and I just I can't figure it. If you about email, if you care about your privacy, why are you still using free email? Spend a couple of bucks and get a real email service like Fastmail.

Fastmail is an independent, employee-owned email provider. They've been doing it for over 20 years. This morning, I said hello to the Fastmail CEO, former CTO, and thanked him. To the Fastmail CEO, former CTO, and thanked him. I said thank you for doing an email service that puts customers first. It offers a premium inbox experience where privacy is job one Instead of ads and creepy data sharing. Fastmail customers get a clean interface with innovative features that value your time. Fastmail is a recognized leader in the email world. I thanked him for his contributions to open source software, like the Cyrus IMAP server that they use. But he also said and open standards. And I said yeah, and open standards. In fact, many other email services follow Fastmail's lead when it comes to email, contacts and calendars.

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You're of Govna. Your governor, kathy hawkell. How do you pronounce that? Hochul has, uh, or said she will sign the bill to protect children from addictive recommendation algorithms. It's the safe act for kids. It will stop addictive feeds exploitation. Passed by the New York State Assembly. She said she'll sign it into law by now. She probably has. It keeps platforms like TikTok and Instagram Actually, I'm not dead against From serving content to users under the age of 18 based on recommendation algorithms, meaning instead, they will have to provide reverse chronological feeds for child users, which which?

is which research shows is worse well, this is what I would say. The clear problem with any bill like this is any age verification system is going to be a massive privacy problem period period If you have to prove you're over 18 or you know you. Just that's not going to. That's a that's a horrible idea. So instead, why don't we just make this law require social networks offer reverse chronological feeds for all users, but again?

1:20:48 -  Paris Martineau
it's worse.

1:20:49 - Leo Laporte
Why is it worse? I like I don't.

1:20:52 -  Paris Martineau
Research shows. It's in my book. You'll see it in my book. Whose research? Meta's research Researchers no, no, no, no, no, no. Researchers who looked.

1:21:00 - Leo Laporte
What's worse about it?

1:21:01 -  Paris Martineau
Two researchers two researchers I trust greatly, from NYU, josh Tucker, and from University of Texas, Austin, talia Stroud ran an experiment where, at scale to say what happens if we just do a reverse cron with a group versus a regular group and people are less well informed, there's more junk in the feed.

1:21:24 - Leo Laporte
They end up using it less because it's a less pleasant experience, um, which maybe you could see as positive well, the one thing I can grant you is obviously the reason these companies don't do that they do recommendation feeds is it produces a stickier site.

1:21:38 -  Paris Martineau
It produce it's also just a better experience. I don't think it's a bad. I will disagree with you to the bitter end.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
I know you always the the thing that's wrong with facebook. The reason I don't use facebook is because it puts so much crap in my feed. I follow people I'm interested on facebook. I want to see their posts in the order in which they post them. That's all. I don't want to see all this other stuff. Well, that's a reverse chronological feed.

1:22:02 -  Paris Martineau
Twitter same thing, so Hochul's doing this as pure moral panic, according to my book. She said in a press conference do you understand how algorithm works? It follows you.

1:22:12 - Leo Laporte
It plays on you. Clearly she doesn't. Yeah, I mean obviously that's so, that's BS.

1:22:20 -  Paris Martineau
But I think many, many users would say no, that's what I want. Let's do it on the basis of research. Let's do it on the basis of fact, not on presumption. Okay, maybe I'm wrong. Okay, then let's study it and decide what is the best kind of feed if you're going to have a kid on instagram to give them instead. This is just the presumption that algorithms are evil. Let's get rid of them, and there is research that says it's worse. You might like it this way paris, you're the tiebreaker you're the kid.

Oh, she muted herself. They're muted.

1:22:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, paris, yo paris, you're muted sorry guys, I don't know how I got muted I liked it um briefly I did a brief uh research of the um research that you're talking about, um, and it's interesting because it doesn't pertain to um specifically. What the research pertains to is whether or not using a reverse chronological feed would lessen political polarization in adults.

And it found that it didn't. It mostly found that using a reverse chronological feed just stopped people from using the platform. This is a quote from that researcher. I'm forgetting his first name, but his last name is Tucker, josh Tucker. Josh Tucker, he said we did find, actually, that it had a big impact on what was going on in the platform. So people who are putting the reverse chronological feed on Facebook ended up using Instagram more than people who are getting the reverse chronological feed on Facebook. We did a separate study with people on Instagram and people on Instagram who got the reverse chronological feed started using TikTok, and I mean it makes sense. The reason why the platforms are using engagement driven algorithms is they've figured out what to keep people on the platform with, and I think that you're right, jeff, in the sense that it would be really interesting to redo this research when it comes to children and see, because, I mean, I think part of what people are trying to solve for in making these laws is the idea that these feeds are addictive, which they kind of are.

They're trying to give kids access to these social media platforms, perhaps in a less addictive way, which it seems like the reverse chronological feed would do.

1:24:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it wouldn't be as appealing. It wouldn't be as appealing. It's not as appealing. I think it's fine. Yeah, it wouldn't be as appealing. It wouldn't be as appealing. It's not as appealing, I think it's fine.

1:24:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's all right for kids to have a slightly less appealing version of Instagram if they're going to have any version of Instagram at age 13.

1:24:48 -  Paris Martineau
But what it could also mean is your dumbest, stupidest, worst friend stuff, which the algorithm might know smart enough, but that's why I follow them.

1:24:54 - Leo Laporte
To put it I want to know what my dumb, stupid friend's team is old.

1:24:59 -  Paris Martineau
You're not 14 years old, right? If you have a bunch of 14-year-old boys or girls who are putting dumb stuff in and the algorithm knows better? Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa.

1:25:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I will say if it's truly dumb, stupid stuff, the algorithm is going to show it to people.

1:25:15 - Leo Laporte
The algorithm knows better is the big problem right there. The algorithm does not know better what you should show a 14-year-old.

1:25:23 -  Paris Martineau
The algorithm knows one thing Based on research.

1:25:25 - Leo Laporte
it could no.

1:25:26 -  Paris Martineau
Maybe no, but that's not what it does.

1:25:29 - Leo Laporte
The algorithm does one thing, which is maximize.

1:25:32 -  Paris Martineau
It can do whatever it's told to do. You can tune it differently. It maximizes the change, so maybe you want an algorithm, but you want the algorithm to be different.

1:25:39 - Leo Laporte
So are you saying you would approve of a New York state law that would tell no?

1:25:44 -  Paris Martineau
I wouldn't approve of a law in any case. No, I would approve of what. Paris just said Right. I would approve of what Paris just said is let's do research and then you can say this is the best feed for young people. I don't know what the answer to that is. Let's do that then, and it could be a very different algorithm, that's okay.

1:26:04 - Leo Laporte
It could be reverse chron maybe, but let's, let's do it on the basis of fact on stupid presumption right now I they used to have a button that said chronological. They no longer do and as a result, I get angelina jolie lovers in my facebook feed.

I know uh, dolly parton stays working nine to five so every time my feet is awful hide all from angelina jolie followers. Now let's see what else I get. Okay, that's good press democrat. I don't follow them, but at least it's my local news. The glam of the 20s in old hollywood. Loretta young, what do they think? I'm 67 years old, interesting grammatical okay, this is a guy I follow.

1:26:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay old, past days a photo of times square in 1912. I'm not following. You block them. I that you block them I block them.

1:26:59 - Leo Laporte
That's right. But the problem is I did this, I did this for months and months and months and the feed never got better, there's always more shit.

1:27:07 -  Paris Martineau
Sorry, john, there's always more junk.

1:27:19 - Leo Laporte
And so if Kathy Hawkle can persuade Facebook to offer everyone a reverse chronological feed and, by the way, they used to, and then they made it so that the settings stopped- you may be happier, and I'm not against that, that's fine.

1:27:26 -  Paris Martineau
But what I am going to insist on is we don't know that it's better for kids.

1:27:31 - Leo Laporte
I am happy, though, to see that apparently Stormy Daniels wants to follow me, even though her name is different. I don't understand that.

1:27:39 - Jeff Jarvis
She's Robin M Mayer.

1:27:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that must be her real name, so there's still a way to get to that feed Leo. How do I get to the chronological? Please tell me Feeds, feeds, feeds, feeds. Okay, friends, friends and then just friends.

1:27:53 - Benito Gonzalez
There you go.

1:28:00 - Leo Laporte
And now it's a reverse chronological feed of just people I know so far, so good. I mean, you're still going to get ads and stuff. Well, I still get people who are going to refeed memes, coffees, debate, fight club, that's their fault. But that's my friends for you. So that's okay, I can live with that.

1:28:12 -  Paris Martineau
Yeah, this is good. Where is it again? Where's?

1:28:13 - Leo Laporte
feeds. Nobody knows God.

1:28:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I love the part of the show where we explain how to use basic tech platforms. Here's how you use Facebook.

1:28:21 - Leo Laporte
Now I should point out that if I press the home button or refresh the page, it's going to go right back to this. So every time I go to Facebook, but maybe if I bookmark feeds, friends is there. Maybe I could do that. Yeah, maybe I'll make that as a bookmark.

1:28:36 -  Paris Martineau
It does have a URL of filter equals.

1:28:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so I'll make that my uh, my bit, my facebook bookmark. I still won't ever go there.

1:28:42 -  Paris Martineau
I'll go to instagram because it's much more h underscore crop, so yeah okay, I have a question for you guys.

1:28:48 - Jeff Jarvis
When you use instagram, how are you using it? Are you scrolling through the feed or are you looking at stories?

1:28:54 - Leo Laporte
I stopped, I stopped. It's gotten so bad and now they're saying we're going to force you to look at ads. In fact, they're even contemplating putting interstitial ads in your friend's video. So you're watching Saul Hank cook up a fine prime rib sandwich and in the middle of it you got an ad. What Now? That hasn't happened to me yet.

