This Week in Google 672, Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiG! This Week in Google, we've got an actual attorney, Kathy Gillis joining us to talk about Twitter versus Musk. Jeff Jarvis is also here, Ant Pruitt. And what happens to Twitter after the smoke clears, some people say it's actually gonna be good for Twitter. Speaking of smoke, they're banning Juul, but why can't the FDA ban cigarettes? Isn't that the real disaster. And then it's time for twink coin. The first cryptocurrency based on pastry, it's all coming up next on TWiG!

Narrator (00:00:36):
Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:45):
This is TWiG. This Week in Google, episode 672 recorded Wednesday, July 13th, 2022. Lamination From the Heart. This Week in Google is brought to you by New Relic. That next 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. Get New Relic before it does, and you can get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data per month, free forever, No credit card required. Sign up at newrelic.com/twig. And by Cachefly. Deliver your video on the network with the best throughput and global reach, making your content infinitely scalable. Go live in hours. Not days. Learn more at cachefly.com.

Leo Laporte (00:01:29):
It's time for TWIG This Week in Google, Stacy's got the week off Ant Pruitt is here from Hands-on Photography and community manager of the fabulous ClubTWiT. Hello, Ant. Good to you, sir. How you be Mr. Laporte? I be fine. I'm very well, indeed. How are you? Excellent. I saw you earlier. Unbelievable as always. It was pizza day at the, at the east side studios and I saw you earlier enjoy right. Excuse me while I bur yeah, I know I was, I literally was burping during Windows Weekly. It's kind of embarrassing. Also here, wait a minute. I've got a card now that lists all his fine attributes ladies in general. Oh boy. <Laugh> Jeff Jarvis. He's the Leonard tow professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark,

Leo Laporte (00:02:15):
Graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York. It's all more elegant. Now it's with the new logo. It's I know, I know it's elegant. It's a good word for it. It's very nice. They've even laminated the your introduction card so that I guess you're gonna be around for a while. You can't lose it. Well, try to get rid of a bad penny man, bad penny. We thought we should bring in some legal counsel on this day of all days. Actually there's not a day goes by that TWiG. Couldn't use legal counsel. Kathy Gellis is here. Ccouncil.com in beautiful New Jersey. Hello, Kathy.

Cathy Gellis (00:02:50):
Thanks for having me someday. I hope to have a card

Leo Laporte (00:02:53):
<Laugh> oh, that can be arranged. That can be arranged.

Cathy Gellis (00:02:58):
I'll know I've arrived. When, when I, when my credentials can be laminated, I know I'm

Leo Laporte (00:03:03):
Really somebody <laugh>, that's the real deal, man. That's the real deal. Cathy's also a contributor at Tech Dirt and read the entire 241 page filing from Twitter's attorneys at the Chancery of the state of Delaware. Did you read at all next it's only 62 pages. It's not that's. You could, you could do that in the morning.

Cathy Gellis (00:03:32):
I, I did some preparation for today. I have not read every word, but I read the, of most of the filing. Most of, I think I read all of there's a motion to expedite that came out today. And then I was going back to the original agreement and I looked over a couple of the terms of the agreement. Oh, you did your home work. I did. I even went your homework. I know. Well, this is so annoying. Last time I complained that you made me remember corporate law. So I even went and looked for my corporate law

Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Law

Cathy Gellis (00:03:59):
Books, which I could not find, but wow. I'm for sensible things to say on the subject, because somehow I thought you might ask me a few things. So

Leo Laporte (00:04:09):
Not too many, we're not gonna make these.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:10):
So what do you think, Kathy? What do you think?

Cathy Gellis (00:04:13):
All right. 

Leo Laporte (00:04:14):
Well let me actually, let me give you a less open ended question. Cause that's that's that could, that could be a lot of things. Maybe start at the, at the 30,000 foot level, Twitter is suing Musk saying, you said you were gonna give us 44 billion. And by God we want the 44 billion there's suing in Delaware because that's where Twitter is incorporated. It's in the Chancery court which I I've been told. And some of the actions like this moves quickly. What is, what is the timeframe you think for this kind of a lawsuit?

Cathy Gellis (00:04:47):
I don't know, but the motion for, to expedite was there's supposed to be a drop dead date, built into the merger agreement itself, which was like October 24th of this year. So the idea with the motion to expedite is that there'll be about two months of pre-trial. So whatever discovery would happen, enough time for a trial and enough time for an appeal for there to be a final resolution that would happen before October 24th. So that sort of thing is apparently not unprecedented. According to motion expedite it. It's fast on by general terms, even without the cause

Leo Laporte (00:05:25):
I've heard, heard people say, oh, it's gonna be 10 years before this is resolved. No, no, no, no, no. It's not a decade long action.

Cathy Gellis (00:05:30):
No, I went through

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:31):
This other thing is, was time Warner and, and Paramount. Cuz there was a fight over that just as we were starting to Entertainment Weekly. And it was a couple weeks.

Leo Laporte (00:05:39):
Delaware is very corporate friendly too. That's why you

Cathy Gellis (00:05:42):
It's not really a regular court. I don't think the Chancery court is every so often you hit things that sort of have courts with unusual jurisdiction. And the terms of that jurisdiction tend to be ne very narrow, but by being very narrow, they can be, be very efficient. So we're not talking a normal federal civil litigation trial, which has its own timeline for how long it would take. This is something that speaks to Delaware law, specifically corporate law specifically, and the Chancery courts being the courts of jurisdiction to, to work this out. And so they've seen this before Delaware has laws built in order to companies like going there because it can be so efficient from the corporate law front. And so they got systems, but this is kind of people have reflexes from general standard, federal civil litigation. And those instincts don't really apply here both in terms of the process. And also I think in terms of the substance where even though this is a breach of contract claim and you see those in federal court, this is an unusual and very specific type of breach of contract claim. Yeah. And and it's,

Leo Laporte (00:06:45):
It's one that features, for instance, a variety of tweets and emoji, there are emojis are involved.

Cathy Gellis (00:06:51):
Well, well I meant in terms of normal Chancery court things, but yes, it also has it. The one thing that will be interesting is, well, the one thing that's probably a lot, that's interesting about this, but it also has a some characteristics that are unusual for the Chancery court to be dealing with. So I don't know if they've ever adjudicated a poop emoji before, but now they will. So

Leo Laporte (00:07:11):
They'll be the first appropriate since world emoji day is Friday. I guess there, I'm not sure what Twitter wants to gain from this it's because the money isn't coming out of Elon Musk's ample pockets, but is involves a number of other investors. I don't know if they really intend to get all 44 billion, they may, but they want more than 1 billion. They want more than the 1 billion breakup fee. The they deserve it important. Paragraph, I think in paragraph four of the of the nature of the action that price presented by Musk on a take it or leave it basis in an unsolicited public offer represented a 38% premium over Twitter's unaffected share price unaffected at the moment soon, soon to be affected. The other terms must offered and agreed to were he touted seller friendly? There is no financing contingency and no diligence condition.

Leo Laporte (00:08:06):
<Laugh> the deal is backed by airtight debt and equity commitments. Musk has personally committed 33.5 billion. I think that 33.5 billion is an important number. I suspect that's maybe the number they think they can get out of out of Musk, although he wouldn't then own the company, he would, I don't know what that I it's very complicated because in order to buy the company, he has to get fif has to have a proxy vote with the shareholders, gets 51% of the proxy vote. And then all the shareholders have to get $54 and 20 cents per share, which is a total. And he is already said he doesn't want it. And he said he doesn't want it. And presumably the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and Larry Ellison and the others who've put up money, Larry put up a billion himself. They are, they gonna be actually, that's a question for you, Kathy, are they bound by what the Chancery court of Chancery says?

Cathy Gellis (00:08:58):
Actually, I don't know the answer to that. I'm not sure they'd be bound specifically because I think

Leo Laporte (00:09:03):
They're loaning him the money, right?

Cathy Gellis (00:09:06):
Yeah. The contracts are with Musk and chances are, he might be in breach of their contracts to them where they could basically pull their money. Like he, he might end up, I don't think I'm speaking outta school on this, but I, I could be wrong. Like all of this is a, I'm not a corporate lawyer. And B law is not very stable these days. And C this is really pushing the edges of it. But one outcome is he could potentially be on the hook for if he CA even can't do the purchase, but some form of damages that comes close to the purchase price and not really have a way to finance it. And one question is then what you know, he may have a judgment against him. It may. And what does he do if he's got this judge, what happens to Twitter?

Cathy Gellis (00:09:44):
If Twitter wins, the money has an award against him. What money can they actually extract from him? Right? this is gonna be, I mean, the problem with the five, six years in law is that we've been stress testing, every single aspect of constitutional law, corporate law, contract law, tort law, everything has been going against the outer boundaries of how this law is supposed to function. And when you go to that and you push the edges, you find out to what extent it actually can function well at the edges, this isn't supposed to happen. This isn't supposed to be a kind of thing that's supposed to happen. And Twitter's complaint really kind of puts together why it's not supposed to happen. You're not supposed to have a purchaser walk in, make an offer, and then essentially vandalize the company and then walk away from the deal. Yeah, so

Leo Laporte (00:10:29):
They say's exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy, a model of bad faith. The claims are pretext and lack any merit. This is, I've said this before. We're in a situation we have been for five years, all, everything, everything in this country, the rule of law is to is kind of assuming a certain amount of normal behavior. And when people are willing to go beyond the norms, we often don't have,

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:59):
Well, then the question is, do we enforce the law in this case? And the norms though, you're right. Those are two different things. But, but there is precedent here. There are things to call upon. I put up a really good thread from Morgan Ricks about the remedies involved, a Vanderbilt law professor. And, and, and I'll just read two of 'em. It's very daunting to order specific performance in a situation like this. There's external financing that has to be made to perform, which is what you just talked about. And if Musk floats your, what if Musk floats your order? It turns into a showdown over the court's jurisdiction and power, which is what you're saying, Leo, is that when you don't follow all the rules yeah. If

Leo Laporte (00:11:36):
You just walk away, what is the, what are the chance he is gonna come after you?

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:40):
<Laugh> well, there's, there's chancellor. There's also don't forget S E C, right? Cause he's, he's,

Leo Laporte (00:11:44):
By the way up, up to now been kind of lenient with Mr. Musk. Cause let's always say, but

Cathy Gellis (00:11:50):
I think he's in trouble with S E C is gonna happen to him. I mean, if they enforce it, that's irrespective of what happens with this case. Exactly. But the issue is like that's punishment, normally specific performance over a human being as a remedy for contracts is dis favored because there's a 13th amendment problem with forcing another human being to do something they don't want to do. This is a little unusual because he sort of a human being in sort of in corporate form. And it's not quite clear. Can you, you can sometimes get specific performance out of like an enterprise. Yes. Come to close your deal. You have no choice. You can't walk away. It's been happened. And there's so citing a Tyson foods merger from sometime in this millennium, as, as an example of one where it would happen, but it's tricky under the best of circumstances. And this is really sort of the outer edge of this is not normal. This is a human being who happened to have a billion dollars to throw around. So I it's very strange. I mean,

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:46):
Rick thinks that that, that there owed a billion for the Raup fee, which I certainly would agree with and a billion in monetary damages. Now, where did he come with a billion for that? But I think you're talking that everybody's talking about how Twitter is so bad off Twitter can get rid of Musk. And I think we'll get a few more billion cash in the bank. Now if they have a different board and different management, that's a different question. What do they do with it? But I think Twitter can end up in the long run hurt for now, but if they can get rid of Musk and get some money.

Leo Laporte (00:13:19):
So, so that's the, that's the point of that's

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:21):
What

Leo Laporte (00:13:21):
E said kind of, of, of these lawsuits and everything. It's weird because E also said Twitter should just walk away and say fine. And what a number of people complained about F who's, the founder of Twitter E's tweet was that ignores the damage that Elon has done to shareholders, right there is beyond the hurt to there's

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:42):
Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Leo Laporte (00:13:43):
Here, there is a sign. I mean, look at the current stock price for Twitter. I mean, there, this was damaging. This looks, you know, like almost like a pump and dump scheme that went wrong when horribly wrong and who gets damaged in a pump and dump scheme is the everyday investors. So there, so it's easy for E you know, billionaire to billionaire to say, oh, let Elon off the hook. But there are a lot of Twitter investors who are left holding the bag and then

Cathy Gellis (00:14:11):
Court cares about right. Chance record is all about shareholder protection. Yes. I mean, possibly at the expense of other things, it would be good for law to care about, but that's what Delaware corporate law optimizes for protection of shareholders, particularly of minority shareholders. And so that's what it's adjudication in this forum is going to be keyed towards. And yeah, there's been damage. I mean, I use the word vandalized Twitter, didn't use that word, but they basically make the same point of you came, you offered, you kind of made it that we couldn't say no. And then we said yes, to let you go ahead and close this deal. And you immediately disparaged us, like, and here's your P emoji like this is,

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
Which was

Cathy Gellis (00:14:49):
Coaching argument,

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
Specifically violation of their agreement. They had a non disparagement agreement agreement.

Ant Pruitt (00:14:53):
Yes. You were saying that he D Twitter deserves more than the $1 billion clause that was there. Is it only because of his poor behavior or if, if he hadn't done any of these stupid tweets and poop emoji things, good question. And decided, you know what, I, I don't, I don't want to do this. Are you saying, okay, now they only deserve a 1 billion.

Leo Laporte (00:15:14):
No, that happens all the time. People back out of agreements all the time. Well,

Cathy Gellis (00:15:17):
Well, so I, this is, this is the answer that I prepared in advance. Good, because I, I, yes. Although all the caveats, not a corporate lawyer, this is weird. This is outside the jurisdiction, but one basic point to point out is da I think normal Americans view damages, you win in a, in a lawsuit as sort of like almost a prize of like, Woohoo, we got a million dollars of the settlement or something like that. And that's not how damages are supposed to work. The idea of damages is that it's supposed to, in most cases, it's supposed to make you whole, particularly in a contract case that the idea of damages is that the parties had thought they were okay. They thought they were gonna have this deal and the deal fell apart. So the point of the damages is to make them as okay as they would've been, if the deal had closed.

Cathy Gellis (00:16:04):
So, right. The idea with the billion dollar da fee that they wrote in, is that okay if this deal falls apart. And I think the $1 billion that clause maybe could have been better rid, but I think the point of is if the deal fails for a couple of reasons, we can't anticipate we'll be hurt, but we think that the hurt can be measured by a billion dollars. And if you pay, it will be whole and then go about your lives. The issue is that Musk did more. And the reason is getting breached is not necessarily one of those terms that in it was anticipated, but other terms beyond that, and also he caused additional harm. So I think what's happening with this complaint is that it's being queued up to try to get something more, to recognize the huge hurt to Twitter. Some PE and I don't think that billion dollars will necessarily function as a cap because I think it was based on if you walk away from a number of these circumstances, we can anticipate this is the measure of damages, but that Twitter is now arguing. This is something that nobody would've ever anticipated, cuz we would've anticipated that you'd act in good faith. And because you acted in this way instead, nobody could infer that you're acting in good faith. And we, you know, we can't clean up the mess that you've made for us just because you've walked away now. So, so I think they're trying to do that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:18):
So, so not if you look at the market cap right now. Sorry, sorry, go ahead ed. Sorry.

Ant Pruitt (00:17:23):
I, I, I don't claim to know the law like anybody else would that's not a lawyer, but does defamation come in here? Is anything around that part of this consideration for, for his bad acting or is it just I

Cathy Gellis (00:17:39):
Don't

Leo Laporte (00:17:39):
Or is that a different foreign

Cathy Gellis (00:17:40):
Track? My, so I think the thing is that the jurisdiction and the claims may be limited, but I'm speaking a little bit outside my zone here, but this is not a blank slate for other types of claims that they might have against Elon Musk, including under California law, like unfair business practices. So

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:58):
They could make that too.

Cathy Gellis (00:18:00):
Not they could,

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:01):
They could go no, not Chancery, but they could, whatever they went in Chancery. They could still go to ask question, could they go to another court on another action?

Cathy Gellis (00:18:09):
I don't know. Or,

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:10):
Or the settlement here would be here's your money that ends it.

Cathy Gellis (00:18:14):
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, basically one of the things that like you're trained up in law school is you play the hand, you're dealt. But sometimes there's certain ways that things are set up where it's like, no, that's much more of a hail Mary than you'd thought. And I don't know the answer to the question of how many bites at the apple and how many quarts they could get. But if they found that they needed more bites, they would certainly try to get some, it made sense to the apple to, yeah, I love. But I don't know if they can. And right now you've got a live contract where there's been a breach and the, and right now the Chancery court is the one to adjudicate the breach. And when you call, when they look at what broke and the, the hurt that happened, they're looking for a measure of damages. Now I think one of the reasons they're asking for specific performance is that share price is a way of starting to come up with a number. So if it's not gonna be forcing him to purchase at that number, then it might out translate into some other form of money. And that's gonna turn into multiples of billions, I believe is the most. So the

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:07):
Current, the current

Cathy Gellis (00:19:08):
Shooting,

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:09):
So Kathy, to, to answer that the current market cap was 28 billion. The offer was 44 billion. So right there is 16 billion as a starting point. Now I'm probably not gonna end up there. You could argue that the 44 billion was not the high end. It was what the stock was at the time, but that's still a lot more than 28 billion. So the Leo's point, the damage to the shareholders is considerable and measurable. And then go to S point, there's also damage to reputation. They've lost management. Mm-Hmm, they're losing people. There're all kinds of other things, too.

Cathy Gellis (00:19:41):
People wouldn't frame it

Ant Pruitt (00:19:42):
Because of the speculation of him being the new ownership too. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:19:45):
So I wouldn't frame it as defamation, partly because it's defamation is very narrow in the United States and corporate defamation is even more narrow than that, but there's definitely an issue of disparagement, which they bring up in the complaint because he was obligated not to disparage the company and he did. And in theory, the deal could still close even though he did, but then he walked, he disparaged and then walked away. So now they're like, you know, these are the things of the true measure of damages. No, not necessarily the, the billion they had prenegotiated because they knew how much harm he could potentially. Cause if they walked away, but they hadn't anticipated how much harm he could. Cause if he also breached the non-disparagement cause so somehow they would probably want to collect the money. That would count that damage and remediated, I don't know if this is the vehicle for it, but they're swinging for the fences. As far as this vehicle is concerned to try to get a number that's high enough. And realistically, if they got a number that's high enough that if

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:39):
You had, alright, let's do a pool. If a let's presume that Twitter wins and Musk gets away, Musk has to pay them out. It may come out of chance. Ray. It may come out of a settlement. What number do you think might be each of

Leo Laporte (00:20:54):
You? Well, I should, I should point on you brought this up, Kathy. The, the precedent for this is that earlier Tyson foods, case where they tried to back out of a purchase of the Iowa pork producers, IBP this is in 2003 and the Chancery court said, no, you can't back out. You've gotta buy 'em. And it's not exactly analogous. I hope that

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:19):
Doesn't happen here.

Leo Laporte (00:21:20):
Well, it's not exactly analogous, but it's similar. And by the way, Tyson did a lot of damage in the process, you know, chasing off other bidders like Smithfield, who also wanted them. So IBP had a pretty good cause in this case to say, Hey, you know, you, you really damaged us. And they were Tyson was forced to buy 'em. So that is, I think that's what Twitter is saying is this is like Tyson. There, there isn't a material adverse effect. Elon, remember Elon publicly has said, the problem is the five that the Twitter's figure of 5% spam bots is way low. That's not what he, what his lawyers, Skadden Arps said in their complaint against Twitter, in their, in their request to back out of the deal. They said that Twitter was non cooperative. And Twitter's saying, what do you mean non cooperative? A, we were B we didn't have to be, we were more cooperative than we even had to be, because exactly this was a no due diligence deal. Yes. So they gave him a whole bunch of didn't. They give him the fire hose, all sort gave the fire hose and Elon claim limited. And that was a problem. There were claims and they

Cathy Gellis (00:22:27):
Raised the late the rate, I think, right, to something that was like completely unprecedented.

Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
I'm gonna quote Andrew Torres from the opening arguments podcasts. They did three whole episodes on this <laugh>, which, which, which was quite good and quite interesting, going back to the origin of it. But Andrew, who, and this is kind of in his in his bail wick he he did talk about the Tyson case. That's how I know about it. He, he pointed out that it probably that the court may decide and should probably decide that because Twitter did not have to give Elon anything it's re was reasonable not to give him anything because the fear would be that Elon would then use that information against Twitter or tweet it, that it was in effect. If this is the analogy they used, if you bought a house as is, and then a day before closing said to this seller, oh, and I wanna inspect the roof, the seller would be within their rights to say no. Yep. Because you said a, you were gonna buy it as is you, you wave that. Right. But furthermore, that gives you ammunition. If you go inspect the roof and you find something or you damage the roof, it it's only to the seller's disadvantage to give you that information. So the fact that Twitter cooperated at, at all, I think their lawyers are gonna make the case. We went above and beyond our requirement. We were not required to par to give them anything. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm, <affirmative>

Cathy Gellis (00:23:58):
Twitter's behavior at this point reads like, okay, either reads that they were really, really, really desperate to close it.

