This Week in Google 686, 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. Ant and Stacy have the week off, so I'm thrilled to say Jeff Jarvis, Gle'nn Fleishman, and Kevin Marks join us this week to talk about Kanye, Elon, and Donald, the new big social media owners. We'll talk about Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky Initiative. In fact, Kevin's gonna weigh in on the new protocol. Can this be the future of Twitter and all social media and how TikTok ate the internet? Mm, good. It's all coming up next on TWiG!

(00:00:48):
This is TWiG This Week in Google. Episode 686 recorded Wednesday, October 19th, 2022. Indoctrinized and Radicalated. This episode of This Week in Google is brought to you by ITProTV. If you're looking at a break into the world of IT or if your IT team needs to level up, get the introduction you need with ITProTV. Check out an ITproTV business plan by visiting ITPro.tv/twit today. And by HPE GreenLake, orchestrated by the experts at CDW. Who can help you consolidate and manage all your data in one flexible edge-to-cloud platform to scale and innovate. Learn more at cdw.com/hpe. And by Nureva. Nureva has simplified everything about meetings and classroom audio. You get great audio in systems that are easy to install and manage. Visit nureva.com/twit and get 50% off one Nureva HDL300 system for mid-sized rooms when you get a live online demo and buy before December 16th, 2022. It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google to show where we get together with our favorite Google verses to talk about Twitter, <laugh>, Facebook, and everything else. Jeff Jarvis is here, Leonard tow professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark

(00:02:20):
Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Hello, Jeff. Hello boss. How are you? What camera are you using today? Cuz it looks really natural.

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:28):
It's the same Logitech, but I just a adjusted and I've gotta play with it. You adjusted. It looks really good. I'll, I'll have to adjust again. Yeah, now it looks actually good. I look

Leo Laporte (00:02:36):
Alive. You look normal. Yeah. You

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:38):
Look like I have to play with the white balance and the exposure time and the gain and the brightness. And you look

Leo Laporte (00:02:43):
Like a really good mortician has gotten a hold of you and is just really, really cleaned you up Good. Yeah. Stacey has the week off. So does Ant Pruit has the week off. But good news, Glenn Fleishman's here. We always, always love having Glenn on Glenn.Fun. Hello Glenn.

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:03):
Hello. How are y'all?

Leo Laporte (00:03:04):
Great to see you. You've been on a jaunt across the great Midwest in search of That's right, Lead

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:12):
Type in. Yeah. I went to the, I went to, There should be a song for this. The, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. A museum at the OSU, the Ohio State University Libraries.

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
Is this the cartoon library or a It's cartoon. It's library <laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:26):
It's a, but it's a very good one. They have an amazing collection. They have an upcoming exhibition that's gonna show off the collection of Bill Black Beard. Great. Name. A guy who in a San Francisco rental house cumulated millions of comic strips. They're being thrown out and deaccessioned by newspapers. Oh, wow. So that's one. It's an amazing collection. Un un reproducible collection. And they're about to do an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of having acquired that from the now late Mr. Black Beard,

Leo Laporte (00:03:56):
Because we do have, in San Francisco a not a great cartoon library. And I would imagine other cities have something similar. This looks like a scholarly library of cartoons. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:06):
Yeah. They great exhibitions. A nice exhibition space. And they're, but they're archives. They pulled stuff out from the back for me. And it was it was a glorious few days of sitting at a room and staring at things. So

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:18):
You is an archivist. Happy to have you there. Ooh, let me show you this. Let me show you that kinda,

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:22):
That kinda state. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Answered questions about printing and looked at things and got answers on those.

Leo Laporte (00:04:28):
Oh, interesting. So you were there not merely as a, as a, as a visitor, you were there as an expert.

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:33):
I have developed a very, as, you know, a very strange expertise and very, very niche subject. And so I've got a video that's in this upcoming exhibition about Bill Black Beard. No kidding. About how kidding. Oh, really? And about how comics were printed or syndicated and then printed in the metal type era. So I did a video for them that'll be running during the exhibition, which is very exciting. First participation in exhibition.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:54):
Did you bring this an opportunity to explain the phrase boiler plate

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:57):
<Laugh>? Oh. Not that one, but I could, But, you know. Okay. Hold something back for later when it's

Leo Laporte (00:05:03):
Good. Right. <laugh>, did you bring any loot back from your

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:07):
Trip? No, unfortunately. No. No loot. Well, actually I have a new flan, but it's too boring to show. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:14):
I want hear about the

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:15):
Next Wait, I'll unpack later. Later. I'll get up at some point and I'll show some metal type. I I did pick up along the way.

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Oh, excellent. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:21):
That's what I wanna hear. I wanna hear about the next visit was,

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:24):
Was the ts the TSA had to inspect my luggage cause I was carrying pounds of metal type lead type back

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:30):
<Laugh>. How heavy was your bag?

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:32):
It was pretty heavy.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:34):
So you went, you went to a collection of type foundry machines of materials. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:42):
Yeah. There's this lovely fellow who passed away early this year in his seventies, Greg Walters. And he spent a good chunk of his life acquiring American type founding and type casting equipment. So the stuff that was used to make metal type for printers. And it, it'll, you know, it, over by the eighties, nobody wanted this stuff. It was being thrown out and junked. And fortunately, this is kind of like the Bill Black beard story. He and a few other people have been rigor, have been collecting it and keeping it many of them keeping it in use and un learning how to use it or refurbishing it. So Greg passed away and some of his friends and colleagues have been working to consolidate his collection. He's got a giant barn in Piqua, Ohio, apparently home of Captain Underpants. I learned after being here.

Leo Laporte (00:06:26):
Oh, love Captain Underpants. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:28):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:06:30):
Kids grew up with, Captain Underpants

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:32):
Glenn, have you read this?

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:33):
I have not. I know of that book. That's fall of ATF, that's story

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:37):
Very hard to find.

Leo Laporte (00:06:38):
Alcohol, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms?

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:40):
Ah, American type founders.

Leo Laporte (00:06:42):
Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:43):
The, there were independent when they, before the Linotype, there were independent type foundries doing different sizes, different this, different that. And when the Linotype and the other type plant of machine hit they knew they were doomed. And so they combined eventually into one company. And it was American

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:58):
Type, which could a legal combine. They were allowed because they were the, if they'd gone to business, there would've been no independent type production in America, which is kind of a big deal. I mean, we don't think about it now, but it was, there were hundreds of thousands of individual printers, and they needed type to, to set the work for businesses and academic institutions all over the country. They've

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:18):
Been boxes like this. Yeah. Well, Fox.

Leo Laporte (00:07:21):
So we I, we thought we were gonna have Kevin Marks on, He's scheduled to be on, if he shows up. I've, I'm gonna hold a story until he shows up. But one of the big stories this week is we're starting to see for the first time a sort of an API for Blue Sky, or at least a roadmap for decentralized networks. And because Kevin is all about open standards on the web I'm gonna, we'll get to this. If he shows up, I'll hold it until he shows up. Otherwise, we'll get to it. And

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:53):
Let's note too, the next week you have @rabble on

Leo Laporte (00:07:55):
And @rabble is gonna be on. Yeah. So we're really, this is, we're gonna be delving into this whole idea of social networks and federated social networks. @rabble Created something that you were talking about with Mike Masick some weeks ago. And you, you set me up with it. And he saw that I had joined, It's called Planetary. There hasn't been much activity on Planetary, but I did create an account and followed him. He also worked at Odeo and at Twitter and worked on Blue Sky and knows a lot about Blue Sky. So anything we say today is just a preliminary to what we might talk about next week when @rabble

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:31):
So I can't wait to let discussion. But in the meantime,

Leo Laporte (00:08:34):
Well, there was big way for it. I thought. In the meantime, we could still talk about social networks, because now we have Ye and Musk and Trump potentially owning three of the biggest, well, not biggest, most prominent, I don't even know, three social networks.

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:54):
One big network and two other things.

Leo Laporte (00:08:56):
Yeah. Two other lesser networks. Twitter, of course, would

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:58):
Be kind of make, kind of makes you Miss Jack and think that Mark Zuckerberg isn't so bad. Hey, folks, you didn't know what you had when you had it.

Leo Laporte (00:09:09):
So I don't even know where to dip into this Devil's Food cake of fun. But I guess we could start with Kanye West, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, now known as Ye. Who after being booted off of Instagram and Twitter for blatantly racist and anti-Semitic postings has decided, by the way, not a coincidence. Shortly before those tweets and Instagram posts, he was seen at New York Fashion Week in a White Lives Matter outfit, which I guess if you're given the benefit of the doubt, could be some sort of social commentary. I don't know. White Lives Matter, standing next to Candace Owens, who's also wearing a White Lives Matter t-shirt, she is the wife of the founder of Founder Parler. Sure, sure. Which Kanye has now announced that he wishes to buy in light of his being banned from meta's, Instagram and Twitter. Now, the, a whistleblower, or a leaker, I don't know what you call him from Parler, says Parler only has about 50,000 daily active users, which is a goodly number. I bet you it's more than Mastedon. But anyway, 50,000

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:24):
<Laugh>. It's

Leo Laporte (00:10:25):
Not an insignificant number, but it's not 300 million, which is what Twitter has 50 million daily active users, or 50 million. A 50,000. 50,000. I did say 50,000 and that's correct. 50,000. And the, the same Leaker said, and is w they've been shopping it for some time at a wildly overblown valuation. We still don't know what that amount of money is. Kanye, who's one of the richest musicians in the world, he's worth I think, $6 billion, can, can't afford Twitter, but he could probably afford Parler

Glenn Fleishman (00:10:55):
I, I can't remember who said it. I was just saw this the other day. It might have been Ryan Broadrick, who runs the Garbage Day newsletter. But it was that when you, when you're an angry, middle-aged or older man and someone tells you you can't say something, you buy a social network now.

Leo Laporte (00:11:10):
Yeah. That seems to be the case. Elon certainly you know, one of the motivations for him bidding 44 billion for Twitter was President Trump's deep quote de platforming getting kicked off of Twitter. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:26):
So Mike Masick says that, that that Ye is being taken advantage of.

Leo Laporte (00:11:31):
Yes, Sure. That's kind of the cons consensus. You know, a lot of people say, Well, he's mentally ill. We have to give him a pass. I don't know, really. I don't know. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:42):
You're all on some spectrum

Leo Laporte (00:11:43):
Of, at least, Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:44):
I don't know. I mean, you can be, you can have, This is, this is the thing. A lot of things get attributed to people who are in mental health crises and but there's, there's a lot of people with mental health issues. There's a huge number of people Yes. Who have them. And a very, very, very small number of them are jerks in relative terms. I mean, compared to the rest of the population, having a mental health problem doesn't mean you kill people. Doesn't mean you're a jerk. Doesn't mean you don't listen to people. But, so Kanye or Gee could be both a terrible person and being a mental health crisis. And so you're allowed to have sympathy. He could be both the latter <laugh>. Yeah. Right. He can be both. He can be both. I mean, there's no, there's nothing. He

Leo Laporte (00:12:23):
Doesn't get a pass.

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:24):
Right. You have to look at his actions. Yeah. I mean, you can worry about his behavior and you wish there's people who he could listen to, but he's far too wealthy for anyone to tell him not to do something or for him to listen. And he is not gonna be put into a conservatorship. He's, you know, certainly in control enough of his affairs. But you're like, it, it seems like he's engaged in self-destructive and erratic behavior. And that's one thing. But the other is he's doing things that are intentionally harmful and damaging to groups of people and individuals. I mean, he was practically stalking Pete Davidson at one point when Davidson was dating his son.

Leo Laporte (00:12:56):
He still is. I mean, he tweeted he was a heroin addict. He's been saying all sorts of, man. So this is what Elon posted this morning and immediately took down the three Elon's, Oh, Lord. Says in re

Glenn Fleishman (00:13:07):
Where's the fourth horseman

Leo Laporte (00:13:09):
Of the apocalypse. Yeah. In retrospect, it was inevitable. There it's a Trump musk and Ye. Dressed as musketeers with their swords, Parler truth, social. Interestingly, Musk does not say Twitter, but says X because of course, that's his plan. I guess his, his evil genius doctor, No plan. Yeah. in retrospect, it was inevitable is at the end of these kinds of social media. I mean, this is it's increasingly, if Musks posts this, this tells you that his plans for Twitter are not completely neutral or benign. Right. What do you think first?

Glenn Fleishman (00:13:53):
Mo moderation is already a problem on the, the best moderated platform among those three would be Twitter. And it's a huge problem. They have a huge issues with people being brigade and dog piled and harassed, and celebrities deciding whether, you know, celebrities you might like and agree with, or celebrities that you think are ods or other, or political figures. Figuring out ways to weaponize Twitter to attack people to point all their followers to them and produce harm. So Twitter already has that problem, and Musk looks at that and says, There's not enough free speech there. Yeah. There's too much control going on there. Yeah. So most social networks, I think, thrive by the participation of a relatively small number of people who make it worthwhile to be there. And by some kind of oversight that keeps the noise just low enough that enough people stay there, that it's worthwhile to advertisers. So Musk is basically gonna drive off the people who are already like on the fence about staying on Twitter, whether it's celebrities or Jeff Jarvis's of the world, probably. Right, Jeff. And and then also the people who come there for some amount of content, some amount of some participation, Parasocial or otherwise, they're gonna leave too when it's all noise, when it's all garbage.

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:07):
Yeah. I, so I, I, I tweeted this, I think during the week that the extremes now see speech as censorship. You can't cancel me. You can't criticize me. Right. And they see moderation and editing and publishing and choice as censorship. Then they don't see, of course, the paradox of that. Cuz they want to have their say whatever they wanna do. And yeah, I think it's the death of that kind of corporately controlled platform potentially. I mean, we're not there yet. Musk doesn't own it yet. And that's why the blue sky and, and and planetary discussion is so interesting is, is is there an opportunity

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
For, It might be the time, right?

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:53):
<Laugh>? I put another story in the rundown, Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:15:56):
Well, before we do it, I just wanna mention real quickly, the Fifth District did this week in, I think in a, in good news, it's good news delay the enforcement of Texas's social media law. So now both Florida and Texas's questionable social media laws are on hold until, according to the fifth district, the Supreme Court weighs in on this either to, they haven't agreed to take it, but it either to not take it or to agree to take it. So

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:25):
It seems so prima fasha, I mean, I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but I think that's, everything I've read makes it sound like this is so blatantly unconstitutional. Except if the Supreme Court decides to carve out something that then makes, then it's constitutional <laugh> use the magic constitutional wand. But I don't think so, I don't think this falls inside the purview of the things that the, you know, conservative majority court wants to do. I don't think they're, they don't seem to be eager to make to restrict speech by commercial entities, even if it's, you know, anti-conservative speech or whatever might be alleged

Leo Laporte (00:17:02):
As somebody. Yeah. I think we pointed out last week Kanye's evil tweets had the Texas law been in effect, could have been Texas could have forced them Twitter not to deterred not to not to take them down. So, yeah. You know, it effectively bans moderation on large social networks.