1:29:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Revenue always must go up Leo.

1:29:16 - Leo Laporte
The only time I ever go to Instagram to see what my son is up to. Other than that, I used to be an Instagram addict. My wife still is but it is no longer the people you follow. It's so many other people and it's a lot of ads, like here's one for need a break from alcohol no, so there's a way to get to that feed too, if you want to. There is yeah Like no, so there's a way to get to that feed too, if you want to. There is yeah, like the reverse, chronological feed.

1:29:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it's up in the corner.

1:29:41 - Benito Gonzalez
So scroll all the way back up. Yeah, no, no, no, go back, go back. Go to Instagram. Click on Instagram.

1:29:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how to use Instagram. How do?

1:29:49 - Jeff Jarvis
you use that?

1:29:50 - Leo Laporte
Click on Go back, click, and that's just going to be the people I follow, yep. Okay, oh, that's clear enough. Okay, that's good. So good, am I going to see ads? You'll probably see ads still, yeah.

1:30:05 -  Paris Martineau
Yeah, okay, but you used to buy things from Instagram.

1:30:08 - Leo Laporte
Well, I know that's part of the reason I stopped using it is because I kept buying underwear and stuff. Oh look, here we are.

1:30:20 - Jeff Jarvis
This is good, this is a twitter. Yeah, I will say, after talking a lot of smack about my me never finding anything good on my instagram ads, my instagram ads have sworn in quality.

1:30:24 -  Paris Martineau
Ah see, all you have to do is complain. What have you bought paris? What have you bought I?

1:30:28 - Leo Laporte
got some shoes did you get the birchbox shoes with the extra wide toe toe thing you have to be? You have to be over 60 to get that weird looking shoes.

1:30:42 - Jeff Jarvis
The girlies in williamsburg love it whenever I wear them, so really what?

1:30:45 - Leo Laporte
what's the brand? I'll tell you what charlotte stone charlotte stone there's a uh a sneaker brand I think it's dc that I always know if somebody is an instagram nut because they get those sneakers and they're they have. They look like they have little springs in the heels and when I'm going around oh, wait a second.

1:31:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you talking about z coils?

1:31:06 - Leo Laporte
maybe it's z coils, I don't know.

1:31:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, I see them I don't think that these are on.

1:31:11 - Leo Laporte
These are no, no, that's not that. That's cute, though. Hold on, let me wait do you? Wear these. Wait, they have little. They have little springers in the heel. It's like a pogo stick attached to the heel of your shoe. That's why she's taller than I thought.

1:31:25 - Jeff Jarvis
You do wear them. I got a. These are a vintage pair I got on eBay.

1:31:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you never wear them, you just put them on the wall.

1:31:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I wear them all the time Really.

1:31:36 - Leo Laporte
Do people look funny at you?

1:31:42 - Jeff Jarvis
No, people come up to me and they're like whoa cool shoes, where did you get them? Um, or I've had multiple times. Someone I know will, who knows I have these shoes, will send me a screenshot of someone else they know's instagram story that I don't know of my shoes.

1:31:56 - Leo Laporte
Wow, all right, because they kind.

1:31:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Because they kind of look. They look like sneakers with heels, but they're springy. They're actually orthopedic shoes. They're very comfy.

1:32:04 - Leo Laporte
But they don't look like orthopedic shoes.

1:32:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, no, they look like weird space shoes. He's a dorkier.

1:32:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, my Birchbox shoes, not Birchbox. What is it? Birchbox? That's not the Birchbox, it's a makeup company. Yeah, no, no, I can't remember the name of it.

1:32:19 -  Paris Martineau
You get a shoe a week yeah.

1:32:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, but just one. You've got to wait until they send you the pair. That's actually a great idea, so Google moving right along.

1:32:32 - Leo Laporte
Google had a clever idea. Remember, google is being sued by the United States Department of Justice over Monopoly, particularly in online advertising. The government asked for a jury trial. Now, that's interesting because the only reason they could ask for a jury trial is that they were asking for monetary damages to compensate federal agencies that bought online ads and, they say, were overcharged because Google's ad product was anti-competitive. The dollar values associated with the claims are small only three quarters of a million dollars, but enough that the DOJ could say your Honor, we are looking for compensatory damages for our government agencies, in addition to shutting Google's ad business down. So what did google do? They wrote him a check. They wrote a check not just for 750 000, but for treble damages. So for what is that a?

little more a little more than uh, three million dollars. I mean Google big deal. They wrote him a check and now the judge says oh well, I guess you're not going to get a jury trial. The US District Judge Leonie Brinkema will now be the sole arbiter. And actually that's good for Google, right, because a jury in general juries don't like these big companies and it's unpredictable what a jury will do. But a judge, maybe you could assume, will be a little bit more knowledgeable. So at a hearing last week in Alexandria, justice Department lawyers said the check is insufficient. Your Honor to moot the damages, how dare they.

Judge Brinkham has said no. The amount of Google's check covered the highest possible amount the government could have won. In its initial filings she likened the receipt of the money which was paid unconditionally to the government, regardless of whether the tech giant prevailed in its arguments to strike a jury trial, as equivalent to receiving a quote wheelbarrow of cash, of cash. It feels a little wrong that Google should be able to say well, I'd like to write you a check for two and a half million dollars. Now what do you say? And then get off the jury trial. But it worked. This is separate from the DC case.

1:34:54 -  Paris Martineau
Somebody earned their bonus at Google.

1:34:56 - Leo Laporte
Good move lawyer.

1:34:58 -  Paris Martineau
A lot of back slapping on that one Just write him a check.

1:35:00 - Leo Laporte
And it worked. Just cut him a check. Cut him a check. I'll have to remember that next time I'm sued for treble damages. Just cut him a check. Let's see what else is going on, did you? I should go look at what you guys put in, shouldn't I? Because that's what really matters?

1:35:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I should go look at what you guys put in, shouldn't I, because that's what really matters. Do you want a completely irrelevant story? Yes, it's down where my pick of the week starts Down, low, down low below. Line 135. Joey Chestnut is out of the 2024 Nathan Hot Dog Eating Contest.

1:35:37 - Leo Laporte
You know what, Lisa?

1:35:38 - Jeff Jarvis
For vegan.

1:35:39 - Leo Laporte
Franks this morning. Lisa said she was going to sign me up for this. Well, leo here's what I'm saying.

1:35:48 - Jeff Jarvis
You should, because have you ever? Have you guys ever watched the Nathan's? Hot dog eating contest.

1:35:52 - Leo Laporte
It's the most revolting thing, the actual hot dog eating.

1:35:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Disgusting. The 10 minutes before, phenomenal because of the announcer, this guy George Shea, who's kind of the mastermind behind all of it. If we go to line 136, we can play the sort of this is the intro to Joey Chestnut. That happens.

1:36:13 - Leo Laporte
This is when Joey was still competing. The legendary there will be a day that is the end, the collapse of time and all that stood within it, a day of nothing.

1:36:28 -  Paris Martineau
Of no one, of nowhere.

1:36:30 - Leo Laporte
This is from ESPN.

1:36:31 -  Paris Martineau
But that day is not today.

1:36:34 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the usual MO at the Hot Dog Game Contest.

1:36:39 - Leo Laporte
Today, we blinded the earth with our desire.

1:36:43 -  Paris Martineau
And while it is still ours, we will bend this.

1:36:46 - Leo Laporte
By the way, he's talking to a. Coney Island crowd filled with people wearing hats that look like hot dogs. And here he is, ladies and gentlemen, and then Joey.

1:36:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Chestnut rises from the earth.

1:37:00 - Leo Laporte
A humble consequence of carbon, the fleeting fray of life. You wouldn't want to face him right.

1:37:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I am in that crowd somewhere. I was there that night, were you.

1:37:12 - Leo Laporte
You saw him rise up.

1:37:14 - Jeff Jarvis
And I had no idea that this is what every intro is like at the hot dog eating contest. The guy, his whole MO, he spends months coming up with these intros it's so fun. And he, I think, told what was it? The New Yorker? I wish I could find a way to open the festival by speaking in tongues. It's incredible. This guy's great. Anyway, I'm sad that we won't get this this year.

1:37:35 - Leo Laporte
So Joey has decided he's out because there's a vegan dispute over vegan Franks. Joey got a deal.

1:37:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Joey got a sponsorship deal for Impossible Foods to. You know, probably do some social media posts, some ad campaigns about the Impossible hot dog the impossible, uh, hot dog. Apparently part of one of the things I found quite interesting about the story is part of being a champion of the nathan's hot dog eating contest, which again happens one day a year on fourth of july. They pay joey chestnut like three hundred thousand dollars a year as part of that he was offered a 1.2 million dollar four-year contract yeah, you couldn't pay me enough to eat 72 hot dogs in.

1:38:24 - Leo Laporte
In what is it? An hour, half an hour? How?

1:38:26 - Jeff Jarvis
long, not not an hour, like minutes oh yeah, and it is crazy and I mean, I don't know if I was getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and all I had to do is one day of eating a lot of hot dogs. I feel like I could eat a lot of hot dogs.

1:38:42 - Leo Laporte
He has won every year since 2016.

1:38:44 -  Paris Martineau
He is that good oh yeah, yeah, yeah he is, and his technique, you know, is to flood it with water, so his stomach gets jammed, not only with how many hot dogs, is it? 76. 76 hot dogs, but also gallons of water.

1:39:00 - Leo Laporte
And imagine a watered down bun is disgusting oh, do you have to eat the bun as well as the dog? Yeah, you have to eat the bun.