Leo Laporte (00:24:05):
That's what it looks like doing everything.

Cathy Gellis (00:24:07):
Cause they, but it also reads as they were, they knew this day would come and they wanted to make sure that when this lawsuit got filed, they were in the best position possible. Yes, exactly. I think it's, yeah, it would be their within the rights to say no, but then you have to litigate it. And the fact that they gave him everything, they went above and beyond to give him stuff, his ability to say, no, I didn't know enough is, you know, they're pulling the, the air out of that.

Leo Laporte (00:24:29):
I it's all negotiation. Yeah. That's all I have to say. We, we really come to a point in this country where these trollish billionaires seem like they can get away with anything and do anything they want. And it really may be, is time to say, no, no, you have legal obligations. You have to fulfill. I don't. I think EV really Williams is completely wrong. You know, his tweet was I'm sh you know, if I were on the board, I'd be asking if we could just let this whole ugly episode blow over. 

Cathy Gellis (00:24:59):
No, you can't. He's really injured the company. Well, don't

Leo Laporte (00:25:02):
You, it very interesting. And I I'm trying not to be conspiracy minded here, but both Evan and Jack both were very pro Elon here. And I, I feel like this, somebody said maybe it's the case. That that explains why Jack left abruptly put in agro wall. Arguably not a great choice for CEO at Twitter because he anticipated this and he wanted this to happen. He wanted Twitter to be sold to Elon. And that's why he was pushing this all along. Here's the only real question to me, it it's pretty apparent to me that Elon's in the wrong, Twitter's got a very strong case here. They should win. But Kathy, what happens if they do win? The court says, no, Elon, you have to buy it. And he says, yeah, but all of this is contingent on loans from a bunch of other third parties. Can he be forced to somehow fulfill that?

Cathy Gellis (00:25:58):
I don't know. I think the play here is to, and to possibly everyone's satisfaction. The question is what the dollar amount is, is that it in lieu of the specific performance, what would be the damage that would be calculated?

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
And some of that should go to the shareholders, right?

Cathy Gellis (00:26:13):
Potentially. Yeah. The money

Leo Laporte (00:26:15):
That goes into the

Cathy Gellis (00:26:17):
Goes into it goes into the value of the company. I mean, yeah. And this is so annoying, cuz it's pressing, there's, it's a lot of legal pieces in motion to which there's answers. But a lot of us who don't practice this every day, don't necess, there's an answer over here and an answer over here. So there's a lot of threads. What happens? What if they do get a money judgment from him in some way, how do you enforce it against what do you enforce it? Like, this is a very geeky moment in time, but it's also really annoying to show up as a legal expert on a show and, and not have all the answers because there's a lot of interesting questions out there. So we love your humility. I'm it's times like this. It's so glad I went to law school, but I, there is times like

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:58):
This. I'm so glad I didn't.

Cathy Gellis (00:27:00):
Yeah. I don't know. I, I wish it gave me more x-ray vision. And it's kind of, you know, it's exciting to see it play out, except I'm upset about this. This is not a company I don't care about. This is not people I don't care about. Yes, yes. I, I really liked what Jeff said and I am inclined to agree. I think the best outcome for Twitter is get this, get this out of the way, extract as much cash as you can, which I think really should be more than at least a single billion, but I don't know how many other billions it should be for a just result. Somehow inject that into the company, get rid of its current board and get good people who believe in the company back on board, who can retain the talent and go forth and be a really innovative and civically minded company that it's been.

Cathy Gellis (00:27:42):
I mean, SI Twitter has been a really good neighbor in the areas of law that I care about and free speech. Yes. And free speech protection. They stand up for their users. They push back against abusive subpoenas. They're pushing back against sensorial behavior in India. Like this company has been a really good neighbor and I want them to succeed. And I think we're all kind of screwed if they don't. So this there's a certain bit where there's like some interesting shaded Ford let's get the popcorn. Except I care too much about this company and what happens and this really interesting medium that they've developed. So I want the result and I'm rooting for the result and it's contorting my legal analysis to get the result that I think would be best <laugh>. But as a lawyer, I'm also an advocate. So what do I need to push on to, to get that?

Cathy Gellis (00:28:26):
I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that Twitter can win. Twitter can win with money. Twitter can win with an award of money that somehow they can enforce and then they can go on with their lives. However, that's a real, that's a bunch of really small eyes of needles that they need to thread an awful lot through. And the only thing that makes the popcorn needing a little bit more palatable is this will start to happen more quickly than a normal civil trial would. If the ex, if the motion to expedite is granted cut off the presses. A colleague said they recently turned down one motion to expedite, but that may have been because it was at the beginning of the pandemic. So can't quite read the tea leaves there, the motion that was a different case, a different, it was a different case.

Cathy Gellis (00:29:06):
And this one, you know, reading their motion was compelling. Now, also all of this analysis needs to put a giant asterisk of we have not seen what Musk would like to defend himself with. And he gets to, and scan Arps is not a bunch of stupid lawyers. Like they, they know how to write a pleading, so something will come and we can see what defense they, he, he, he provides which, you know, and then we can go analyze this again. But people are wondering because so much of this has happened in public. Like what could he possibly say to defend his, you know, what he's done here? And the only to imagine

Leo Laporte (00:29:41):
About all this is, we're gonna hear a lot more Elon Musk, Twitter. Yeah. News over the last next year. Unfortunately.

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:46):
Yeah. Aunt was hoping there was a lot about he,

Leo Laporte (00:29:49):
This let's move on from that to say,

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:51):
Can I ask, talk about it? Can I ask question first?

Cathy Gellis (00:29:54):
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:54):
Yeah, I know it's not a democracy. Can I ask question first? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, he looks so sad up. He's gonna me ask a question. <Laugh> I would, I would like to hear as Kathy started on this path, I'd like to hear if you, if, if you're the new chairman of the board and the new board member of Twitter, new CEO of Twitter, what do you do now? Do you look for a purchaser that's question? One question two is whoever does a deal with Elon Musk again in life? What happens to him in business?

Cathy Gellis (00:30:22):
I

Leo Laporte (00:30:23):
Don't think Twitter would've talked to him. They knew exactly what was coming up because he'd already gotten in trouble with the sec for pretending that he was gonna take Tesla. Private Twitter knew exactly who they were dealing with. I don't think they wanted to do this, but what choice did they have?

Cathy Gellis (00:30:39):
Right. It's tricky. I mean, a key term that I've not used yet, but it's really important for all this analysis is the idea of fiduciary duties and who has them and to whom do they have them. And that there's fiduciary duties to the companies, to the shareholders, Alan Musk, arguably had some fiduciary duties during the dependency of this duty and of this transaction. And one of the arguments that that they made in the pleading is that he basically breached it because he wasn't giving consent. So they could do the things that it would take to, to retain the talent. That's a big thing that you have to follow with, you know, did the people currently in power do what they should have been doing as to protect them, the company to protect the other shareholders. And the answer is they may have been between a rock and a hard place, and they did what, you know, a reasonable thing. But you might want,

Leo Laporte (00:31:28):
Initially they adopted a poison pill. They said they were gonna adopt a poison pill. They, yeah, they tried to. And then they just finally, for some reason, just threw up their hands and said, well, no one else is gonna buy us. Maybe he's not completely full of, you know what, it's

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:41):
Tricky. I'm

Cathy Gellis (00:31:41):
Must get different. Somebody's offering you. Yeah, go ahead. Well, if somebody's offering you a lot of money, more than, you know, somebody offers to buy your house for more than it's worth

Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
There's premium. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:31:51):
How do you, it's a tricky thing to then say no to that. And there's a question of whether you're actually within your fiduciary duties to say no to that. That's tricky because the problem is is you well, free money, you know, that you should say yes, except it was free money with this huge anchor around it where free money, unless you lose the entire company in the process of pursuing it, in which case, and maybe there was enough writing on the wall that they really should have said, this is not free. This is like too good to be true. And we cannot possibly say yes to it because it's gonna break the company if we, if we try to do this. But I don't know, you know, hindsight 20, 20, et cetera. But I don't know, you know, the problem is, is the company is capitalized in a not particularly strong position and getting it to a position where it is strong and can't just be swallowed up by somebody else who has the cash in hand and doesn't really care about the company. That's a thing that could happen. Although corporate that's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:46):
What I'm trying to ask here is let's say, let's say you've got 3 billion, more you're rid of Musk. What's the strategy for Twitter going forward measure. We're past chance right now we're past all of this.

Cathy Gellis (00:32:58):
I mean, I think some of it is what is its business plan and what is its path to profitability and what is its monitorization plan and how do you take what's what works best about Twitter and expand it and expand it in a complete, in a increasingly hostile regulatory environment. You can, this is a tough company to drive, but it's also incredibly exciting about what it can do. And if it's got the runway to succeed this is tricky. It's a public company, so it's got different things, holding it back and different duties and obligations it's regulated in different ways. But on the other hand, some of that regulation should have protected Twitter much better than it has so far.

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:33):
I say,

Cathy Gellis (00:33:34):
This

Leo Laporte (00:33:34):
Is tough C suite.

Cathy Gellis (00:33:37):
I don't necessarily have a problem with you know, an engineer being CEO. I kind of like that. The problem is, is the moment in time, was it really needed somebody who, who might have had more of the corporate savvy to navigate this. Right. But in terms of rebuilding Twitter, he might actually be the guy let's

Leo Laporte (00:33:54):
Face it. It's the board is the issue here. The board, by the way, does not have a lot of dog in this hunt. They're not big shareholders as Musca has pointed out. So their fiduciary responsibility is to the shareholders.

Jeff Jarvis (00:34:05):
That's and Evan, Jack are off the board.

Leo Laporte (00:34:07):
Right? Yeah. It's interesting that Evan, Jack both have big opinions about this. I think I would, I would say the issue really was it's do or die for Twitter that this, this guy ultimately is the white Knight they needed because no one else would buy it. That's been on for sale for a long time. Nobody else is gonna buy it. Except

Cathy Gellis (00:34:29):
He was a wolfed suite in sheeps clothing. That's it wasn't ideals.

Leo Laporte (00:34:33):
They knew that,

Jeff Jarvis (00:34:33):
Oh, and the sheep's clothing was thread bear. Yeah. They

Leo Laporte (00:34:36):
Knew it. Yeah. And they, and I think that they said, this is our last shot guys. That's clearly what Jack Dorsey thought. And this is, we, you know, take it or leave it. And I don't know what Elon was thinking, whether he ever really wanted it.

Cathy Gellis (00:34:53):
It's my best. I don't think, I don't think he understood what was valuable about it. Yeah. I mean, he rails at things that are actually good about it and he, right. He doesn't seem to understand a lot of the issues, including the things he doesn't like about it. Like he really doesn't have a lot of understanding about what the business was. He was trying to buy his way into. Well, and there's been huge. I would hope that

Leo Laporte (00:35:10):
A huge cost to Twitter because it's, I mean, they've lost staff. In fact I have a story here somewhere that the Twitter's Twitter is completely demoralized by this.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:21):
Yes mm-hmm <affirmative> they also fired to, with what I don't understand is, is Kayvon. I'm believe his last name was, we had a product is, is brilliant. And they fired him and I'm not sure why they fired two top executives. I, I, I don't get fat. And that's one of Musk's argument by the way was, oh, you're tearing the company apart before I buy it. You've, you've, you've fired key

Leo Laporte (00:35:40):
Employees at this point. He's just throwing everything against the wall. Of course

Cathy Gellis (00:35:43):
He is, of course he's. But, but that's, that, that has a, a little bit more traction than most of the things he wants to say. I don't think the bot thing has traction. I don't think that not giving him information has traction that I think is a defensible thing. You know, managing the human resources, but that might

Leo Laporte (00:35:59):
Is in, that's a, a, a materially adverse that's, by the way, that's the, the term that, you know, they've gotta demonstrate that's what happened in Tyson versus IBP versus Tyson. It has the, the court decided that the, the things that had gone on at IBP were not materially adverse. And as a result, the merger agreement had to go through. Tyson said, oh, no, no, there's their prices gone down. There's all sorts of terrible things happening. And the court said, no, it's not enough. Is

Cathy Gellis (00:36:27):
That, I also tend to think that Alan could have negotiated for more. Like if you wanted to lock things down in place, he probably could have asked for more. And instead he sort of negotiated agreement that gave the company latitude to continue to run itself. And it did continue to run itself. And it's not clear that the personnel changes are out of line with a company running itself. Which typically, like you kind of have some discretion to run yourself where shareholders can't come after you for you ran your, you ran the company this way. And I object. So I, you know, it's, it, it holds water that he could complain about that, but I don't necessarily know if it's gonna win the day. And a lot of this stuff is like, it's not like it's never happened before. A lot of these terms were standard and the chance court has seen them before and knows how to adjudicate them. And there's some precedent that they can, they can turn to

Leo Laporte (00:37:16):
What happens to Twitter. Now

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:19):
That's my

Leo Laporte (00:37:20):
Question. Yeah. That's, that's really what we care about. Right. Unless you're a shareholder, right,

Cathy Gellis (00:37:24):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:37:26):
I know Twitter, your value has nothing to do with any of this. It's the people who post Twitter. Yeah. It's us. Well, we continue to post to Twitter. Why wouldn't we?

Cathy Gellis (00:37:35):
Yes. I didn't like the idea of posting to Twitter. If, if Elon owned it, that felt like a different proposition than what I bargained for. 

Leo Laporte (00:37:44):
Although some people, some people did leave most people just said, well, let's see what happens. Right. People leave performatively all the time. Yeah. Mike Isaac I think quit and came back and yeah. But so honestly the value of Twitter has nothing to do with as long as they can keep the servers running. Right. It has nothing to do with the company, has everything to do with who's on it. And who chose to it, assuming that nothing that happens in all of this brings the servers to their knees.

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:17):
If it becomes a protocol, if you go to the blue sky,

Leo Laporte (00:38:21):
I mean, you're gonna still tweet Jeff. I know you are,

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:24):
I'm gonna, I'm gonna tweet. And, and I, and I think that if it does become a protocol and you can build things on top of it, WordPress, like it could be the conversational WordPress. It could, it could grow much, much bigger if it goes back to even better than an API, the protocol ability to build things on top of it and businesses on top of it. I think there's ways to make that happen. It's not easy. It's not, it's not clear and obvious how to do that. But I do think there is a, a different strategy to be had.

Ant Pruitt (00:38:50):
Is this, are you basically saying they need to reinvent themselves? Because at decor that's not what Twitter was all about.

Leo Laporte (00:38:54):
I don't that to change a thing. They have to keep the servers running,

Ant Pruitt (00:38:57):
Just keep the servers up so we can have those really quick bursts of communication with people we care about, or

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
Twitter is what we say it is phone. If you will, Twitter is what we say. It is aside from features like Twitter blue or the edit button, none of which really, which is diminimous. Twitter is what is, what it's is, is made of people. <Laugh> like silent green. And if the people still tweet and the people still go there to read it, as long as they can keep the servers going. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, I mean, that may be a question, cause I don't know how they wanna

Cathy Gellis (00:39:26):
It's more than that though, because then you also get into content moderation and things like that. So one of the things is whether Twitter is multiple things at once, all rolled into a company like all the social media companies are both infrastructure and application at, at the same time. And one of the things that I think makes sense in Twitter is probably further ahead in thinking about this than any of the other companies, because of the, the blue sky is that Twitter functioning as essentially almost platform infrastructure for other people to yes. Then deploy for their own communities and their own content and their own distribution of like 240 character tweets or whatever whatever they end up called, where you divorce a little bit, the, the hardware and, and saw, you know, the really embedded infrastructure parts of, of what Twitter is from the content that sits on top of it. That may be inevitable anyway. Just because of the regulatory,

Leo Laporte (00:40:22):
I think that there are, to be honest, we're gonna take a break a second and unfreeze Kathy, but I think there would, we have to take a break anyway, but I think there are to be honest maybe ways to handle this issue of server and moderation, all the expenses of Twitter in maybe a better way than a monolithic Twitter Masson handles easily handles ion issues. Maybe there's a way for Twitter to self moderate you know,

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:50):
Or choice moderate that I, I get my Twitter, you get your Twitter. Yeah. Right. We have different Twitters. And I, I hire, I hire aunt, how hard is to run my Twitter and pay him for that. Well, or you just,

Leo Laporte (00:40:59):
Are you just unfollow and block people that you don't like, and then your Twitter is just what you want it to be. I think it's completely doable. So I don't think what it is. This might be actually saluatory for Twitter in the long run. That's

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:13):
My argument. I think this is, it was a bad that they got Schmitz by him at all. Well, I, but if they can get rid of him and get some money and yeah, he gives him, he gives him,

Leo Laporte (00:41:24):
He's got 21 billion that he's out of pocket. He gives him 21 billion, which I could see the court saying, well, we can't force your lenders to give you anything, but you, your 21 billion is good. Still give him 21 billion <laugh> and that's enough. That's enough to run Twitter for a long time. Oh

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:40):
Yeah. 5 billion, 10 billion. This

Leo Laporte (00:41:44):
Could be quite good

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:45):
That you buy the argument that Yahoo made, that he, that he, he did all of this, so he could cash out more Tesla stock.

Leo Laporte (00:41:52):
That was a very, that wasn't actually did not come from Yahoo. Yahoo had the story,

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:57):
The story. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:00):
Was it Matt Lavin? I can't remember, but somebody clever said Elon had was at a, a, a point in time where he had to sell stock or lose it and he needed a way to do this, that had a cover. So I thought that was kind of clever. This is on 27, Henry blo said this,

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:22):
Oh, it was Henry said that

Leo Laporte (00:42:23):
Henry blo said this. So this is a tweet from Henry blo. He said that Musk's tenure, Tesla options were about to expire. So he had to sell them the Twitter bid allowed him to do that without facing questions about why he was selling. And incidentally, he sold at an excellent price. Now, Henry lodges pretty sharp.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:43):
Hmm. That he definitely is.

Leo Laporte (00:42:45):
He knows the market and he knows the ways of marketers. So maybe, maybe that's what happened.

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:51):
He could have done a better job and just walked away with a billion costs for doing that and not with right. And 20 billion.

Leo Laporte (00:42:58):
I want him to be slapped silly personally.

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:00):
I, I,

Leo Laporte (00:43:01):
But that's completely an emotional <laugh> that's not a legal judgment. Wow. I just, I just an

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:05):
Emotional judge wanna file a friend of the court brief. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:43:08):
Yeah. Well, well, my legal analysis is, is being tinted by the same sentiment. Yeah. So which is a danger, you know, I wanna put up all the asterisks for you know, I, it does not feel like justice is getting served. If he could just hit and run like this and run away. I wanna, I want to feel as a citizen of this planet, that law can prevent this sort of thing. And I know that law is built to prevent this sort of thing. So I'd like to see it actually flex its muscle yes. And do its job and down with this sort of thing. And that there's actually a remedy that law can deliver to somebody who got hurt by this sort of behavior.

Leo Laporte (00:43:42):
Well, and there is a, there's a real argument. Not that we need that to be because if, and this is what the S SEC's job by the way is to preserve faith in the markets. And, and the number one job of the S C is to make sure that any investor feels like they have all the information that any other investor has so that they can make an intelligent decision to buying a stock mm-hmm <affirmative> investors will abandon the stock market. If they feel like it's, it's rigged. And there's an inside, you know group of people that knows what's going on. And that's the S SEC's entire point of for its existence, cuz otherwise the markets don't work. You have to feel like it's a fair market. This is the kind of thing that makes people say, that's it. I'm not, I'm not buying stock anymore. So it's really important. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that this, this be solved and that people be made whole, and that this kind of behavior is sanctioned in such a way that it doesn't keep happening. You don't want somebody else to do

Ant Pruitt (00:44:41):
This. Twitter being made whole is whole is one thing. But the sec stepping up and doing what they should do as a whole other thing. Things there, punishment. Yes. Yeah. I, I too punched. We'll see if that happens.

Leo Laporte (00:44:54):
It's it's also

Cathy Gellis (00:44:54):
Part and affected Tesla too. Yeah. Like if that theory is correct and stuff, you know, he's got a lot of equity in a lot of positions and he was mushing them around. So and possibly not in the way in the transparent way that it's supposed to happen. It's

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
In a way, the point of any court too, is to preserve our faith in the rule of law. You know if you, if you go to a country, I use Egypt as an example. Cause I have some direct experience there where you can, you can do something cuz you know, somebody in the government or you pay the right bribes. It undermines everybody's faith. In the fairness, the essential fairness in the rule of law. And as soon as that starts to crumble, it all comes tumbling down. That's why Trump needs to be taken a task. It's why Elon needs to be taken a task. If we want this country to continue to operate, if we want our social contract to continue, it requires that the institutions act in such a way that our trust is preserved. That's what the courts do. That's what the sec does. That's what government does. So it's, that's really the stakes of this. If you ask me, it's not, yeah. I hate stupid billionaires and they're jerky jerk, jerks, you know, they're

Cathy Gellis (00:46:03):
Poop. I would like to amend that please. Yes. Plus one. Amen. Exactly. And, and, and all the forms that that you've just described, like we need to see that law actually works. Yes. And that it works for bad actors cuz otherwise, where are we, what defense do we have? What are we proud of? How do we understand our society to function? And what do we believe in so that, you know, we don't just feel like it's, you know, pure power, pure violence. That is how our society is structured. We think we're better than that. And I'd like to, but you know, now the rubbers hits the road. We need law to show us that we are better than that.