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:18):
I mean, Jeff, I, I thought Jeff and Reese, what what you were saying is, I think you have the same people saying, don't say gay and saying, I wanna be able to say the

Leo Laporte (00:17:26):
Whatever I want

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:27):
Slur about gay people. Right. And I'm like, that is, those are, those are so obviously contradictory that they are fascist in nature. Right. There's no way to interpret that speech

Leo Laporte (00:17:38):
For the, and not speech for me and not for the Exactly.

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:40):
Yeah. Yeah. But they, they couch it in all this, you know, approach as if it is some kind of free speech maximalism. And then they're constantly Right. The cancel culture, everything else. They don't want people to say anything that is outside of what they think is okay to say.

Leo Laporte (00:17:54):
I mean, it's pretty clear to me at this point that after four years of Donald Trump, the lesson learned by some people was deny and lie. You could say anything you want, even if it's clearly not factual based. Just, just say whatever you want. Say what? And, and so any inconsistency in, in, in, in that, they just gloss over. And the people who believe in them and support them will, will go along with it. And the rest of us didn't like 'em much anyway, so Yeah. There you go. But

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:26):
The point is to irritate people, the point is to own the libs. The point is to be in directions.

Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
Well, I don't know what the point

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:31):
Doesn't matter. Think doesn't matter what you say.

Leo Laporte (00:18:33):
Ultimately, that's the real point, is to gain power. Yes. Not to irritate the libs, but,

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:39):
But the way you do it Well, but the way you do it, there

Leo Laporte (00:18:41):
Are, there's a group of people in the world for whom the goal is to irritate the libs and they will vote for you and

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:48):
You

Leo Laporte (00:18:48):
Exactly. Yeah. And they will vote for you. But I don't, I don't have, I am not at all sangu. When about Rh Ron DeSantis or no. Or any of these people, their, their intent is not to irritate the libs. They're just using that as a way to get elected. Their intent is to consolidate power.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:04):
Their, their intent is to destroy. What, There's another paradox here. Their intent is to destroy the institutions of democracy.

Leo Laporte (00:19:10):
Yeah. Because that's how,

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:11):
That's autocrats.

Leo Laporte (00:19:12):
Do they know? And they have said, they've said it, they've said the quiet part out loud, We can't win if we don't. Right. And so they know that they only have 30 or 40% of the a populous. And so they don't just as Hitler did not have a majority in why Mar Germany, they know that they have to win by other means. And they've used this social platform, not the social media platform, but the social platform of gay Mary onstage and abortion and all of these things to

Glenn Fleishman (00:19:36):
Where is your Hitler jar? You have to put $5 in

Leo Laporte (00:19:38):
Hitler jar. Oh, that one. That one is a full jar. There's

Glenn Fleishman (00:19:41):
No room that's bulging. No

Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
Room.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:43):
I think Godwin has has given a pass solution for

Leo Laporte (00:19:48):
God was given us a pass today.

Glenn Fleishman (00:19:50):
No, but it's, it's true. Right? Demo democracy, majoritarian governments are not democratic. Typically Democratic in nature. Yeah. Because the minority, if the minority can maintain, Well look in Italy

Leo Laporte (00:20:01):
The long term she only won 24% of the vote. But it was enough to make a parliament for her to, in a parliamentary democracy, to

Glenn Fleishman (00:20:10):
Look at England, England's about to have the fifth Prime Minister in how many years. And and she won. People keep saying, I, here's the thing I think you have to say about the uk, is they say that Liz Truss won the votes of 160,000 conservative party members and it's like far fewer than that voted. And she won a minority of those votes in the first round. So she didn't even get 160,000 votes. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
Yeah. Musk, according to the information, will have absolute control over Twitter. They have apparently seen the new purchase documents. These are the new ones. And he will have sole discretion to decide what to do with Twitter, whether to sale, sell it, to have an ipo who's on the board. He'll absolute. He will have quote, exclusive authority to appoint and remove members of the board. And all minority investors have to agree to vote for whoever he nominates according. This is the this is the

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:03):
Said like a true autocrat. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:06):
This is somebody pointed out yesterday is, this comes from Elon being ousted at PayPal back in the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wants comp, he needs that kind of control. He doesn't feel secure otherwise. This is the shareholders agreement prepared by Musk lawyers for equity investors. So he can do an ipo if he wants. I mean, he's gotta find some way to recoup his 44 billion.

Glenn Fleishman (00:21:32):
He's not gonna be able to finance this though still. Right. I mean, that's the, I was reading about some of the banks involved or dubious about whether they, you know, they'd like to pull out if they can find an excuse, they will. So you could have subsidiary lawsuits. He's, you know, what's the best way to destroy yourself, I guess, is to try to buy a social network because boy, have his fortunes changed despite the success of Tesla as a car company since he said he was gonna buy Twitter. Yeah. It just feels like he, he cursed himself.

Leo Laporte (00:22:01):
Is it does, is this some sort of indication that we are at end times for social networks? Cuz let's face it, MEA is not doing so great either.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:10):
No. Well, so, so there is a story I put in the rundown that I think is oddly relevant. Leo. It is. Oh. Not gonna give you the end number, don't I 63 a company formerly known as jarvis.ai, now called jasper.ai. Cause I'm gonna guess a certain movie company had a problem with using my name. And oh my. So they just got a big investment at a 1.5 billion. So if you go now, go back up again, if you would be so kind and go under I think it's features. Try that. I wanna, I wanna go to their product page. I, I tweeted the whole these product pages today, and it's just amazing. Or maybe start for free. Try that down below. There you go. No, sorry. Back. Sorry, I didn't prepare well enough to get you on the right. So, so they, what they're saying is we're gonna use your AI to create, Oh, here we go. These things. So we're gonna, That's it. That's it. So social media, we're gonna use, you're gonna use AI to create months of social media,

Leo Laporte (00:23:14):
Come up with dozen minutes, clever Instagram captions. Some, some may be quite funny, <laugh>, Right? Catchy videos already. By the way, you could see this on TikTok, I guess somewhat on YouTube. It's a little more opaque. But on TikTok, it's clear that a lot of the content is AI generated. A lot of the scripts are, there's a lot of accounts that are completely spammy accounts. Tiktok is suffering from this already. You can also with Jasper. So Jasper's an AI platform platform based is basically stuff. Actually G three is like G PT three. It'll

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:49):
Generate it's been around I think a little bit longer. I don't know. And it does art too. But if you go, if you go to the, the, the, the articles, one,

Leo Laporte (00:23:54):
It's only AI trained with direct response marketing frameworks. Oh, that's good news. Now

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:59):
Go to the

Leo Laporte (00:24:00):
Articles. It'll also write your WordPress articles. Stop

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:02):
Struggling with how to begin an article, a breakthrough your writer's block with ai, write SEO optimized blog posts 10 times faster with

Leo Laporte (00:24:10):
Jasper. This is very dystopian. It's a, it's a, isn't it, it's awful world filled with AI generated content.

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:16):
So

Glenn Fleishman (00:24:16):
That's why point, can I say that? I think

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:18):
Can't, what this leads to is not the death of social, it's the death of content.

Glenn Fleishman (00:24:23):
It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:23):
The death of the idea of content. So

Leo Laporte (00:24:27):
This is content was some, So this is

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:29):
Precious thing we had to make

Leo Laporte (00:24:30):
Because two weeks ago we talked about that article. You you brought up about the end of social and it's being replaced by content, by TikTok and YouTube videos. And now,

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:41):
Now how,

Leo Laporte (00:24:42):
How quickly that ended <laugh> two weeks, two weeks later. Where

Glenn Fleishman (00:24:46):
Can we, when can we get cut out of this? Like, I can't wait for AI to both produce and consume content. We don't need to be involved. We can be doing something much more useful with our

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:55):
Well, that's my AI will fight with your ai. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:57):
That's clearly the premise of Jasper ai. Don't waste your time creating content. Yeah. Or marketing tools or advertising. Just let a AI do it. And you go on to do what? Play golf attempt to buy. So

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:11):
Content becomes content and conversation become completely devalued.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:14):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:15):
Right. Because we, we hit a, we hit a, an endless abundance of it. We don't know the source. We don't have any rela real relationships. This is the dystopia. And then I think, I think that burns through all the old companies. And then I think a little blue sky from the ashes of the nuclear waste comes up with new conversations and new ways. People, Well,

Leo Laporte (00:25:36):
You're acting as if it's a human need to post 280 character

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:41):
<Laugh>, meaning

Leo Laporte (00:25:42):
It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:42):
A human need for me to meet Glenn Fleishman. Yes, it is <laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:46):
But here's my question about that though, is that I feel like we are in a golden age. Gosh, this is one. I wish Kevin was here because he's such an or blogger. You know, I, I think I was back there. Yeah, we're all back there kind of at the beginning. Right? But I feel like Kevin has had his finger on the pulse of this. So anyway, but he, but it's, it feels like we're in another golden age where people wanna read things long form journalism. Maybe it's hard to fund it, but people wanna read it. I mean, I find myself navigating, I use the news app on Apple's, Apple's news app, and it always directs me to really interesting super long articles that I'm shocked or still being written, and that are great people sub stack in the rise of newsletters.

(00:26:23):
Now, I know there are blips in that model, but people are writing thousands or tens of thousands of words a week and to new audiences to read them where they couldn't reach them before. The amount of, of good programming being produced, a video series and movies, like we're in a golden age of interesting stuff being made. Some of it quite original. It's not all derivative. We're seeing great adaptations, but also entirely new things. We're seeing voices heard that weren't before, even if they aren't being heard as much as they should. So, but you can cross that with like, well, let's just automate all social media. Maybe there's short stuff just needs to be stuff we don't pay any attention to anymore. Maybe that's the point.

Leo Laporte (00:27:03):
I'm not gonna miss Parler or truth social. I suppose there's a group of people who might there's still gab getter. There's plenty

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:11):
Of, That's who's buying gab, right?

Leo Laporte (00:27:12):
There's still plenty of right wing. You know that'll be Glenn Greenwold.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:17):
Well, well, no, Glenn Greenwald is doing, he's the fourth. He's doing, what is it, Rebel?

Leo Laporte (00:27:23):
I

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:24):
Himself with?

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:26):
Yeah. I don't think he's buying it, but he's yeah, they, they're, he's their star. They've, they've, they've kind of invested in him.

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:33):
He's, he's doing a story given all the harassment he got from Bolsonaro. He's now seems to be tasks. He supporting Bolsonaro, which is incredible.

Leo Laporte (00:27:42):
I don't yeah. Like Putin Green Wall is a study of something I don't really know.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:48):
He's gone over the edge and in the rabbit hole and out the other side and up, up in a manhole covenant cover in, in Moscow. He's just

Leo Laporte (00:27:54):
Wacky. Article well, let's see. Okay, so Parler truth, social Twitter meta is meta. Is meta in good shape? Is it gonna emerge from this as the as the, as the soul surviving social? They're,

Jeff Jarvis (00:28:16):
They're, they're abandoning

Leo Laporte (00:28:17):
Social. They're they're able to believe it. Yeah. They're doing it's not vr Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:28:22):
It's not growth for them anymore. Right. That's the Facebook thing is, is they haven't found, you know, they want the next big thing. And if social, even if it's a sustainable advertising, high profit advertising thing, they don't care. It's delightful though. I kind of wa love watching Zuckerberg Homer Simpson his own company. And you know, usually you have to bring in somebody from outside to ruin your company with elaborate ideas that don't work. He's doing it himself. You're, you all remember Bezos's Amazon fire phone and he learned a lesson from that. There's not been a fire phone since Bezos Simpson's that. Right? I mean, that was a incredible debacle. Incredibly embarrassing. And they learned, and Zuckerberg is, feels like he's been the company and on something, those articles coming out where they're having to practically force employees to use Horizon <laugh>, where I love the whole thing where not the God, that piece where it said there's no, there are no girls in hot girls summer room or whatever. There's no <laugh>. There's just, Oh my God. It just sounds like the worst party to what I think

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:27):
Over met. Nobody came. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:29):
It's the, it's the dash con ball pit. But that's all it is. One giant. One giant. The tiny Ball pit.

Leo Laporte (00:29:36):
All right, I wanna take a little break. We'll come back. We've got Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Jarvis. I could just sit back and relax. This show can be on, on autopilot. You guys are great. Wait till we get the fonts. Wait, wait til we just, I'm gonna go get a, I'm gonna go get some type, go get some type please. <Laugh> we'll take a little break, come back. Do we know is are we just gonna say Kevin isn't gonna make it or hasn't showed up? Rats. says Fall to Sleep. Jason, I, I presume you're reaching out. He, I wonder if he got the wrong day or time. He is in the UK and it may be too late at night. Yeah, our show today brought, maybe he's an exchange. I'm sorry. We'll go on. We'll just, we'll, we'll go on with the we'll do the Blue Sky story since it's ties in.

(00:30:19):
 Our show today, brought to you by IT Pro tv. These are some people I've known for some time. In fact, I think I'm pretty sure since before they even launched it Pro TV in 2013, I met the founders, Tim and Don at NA B. Some years earlier, we had a panel Adam was on, and I was on a bunch of creators on the internet talking about, you know, how the internet was providing this great platform for content. And Tim and Don, who at the time were IT trainers, a classroom traditional IT trainers looked at it and said, you know, it'd be interesting to do it training over the internet. And IT Pro TV was born, and I'll, I'll take a little credit that they kind of modeled it on what we do here at twit. They've gone well beyond anything we've ever done.

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And they love it because the IT pro TV trainers are, well, they call 'em Edge detainers. They are professionals in the field. So these are their peers talking to them. People, they look up to people who really know their business, the real experts. But they all have a spark. They all have a certain something. It's a, I think it's a passion for this subject matter. So your IT pros are gonna watch these videos and go, Yeah, these guys get it. These guys, I'm learning from them. And their enthusiasm is communicating. I'm excited about my job. Again, you're gonna, this is gonna really transform your IT team. They can get training for any area of it and even some soft skills. All the certifications. One place where you can go it. Pro TV has every vendor, every skill, Microsoft IT training, Cisco training, Linux, Apple Security Cloud.

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And so much more, more than 5,800 hours worth. Ranging from technical skills to compliance to soft skills. And the the business plan has a great dashboard. You can track everything that's going on, managed seats, assign and unassigned team members. You can even create subsets of your team and say, You guys learn this. You guys learn this. You'll get monthly usage reports. You'll get beautiful visual reports so that you can show the boss, you know, here's our roi. Look at these guys are really watching it. You'll get immediate insight into their viewing patterns, their progress. I think you're gonna love it Pro tv. And I know your IT professionals will, and I know anybody who loves it or wants to get an it, loves it pro tv. We've seen that over the years. Individual plans, business plans, go to IT pro.tv/toit right now.