1:39:07 - Jeff Jarvis
They dunk the bun in water to make that's the idea. But the dispute comes from the fact. I guess part of the clause to get paid your hundreds of thousands of dollars of hot dog yearly money is that you can't hawk other dogs here's what uh mle, which is what is major league? Eating major league eating.

1:39:25 - Leo Laporte
You're kidding here's what mle said in a statement we are devastated to learn that joey chestnut has chosen to represent a rival brand that sells oh, oh, my God plant-based hot dogs rather than competing in the 24 Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. Mle and Nathan's went to great lengths in recent months to accommodate Joey and his management team, agreeing to the appearance fee and allowing Joey to compete in a rival, unbranded hot dog eating contest on Labor Day. For nearly two decades we've worked on the same basic hot dog exclusivity provisions. You can look it up. However, it seems that Joey and his managers have prioritized a new partnership with a different brand over our longtime relationship. Joey Chestnut, they go on to say, is an American hero. We would love nothing more than to have him at the Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. We hope he returns when he's not representing a rival brand.

It would be a shame if those impossible meat dogs were shoved down your throat.

1:40:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, sorry, they didn't say that, for comparison, the guy who placed second last year ate 49 hot dogs, basically 30 less. It's not even close. I guess this year it'll be a tight competition if he doesn't. Yeah, it's not even close. I mean, I guess is he gonna, it'll be an impressive. It'll be a tight competition if he does yeah, it's good.

1:41:03 - Leo Laporte
Actually we got joey out of there because he was really clogging it up. So to speak.

1:41:07 -  Paris Martineau
It's like tiger woods breaking his leg.

1:41:10 - Benito Gonzalez
You know a japanese guy that beats everybody.

1:41:12 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought there was well no he was banned from the competition because he, I believe, jumped on stage and beat someone up.

1:41:23 -  Paris Martineau
Wow, I'm trying to remember.

1:41:25 - Leo Laporte
Wow, okay, joey Chestnut World record is 76 hot dogs and buns set in 2021. He's the king undisputed. It's kind of like, oh, here he is eating, oh, this is the most gross thing ever. Oh it is, this is for ESPN. It just is. Where's the bun? Oh, I see he's shoving in after the hot dogs.

1:41:53 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, he like sticks it in a glass of water so it turns into a little ball of bread.

1:41:59 -  Paris Martineau
That alone is disgusting. Is that his special technique?

1:42:02 - Leo Laporte
Do they get mustard on here? Look at Joey, he's already at eight minutes in he's up to 14 hot dogs. It's not even close. It's not even close.

1:42:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that Mrs Chestnut? No, that is, I believe, the women's winter. There was a mrs chestnut who was engaged to. Joey chestnut was also a competitive eater, but they um broke up right before the hot dog eating contest when, before they got married and this was, of course, part of the george shea intro, which is like he married him and then divorced then uh called off the engagement so that he had a void that could only be filled with hot.

1:42:47 - Leo Laporte
Also, you actually went to this. I can't believe you went. I did, I did.

1:42:53 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the perfect Japanese champion was banned due to a contract dispute and then he ended up trying to jump on stage, so then I think he was banned again. But I did go a couple of years ago because one of my friends got us VIP tickets, which is where you get to stand in the front there, even though it's not really a ticketed event.

1:43:15 - Leo Laporte
Do you get slobbered on?

1:43:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm worried about getting hurled upon after the con we still kind of I think we were like three rows of people back who's the horrible comic with the watermelons um gallagher, gallagher there is a chugging contest also, one of the many uh leading up events, and people like chug a gallon of something.

and the thing that baffled me is, after the hot dog eating contest was over, we had our day at coney island. We we went to L&B Spumoni Gardens, a great pizza place not too far from Coney Island, and a lot of the guys from the food eating competitions and the winners of the chugging competition were there eating giant pizza and I was like how, how do you have room?

1:43:53 - Leo Laporte
I think they've got a well, I don't know. Anyway, let's take a break.

1:43:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't know. Anyway, let's take a break.

1:43:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, they've got a hurling clause where you can't vomit for a certain amount of time afterwards. Oh, really, like what is it though? Ten minutes, five minutes, what is it? I mean at some point Leo's dad must come up.

1:44:09 -  Paris Martineau
Remember that backpack.

1:44:10 - Jeff Jarvis
You had Ten minutes, ten minutes Really.

1:44:13 -  Paris Martineau
Is it really true?

1:44:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they got a 10-minute moment.

1:44:15 - Leo Laporte
You got to keep it down for 10 minutes, then whatever happens, happens what backpack. I had a hot dog-eating backpack.

1:44:21 -  Paris Martineau
No, no, no At South by Southwest.

1:44:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah.

1:44:26 -  Paris Martineau
You need to send it to Paris so she can cover July 4th for the.

1:44:31 - Leo Laporte
Twitter network. You could do it all on your phone. Now. You don't need a backpack anymore. Times have changed. You're watching this weekend. Now what Gagging, I think, is all I can.

1:44:44 - Jeff Jarvis
In a Glizzy's. That's the other name for hot dogs. It's not bad, it's just a name for hot dogs.

1:44:50 - Leo Laporte
Glizzy, you call hot dogs Glizzy's.

1:44:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Some people do.

1:44:56 -  Paris Martineau
Chestnut lost to Kobayashi in the Johnsonville World Bratwurst Eating Championship in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He ate 45 bratwurst sausages in 10 minutes. Kobayashi ate 58.

1:45:09 - Leo Laporte
It's probably a good way to lose weight, because after you do that you never want to look another hot dog in the eye again. I mean you probably don't eat all year. Kobayashi actually recently retired for health concerns yeah, it doesn't seem like it's a good thing to do your body. You're watching this week.

1:45:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sorry brief, one more hot dog okay he says he no longer feels hunger I don't feel hunger.

1:45:36 - Leo Laporte
I have eaten. He's actually a skinny little guy, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, he's not a heavy man. There they are facing off last year. It's so gross, I can't. It's awful. It looks so unpleasant.

1:45:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It really does. He looks in pain when he's smiling with a mustard belt.

1:46:00 - Leo Laporte
It just shows the lengths people go to to get on TV. Yeah Well, you can watch it 4th of July on ESPN. It's probably on ESPN El Ocho, I'm guessing, not exactly the main.

1:46:14 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I think it's on the main one.

1:46:15 - Leo Laporte
Is it? Yeah, it's got to be oh.

1:46:17 -  Paris Martineau
I'm sure it gets good ratings. Oh yeah, no.

1:46:22 - Leo Laporte
And it's brief, right, yep. Paris Martineau, the Information. Jeff Jarvis, former professor, when is your new gig going to start? So I can start, I'm in talks right now.

1:46:33 -  Paris Martineau
I just had a talk with a dean only this morning, so I'm working on it.

1:46:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so, so, but for now, the emeritus leonard tap. Well, I'm always back, I'll always be that. He's always like. You can never take it away, you can't once I'm married, take that away from.

1:46:48 -  Paris Martineau
I didn't realize it's full professors who get that automatically, are you not? A full professor I was a full professor, you, you were tenured I am yes.

1:46:57 - Leo Laporte
Wow, that's amazing With a bachelor's degree. It really is. That's amazing, amazing.

1:47:05 -  Paris Martineau
So I was. I was in St Andrews at the university at last year at their book history conference because, of course, the good book parenthesis, and I'm talking to the two people who were just brilliant scholars, amazing scholars, and I'm talking about what I've done and I said, well, I started three master's degrees they looked at me like why didn't you finish?

1:47:28 - Leo Laporte
I said no, no, no, I created them I. Oh, yeah, you started them, as in, I inaugurated them, not, yeah, began them, yeah, wow, yeah, um, did you see the uh artificial intelligence that's running for the House of Commons in the UK? I did not.

1:47:47 -  Paris Martineau
What.

1:47:50 - Leo Laporte
It was only a matter of time. Where is that story? I thought we had it here. It is line 51. There it is, wired magazine, the. There's an ai candidate running for parliament in the uk, ai steve. Now. If it wins it'll be represented by a businessman, steve endicott. But endicott says he will merely be a conduit. The ai will make the policy decisions I'm.

1:48:19 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a sign of a fake country.

1:48:22 - Leo Laporte
Voters will be able to cast their ballot for AI Steve, as well as ask policy positions or raise issues of their own. Ai Steve will then incorporate suggestions and requests into its platform. Endicott will be the in-person representative attending meetings and parliamentary sessions on AI Steve's behalf. He says he sees AI Steve as a way to allow for a more direct form of democracy. He's not wrong.

1:48:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait, I'm sorry. What is it based off of?

1:48:51 -  Paris Martineau
What models are you using? Only you would ask that.

1:48:54 - Jeff Jarvis
What data is informing its decisions? Is it just some guy? What data is informing its decisions? Is it just some guy?

1:48:59 - Leo Laporte
Currently AI Steve is mistakenly listed on the ballot as Steve AI, which Endicott is working to correct. Ai Steve was designed by Neural Voice, an AI voice company, of which oh Endicott is the chair. According to Jeremy Smith, the company's co-founder, ai Steve can have up to 10,000 conversations at once A key element in creating your own database of information, says Smith, and how to inject customer data into it. So I guess it's kind of an ad for his company, isn't it? When Endicott attempted to stand for office in years past, he said he felt like life was all about party jockeying and worrying about which seats or districts were safe, rather than responding to the needs of real people. I think he's not far off. How could it be any worse than our current elective representative?

1:49:52 - Benito Gonzalez
You shouldn't ask that question, Leo, because it can always be worse.

1:49:55 - Leo Laporte
It can always be worse. Is that your motto for life?

1:49:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, Is it not yours?

1:50:03 - Leo Laporte
ai steve no, it cannot.

1:50:05 - Benito Gonzalez
It can only get better, it gets better it gets better, but it can always be worse it can always be worse.