Leo Laporte (00:46:36):
Yeah. And I can. And there's example, after example of countries where that has failed and they become failing countries. It's not a good look. Let's take a little break, Kathy gal. So glad to have you yay. From the beautiful day Bedminster golf course in downtown Nutri <laugh>

Cathy Gellis (00:46:56):
No, <laugh>, I'm not there. I am not there from

Leo Laporte (00:46:59):
The gardens

Cathy Gellis (00:47:00):
Record from

Leo Laporte (00:47:01):
The gardens

Cathy Gellis (00:47:01):
State. I'm the garden

Leo Laporte (00:47:02):
State CG count.com is her website. And what kind of you keep saying, you don't do this kind of law. What kind of law do you do?

Cathy Gellis (00:47:10):
I have internet law. I usually say of some tech policy generally. And then first amendment civil liberties type law.

Leo Laporte (00:47:17):
Good. The good kind.

Ant Pruitt (00:47:18):
All God's work. The good

Leo Laporte (00:47:19):
Kind, the good kind. Jeff Jarvis. He's keeping us honest as a professor of journalism at the wonderful city university of New York and are of course a Stal word of this show. And, and the chief anti-democratic officer. We also thank Mr. An put for being here. The voice of reason, the calm voice.

Ant Pruitt (00:47:42):
I'm just keeping the seat warm right now.

Leo Laporte (00:47:47):
Well, you're doing a lot

Ant Pruitt (00:47:49):
And trying my best, not to say anymore yet. SP splits on air.

Leo Laporte (00:47:52):
Sorry. It is tempting though. Isn't it? I don't blame you. Our show today brought to you by new Relic. Oh Lordy. If you're a software engineer, you know that late night phone call just waiting to happen. The phone rings, the slack buzzes, whatever it is that gets you outta bed. And there's an alert and something's broken now, you got your whole team scrambling you. The, the boss is calling. You got tool after tool, after tool, you're firing up. No one. It's like a, a fire drill. No one knows what's happening. This is all cuz you have not implemented observability and your networks and systems. According to new Relic report, only half of all organizations are doing so. And it's clear. Maintaining network. Observability is a big issue for companies around the world. That's why you choose new Relic, new Relic, all in one 16 different monitoring products with all in one place.

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So what are you waiting for that middle of the night phone calls just out there waiting to happen. Get new Relic right now before it does takes a minute to set up costs you nothing, no credit card needed sign up right now. New relic.com/twig if new Relic knows you ought to know. N E w R E L I C. New relic.com/twig. We thank of so much for supporting this weekend. Google you support us when you use that URL, new relic.com/twig. They all went to Chicago style pizza place for lunch. Oh, I can't, I can't eat that stuff. So I have a nice salad

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:35):
Instead. What did you have aunt?

Ant Pruitt (00:50:37):
I had a deep pepperoni pepperoni, and then there's some other one back here.

Leo Laporte (00:50:41):
His request was simple. They asked, what do you want? He said meat. <Laugh>

Ant Pruitt (00:50:49):
I'm a simple man. I don't wanna

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:51):
Me sweat.

Leo Laporte (00:50:52):
<Laugh> somebody asked for a pesto pizza. I said, come on, get outta here. Go away. Get outta here. That was Russell. I think Russell wanted pesto. All right.

Cathy Gellis (00:50:59):
What are you guys talking about? Eating pizza in California?

Leo Laporte (00:51:02):
I know it's not the real, but this is Chicago style. So it's deep dish. So it's not like what you're getting out there in beautiful New Jersey. I was really thrilled when we were in Rhode Island that Frank Pepe's pizza Nepal has opened a Warwick, Rhode Island branch. So that's the only real pizza Pepe's pizza in new Haven.

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:22):
I I'll remember that. I ruled that. Genos east was the best in the country.

Leo Laporte (00:51:27):
No, that's a Chicago style. Yeah, we have a it's very similar to Geno's actually old Chicago pizza here. It's pretty good. Jeff, when he worked, was this at entertainment? Weekly people. People, when he worked at people was like the pizza guy. <Laugh> yeah. Wow. But a lot of new Yorkers really hit your guts after that

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:47):
John New York

Ant Pruitt (00:51:49):
Half now.

Leo Laporte (00:51:49):
Oh, okay. Good.

Ant Pruitt (00:51:50):
We need to add that to his lower hand.

Leo Laporte (00:51:52):
Yeah, really?

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:52):
I was on the menu at chins east.

Leo Laporte (00:51:57):
Oh

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:57):
The cover of the menu. We

Leo Laporte (00:51:58):
Have to de laminate this and add it. <Laugh>

Ant Pruitt (00:52:02):
Mr. Burke, where

Leo Laporte (00:52:03):
Are you? There's it. Google doc. Oh, let me add it to the Google.

Cathy Gellis (00:52:05):
I'm still working on my first lamination and he's on his second

Leo Laporte (00:52:08):
<Laugh> oh, this is like the fourth Google shareholder, former TV guy critic. Frank Sinatra called him a bomb. Ray crock called him a nickel millionaire. Murphy brown called him a bottomless pit of hate formerly one of San Francisco's 100 most eligible bachelors. He lived in the New Jersey tomato fields, the human Dedos. These are all things he's called himself. El Hefe de taco bell does not take criticism well trapped in the jungle gym of life. Online man certified big guy disaster in the grocery store author all about Anne Mo email of the week for November 23rd, 2021, and almost a New Jersey mall. Mogul ladies and gentlemen, I give you

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:46):
What was the latest and line 1 91 is me on the cover of Geno's east, a pizza menu cover boy.

Leo Laporte (00:52:55):
So, oh man. So we have to add this to the <laugh> to the the Google doc. I gave Geno east five pies in my very scientific survey for people. And so as a result, they made him a menu at him. What was the Jeff Jarvis pizza? <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:16):
Well, what do you mean? I had ordered pepperoni.

Leo Laporte (00:53:18):
Oh, what do you expect? I thought you, but did they name him pizza after you? Is that what you said? No,

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:21):
No, no, no, no, no, no. They just put the, me, they put my review on the cover of the

Leo Laporte (00:53:24):
Menu. It's on the menu. That's

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:26):
It. That's me. That's my review on

Leo Laporte (00:53:28):
The cover menu

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:29):
By Jeff Jarvis,

Leo Laporte (00:53:30):
The gen P is it still there?

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:32):
No, I don't think so. Was for years,

Leo Laporte (00:53:35):
1980. Who's Jeff Jarvis. You don't really want

Cathy Gellis (00:53:38):
I'm sure. I would trust the a 30 year old, 40 year old, old, 40 year old.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:44):
And then, and then when I wrote review of Genos east, when it came to San Francisco for the examiner under the headline of burp to remember <laugh> they posted the, a copy of that review and every gen east in the country.

Leo Laporte (00:53:58):
Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:59):
I would, I would be able to go in and remember kids there's me and they'd run away. Embarrassed. You

Leo Laporte (00:54:03):
Were peripherally a question on jeopardy about a month ago. Did you know that?

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:08):
No, I had

Leo Laporte (00:54:09):
No idea. They said UW. It was about the satellite oh,

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:15):
Sky, lab,

Leo Laporte (00:54:16):
Sky. Oh, they said this satellite. No, no. The San Francisco examiner offered a whatever $10,000 prize for a piece of this satellite when it crashed on the earth. And the answer was what is Skylab?

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:29):
Skylab, Skylab.

Leo Laporte (00:54:32):
So I thought of you when I saw that and I knew the answer by the way.

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:36):
Thanks. Thanks. Here's here's another, let me see. I'll put another image up here. No,

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
That's okay

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:42):
About me.

Leo Laporte (00:54:43):
Although me, you might be interested to know that according to NASA, the the, the asteroid BEU B E N N U is its surfaces close to a plastic ball pit. You might be interested to know that

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:59):
This is interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:55:01):
And there they were puzzled because back in 2020, the ocirus spacecraft was supposed to land on BEU. Or you may remember this an asteroid 200 million miles from the earth, collect a small sample and come back. But when the spacecraft started to go down, I realized it would've sunk into Beno. Had it not fired its thrusters to back away immediately after it grabbed the dust rock, it was starting to sink into the, it turns out the particles making up BEU exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other. That if a person were to step out on a BEU, they would feel very little resistance as if stepping into a pit of plastic balls that are popular play areas for kids.

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:45):
<Laugh> thanks for the explanation. Yeah. Journalist

Leo Laporte (00:55:48):
The ball pit. No, that's it that's

Cathy Gellis (00:55:50):
How deep, how deep. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
They didn't say that. Like how how's

Cathy Gellis (00:55:54):
Like, if it only goes up to your knees. Okay, fine. If it's a little bit higher than that quick sand, you're gonna have issue quick sand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, atmosphere may also be a problem. So you, you, you may have other issues, but that sounds like an issue unto itself

Leo Laporte (00:56:11):
Anyway. Yeah. I mean, they don't, I wish they would say, you know, how deep would you sink? How deep is your ball pit deep is your ball pit. I really want to know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:22):
Plus when it, it took off, did it need the resistance of taking off from the asteroid?

Leo Laporte (00:56:26):
I imagine the flying ball pit balls from the ball pit,

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:29):
Or it just scatter the whole damn thing. It ruined the asteroid.

Leo Laporte (00:56:32):
I don't know. They made a mess on BEU.

Cathy Gellis (00:56:34):
You've ruined that asteroid. <Laugh> go to your room

Leo Laporte (00:56:39):
Is your bald

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:41):
It'll run into Elon's Tesla space.

Leo Laporte (00:56:44):
All right. Back to work. Yo guys, unlike, unlike the Twitter employees who apparently have completely lost all their mojo Twitter's according to wired magazine, as Elon walks, Twitter employees say, no, one's in charge. They're fed up about being kept in the dark one. Twitter employee said Twitter is a poop show internally. I can confirm that for you right now, without a doubt talking to wired. There's no strong leadership at the moment, says a second Twitter staffer. Also speaking anonymously, the entire company's running on autopilot a third. What do you

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:22):
Expect them to do right now?

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):
I've been at companies during a transition like this and it's oh yeah. What

Cathy Gellis (00:57:28):
Is the exact date on that? Because I wonder if it it's predates the, the, I wonder yesterday, the effect of morale yesterday. So does that incorporate the aftermath of the litigation being filed? Like I oh, much VE you like to think that there's gonna be like an uptick in like, okay, there's a meaning, there's a purpose. Something, although it's shooting for purchase, which may not actually enthu most of the Twitter employees, but it's some it's Twitter fighting back. So

Leo Laporte (00:57:55):
That something, in fact it had, according to wired, we we've been told nothing by senior management, internal communications about the latest developments have been limited to a message pointing users to a tweet by a company chair, Brett Taylor, who said, we're gonna Sue. This was so it was prior to them filing the suit, but they did say we planned to pursue legal action in the Chancery court. Employees have been asked not to add their own comments to that post. One employee says every time I find out something about Twitter, I found out on Twitter. <Laugh> I find out about the must news via friends, not through my own company, which has been a consistent issue from the beginning

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:32):
Liner.

Cathy Gellis (00:58:34):
The, the tricky thing is that's actually, you know, from the lawyer perspective, that's good. Like, you kind of want that information discipline because you don't want, and this is kind of Musk has used this before where wayward, Twitter, people have said things have vented and he's wanted to use it against the whole company. Right. Which kind of puts the employees in this really impossible bind because kind of to do your job, you need to be able to talk around the water cooler. But the problem is, is the water cooler is discoverable and it can mess up the litigation position of the, of the company. It shouldn't matter, but it ends up mattering because it creates optics and things like that. So this, this is tough and it isn't just Twitter that has this problem, like any company with employees, especially a lot of employees, some of who may not be having a good day. And, and they say things. And if, if those things are ever found and sometimes they might have to be found it can create problems, but not letting employees know stuff or talk about stuff also creates problems. So I don't know what the path through is. This is a really unfortunate bind that companies can actually be in

Leo Laporte (00:59:36):
Today. A famous short seller, aptly named Hindenberg research. <Laugh> I, I bet your blimp is gonna crash. I think so. Yeah, it's clever, but they didn't buy, they didn't short Twitter. They, they went long on Twitter, which has actually boosted Twitter, shorty

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:55):
Neon.

Leo Laporte (00:59:55):
They said exactly that we've accumulated significant long position and shares of Twitter. Twitter's complaint poses, a credible threat to Musk's empire. Where do they say that? The whole on Twitter on Twitter? <Laugh>

Cathy Gellis (01:00:10):
It that I don't think that's beyond the, this is rose covered glasses for how I want justice to play out. But if they are able to somehow extract leverage for money from Musk, where does he get the money from? And that I think puts his empire at risk cuz he is not, he has, you know, a huge amount in terms of assets and capitalization as overall net worth, but it's not all liquid. And so it tons

Leo Laporte (01:00:34):
Debt against it already. Well, and

Cathy Gellis (01:00:36):
Here's against it. And

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
Here's an important number. Bloomberg, I think estimated that if Tesla's shares went down below 7 25, you know, he borrowed on margin that he, the margin would be called and that Tesla's now at seven 11 <laugh>.

Cathy Gellis (01:00:52):
And the, the problem is, is if he, if he has to

Leo Laporte (01:00:55):
Down 700, so yeah,

Cathy Gellis (01:00:56):
If he has to liquidate, then he's gonna flood the market, which is also gonna drop money further. So he's also in, in a position of losing whatever control he has over his other companies as he divest

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:10):
And then Tesla share or other people up the yin yang.

Leo Laporte (01:01:12):
Well, and that just shows you that Elon is not the genius. Some theme to think he is, this is really been a, not just bad for Twitter, but bad for Elon in all of his holdings. Right?

Cathy Gellis (01:01:25):
Yeah. I mean, he tried to buy a business. He didn't really understand, that's not a good move under the best of

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
Circumstances. And then, and then lost his, you know, confidence and

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:35):
You tend to be a little more positive on than we do.

Ant Pruitt (01:01:39):
I stay, I still say that he was potentially buying Twitter to put other folks in place to help it be a more successful business. Not necessarily him doing all of the stuff, that's gonna change it, but putting the other people in place similar to how it is with SpaceX and so forth, cuz it, those, those rockets doing whatever they're doing, ain't got nothing to do with his brain. In my opinion, it's, it's the team, it's all of the other scientists that he helped put in place. Clearly

Leo Laporte (01:02:05):
He's done a good job

Ant Pruitt (01:02:06):
To get stuff done of that. Yeah. And I figured that's what he would've done with Twitter. But most people don't really care for that opinion. <Laugh>

Cathy Gellis (01:02:14):
Well, so it's an interesting opinion, but I wonder, I don't think he understands the business enough to know who was qualified to run it for. Yeah. So I think, I think that might almost be easier with SpaceX cuz like, did you, did you build a rocket than did it go up in space? Okay. You might be qualified, whereas you're qualified Twitter. Like I think it's did you deal with don't know, I suppose the items on the resume that that may be more specific to it, but, but it might be easier to vet expertise for something where the science is a little bit more straightforward. Whereas Twitter is messy, this is humanity and human beings are messy. And even the people who are expert at it are sort of, you know, trying to figure out everything that's going on. And I, and just his attitude in terms of his misapprehensions about how things work, how the law respect it wor Twitter works. It's just, yeah. Okay. So he would put in a qualified team. That sounds great, but I'm not sure he'd be able to come up with one because I don't think he knows what one looks like mm-hmm <affirmative> and is able to evaluate the qualifications. So under even if he meant, well, his ability to pull this off, I think is dubious.

Leo Laporte (01:03:17):
It's kind of, I mean, that's AC actually part of the problem with Twitter is nobody's ever done this before. There is no mm-hmm <affirmative> you can't even look at Facebook and say, oh yeah, we'll just copy their, no, their strength, no Twitter is absolutely a unique business. It's not anything we've ever seen before,

Cathy Gellis (01:03:32):
But there's some acuity that you can still demonstrate. And you know, also there've been people who've been building it for a while and you know, there's, there is some expertise that's built and certain ways of sort

Leo Laporte (01:03:43):
Of it's all at Twitter, ironically.

Cathy Gellis (01:03:46):
Yeah. So they, they really need to not lose the, the knowledge base so much. Although there have been generations of leadership that I think have made missteps, but Twitter is an interesting company with an interesting corporate soul. And I think that thing that makes me root for them is hoping that they can keep that the bit, that really sort of understood how they were idealizing free speech as a, as a normative value. And I know they get criticized for like, well, you kick somebody off. How can, how can that be pro-free speech? But ultimately I think they are in a number of ways, including, as I said, like the way they back up, their user speech trades, protect anonymous users you know, how they even deployed their legal team, which was under the guidance of AMAC originally, I think like there's some really good stuff. Some Twitter's got an excellent legacy. And so if they can value that and build up around that, that core, that soul that's kind of been the running theme throughout its entire history. I think they stand a chance, but I don't think that's what, I don't think he even recognizes that there, the closest company put awful lot of other people,

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:46):
The closest company Leo I think is WordPress.

Leo Laporte (01:04:51):
Well, right? EV Williams who founded Twitter left and

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:56):
Blogger before

Leo Laporte (01:04:57):
That, before that Odo first blogger then Odo, which was a podcast platform kind of about it because we were on it kind of it was too early and it maybe wasn't quite the right idea. He very famously gave all the investors money back, which is unheard of in Silicon valley founded after that founded Twitter left Twitter coed co-founded with, with Jack and another guy whose name never gets oh, Ringo. Yeah. <laugh>

Cathy Gellis (01:05:26):
Wasn't a biz stone.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:28):
Biz

Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
Stone. Yeah. Biz came later. There was another guy who says I invented it on the swing, said gold, gold, south park,

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:33):
Jason Jason

Leo Laporte (01:05:36):
Is Goldman or something anyway, come on chatroom. See isn't that sad? This guy, you know

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:42):
Noah Glass. No.

Leo Laporte (01:05:44):
Yeah, no glass.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:45):
Was it dog glass?

Leo Laporte (01:05:46):
Yeah. No glass. And he even came up with the name Twitter. Yeah. Noah Twitter. He said is at O anyway. I know because I was there. I, I remember I was in the park. They were swinging no, I know because they stole, my name is how I know. Yeah. <Laugh> <laugh> I asked him about that later. He said, he said it was great. We asked him on the, our show about inside the net, we were interviewing. And he said, well, he said, yeah, I know about twit, but I didn't think either of us were going anywhere. So what the hell? Wow. <Laugh> <laugh> he was half, right. He was half. Right. Anyway.

Cathy Gellis (01:06:22):
Oh, I did find it interesting in the complaint. They capitalized the word tweet and from a lawyer perspective, that was fascinating. They're not using they're, they're not risking generic side of their own right. Corporate names. That tweet was capitalized in every instance that they used it. I just thought that was an interesting thing

Leo Laporte (01:06:40):
At one point, and I kind of Google considered this at admission of if not guilt guilty conscience. They decided to get everybody to call it a tweet, not a TWI. There was for a while people were calling 'em tweets and they, they, they trademarked tweet and they said, please call it a tweet. So nice. Even if it had nothing to do with me, I, I, I took it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:02):
Maybe you could have gotten some money out of

Leo Laporte (01:07:05):
<Laugh> anyway as

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:07):
Jamer B laughs in the background.

Leo Laporte (01:07:09):
Yeah. <Laugh> <laugh> anyway F who then left Twitter and medium after five years running Twitter medium a publishing platform in 2012. That was and I didn't remember this. The name comes from the fact partly comes to the fact that it's a it's in between a full length blog post, and a tweet it's a medium length post has now stepped down on Tuesday a month. Short of 10 years Williams is giving up. He is going to move upstairs, become chairman. He will be replaced, which is interesting effective July 20th, just a few days from now by the chief executive of the online coaching company, coach.me, Tony Stubbe.

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:02):
They have a history together.