(00:34:33):
Give your team the IT development platform. They need to level up their skills while enjoying the journey for teams of two to a thousand, they've got it for you. It pro.tv/twi, it pro.tv/twi. Thank you. It pro TV for all you do for us. I know we many of our viewers and listeners, are it pro TV graduates or attending right now? It pro and the rest of you are it pro tv future students? It pro TV slash twit? Hey, good news. Kevin Marks is here. Ye. We've we've got we've added Kevin to the lineup all the way from the UK where it is late in the evening. Hi, Kevin <laugh>.

Kevin Marks (00:35:16):
Hi there. No, sorry about that. I've been a bit sick the last two days, so I lost track of the,

Leo Laporte (00:35:20):
Oh, I'm so sorry. I hope you're feeling all right now. Keep be around.

Kevin Marks (00:35:23):
Well, I've got cough. Sweet. So I'll try and keep going and, and mute when I cough. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
I thought maybe you were the next Chancellor <laugh>.

Kevin Marks (00:35:31):
Well, that's the other thing is I've been watching the UK Parliament this evening and rolling my eyes and disbelief. So he, What's

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
Going on

Kevin Marks (00:35:39):
<Laugh>? The government is collapsing in three ways at once. Basically, it's a bit hard to tell exactly what's going on my, but they had a vote on fracking tonight that was called by labor. The government first said it was a confidence vote. Then when there is they're gonna lose. Said it wasn't a confidence poke then they were actually wrestling with each other in the voting line. And the two chief, we resigned and oh, oh my God, I don't actually know what's going on in the

Leo Laporte (00:36:06):
<Laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:07):
This cabinet secretary who yesterday's was raving about let's see if I can do it. Guardian reading tofu, idiot arians.

Leo Laporte (00:36:16):
Oh my god.

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:17):
Forced to resign over a security breach today.

Leo Laporte (00:36:21):
Oh my God. Yes. And, and it's, and all of this precipitated by a tax cut, which is something that here in the US would guarantee you. Four more years, it's tax cut for the very, very richest ah, that's the problem. And the markets is the, which is weird also in the markets. It's a combination of,

Kevin Marks (00:36:39):
It's a combination of a tax cut. And no, no plan for how you would pay for it. You know, no budget balancing, basically.

Leo Laporte (00:36:47):
That never stopped us. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (00:36:49):
<Laugh> not putting it past the OBR and firing this. She's also in charge of it. So basically is what it was, is what it meant was the markets were looking at this going, This doesn't add up. I don't understand what they're gonna do. We need to understand what's really going on. But clearly they're spending at the wrong end of the economic distribution. Because actually the big challenge here at the moment is, is the cost, the rise and the price of gas, like mee gas

Leo Laporte (00:37:15):
Inflation is worse. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (00:37:18):
And I, yeah. And that, and that's pushing up our inflation. But also it's explicitly pushing up household bills by a factor of four for, for electricity and gas, which is yikes for that as well.

Glenn Fleishman (00:37:30):
I have people on Twitter actually telling me when I'm like, they're some businesses that are, they're gonna see four to six fold increases in their electrical costs, for

Leo Laporte (00:37:37):
Instance. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:37:38):
They're like, No, no, no. You're making that up. There must be. It's just the mar. It's like, no, here. These are sources. This is literally, people are posting the bills. They're watching like bakeries. But that's not 5,000 pounds. Well, no,

Leo Laporte (00:37:49):
It's not. Trust is fault. That's the war in Ukraine's fault. That's Russia's fault. Well, Morriss Johnson and Brexit,

Kevin Marks (00:37:57):
It's also like only investing in gas for the last 20 years, rather than looking at other energy supplies. And blocking on shore wind and blocking installation of housing and blocking nuclear for 20 years. You know, there's, there's like, there's, there's, there's a great deal of sort of built up stuff. Yeah, we are, we've cut down on coal. We've basically replaced it with, with, with natural gas. And also they closed the natural gas storage facility two years ago. So we can't actually store

Leo Laporte (00:38:23):
<Laugh>. It's like,

Kevin Marks (00:38:24):
It's like great cascade failure of government. So they, they're trying what, so what they, what they need to do and what the first thing they'd said they were gonna do, which is so much to their credit, there was, you know, we were waiting for the, the Johnson debacle and the, the election, the internal election finish was that they said, Okay, we are gonna work out how to fund your, fund your bills and we'll we'll pay you, you know, we'll pay you so that you don't have to pay all these bills yourselves. But then they also refused to do a winful tax on the gas camp who was getting all the windfall product profits from this. And so basically the budget didn't add up at all. The markets were looking at going, This is only work if they're gonna cut something else. Tim said, Well, that's gonna be and then it just got more and more chaotic. And eventually they were like so you should do a was full stuff. You

Leo Laporte (00:39:11):
Should just be stuck with whoever you got for four years and just, you're stuck.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:15):
You're

Leo Laporte (00:39:16):
Just stuck. They

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:17):
Start, Well that gets all outta think, Where's general election? It's 2024. 2025. Gather the next

Kevin Marks (00:39:25):
It has to happen by, Yeah. I think January, 2025. But the Prime Minister can call one before that if, if they decide to, or the parliament can call one by voting. No competence in the prime Minister.

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
I'm, That's what I'm surprised. It has not happened.

Kevin Marks (00:39:43):
Surface 10 of the majority of 70 or so. So it will take a lot of them to defect. All I see quit or commit suicide for that actually happen.

Leo Laporte (00:39:52):
They're

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:52):
30% behind in the polls. So they probably don't wanna do it now.

Leo Laporte (00:39:55):
Right. If

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:56):
Facebook were a country, it would be England

Leo Laporte (00:39:59):
<Laugh>. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:59):
That's mean. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:40:01):
That's

Kevin Marks (00:40:02):
A bit harsh.

Leo Laporte (00:40:02):
We saved a story.

Kevin Marks (00:40:04):
You do have our wrong deputy prime minister running Facebook's. That's

Leo Laporte (00:40:07):
Right. In plague. That's true. That's right. That's right. So maybe there is something to that. We saved a story just for you, Kevin, Mark. Cause I really wanted to get your comment on it. As you know Jack Dorsey before leaving Twitter established and funded something called Blue Sky Social, which is an attempt to create a federated Twitter. The next Twitter in effect, it is now kind of going public. In fact, I'm here on the launch page, which is B S K y.app, See what's next. Blue sky social's blue

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:43):
Page. And then there's also the API

Leo Laporte (00:40:44):
Page. So yeah, there's a new api, which is called at I think the, AT protocol. If you go to Blue Sky web X dot XY app Pro Protocol. Yeah. Is that what they call it? The at Oh, that makes sense. At

Kevin Marks (00:40:57):
Yeah, it's, it's actually really bad because if you search for at, you get mod commands and things <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
Yeah. It was adx

Kevin Marks (00:41:04):
STO

Leo Laporte (00:41:04):
Thinking it was called the authenticated transfer protocol or adx. But they, I guess cuz the at sign on Twitter, they thought it'd be clever to call it the app protocol. So I'm curious because we know you're the open web advocate Mr. Indie Webb and Open Standards and all that. When, what is your initial, Well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:25):
Can you go down, can you go down the, for the audience, can you go down there? There's a list of four principles to it. Yes. On that poster, it might be useful to have that as

Leo Laporte (00:41:32):
A background. Yeah. Account affordability. A person's online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability or users, AKA Twitter. With the AT protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph. That's great. And by the way, that's right now what Macedon offers and I guess that's the, we'll talk to Randall's next week about his, his proposed setup plan

Kevin Marks (00:42:01):
Probably move things in inside. Yeah. But it's one of the things he hasn't quite solved yet, at least maybe has since I last looked at it. But one of the problems that his thing has is it's very tired to the device. So Right. He changed phones, you tend to lose it.

Leo Laporte (00:42:13):
Right. the second point is algorithmic choice algorithms dictate what we see hook we can reach, We must have control over the algorithms if we're gonna trust in our online spaces. The AT protocol includes an open algorithms mold, so mode, so users have more control over their experience. And

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:28):
What this says to me, just tell me wrong, I here at this moment is that you could also have a choice among algorithms.

Leo Laporte (00:42:33):
Yeah. Well, we'll see. Right. Inter operation, the world needs a diverse market of connected services, et cetera, et cetera. The at protocol includes a schema based inter operation framework called Lexicon to help solve coordination challenges. I guess that's, that, that's toward federating or is it something like Federating, I guess. And then finally the fourth tent pole performance. A lot of novel protocols throw performance out of the window. I think it's something the folks at Twitter learned is you can't do that. <Laugh> fail. Well fail Well in long loading times before you can see your timeline. We don't see performances optional. So we've made it a priority to build for fast loading at large scales. I mean, it makes sense. This is a team that has, you know, that has real world battlefield experience with Twitter. So it makes

Kevin Marks (00:43:22):
Sense. Well, to some extent. I think a lot of them are third parties, but they've got Paul Frazzy there who has, who built the Beka browser on the DAP protocol. So he's sort of got the experience of building alternate protocols and things. So that's, that's sensible. And from what I've, what I've read of it so far it's it's more sensible than the, than the first draft, which is, which is good. But there's sort of edging towards the Indy web principle of domains are identifiers. But kind of pretending that they've, that they're not by using, wrapping them in dds. That, that's my sort of high level thing. So the thing, the thing about account portability is we have account portability. It's called domain names. You can buy a domain name for a fixed period of time. You can argue, you can rent a domain name, but you know, you, you've put money down, you've buy a domain name, you've, I've got kevin marks.com, you've got tweet tv, whatever.

(00:44:17):
 You can pay that down for, for five years or 10 years or whatever. You can move where that is hosted automatically. You can move the registrar for that automatically. You know, that's, we've, that's, that was inish that was a problem 25 years ago. That's kind of solved now at that level of, of portability that exists. So given that you've got that and you've got addressability via URLs, a lot of the other stuff of this is sort of somewhat redundant and it sort of feels like that as well. Cuz their protocol, the transport protocol is basically a wrap around htd s which is fine. That's a good idea. But so, but they're just wrapping it in, in some, some extra complication so they can move their own protocol on top of it.

Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
So

Kevin Marks (00:45:00):
In, in my point of view is like, yeah, so we use https and we'll use HTML as the, as the transport protocol and we'll, we'll define some ways of marking up the html so we can do that. And then we have a few API hooks for saying this is a reply, this is a follow and so on. They've got some, the interesting bits in the app pro tube stuff was they were talking about interesting distinctions that I haven't seen made before. If I can find where, where it is. Is it developer's page?

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
There is slash

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:33):
Docs. Slash docs

Leo Laporte (00:45:35):
Slash docs.

Kevin Marks (00:45:36):
Yeah, there we go. So it's, it's, so it's, it's sort of taken the ID provision stuff, the global IDs, and then you get and look at them, they're actually URLs. And then they've got keys to map the URLs, which is kind of unnecessary. My experience the way you get human readable names is by using actual domain names. The did the did ones look like hell and aren't human readable.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:05):
So are you saying Kevin, that every user would have a domain name as their id?

Kevin Marks (00:46:10):
That's what it looks like.

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
So that, so that's one of the problems to solve it and it's key to the first two principles is you have to have a unique name that's

Kevin Marks (00:46:24):
Well you can have a SubD domain. So again, you can have a SubD domain, like you can have a SubD domain on Tumblr report.

Leo Laporte (00:46:29):
So I'm at LEO LaPorte on twitter.com. That is, but

Kevin Marks (00:46:33):
You don't get, that's a SubD domain. You get that twitter.com/le laport, whereas if you're on Tumblr, your laport do tumblr.com Right. Which is a SubD domain, which works as a separate routing entity. And, but you could

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:43):
Also la port.com, which would be

Kevin Marks (00:46:46):
The We need a port. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:47):
That would be the true universal.

Leo Laporte (00:46:51):
So would everybody, I mean, it seems to me that that's not how most people think of their social. They think of going to a company and that's the root domain and then having their user ID at that route domain. Well, even if it's leo.tumblr.blog or.net

Kevin Marks (00:47:06):
As Yeah, but that's, you know, that's fine. I mean, you can, you can debate that. And I've been arguing with Blaine about this for at least 15 years. And his, his mythical grandmother who doesn't like URLs, but actually when we were blogging, we understood URLs fairly quickly and knew how a link to each other and could work it out. And

Leo Laporte (00:47:23):
Could every human in the world have their own domain? Would that be advisable?

Kevin Marks (00:47:29):
Yes. Okay. Or they could have sub they can have sub domains. People can, people can give you sub

Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
Yeah, we have, we could have the LA Port family and then

Kevin Marks (00:47:36):
You could be Yeah. Or you could have, you could, you could, you could create TWiG club.com Right. Or TWiG.club and, and give giveaway or sell SubD domains. Well, we

Leo Laporte (00:47:44):
Do's with MA on, we have twi.social and I'm does social at Leo, I guess. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:51):
So, so, but a URL becomes a U P L Universal people locator. Right. It becomes something that can then operate across any domain, which

Leo Laporte (00:47:59):
Is the key is this has to be portable. So it can't be tied to Twitter. It's portable. Yeah. It can't be tied to Twitter because then I wouldn't be able to leave Twitter. It has to be somehow portable.

Kevin Marks (00:48:08):
Yeah. So, so the, the portability comes in where, this is why you register your own domain and then you can change the CNA and, and move it to somewhere else. So I can register kevin marks.com and that used to point at my friend server. And

Leo Laporte (00:48:20):
So this is an analogous

Kevin Marks (00:48:22):
Email right now. It points to,

Leo Laporte (00:48:24):
It's an analogous to email. A lot of people have yahoo.com or gmail.com. But I've long recommended you go out and get a domain name. So I'm leo@leoville.com. And then I can use a MX

Kevin Marks (00:48:37):
By Google for my old ones. Are those

Leo Laporte (00:48:38):
Yeah. So I can point that anywhere I want and or even host my own email, which nobody does anymore because

Kevin Marks (00:48:44):
Yeah. That's for different reasons, but yes.

Leo Laporte (00:48:46):
Another reason it's higher

Kevin Marks (00:48:47):
Deliverability. Yeah. Deakin. But, but yeah. And you know, the point is, we actually know how to, we know we, we, we know how to do portable names on the internet. They're called domain names. They're solved at more than one layer. Anything that's, any serious hosting provider like Tumblr or Micro Blog or Blogger will have a way for you to route to a your own domain name if

Leo Laporte (00:49:11):
You want. Yeah. I have tumbl tumble leo.com leads to my tumbl Leo Tumblr.