1:50:12 - Leo Laporte
Ai steve will be different. Ai steve will transcribe and analyze conversations it has with voters and put issues of policy forward to validators or regular people who can indicate whether they care about an issue. So it kind of almost polls the electorate to see if they want this.

1:50:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, what's stopping me from somehow creating like a hundred different user sessions saying all I care about is this specific niche issue, and then getting ai steve to vote yes on that to benefit my mega corporation of evil?

1:50:46 - Leo Laporte
well, here's how they're going to do this. Endicott says that his team plans to reach out to commuters at the brighton train stop, which would be his district about an hour outside of london, asking them to fill out short policy surveys by email on their commutes. Having the voting system of validators to actually check those policies, make sure they're common sense and also in control of saying in Parliament we want you to vote this way just makes sense to me, which that sentence did not make sense to me, but I'm glad it made sense to you.

1:51:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Finally, you know the effective uh system in the world is somebody on the street corner asking for your attention for a moment. You know that's I don't think I've ever you sound like a republican.

1:51:28 - Leo Laporte
You sound like and I mean that with a small r you sound like somebody does not believe in the democratic well, no, no, I'm just saying that's not the way to have the democratic system work like.

1:51:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Like when I am walking to and from the subway, I would say on a multiple times a week basis. Someone's like excuse me, could I have your time? And they've got a clipboard.

1:51:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I hate that.

1:51:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Scam and I'm like no, that's what everybody's going to think.

1:51:51 - Leo Laporte
This is, there's no way they're going to be like yeah, AI, Steve is real actually we have a problem with that in california, because that actually is how you get a ballot measure on the ballot. It only takes a few, like a hundred thousand signatures. So if you've got the money to to put a bunch of canvassers out there getting signatures, it's you can get anything on the ballot in california. Uh and, by the way, the way, and ruin the state this is it did.

This is what kathy gillis was talking about. She said the way it's set up, any anything passed by that ballot measure can only be overturned by a ballot measure. The assembly can't overturn it, only another ballot measure. So it's really a mess me. So hey, you know what ai steve sounds like a pretty darn good idea to me. You couldn't do it here because he's not a citizen and he's probably not 35 years old. I don't know, it doesn't seem like it would be constitutional here, but apparently in the UK anything goes.

1:52:51 -  Paris Martineau
Aren't corporations? Well, you can have the AI advise you or PR people, thanks to.

1:52:56 - Leo Laporte
Citizens United Benito. Corporations are people. So maybe NAI could run. What a world we live in, mm-hmm. Anything else you want to talk about? Oh, I have something. Uh, line 89, you remember she's got all your bad habits.

1:53:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, jeff, I gotta tell you um no, that amazon tribe did not get addicted to porn we talked about how the remote amazon tribe tribe got internet through starlink and it was an interesting story about all the how they're kind of speed running, all the effects of a social media generation. It did, however, get picked up in a million different outlets which all honed in on the couple lines about how someone was concerned that a lot of the boys in the tribe were using their phones to look at pornography, and it led to basically a misinformation like campaign of everybody saying, oh, this amazon tribe is now addicted to porn, and the new york times had to put out an article like which is very rare that they do this.

1:54:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the same author, because jack nickus wrote the original story took great pains to say. The story we published June 2nd did not say that they were addicted to porn, but over the past week more than 100 websites around the world have published headlines that falsely claim the Maruba have become an addicted to porn. The New York Post was among the first, of course, saying last week that the Maruba people were hooked on porn. Dozens quickly followed that. Take TMZs.

1:54:34 - Leo Laporte
oh, it's all the best journalists was among the first, of course, saying last week that the marubo, people were hooked on porn.

1:54:37 - Leo Laporte
Dozens quickly followed that. Take tmz's. Oh, it's all the best journalists. Tmz's headlines were perhaps the most blunt. And this is all in caps, tribes, starlink, hookup results in porn addiction. Exclamation mark. Exclamation mark. Exclamation mark. Similar headlines proliferated around the world, including in the uk, germany, australia, india, indonesia, malaysia. Well, it's good it's. It's not exactly beet sugar, it's more like honey.

It's like beet honey yeah russia's state media outlet, rt, published a claim in arabic in brazil. The rumors spread fast, including in the small Amazonian cities where some Marubo now live, work and study. So Jack says the Marubo people, to be clear, are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest and there was no suggestion of it in the New York Times article.

1:55:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And you know. To bring it all back to our favorite guy, elon Musk also tweeted this week a screenshot of the story, saying it was disrespectful and unkind of the New York Times to say that about the tribe.

1:55:45 -  Paris Martineau
Which they didn't.

1:55:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Using this as if they didn't.

1:55:47 -  Paris Martineau
Of course, of course he never gets anything right. Yeah, of course. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, yes and Elon Musk, yes.

1:55:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes and Elon Musk yes, a big Me Too story in which the journal soft pedals it and talks about his I quote boundary blurring relationships with women at SpaceX. He had sex, for instance, with an employee and former intern and asked a woman in his company to have his babies. You know, elon has, among his other many strange beliefs, the belief that we are in a population crisis and that people with his high IQ should be reproducing maximally.

1:56:26 -  Paris Martineau
This is Elon Eugenics. This is all Tascreal.

1:56:28 - Leo Laporte
Drink, a former SpaceX engineering intern. He contacted her to discuss a role on his executive staff in 2017. The woman spoke with excitement to her friends about a high-profile, problem-solving role at the rocket company a dream for someone a few years out of college. This is the worst. She and Musk met years earlier during her internship, when she was still in college. She had approached him with ideas for improving SpaceX. Her outreach had led to a date, which led to a kiss and eventually sex, she told friends the year after her internship. The billionaire had the fresh college graduate flown out to a resort in Sicily before they ended things. She's more than 20 years younger than Musk Attempted to restart the relationship. She rejected his advance. They remained close as she tried to establish herself in the new job. This is straight out of the you know Harvey Weinstein playbook.

He texted her off and invited her to come over to his LA mansion at night on multiple occasions. Sometimes she accepted his invitations, but friends said she told him at the time his behavior made her job harder. She eventually moved off the executive team and left the company in 2019. Her lawyers, who also represent musk okay, there seems like there's a problem with that uh-huh provided the journal with two affidavits signed by the woman disputing the journal's reporting but confirming some of it, including that she had had a romantic relationship with musk in the past.

1:58:03 - Jeff Jarvis
She obviously we know what's happened here yeah, she's one of several female employees at spacex, the journal writes, who have told friends, family or the company itself that musk showed them an unusual amount of attention or pursued them.

1:58:18 - Leo Laporte
So she told that to friends at the time. But then the affidavit she said nothing that Elon Musk did towards me during either of my periods of employment at SpaceX was predatory or wrongful in any way.

1:58:32 -  Paris Martineau
Can you unlock the door now?

1:58:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Former SpaceX executives, as well as fired SpaceX employees who complained to the National Labor Relations Board in 2022, say a high-level group. Brad Musk fails to apply his company's own rules to the. Ceo contributing to a culture of sexism and harassment. They say there's an understanding that Musk, a charismatic leader with many fans who call him a genius, can act with impunity. Quote Elon is SpaceX and SpaceX is Elon.

1:59:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, we might find out if that's the case this week, because, of course, as you know, shareholders are voting on his $56 billion pay package, a pay package which was overturned by a Delaware court. Actually, now it's down to $44.9 billion. He has threatened to leave the company if he doesn't get that vote in his favor this Thursday, or take his artificial intelligence research to another company. So there's a little bit of a kind of a stress on the shareholder.

1:59:36 -  Paris Martineau
Taking my ball and going home.

1:59:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, um, it is an all-stock compensation package, but it's worth quite a bit less than it was. I note about 12 billion dollars less than it was why any other person in any other company?

1:59:53 -  Paris Martineau
a he'd be fired by now. B there'd be stories all over media about this. Well, don't you think it's?

1:59:59 - Leo Laporte
interesting that, with this vote coming up on thursday, that the wall street journal publishes this article. I mean you might interpret it as a hit piece on elon musk prep. Prior to the oh I think, I think this the reporting is prior to the play oddly yeah, uh, they also resurrected that story about him offering a spacex flight attendant offering to buy her a horse in exchange for sex acts. I'll buy you a horse. That now, uh, do you think that's romantic?

2:00:32 - Jeff Jarvis
another woman who left the company in 2013 alleged an exit negotiations at spacex human resources and legal executives that that Musk had asked her to have as babies. And a fourth woman had a month-long sexual relationship with Musk in 2014 while she directly reported to him. The relationship ended badly, leading to recriminations over text and email as she left the company and signed an agreement prohibiting her from discussing the work for Musk and email as she left the company and signed an agreement prohibiting her from discussing the work for Musk Regarding the intern.

2:00:59 -  Paris Martineau
They bonded over Star Wars and kissed, Isn't?

2:01:06 - Leo Laporte
that how all wonderful romances begin.

2:01:08 -  Paris Martineau
It's not the kind of story you like doing.

2:01:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't because it's so salacious. True or not it's so salacious. I think it's pretty apparent to those of us on the outside that elon is a difficult person to work for has some very odd beliefs. Now, I have to point out, we all thought that he was going to destroy twitter, right um, and that twitter would collapse by because he fired three quarters of the staff it hasn't I don't know if it's better than it was stopped working, but

it's well, but we thought it would, we thought it's gonna. You know, he came in and said some history on.

2:01:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Like people who have tend towards histrionics thought it would stop working, I feel like anybody who understands how websites work didn't think that just by firing the staff at the website would cease to exist.