Leo Laporte (01:08:05):
The name Stubbe familiar. I feel like

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:08):
It's in the story, the time story he

Leo Laporte (01:08:13):
He's been, he's been around Casey Newton and platformer writing also about this. I, you know, basically I think the, the conclusion that Casey makes in a lot of makes a lot of people make is that medium could have been subs stack but, but somehow missed the boat. And of course it went through several famous pivots and, and a, a former employee noted. This is Casey writing that for all the pivots over the years, Williams always seemed a step behind quote, I'd say you could describe the, a era of medium as a series of digital publishing experiments that often felt of the zeitgeist without ever defining it. A lot of the work medium did over the years genuinely had an impact. And I know you publish on medium Jeff, but it often felt for whatever reason, like E made it a point not to lean into this work, he meandered and never

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:12):
Sense. I think that's a bit unfair. I think that, that two things, I think that, that E had a medium, had an impact on so many other publishing platforms. It set a standard for typography, ease of use wizzywig, beauty, and, and so on. He had a vision for the God. I wanna say the word platisher to be a publisher and a platform at the same time and figure that out, which he, which he didn't. And the problem always was trying to figure out the business model for content now in a world where everyone can speak, see Twitter discussion. If speech itself has become the commodity, you know, it's no longer a, a special thing to write. It's no longer a special thing to be able to publish. Everybody can do it. That's the beauty of the internet. How do you then make something on top of that? And I think that he was in the one hand, wanted to be judge, but not too judgemental. He wanted to be a platform. Anybody could publish here, but then will, will elevate the good stuff. I think that's exactly what the web needs. He just, unfortunately didn't figure it out yet. It didn't figure out. He went from having native advertising to advertising, to no advertising to the membership plan. And he never hit on the business model that was gonna make successful by the way, stumble mine was lead engineer VP of engineering at

Leo Laporte (01:10:25):
Odio. Yeah. That's where I know the name. I remember Tony. He also wrote the for O'Reilly wrote the the Pearl handbook <laugh> oh, of course. I'm sorry, the regular expression handbook. So the guy's a geek, he's a total, total geek. He the regular expression pocket reference and, and he's a Pearl programmer. So that's an interesting choice. It almost feels like Eve's like saying, okay, fine, you do this. I I've, I've lost my mojo here

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:59):
And E's gonna start a laboratory. And I, you know, E's changed the world a couple times, blogger blogger's huge before there was WordPress huge

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:06):
Really set the tone. It really, it really made it popular and made it possible. Twitter. We've been talking about for an hour and a half now it's changed the world medium, not as much as the first two, but still had impact. I don't know anyone who has had much impact serially as F Williams.

Leo Laporte (01:11:23):
And yet I, you know, the, the that's fair. The, the point that absolutely fair is that he never could figure out a way to make medium work five bucks a month. Didn't do it. He, yep. He just couldn't quite, and that's, by the way, those are hard things to do. So that's, and again, given his success, as you point out with blogger and Twitter and you know, to some degree, medium inspired a lot of people. He, he deserves some credit. So I agree with you.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:49):
He, he turned and I have this conversation with him. He turned rather adamantly against advertising. He first wanted to reform advertising. He thought he had a way to fix advertising, make it more relevant, make it less, less intrusive, make it decent. And, and he couldn't make that happen, probably cuz he didn't have the scale to do it. And advertiser was just stupid. All they want to scale, even though that's that's passe. So that he gave up on it and tried to come up with a way to get the money from the people and all God's children have paywalls now. So that's not the work. Yeah. I think there's a, there's a future. This is my blue sky rant, but I think there's a future in a curatorial layer as a premium layer. And I don't know where that goes. I don't know exactly what that means, but I think there's, we're, we're at the bare beginning. It's only 1480 in Gutenberg years.

Cathy Gellis (01:12:39):
Jeff, I have an update for you on one of your favorite topics, an ancillary copyright. Woohoo.

Leo Laporte (01:12:45):
It's been a

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:46):
Long time life short. It's

Leo Laporte (01:12:48):
Been a long time. What's the, and the, we should do segment it's the ancillary copyright time.

Cathy Gellis (01:12:55):
No, no, no. I don't think we should make it a segment because the news actually on this unusually sit down, you know, Fasten your seatbelt. The news is kind of good, which is that the copyright office was considering whether ancillary copyright was an appropriate remedy for fixing whatever ails the news. And they decided, no, this is not a job for a copyright law. And so, and they, I haven't fully digested the, the report that they issued, which I think came out last week mm-hmm <affirmative> but some of commentators found that it was so persuasive that hopefully it takes the wind out of the sales of anything that Congress was trying to think of doing that this was just an extra layer, not appropriately tailored for all the competing interests and just not a good idea. And they're like, this is not the place for copyright. And so they recommended that the copyright law does not get dragged into doing this. So hopefully, maybe that's excellent. Yes. At least in American law, they let's not make this a feature because maybe this is something that we can never speak of. Again,

Leo Laporte (01:13:51):
I am gonna regret asking this <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:57):
Set the clock now we'll see how, how long sheet I can go. What

Leo Laporte (01:14:00):
Is what are we talking? What is ancillary copyright,

Cathy Gellis (01:14:04):
Right. For those who didn't tune in for the other show where we spent half the show talking about it. Although you were there ancillary copy,

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:13):
I'm asking for a friend understand. All right. Yeah. OK. <Laugh>

Cathy Gellis (01:14:17):
Ancillary copyright was essentially we're talking link taxes. And the question is how were you, could you sort of enforce that if a social media platform allowed users to link to other or search engines or yeah. A platform of some form linked to a source of news somewhere else that could, that source that you ended up at somehow charge you for the right of having a link on your site to their site. And what's the leverage that you would use to do that? And let's think about whether copyright is the lever ancillary copyright was, is copyright law, the leverage to force a payment of some form. And so the copyright office said no copyright law should not be the thing that, that causes that to happen. Whether somebody tries another mechanism, but I'm not quite sure whether there are mechanisms and in American law would be available to them. But other nations in the world think this is a perfectly good idea, even though it isn't and are still trying to have their own link tax proposals, where if a platform allows a user to link to a new site, somehow the platform has to pay for the privilege. Even though this gives the platforms, audiences, and they need audiences, they're not making any money. If they publishers have audiences, if the publisher's

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:32):
Audience, the publisher audience. Right, right, right. This is the, this is the Q the reggae beat lace threat. It was the Spanish link tax. It is the new legislation articles, 15 and 17 in the EU. And it kind of informed the Australian thing too. But the other part of this is it's not just about this idea that you took my, you took my headline and linked me. You stole from me, you gave me nothing, which is a ridiculous economic argument that publishers try to make, cuz they're so desperate cuz they've done nothing. The other part of this, it was an effort. It is an S an effort to resurrect the hot so-called hot news doctrine, which was an effort at the beginning of radio. And then again, more recently to say, oh, if it's my story, if I got the story, you can't report it over a certain amount of time.

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:19):
Well, that's contrary to everything about copyright. Copyright says you cannot own the information you can own only the treatment of it. So if you know that Hindenburg is selling long or buying long on Twitter, that's a fact. Now, if I explained it critically brilliantly and you take my explanation, yes, I can go through for copyright. But the fact you can't, however, the associated press was trying to say no, no, no, no, no, no. If that's our story, we get to keep it for so many hours. They tried to prevent radio from even talking about news for 12 to 24 hours, say in the newspapers and the wire services owned that first. And it was an unfair acquisition of their value. And then AP and company tried to resurrect this again recently without success. And this copyright effort on the effort of publishers was a similar effort to do that. And I'm I'm I, I like Kathy, I applaud the copyright office.

Cathy Gellis (01:17:15):
Yeah. It was a good ruling and it quoted me well. So in the report. Oh

Ant Pruitt (01:17:19):
Yes. Oh,

Cathy Gellis (01:17:20):
That's always neat. Like, like for, for who? For whoever's putting together my laminated card. We can throw that on the list.

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:30):
Yes. That's a good one cited by the past pep force.

Cathy Gellis (01:17:34):
Yeah. No, it's always, I got cited in a congressional research service report. You know, it's always nice of like you win by showing up and it's always kind of nice. Like if all this work that I've been doing, like speaking to the record actually like know makes a difference and it may be like buried in reports that nobody else will ever read ever, ever again. But my name is now etched in history. So Kathy documents

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:56):
It's God's work and we thank you for it.

Cathy Gellis (01:17:58):
<Laugh> oh, thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Moving on from ancillary copyright to Google.

Ant Pruitt (01:18:04):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:18:05):
The show. This is about Google this week in ancillary copyright. Although

Ant Pruitt (01:18:10):
We did have that title.

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
Yes. <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:13):
Jesus VKA in Le shoe track

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
<Laugh> yeah. Sunar Pacha sent out a memo to employees that boy, you know, it's hard to imagine Google in hard times. Right? the uncertain he wrote global economic outlook has been top of mind, like all companies, we're not immune to economic headwinds. So he says, I want you <laugh> to work harder. We we are going to slow down our hiring process, slowing the pace, but still higher for the rest of the year. Yeah. but we'll focus on engineering, technical and other critical roles and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long term priorities. You mean you weren't doing that before. Okay, fine. But moving forward Googlers, we need to be more entrepreneurial working with greater urgency, sharper focus. And we go more hunger than we've shown on sunnier days.

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:18):
So how do you be arch the company that size

Leo Laporte (01:19:20):
<Laugh>

Ant Pruitt (01:19:22):
I'm just glad to hear him say focus cuz I tell you that's been his problem from day one. Google has,

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:29):
And that has been round

Ant Pruitt (01:19:30):
D and focus is, is all they need. That's all they need.

Leo Laporte (01:19:34):
Well, but the focus you're looking for is a greater company focus. Yes. All this is gonna do is make everybody focus harder on the thing. The one thing they're doing

Ant Pruitt (01:19:46):
And this, the start he's planting the seed. That's that's all I'm asking. He's planting the

Leo Laporte (01:19:49):
Seed. I think he just wants the work to work a little bit harder,

Cathy Gellis (01:19:52):
But that's the shame for like again, what was good about Google at the outset? Like they were encouraging, what was it the 20% of your work week was happened? Like do something that wasn't your job to your own side and it produced, I mean, it's partly why the Google was doing so many things because it was producing a whole lot of cool stuff. Gmail. So like Gmail. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So like you kind of would want that back, but you kind of, you don't get that by cracking the whip,

Leo Laporte (01:20:18):
But the, but put yourself in the in the position of an everyday Googler receiving that memo, what, what is the takeaway? What are your, what's your action item

Cathy Gellis (01:20:27):
Now? I mean the free lunch takeaway to me is like, is like, yeah, some of the snacks are going away. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:33):
I feel

Cathy Gellis (01:20:33):
Like there was a whole lot of language in that, like be hungry. Well we're taking away your snacks and <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:20:40):
You know, that nine hour Workday. How about 20? We didn't mention, we should have mentioned Twitter played a big part in yesterday's January 6th hearing they had a twiddle Twitter whistle blower with a duke boy or a, and a obscured personality talking about particularly about Trump getting treatment at Twitter. The employee whose identity was kept secrets was a served in the content moderation team in 2020 and 2021. He said former brother or Donald Trump or any other user on Twitter. He would've been permanently suspender of very long time ago. Hmm.

Cathy Gellis (01:21:31):
That's a very good rendition.

Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
I can, I can say nice works. Nice. I can't blur my face, but I can <laugh> I can, I can do that. Apparently people at Twitter were alarmed by the response to Trump's call for the proud boys at the debate to stand back and stand by. One, the Twitter employee said my concern was that the former president for seemingly the first time was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives on the social network. Users responded as if we were call to arms. It felt as if a mob was being organized and they were gathering together their weaponry and their logic and their reasoning behind why they were prepared to fight. So they're seeing all these tweets in response to what the president said at the debate. And then of course be there be wild, which was December, 2020. According to the Twitter inside of the responses and the social network alone were enough to suggest there was a potential for violence,

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:36):
But what let's think back it's the, the debate, the campaign is on. If Twitter had come out and, and shut down Donald Trump's, couldn't do it account. There's no way. Yeah. There's no way. So what, what did, what,

Leo Laporte (01:22:47):
How about still be wild? How about December 19th? He's already been even then, you know,

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:52):
Until election, January 6th was when it became safe to do it up. And before that I think it was nine impossible.

Leo Laporte (01:23:00):
The, the employee said the night before the insurrection, the employee said they could barely sleep featuring imminent violence. I was on pins and needles because again, for months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die. On January 5th, I realized no intervention was coming.

Ant Pruitt (01:23:24):
Is there another person on the Twitter staff that could say the same thing that this, this person was saying about the

Leo Laporte (01:23:31):
Incident? This is, you know, all, is this

Ant Pruitt (01:23:33):
Someone offered

Leo Laporte (01:23:34):
Grapes, this is offered in testimony in the, in the January 6th.

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:38):
Why was it anonymous if it's a former employee? I don't understand why it had to be anonymous.

Cathy Gellis (01:23:42):
Oh, I mean, the, the re the, the amount of what would fall on this person's head, if they were known, like, I could see this doesn't strike me as sour grapes, where even if there's not unanimity, I think there was probably widespread concern because I think the talking through of, okay, you're right, this is bad, but what can we do about it that won't also possibly precipitate a bad move? Like this was a really tough situation. I don't think it's clear that Twitter could have acted in any particular way other than just sort of choosing the path of least resistance, because it was actually, wasn't really a default position, but as opposed to mm-hmm, <affirmative> like, you kind of, you were, you'd already sort of made the decision longer and you're just kind of continuing it a little bit, but, you know, it's, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's a deliberate action, even if it wasn't ideal, but it's not clear what deliberate action could've been better.

Leo Laporte (01:24:31):
Well, here's the, I guess the damning sentence quote, I believe the Twitter relished in the knowledge that they were also the favorite and most used service of the former president and enjoyed having that sort of power within the social media ecosystem.

Cathy Gellis (01:24:46):
Clap that reads a little bit more like the sour grapes a little bit, but mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I mean, I think if you're, you know, you're at the PLA, there's always sort of what you need is pride at the platform, cuz you're an important platform.

Leo Laporte (01:24:57):
What you need is like smoking gun, the email from Twitter management to him saying, do not suspend the president Trump's account. It's too valuable to us or right. But there's that they didn't offer that at all. It's just, it's all, it's pretty much hearsay. Right. He doesn't know. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:11):
Then, so Joe Scarborough was screaming this morning about blaming everything on Twitter and Facebook again, cuz it just gives him excuse to. And next thing he'll go after section two 30 and Mike Bessicks head will explode <laugh>

Cathy Gellis (01:25:21):
Well, mine too. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:22):
I know, but I'm just, Mike's a little more public and living near the edge, he's like the guy, the guy who fell into Vaus

Cathy Gellis (01:25:33):
No, I, I would like to Masick has more self-awareness than that <laugh> I think

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:40):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:25:41):
Google has offered concessions to attempt to head off a possible us antitrust lawsuit and its ad tech businesses, according to the wall street journal, speaking to people, familiar with the battle as part of one offer, Google has proposed splitting parts of its business, that auctions and places, but still

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:03):
Staying under alphabet

Leo Laporte (01:26:05):
And apps it a separate company under the alphabet umbrella. Yeah. The entity could be potentially valued at tens of billions of dollars. That's what's so beautiful about these divisions, you know, it just increases the overall value <laugh> yeah. It's not clear that journal says whether any offer short of actual asset sales would satisfy the department of du justice where antitrust officials have signaled a preference for deep structural changes to Google's ad tech business. It, I mean, it feels to me just looking at on the surface that Google does kind of self deal in their ad auction where they're the buyer and the seller you both broker and oxygen,

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:43):
Even if they didn't, you have to ask and you have to Wonder's they've got to. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
So I think ultimately the DOJs it's right. They're gonna say, yeah, you can't be both pick one and then sell. Do you think they

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:00):
Could keep it under alphabet or they'll be forced to sell? No,

Leo Laporte (01:27:02):
No, they're gonna that's ridiculous. <Laugh> alphabet.

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:06):
Doesn't nice. Try boys. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:07):
Nice try alphabet. Doesn't report this separately as separate companies, the alphabet results are the alphabet results. I, yeah, I don't <laugh> I don't think that that would work. Anyway, we'll see. So this is, this is the negotiation has begun, I guess, any moves the journal says by Google to restructure part of its ad tech business could shake the digital advertising industry. Yes. That seems fair. Advertisers slated to spend more than 600 billion on digital ads worldwide this year, according to e-marketer last year Google's business of brokering the sale of ads on other websites and apps accounted for 31.7 billion of revenue, 12% of the total. So that was a big part of their ad business.

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:53):
The question too is how much do they take at each end of the transaction? It's it's a double dip too.

Leo Laporte (01:27:58):
Yeah. Yeah. Do we care about the nothing phone? I think they covered that thoroughly yesterday and all about Android. And since it will not be available in the us who cares, but not who cares. <Laugh> who cares? We don't

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:12):
Care. It's nothing to us. If

Leo Laporte (01:28:14):
It's it's it's not America. <Laugh> who cares?

Cathy Gellis (01:28:17):
RI shot. It's dead to me.

Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Rimshot although it's weird. These LEDs on the back, it's just, it's just weird. Yeah, it is two ninety nine. The nothing phone one I'm sorry. 399 pounds pounds, which is 475 S D just on sale July.

Cathy Gellis (01:28:36):
Oh, you were talking about money. I thought you were talking about the weight of the phone. I like

Leo Laporte (01:28:40):
So heavy man who wants to 99 pounds. That's for eight gigs of Ram and 128 gigs of storage.

Cathy Gellis (01:28:47):
I know phones are getting big these days, but that just seems excessive, heavy,

Leo Laporte (01:28:50):
Heavy, heavy, heavy. I, why is the pound not not equal to a dollar? The Euro is, come on England. You're getting

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:58):
It's coming down, falling back. Yeah. It's coming down. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:01):
Falling behind. Yeah. I don't think we care about the nothing phone. No. Do we care about this is in the New York post, so I know we don't, but it was, it was a great picture of skateboarders swarming Google's Waymo vehicle and trashing it on San Francisco on Saturday night,

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:21):
San Francisco is, is outta control.

Leo Laporte (01:29:24):
Yeah. Uhhuh vehicle was not autonomous according to motherboard at the time of the incident. So that means there was somebody inside driving

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:31):
Driver managed to get out to safety. Yeah. Before the full

Leo Laporte (01:29:35):
Ice, I feel like this is what is the beginning of what we're gonna see a lot of don't you think? Well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:40):
It's my friend, Doug. Rushkoff spend time throwing rocks with the Google bus.

Leo Laporte (01:29:43):
Yeah. I mean as somebody drives an electric vehicle very frequently, there's passive aggressive hostility against electric vehicles. People park their big trucks in the charging spots. They deface and break the chargers. Why do they

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:57):
Hate you? Cuz it's woke driving.

Leo Laporte (01:29:59):
Why is I woke? Yeah. You nailed it. Woke driving. There's just this thing, you know, I don't get it either woke the wheel. I don't, I don't get actually according to Bloomberg electric vehicles have passed the tipping point in the us 5% of current of new car sales now are EVs. And in other countries where adoption has hit 5%, it's be it's it's it's the bottom of the hockey stick. It's when it starts to take off probably the price of gasoline doesn't hurt that easily.

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:37):
And by the way, Mr Musk, you're gonna have lots more comp.

Ant Pruitt (01:30:41):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:42):
Yeah. In fact you should, Tesla's not even the number one manufacturer of electric vehicles anymore. It's China's B, Y D. So Bloomberg Saturday said once 5% of new car sales go fully electric, everything changes and 19 other countries that this has happened in. You see this kind of hockey stick effect. If the us follows the trend, a quarter of new cars will be fully electric in 2025 in just three years.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:11):
Can't wait.

Leo Laporte (01:31:11):
Yeah, I think that's good. Look at that. I didn't realize Norway is almost 90%.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:15):
Did your dear wife's mini ever get fixed?

Leo Laporte (01:31:17):
It's all good. It's working fine. Okay. So

Ant Pruitt (01:31:20):
Now we have feel fine with all of this push, but we better fix infrastructure over here in California with all of the oh yeah. Round outs.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:28):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:31:29):
Well there's some good news there. Oh, you're you're not talking about chargers. You're talking about just electricity,

Ant Pruitt (01:31:35):
Electricity in general. Yeah. You know, it it's AC turns on for most of the people in their homes and then their power is out. Right. Just really

Leo Laporte (01:31:43):
Well, you know? Okay. So that's interesting because whose problem is that? Is that because there's so many electric vehicles? No, it's because we have a for profit entity entities running our electrical grid in our area it's Pacific gas, say their name. Yeah. PG E <laugh>. And PG E's business is not providing you know, electricity at a low cost it's it's building power plants. So for instance, when you get solar panels, PG E will not let you put solar panels in, in excess of the amount you use. Right. They don't want you generating in competition with them. But from the point of view of EV owners and society in general, hell everybody should have, you know, as much as as many solar panels as their roof can hold. If you want to do that, you should be allowed to do that. Should be allowed to at least your choice.

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:34):
But wait, wait, wait, you could, could, could you, you can install more. You just can't set the, the, the no electricity back up the

Leo Laporte (01:32:40):
Line. No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:42):
You can't even install

Leo Laporte (01:32:43):
Them. No. <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:44):
How is that regulated?

Leo Laporte (01:32:46):
Because it's connected to the grid like, oh yeah, you're right. If we were not, if we were off grid, we could do whatever we, oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:51):
Off grid, you could do whatever we

Leo Laporte (01:32:52):
Want. Okay. Right. But, but we are still on grid because right. You have to be on grid because if the, if you know the sun doesn't shine <laugh> you still need a little trickle. If you have, I mean, we have big batteries, we have Tesla power walls. And the idea is we don't want we'd I'd love not to be on grid at all, but no everybody's on grid because, and so if you're on the grid, then PG E gets to say what's going on?