Kevin Marks (00:49:17):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:49:17):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:18):
That's not universal. The content on there can be exported, but I think what's really interesting here is that, that there's a universal idea. There's a global id. It's a, it's a new name space in that sense. It may be built on domains, but if everybody felt they had to have their own it's like having a street address. You have a unique address.

Kevin Marks (00:49:39):
Well, I mean, you know, making name spaces has been a good business model for companies for a while. You know, Twitter does quite well out of its name spaces. And if you've got a, if you've got a nice short Instagram name, you know that everyone is trying to steal it from you. And so you could do that, but you, but, and also domain names the sales are, are saleable. You can, you can buy and sell domain names and register ones and, and if you've registered one you

Jeff Jarvis (00:50:05):
Control means you can do that too. Yeah. If you control that, you can sell them. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (00:50:09):
Yeah. So, so there's, you know, it, it's, you know, there's a lot, a lot of these, these distributed things keep trying to reinvent things that don't need reinventing cuz actually domain names are distributed that they're, or rather they're fungible in a good sense. You can they're substitutable. You can swap out your domain name provider. You can swap out your DNS resolver. You can swap out your hosting. And all three layers are straightforward to swap a wall because we've had the, the fights and the lawsuits and the dispute resolution procedures. And we've got, I can dispute resolution about who gets to own a name and we've got DNS hierarchy and who gets to create DNS things. And we've got different hosting providers. You can point things out and the ones that have been sort of scammy and locked people in have, have mostly been dumped in favor of ones that aren't. There's a certain amount of sort of upsell this to it, but broadly that, that's true. Now.

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:04):
So Kevin, I'd like to have your kinda high level on this. Do you have hope for Blue Sky that it's going to develop into something useful and, and interoperable with what you are working on or not, and why not?

Kevin Marks (00:51:15):
If that's the case I'd like to get into interrupt with us, but they, they're always a bit none not invented here about things. But I, I would, you know, Yes, I'd like to get them to do that. There was a, I'm trying to find the bit that I thought was interesting in this, which

Glenn Fleishman (00:51:34):
I, I have to say, I'm confused about the whole algorithmic choice aspect of this. The, the feels like there's a right wing focus. I mean, not to, I don't know, not to belittle this from a computer science standpoint or something like that, but there seems to be a right wing focus on the algorithm as a tool of anti-free speech that's enforced on existing social networks. And I don't understand what algorithm choice means in this context.

Leo Laporte (00:52:00):
It's, you're missing the left wing point of view on this. You

Glenn Fleishman (00:52:03):
Get to Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:04):
The left wing point of view on this is the algorithms lead you down in extremist path.

Glenn Fleishman (00:52:09):
Ah,

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
Okay. There's a, there's a story effect this week about how in invariably YouTube's algorithm will choose extremist content because it turns out to be more engaging. So that's, so that's the other side of the bad bad.

Kevin Marks (00:52:26):
And, and also, who do we use, which is obnoxious content? Because that is more engaging. Yeah. And so the, since they,

Leo Laporte (00:52:32):
So it'd be nice to have plug and play algorithms. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (00:52:35):
I see. I could say it be a popup menu that says fascism spam, actual good people.

Leo Laporte (00:52:41):
Yeah. That's part of the problem is, well, how's that gonna work? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:47):
Well, well, Pere I think it is, has argued for a long time. He argued to Facebook. I saw him do it at, pardon me, Davo, where he said, Let's somebody create their own dial. Well, you nothing but, but crap. Go ahead. That's your choice.

Leo Laporte (00:53:02):
Twitter list. I mean, your covid list for instance, is an algorithm algorithmic sort of, No.

Kevin Marks (00:53:08):
So, so Twitter has, has a bunch of options in it that it says sort of confusing number of them. Now I'm, I'm getting, I'm kinda lost to that left sidebar. Cause it's got lists. It's got the home versus chronological toggle. It's now got communities, wherever they're called, they're gone. Again, custom

Leo Laporte (00:53:26):
Time. I don't have communities. I have

Kevin Marks (00:53:28):
Keep more, I think they're in there

Leo Laporte (00:53:30):
Under more. It's more Now that's, that's when you know you got problem when you have a lot with

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:34):
Baffling communities.

Kevin Marks (00:53:35):
Yeah. So they've got communities

Leo Laporte (00:53:37):
Topics,

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:38):
Right. You can set up,

Leo Laporte (00:53:39):
Oh, there's a lot of

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:40):
Topics. And then they get tagged by weird things like topics. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (00:53:43):
It's okay. Is part of lists.

Leo Laporte (00:53:45):
Yeah, I did, you know, at first it, it, it, it revealed this by saying, Give us some topics you're interested in. And so I am following quite a few. It turns out I didn't realize about about 18 topics. I part

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:57):
The

Leo Laporte (00:53:58):
Useless. Yeah. But I don't even know what that means. Does that mean that, So those are gonna be new accounts that I normally

Kevin Marks (00:54:03):
That feeds into your home feed. If you look at the home feed. Okay. You sometimes say because you follow topic ads.

Leo Laporte (00:54:08):
Yeah.

Kevin Marks (00:54:08):
Okay. And then you've got lists, which is sub list of people in Twitter. You've also got Circle Now, which I don't actually understand at all cause I'm trying, I've got bored at that point. But list lists are kind of useful. Lists are, here's a subset of accounts. What have they been talking about recently? Yeah. I've

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:25):
Chosen them explicitly. And all I get is them in, in reverse cro. So that's, that's that, that's the, that's the,

Kevin Marks (00:54:35):
And in, in the mobile version, you can sort of swipe between this at the top.

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
And at one point, many years ago, I created a bunch of lists of my own <laugh>. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:43):
Know. And I, I've, I've my

Leo Laporte (00:54:44):
Minor.

Kevin Marks (00:54:45):
Have I looked them ever? No. No.

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
<Laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:54:48):
No. I've totally forgotten about

Leo Laporte (00:54:49):
Lists. Yeah. Yeah. So lists. Unless I click on a list, I'm not, that doesn't change my home feed. But Topics does,

Kevin Marks (00:54:59):
Does well, Topics only, only inference it slightly because it just makes them more like to show up.

Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
Okay. And communities

Kevin Marks (00:55:06):
It's sort of weird subsets that you can pose to, and that there's only seen by those communities. Oh. but they show up in your home feed or they show up in Community feed. It's kinda like dual class. A

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:16):
Bit weird. Yeah. I don't even understand it. And I tried it. It's just this is part of their Yeah. I mean, not, you know, not that I'd want Elon Musk to own it, but it is kind of a, It feels like there's a lot of spaghetti on a lot of

Leo Laporte (00:55:27):
Walls. Yeah. <laugh>.

Kevin Marks (00:55:29):
I mean, you know, they've been trying to solve this problem for a long time. You know, where is the

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:32):
Sauce?

Leo Laporte (00:55:33):
So topics is a little bit Reddit is what it is, because you have to, it asks to join and, you know, it's, it's a little bit of a Reddit kind of. Well

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:41):
Then there's also the thing now where I can also have a small group of people. Twitter, circle

Leo Laporte (00:55:45):
Your circle for the circle. Oh, let me add you to my circle. It's,

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:49):
It's this, this guy named Jeff Jarvis for mine. I don't know why.

Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
Who's recommended? My wife. Some people I worked with at Tech tv, Aunt Pruit Dick. So I'm just gonna add these people to my circle. Now what do I, Now you

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:03):
Can, you can tweet just to them.

Leo Laporte (00:56:05):
Oh, oh,

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:07):
Oh. A lot. So

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:09):
Now try to tweet. Now try to tweet and see if it,

Leo Laporte (00:56:11):
If it, I can choose, choose, choose when I tweet, not say. And now my tweet is gray out <laugh>. Yeah. It doesn't work in both. Oh, there it is. There it is. Everyone Twitter circle. There's only one circle. And then I'm in. Do other people, a community, Do

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:26):
Other people see it? When you put, This is so funny. Do other people see it when you peak to your Twitter circle? Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:56:33):
Only your Twitter circle can reply.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:34):
You're told that only and select people have seen it. I'm in

Kevin Marks (00:56:39):
Circles.

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:40):
So you can be on a, you can have a public click on Twitter now.

Leo Laporte (00:56:44):
So this isn't exactly choosing an algorithm, but it's, it's Twitter's version of it. Cuz Twitter is all based on who you follow. So it makes sense. This is kinda more, But

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:53):
Leo, the real point of Blue Sky, I think is I could hire someone to create an algorithm for me. I could hire someone to create the best science and curate that and find the best people and eliminate junk science. And, and, you know, I can hire the Neil Degrass Tyson version of Blue Sky,

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:12):
But then push that out as a product. Can I push that out as a Exactly. Product. Can I create, can I keep Jarvis, strangely enough, a Jarvis site? No, no. That name's been taken. And as that would be all the, you know, an excellent curated thing that comes from all blue sky posts, but running through the Jarvis algorithm.

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:29):
Right. And maybe, maybe it also eliminates certain topics. It doesn't allow vea it it reprioritizes things. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it adds people or, or, or does things. That's the, that's the promise. I said this on Twitter to Jack and he said, Yeah, that's the idea. It's, it's very WordPress. Like, there's a, there's a, there's an open source layer of code, and then there's, companies can be built upon top of it. And as Matt said to us a few weeks ago, wordpress.com is, is, you know, does not dominate the use of WordPress.

Leo Laporte (00:58:06):
Can I channel our audience at this point? This is all too damn complicated. Nobody wants this. The reason Twitter existed in the first place was it was damn simple

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:17):
Cuz But you're gonna create the TWI thing that's gonna be really easy to use. And that becomes an opportunity for you in business because you simplify it. Yes. It's complicated. And you, Leo will come on and you will create a

Leo Laporte (00:58:28):
Beautiful, All right, so let's say I created some beautiful simple thing.

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:32):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Kevin Marks (00:58:34):
So don't,

Leo Laporte (00:58:34):
And now, now it

Kevin Marks (00:58:36):
Let's me use with

Leo Laporte (00:58:37):
A circle. Sorry.

Kevin Marks (00:58:40):
Oh, does it change? How's the circle work now?

Leo Laporte (00:58:42):
Now you circles, now you tweet and you can choose a who get that tweet. I see. Everyone circle. Or, So if I create something that is simple, because I know, frankly that people don't want anything this complex. I Right. I'll be, I'll be the, you know, the

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:56):
Leo's best stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:58:58):
And then what, where is it hosted?

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:02):
It's, it's, it's, it's federated.

Leo Laporte (00:59:04):
So I have to host it. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:07):
There, there's a

Leo Laporte (00:59:08):
Host or I could go to Micro do blog or somewhere. Yeah, exactly. And they can host it. Okay. Right. And then it's in it, The advantage is somebody can move out or they

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:18):
Exactly. They can take with them their own content that they posted there and their social graph both.

Leo Laporte (00:59:22):
So I see. And they can move. Exactly why Kevin Marks, you said this, this is just the internet. This is called the Worldwide Web. Yeah. This is websites and maybe web mentions. You know, Yeah.

Kevin Marks (00:59:33):
So, so this is the point, you know, basically, which

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:35):
Is good, we return to the web.

Leo Laporte (00:59:37):
Yeah. But we already have this.

Kevin Marks (00:59:39):
Well we have, we have this, we kind of have this with

Leo Laporte (00:59:41):
Nobody's using it, by the way.

Kevin Marks (00:59:42):
But the challenge is getting people to use it. Yeah. And the, and so, so I'm happy to go and talk to the Blue sky people or the app pro people, whatever they're call this week and say, Yeah, I agree with a big bunch of what you're saying. Can you make it map? Can you make your web, web based version of this match our web based version of this? And then we can interoperate. And that's great. You know, like I went to tum, I said, Can we put before my son time? And they said, Yeah, sure. And now they have him

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:04):
World peace right here. We can see it before our eyes.

Leo Laporte (01:00:07):
But I don't see any massive adoption of any of this.

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:12):
Well, cuz it's Leo, you're killing it. Before, before it's even the zygote is even impregnated here. Geez, man.

Leo Laporte (01:00:18):
Yeah. But, but, but I mean, honestly, let's just be honest with ourselves. If we take a look at it, Well, I mean, nobody's gonna

Kevin Marks (01:00:24):
Do this. Well, you could probably get to mass and scale without too much.

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:27):
Well you're, but this is isn't the point of this protocol. But

Kevin Marks (01:00:29):
Then you think the same issue as that MAs has

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:31):
Ja Jack wants Twitter. I mean, Jack's goal is that Twitter would adopt Blue Sky. Right. So that's would get you your massive,

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
It would just be one of one a blue sky based or an app protocol based.

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:43):
I mean, conceivably, I don't know if he'll have the motive, have the ability to do it. But if Elon actually does

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
Complete Elon's not good. This

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:49):
No, I thought he wanted this independent. It is, but

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:53):
He's, he screwed up. Touched it.

Leo Laporte (01:00:56):
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:56):
Cause Jack wants it.

Leo Laporte (01:00:57):
There's, that's

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:59):
Why Jack's sucking up to Elon. I think there's

Leo Laporte (01:01:01):
Your mvp. Gone. Who's next? <Laugh> gonna do this is what, what

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:09):
What Twitter has to do is open up to it. Yes. Right. And Jack is gonna say to Elon, This is the path. And this is how you also get out of trouble. Elon, somebody posted something. They didn't post it on Twitter. They posted on Right. A leoville. And who cares? And the government can't come up to you and you can't take it down. And that's your free speech world. You want Elon, follow me, Follow the light. Elon follow the light, says Jack

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
And Will Elon do it? No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:34):
I don't know. He might.

Glenn Fleishman (01:01:35):
That smells very block chainy. I know there's no blockchain element to it. I, or at least in this implementation. But that idea of like, but it, but it is, this is the why you have layers and protocols is it lets you wash your hands of the problems at other layers. And then we've seen what happens to Cloud flare. When Cloud Flare tries to say, we are not at a layer of responsibility for the content. Period.

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:54):
This is an uncontrollable world. Right. That's, that's why see the conservatives are like it cause it's uncontrollable by the libs. The libs should like it cause it's uncontrollable by government.

Leo Laporte (01:02:04):
Kevin, what, what is your best

Kevin Marks (01:02:06):
Is

Leo Laporte (01:02:07):
That of, of the chances of success?

Kevin Marks (01:02:12):
You know, it's, it's like any of these things. It's like, you know, Mac Don has done reasonably well. It's ticking over. It's not, it's not grown to the same size as any of the others as Twitter or Tumbl to say. But it's got a reasonably stable set of people using it. And it's shown up some of the issues that have come in when you have multiple <inaudible> servers and things like that. So that's a, that's a good model to look at. And you know, it was two or three years ago we were chatting about that here. Was it? Maybe it's four years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:02:37):
Yeah. I still run a Macon instance. I can't say it's particularly active. In fact Macon technology just shut down. 