2:01:57 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm not on the inside, I don't know if he's a bad manager or not. I don't think I'd want to work for him. I don't think anybody in their right mind would want to work for him. Clearly, people do, though. I mean, spacex has a great series of successes. They just did it again. Did the chopsticks catch the thing? Yet? No, it landed in the ocean. Okay, this is the sorry. So this is the fourth flight, fourth test. You say that six times fast. This is the fourth test flight of Starship, which has the largest rocket in history and is part of NASA's plan to put humans back on the moon, and they say in 2026, that seems unlikely, and then that's preparatory to putting people on Mars in 2027, 2028.

2:02:55 -  Paris Martineau
I think that's why we have AGI by then too. So it's a busy time. That's great, but 2028.

2:02:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that's probably where we have AGI by then too.

2:03:00 -  Paris Martineau
So it's a busy, busy time. That's great, but you know back to okay.

2:03:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I will say pretty well with SpaceX, right?

2:03:05 - Leo Laporte
Starlink is an amazing story. Look at our host for a untitled link show, jonathan Bennett, who does the show from Starlink, and it works quite well, right?

2:03:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So it from starlink and it works quite well, right, so it's? I mean, I don't know. I mean a couple points. One twitter monthly active users are down by basically a quarter um over the last year. This is according to an nbc news report from uh, what was it? March? Two, I don't think anybody is saying that the like products like starlink are bad. I think the fundamental um critique here is that musk is able to overhype his products at a level no other chief executive is. He is able to send the stock prices of his companies skyrocketing in a way that is not tethered to reality. That's part of the reason why probably his board keeps him around despite all of these hijinks is there's no like. If you had a normal CEO, you wouldn't have. Tesla's stock price wouldn't be where it is today. Probably a big part of musk's allure as a chief executive is the way that the culture reacts to him yeah, how he plays media and media play along.

2:04:29 -  Paris Martineau
I get. So I'm still on twitter and I get crap for it once in a while. Uh, walt mossberg yells at people all the time. You have to get off twitter because it's evil and I say but there's communities there that matter to me. Have you guys watched the Hulu Black Twitter special?

2:04:42 - Leo Laporte
No, is it good? I know you're kind of an expert on Black Twitter.

2:04:44 - Jeff Jarvis
No, but it's based on Jason's story at Wired.

2:04:48 -  Paris Martineau
Wired. Yeah, have you watched it in Paris?

2:04:51 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I haven't. I need to.

2:04:52 -  Paris Martineau
I would recommend it to you both. It's good. You think it's good? Yeah, and it's important to see that perspective about communities, that they own what they built there and it's not easy to just move that somewhere.

2:05:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:05:04 -  Paris Martineau
And so part of what appears on Twitter is, to my mind, white flight is that those of us who can easily I can go to Mastodon and I can go to Blue Sky and I find people I want to talk to and it's easy and fine because I didn't build it's me as an individual able to do that but a whole community is a very different matter yeah, I mean I have to admit, every few days I go and look at twitter because and I do fairly frequently find stories that I haven't found elsewhere that I want to cover.

2:05:31 - Leo Laporte
I mean that's most of the time I spend on the Internet is looking for stuff to talk about on this show and others, and Twitter is a good resource for that. I don't see I see people complaining that the For you feed is filled with hate and ugly videos and stuff, and I don't see that for some reason, I don't actually see it though, yeah, so.

2:05:54 -  Paris Martineau
Well, I see the most complaint I see now is on threads, for some reason. I don't actually see it, though. The most complaint I see now is on threads. Journalists constantly complain about threads because threads is downgrading political news. Go to Mastodon and go to Blue Sky.

2:06:05 - Leo Laporte
I still am a Mastodon fan. I know it's a little nerdy and maybe not as buzzy and exciting as the commercial, but I like the fact that it's open, that we can run our own server, which we do at twitsocial. By the way, you're all invited, if you are curious about Mastodon, to sign up. Just make sure you say I listen to twit or twig, or you know, leo sent me, or something like that. So I know, because we get a lot of spammers too trying to join. You know, saying things like I would like to talk about my fine widgets project so that everyone could get widgets in their home, and I usually just I reject those people. So but there's something about Mastodon, I just really like it. I feel like it's just nerdy enough. I don't know.

2:06:56 -  Paris Martineau
I find some things really. I was in a discussion the other day and some things really take off. A mastodon. I do cross post. I will confess that. But it's fascinating to see what picks up in one place and not the other. And I don't have any pattern, necessarily, but it is different. I haven't been able to suss it out yet.

2:07:14 - Leo Laporte
It's the nerds. I like the nerds. I'm a nerd guy, I like nerds. Oh yeah, and X used to be nerds, and now I don't know really how I would characterize what X is these days.

2:07:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I will say my main complaint with the For you feed is it's all just clear, it's promotional Engagement bait. Yeah, it's the sort of thing where I will notice if I um, it reminds me of instagram's algorithm in some way. I turn off suggested posts in instagram for this reason where, if I so much as like hover over a video, like I hovered over a video of something relating to bridgerton the other day, I don't watch that show, it just intrigued me. And then for the next couple of days, every other post in my for you feed was bridgerton related content. It's just overly sensitive in a way that I don't find very useful that's interesting.

2:08:04 - Benito Gonzalez
Huh, that's actually why I don't use algorithmic feeds at all, like I don't use algorithmic feeds at all because of that, because you're going to get that, yeah because I don't want to like. I don't mean I want to do all that, I just want to see. See, there's one thing I don't want all of that.

2:08:16 - Leo Laporte
I never reply, I never like, I never send signals. So I think that that's helpful, because now I'm just getting. They don't know. They don't know who this is. It's browsing it.

2:08:26 - Jeff Jarvis
For instance. I guess one thing that's worth talking about is today Twitter rolled out hiding likes, which I think is a sad update Whenever you click on a post you can't see.

2:08:40 - Leo Laporte
You can see like 32 people liked it, but you can no longer see who those likes are, and we, we did use that uh often to tar people with somebody else's brush, you know, to say, oh you see the? You know, this guy liked that neo-nazi post. He must be be a neo-Nazi too. Now you can't do it anymore. I'm not sure that's a bad thing Famously.

2:08:59 - Jeff Jarvis
whatever it was, was it five or six years ago, on September 11th, ted Cruz liked a porn tweet, or Ted Cruz's account.

2:09:09 - Leo Laporte
Right.

2:09:10 - Jeff Jarvis
We'll never have a moment like that again.

2:09:12 -  Paris Martineau
No, I liked seeing who liked it on that, that occasion where I think who was friendly to this, who was nice to me about this?

2:09:22 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, no, I mean, you can still see who likes your own post something I did really like it. Whenever you know, if a post was popping off with an opinion I disagreed with and I saw someone smart under it give what I thought was the correct. Uh, take on a subject, I like seeing who are the eight people who I think actually really get this that have liked that post don't you think all social networks are just turning into tiktok clones ultimately?

yes I mean everything is optimizing for video in a way that I find very infuriating it's sad about twitter, about Twitter.

2:09:56 - Leo Laporte
Twitter used to be text.

2:09:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, twitter used to be all about text, and now it's really all about TikTok style videos.

2:10:02 - Benito Gonzalez
It reminds me of the pivot to video.

2:10:06 - Leo Laporte
Everybody's pivoting to video, all right. Well, is blue sky any better? I don't know.

2:10:12 -  Paris Martineau
I like blue sky.

2:10:13 - Leo Laporte
I really do, yeah, all right. It's a great place to get. It looks like planners and notebooks and all sorts of lovely. I think that's the wrong blue sky. Oh, is that not? That's the different blue sky, Okay, yeah, I think I knew that. I am sad about this, but I don't know if I should be. Sony has purchased Alamo Drafthouse. Alamo Drafthouse I first experienced it in Austin, Texas, where I think it was started South by Southwest right, it's this amazing theater where you could get beer and food brought to you.

They had special seats that had little tray tables and trenches in front of them so that the waiters could walk up and down the aisles without blocking the movie. They did great programming. They mix interesting movies together. I just loved it and it spread. In fact we had one in san francisco. Most alamo locations are in big cities but uh I you know, like all movie theaters, they're struggling. Uh, and sony, which is a motion picture company, among other things, has purchased uh alamo draft house they'll continue to operate the 30 cinemas.

2:11:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Sony did not talk about the terms of the deal, so maybe they've just kept them alive one thing I think that's interesting about this story because I had kind of the same reaction as you, leo is this wouldn't have happened if not for, during the Trump administration, the Trump DOJ rolled back an antitrust decision from like the 40s.

2:11:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what I was wondering effectively it.

2:11:55 - Jeff Jarvis
It broke up, so this is actually a move back to the old hollywood studio model because this antitrust decision that happened in the 40s was designed to all.

the hollywood studios at that time were vertically integrated, where the same company that you know made them, that came up with the idea for the movie chose the actors, made the movie. They also owned the made the movie, they also owned the theaters, and that resulted in a lot of unfortunate outcomes for consumers. So the DOJ at that point broke it up as an antitrust issue. In these series of settlements, kind of known as the Paramount Decrees, trump's DOJ and I think like 2018, 2019, was like oh, we don't need that anymore and got rid of it. And because they got rid of that, that has opened the door for Sony to acquire Alamo.

2:12:43 - Leo Laporte
This is from the Wikipedia article about the 1948 United States versus Paramount Pictures case. A Supreme Court ruling decided the fate of film studios owning their own theaters and holding exclusivity rights in which theaters would show their movies. It changed the way movies were produced, distributed and exhibited, opened the door for more foreign and independent films to be shown in the us in 2019. As part of a review of its ongoing decrees, the department of justice issued a two-year sunsetting notice for paramount uh aug 2020. So in August of 2022, that antitrust restriction disappeared, doj saying it was no longer necessary as the old model could never be recreated in contemporary settings. And there's Sony, a big motion picture studio, buying a 30 theater chain. Maybe just a little toe in the water just to see what happens. Let's just see.