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:14):
What a delightful company,

Cathy Gellis (01:33:16):
Although then this is still a better than Texas where yes. It I mean, it's actually interesting cuz I think the Ford F-150 has a, an electric version of itself that apparently can power a house, power a house. So I wonder if I wonder if that will actually drive adoption because if you live in Texas, you might need your truck, you got a truck, you like a Ford of some California doing

Leo Laporte (01:33:40):
Your right <laugh> you could actually, California is doing one that here recently, because technically do that with any, any vehicle. If you had an inverter, you could take the DC power from the battery and and

Cathy Gellis (01:33:51):
Power. I think it was a question of capacity that the capacity was such that it, it had enough to power the house. Whereas I think another, a more, a smaller car might not be able to do quite that much, but you could probably drain something off of it. Cause you could at least plug into your, your lighter suppo I suppose, or something.

Leo Laporte (01:34:09):
So let me see. The F-150 battery is 145 kilowatt hours. My battery on my four Mustang is 88 kilowatt hours. It's it's not quite, it's more, more than half that it's enough to power the house for a little while. Maybe not all, not for weeks. That's awesome. What's

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:29):
Your home charger? Is it still, still your old Tesla home charger?

Leo Laporte (01:34:32):
Yeah. Yeah. We just have a just adapter. Yeah, it's the same plug. It's anema 1450, the same kind of plug that your dryer has or your RV. It's two 40, right. Uhhuh. And it's two 40 it's on a, ours is on a 50 amp circuit I think. But it only delivers 32 amps to the vehicle. So yeah, you just have to have the right, you know, adapter to plug it into the car. We have two of those. We have two NEMA, 1450 S on each side of the garage. So we cuz we have three electric vehicles. There's actually a competition for the charger, but because we have 60 solar panels and we generate a huge amount of electricity. We're not taxing the California grid to power, to charge our cars up. We generate

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:16):
Just when you lose power as happens in California, how long can you run the house on the battery

Leo Laporte (01:35:21):
Power? We have two of the big Tesla power walls. So obviously we'd wanna shut down things. We wouldn't be charging our cars at that point. So it really depends on how, how much, you know, you've got turned on, but we could go in theory. The whole, my whole idea is, and I think if we got one more power wall, we could for sure do this is to just get through the night until the sun comes out. Then we charge up some more. Cause we always, we can run off the sun plus charge the batteries. Don't tell two PG and E that <laugh> we can, we kind of did a loophole thing. We got a certain amount, the amount they would let us, then they say, well, if after six months you're using more than that. Then we were cuz we suddenly had all these electric vehicles you could apply to get more. So we put another 30 panels on. So we've slowly kind of increased. Wow. We are pretty much the whole roof is covered.

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:08):
Plus you could connect some panels to your power wall

Leo Laporte (01:36:11):
Only in theory. But although yeah, we don't, it doesn't do that Umhmm <affirmative> I don't know. It might be, might be beyond me. I don't know. Let's see. I'm I'm going through, let's do one more break and then we do have a change log. Cathy has some good articles. I want to talk about the Copia Institute, vulnerable people. We did the light song G <laugh> and played the Rega. Yeah. And play the reggae. The inform act probably should go after that one. I want to talk about the jewel cigarette ban. Ooh. Cause it kind of bugs me. Be honest with you. I understand

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:54):
Libertarians coming out.

Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
I hear your thoughts on that. If the FDA wants to ban something, ban tobacco, there we go. Okay. Why are they banning E SIGs and not tobacco? I'll tell you why it's called profit. No, they're not allowed profits. No, they're not allowed to ban tobacco. They're not allowed because big tobacco got a law passed that said, oh you, you can't ban tobacco. Thank you, RJ Reynolds. But so meanwhile, the FDA can re regulate the tobacco industry. But with certain limitations, for instance, nicotine and cigarette products cannot be banned flavorings like mint and fruit can. So at first the FDA banned fruit flavored jewels. And I think that's appropriate because mm-hmm <affirmative> the issue is I, you know, I think e-cigarettes are a better choice for smokers. If you're smoking, if you're burning tobacco to get your Nick fix,

Ant Pruitt (01:37:57):
If you need the nicotine,

Leo Laporte (01:37:59):
You should be using an e-cigarette all the evidence is that that's much better for you than burning the tobacco. The problem is with these fruit flavors, you get kids for the first time smoking using e-cigarettes. Yeah. So that is, and I understand that's why they banded, but it pisses me off that it's completely legal to sell moral burrows, but not jewels is just mind boggling. And by the way, there's another loophole. The only reason you can't sell jewels is cuz they're refillable. You can sell disposable SIGs. They're not banned.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:32):
What do you think about FDA proposing to ban menthol cigarettes?

Leo Laporte (01:38:36):
That's fine. I, you know, if that is that, is it cuz it attracts kids.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:41):
Well it's because it's flavored, but it's also an issue that, that menthol ranks higher with black

Ant Pruitt (01:38:47):
Consumers in the black community.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:49):
Yep, yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:38:52):
Why is it more popular than the black community? Is it actively sold to black consumers? I know there's, you know, ads for cools billboards outside of, you know, stores and, and black.

Ant Pruitt (01:39:01):
I couldn't tell you why, but I know that's all that's ever smoked that in the communities I've been in is, you know, populated by black people's menthols. It was never to Mar barrels.

Leo Laporte (01:39:12):
If you can't buy the menthols, if you can't buy your cools, you're gonna stop smoking. Hell no,

Ant Pruitt (01:39:18):
No <laugh> probably not. No

Leo Laporte (01:39:21):
<Laugh> you're just gonna get lucky. Strike means fine tobacco. You're just gonna change to a non you're not gonna get new ports. You're gonna get Mar bros or whatever. You're I love my favorites or spirits because they're natural.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:34):
<Laugh> next? So is the dirt you'll be buried in? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:39:40):
<Laugh> honestly jewel, which is not owned by big tobacco is probably getting punished because they are not owned by big tobacco. Whereas many of these other SIGs are owned by RJ Reynolds and others. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:55):
If jewel goes away, there's the EIG go away or just Juul.

Leo Laporte (01:39:59):
Any refillable goes away.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:02):
I see,

Leo Laporte (01:40:03):
I guess views V E and puff <laugh> puff. Fire are disposable flavored disposable products, which are, are actually more popular than Juul with kids. You might wonder, well, golly, who makes a views? I believe that's RJ Reynolds.

Cathy Gellis (01:40:26):
Oh good. So we've also got extra waste in addition to the

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
Smoker travel. Yeah. Let's throw 'em away too. So I mean it's more complicated. I understand you don't want to get kids who are non-smoker smoking. I understand that. That's a bad thing.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:36):
Well, something about Juul before I understood what Juul was, I'd go by. I saw it more in, in Europe. I think in, in Mexico, I'd go by a mall and see the store and say, wow, I don't what's that product. It looks so cool. Yeah. And I'd realize it's jewel. The design was,

Ant Pruitt (01:40:49):
It looks, it works sleek. Perfect marketing.

Cathy Gellis (01:40:52):
I'm just wondering how, how many kids pick up smoking because of the culinary experience involved with it. Like I'm not entirely sure this is the driving factor.

Leo Laporte (01:41:00):
I mean, I

Cathy Gellis (01:41:00):
Suppose if it doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:41:01):
Taste flavors, they like smelling like mango

Ant Pruitt (01:41:05):
And the look of the, the, the puff of smoke that they blow out all of that it's.

Cathy Gellis (01:41:09):
Yeah. But that's, that's extra things like there's other ancillary things you think you're getting if you're smoking and it, I mean, I suppose if it doesn't taste disgusting to you, you're more likely to, to continue, but yeah. But then again, people were continuing even when it did taste disgusting. So I, I don't know. It's I don't think it's a driving force to pick it up. It just might be a slightly sticking force once you have picked it up. But I don't think they're doing it cuz oh, it tastes like this. Cuz we already had gum. So like if you just wanted the flavor experience, there were a lot less like poisonous ways to ingest it.

Ant Pruitt (01:41:42):
So true.

Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
But look at the delicious flavors of puff bar, by the way, this is from the esteemed journal tobacco reporter.com the puff bar, which is owned by Patrick Beltran and Nick minus, they're not owned by a big tobacco. Unlike views is legal because it's disposable comes in flavors like lush ice, strawberry leechy blue raspberry peach Tangerine. I figure if I'm gonna get a nicotine delivery system and it tastes like Tangerine. Yeah. Get more, get more. Is nicotine. I that's, this is another question. I don't know. The answer is obviously smoking a cigarette causes cancer, heart disease. It'll kill you. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> we know this mm-hmm <affirmative> and perhaps, you know, vaping is bad for you, although I that's not immediately clear

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:39):
The, the connections with COVID were not good. You were more vulnerable to worse symptoms, especially in the, in the first ones. Attacked your lungs more. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:50):
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Is nicotine per se bad for you? It's a mood alt alter it usually Lev it. It could

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:58):
Cause an increase in blood pressure, heart rate flow of blood to the heart, a narrowing under the arteries I'm reading.

Leo Laporte (01:43:04):
So does a hot dog

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:04):
Heart association,

Leo Laporte (01:43:05):
By the way. In fact, according

Ant Pruitt (01:43:08):
Run that pizza just shoved down hot dog up an hour ago,

Leo Laporte (01:43:11):
Every hot dog costs you 30 minutes of your life. They

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:15):
Being bacterial walls.

Cathy Gellis (01:43:17):
Yes, but I think the point is it also delivers a benefit, which is nutrition. Whereas what is nicotine actually giving you?

Leo Laporte (01:43:23):
That may be debatable.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:25):
All lawyers are no fun.

Leo Laporte (01:43:26):
I've just been handed some laminated cards. <Laugh> oh,

Ant Pruitt (01:43:31):
Didn't I tell you to be before an interview.

Leo Laporte (01:43:34):
Catherine R Gillis Squire and T we got one for you too.

Ant Pruitt (01:43:38):
Good enough.

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
Simple. <laugh> it just says ant, but I love it. You know? It's good. It's good. I love it. So now everybody's got laminated. Thank you. Right. Thank you to the, the laminators <laugh>.

Cathy Gellis (01:43:53):
That is an impressive operation too. Do we laminate quite so quickly?

Leo Laporte (01:43:57):
We have a laminator here. Huh? I gotta bring some stuff in <laugh>. Anyway, I, you know, I just, I, I understand why you ban 'em I really do. You don't want to get kids smoking, et cetera, et cetera. But I feel like if you really wanted to do some good, you should ban cigarettes, but if can they do that? No, no. They should be able to no, I, I, I was, yeah, I was. Who do we vote for to make that not happen. And, and I feel bad for this company jewel, which actually, you know, really did some, you know, they did it all right. They marketed it. They made a beautiful product. They all

Cathy Gellis (01:44:33):
Right. Anyway, I think that's the criticism of they market it, they were successful. So it was kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, they were kind of, if they were sort of the, they might have made some bad decisions, but if they were just kind of in the shadows of like it's not smoking or something like that as an alternative I don't know. I, I think they just were too popular and it blew up in

Leo Laporte (01:44:54):
Them jewel by the way was eventually bought by Altria, which is the cleverly disguised name of Philip Morris <laugh> <laugh>. But you know, if I made tobacco cigarettes, I absolutely would say, well, what's next, you know, let's they invested 12 point KKI billion dollars in ju yeah. All the tobacco comes from Klai doesn't it nor of khaki Lai in Virginia. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> one of my favorite episodes of madman. I think it's like the second episode. They're they're trying to save the tobacco company. <Laugh> they're, which is their big client is an ad agency in me. And Don, who is just the best ad guy ever talks to the executive. What is it? How do you make your, how do you make your cigarettes? And he says, well, you know, we pick the tobacco and, and we toast, then we get cook it and then we put it up and he says, so it's toasted.

Leo Laporte (01:45:48):
Well, yeah, it's we cook it oven and it's toasted, that's it? That's our slogan. <Laugh> beautiful. That's freaking. And the guy says, well, but yeah, but every cigarette is toasted. No, no. Only whatever Winston it's toasted. <Laugh> I love that. It's a great episode to watch because the problem these cigarette companies have is that, that now people know it's killing you. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> like, this is that the period in the early sixties, when it's starting to come out, these cause cancer and, and the cigarette companies can no longer, you know, without, with a straight face, say four outta five doctors recommend, yeah, you smoke Winstons. So they need some other, you know, benefit. And they're desperate cuz they got nothing. They're all the same. It's a commodity product, obviously it's toasted. All right. Now let's take a break now, now to our sponsor jewel, jewel. I, I will be glad to know that I've refused. E-Cigarette advertising all along. We never allowed that. Yes. Even though we were offered it many times not cuz I mean I'm not, I'm not against these cigarettes. My daughter who smoked cigarette cigarettes, I really pushed hard to go to vaping, which she did and then she quit. So it's a, it was a success story for her and she hasn't smoked in, in a year. So it was really

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:13):
Got her on the back.

Leo Laporte (01:47:13):
It's a very big success story. You know what finally did it was she found out that her great grandfather, my dad's dad died of lung cancer at 53. And that was kind of the end of the story on that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> she said I was smoking again very young. Yeah. She does eat at least a hot dog a day though. So I'm still worried. No, we're not. We're not gonna miss Costco. My diet Costco. She got him a Costco. Costco has pledged pledged. They will not raise the price of the Costco hot dog. Even though they have raised the price of what is that chicken thing they do?

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:43):
Oh no. I thought it was full five bucks.

Leo Laporte (01:47:45):
No, they raised the price in the chicken, but not hot dog. Chicken tells you something about the hot dog and

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:51):
The hot dog by the way, is, is bigger than your normal hot dog.

Leo Laporte (01:47:55):
No, it's a giant.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:56):
It's a, it's an inflated

Leo Laporte (01:47:57):
Hot dog. Yeah. I believe that chicken bake went up but not the hot dog. And then, and then the CEO of Costco is pledged Eric Dunman and the Chad says it's like eight bucks now. Yeah. Chicken bakes. Eight bucks. Yeah. Chicken bake. Not cheap

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:10):
Chicken bake.

Leo Laporte (01:48:12):
Oh, you've never had a call.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:13):
It

Leo Laporte (01:48:14):
Constantly gone. Wild Costco raising prices for its chicken bake and 20 ounce soda. You want something? That'll kill you. Fast chicken, bacon and a 20 ounce soda. It's a

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:25):
No it's it's a roasted chicken. It's a fine thing.

Leo Laporte (01:48:27):
Sure. It's a chicken best. It's great. With bacon and Caesar dressing baked inside a cheesy Breadloaf oh no, no,

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:33):
No, no. That's okay. That's not, that's not, that's

Leo Laporte (01:48:35):
Not chicken. <Laugh> oh yeah. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:37):
I said it

Leo Laporte (01:48:37):
Was the rotisserie chicken. Oh no, no, no.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:39):
Rotisserie chicken is five bucks. No,

Leo Laporte (01:48:40):
No, no. Fortunately it's loaded with salt, which means that 20 ounce soda is a deal is required. It's required. But for some reason the hot dog and soda combo is gonna stay a buck 50. I don't know why might have something to do with the cost of a hot dog

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:59):
Or the economy. It's it's a generous act because there's a, the cost. Yeah. Hot dog index. It's always adds, adds that 100. And if it goes up, then watch out

Leo Laporte (01:49:09):
When co this is from metal flaws. When Costco president w Craig Gillick once complained to Costco co-founder and former CEO, Jim Senegal, that their monolithic warehouse business was losing money on their famously cheap dollar, 50 hot dog and soda package, Senegal listened nodded. And then it did his best to make his take on the situation. Perfectly clear. If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Senegal said, figure it out. <Laugh> so doesn't matter. Style. That's a management style. The price has never been raised since 1984 quarter pound all beef tube

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:50):
Inflation adjuster. So

Leo Laporte (01:49:54):
19 84, 19 84 was a buck 50. That includes the soda 20 ounces. Actually, it's probably cheaper if you buy the hot dog and soda and then buy the chicken bake.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:04):
So that is $29. And no, I'm sorry. That's $4 and 28 cents.

Leo Laporte (01:50:08):
It's $29 hot dog days.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:11):
It's a, it's a, it's a four and a quarter hot dog.

Leo Laporte (01:50:13):
Yeah. Seems

Cathy Gellis (01:50:14):
I mean, I know, I know Biden's getting roasted on the 9.1 statistic, but I don't think it's, it's a $29 hot dog. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:50:21):
No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:22):
It was, I spoke too soon. I was pretty the, before I put the period in between the one and the five

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
The, the theory is if the, if the customer buys the buck 50 hot dog just before leaving their store, they're left to the lasting impression of being treated well. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:39):
Yeah. They're well, they've got a memory of the hot dog. That's for sure. In the visit.

Cathy Gellis (01:50:44):
Well, it's basically, it's a coupon off of your total that's right

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Purchase. That's

Cathy Gellis (01:50:48):
What it's. So it's what I know what the average purchase yeah. Is. And what percentage of it is where it's like, oh, shop here 10% off. So I don't know. Whatever. The

Leo Laporte (01:50:56):
Average Costco is sells more hot dogs than all major league baseball stadiums combined. Wow. 100 million hot dogs. A

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:07):
Wow hot dog. Good

Leo Laporte (01:51:08):
For damn dog. When, when California recently enacted a soft drink tax, it would've raised the consumer's cost Costco locations in California switched to include diet Pepsi because diet drinks are exempt. So there you go. There's everything you ever wanna know. But the chicken bake the hot dog, the giant tube of delicious meat left.

Ant Pruitt (01:51:36):
And according to Mr. Burke, nice beef ribs or at Costco tube.

Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
Oh, alright. Premade rib.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:42):
Well, here's the other thing.

Ant Pruitt (01:51:44):
So I need to make the trach. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:45):
Yesterday was taco Tuesday. There is a make it yourself. Taco kit at Costco, quite quite a thing. Nice. Nice chicken veggies, cheese. What do you

Leo Laporte (01:51:56):
Need? Salsas? What do you need for a, to make it yourself? Hot dog kit. <Laugh> no, no, no taco taco taco. Okay. Taco kit. That's the beauty of the hot dog. It's a simple dish. It's made.

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:07):
It's

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
Made, oh, it's a taco. Doesn't even need to be cooked. I remember as a kid, I had a, a friend who would eat hot dogs, raw of the package. He

Ant Pruitt (01:52:14):
Said, no. They're yeah. My family does

Leo Laporte (01:52:15):
That. They're pre cooked,

Ant Pruitt (01:52:16):
Man. My family does that really? You know, I, I grew up on Vienna sausages and potted meat. So pop name, Oscar Mayer, straight out the pack was

Leo Laporte (01:52:26):
You gotta be mighty hungry to eat that hot dog.

Ant Pruitt (01:52:29):
I say totally normal. I'd do it. This I'd do it today if I had to, but I choose not to

Leo Laporte (01:52:34):
<Laugh> but only if I

Ant Pruitt (01:52:36):
Had normal days,

Leo Laporte (01:52:38):
<Laugh> learned

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:40):
A different way.

Ant Pruitt (01:52:41):
Grandma. I'm hungry here, eat this weenie and pull it straight out the pack.

Leo Laporte (01:52:46):
Wow. <laugh> wow. Let's take a little break. Kathy Gilles, wait a minute. Kathy. Katherine R Galles SQUI is here. <Laugh> former internet professional webmaster. Now assisting clients with legal issues relating to the digital age also.

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:02):
Well, you left out that she was cited by the us copyright office. That was the whole point.

Leo Laporte (01:53:07):
Yeah. It also says laminated

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:09):
Again, guys. It

Leo Laporte (01:53:10):
Also says currently using ethernet ethernet <laugh>

Cathy Gellis (01:53:15):
And I still got dropped. It

Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
Still got dropped.

Cathy Gellis (01:53:19):
I mean, I hate the internet. One of my end internet lawyer for this technology is just for sync

Leo Laporte (01:53:24):
Really come on. Also with us, from hands on photography and <laugh> and through

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:31):
It, the share of the TWI network.

Leo Laporte (01:53:34):
And by the way, we had it scheduled on Thursday. We had for the club TWI, we had a event with Alex Lindsay. He has been called by a higher power. So he will not be available for that event. We'll re we will reschedule. I'll figure how a date. Yeah, that's fine. July 20. It

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:51):
Was actually a scary way to say it.

Leo Laporte (01:53:52):
He called he's been called

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:56):
You're pod.

Leo Laporte (01:53:57):
I had power. I was in the brick. I was in this just caught dead. I was in the cottage and I was telling my wife, you know, somebody I'll be working up there. And she said, oh God, no, I hope not. Cuz I pointed up. No, I said I meant upstairs. I didn't mean <laugh>. I didn't mean anyway. Members, fireside check coming up, July 28th, 9:00 AM. And that's gonna be planning. Lots more events course got Stacy's book club. I've been reading the book. It's good. Did you read it yet?

Ant Pruitt (01:54:21):
I started it today because I just finished termination shock the

Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
Yesterday or yeah, congrat

Ant Pruitt (01:54:27):
Day and I did enjoy termination

Leo Laporte (01:54:29):
Shock really after all that it was okay. I did enjoy it. There's a good book review of it. I think it's in slate. Star codex. I can't remember, you know, the astrol 10 codex blog. But I'll pass it along to you cuz it, it talks about the

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:45):
Book I'm I'm listening to now. I think you all might like

Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
What's that what's

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:48):
That tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow John Green went berserk over it and I listened to

Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
Him of John and Hank

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:58):
Fame. Yeah. Of John of right. And it's oh where the hell is there we go? It is by Gabrielle Ze. It's about three friends who make video games. Oh. Through a period of their lives and their relationships and so on. And it's really good. Which leads me to a question actually. Cause I'm, I, I feel this made me really feel that I'm missing out on a whole chunk of culture cuz I don't play games. So I have this question for you.