Kevin Marks (01:02:46):
And yeah, I saw that.

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
Yeah. So I ma

Kevin Marks (01:02:49):
Is taking over working now.

Leo Laporte (01:02:51):
It's kind idling, <laugh>. I mean, I love Mastodon, but you know, it's got the network problem. It's all of these have the same network problem, which is, until your friends use it, you're not gonna use it. I'm sure it's working well for some people whose friends are all using it. It's very, And that's,

Kevin Marks (01:03:10):
That's like any of these things. I mean, you know, and for some extent I approve of that. That was what I liked.

Leo Laporte (01:03:15):
That's a real social network. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (01:03:17):
15 years ago when had a whole bunch of social networks that people chose because they're friends of there rather than just

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:23):
Blogs. Blogs. They were wonderful things.

Leo Laporte (01:03:27):
Yeah. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:28):
We, and we made connections and we wrote about each other and we connected. It was a beautiful thing.

Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
Let me take a little break. Come back. We will do more. Kevin, take a get a cough sweetie. <Laugh>. It's

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:39):
What's the brand? What's the brand? What's the very English brand you use for coughs at cough drops? Kevin? It's gotta

Kevin Marks (01:03:45):
Be something Lockets

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
Lock. Its cough's Tws for when you cat Brave <laugh> get a locket. Alright, I'm looking 'em up. Here we go

Kevin Marks (01:03:58):
On Fisherman's Friends. But I don't actually have any of those

Leo Laporte (01:04:00):
Social bunch. French is, Oh, I love Fisherman's Friends. Gorton of Lobster. God Lockets Honey and Lemon times 10.

Kevin Marks (01:04:07):
Those are the ones. Set 'em down to one now. So I'm gonna try and get 20

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:11):
Bucks

Leo Laporte (01:04:12):
Last Locke. Well that's in the us Of course you're outside

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:14):
Lot cheap. That's for Brit. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:16):
Yeah. Look, you can get all three if you want. Beekeepers Naturals, Traditional Medicinals and Lockets Honey and Lemon for the Anglophile in the all our show today. Brought to you by H P e Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake, orchestrated by the experts at cdw. The helpful people at C D W. Understand your organization needs simple management over its big data. Right. But with some needing to keep their workloads on prem for organizational requirements, it can be challenging to organize and optimize your data. And that's where C D W can help your organization. By consolidating and managing all your data in one flexible, unified experience with the HPE GreenLake Edge to Cloud platform, The experience you'll get with HPE GreenLake is unique because no matter where your data or applications live, you can free up energy and resources with automated processes and streamlined management. And we could all use a little more streamlining in our life.

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Am I right? Not only that, HPE GreenLake creates a seamless cloud experience among multiple data environments, thanks to the AVI as a service model that meets your remote workforce at the edge. And with unrivaled scalability, you'll see an instant increase in capacity, allowing for greater flexibility and accelerated business growth so your team can tackle bigger priorities like innovation when you need to get more out of your technology. H p E makes data transformation possible. C d W makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/hpe cdw.com/h p e. And we thank 'em so much for their support of this week in Google. Yeah. I mean you know, so Blue Sky's moving forward. Great. I don't know. I don't even understand. I don't feel like this is something that's, that you're gonna just get a bandwagon effect and everybody's gonna go all crazy for it. You know, look at all the things. Twitter's already doing that. No, none of us really even know about <laugh>.

Kevin Marks (01:06:32):
Right. One other thing, we've, we've also got the the weird Mac forks, like Parlay and or the other one was

Leo Laporte (01:06:42):
GAB is a masteron, isn't it Gab? Yeah.

Kevin Marks (01:06:44):
Also Ma Fork. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:06:46):
Truth social was a Mac Fork I believe. I don't know how that resolved. Yeah, well there was open code you use at some point. Yeah. It looks just like Twitter, so why not? Yeah, I use yeah, there's an Instagram clone called Pixel Fed that's also maed on. And what's nice is it's it's federated. So, you know, you can follow let me log in here Bonita before you show it so I can show what it looks like. It looks just like in Oh, my credentials don't match. What does that mean? <Laugh>? Oh, I, here we go. I was using the wrong login. There we go. So this, I can follow this on a ma on incidents instance. No, I guess I'm gonna have to, I guess I have to reset my password. Maybe something's happened to to this cuz I can't log in. But it looks nice. I mean maybe I can just, can I, No, I can't really, But it doesn't look at all like, Ma on here, here we go. Here's a sample. It doesn't look at all like, ma it looks a lot more like Instagram. You've got comments, you've got likes, you've got suggestions. But it is Mastodon. So I, you know, so that's kind of cool, right? It's all in the fed averse.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:58):
Yeah. And imagine if you had a universal identity, Mrs. Kevin's vision all along, Right. Across the platforms. And you publish once to many places and maybe, maybe the beginnings and, and, and the, the roots are there and what Kevin has done and Ma done, has done. And if Twitter can come, come along, don't give up yet, Boss, don't give up. Have a little hope. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (01:08:19):
Yeah. Interoperability is a slow process. Cause you've gotta get people to believe in it and then implement it. And also you've gotta make it easier for them to do it, which is part of the iteration of this. Right. And that's something we learned. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:29):
What's the definition of critical mass too, is critical mass. Everybody, I don't think we want that necessarily anymore. Critical masses, the people that you care are there. You know, we'll see.

Kevin Marks (01:08:40):
Well that's, that's the thing we're seeing is that people are less comfortable with pub publishing stuff publicly. They're doing more stuff in in friend groups. Yeah, exactly. Chat, chat groups and things now. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:08:50):
I feel like Discord, for example, has already solved this pretty much solve this problem and just, we don't, because it's not visible. You know, the only people who see what's going on are the people in those groups. You know, we're not even, we're not even aware of it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:05):
You know, Discord is messy

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:08):
To a Twitter user. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. It's not to a Slack user. Slack not, But to a Twitter user

Leo Laporte (01:09:15):
Or to a Facebook user, I think it's a good alternative. Right?

Kevin Marks (01:09:19):
Yeah. It's less, it's less mixed than Facebook.

Leo Laporte (01:09:21):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:22):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:25):
Alright.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:25):
But it doesn't matter. The AI's gonna speak for us. It'll be fine.

Kevin Marks (01:09:29):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:09:32):
Let's move on then. I guess. I, I mean we'll continue to follow this for sure. We will be talking more about it with Rebel next week. Rabbel is the creator of Planetary and has its own, what is it called? What's the Protocol? Rumble? I can't remember. Yeah,

Kevin Marks (01:09:47):
No. Something like that. Oh God no. I can't remember either.

Leo Laporte (01:09:51):
<Laugh>

Kevin Marks (01:09:55):
Rabble Gossip based protocol. Damn it,

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
It's like, it's gossip based.

Glenn Fleishman (01:09:59):
Is it Ro Rob Rubble? Is it a McDonald's based protocol? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:10:02):
I ble. Looking at the website here, planetary.social. So even, even this is really being sold more as a, as a, something looks just like Twitter, right? But has advantages over Twitter. Scuttle butts. There it is.

Kevin Marks (01:10:20):
Scuttle Butts. That's what it's called. Yeah. Scuttle Butt.

Leo Laporte (01:10:22):
How

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:22):
Could you forget

Leo Laporte (01:10:23):
Scuttle Butts? It's a great name.

Glenn Fleishman (01:10:25):
Oh, Gossip was the wasn't that the Google protocol? Long ago? Google Chat. Maybe something like that. Maybe

Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
There was

Kevin Marks (01:10:32):
Like, gossip is a generic term for that kind of protocol where you, you share stuff side to side. It's a bit sort of using it, like where you've got a bunch of servers that share a bit species to each other. Ah. and it gathers stuff that way.

Leo Laporte (01:10:42):
What happened to Xmpp? Would that have been a good choice? Did we throw out some something good? Like Google tried to throw out rss.

Kevin Marks (01:10:53):
So XMPP was, was reasonably good at iop, but it was, it was a bit annoying to, to scale. There was this certain amount of friction about the extensibility. Basically it was one of these XML protocols that got a bit verbose. But it was, it was, but it was, it was useful Basically. It was useful for IOP until everyone decided they didn't want to interrupt anymore. That was was the thing. It's like a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:11:13):
Oh yeah. Very wanted silos. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (01:11:16):
Yeah. Cause Google was using it. Facebook was using it. AIM was using, Microsoft was using it. And then they all decided, you know, alongside their own protocols, they all decided actually, we don't wanna do this anymore. We wanna have our own priority ones. We can make it much more, you know, much, much more the same shape as our internal APIs and do it that way. I mean, when it, it stopped Inate, which is a shame. And they, which you know, is my same experience with open social, which is like, Yeah, we can make every I operate. It's like, Yeah, that's great. No, we don't want to do that anymore. Yeah. Huh. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:11:48):
I, I, yeah. I, I stand by what we said earlier. You weren't here yet, Kevin, when we said that social is dead. It's being replaced by content. Oh, content is dead. <Laugh>. It's being replaced by ai. It's being replaced by ai. So it, it's all over for everybody. <Laugh>, everybody. And now you've got Letitia James, people like her accusing social media of radicalizing people. The New York State attorney's General's office and the governor on Tuesday released the findings of a investigative report on the mass shooting in Buffalo. The shooter was first indoctrined and radicalized through online platforms. Uhd Doctrinalized, Indoctrine indoctrinated. Is that the word they used? No. Oh, Doct. I'm sorry. It's the word I used. You'll make up First. Indoctrined and radically through online forms, <laugh>. The radicalization happened by quote, explicitly racist, bigoted and violent content. He viewed online on four chan Reddit and elsewhere.

(01:12:53):
She said, fuel fringe platforms like four chan fuel radicalization, and later damage vulnerable communities. Then they said, Oh, and by the way, it shouldn't be allowed that you live stream mass shootings. Yeah, I agree. That seems good idea. Don't allow that. No one allows that. What happened? Pass it along. Pass, pass. The law won't happen again. Yeah. The suspect live streamed on Twitch for about two minutes. It is the case though that those two minutes got circulated among extremist groups. And she said even this relatively short video is enough for the horrific contents to spread widely and inspire future shooters. And you know what? That's probably true. You know, the, the target bro did news stories about it in the past Right. And did lots of things. Well, notice I did not say his name. One case his name appears in the, in the report. I'm not gonna say his name. I don't think we ever should glorify these people. You should never know who they are. They should disappear down the hole of memory hole of history. But that's not always the case. The new Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hu Hul Hle, Yes. Hle Hle says this report offers a chilling account of factors that contributed to this incident. And importantly, a roadmap uhoh toward greater accountability.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:14):
We need to add here with his moral panic. So

Leo Laporte (01:14:16):
Yeah. Well,

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:17):
In a section two 30 button you press and it like does a sound blur thing for section

Leo Laporte (01:14:20):
30. It is, of course. You know, that's where they're going. But Yeah, that's what it's going. I can't disagree with them though. That that is, that is the fact of the matter. I don't think you should pass a law against radicalization.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:32):
Well, but, but you know, Leo against

Kevin Marks (01:14:33):
Guns is the thing you do. I mean, I know I'm the Englishman here, but that's the bit, that's the missing link.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:39):
Yeah, exactly. Kevin's exactly right. There was another, there was another paper today that, that I actually put up under my stuff at one 20 that, that backed up work done by a Danish a social psychologist named Michael Bong Peterson, in which they say that the, the echo chambers are the ones in our real life. And what the internet does is it exposes us to people that we don't like and we fear. And that, and that it does not turn to, it does not make us hate. It brings our hates out. And so if you go, Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:15:15):
Cause I hate those ex I hate those Nazis. I agree with him.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:20):
So the problem is that if you say, if you, it's a very oversimplified answer to say, Oh, this guy was perfectly normal. And then he watched some online videos and he decided to go off and show they're,

Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
They're not saying that. Are they, Are they saying that if they

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:31):
Are, they're kind of saying that the guy was radicalized? Yeah. You know, it's that he was, before that he wasn't radical and no, before that he was, he was fooled with hate. And it, and, and, and yes, he found the

Leo Laporte (01:15:42):
Means. He gave him an avenue.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:43):
Exactly. But, but is not good. Company should take it down. Yeah. But, but this

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:49):
Is like, this is like pro anorexia sites, right? I mean, that's been an issue Right. For decades now. And, and not necessarily it, it certainly hasn't been one. But there were a lot of battles fought to try to reduce the amount of exposure of that kind of information align. It's, it's the reinforcement. It's not necessarily an echo chamber. It's a, a tighter and tighter feedback loop against more and more like-minded people who reinforce the most radical of your ideas. And you know, I see this happen on the left. You see people following, you know for a while Louise Mench would say any crazy thing. Kevin knows very well who she is. I'm sure the rest of you do too. But the former MP who moved to the us I,

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:28):
I haven't heard her name in all the while there.

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:30):
Oh, well she was doing Trump. It's, you know, the United States Supreme Court Marshall is going to arrest Trump on the runway. And people wanted to hear that and they would amplify it or some of the election not fraud, but the people of elector integrity people, not the, the people like Matt whose last name I'm blank Yeah. Matt Blaze, who are sensible and rigorous and academic and site have citation and so forth. But there are other people in that, you know, realm who exist solely to feed that. So it's not a right wing only phenomenon, It's that the right wasn't, didn't have as much enabling factors. A lot of what people wanna do in, in extremist circles on the right, they had a harder time finding like-minded people to the quantity that they can. Now, I don't know that the left was necessarily easier, but it feels like the internet algorithms tend to bring people together with more extreme reactionary than radical ideas. I don't know if that's been, if that's provable or not, but

Kevin Marks (01:17:28):
I'm not sure that's truly true. I think, I mean, Corey do's analysis of this is quite good cuz his, he ties it up with, you know, the brainwash narrative plays into the hands of Facebook. Cause that's what they're selling. They're selling me persuade people to buy things by using our network. But actually what they're doing is selecting subsets of people to talk to. Right. and so you can, you can pretend you're a genius marketer by thinking of a subset and defining one, and it'll go out and find that subset for you and put, show you around to them, which, which feels like you have got more control if you're just doing keyword. So

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:59):
Kind of confirmation

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:00):
Bias sort

Kevin Marks (01:18:00):
Of. Right. But the thing that it does is it does help you find groups of people who you kind of sympathize with and you'll follow. And then it'll reinforce that and build up that feedback loop. And so you end up with, which should be

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:10):
Very good, like lives matter and Me too.

Kevin Marks (01:18:12):
Yes, exactly.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:13):
And, and, and this is community and these are tribes and these are, you know, houses of worship and all kinds of good things through the years. Let's not lose sight of

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:21):
That. It's

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:23):
Jerks get together. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't all get together.