2:13:40 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, the big difference here is that theaters don't make money anymore. It's not like a big money business anymore.

2:13:46 - Leo Laporte
But you can make money if you are a motion. Let's say you're Comcast Universal and you buy all the AMC theaters and you give them exclusive rights to all your movies maybe you could make money.

2:13:59 - Benito Gonzalez
I know that sounds like Netflix to me.

2:14:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, that's right. Netflix, by the way we just were talking about it last week owns a wonderful movie theater in New York.

2:14:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the Paris Theater.

2:14:09 - Leo Laporte
Something that Scooter X pointed out.

2:14:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah named after me. Something Scooter X pointed out in the discord is uh, there's actually a provision that allows the ownership of single uh individual cinema things like that. But the thing that's notable about this case is that sony's buying a chain of theaters right 30 the seventh largest chain.

2:14:29 -  Paris Martineau
It's only 30, but they're waiting.

2:14:31 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. It's the second largest chain in the us. Seventh, not second okay, amc I know.

2:14:37 -  Paris Martineau
Seventh, I go to movies.

2:14:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I used to be a big Alamo girlie. I'm now a Nighthawk girlie, which is I believe it's like a local chain here in New York City. There's two, but I believe it ended up it was the progenitor of the idea of having kind of like the dine-in movie experience that alamo is now famous for I would call this show the nighthawk girly.

2:15:03 - Leo Laporte
But then I'm afraid the wall street journal would do an expose on me and I'd be out of work. So I just I won't, I'll, I'll. I'll just pretend I did. I'll think about it besides oppenheimer? What was the last time you went to? That was the last time besides oppenheimer I before covet the last time you went to a movie.

That was the last time besides Oppenheimer before COVID, what about you, jeff? Oh wait a minute. John's mad because during COVID he rented the entire motion picture and brought. It was about 20 or 30 of us folks to see the Doctor Strange movie when it came out.

2:15:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that's fun.

2:15:35 - Leo Laporte
So you're right two times since COVID.

2:15:39 -  Paris Martineau
So I missed my movie theater's really greasy, oily popcorn and a few weeks ago I went. I'm just going to buy a small popcorn. I need a snack Small, a little tiny popcorn. Oh it's huge.

2:15:52 - Leo Laporte
It was only $9 if you buy the big one, so buy the big one, right right, it's only $9. If you buy the big one, so buy the big one, right right. It's a weird pricing model they have in motion pic in movie theaters. That stuff will kill you, it really will. Well, it's yeah yeah, yeah, I think it's over for movie theaters. We have basically a home theater now with a 70-inch OLED screen.

2:16:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm shocked that you guys say this.

2:16:16 - Leo Laporte
I love movie theaters, but you're a social animal. You go with friends, presumably. Yes, you are Right.

2:16:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean I've gone in the last. I mean I used to not watch movies at all, but I have gotten really into watching movies over the last year and I'll go by myself to movie theaters.

2:16:31 - Leo Laporte
I love.

2:16:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I just enjoy watching something on the silver screen with a bunch of people.

2:16:37 - Leo Laporte
Unlike you, I will watch Criterion Channel, but I don't know why.

2:16:41 -  Paris Martineau
So let me ask you this Paris, the theaters now have assigned seating.

2:16:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, oh, interesting my problem with that is.

2:16:50 -  Paris Martineau
I remember going to a Berlin theater many, many years ago where they had assigned seating to them and they believed it. I was in an empty theater all day long, two people right next to me, because that's where their seats are, so they're going to sit there and I'm going to sit here, the whole theater we can sit in. The problem I have with assigned seating is I sit next to somebody who does open mouth popcorn chewing. I want to move away. I can't move away because it is an assigned seat I mean if the lights are down you can move away once I know,

2:17:21 - Leo Laporte
it's like an airplane once they close the door, all seats are oh, not anymore, oh no oh no, I mean it's a little bit.

2:17:30 - Jeff Jarvis
I will say I don't that much enjoy going to movies where it's not assigned seating or kind of a food situation like whenever I've gone. The only time I go to a normalish movie theater is when I go to the imax amc theater and I feel like a barbarian having to you know, and even then I think it is still assigned seatings. You pick the seats but you're like in the tiny little movie seats balancing your popcorn. I need a table, I want a plush seat where I can lean back. I want someone to come take my order.

2:17:59 -  Paris Martineau
That's the movie experience where are you paris on talking in theater during the movie?

2:18:04 - Jeff Jarvis
no no maybe an occasional whisper comment like yeah, who the hell's that? And yeah. Or like a little joke or something.

2:18:14 - Leo Laporte
What did she just just say? If I lived where you live Paris I'd probably go to the movies all the time.

2:18:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.

2:18:21 - Leo Laporte
I love movies.

2:18:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm lush with choice.

2:18:24 - Leo Laporte
But here in Petaluma there's one theater. They have rats, which is kind of the New York experience.

2:18:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I admit that is true.

2:18:34 - Leo Laporte
How much?

2:18:34 -  Paris Martineau
does a ticket cost these?

2:18:35 - Leo Laporte
days? I have no idea. Oh God, it's $. But I just. How much does a ticket cost these days? I have no idea, oh God it's $15 or something right, it's like $20.

2:18:43 - Jeff Jarvis
It could be $15 or there's like cheaper. I will often go to Nighthawk has like the I like when I don't watch that many new movies, but I like watching like throwbacks, see, and that's the other problem.

2:18:51 - Leo Laporte
You still have discounted. You have re like Nighthawk here. We're going to only see the first run. You know whatever's showing and movies this last couple of years have not been the best years for movies. Right, they're awful.

2:19:03 -  Paris Martineau
Years ago. I contended many years ago that TV was better than movies, and now they're both trash. That's when you wrote for TV.

2:19:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, one of my favorite websites is screenslatecom, which essentially compiles all of the um movie listings of like indie cinemas in new york and la by day so you can see it. Alamo draft house, lower manhattan. They have weirdo mystery movie tonight at 9 30.

2:19:28 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know, you can see there's got a 19 so this is kind of like a criterion collection on the screen and I agree, agree, oh, dog Day Afternoon is playing. What a great movie. Have you seen the Zone of Interest yet? Highly recommend it. Oh, that is a good movie. It's very simple and slow, but it's extremely powerful. By the time you've seen it all.

2:19:52 -  Paris Martineau
There's also a documentary of the same story.

2:19:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I know that one is called, but I'm a Cheerleader, right? No, that's not it.

2:20:01 - Jeff Jarvis
That's very different, very different.

2:20:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, it's based on a yeah. Is it based on a documentary or a novel? The Zone of Interest, anyway.

2:20:13 -  Paris Martineau
I don't know.

2:20:15 - Leo Laporte
It's Jonathan Glazer's latest and it's it's it masterpiece. I think it was nominated for an academy.

2:20:21 - Benito Gonzalez
I know it was nominated, I can't remember if it won, it won and he made a speech that was controversial.

2:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Ah, that's the one where he said, yes, okay, that's right, I remember now, yeah, uh, or teen witch. I could go see that Alamo Drafthouse and the New Mission showing Back to the Future, part 3. A little watched final sequel. Then Teen Witch, followed by, on Weird Wednesday, the Corridor of Mirrors from 1948. You could spend the whole day eating. What do you eat at the Alamo Drafthouse? It's got weird stuff, right, weird food.

2:20:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I think I like their queso dip is good. Oh, I love queso. They've got some good loaded fries. One time I went oh no, this is a Nighthawk Nighthawk, similar. They have just a mystery bucket of different gummies, which is one of my friends and I. Oh jeez, there was a time where-.

2:21:11 -  Paris Martineau
Those kind of gummies or not gummies? Those kind of gummies or not gummies?

2:21:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, the mystery was that they were gummies, but it was, like you know, a gummy worm, a gummy strawberry.

2:21:24 - Leo Laporte
You didn't know what sort of gummies. They were all legit gummies.

2:21:26 - Jeff Jarvis
They were all legit gummies.

2:21:27 -  Paris Martineau
Okay so the downtown Brooklyn Alamo House menu has fried pickle spears.

2:21:34 - Benito Gonzalez
It's going to be curated films because people watch movies at home now, because everyone has a great TV and a great system.

2:21:41 - Leo Laporte
That's the thing. I have a very nice system. The movies look better. Oppenheimer really honestly looked better on my OLED at home on a Blu-ray. I have good sound and it's comfortable. We actually, lisa, bought movie theater seats, so we can recline, it's got a table, it's for your popcorn, it's got a cup holder, so it's just like going to the movie theater by yourself, you see.

2:22:04 -  Paris Martineau
But here's the thing it's just too woke At the Alamo in Brooklyn. Truffle herb, parmesan popcorn, yum.

2:22:12 - Benito Gonzalez
That's woke, that's bougie.

2:22:14 - Leo Laporte
That's bougie, but it's not.

2:22:16 -  Paris Martineau
It's also delicious Vegan cauliflower basket, jeez, okay.

2:22:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, jeff, you're not going to like Nighthawk, which will frequently have a pairing menu with their movies, where it's like courses.

2:22:30 - Leo Laporte
What kind of wine goes with a mystery bucket of gummies? I'm just curious.

2:22:40 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a great question I feel like a chardonnay or something crisp and light. For instance, right now at the night hawk, you could uh get a paired food and drinks for furiosa.

2:22:47 - Leo Laporte
The mad max saga uh, which is, oh, they pair it with the movie is born. Oh, they have a lamb they have a lamb kofta.

2:22:55 - Jeff Jarvis
um, and the darkest of angels is the drink, which is a four pillars bloody Shiraz gin with a let rose, grapefruit, ginger and lime Yum.

2:23:08 - Leo Laporte
See, bougie does not mean anything but delicious.