Ant Pruitt (01:55:29):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:29):
What game should I Ooh do now I don't like shoot him up so I don't wanna drive stuff around. The last game I played was missed. That gives you an idea how long it's been?

Leo Laporte (01:55:41):
She St and what are you gonna gonna play it on? You're gonna play it on your Mac. What are you gonna play it on? I can play it on the Mac. On your Mac? Yes. It's. It's your Mac or do you have other things you could play it on? Chromebook. No Mac. Okay. So we need some on Mac. Okay. We're gonna take a break later. Think everybody come up with an idea for Jeff. His first game since missed <laugh> grandpa, grandpa. Yeah, they've been a lot of interesting choices out there. Our show today brought to you by cash fly. How do we know cash fly is so good. We've been using 'em you're using 'em right now. We've been using 'em for 10 years. Whenever you download one of our podcast, audio or video, you're getting it from cash fly. And because cash fly is 50 plus locations around the globe points of presence.

Leo Laporte (01:56:30):
They call it. You are gonna get the content from a server that's near you, which means it's fast. In fact, cash fly gives you the best throughput and global reach and cash fly offers. Not just downloads, but they are now doing ultra low latency, video streaming. This is amazing. You can go live in hours, not days with sub one second latency ditch that unreliable web RTC solution for their web website at live video workflow that is scalable to millions of users, ultra low latency, video streaming less than one second latency. Imagine that. And of course again, you'll reach your audience anywhere in the world, because with all those points of presence, your audience is closer. Plus if you use cash life storage optimization system, we do you'll reduce your bandwidth and increase your cash. Hit ratio to a hundred percent because instead of storing your content, offloading it to an origin server, you keep it on ized servers where it's available immediately reduce your origin server usage, your S3 bills than the like speed up transport and always be available.

Leo Laporte (01:57:39):
I think that's a fantastic solution. We've been using that for years. I think unofficially, I don't think they call it the storage optimization system. They just very kindly let us store our stuff on the ized servers. That makes a big difference. You ought to check that out. Plus fully manage CDN solutions, ized elite managed packages give you V IP treatment, 24 7 support and response times less than an hour. Ized, just the best lightning fast gaming downloads are faster. Zero lag, glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization. So your site loads faster on any device. You get multiple CDNs for redundancy and failover, which intelligently balances your traffic across multiple providers, giving you the shortest route, mitigating against performance glitches. It works so well. In fact that over the last 12 months, cash fly has a 100%, 100% availability. That's amazing. 30% faster than other major CDNs. 98% cash hit ratio 10 times faster than traditional methods. They're on six continents. You ought to be on cash, fly cash, fly call 'em right now learn more 24 7 365 priority support. They're always there when you need 'em cash. Fly.Com. How many times have you ever heard me say it? Bandwidth for this week in Google is provided by cash fly@cachefly.com. Thank you. Cash fly. We really, really appreciate it. Let's do the Google change log.

Speaker 6 (01:59:13):
The Google change log.

Leo Laporte (01:59:21):
The last major release of Android 13 beta four is out for pixel phones and anybody who is on the beta plan. That means we're close to Android 13. In fact, an you might wanna try it on your pixel six, cause I'm hearing now that we're really close to release it's very stable and a lot of people says it's better. No, <laugh> okay.

Ant Pruitt (01:59:43):
We don't need case production versions, right? No.

Leo Laporte (01:59:47):
Mm-Hmm all right. Good deals. That's right.

Cathy Gellis (01:59:50):
Now's the and version of one star on Yelp. Just that, just that expression.

Leo Laporte (01:59:54):
What is it? Doesn't Jordan peel. Have a movie called. Nope. That's it? Nope, sure does. Nope. Nope. Not gonna do it. Right now is a good time though. I know. Do you like your, are you happier with your pixel six now? Ann, are you?

Ant Pruitt (02:00:09):
I, I am. They, they did fix some things over the last several months and the different patches and whatnot, but it still just frustrate the crap outta me that the production version was so buggy on day one. It's just not cool.

Leo Laporte (02:00:23):
Well, if you've been thinking about pixel six, I'm seeing discounts all over Amazon prime discount down to 4 99, that's $400 off. I think you're gonna six

Ant Pruitt (02:00:33):
Or six. That's

Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
A fair deal. That's the six, I think the six XL is all or six pro is also being mightily discounted the five, eight due soon.

Cathy Gellis (02:00:42):
The good news ant is now Googlers are hungry. So that should, that should work

Ant Pruitt (02:00:47):
Well for the next ation. Oh, that's focus. They have it. They're

Leo Laporte (02:00:48):
Focused now. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (02:00:50):
Kinda get more. They get more snacks when they get that product out the door.

Leo Laporte (02:00:53):
No snacks for you.

Cathy Gellis (02:00:54):
Or apparently they're taking away the snacks to hope. You know that they're not like wasting time eating the snacks instead of building a better

Leo Laporte (02:01:00):
Work,

Ant Pruitt (02:01:00):
Harder focus, focused

Leo Laporte (02:01:02):
Focus. Oh, it's already sold out. Scooter X says nevermind. But keep your eye peel. Cause prime day continues and there, there, and it's not just prime day. You go to the Google store. I see. Yeah. $200 off and things. The Google duo merger with meat starts rolling out today. Oh geez. Oh no. You know,

Ant Pruitt (02:01:23):
What was the name finalized

Leo Laporte (02:01:25):
On meat?

Ant Pruitt (02:01:27):
It's just meat. Okay. Just

Leo Laporte (02:01:28):
Meat. There are some new features. Oddly in duo. A handful of users are seeing duo is getting even better just under the search field. Your duo app will become meet with a new name and icon and more features like background effects after tapping the fab floating action button, which drops call and just says new, you now have options to create a new meeting and schedule and Google calendar. That's the meet side. Why, why?

Cathy Gellis (02:02:01):
I agree. So I think I said that before, but like, and I was thinking about this in the earlier conversation about Twitter and stuff, where one of the things that it did really well is it followed its users like the whole way that they, the apps end up hyperlinks, cuz that was behavior that users were doing. So they built the tool around it, being responsive to your users and understanding what your users need and how they interact with your products. Seems like it really should be at the top of the list of what you're building for. And I'm not sure it is. And I think that's coming back to haunt everybody because you get more consumer dissatisfaction, which then turns into more regulatory pressure, which turns into bad laws that end up impinging on innovation that would actually make better products. So like not doing it terribly from the outset and paying attention to who your audience is and what you're building and who you're building it for. That really needs to be a bigger priority than I think it is.

Leo Laporte (02:02:48):
We would, but they took away the slim gems.

Cathy Gellis (02:02:52):
<Laugh> maybe that's the trick. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:02:54):
Blood sugar. I can't go well spoken Kathy Ellis. I agree. I love that. Yes. Yeah. Well spoken preach well said I there's nothing you which wanna shake 'em shake 'em and say, come on, get together.

Cathy Gellis (02:03:09):
Well, I've given that lecture before, like in, in lawyer CLEs, like talking to product council, like don't piss off your users because if they get upset and they don't have market pressure to get something better from you, they're gonna go to their regulators and the regulators eventually will respond and it's probably not going to be good. So like the fact that you can legally build crappy products right now, shouldn't be what you give yourself permission to do. You should really try much harder not to. And I'm not sure the design steps are in place to be responsive enough to your audience and understand it where they're gonna be able to architect things that are actually more successful products that irritate their users much less than they currently do.

Leo Laporte (02:03:48):
But you don't think anybody gets up in the morning says, well, I'm gonna make a crappy product today.

Cathy Gellis (02:03:52):
No, I think they get myopic. I mean, before it became a lawyer, I was a webmaster and I mean, webmaster websites are still bad, but they, that says, oh good. Yeah. Okay. See the, the card doesn't lie. So the point with the Webster is,

Cathy Gellis (02:04:06):
Is like, there were a lot of bad websites and to build a good website, it wasn't that you, there was one right way to do it, but you had to ask questions like, who's your audience? What do they need to know? What are they gonna like look for? And, and it wasn't that there's right answers. But you have to ask the questions because that'll organize your decision. So you can produce something that is like, hopefully going to do the job because you've put some thought into what the job is. So the problem is, is myopia tends to set in for people with the power to cook up really cool things. Cuz you, you get very insulated in what you are thinking about and what you wanna see and you build for that, but that isn't your, your market necessarily. And unless you've got the discipline to think harder about your market, it respond to it in proper ways.

Cathy Gellis (02:04:51):
There's a lot of like superficial ways that people respond to markets, but to really respond to it in a meaningful way and understand it you know, it takes effort and resources to do it, but it's absolutely effort and resources that are well spent. You have better products, happier customers, longer pro better product market entrenchment. And you don't piss off regulators who can come back to slap your hand. Although if your competitors piss them off, then they may still come by. But at least if you put other products in the market, you'll also succeed in the market much better than if you just Ram poorly designed ones down people's throats because you can

Leo Laporte (02:05:27):
Word.

Cathy Gellis (02:05:28):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:30):
Google one, did anybody subscribe to, I subscribe to Google one?

Ant Pruitt (02:05:34):
I do too. No.

Leo Laporte (02:05:36):
If you, if you have a two terabyte plus plan, here's a nice new feature for your meat slash duo meet video features. No one hour group limit, for instance. So they're gonna add, I think this is a kind of nice to know a little come on for you to maybe do more with meat. Right? Google is I did that one Google compose window update adds profile avatars, right? Click menu and more that's that's in the Gmail composed window. So you can you do some settings there. It also is getting better at noting whether you're trying to add a recipient, that's already in the email saying, no, you already did that.

Ant Pruitt (02:06:19):
No, that's cool. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:20):
Chrome

Ant Pruitt (02:06:21):
Cast. I do like when it suggests like, Hey, do you want to add this other person? Because they were a part of the conversation as well.

Leo Laporte (02:06:27):
Oh, that's a good feature.

Ant Pruitt (02:06:28):
Isn't it? I've seen that a time too. Yeah. Instead of cuz I am one that hates reply all, if I don't necessarily have to tell everybody, just tell the person that matters, but there was a message today that I reply to and it, it suggested, Hey you, do you want to add this person? And I, I did cuz it, it worked for that time.

Leo Laporte (02:06:47):
I was actually just on a hysterical reply, all thread, somebody I, I won't name names, but some, a product was soliciting YouTube creators to do videos about this product sent out of an email to 600 creators. I was on that list. <Laugh> offering them three to $600 to do a a feature of this and a number of the YouTube creators replied all. So I kinda got a little, a little

Ant Pruitt (02:07:21):
Peak. I bet doz were hilarious.

Leo Laporte (02:07:23):
Yeah. A little peak into the exciting world of YouTube scam scamming. I guess it's not scamming. I mean you have to disclose and all that stuff. And then the funniest thing is then another company which apparently was already on this list, sent out an email to the entire list saying, Hey, just so you should know that, you know, if you are a creator, you should be getting more money than this. And we can,

Ant Pruitt (02:07:49):
I was gonna say, it sounds like low balling. Woo. Not scam, low

Leo Laporte (02:07:55):
Ball. What a mess I should find that it'd be fun to read. Youtube is finally rolling out picture and picture for iPhone and iPad. Somebody sent us an email saying your, your podcasts aren't working. The YouTube thinks it's music and it won't do, apparently won't do that for music. But we checked, our settings are correct. These shows are correctly marked. So maybe this is just a, you know, a glitch in the early days of P P. But it works

Ant Pruitt (02:08:25):
Fine in Android.

Leo Laporte (02:08:27):
Yeah. It's something. Iphone is only an iPad of just recently added picture and picture. You might have to turn it on in your general settings, but that means you can continue to watch. Oh, you also have to be a YouTube premium member. Of course.

Ant Pruitt (02:08:41):
Oh, I didn't catch that.

Leo Laporte (02:08:42):
Mm-Hmm yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Yep. It's available to free users, but only for non-music content. Maybe that's why that guy was complaining anyway. Chromecast with Google TV, its first update of the year build QTS one dot two, two dot five oh four.zero, zero eight. Ran a platform improvements to help some apps with HG 4k video playing in DRM, video playback, additional bug fixes improvement over wifi booth. I love actually my Chromecast with Google TV. That is a really great device and I use it all the time. So I welcome the update 49 bucks. Although apparently it's discounted 10 bucks. Now if you shop around, is it go Google TV is not your YouTube TV. I always get confused. Yeah, no it's and nor no Google TV is like Android TV. It's

Ant Pruitt (02:09:36):
Like the OS

Leo Laporte (02:09:37):
Ish. Yeah. Yeah. It's their TV interface.

Cathy Gellis (02:09:39):
Yeah. I hate the last three sentences that have just come past. Like this makes no sense. Like how does one orient themselves in a world where it's TV, it's online, it's online TV, but not this brand TV, not this brand online TV, even though they're all owned by the same company, like this is ridiculous and it causes confusion. And I don't think that confusion is is it it's, it's not negligible. And it causes problems like cybersecurity problems. Like everyone's confused about what products they're using and why and how to control their logins and their, and their subscriptions. Like I think this is causes con consumer confusion, even amongst sophisticated consumers. This is not good. I think, I don't know.

Ant Pruitt (02:10:19):
Get off my line are you're saying it needs some focus. Is that what you're saying?

Cathy Gellis (02:10:23):
Coherence something.

Leo Laporte (02:10:26):
Well, I agree with you Kathy Galles S square. I think you're exactly right. <Laugh> it's a very, I get, well, you know why cuz on the radio show I get calls from people all the time or utterly confused, baffled, bewildered frustrated by this. And I ju all I say to them is like in a lot of, you know, whenever you have incumbent business being completely disrupted by the internet, it's a mess as everybody readjusts their business models and you know, companies get aggregated, they go out of business. It's just a mess. And the TV business is very much in that middle of that. Right now, although if you look at the Emmy awards the nominations streaming really big success. Yeah. So you know, it streaming here. I mean very, very clearly right

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:19):
To further confuse Cathy. Youtube TV has 5 million plus users more than the biggest live TV surface. The

Leo Laporte (02:11:29):
Biggest, the biggest yep. Was, was thinking of moving. Cuz I saw on Reddit, somebody posted bandwidth usage by the different streaming TV services and Hulu was by far higher bandwidth usage, which usually goes along with higher quality image and, and YouTube TV. Wasn't very good. But then I saw a tweet from somebody who said, I couldn't watch the formula one race in my Hulu TV. And that's when I said, I'm staying with YouTube.

Ant Pruitt (02:11:52):
No, no, no, no, no. Hold on. Let me, let me correct it. I couldn't watch it on my Hulu TV because I killed the live TV subscription. Ah,

Leo Laporte (02:12:02):
That's

Ant Pruitt (02:12:03):
Why I turned it off because I'm not watching any live TV anymore. And I was only watching the F1 stuff. That was it using the

Leo Laporte (02:12:11):
GVR we're trying to watch it live.

Ant Pruitt (02:12:14):
I, I was trying to watch it live when I could wake up

Leo Laporte (02:12:16):
Like six in the morning

Ant Pruitt (02:12:17):
Or something it's really early, but I'm usually up. So

Cathy Gellis (02:12:20):
See, this is bad. This is why killing off low was a problem because you've got all these spectrum is public. You've got a whole bunch of stations that need to use the public airwaves to get to audience. If they're gonna make any money via advertising from having it watched. And I know they're like all competing for like the carry fees, but that's not enough cuz people are turning it off. So if live TV is still gonna be a meaningful medium for people, we need a way to access it. And copyright law has killed off all the rent and antenna services. So unless you wanna cough up the money and like an is deciding, it's just not worth the money and he is not alone to decide, well, I just don't watch it enough. Then people won't watch it at all. And I just don't see why the over the air stations sued out of oblivion, the, the necessary tools that people needed to watch them at all. Like this was just so suicidal on the behalf of these stations. Yeah. And terrible for copyright law on the public interest and public spectrum and

Ant Pruitt (02:13:18):
Ridiculous. It's, it's crazy because I've been practicing this quote unquote, practicing this for, for several years now I will cut cable until football season and my family got used to me doing that. We didn't have any television until football season come around because none of us watched anything live. It was a total waste of money. And then when I totally cut cable out and started latching onto these streaming services that added live capabilities I saw. Hmm. I'm still not watching it much. So let me just save these extra 50 to $60 a month until

Leo Laporte (02:13:49):
Football. Did you like Hulu TV just had cur I been a YouTube TV subscriber, but I would, like

Ant Pruitt (02:13:53):
I say, I really like it other than their interface still stinks. Mm-Hmm cuz I did try YouTube TV as well. After I had originally started with Hulu live TV and YouTube just, I didn't care for it. It started screwing up my regular YouTube viewing habits, because I guess it was feeding my live TV information from my YouTube account to my desktop watching stuff and I didn't necessarily want that algorithm mixed up.

Leo Laporte (02:14:24):
Oh I agree. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (02:14:25):
You know, so

Leo Laporte (02:14:26):
I I'm happy with YouTube TV. I like the DVR and that's what I do. I, I, I told it once I liked F1 and now it records all the F1 races and it's, you know, I, I can always watch 'em and it's nice. So it doesn't, it's not easy. It commercials on on YouTube TV. I don't know if Hulu has a skip on you can. Yeah. TV has skip on. So what I found out though, this is good. If you watch YouTube TV and I bet it would work with Hulu TV on an apple TV, you can tell Siri to skip a certain amount of time. So what you do is you figure out how long the breaks are and you can say, Hey Siri, skip two minutes and it's breaking

Ant Pruitt (02:15:01):
The break. <Laugh> nice hacks, sir.

Leo Laporte (02:15:04):
Yeah. And you, what you pretty Crick quickly learn what the various network break lengths are and stuff. But

Ant Pruitt (02:15:09):
We do appreciate our advertisers here at

Leo Laporte (02:15:12):
Never do that on a podcast that would be fool. Cause you wanna hear all the funny

Cathy Gellis (02:15:17):
Things to said yes. Manually chosen advertising is one thing. That's the ads I saw on my Roku that stemmed from I other things about me based on online activity or phone calls or something like that. Wow. Scared the crap outta me. Yeah. Given geopolitical situation. In fact, the, the national situation, this was stuff that I had looked into that now whatever streaming service I was using thinks I wanted to learn more about it wasn't necessarily wrong, but I did not want anybody else in the universe to know that it was something I cared about. And it's now dangerous to me. If somebody else in the universe knows that I was interested in pursuing more information about some of these things. This is a big mm-hmm <affirmative> problem that we're really gonna have to, to pay a lot more attention to. And I say that as somebody who has very dubious opinions about regulation and how it can strangle, I think we gotta be really, really careful, but I don't think nothing is an option because this was the data sharing is, is a huge problem.

Leo Laporte (02:16:22):
And that's the Google change log.

Leo Laporte (02:16:25):
Oh boy. He did not expect that. Did he? I really threw you on that one. Sorry, sorry. Sorry. <laugh> Hugo award nominee for best short story of finalist, a series of text messages. That's an interesting way to publish a short story. Chuck Taggart tweeted the text messages. He said, this is the only one that made me qu cry. He has screenshots of the text messages. This is I won't read it cuz it's got some bad words in it and so forth. But this is a good argument for actually it comes from by Dyke energy. She's tweeted it. But this is a good argument for Twitter threads. Now you got me because this is a whole short story in a Twitter thread, which is kind of captured text messages.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:19):
It's about two worlds and about gender and sexual identity and, and it's, it's a wonderful to see this kind of cur creativity with the

Leo Laporte (02:17:29):
Form. And I love it that the Hugo committee says, Hey, yeah, that counts. We can nominate that. How did whoever wrote this? How did they publish it though? I mean, they just sent in a bunch of text message.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:41):
Not, I don't know, I put it up, but I don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:17:42):
Yeah. I love the, I saw it on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. But it's Twitter was screenshots of, of text messages. So that's, that's just fascinating. I don't know. This is actually a tweet thread from last year. So this was the tweet thread that published it, I guess. And then I think so. Yeah. In fact, yes. Okay. So buy energy AKA Azure Husky. This is, this is her story publishing it. She's now a Hugo finalist. So that is her

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:17):
Or there. We don't know the

Leo Laporte (02:18:18):
Pronoun. No, she uses she her. Does she think so? That's great. So she published this, I love it on on Twitter as a series of images of text messages. We, at one point we had a Tom Merrit and a bunch of us had a Twitter account called one 40 novel back when Twitter was 140 characters where we were all writing. Oh, novel. I remember that. Remember that. And we each, each would post and then we would take turns posting. It didn't work out very well. Yeah. I can't remember that. It was, you know, too many horses pulling in too many different directions. I love that. I think I am now in the Jeff Jarvis section <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:02):
Way. Hey, Hey, I try to be helpful.