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:25):
What's the opposite of going down the rabbit hole? Like there is sometimes the opposite. It's like coming out of the, I don't know, it's climbing up the ladder to the castle in the sky. I don't know. Something like that.

Kevin Marks (01:18:34):
Right? <laugh> reaching niana or something. Yeah, but it's, yeah, no, that, and that's it. It's, it's like so it's the question of, you know, look at your peer groups and see if you really want 'em to be your peer groups and if not, change them. But that, that is hard to, it's hard to know. Cause if that's, if you sort of stumbled into that group and that's, that's where you're getting your validation. That's, that is part of the worry of it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:54):
It, it's also though, if you have five isolated people, each of whom hates the governor of Michigan, let's pretend. And in the non online world, in the days before social graphs and reinforced behavior or connections, those five people would just hate the governor of Michigan and not do anything about it. But in the current era, those five people have found each other and they go out and try to kid her. I mean, I'm, this isn't, whatever. No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:18):
They could find each other pretty easily before

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:20):
Couldn't one, but could they, I mean, we had militias, But the, but the issue is are, are we in a new era of mass radicalization and mass reactionary, you know, branches and, and we hit, have we have things changed because it's easier to find other people who, I mean, this is, here's a great example and forgive me, but I'm talking about pedophilia. But I think it's an important one is when you look at what's the correct term? It's the begins it's child's sexualized images. I can't grooming. No. So there's C c Sam. Right. See, Sam. So those, it it is absolutely the case that people, because it's an illegal activity, people you know, were limited in their ability to exchange material in front of other people like them. And the internet gave people who have a predilection to view those kinds of images, a greater opportunity to find one another because of the illegal and forbidden nature of it. Right. And so that's, it's absolutely the case. But they're also being more centralized. It's allowed people who fight the proliferation of CS a m and abuse of children online. It's given them more tools to find large numbers of people engaged in it. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:24):
Well, so, so Glenn, it's also true that there is a lot of research about this. The, the extremes are always tiny numbers. And so it's not about mass, it's not about mm-hmm. <Affirmative> about everybody. It's about, in your case of the Michigan, it's about enough people to go and threaten the life of the governor of Michigan.

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:40):
Right? Right. Are we reaching critical

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:42):
Mass? Critical mass?

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:43):
Yeah. But does the internet, does the internet spark that? Does, does Facebook, I mean, I guess this is the point in the question is, does does the algorithm and algorithm, or of all the algorithms when you go on YouTube and, and in 10 minutes you're being shown how the Illuminati control the finances of the world or something. And you've started, like I was looking at shark videos. How did I get here? Like, is that something that actually causes harm or not? Or

Leo Laporte (01:21:10):
Is it Well, that's, so that's the question because, and that's what that article was supposing, is that it, YouTube tends to lend itself towards that kind of,

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:19):
But research station, but there's that, that other one

Leo Laporte (01:21:22):
As well. So I would, I will grant you what you were saying Kevin, which is, Oh, so

Kevin Marks (01:21:25):
Youtube, YouTube has changed it a bit. Youtube was much worse. Right? Yeah. And they've adjusted what they do now to try and avoid those rat

Leo Laporte (01:21:31):
Holes. If you think Mark, Mark has always said this, people are happier when connected. It's all about being connected here. We are, we facilitate communities and yes, they'll be positive communities, There'll be negative communities, but they're all, we've created a platform that facilitates that. You're gonna need

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:45):
To learn how to, how to live together. And that's the problem. I, I, I think, you know, a lot of my view of this, it goes back to as

Leo Laporte (01:21:52):
The, as

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:53):
Mechanization of media. When media became, when media became mass, we were all presumed to be the same. And there was this one kind of view of society where a lot of people felt left out on both, both ends of the spectrum class. From that picture of what society was.

Leo Laporte (01:22:07):
There were precious few ways of creating community in the past. And it was always geographic. Right. If I'm not your neighbor, I'm not. We're, we can't kidnap.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:15):
Right. And if you're a gay person, can't

Leo Laporte (01:22:17):
Up Gretchen Whitmer together, cuz I need to be next to you. But but or and that's what happened. Gay people formed communities of interest in San San Francisco and other places. Yes. Because they did wanna be together with geographic. So the internet has, has allowed us to transcend geography in all sorts of ways, including that. So really isn't the only question whether these companies in these algorithms are pushing us in a negative way. I mean, they're pushing community, but isn't there,

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:49):
They're always doing both Leo. They're always going to do both. And it's not them. That's a technological determinist view that the technology and the company makes us do something. Are this has been a long time a racist station? No,

Leo Laporte (01:23:01):
No, no, no, no. If you're, if you've invented a social network, the point of which is to allow people to form communities, non geographic communities of interest. You set that all up. This is all machinery. Setting up communities of interest. You're gonna get all kinds, you're gonna get communities of people who knit and communities of people want to kidnap governors. The, the, that's fine. The, that's, that's, that's kind of a neutral platform. But there seems to be some evidence that some of these platforms which are optimizing for engagement, that their engagement goes hand in hand with, I don't know, outrage or some sort of emotional buzz that tends to lead you in a particular tour, a particular kind of community. Community you might not necessarily wanna join. You

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:46):
Ahan who, who, who, who can't stand Facebook, who has written books against Facebook and Google. Right. But Civa will argue Strangly, don't try to isolate one and, and, and blame them. It's a media ecosystem. And it includes the media itself. It includes Fox News, it includes msnbc, it includes cnn, it includes newspapers. So

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
Fox is a good example.

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:04):
Use all kinds of

Leo Laporte (01:24:05):
Things of, of a channel that succeeds by Accreting a certain kind of person. Absolutely. Right. That's their goal. You, you might make the case, I think you probably could make the case that somebody might stumble there at a neutral and be, and be same thing with MSNBC and be, and be tilted in one direction.

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:24):
Oh, I watched my father, who is now 96, who was a reasonable Republican, who went on the deep end. And then when he couldn't hear anymore, and, and his hearing aid didn't work literally for the year in, in, in, in Covid until we got him up here and he doesn't watch Fox anymore. And he just voted Democratic. Right. Never thought that would happen in my life. Wow. Yeah. So deep programmed by the absence of Fox and as member.

Leo Laporte (01:24:47):
So clearly that's it. So it's, I mean, the internet facilitates these communities of interest across geographic lines. That's neutral. We just

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:56):
Wanna make, So I met Glenn,

Leo Laporte (01:24:57):
Right? Yes, exactly.

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:59):
I met

Leo Laporte (01:25:00):
Know Jeff. Yeah. So that's fine. That's what we want. That's what the internet does. What we don't want is for companies, especially companies who are doing this with a profit motive to foster aer I mean, a certain kind of connectivity. Is that right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:15):
Well, no. Do we, do we want them to foster a positive connectivity, then, then the argument becomes what's a positive?

Leo Laporte (01:25:20):
Well, that's right. So it should be neutral. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:23):
No, there's no such thing as neutrality.

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:24):
Well, no

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:25):
Such thing in life as neutrality. It doesn't exist. But

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:28):
So all, so al I mean, this is where I get, I get, I'm frustrated, but I think my head starts to spin where it's, it's, I think, I think we all agree, maybe, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think we all agree that that there's a different, that, that whether social networks reinforce existing beliefs or help people gain new beliefs. Like I think it's very, I I think you could make a strong argument that qan on spread heavily online, but there has been a very strong real world component of it where people recruit and, and meet and sort of in, in certain circles and have spread it that way too. So it's got two parallel vectors. But one of them, you know, it really began and spread as a strictly online thing and took over, became this political movement that has tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people around the world who believe in it.

(01:26:14):
Right. So I don't think that that could have existed just with an you know, a real life component. We've seen how groups that wanna practice violence in the United States in particular, how they've been constrained in the past in recruiting people when it has been a geographic based thing. And it's the same thing with groups that are more positive too. The ones that are extreme obviously have the limits of engaging in often illegal activity. So they have to hide it in the, and online gives them a better place than, you know, other, any kind of thing you could do in real life where you're trying to find the right kinds of people. So I guess where I get go round and round is like, so what's the role? Like, like YouTube I don't know if they ever agreed Kevin, I, I know that they made those tweaks, but they changed their algorithms.

(01:26:56):
So it doesn't take people quickly into like the biggest conspiracy theories or, or that's what seems like if you know that tweaking the algorithm changes what people see and how they're directed into political or conspiracy ways, then is there a role for government in which it could regulate? I mean, I, I think it would be very difficult to regulate any kind of fashion that wouldn't provide bias or cause other problems. But is there a role for any party to say these we need to have a, we need to have a comprehensive change. We need have a specific change in order to prevent extremists from finding community online that they would, that that is different than the kind of community they would find in the real world.

Leo Laporte (01:27:37):
Did

Kevin Marks (01:27:38):
The challenge is how, it's how you specify that. I mean, and it does come down to effectively the platform setting, except we use policies in deciding to enforce them. And you know, Reddit has started to do this. Reddit was, Reddit has like thousands of sub communities. And some of them are toxic and they've been gradually deleting a few of them. But it's fairly for them to form a new one. But by actually actually deleting that has helped a bit with Reddit. Reddit, Reddit does Havet communities on it.

Leo Laporte (01:28:05):
Red, it's clearly not four chan. Right. So they, they've done, they've done something to keep themselves from becoming four chan.

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:11):
Well, and then four chan became too moderated for people. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:28:18):
So is Vance Jeff, is Vance Packer discredited these days? Oh yes, absolutely. The, the the the hidden persuade all Fake Hidden Persuaders was faked. Cause it was his contention in the fifties that movies that Yeah. Movies, you know, he was talking about, about those Blip verts. But but it was his, I don't think his

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:38):
Basic Oh, that guy. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:28:39):
I don't think his basic contention was wrong, which was that companies and politicians and other groups want to influence people. He was said they were doing it in movies and tv. I'd love to see what he thinks of what he would've thought of the internet. There, I mean, I guess that, here's another question. There's another question. Here's another question. There's truly, Rupert Murdoch is a, a malign influence. Right? Amen. And so, and so he has created a platform that is clearly designed to influence and has succeeded very, very, very well in that with Fox News. So that's bad. That's, I mean, we can

Kevin Marks (01:29:15):
And the Times and the sun. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:29:16):
Yeah. And the Times and the sun Fox,

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:18):
He's specifically, he's specifically funding a creation of misinformation. Yeah. Maybe not disinformation, but certainly misinformation, which is separate than, than individual. Right. It's separate than a, a collection or coalescing of individuals who have maybe brain worms. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:33):
That,

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:33):
So le let me, let me, let me answer your question this way. We agree there's bad propaganda. Is there good propaganda? Right. Is it is convincing people to wear mask vaccinations? Is that propaganda? Is that education? Is education propaganda? Should journalism be be having these outcomes and and, and judge our success or not based on that? Those are the kind of questions that I ask and don't necessarily answer in school. 

Leo Laporte (01:29:57):
Or maybe our moss should, Well, but see, we wouldn't agree on what is propaganda. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:03):
That's how we negotiate. That's, but that's the whole process. We are renegotiating our norms in a new reality. And voices who were not heard in mass media are now heard black voices, women's voices, queer voices. And the old powerful voices hate that. Yeah. And they, and, and, and they want to the one and at once, the paradox you mentioned before, shut them up. You can't mention gay, but then condemn them because you can't convert people to being gay and all that stuff. And we're gonna hate people and use the F word as, as Glenn said. And so that's the kind of, we're in this negotiation. There was a wonderful Twitter thread by a, a Canadian academic thing, Regina Reini about two years ago, in which he said that there's a fight between those who want to add to the list of things that are not considered polite in, in society.

(01:30:49):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you know, you can't say girl for woman anymore. And there are those, she called the status quo warriors. No, you can't tell me what to say. How dare you tell me what to say. No, I'm not telling you. I'm just suggesting that I find this offensive or, or bothers me. And we should have a discussion about whether that's something we still consider civil and that and that. And so that's now being, that that negotiation is now being called cancel culture. It's in itself is being poisoned with the idea that we can't do that. We can't argue about that. No. We must argue about that. That's what society is. And when we talk about polarization, what bothers me so much about that, that motif is that, is that it acts as if if to say, I hate Nazis. I'm the bad guy, cuz I'm being polarizing and I'm pushing them off. No. If you try to find a new center where the Nazis are closer to me and normalize them, and that's what media have done in the last six years, that's a real problem. So

Leo Laporte (01:31:42):
The interesting thing happened,

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:43):
That's why there's no, there's no, That's why I say there's no objective. There's no, Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:31:48):
No, I understand. Is who Yeah. Who's gonna make the rules. I

Kevin Marks (01:31:51):
Well, boring thing about Soman cuz you know, she, she was the home second to yesterday and she was just passing laws about public dissent and online censorship. And she was the one doing the tofu reaching woke arti enemies of the people type nonsense in parliament. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:32:10):
So there's an interesting,

Kevin Marks (01:32:11):
This sort of weird slogan based

Leo Laporte (01:32:13):
Case. I have a case study I'd like to propose. So in this country there are, I don't know what, a thousand radio stations, local radio stations. And for a long time the FCC prohibited one company from owning more than two stations in any given market. Yeah. Yeah. And as a result, there was a great diversity of thought in these radio stations. Now, I, and I don't know, this might just be coincidental timing, but last two decades the fccs changed that rule. And what happened is a, a handful of very large companies bought up all the radio stations in the country. So there are really only three different companies that own the vast material. What are those companies, by the way? Iheart is number one. Cumulus is number two. And Entercom now called Odyssey is number three. They're by the way, all of them faced with huge debt because they leveraged all these acquisitions.

(01:33:07):
Right? So Odyssey is close to being delisted from the stock exchanges. Last time I checked this stock was 88 cents. Iheart had to renegotiate its debt because it could not, the debt burden would've killed would've driven it into bankruptcy as well. And they were able to renegotiate the debt and I think we'll go forward. But that consolidation, once they get over the massive cost of it allowed. Now this is a question, if it was, if there's correlation or causation, what happened over the last 20 years is that local talk radio veered dramatically to the right. There have been attempts to create left wing talk radio at the Ms CBC of talk radio, Progressive talk radio. Oh, Air America. Air America failed miserably, all failed miserably. People love right wing talk radio. Now there's probably a lot of demographic reasons for that. The only people listen name radio anymore are, you know, into their sixties.

(01:34:05):
 You know, so there may be demographic reasons for that as as well. But for some reason, the only way you could make money in radio became right wing talk. Yeah, yeah. Right. now you can say it's related to this consolidation. Maybe you could say it's related to the aging demographic, the dying of the medium maybe or maybe right wing talk. I think this is the case is is actually much more. It gets you going, it gets you excited, it gets your blood pump and people love it. And I think it radicalizes people you point to Fox News is radicalizing the nation. I think Rush limb posh and, and his ilk did started, they not only started it, I think they might have done far worse because they're talking to people. Yes. You know, they used to anyway be talking to people for hours a day. And I've, I've seen many people radicalized by it. So is that an example of an, That's an algorithm. It's a human algorithm where program directors all across the country noticed that when they, when they went right wing rush limb is dominated, that it worked really well when they went left wing, it didn't work well. So we're do more of that. That's an algorithm. Right.