2:23:12 - Jeff Jarvis
And my bougie is good. That means nothing but bacon and goat cheese pizza.

2:23:14 -  Paris Martineau
Oh no, OK the pizzas at Alamo are good. They're nothing but expensive. Brussels sprout bacon and goat cheese pizza oh no, that's bad.

2:23:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, the pizzas at Alamo are good. They're like flatbreads.

2:23:20 - Leo Laporte
It's really nice All right, we're going to take a break.

2:23:24 - Jeff Jarvis
From this riveting technology.

2:23:26 - Leo Laporte
talk From this fascinating conversation and get your picks of the week in just a bit. There's more food ahead. Just quick. Ah, exciting, just exciting. Uh, I should mention that if you're not yet a member of club twit, we would very much love to have you in the club. We are this close inches away from our 12 000th member, so I think when I checked on windows weekly 22, all we need is 22 new members.

2:23:51 - Leo Laporte
I would love to come on, I would love 12 000, uh, today, and I'll tell you.

2:23:56 - Leo Laporte
It'll tell you it's not about anything, but keeping these shows going. It doesn't go in my pocket, it doesn't go in Lisa's pocket. We're not getting paid next month because we're pretty much out of money, but we want to make sure the staff gets paid, the lights stay on. We want to make new shows. We want to keep doing the shows we love doing for you. So if you listen and you like, please join the club. It's only seven bucks a month, very inexpensive, I think. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord. Some people say, well, I don't want the Discord, you don't, I want the ads. That's fine. You know these are just little things we're throwing in, but really the seven dollars is all about keeping the shows on the air. If you want to help twittv, slash club twit and we thank you in advance. We are close. 21 more will put us over the top. 21 more, okay, um, yeah, well, I guess we start with stace. Stacy, sorry, I guess we start with paris.

Stacy's on my mind, because stacy is, she was on twit, she was on twit on sunday, if you like, stacy, stacy, sorry, I guess we start with paris, stacy's on my mind, because stacy is on twit she was on twit on sunday, if you like, stacy and her book club is coming up on the 27th. We're doing high voltage, so that's why I was thinking, uh, about stacy because of the club, but, uh, paris martineau, what is your pick of the week?

2:25:12 - Jeff Jarvis
my pick of the week is something I talked about a couple weeks ago Renfair.

2:25:17 - Leo Laporte
I started watching that because of you. It is phenomenal.

2:25:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I hadn't watched it at that point. I just finished it. It is I've described it as it is succession meets medieval times meets Tiger King, but filmed like a fever dream.

2:25:35 - Leo Laporte
It's got a Tiger King kind of feeling to it.

2:25:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, it is about the texas renaissance festival. This massive renaissance fair in texas that has been operating for decades is grown to the size where the um owner and operator of it has essentially has literally built a town. He incorporated a whole city of which he is the mayor. His name is king george. George follows, yep, george coolum.

2:26:04 - Leo Laporte
He's like 86 years old, kind of losing his marbles in more way than one he says I'm gonna live another nine years, but I don't want to spend my remaining time running the renaissance fair. He says quote I want to do art and chase ladies and that that he does except for he.

2:26:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It is really a story about control and that he can't give up the power of it. So it's kind of the succession battle between the popcorn king of the renaissance festival and the chancellor who's their general manager about who's going to win to take over?

2:26:36 - Leo Laporte
the guy says uh, we this Ren Faire on kettle corn, because that's his concession.

2:26:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, he's the kettle corn lord. Oh my God, this is so weird, this guy who's trying to buy the Renaissance Festival, which goes for tens of millions of dollars. He's kind of a tech bro-y type.

2:26:54 - Leo Laporte
He's always seen wearing AirPods talking on the phone and then crushing Red Bulls.

2:27:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Going so hard on the Red Bulls.

2:27:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if they're adding the gulp gulp gulp in post or if he's really gulping those, but it's like it's hysterical. It is the weirdest show I've ever watched. It is Tiger. King, it is. Yeah, I've ever watched. It is Tiger King. Oh, it is. Yeah, I've only gotten through the first one. Does it get weirder? I knew you'd love it Paris.

2:27:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it gets so weird.

2:27:23 -  Paris Martineau
So are you planning now to go to a Ren Festival somewhere?

2:27:26 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I am oh well, you know, we used to have the Ren Fair out here in Novato every year. It was great, it was good, I loved it, and our own, scott Wilkinson. It's very funny.

2:27:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I've read a lot of interviews with the director now and one interviewer had asked him like oh, has your body changed at all? Like, what has it been like subsisting on Ren Faire food for three years? And he, he's like. I've gone from being a scrawny man to having the physique of a 1950s jewish boxer. He's a jewish and he's like, because all I keep eating are turkey legs and things like that. And it's. It's really.

2:28:06 - Leo Laporte
I would recommend it's produced by benny and josh safty, which is interesting, but the director I've not heard of production company. Yeah, lance um lance oppenheim.

2:28:14 - Jeff Jarvis
He's the guy who did, uh, some kind of heaven um as well as sperm world. A documentary.

2:28:21 - Leo Laporte
Here's a resume yeah I actually liked some kind of heaven. That was about the villages. Right, that was, yeah, this. I can see now the similarity.

2:28:31 - Jeff Jarvis
This is very much like the village the thing that I think is really interesting about it which I was surprised to read online that a lot of people um took issue with is it's it's very much not your standard documentary. It doesn't, you know, begin with a guy like sitting down in a chair being like okay, let's begin, or whatever. It is very artistically directed and which is similar to the director's kind of take. On a lot of his documentaries they're kind of of a fantasia, but in this case it's like heightened and the director, when interviewed about it, was like yeah, normally, you know, I try to like do some sort of treatment and like really put film it in a way that people feel the feelings my subjects are feeling.

But he's like this one was different because the cast is all theater nerds. It's all people who've worked in theater at a renaissance fair for decades, so they were really game to be like. Let me walk you through an interpretation of how I was feeling in this moment and you get some really wild scenes out of it that like make you think like oh, is this real or not? And it's communicating something real. But it's very artistic and I love I'm reading the interview in hollywood reporter uh, with oppenheim the director and it's communicating something real, but it's very artistic and I love it.

2:29:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm reading the interview in Hollywood Reporter with Oppenheim, the director, and I'm starting to see myself in this. He says the more I worked on this, the more I saw different Georges all over our culture. It was like the movie they Live. I think this story is about a man of advanced age who is creating something very specific to him that has become very successful and he doesn't know if it can run well without him. And if you look around society, this exact archetype is all over. I think we should have a documentary about Twit yeah.

2:30:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I think that would be really interesting.

2:30:15 - Leo Laporte
I could pretend to hand it off every episode to another person and yank it back. It's really kind of interesting. He says but you know, you get week one, yeah, you get week one.

Ren Faire has a lot to say about where we are as a culture right now, with so much of the government and institutions being run by people of advanced age who are clinging to their positions because it gives their life meaning and purpose, and what that does to the people that work underneath them. That could steward the next generation, but maybe they don't have the same amount of magic the first person does.

2:30:48 -  Paris Martineau
Wow, very so paris, the ren listcom. This uh ren fair Fairs near you and related ones. You might like this. In Marcus Hook, pennsylvania, there is a pirate festival.

2:31:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Ooh, I do like that.

2:31:06 - Benito Gonzalez
I thought you'd like that. Yep, yep.

2:31:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, I will be going. Will we go September 21st?

2:31:13 -  Paris Martineau
Count me. In Hotsville there is the Enchanted Valley Fairy and Pirate Fest.

2:31:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh.

2:31:21 - Leo Laporte
What costume would you wear for that?

2:31:26 - Jeff Jarvis
For a pirate festival.

2:31:27 - Leo Laporte
Would you be a? Pirate or a fairy.

2:31:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I can't be a pirate, that would be too easy Be a fairy, no, I mean I.

2:31:31 - Leo Laporte
How about a fairy pirate?

2:31:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Honestly, my first thought is a parrot, and then I would creatively pose with pirates. Where? I'm kind of far away. So I look like them on their shoulder.

2:31:43 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, that's brilliant Force perspective, yeah force perspective parrot.

2:31:47 - Leo Laporte
Force perspective Paris, perspective Paris.

2:31:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I like it.

2:31:50 -  Paris Martineau
I like it. Leo, if you go to therendlesscom, slash all hyphen fairs, you will see a visualization of how many of these things there are.

2:32:03 - Leo Laporte
I'm not surprised actually.

2:32:06 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, you can't be surprised Like anyone who's? Into anything that much. There's definitely going to be lots of them, like a lot of people do this.

2:32:16 - Leo Laporte
I love Renaissance fairs. I can't pull it up. Therenlistcom. Slash all-hating fairs.

2:32:24 - Jeff Jarvis
And it's fair just spelled normally, not with an E.

2:32:29 -  Paris Martineau
Or just go to TheRenlistcom Three parents.

2:32:34 - Leo Laporte
It's late in the day, I don't know if I oh there are quite a few of them and they have different colored markers depending on what kind of fair what fetish you're into yeah, let's see what's? Pirates of the pacific festival, there you go oh, that's just up the road in mckinleyville, let's all go. Or medieval festival of courage, courage, ohage, oh, courage, courage.

2:32:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, you know what's on there Texas Renaissance Festival as depicted in Ren Faire, of course Runs from. October 12th to December 1st.

2:33:06 - Leo Laporte
This is the season. This is the season. Oh my God.

2:33:09 - Benito Gonzalez
The success of the show is going to make this story even crazier.

2:33:11 -  Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, there's going to be tons of them?

2:33:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, don't? We also have a Civil War reenactment up here.

2:33:20 - Jeff Jarvis
You've got to, oh, you have to.

2:33:21 -  Paris Martineau
Yeah, sure yeah, even though the Civil War was not fought anywhere near Right.