Leo Laporte (02:19:06):
Eat the rich. That was one of

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:07):
Mine that was smart as remark. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:19:11):
Okay. Uhm, S C HF short for mischief invites you to eat the rich at their ice cream popup. They have eat the rich popsicles, including bite Bezos, munch, Musk, and snack on Jack. There's a gobble gates and they suck Zuck. Are they actual, can you actually get these? I think you,

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:34):
I think you can. I think you can. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:36):
Pop off. It's an art. You've

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:37):
Other similar kinds of things. Yeah. Somebody said on Twitter, I forget who it was. So this is, this is an attempt to mock capitalism, but it is an in another way to put it as it's the extreme of capitalism,

Leo Laporte (02:19:48):
They look mighty tasty. I just gotta say that. And they're gonna be all over the LA area. It's like LA, right? Yeah. So you can go and munch Musk at a popup near,

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:00):
They also had 6, 6, 6 chicken sandwiches in response to Chick-fil-A <laugh> being closed.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
Wow. And at one point they did the little NAS ex Satan Nikes. I don't know what that was all about. I'm not hip enough. To know that world emoji day is coming up. It's on Friday. I won't be here on Friday. I'll be in Seattle getting ready to go on a cruise. But I thought I would share the new emojis that are coming in 2022, a shaking face, two pushing hands, a plain pink heart. These are some of the new emojis. Are you excited for 20, 22? There's also what

Ant Pruitt (02:20:41):
I, I, I think I can hear Micah's Sergeant rejoicing loudly.

Leo Laporte (02:20:46):
Now. Why did he, yes. Was he looking for one of these emojis? Oh, he loves emojis emojis. Well, he might like, besides those, the donkey, the moose, the jellyfish, the hair pick this is a condo, which is a symbol of the Sikh. Faith looks like a Peruvian flute, some Moroccans peas in a pod, a ginger, a goose, a Raven. This is a pretty good collection of emojis. You know, it's not easy to get these. You have to get them approved.

Ant Pruitt (02:21:20):
Right?

Leo Laporte (02:21:21):
Not easy. So happy world emoji day,

Ant Pruitt (02:21:26):
Not everyone is Ms. Jane Donovan had that.

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
No, she, which, what was the emoji? Jane. Jane

Ant Pruitt (02:21:32):
It's poop emoji, right?

Leo Laporte (02:21:33):
Poop. No, Joan Donovan. Oh, not Jane Jones was a dumpling or I can't remember what her dump.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:40):
No, no, no, no, no, no. She was beaver was the number one Trump. She was the

Leo Laporte (02:21:45):
Beaver beaver. She was the beaver. And now Jenny,

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:50):
Jenny eight Lee was the dumpling.

Leo Laporte (02:21:52):
She was the dumpling. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:53):
And she joined the committee that down

Leo Laporte (02:21:55):
Chooses those things. Right. And if, you know, actually if you're interested and you wanna read the original beaver emoji proposal, <laugh> it is

Ant Pruitt (02:22:11):
Say it with a straight face.

Leo Laporte (02:22:12):
Yeah, it is. It is. It is published up there on the Unicode cus sodium. But I think it's a good idea probably to read these proposals so that you too can be prepared to,

Cathy Gellis (02:22:24):
Again, these are very 20, 22 sentences.

Leo Laporte (02:22:27):
They really are

Cathy Gellis (02:22:28):
Just get in your time machine. They really are set it back a few clicks and you would never be having this conversation.

Leo Laporte (02:22:34):
And and actually if you search for Joan Donovan and emoji, you will find a link to this week in Google where Joan explains to us, <laugh> how it all happened. <Laugh> yes. Emoji day coming up hostess is launching its own cryptocurrency, the twink coin <laugh> twink coin, snack cakes, limited edition as, as one would expect. They are in fact not to be used as currency they're they're to be eaten. They vanilla sponge cake.

Cathy Gellis (02:23:16):
That's debatable.

Leo Laporte (02:23:17):
Yeah. <Laugh> interior. The twink coin. Look for them. The store near you. I'm eating my crypto.

Cathy Gellis (02:23:32):
I mean, if you, if you're willing to do the hot dogs, I suppose there's no limits, you might as well have this, but

Leo Laporte (02:23:40):
The information has decided to put money where it's mouth is. They're launching a social network for rich people. I mean, subscribers, since the subscriber's paying as I am $400 a year I guess it's fair to say it's a social network. I'm thrilled. Jessica lessen. Who's been on the show before we're big fans of the information mm-hmm, <affirmative> announced that the new system patrols out this week will have three core features. User profiles subscribers will be able to opt in to share fuller information about themselves, their interests. You can also opt in to send and receive direct messages. There'll be a directory of profiles. It sounds a little bit like LinkedIn and there will be a forum.

Cathy Gellis (02:24:23):
Actually, let me not be cynical about this. I love this news. And it's very similar to, cause I write all these Amicus briefs for Tector. The COPI Institute, which is the Tector is the news publication arm of the same enterprise. And I make the point in these things that one of the ways that Tector at this news site interacts with its audience is thanks to two 30 is section two 30. It has forum for comments. It has other forums for subscribers to talk to it's each other. It's also a platform to pro to do monetization. So we're solving the, how do we fund news business type thing? It's great to actually see other people doing, because it becomes part of my advocacy and saving section two 30, because when you save section two 30, this is what you save to this interaction of people who are reading and consuming discourse and help feed the discourse. This is fantastic. I'd like to see more of this happen. And I wanna roll it into an Amicus brief or something like that. To point out to people who wanna step on section two 30, that this is the type of, that this an enterprise like this couldn't do it if we didn't have this law to protect it.

Leo Laporte (02:25:30):
Yeah. I mean, we have TWI has a number of ways we can interact with our audience. There's an IRC that's open at all times. There's a, a dis discord server for our club, twit members. There's a discourse forum twi.community. There's a mast on instance. And yeah, if it weren't for the minute, section two 30 falls, I have to close them all. Cuz we can't afford to be sued. You know, for what people say on our various floor,

Cathy Gellis (02:25:59):
Everyone thinks, yeah, everyone thinks section two 30 is Google, Facebook and Twitter. And that's like, you should be able to have the entire conversation about section two 30 and never mention these names at all. That this is really about this week, this is about TWI. Tector the information. Yeah. All these other enterprises where you're having discourse, you're prevent presenting information to an audience. The audience is continuing to discuss it and providing information back to its community and to the, the, the media outlet. Like this is a really synergistic thing. And this discourse is enabled by section two 30, which backs up the first amendment values that help the discourse exist. Like it hurts public discourse entirely if we do not have this law. And that's what I try to write my briefs about to like point the and do advocacy to sort of say resist the temptation that just cuz the internet has some bad stuff. You do not wanna take this away because you will take away everything that is good, including the ability of having independent media out there.

Leo Laporte (02:26:58):
So you filed an Aus brief with who and for what I'm looking at this <laugh>

Cathy Gellis (02:27:07):
Several things but sent to you and the rundown is two things in particular. One was a section two 30 brief at the 11th circuit. Where again, it was a defensive section, two 30 to point out that vulnerable people defend, oh wait, that's the other one that you pulled up? Oh

Leo Laporte (02:27:25):
We can see pull up the other one. You want copy protections for the, oh, there's so many of these. I know copyright law destroy free expression, a rare right. We ostensibly have left. Is that it

Cathy Gellis (02:27:36):
That's the, I can talk about that one. But the one I launched into was the one that talked about vulnerable people

Leo Laporte (02:27:41):
Line 64 line 64 vulnerable people because vulnerable people need section two 30, what you were just saying. And as a vulnerable person, I agree. So this is for the 11th.

Cathy Gellis (02:27:54):
This is the 11th. This is following

Leo Laporte (02:27:57):
MH versus O ma.

Cathy Gellis (02:27:59):
Yeah. As of these, all these cases involve absolutely terrible things that happen. And let's not gloss over that. An absolutely terrible thing happened to MH, which MH may be the guardian and not the child, but basically the child was induced to do something sexually inappropriate. This was a problem. But what the plaintiffs wanna do is not, not, they're not looking for the remedy in this case to go after the person who actually caused the harm, they wanna go after the platform because since the platform existed and this, this terrible thing could happen, that somehow they want the platform to be at fault for it. And that sounds very tempting in this particular situation, but that does not scale to any usable way where that would basically, they basically want section 2, 2 30, not to work in any sort of insulating capacity that makes it useful for anybody who needs it in order to provide any sort of form for any sort of communication among users and user expressive content.

Cathy Gellis (02:28:58):
If you take it away or you make section two 30, not applicable here, it will essentially not be applicable anywhere. And then forums can't exist, including the forums that vulnerable people need to a, you need the forums because you need the forums to be able to call for help, organize, push back. If you know, the politics are going really badly and you're gonna hurt vulnerable people. Like you need the ability to speak out. And section two 30 means that the platforms can exist to help you speak out. If you don't have section two 30, then the forums either can't exist or they're gonna have to screen out so much content that even if they're available, you're not gonna get to use it. And the second thing that section two 30 does is try to actually make these conducive communities within which you can speak.

Cathy Gellis (02:29:41):
And obviously they can't and don't do it perfectly, but it, they can give it as best try as they can because they have the legal protection that section two 30 provides to back up their ability to make moderation decisions. And if you take section two 30 away, then whatever communities remain will be particularly toxic. So again, vulnerable people are not gonna be able to successfully speak online. So it's like you, if you have to kind of expand the view and that's what we were telling the court that you have to look at it more broadly. And I know the temptation is to give this particular victim a remedy and the deep pocket to try to pull from as the platform. But that would mean that you've basically turned section two 30 into a melody. It can no longer function as an insulating law. And if it doesn't function as an insulating law, then nobody benefits from it. And all the activity that it protects stops being protected and goes away.

Leo Laporte (02:30:31):
Omega's an interesting plaintiff or be, or respondent, I guess because they are a chat that allows you to talk to strangers. They claim to be moderated. Although I noticed there's a button that also has an unmoderated section, they also say you have to be 18 plus or 13 plus with parental permission which might let them off the hook cuz after all isn't the parent responsible for the child

Cathy Gellis (02:30:55):
That came up in the case. It doesn't, I don't know how salient it is to the section two 30 issue. I mean basically section two 30 doesn't require section two 30 itself does not require them to limit it or in any way like that same way, section two 30, doesn't require you to moderate your forms in any particular way. Right? Right. So they're trying to say

Leo Laporte (02:31:16):
That. Why did the 11th circuit just throw this out because isn't that what normally would happen with section two 30 that just say no, this no,

Cathy Gellis (02:31:24):
Well, no, cuz this is this is the appeal. So they tried to Sue omega and they, they lost because a couple of the claims were outright dismissed and then section two 30 held where section two 30 prevented the other claims they wanted to go forward. So they lost it. Section two 30 did its job. They are now appealing where they want the 11 circuits to say Uhuh, the district court got it, got it wrong. Section two 30, shouldn't have precluded the claims. Here's why. And then we joined as an Amicus to sort of push back and say bigger picture. If these claims could go forward, then section two 30, no longer functions in the way that Congress wrote it to do and intended for it to do. And all of a sudden speech is not protected, including for other vulnerable people. I mean also non vulnerable people, but we wanted to really make it that the optics are you know, your temptation is to help a person who really needs help, but other people are also going to need help. And those people are best help by having section two 30 preclude some of these sorts of claims because in the bigger picture, more vulnerable people are gonna be helped in more significant ways.

Leo Laporte (02:32:26):
How is the 11th on these kinds of things? They're Georgia, Florida and Alabama,

Cathy Gellis (02:32:33):
I don't know, but this is the case that took one of the Florida theme park statutes where Florida trying to regulate the internet. So it's partly why I wanted to make sure. Yeah. And they actually came out with a decision that was relatively friendly on the first amendment front, where they could recognize the speech issues and had some inclination to vindicate them. It wasn't perfect, but it, but it was much better than it could have been. And but they never really reached the section two 30 issues on that case and they may in the future. So I think it was sort of important to use this opportunity to start educating the 11th circuit because these issues are not gonna go away. They're gonna come back. But there is persuasive precedent in other circuits that they can certainly draw from. I think the legal argument is very strong on a Meley side, but whether the, the 11 circuit just will really want to like undo things just to try to provide support to this plaintiff, I hope not. But, and that's why we were there to try to avoid that temptation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:33:30):
Yeah. And good on the Copia Institute for supporting that kind of work. That's great.

Cathy Gellis (02:33:37):
It's tricky cuz like you don't wanna like, you know, it's a sympathetic plaintiff, but we run into these situations because the principle of the thing and how it applies more broadly is really more people will benefit by pushing back on some of these more individualized claims.

Leo Laporte (02:33:52):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:52):
Yeah. That's why we need legal thinkers. Like you to be thinking about this and raising those issues and reminding people that the emotional response is often not the

Leo Laporte (02:34:04):
Long term. Yeah. Because nobody wants small children to be, you know, kids to be

Cathy Gellis (02:34:08):
No, of course not

Leo Laporte (02:34:09):
Used in a public forum,

Cathy Gellis (02:34:11):
But, but they're more likely like if you lose section two 30, then the forums lose the ability to try to moderate them at all. All so like that's not gonna work out well for them and protect anybody. Yeah. So yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:34:23):
And we do moderate. Of course we actually are pretty actively moderate IRC. We don't have to moderate the discord so much cuz those people paid to be there. And for some reason, people pay don't seem to be so troublesome manage

Cathy Gellis (02:34:35):
Forward it. Now that next time you go back in there,

Leo Laporte (02:34:38):
I'll just scared. I just hold up the ant card and they go, oh nevermind. <Laugh> nevermind. It's

Cathy Gellis (02:34:42):
Laminated. It's laminated now

Leo Laporte (02:34:44):
Laminated now with lamination. Do we come up with a game for Mr. Jarvis? I, somebody suggest the untitled goose game, which would fit his personality. That in that game you play a goose, taunting, terrifying and annoying gardeners and other people as you wander around. Oh I think you wanna take fast. I think you'd like goat simulator too. Actually. What kind of game? What, what kinda, we gotta get some more information about you, Jeff. What do you think you would enjoy?

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:15):
I think so. I, I don't, you

Leo Laporte (02:35:17):
Don't wanna shoot stuff. I understand.

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:18):
No, I don't wanna shoot stuff. I don't want to lemme tell you what I do wanna

Leo Laporte (02:35:23):
Do. Do you want a puzzle game?

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:26):
I hate word.

Leo Laporte (02:35:27):
Not that kind of puzzle

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:28):
Crossword puzzles. I know, but I just, I just, if it's too puzzley no, it feels like a waste of time. Cause

Leo Laporte (02:35:34):
Portal, a lot of people suggested portal mm-hmm <affirmative>, which I think is a lot of fun. I

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:39):
Think about characters. I think, I think, I think

Leo Laporte (02:35:41):
What it

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:41):
Must be about

Leo Laporte (02:35:42):
This. Oh, I know. Not super Mario brothers people dunno. That's not a good character. Hey, it's a Mario Hey super Mario brothers. That was a good, how about last of us? But it that's

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:52):
Where this, this book tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow kind of starts, but go ahead.

Leo Laporte (02:35:56):
There are some games where actually there's some good indie games out there where it's more about the person mm-hmm <affirmative> it's more about it's like storytelling, which I think you would, like, somebody's saying you'd like Minecraft maybe. Yeah. maybe but if you want storytelling, there's some good, but unfortunately I think a lot of 'em are in the PlayStation. There's some good indie games on the PS four and PS five. Last of us might be too grim for you. There was, oh, just get on some mad in football.

Jeff Jarvis (02:36:32):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:36:33):
Settles it all. Yeah. Right there. I'm trying to remember. There were some, there were some really good indie games that had stories and you really felt like you started to identify with the character. I think that's what you want. You want something to be that you can like, ah, man, I don't know. This could be a hard one and it's gonna be on the Mac. That's the, that that's the hardest thing somebody said Oregon trail. Not only that you said

Jeff Jarvis (02:36:59):
<Laugh> not even, I know that insult that is wow. Classic

Leo Laporte (02:37:05):
It's in the it's in the arcade and actually argon trail just added the ability to monitor your steps so that you could find out how close to Oregon you are based on how much you walk, which is, is kind of a fun little thing. I dunno.

Cathy Gellis (02:37:18):
I mean, you could go I guess, to like go games or something like that and browse, cuz they've got a lot of old school games. Like, I mean I only play a game that I was playing in like 2002. And I downloaded it from go and I'm perfectly happy with it. But they may have other ones, like other games that came and went and I think it can work on non PlayStation things

Leo Laporte (02:37:42):
Like it on yeah, it's all. Oh wait a minute. They do have some Mac stuff. You could there's some apple stuff. Gog is great, good old games and they're cheap. They're a couple of bucks

Cathy Gellis (02:37:52):
And I think DRM free, which was also important to me. Yes. Some of the other com commensurate services may not be,

Leo Laporte (02:37:58):
And it's France week, so you can get a French game.

Ant Pruitt (02:38:02):
<Laugh> Ooh, Ooh.

Leo Laporte (02:38:07):
That's a, that's kind of a challenge. We wanna get a game that will, Jeff will enjoy or at least open his, I mind to the idea that games could be something found

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:15):
That's that's it. Yeah. And, and, and what, what interests me about them in, in this book? Cuz it's a really nice, it does start with Mario, her brothers. It starts with two 11 year old kids in a hospital with Mario, her brothers and then they become lifelong friends and and, and, and make games. And at 1.1 of the games they make into an online environment mm-hmm, <affirmative> take it out of the game. So it shows the, the progression the history of gaming, which I, which I find interesting as well. But what interests me, I think going forward is the AU the game maker as AUR and the game player as collaborator in the process of mutual collab creation. That's what interests me. Does that make any sense?

Leo Laporte (02:39:03):
Yeah. And I'm yeah. Do you like board games? Like do you ever play any kind of,

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:08):
No, I'm very boring. I can't stand games of any sort. That's the pro that's why I don't game.

Leo Laporte (02:39:13):
It's gonna be pretty challenging. You no monopoly. No. Sorry. No part

Ant Pruitt (02:39:19):
Emulator for the Mac. Yeah. And grab super Mario your brothers, just like to book

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:25):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:39:26):
It's just not 12 though. That's the problem? No.

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:29):
Yeah. No

Leo Laporte (02:39:30):
Flight simulator pack.

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:32):
No, that's not about people. I want things about people.

Leo Laporte (02:39:34):
Yeah. There's some good story games. I

Cathy Gellis (02:39:36):
A fan person.

Leo Laporte (02:39:37):
Yeah. The telltale catalog.

Ant Pruitt (02:39:46):
Tell tale mortal combat <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:39:50):
You're you're just best auto my head up an you're I'm gonna come back and be a,

Leo Laporte (02:39:56):
Oh that's monkey island salmon max.

Cathy Gellis (02:39:59):
You right. The game I play is heroes of might and magic three. There's a game. I like it.

Leo Laporte (02:40:05):
That's a real game. Yeah. I don't

Cathy Gellis (02:40:07):
What Jeff heroes of might and magic three, not after three, not before three and not the other heroes series. Heroes of Mito magic version three.

Leo Laporte (02:40:16):
Yeah. If you liked board games, some civilization would be good, but I don't. I think he doesn't like board games and, and that is the ultimate board game. It's a turn based game. So SIV, while a lot of people love it may not be the right thing for Jeff. I

Cathy Gellis (02:40:31):
Think. Well, there's some city or, or age of empires, but I can't find age of empires

Leo Laporte (02:40:35):
Anymore. I love age of empires. Oh, they re-released it in a in a, oh, did they? Oh yeah. You can get it now from Microsoft. And it's really

Cathy Gellis (02:40:42):
Good. I'm really irritated. Cuz I own a copy that will no longer run on any usable machine. And then this offends me deeply.

Leo Laporte (02:40:49):
Yeah. yeah. Age of empires got remastered. In fact the new age of empires is I hear very good. If you really like age of empires, which I did, it was one of, I think it's called a definitive edition. Something like that.

Ant Pruitt (02:41:02):
I don't think any game is gonna satisfy him.

Leo Laporte (02:41:06):
No, I'm really rack in my brain. There are games where it's a story. Like you're a, you're a character. Oh you know what? The game's coming out next week. Oh, I found it for you. I know exactly what game it comes out next week. I'm so excited. It's a third person. Cat adventure game. It's called stray. You play a cat wandering around in an environment and you have to, it's kind of puzzley it's not interesting kill any, anybody you have to solve puzzles. I think actually

Ant Pruitt (02:41:39):
A bit hates cats though.

Leo Laporte (02:41:41):
Do you hate cats?

Jeff Jarvis (02:41:41):
No, I have one. Why is there a phone

Leo Laporte (02:41:43):
On the cat? No, because a Mo it's a cat in the Fu so sort of little sciencey, future science fish.

Jeff Jarvis (02:41:49):
It's Lambda meets

Leo Laporte (02:41:52):
Cat. Yeah. Sort of I think the, the thing is your, is your interface or something?

Cathy Gellis (02:41:57):
That cat was on Bart.

Leo Laporte (02:41:59):
Yeah. So this cat can eventually get these robots to do what it wants.