(01:35:12):
Driven by profits and know it's

Kevin Marks (01:35:14):
A centralized algorithm by one of the three companies. Cause they were

Leo Laporte (01:35:17):
Basically scheduling. It's more centralized station centralized. But maybe it's just because somebody did it and then everybody noticed, Hey look, it worked. You know, I mean radio has also done that, you know, oldies, the oldies format swept radio even when there was a thousand different old stations, because it worked. People liked oldies. So I

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:34):
Think you mentioned there,

Leo Laporte (01:35:36):
That's a case study, but I don't know what caused it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:39):
It's really interesting though. There, there, there, Leo, I think another, I realized the other day that broadcast has gone from 1920 to 2020 and is really coming to its end hundred. ABC is gonna give up 10 o'clock radio

Kevin Marks (01:35:49):
Bbc.

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:50):
Yep. Exactly. And, and that, that, that was a century of broadcast. It was a century of the real mass. And, and I think that that, that that's what's ending. And there are those who still, you know, when when, when SEMA for started on Tuesday and their, and their, their opening video was being nostalgic about Walter Cronkite, for Christ's sakes <laugh> that was a, that was a very limited view

Leo Laporte (01:36:13):
Of America because Edward Armour was just too far <laugh> Yeah. Too long ago.

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:17):
That's the way

Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
It was. You know, I was thinking about that last night about how Walter Cronkite is ancient history. Right? I mean, he,

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:23):
He, he, my students did not know who

Leo Laporte (01:36:25):
He was. No, they called him Old Iron. But because he was an AP guy who just happened to be able to sit for hours at a time and broadcast <laugh> and, and really had no opinion or point of view. In fact, it wasn't until Vietnam that he ever had an opinion or point of view. As soon as that happened, that changed a lot of, of our, what, how we think it brought of the influence. So

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:46):
Here's another way to ask your question, Leo. Is, is, is radio inherently conservative talk radio inherently conservative? Is television inherently liberal? Or is, is the internet inherently one or the other, or No, there's,

Leo Laporte (01:36:59):
Well the only reason I bringing this up is because the heat generated by right wing talk on radio was very good commercially. And it sure looks like the same kind of heat that's generated on Twitter. I see. And on Facebook and social media. And I think it's possibly the case again, I don't know cuz it's, you know, there's a lot of variables, but it's possibly the case that that just gets humans, you know, where they live and, and is engaging. And so you're gonna make more money when you do it. Glad

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:25):
You know, the psychology experiment story, I, I think I may have even told it on this podcast or videocast before, but stop me if I have, is and I think it's an alleged experiment. I'm not sure it actually ever occurred, but it, it it has the truthiness to it right? Is that students decided to play an experiment on their, against their professor in a psychology class. So starting at the beginning of the term, they only paid attention to him when he was on one side of the room, <laugh>, by the end of the term, they had him crouched into a corner and he wouldn't front when he spoke. Now again, I don't know, I believe I've read that this is a, it's, it's apocryphal, but you can see how well that would work. And I feel like the, you know, Rupert Murdock became successful.

(01:38:07):
 I would say there's a small element of how he radical he pushed people in a direction. Right. You, it is propaganda. When you're confronted with the same information you're told it's true in an authoritative way. You can internalize it. Not everyone has the critical facilities to resist that indefinitely or even any interest in it. So Right. That's part of it. But it's also, he went where his audience was. The New York Times has a profile today of the Fox News. I think she's the president or ceo I forgot. Which, and that it's something like you never something like her motto is never to work against the beliefs of her viewers, but she assembled viewership. So it says, even in the, the little nice nugget in the story was even if that means ignoring a major story for a year. Right. And like the January 7th thing.

(01:38:50):
 So, or January six, excuse me, I've already forgotten. So the question I have is, is all media an experiment of getting the professor to stand? Yes. The crouch in the corner of a room? Yes. But as an but as an audience member. So Rupert Murdock is that Audi is the, is the people in the, the the students and he's only paying attention to her. I'm sorry, I'm saying this the wrong way. Rupert Murdock is that professor crouched in the corner? Yes. But it's a very lucrative corner and the all students, so who push people watching? Yeah. If, if the audience isn't paying attention in that corner, then would Rupert Muroc, and I think we've seen this in some properties, some things he's done, he has moved, or various people in his empire have moved things away from that corner. Right. And we have much more extreme networks that are on unable, that have been blocked on blacking one o

Leo Laporte (01:39:38):
N Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:39):
Yeah, exactly. Those folks who are, who are much more much

Leo Laporte (01:39:43):
More willing

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:43):
Alive. Much <laugh>. Yeah. Much more align, much more partisan even further to the right than Fox before.

Leo Laporte (01:39:48):
I, I think you nailed it. Ru I don't think ru well he has certain economic desires depend with things that just, just push forward. He does have some Yeah. For political. Absolutely. But mostly he's interested in money and, but

Glenn Fleishman (01:40:02):
People don't see tabloids, People don't buy tabloids at the checkout counter. They buy them partly because they're there, but they buy them because they like the headlines and they Optum, I mean, SEO is supermarket checkout. Right. And it's, yes, it's now can be done at a billion times to scale.

Leo Laporte (01:40:16):
Here's the Washington Post, how the, how TikTok ate the internet. By the way, this is like getting on the cover of Sports Illustrated. As soon as you've got a think piece about your social network, it's certainly about to die. You can guess this part, <laugh>. But it, it really, I hardly knew the it's, and, and so tick read the subhead, Leo read the subhead of that one. The world's most popular app is pioneered in new age of instant attention. Can we trust it? Now, that was why you trust that was why I put this article in here, is this whole notion of, you know, are we being manipulated? Somebody sent me an article from a professor who said, Oh, VR is gonna be the ultimate manipulation tool because when you're in there, I can feed you stuff that's gonna make your mind go any way I want it to go. Maybe that's true, maybe not, but

Kevin Marks (01:41:00):
Nope, same, same nonsense. Yeah. So I hang, I've got another quote for you. David Foster Wallace in e Unas Prum said, TV is not vo and pur and dumb because the people who the audience are older and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar. They're vulgar and brilliant and dumb interests and widely different in their refined and aesthetic. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:41:21):
I love that. Ah, again, brilliant. That's nice. Brilliant quote. This is

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:25):
Absolutely, that's lovely. I I've heard this about you know, gifted children, right? Gifted children are seen as a category and you know, it's measurable. Right. And it'ss a whole debate about gifted education. And I went through a gifted program when I was a kid. Can you tell maybe a little bit Uhhuh that I was

Leo Laporte (01:41:38):
Molded Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:39):
Full of myself. Right. Anyway, at my young age. But so, but gifted education, the thing is, kids who are more normative in general education tend to be, the studies show more alike gifted kids tend to be much more different. And it's not that they're, it's not a measure of better or even intelligence at some level. It's that, it's one of the measures of giftedness is that their interests and abilities tend to be dramatically more spiky, which

Leo Laporte (01:42:06):
Makes them disruptive in the classroom. <Laugh>. Exactly.

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:09):
They might be extremely good at math or art, but they're terrible at another subject. Yeah. but that's, but they're no long, they're not in that normative thing. And it's the same

Leo Laporte (01:42:17):
Thing. A lot of these gate programs are just to get those kids out of the mainstream classroom and off with somebody who can tolerate their interests.

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:24):
Kevin, what you so perfect though is that the massive people, a great quote, are much more similar, Right? That is and that is the thing. Yes.

Kevin Marks (01:42:30):
But, but if they're not even the massive, similar, it's just that they, they, they, they all wanna watch. Oh, I see. Everyone will watch. We all

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
Like cats tv. Yeah. Right.

Kevin Marks (01:42:38):
And yeah. And cats on the internet and you

Leo Laporte (01:42:41):
Know, there's much more diversity in our higher level interest than there is in our low interests. We're all cleavage and cats. It's all we care about. And as a result, that's all kids point of the map. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. And you can't blame TikTok or Facebook or Fox or Rupert for chasing that. He's like the professor in the corner of his class. He's all, they have any moral standards to how far is to Yeah. But no, you look, having a more, you know, having a moral standard in a, in a large broadcasting company is a, is an absolute recipe for failure. So let's not, let's not go there. Well, I don't think to

Kevin Marks (01:43:19):
Cover the BBC a little bit here. I mean, they think

Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
Yeah. But subsidized by the British government for crying out loud, That is not a commercial entity. We've, I'm talking capitalist

Kevin Marks (01:43:29):
Tax. I know, but the point that, that's the point. The point is, that's why you have to do something different. And it's been running a hundred years is mission, is educate and form and entertain. And it tries really hard to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
And it doesn't have a commercial motive. Right, Right.

Kevin Marks (01:43:42):
Well, it does now as well, but it's very good at it,

Leo Laporte (01:43:45):
You know, to the degree it has a commercial motive attacking it. I would submit That's the degree it's starting to beat. Terrible.

Kevin Marks (01:43:51):
Yeah. But that, like the local radio thing, the sort of Liz Truss's first, you know, obvious collapse was she did a eight interviews in a row with different local radio stations in the UK on the 20th of September and got taken apart, literally eight minute interviews. And she was thinking, Oh, look at radio, they'll be easy. And they just completely took her apart. One after another. You tell it's class.

Leo Laporte (01:44:14):
Immediate God bless radio's stitched together into one long thing you could listen to so you could hear each of those interviews. That

Kevin Marks (01:44:21):
Was, there's a podcast, podcast for the whole thing. It's brilliant <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:44:24):
We have so many other stories and we're not gonna get to any of them. I hope you don't mind, but we are to going porn. We're gonna, No, it's not going porn. They're just gonna have some streams that limit to 18 or over it still have the same exact rules. Oh, you misread the head. You read the headline. I was trying for sensationalism. Yeah, that's totally sensational. It's a good news for Netflix. They suddenly developed two and a half million more subscribers and shocked the market. Sure it was Sandman. Yeah. Sand Man did it. Sand man, did it? No, I think it's Jeffrey Dahmer did it. I hate to say it. I don't, I am so disgusted by that. I won't watch Itsome. This this honky hunky serial killer thing that there's so many programs that are obsessed with silly talk about and lowest common denominated programming.

(01:45:10):
Yeah. Talk about monkey brain going after the monkey monitor exploitation. Right. But exploitation works. Yeah. alright, I wanna take a little break and then believe it or not, I hate to say it, but picks of the week time coming up next. We have so many things we could have talked about. I'm not even gonna do the change lock because we've had such a great conversation. Rules are all off. Well, you, I'm trying to get this show down at two hours, dude, it was three and a half hours two weeks ago, and Stacy's never come back. <Laugh>. So she's hiding. So she disappeared. It's like, ah, yeah, I can't do this anymore. So we're gonna try to get this show down to a reasonable length of time. Also out of respect for our three great panelists. Love you Kevin. Marks, it's so nice to have you.

(01:45:55):
 Even o to come. You're here. Thank you. Coming for sacrificing your Yes. It's midnight in the uk so you should be, you should be sleeping, you should be going to bed. So we're gonna let you get to bed. Of course, the wonderful Glenn Fleishman. I hope we can get you on more. I, I told you so much. I told our producers, I said, Glenn should be our regular fill in. I just love Glenn. Yeah, thank you so much. I've successfully got avoided you two talking about fonts. And so I consider this a victory on this show. Jeff Jarvis <laugh> maybe though, let's do it. There'll be some, maybe there'll some be some lead type in our future <laugh> coming up in just a bit, our takes of the week. Ooh. But first this word from Neva, today's it pros. You're in a tough spot.

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So people in these meetings can sit where they want, face where they want, can be comfortable, and you can be comfortable too. Your IT department can be down the hall monitoring, managing, updating, and adjusting all the Neva systems right from the NOVA console, which is cloud-based. I guess you, you know, your IT guy could be working at home, still do it. Nere very scalable for large organizations. Their systems cost a fraction of traditional systems and they work better. And right now, we've been talking about Neva for a while, but we've got a, a special offer I really wanna highlight. You've probably heard us talk about this, the microphone mis technology, how well it works in a hybrid workspace right now, 50% off a Nova HDL 300 system for mid-size rooms. When you get a live online demo and you buy before December 16th, 2022, half off the HDL 300 is perfect for a mid-size room.

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Jeff Jarvis (01:51:00):
We'll do a better job than half the cabinet now.

Leo Laporte (01:51:05):
Ida shut down halfway through the evidence session. It was the House of Lords after all. I <laugh> imagine.

Glenn Fleishman (01:51:13):
Are you re at Listen The Guardian? Are you being tofu also right

Leo Laporte (01:51:16):
Now? What's I I imagine at least half of the Lords there were half asleep, so it they probably thought I was a real person

Kevin Marks (01:51:22):
Human. The audience. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:51:23):
Yeah, yeah. What is Well she's

Glenn Fleishman (01:51:27):
Saying thing is that, that there's a one of Boris Johnson's heading out the doors, attempts to get oh, Kevin, what's her name? The former Secretary of Culture at Nadine. Doris. Doris. Is that it? Yeah, do, yeah. She she may not get her seat in lo in the House of Lords because she lied or allegedly lied to par in a decade ago. And so that's nice

Leo Laporte (01:51:48):
Little one nice thing about a robot. They never lie. Here's a little video. I think I can play this of the

Speaker 6 (01:51:54):
Quick debate and I don't want Ada to fall asleep again. Leave again. I, I shall we, shall we deal with the question to Ada and then we

Leo Laporte (01:52:02):
Can Ada is the robot

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:04):
Ada had had fallen asleep and had to be re

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
There are very many lords are there. It's a small group. This

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:11):
Is committee.

Kevin Marks (01:52:12):
Oh, it's a committee. It's committee the Lord's chambers. There's actually more Lords in Commons. Oh.

Speaker 7 (01:52:18):
Hello. How do you art and how is this different to I produce my paintings by cameras in my eyes, my AI

Leo Laporte (01:52:35):
Algorithms. Can you imagine this happening in Congress and what Sean Hannity would make of it

Speaker 7 (01:52:39):
On canvas, which result in visually and it

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:43):
My elected vice president.

Leo Laporte (01:52:44):
How, All right. That's enough. Programmed enough of Beta Beta. Mr. Glennn Fleishman share some of the than his trust to be fed <laugh>. Share some of the wonderful things you have been up to lately.