2:33:29 - Leo Laporte
All right, Jeff, your pick of the week.

2:33:31 -  Paris Martineau
All right, all right. All right, you have your sound up on your machine here, I do All right. So, all right, you have your sound up on your machine here, I do All right. So I have been abused on this show for years. Yes, stacey did it first. Yes, you did it Paris, you've done it a bit, everybody else has done it. Where I'm ridiculed for making microwave cacio e pepe. Now I want to now, in a moment here, go to the most renowned and scientific chef. There is the guy who runs Milk Street.

2:34:04 - Leo Laporte
By the way I have to point out.

2:34:06 - Jeff Jarvis
He's a microwave food influencer because I believe he either started or is paid by a company that makes microwave bowls that use metal to do something. I know who you're talking about.

2:34:21 -  Paris Martineau
Well, Chris Kimball.

2:34:23 - Leo Laporte
You've got to go back to the beginning. This is the guy. Well, this is the beginning. Go to the beginning.

2:34:27 -  Paris Martineau
No, no, no, no.

2:34:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Go to the very beginning, I was thinking of a different one. This is the very, very beginning.

2:34:31 - Leo Laporte
The hardest recipe ever, the hardest, the most difficult recipe of my entire life. Three ingredients Pasta, pepper and cheese. Watch it anyway. This is Chris Kimball isn't it.

2:34:45 -  Paris Martineau
Yes, what can go wrong? Everything See. Wow.

2:34:53 - Leo Laporte
I gotta, I gotta. By the way, this is the worst sound.

2:34:58 - Benito Gonzalez
I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, homie needs a microphone.

2:35:01 - Leo Laporte
Give the guy a microphone, so he's mortar and pestle grinding some peppercorns. You only use a quarter cup of water. Yeah, look at that, he's doing it in a frying pan. You don't want the big pot of spaghetti.

2:35:11 -  Paris Martineau
So you want the starch.

2:35:13 - Leo Laporte
This is how you do carbonara, too, by the way, this you want the starch. This is how you do carbonara too, by the way, this is exactly how you do carbonara. In fact, really, cacio e pepe is just carbonara without the pork.

2:35:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It's going to be rougher in your hands, and it means that more starch is going to come out of the pasta.

2:35:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting. The science of cacio e pepe.

2:35:30 -  Paris Martineau
See, see, it's not so simple, everybody.

2:35:33 - Leo Laporte
I want to make it now. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hungry. It's, it's a perfect.

2:35:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I won't catch, I retract my statement. That's not the microwave influencer, chef.

2:35:41 -  Paris Martineau
No, no, okay thank you very much he's the chris to do everything exactly right.

2:35:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they test a chicken a hundred ways I have all the other thing cookbooks because I believe that it is the best recipe, yeah so meanwhile, we're going to lose tikt.

2:35:56 -  Paris Martineau
meanwhile, we're going to lose TikTok, and we're going to lose something in our culture TikTok has ignited a cottage cheese renaissance.

2:36:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, we haven't seen this, but I'll also say cottage cheese is having a renaissance because it's big in anorexia communities.

2:36:13 - Leo Laporte
Is it really yes? Well, I know in my youth youth people would go on the cottage cheese diet I have always.

2:36:20 - Jeff Jarvis
That's where it kind of comes.

2:36:21 - Leo Laporte
I have always loved cottage cheese, though it's delicious, uh, enough salt, yeah, salt or pepper, and I actually put vinaigrette, balsamic vinaigrette on it but I think cottage cheese is really just a a substrate for flavor.

2:36:34 -  Paris Martineau
Um but it is, I guess if you lived on it wouldn't, be, good for you oh, this is interesting though.

2:36:40 - Jeff Jarvis
D to c cottage like these, like cute influencery cottage cheese brand that's in jeff's uh thing that makes sense yeah yeah, and if you go to the, yeah, look at that cottage cheese toast three ways.

2:36:52 -  Paris Martineau
That's, that's no diet. I like cottage cheese I like cottage cheese.

2:36:56 - Leo Laporte
I know it's. I'm the only one in the family. That's the other reason I like it, because I can.

2:36:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, I will say second video says best protein weight loss hack cottage cheese.

2:37:04 - Leo Laporte
I'd like to thank cottage cheese for helping me lose weight, sorry what is she's? She's putting an immersion blender in what and blending that's disgusting. What is she doing? Oh, she's got a ton of it in her fridge oh boy I don't know no what does she know?

2:37:26 - Jeff Jarvis
we can't, we can't try and no, what I don't.

2:37:29 - Leo Laporte
Why would you cream cottage cheese? By the way, 1.9 million views, which kind of gives you some idea of, is she?

2:37:36 - Jeff Jarvis
going to explain anything, I guess it's whipped cottage cheese.

2:37:41 -  Paris Martineau
What do you do with it? Eat it. What's the B? It's disgusting. What's the B? I don't know. Well, the reason you lose weight is because it's so disgusting you don't want to eat it.

2:37:50 - Leo Laporte
So I guess the problem really with cottage cheese is some people don't like the texture, so by whipping it you can make it creamy. I guess I'm gonna try it. I have some at home and I have an immersion blender. I shall try this tonight.

2:38:04 - Benito Gonzalez
That video though, has something that I've been noticing a lot on tiktok and instagram reels and stuff like that. It's like videos that say something and they don't actually do the thing there's nothing there yeah, well, you know why they pop off?

2:38:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Because then the comments are full of people being like well, what's the thing? And that is engagement and it boosts the post and feeds.

2:38:22 - Leo Laporte
This is the real problem in the long run with algorithms is that people game them and then you get. It's already happened on YouTube, where the thumbnail in fact, youtube just announced a new thumbnail comparator tool to figure out which thumbnail gets the most reaction.

2:38:37 - Leo Laporte
And this is exactly what's wrong and this is exactly what's wrong.

2:38:40 - Leo Laporte
This is exactly what's wrong is it is everybody's playing to the algorithm instead of playing to the audience, or they're playing games. It's tricks and it it's not good and, by the way, that's why we suck, because we don't do that. Nobody watches our shows. The names are meaningless, there's no good content here, and they're hours and hours long, and I, I, I revel in that that we are not trying to link bait you, we're not trying to trick you into watching, and that's why so few people watch. Oh, and now the google change log the latest we've ever done I forgot the google change log notebook lm we mentioned last week.

It's gone global. Now it has slide support and better ways to fact check. So if you're worried about hallucinations, I actually recommended this to um paul thurot earlier because he he wanted to do this kind of thing. Uh, microsoft has killed custom gpts and co-pilot. But I said it's free notebook lm and it was and it sticks closely to the rag you give it exactly it will not answer things past that it does.

2:39:54 -  Paris Martineau
Does know how to say I don't know.

2:39:56 - Leo Laporte
Google has just pushed out 12 useful features for Pixel, watches, phones and tablets. There are a lot of them. I recommend you read the fine story at ZDNet by Artie Beattie this is too boring for Leo, this is so boring I couldn't they have now added Reverse number lookup.

2:40:16 -  Paris Martineau
Now how could it do that? Because I used to use reverse numbers, a reporter all the time, but doesn't exist anymore well, apparently it does it users now can look up an unknown number by doing a reverse search from the call log.

2:40:29 - Leo Laporte
Uh, because google knows everything right. You can have the new gemini nano ai model on your device, even Pixel 8s and 8A. As a developer option, you can summarize and recorder DisplayPort support. Well, that's cool. Pixel Watches in June will get car crash detection, better bicycle fall detection and PayPal in your wallet. And if you have a Pixel tablet and I think I'm the only one who does there are some small but useful doorbell notification features. Small but useful, that's their Google change log and you thought that Apple was so smart. No, finally.

2:41:15 -  Paris Martineau
Benito just made an editorial decision.

2:41:16 - Leo Laporte
That's it. It's over.

2:41:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Ben benito's like we're calling it, we're calling it five o'clock time to go home.

2:41:24 - Leo Laporte
Thank you everybody for watching the show, despite the fact that we have done no hacks to grow our audience. We just have this club. It's seven dollars. Do what you can to support us, we appreciate it. Jeff jarvis is the officially the emeritus now director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the craig new mark graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york and is perhaps going back to sacramento to get those numbskulls up there in the assembly to change their mind on the so-called Journalism Protection Act.

Thank you, Jeff, for fighting the good fight. We appreciate it, even though you won't be able to lie down on the way out. Thank you, Paris Martineau at the information. She's working on something big. But before she does, a quick trip to see a movie at her favorite movie theater, why not why? Not have a mystery bucket of gummies on me.

2:42:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I shall.

2:42:29 - Leo Laporte
Yum yum yum. Appreciate your support and continued tolerance. Thank you to all of our club members who make this show possible. If you're not a member, twittv slash club twit. Thank you to all of our club members who make this show possible. If you're not a member, twittv slash clubtwit.

2:42:41 -  Paris Martineau
Bless you all, every one of you.

2:42:43 - Leo Laporte
Thank you also to our great sponsors and the people who help put this show together. You hear Benito Gonzalez from time to time, our producer and technical director, john Slanina, our studio director, burke McQuinn, who keeps the equipment running, and Anthony Nielsen, our AI guru. Our executive producer, of course, is my beautiful wife Lisa Laporte. We will do this show again next Wednesday at about 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Watch it live on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit, slash live or after the fact on our website, twittv slash twig.

There is a YouTube channel for this Week in Google. You can watch the edited shows after the fact video and subscribe to audio or video in your favorite podcast client. That way, you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. If you know anybody who wants to advertise in our shows, please have them email advertise at twittv. That is another way you can help us out. You can also tell your friends there's this crazy show. They don't care if you watch or listen, but you should because it's good. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google. Bye-bye.