Jeff Jarvis (02:42:04):
It's Padre's Vacas

Leo Laporte (02:42:06):
I think you, I think I'm very excited about this game. I think this might be the game for you. This

Jeff Jarvis (02:42:11):
Might be, this might be

Leo Laporte (02:42:13):
Cause it's

Ant Pruitt (02:42:13):
It's chicken hit 21 in a chat has the best one. Font match.

Leo Laporte (02:42:17):
No, not font match. <Laugh> it's not that nerdy. So this one, you play a cat it's beautiful environments. Right? You're solving puzzles. You have to solve puzzles. It's not, there's no shooting involved. You're gonna get this robot to be your friend. You have to watch out for these you know, they're going after you, but you don't choose that look pretty cool. Doesn't it look good? Yeah. This comes out next week. I've been waiting for this to come out. I'm very excited about this. Can you play it on a Mac? Probably not. Probably. You need a PlayStation or an Xbox, but this is stray. You're a kitty cat. Don't you think that would be fun? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:42:51):
Yeah. That's the color of

Leo Laporte (02:42:51):
Our cat. Better than a goose.

Jeff Jarvis (02:42:55):
That was a weird Meow mouth, but okay.

Leo Laporte (02:42:58):
Yeah. PS4 and steam, which means you could play it on a PC, but not

Ant Pruitt (02:43:01):
No windows.

Leo Laporte (02:43:01):
Yeah. Not on the, not

Ant Pruitt (02:43:03):
On a map. Oh well or Linux.

Cathy Gellis (02:43:06):
I used to play caverns of Mars.

Leo Laporte (02:43:08):
Oh, that was a fun game. I remember that.

Cathy Gellis (02:43:09):
Yeah. Okay. That was, that was a good game. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:43:13):
I think stray. I'm gonna go with stray, but we gotta get you a PlayStation. We'll send you a PlayStation.

Jeff Jarvis (02:43:18):
<Laugh> no, no, you don't need to send me a PlayStation. You

Leo Laporte (02:43:21):
Don't have a PC anywhere in the house.

Jeff Jarvis (02:43:24):
My daughter has, has, has a PC

Leo Laporte (02:43:26):
Still hers. Oh, wait a minute. What am I thinking? You're made for Sudoku. You'd be a great Sudoku. Oh

Jeff Jarvis (02:43:33):
<Laugh> don't do not don't no.

Leo Laporte (02:43:37):
<Laugh> oh

Jeff Jarvis (02:43:38):
God, try you try it. You, you didn't learn. You bring it up. You nerd you out.

Leo Laporte (02:43:44):
You might with some nerding.

Jeff Jarvis (02:43:45):
Kathy. We've made fun of Leo for his Sudoku. Nerding.

Leo Laporte (02:43:50):
Yeah. They mock me all the time. Yeah. You mind with some, with some effort? I'll have to look and see if stray works on Linux. I bet it doesn't but I will check. You might be able to get to work on your Chromebook. Although I think it's not gonna have enough enough power. I have a game for you. I'm gonna talk about in a little bit, but first we're gonna wrap this puppy up with our picks of the week in just a moment, Kathy Galles is here. S Q I it's great to have you. Thank you, Kathy. Filling in for Stacy. And we needed a professional attorney, I think on this week's episode, for

Jeff Jarvis (02:44:24):
Sure. Certainly not an amateur one. There's enough of those around.

Leo Laporte (02:44:27):
Yeah. Well the three of us usually Jeff Jarvis of course has always what we, what would we do about without Jeff or what we do about Jeff? You

Jeff Jarvis (02:44:36):
Try to find out, but you can't someday. It won't go away.

Leo Laporte (02:44:39):
And the aunt Pruit, I will not be here next week. I think we're gonna have Jason host. Is that right? I can't remember. Jason, I think is that's what it says.

Jeff Jarvis (02:44:48):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:44:49):
And that's then that's the sweet truth.

Jeff Jarvis (02:44:51):
Either that, or we have four guests and no host, which would be anarchy as opposed to democracy.

Leo Laporte (02:44:57):
Well, we need the reason and you can't host is we need somebody to read the ads. So, and it has to be in other words, a and

Jeff Jarvis (02:45:04):
I screwed that up. I couldn't, I couldn't even, you know, switch to the ads,

Leo Laporte (02:45:08):
Introduce the ads, let alone read the ads. So Stacy will be back. You

Jeff Jarvis (02:45:12):
Had all kinds of good jokes. Then they

Leo Laporte (02:45:13):
Went and Jeff, well, because it was my fault, cuz I said I was on a cruise cuz I, I wasn't thinking when I read the ads, I thought it was the ads for the,

Jeff Jarvis (02:45:21):
So what did you do? Did you rerecord the ads then

Leo Laporte (02:45:24):
They figured they edited it. They just edited it.

Jeff Jarvis (02:45:25):
They figured good.

Leo Laporte (02:45:27):
Mr. The challenge was look, if

Cathy Gellis (02:45:29):
They can laminate, they can figure out, oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:45:31):
We kinda laminate their there challenge was because you made point many jokes about it. Yes. We had to not only edit the end, we had to edit you.

Jeff Jarvis (02:45:40):
I know it's cause I've made a whole stick out of it. Leo doesn't know where he is. Leo's lost. Oh my God. Leo says he's on the boat. S telling me no he's thought of the

Leo Laporte (02:45:49):
Island. Geez. I will be on the boat.

Cathy Gellis (02:45:52):
Best material ended up on the cutting room for

Jeff Jarvis (02:45:54):
Exactly. I'm pissed.

Leo Laporte (02:45:57):
I will be on the boat this week. We're going with 120 TWI fans. Can't wait to hundred

Jeff Jarvis (02:46:01):
20.

Leo Laporte (02:46:02):
Wow. Yeah, it's great. Great. can't wait me to all in there. Cruise to Alaska on the all in America, Euro dam leaving from Seattle on Saturday. It'll be great fun with Paul Thra of windows weekly and his wife, Lisa and I, and a bunch of wonderful people. Wow. If I can, I will. I'm bringing, I, I bought the Snapchat selfie, drone. You did, but it's broken it. Not my fault. I was updating firmware and now it's stuck. So if I can get it unstuck, I'll do a selfie with a selfie drone, and we'll send you that of, of

Ant Pruitt (02:46:39):
Everyone.

Leo Laporte (02:46:40):
Unbelievable. Otherwise I'll have to bring the DJ I and do it by hand, but we'll get a drone selfie of the group we lost. Also.

Ant Pruitt (02:46:46):
I tried to tell you not to buy that thing. Didn't I?

Leo Laporte (02:46:48):
Yeah, you were.

Ant Pruitt (02:46:50):
You did.

Cathy Gellis (02:46:50):
You did. When the product's not ready for prime time, An's gonna stop you

Ant Pruitt (02:46:55):
Uhhuh. <Affirmative> absolutely great,

Leo Laporte (02:46:57):
Kathy, your opportunity. And I see you have one, your picture, always a little odd, your,

Ant Pruitt (02:47:04):
Oh, you're the best one. What was it? Hu Huey. Huey Lewis.

Cathy Gellis (02:47:08):
It's I mean, I can't really top that. So I sort of like set the bar like a little too high, a little too early. And so it it's been a struggle.

Leo Laporte (02:47:15):
So no Huey Lewis this time.

Cathy Gellis (02:47:18):
I mean, I could always come up with some Huey Lewis, but I thought you might want me to diversify my,

Leo Laporte (02:47:22):
This is, is this a picture you took?

Cathy Gellis (02:47:24):
I took it yep.

Leo Laporte (02:47:25):
Of the beautiful BA in ha nice. Yep. Yeah. Nice. I love it. I was in Providence two weeks ago. That's where I was not on a cruise and it was really beautiful. This is a good time of year in new England. Why are you? I was gorgeous that day. Why are you there?

Cathy Gellis (02:47:41):
I just wanted the day at the beach. I missed the ocean. It's different in California. I missed the east east coast. Atlantic type beaches. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:47:48):
Yeah, me too. I had clam cakes and lobster roll here is the beach in Cape Cod. This is a beautiful beach and what's nice. This's pretty. When I moved to California, I was so disappointed. The water's freezing cold. I thought the it

Ant Pruitt (02:48:01):
Is cold

Leo Laporte (02:48:02):
On the Atlantic is beautiful. It's warm even in new England. It's beautiful. And there's a great, great Cape Cod shot. What did you take that picture with Kathy?

Cathy Gellis (02:48:12):
Just pixel three.

Leo Laporte (02:48:15):
Nice. You see, that's pretty even the three still great images.

Ant Pruitt (02:48:19):
It's pretty. And horizon line is straight too

Cathy Gellis (02:48:22):
Nice. Oh, thank goodness. Okay. I mean, I don't think I could see properly cuz like there was all this glare I was wearing sunglasses. So at a certain point I'm like, well, well, I mean it's not being film. You can just snap away, but it's not like I threw away a whole bunch. That one actually came out it's and I like the sailboat shot. Like the sailboat timing. I, I have another shot with a sailboat in a different place, but I just like that one better. It's like it needs to be there.

Leo Laporte (02:48:45):
Yeah. Yeah. It makes a big difference without the sailboat. That's not nearly as interesting, so true. Yep. So true. Yep. Very nice, Kathy. Thank you so much for being here. You're really valued for me. Especially when we have these interesting court situations Jeff, a number, an item, a

Ant Pruitt (02:49:03):
Thing. Oh right. Oh right. I gotta do something. I gotta, I gotta earn my group here. Let's see.

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:10):
This you just say, and then you move on office occupancy is stuck at 50%, which I think is an important moment. That's a number. But I found this interesting. I think we might have talked about this before. BMW is gonna start selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month. Not in the us market, but in other markets

Leo Laporte (02:49:25):
And you already have everything you need for heated seats. They just block it in software.

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:30):
It's very kind of learning from Elon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:49:33):
Terrible. Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:34):
Which is terrible. And then the other thing that was interesting that struck me at the same time is Boohoo, which is a e-commerce player. I think mainly in the UK is gonna start charging shoppers pound 99 to return items.

Leo Laporte (02:49:48):
Cause the return issues. Can you say,

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:50):
Wait, wait, where that goes next? Can you say,

Leo Laporte (02:49:51):
You say no, no Boohoo.

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:54):
Yeah. I mean, oh no. People will buy online cuz they're safe because they can return things if they don't like them and they can find out, oh no, no, no, no. It's like when banks brought in ATMs and wanted you to use the ATM so they could fire tellers and then eventually try to charge you for using the ATM so that they can save money, firing the tellers.

Leo Laporte (02:50:15):
Yeah. You,

Cathy Gellis (02:50:16):
What was I saying about following your users and paying attention to your market and what your market wants?

Leo Laporte (02:50:21):
Exactly. Well, this will be a good experiment. We will see. We will see, you know, does it cost them customers? I know I wouldn't buy clothes if I didn't have online, if I didn't have easy return, I'd be yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (02:50:33):
Absolutely not

Leo Laporte (02:50:33):
Be nice. Right. Lisa

Jeff Jarvis (02:50:35):
I'm I'm sympathetic with the companies. Sure. Cause getting the returns is hard. It adds a lot of expense. I get that, but they wouldn't sell anything and they, and they otherwise they'd have to have brick and mortar stores all over the country. They're better off in the long run if they manage it. Right. And if they describe their products correctly and so on, right,

Leo Laporte (02:50:55):
Exactly. Lisa will and she knows she can do this. So that's why she'll do it. Instead of going to a store and trying on clothes, she'll order all the clothes that look good in the catalog, keep the ones that fit nicely and work well for her and send the rest back. That's you know, kind of the, the deal. I understand the stores don't like it, but that's, that's how it works.

Cathy Gellis (02:51:13):
I understand that. You don't know how tall I am. So let me just tell you I'm like five, eight, but I'm really not. So when I go to the stores, they don't have the clothes that fit. They're sending me to the catalog. So what am I gonna do?

Leo Laporte (02:51:24):
Isn't that ironic? Yeah. Yeah. They say, sorry. Yeah. Our son has feet about this big <laugh> <laugh> they're like flippers and you know, good luck trying to find. So they always say, yeah, well you can go to Zappos and that's where we end up getting all those shoes. But if you had to pay to return shoes, no that's not going oh,

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:46):
Especially shoes, all offenses. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:51:49):
Mr. Ant, what do you got for us?

Ant Pruitt (02:51:52):
Well, I have a little bit of a lulls from the folks that lens rentals they were on Twitter. And I thought this was pretty funny and, and related to our recent news TWI news from, was it Tuesday? Yeah. With the web web telescope. And I thought this was just a funny tweet from

Leo Laporte (02:52:07):
Them versus the poor hub has been doing a great job for decades, giving us amazing images of space and all of a sudden this new guy, James web space telescope comes along and the I'm I'm yeah, the comparison. Isn't great. But we got a lot of science at a huble boy. Those pictures from the web are unbelievable.

Ant Pruitt (02:52:29):
They're pretty. Yeah. Very, very pretty. Yeah. You and Mr. Powell talked about it

Leo Laporte (02:52:33):
The end of the day, right? We did, we did a special with an asset press conference and it was really each image was just so dramatic. The most, the most dramatic one here, and this is kind of nice with the slider is this, this is the Karina Nebula. This is the most what I think the most beautiful image that the web got. This is from the Hubble. What this is, is a is a Nebula and stars being born, coming out of the gas cloud. That's the hub, that's the web. And you can see why they're, they're kind of making that tweet because

Ant Pruitt (02:53:12):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:53:12):
Unbelievable is a dramatic, dramatic difference.

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:17):
I watched the beginning of the press conference. I had to switch of course, to watch the January 6th hearing. Not being only a nerd and you know, it was touching when, when one of the scientists said that, yeah, she did ugly cry

Leo Laporte (02:53:30):
When she saw, oh, I would've mm-hmm <affirmative> I was, I was tearing up a little bit. They were stunning. And of course my pick would be the astronomy photo of the day, which I've for a long time used as my wallpaper. And it's today's APOD picture is one of the James we telescope pictures. This is of a distant galaxy and you can see the smears here are the lensing

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:52):
Gala,

Leo Laporte (02:53:53):
Every one of these galaxy. Yeah. Yeah. Distant. Galaxys

Ant Pruitt (02:53:57):
Amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:53:58):
And this, you

Cathy Gellis (02:53:58):
Can get that on a rug. Now somebody like went to one of the sites where you could get custom prints and love

Leo Laporte (02:54:04):
It selling, put it as

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:05):
A right. Right. So, so this, the, the, the, the lens is the light going around something. And that makes it look

Leo Laporte (02:54:12):
Like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, pretty, this is the deepest sharpest infrared image of the cosmos so far a 12 and a half hour exposure. Yeah. Wow. Pretty, pretty amazing. The smacks 0 7 2 3 dash 73, galaxy cluster 4.6 billion, light years away.

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:40):
And they could have chosen any other grain of sand on the end of the tip of the fingerprint around it. Right. That's just one tiny, tiny, tiny slice of what they could have shot.

Leo Laporte (02:54:49):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They'll be busy. They'll be very busy, but what an amazing telescope what else aunt you had, that was one pick, but you have others. I know

Ant Pruitt (02:54:58):
There was one. My other one is because of prime day, I've been sort of looking around for some stuff, for people in the photography and video side of things. And this one is the follow focus from small rig. And I bought one of these a while back, but of course, it's now on sale. And I really enjoy this thing. If you're into shooting video and you want to have a better control of your focus by doing manual focus, this wheel works really, really well. It has B stops on it. So if you wanna lock off where you want to put your focus, you can just pull that little notch down right there and it'll stop where you need it to stop. I use it all the time. I think it was soft for like 20 or 30% on prime day, highly recommended quite Daum useful, small rig. So this is what

Leo Laporte (02:55:47):
They use when they make movies and they do a rack focus. They'll set it up so that they, they know exactly where the start is and where the end is. And they can do it without jostling the camera and all that.

Ant Pruitt (02:55:57):
That's right. Yeah. Very cool. It's it's pretty Daag gum. Awesome. And you can put it on your little mini. It comes with the rail. If you don't have rails to put on your camera. It's it's, it's quite nice. Quite nice.

Leo Laporte (02:56:07):
Cool. 77 bucks. Not bad.

Ant Pruitt (02:56:09):
And lastly, I just wanna say congratulations to Mr. Micah Sergeant. You know what? We got another show. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:56:17):
Yeah. Let's not forget.

Ant Pruitt (02:56:19):
That's great.

Leo Laporte (02:56:20):
Micah's rebirthing hands on Mac. I did 40 episodes than stopped, but nobody better to take it up than our Mac expert. Micah Sergeant. It is club only now. Sorry. so you have to be a member of a club TWI 7 99 a month gets you this, but also all of our other shows add free. You get access to the discord, the TWI plus feed. And because new shows like baby stars, can't get advertising. We like to launch them in the Nebula of the club before we push them out. The club members in effect are, are, are supporting the launch of new shows and we've got, we've got, we hope some other new ones coming along. Ooh, but this will be the first. So there's two ways. Actually you can get it, join the clubs the best way. I think 7 99, you get all the, the shows ad free. But if you want just one hands on Mac, you can also get that for 2 99 a month, seven 90 a month, 2 99 months. And that is all at twit.tv/club TWI. And it's ad free because it hasn in the ads. That's a matter's fact. Yeah, he's doing some really interesting stuff though. I I'm really glad he's doing this. Thank you for the plug aunt.

Ant Pruitt (02:57:28):
Likewise. I just wanted to show off my shot. It's always a pleasure to take the photos of our hosts and staff. I mean, I mean, everybody's so dad gum photogenic it, I love shooting y'all

Leo Laporte (02:57:39):
Some of them are,

Ant Pruitt (02:57:40):
What was Mike take? Well, this week on hands on photography, you're

Leo Laporte (02:57:45):
Gonna

Ant Pruitt (02:57:45):
Fix me. Someone's image will be featured on the show. You're

Leo Laporte (02:57:49):
Gonna, you're gonna fix

Ant Pruitt (02:57:50):
My show. Why do you think I choose a low

Leo Laporte (02:57:52):
Re camera to appear on your

Ant Pruitt (02:57:53):
Show <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:57:56):
And is going to adjust my shot. <Laugh> that should be fun. That'll be fun on hands on photography, twi.tv/hop that's Jeff's Jarvis. So good to have you as always the director of the town height center for entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York buzz machine.com and medium. You're not gonna leave medium, right? No,

Jeff Jarvis (02:58:21):
I'm not gonna leave medium or Twitter. Yeah, dam it.

Leo Laporte (02:58:24):
Yeah. The club price is $7 a month. What did I say? I said 7 99. It's not seven, nine, $7. No. $7

Speaker 7 (02:58:31):
Straight. If you wanna send,

Cathy Gellis (02:58:33):
I

Leo Laporte (02:58:34):
Send it 99 bucks, if you want to. And Kathy gall is so great to have you from tech dirt. And of course her law offices are at CG count. C O U N S E l.com. She's Kathy Gilles on the Twitter. Thank you, Kathy. What are you saying? Burke

Cathy Gellis (02:58:50):
Got show her. We

Leo Laporte (02:58:51):
Her card. Yeah, I showed her the card. Oh yeah. Yeah. I showed her Burke. Burke apparently runs the laminator and he really wanted, he really wanted more attention. <Laugh>

Cathy Gellis (02:59:01):
Cannot give Berk enough attention for laminating that cart. That was, that was amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:59:06):
I wish I had known, I wanted, I could laminate some of my cruise documents. That'd be a good thing to do. Huh? <Laugh>

Cathy Gellis (02:59:12):
So it has to come from the heart Leo. It has to come from the

Leo Laporte (02:59:14):
Heart lamination from the heart. You're right. You know, none of this, none of this spurious lamination <laugh> that's like ancillary copyright. You just it just doesn't work. Thank you, Kathy, for being here. You're wonderful. And I thank your dad for letting us use his bandwidth all afternoon or all

Jeff Jarvis (02:59:32):
And, and his time with you.

Leo Laporte (02:59:33):
Yes, yes, that's right. My mom would not have, let me do this. No, we do this weekend, Google every Wednesday about two Pacific five Eastern 2100 UTC. Watch us live@livedottwi.tv. Chat with us@ircdottwi.tv or in the club, twit discord. After the fact, we have a forum@twit.community, master it on instance@twi.social conversation continues there as well. On demand versions of our show available at the website, twit do TV slash twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. You could find this week in Google, on YouTube. And of course you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. The minute it's available of a Wednesday afternoon. Thank you everybody for joining us. I will be gone for the next week. Jason. And Micah are gonna take over for me. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. Micah's gonna do the tech guys show. That's gonna be interesting on Saturday. That's his first time. Ooh. And I will be back on the 24th to host this weekend. Tech, thanks everybody. We'll see you next time on TWI byebye.

Speaker 7 (03:00:42):
Don't miss all about Android. Every week. We talk about the latest news hardware apps, and now all the developer goodness, happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell also joined by Ron Richards, Florence ion, and our newest co-host on the panel. When to Dow, who brings her developer chops, really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform. We love so much. Join us every Tuesday, all about Android on twit TV.