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:58):
Well, in honor commemoration of the late Queen Elizabeth. The second I present this, which

Leo Laporte (01:53:04):
Is, Oh, I saw this on your Twitter or somewhere. Yeah. This is really cool. Sure can get this. This is in the was it the coronation of Queen Victoria? Is that the

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:15):
Yes. I have a hard time getting this to,

Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
And it's our back enough note the color

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:20):
That's, Can we get it? There

Leo Laporte (01:53:22):
You go. Yeah. Is yeah. That's okay. We get it. We get it. <Laugh> <laugh>. No problem. Tell us why, why is this so gold?

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:32):
So this is this paper, it's called The Paper that Poisoned Its Printers is kind of a, a name for it. It's so printed, 1838. And I just got a copy of it used, you know, a perfectly condition copy. And the, the reason it's called that is they wanted to do a special edition. And this paper, the son and they contracted with the fellow who, ultimately his firm I'm blanking his name. It's the one that Prince Passports now and actually complained during Brexit that the passports weren't gonna be printed by this English company, but by one in, I think the Netherlands or something. Anyway, so this newspaper, they figured a technique to essentially brush, brush brass filing, say that three times fast over a kind of a, a sizing or a kind of gluey material that was printed on the page to give it this gold sheen. So it was golden. And then of course, here's your fold out section. The cover is a portrait of Queen Victoria and the backside of it, the other side is unprinted. So you would cut this out and put this up. And so this is 1838. This is fancy Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
Artwork and suitable for framing. Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:43):
Exactly. So it's a very interesting historic item. And it turns out, you know, there's copies available for sale from time to time. It was not very expensive because it's obscure. Always collect obscure things. How was it killing the printers? More fun. Oh, the, oh, so this is the terrible part. So the co the company back in the days before there were things like, you know hipaa or the equivalent in any country. There's an account from this period. A doctor writes a letter into a medical journal and he says, I had a patient come in and he gives his full name and says, This patient was covered in pus on his various bodying parts. This describes the whole condition and says, and you know, asks him his good doctor. He asks him what, you know, this is before, this is before removing the pump handle the, before the invention of of epidemiology.

(01:55:28):
This doctor asked the question, you know, what was the cause of this? And the kid says, guys's a teenager. Cause of course, 1838, you could probably be 11 or 12 be working at a printing plant or wherever. Well I was working, we were, we were creating these gold huge newspapers at such and such spot. So the doctor, the patient doesn't return after the doctor gives him some treatment advice. And he goes and he does Sherlock Holmesy research. He goes out and he finds, he goes to the newspaper plant where they answer a bunch of questions and he finds out about the brass filing plant. And the deal is they were, there's one company shaving down pieces of brass, and those people were apparently dying. He had second in information about it. Wow. Cuz they're breathing and brass filings. Then all these filings are taken to the printing location and the printers are brushing it on onto this slightly sticky surface.

(01:56:14):
And they're breathing this in and they're getting, you know, scrupulous of medical LICs from it. And so the doctor did all the work and you know, kind of wrote this up as a, as a thing. So it's possible we don't have firsthand information about deaths caused by it, but it's a it's a remarkable thing. But it was also, it was possibly the most the broadest, the widest printed newspaper edition of its time. Probably 250,000 copies were printed over many, many weeks. And they, at the time, these are all rag paper, right? This is being printed wood, pulp paper like used in paperbacks and newspapers at the end of the 19th century wasn't used. So this is cotton paper. It's why it survived so well, it looks so beautiful. It's a little worn, but it's very fresh and 250,000 copies. And I think this one is labeled addition. It's the 15th edition of this printed like two weeks later. You

Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
Should frame that.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:09):
Yeah, I've got it. It's huge. I have to figure out how to open it up. But yeah, it's, it's a piece of fascinating printing history.

Leo Laporte (01:57:19):
And I might add in 686 episodes the first time the word scrupulous pules have been used. <Laugh> on

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:27):
The show we're holding back. So title,

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
No title. I don't think that's got good SEO hate, I hate to say it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:36):
I hear laughing in the background.

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
The studios. Jeff Jarvis, your number of the week.

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:44):
So I think The Freedom House is where it says we're being a depressing show. I'll just continue that that motif. The Freedom House issued its annual freedom report on freedom of expression and the internet. And if you scroll down, you'll see a, a gray box that says that 76% of the people on the internet live in, in of the 4.5 billion people have access to the internet live in countries where individuals were arrested or imprisoned for posting content on political, social, religious issues. 69% live in countries where authorities deployed pro-government commentators to manipulate discussion. 64% live in countries where political, social, or religious content was blocked. Online, 64% live in countries where individuals have been attacked or killed for their online activities. Since June, 2021, 51% live in countries where access to social media platforms were temporarily or permanently restricted. More than half the world and 44% live in countries where authorities disconnected Internet. Internet or mobile networks often for political reasons. So when you hear me screaming, moral panic, this is what I'm doing.

Leo Laporte (01:58:46):
Well yeah, nothing, nothing we've been talking about today. <Laugh> comes close to this,

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:51):
This Yeah. But this is where it heads Yeah. If you don't fight for the freedoms.

Leo Laporte (01:58:55):
Yeah. Or if you do fight for the freedoms, or if you don't fight for the freedoms. We're not sure. Do you think, Jeff, this grim is this show was, it's all, it's only gonna get worse, <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:07):
No, I don't, I would

Leo Laporte (01:59:08):
You're an optimist,

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:09):
I think, but it, Well, but it may be generations'. Hence it. So there was, once I, I debated a German regulator at Perusia. I might have told the story a couple years ago and I said, well, you know, just like, just like Gutenberg, we may have to go through our 30 years war. And he with no German irony cuz it wasn't in his blood, said, it's far too soon to joke about that.

Leo Laporte (01:59:30):
<Laugh> really <laugh>, it still lives in our memory. Mr. Kevin Marks, you've got a pick of the week, I note.

Kevin Marks (01:59:43):
Well, I think this goes with the, talking about domain names earlier. We've got a link on the indie website where you can get free domain names. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:59:51):
Ah,

Kevin Marks (01:59:52):
There's certain registrars that will give you high level domains for free and they'll sort of upset you on hosting and things. So it's great. Four countries and a few fno as a, I

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:05):
Love TK cuz in my, in my field, in, in, in, in editorial, that's what we, when we don't know something to come. Right. So I think that'd be, I'd like quite like that.

Leo Laporte (02:00:13):
It's interesting the three out of the four, actually, I don't know where the four, what Tolo is, but three out of the four are in Africa. See the

Kevin Marks (02:00:19):
Island? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:20):
Yeah. Interesting tv.

Kevin Marks (02:00:23):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
Huh. So that's a indie web special indie web.org is a great site to visit for anybody who wants to keep the internet free, open and to keep the good things happening on the internet. God's

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:37):
Work, Kevin.

Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
It really God's work. It really is you've got a West Coast Home Brew website club meeting coming up October 19th. That's tomorrow in No, it's tonight. It's

Kevin Marks (02:00:50):
It's next two hours.

Leo Laporte (02:00:51):
Yeah. Six to 8:00 PM in Los Angeles time. You can go from anywhere in the world though, right? You don't have to. There's no,

Kevin Marks (02:00:59):
Yes. Yeah, Yeah. No, it's, we've, we've moved entirely online and have been for, you know, the duration and we haven't got done any in person ones for quite a while. Nice. I think there was a couple of, in the Webc camps there was one in Germany, but basically we're doing pretty much everything online these days.

Leo Laporte (02:01:14):
And it's very

Kevin Marks (02:01:15):
Smooth.

Leo Laporte (02:01:15):
Is there, is there an agenda or you just kind of talk about what anybody brings up at these events,

Kevin Marks (02:01:21):
Actually sort of come and talk about your website and what you're, what you're trying to do with it. And, and it's in, that's fairly free form.

Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
Can you get some help?

Kevin Marks (02:01:29):
Yeah, no, that's part of the point is if good if you say, I'm trying to get a website that does this, and we go, Oh. Can help with that, or Have you looked at this thing and so on.

Leo Laporte (02:01:37):
Yeah. Very nice. Indie webb.org. It's in the events section. Kevin, I hope you feel better soon. I, I feel terrible keeping you upset. Thank you for Thank you for doing this. Yeah. Struggling. I really

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:49):
Appreciate it. Great to, great to see you. Yeah.

Kevin Marks (02:01:51):
And it's glad to see you too, Glenn. It's been a while.

Leo Laporte (02:01:53):
Oh, you know each other. Awesome.

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:54):
Yes. We met in, we met I l I think possibly first after some blogging, but, Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:02:00):
Very nice. Oh yeah.

Kevin Marks (02:02:01):
Oh, and I saw you at XO XO last, I think, and I'm looking forward to that. Becoming real ago.

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:05):
That's right. Someday, Yes, someday the Brigadoon of xx Xo xo the Portland. I know. Everyone's excited about that when that happens.

Leo Laporte (02:02:15):
It's every 20 years, every seven years. I can't

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:17):
Remember. Oh, well they did six years, I think. Right? And then they've been off for, for three. They're just at some point, at some point it'll be safe or safe enough.

Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Lovely. Yeah. Thank you Kevin. Marks indie web.org. Anything else you wanna mention or plug?

Kevin Marks (02:02:31):
No, that'll, that'll do for now. Indie Wegs.

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
Good. I'm so glad you were here to talk about Blue Sky. That's fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate your input to your wisdom. Yep. Glenn Fleishman, same to you buddy. Love Glenn.fun is the website. G e n n dot f u n at Glenn f on the Twitter you do other podcasts. I know

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:54):
Occasionally, occasionally I find me on the incomparable network where Kevin will appreciate this one. The pants and the boot podcast where I get people together from all over English speaking countries from around the world. We typically focus on, on the UK and Australia, New Zealand. But we'd really love to get, I, I need to dig up folks from other places where they grew up speaking English as one of the languages spoken in the country. That's not a, you know, a traditional one of those

Leo Laporte (02:03:21):
What a great idea

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:22):
For

Leo Laporte (02:03:23):
Podcasts. That's

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:24):
Good. Yeah. And we have a lot of fun because it's just, you know, it's kind of, it's a comedy podcast. None of us are professional comedians. We're all wannabe comedian whatevers. But we're talking about, you know, so we'll have an entire episode about Lori versus Chuck, but then we'll have a, you know, episode about the use of, of Native people's words and how they're spreading in the different countries we live in. We have a, a regular panelist now from New Zealand who can bring in the it's it Teora no, it's on this tell me the right word there for New Zealand in Maori is

Kevin Marks (02:03:54):
It's Aura.

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:55):
It's Toora. Thank you. And it's so anyway, we try to do a little bit of a span. The last episodes that I'm editing right now, we record a bunch at a time at someone from Sweden who grew up speaking Swedish, but is also fluent in English and Russian. And a woman in Scotland who grew up in Germany and is married to a Scott now. And and our New Zealand friend who lived in Chicago for several years. So we try to span span a range of people's speaking backgrounds.

Leo Laporte (02:04:24):
I will listen. I love, I love language podcasts and some of my favorite people besides you, Glenn, you've got Gene McDonald on Gene is wonderful. Yeah. Love her. And of course associated with Micro Blog, Shelly Brisbane is a regular, some of, a lot of the people we know. James Thompson. Dan Moore.

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:40):
Thompson. Yep. Yep. It's a, it's a great, Yeah, it's a, it's a lovely gang of people at the incomparable and and I've managed to to sneak sneak them into this side podcast. This <laugh> comes out every once in a while.

Leo Laporte (02:04:51):
I love it. And

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:52):
The detector van is a lie. I know Kevin will appreciate that one. You see the tech bad episode,

Leo Laporte (02:04:57):
<Laugh>,

Kevin Marks (02:04:58):
That's a fun one. Okay. I'll have to attempt to listen

Leo Laporte (02:04:59):
To that. Yeah. <laugh>, there is no detector Van <laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:05):
TVC has wanted you to think so, but opinions vary.

Leo Laporte (02:05:07):
Oh, that's hysterical. I thought there was all this

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:10):
Stuff. There is none, right? Is there there is none.

Kevin Marks (02:05:12):
They did used to work, but it was when TV sets were large and basically

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:17):
Could attend leak signal or,

Kevin Marks (02:05:19):
Yeah, because, because there was residents in the, in the back of the set. <Laugh> hilarious. Basically they just looked at houses with antennas on top and then checked if that address had a

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
See if you're paying your license fees

Kevin Marks (02:05:31):
Terrible. And as you, as you don't necessarily need an antenna anymore. That's a bit harder.

Leo Laporte (02:05:34):
<Laugh>. It's thank you Glenn, and of course, thank you to Jeff Jarvis who is our moderator and our ol Greece. He's the director of the town. No, no, no. You are the boss. I'm nothing. This is on democracy. It's a, it's a joint, it's a co moderation ship. I would say. <Laugh>. He's kicked a, You add more stories than I do. He's the director of the Town Height Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the e. Craig. Craig. Craig. Craig Newmar graduate school of Journalism at the City University of New York. Buzz Machine at Thought Calm. We will see you next week, Glenn, I think next week. Next week. Our dear dearly to part of Stacy is not here either, but aunt will be back and Rabel will join us to talk about planetary. He was also the lead dev at od, which was Evan Williams podcast directory before he did Twitter.

(02:06:31):
 He says I was audio started today. Would Odio succeed? Yeah, might. He said he was frustrated at the pivot away from podcasting towards Twitter, <laugh> he also was at Twitter and he knows a lot about Blue Sky. And of course, his creating his own protocol, which we now know is called Scuttle. But Rav joins us next week. We do this week in Google every Wednesday, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc. You can watch us do it live at live dot twit tv or join us in the chatroom at IRC dot twit tv. Our club members who pay seven bucks a month to get ad free versions of all the shows, also have their own chatroom. It's our Wonderful Club Twit Discord. It's gonna be the home to Stacy's book club next week. And of course, lots of other great stuff. If you're not yet a club member, I invite you to join a twi.tv/club.

(02:07:24):
You could also get the hands on windows, hands on Mac Untitled Linux Show, the GFIs, all the other shows that we don't release outside the club twit.tv/club after the fact. You get to add supportive versions of this show at our website, twit.tv/TWiG. You can watch on YouTube. There's a dedicated YouTube channel and of course you can subscribe. In fact, I would recommend subscribing in your favorite podcast client. And if you do that, please leave us a five star review. Let the world know about this week in Google, which is ever so rarely actually about Google <laugh>. We'll see it. We'll see you next time. Have a great week. Bye-Bye.

Speaker 8 (02:08:03):
If you are looking for a midweek update on the Weeks's Tech news, I gotta tell you, you gotta check out Tech News Weekly. See, it's all kind of built in there with the title. You get to learn about the news in tech that matters. Every Thursday, Jason Howell and I talk to the people making and breaking the tech news, get their insights and their interesting stories. It's a great show to check out twit.tv/tnw