This Week in Google 699 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:
It's time for TWIG, This Week in Google. Stacey's here, Jeff's here, Ant's here. We've got a whole bunch of interesting things to talk about, including Stacey's encounter with a fence. She says, "I blamed it on the Tesla." We'll also talk about Chat GPT and some of the interesting ways it's being used, and of course the debate over algorithms and section 230. It's up to the Supreme Court now. All of that and more coming up on Twig. Once again, time for the TWiT audience survey. The annual survey helps us understand you so we can make your listening experience even better. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it sure helps us out a lot. Completely optional, but if you could, please go to twit.tv/survey23. That's twit.tv/survey23. You have till the end of the month but if you would do me a favor and do it today, I can stop mentioning it. Twit.tv/survey23, and thanks in advance.

Announcer:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte:
This is TWIG episode 699, recorded Wednesday, January 18th 2023. Blame it on the Tesla. This Week in Google is brought to you by ACI Learning. If you love IT Pro, you'll love ACI Learning. ACI Learning offers fully customizable training for your team and formats for all types of learners across audit, cybersecurity and IT. From entry level training to putting people on the moon, ACI Learning has you covered. Visit ACIlearning.com to learn more.
Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at twit.tv and launch your campaign now. It's time for TWIG, This Week in Google. In the show, we covered latest news from Google, the Fediverse, the Facebook-verse, the Twitter-worst. Stacey Higginbotham's here. Stacey on iot.com, her podcast with Kevin Tofel, The IOT Podcast. Hello, Stacey.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Hello, everybody.

Leo Laporte:
Hello. Are you freezing cold? You've got a giant scarf.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I am so cold.

Leo Laporte:
I wish I had a giant scarf. I like the look of scarves. I want to wear a scarf.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You could easily have a scarf.

Leo Laporte:
I could, actually. I have plenty at home. I even have scarves... a few from faded startups. Like I have a Chipmunk scarf. Remember Chipmunk?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Wow.

Leo Laporte:
Hipmunk. Not Hipmunk, not Chipmunk, Hipmunk.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Hipmunk. This is an infinity scarf, so it's like a...

Leo Laporte:
Oh, also known as a circle.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, okay. Fine.

Leo Laporte:
Well, it's not a Mobius strip, let's put it that way. Maybe it is, I don't know.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We could turn it into one maybe?

Leo Laporte:
You could. Just twist it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Then she'll never get it off.

Leo Laporte:
Mr. Jeff... That's the voice of reason. Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Of reason.

Leo Laporte:
Nobody's ever called you the voice of reason, have they?

Jeff Jarvis:
No. No one ever does.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We've called him the voice of moral panic.

Leo Laporte:
The voice of passion...

Jeff Jarvis:
No, I'm the one who calms moral panic.

Leo Laporte:
... and the Leonard Tow Professor for journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Announcer:
Craig Newmark.

Leo Laporte:
City University of New York.

Jeff Jarvis:
A different choir.

Leo Laporte:
We should get a pigeon choir to sing his name.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes, we should.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Coo, coo.

Leo Laporte:
He loves his pigeons.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, he does.

Leo Laporte:
And from... points west slightly... it's Ant Pruitt. Actually points north. He's got his Clemson Infinity scarf. Look at that.

Ant Pruitt:
Just trying to be like Mrs. Higginbotham.

Leo Laporte:
I like it. Yeah, I like it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He will never achieve Mrs. Higginbotham's status.

Ant Pruitt:
I know this. I know this. Futile effort.

Leo Laporte:
Doesn't Mrs. Higginbotham sound like a role Robin Williams might have played in a film version of Sarah Higginbotham's at Large? All right, what is happening? First of all, the Twitter auction's over. Sorry if you missed it.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, it's already happened?

Jeff Jarvis:
Did you get the bird? Did you do it?

Leo Laporte:
No, somebody did. $31,000.

Jeff Jarvis:
31?

Leo Laporte:
Something like that, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Shocking.

Leo Laporte:
It ended just about two hours ago. So, I didn't realize it was still on. I thought it was going to be over at 10:00 AM, that's what the auction site said, but it kind of went on. They auctioned off really a lot of junk for the most part. 600 pieces of used furniture, a lot of kitchen stuff.

Jeff Jarvis:
How much could've Ant have gotten a coffee machine for?

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, that's what I want to know.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, they had some good coffee machines.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
I think they went early. Heritage Global Partners. Oh, wait a minute, it looks like there's still some items available. Oh, only a minute left to get these six Knoll Bertoia stools. I'm kind of tempted to get this. 24 seconds left. Should I bid? It's $16,000.

Jeff Jarvis:
No.

Leo Laporte:
It's a conference room...

Jeff Jarvis:
No, we'll stop you. You have only one ad today. No, don't do it.

Leo Laporte:
It's a cone of silence that you can have your... But look how jammed in this conference room is. I wouldn't want to-

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, that's terrible. Imagine that, given our whole current COVID and ventilation crisis.

Leo Laporte:
Well, see, I wouldn't use it for that, I would turn it into a sound studio for just me.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Wouldn't that be cool?

Ant Pruitt:
You could record your next audio book.

Leo Laporte:
I could put that in the back yard.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's it, it's over.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, it's over. But I think it sold for more that 10 grand. There's still a few things left. They're winding down now, if you wanted to get... Most of the stuff I really wouldn't want. A multi-function video conference system. It fits right into your cabinet. Look how crappy this looks.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's got a... Does it come with its own chassis?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Is chassis not included? I don't know. Only $900 if you want to buy this. It's kind of crappy wiring. I was very unimpressed by the wiring used at Twitter. There is a sadness to this, though.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, there is.

Leo Laporte:
Here's the little one. For half the price, I could just get a one-man sound proof booth.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's for anybody who's in trouble. They going there.

Leo Laporte:
There were a lot of these. They say phone booths.

Ant Pruitt:
What makes it sad? They're cleaning up and bringing in new stuff.

Leo Laporte:
Really?

Ant Pruitt:
Hopefully, right?

Leo Laporte:
I don't think they're bringing in new stuff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh no, they're not bringing new stuff in. No, they're not even bringing in toilet paper, Ant.

Leo Laporte:
I feel like it's kind of... I don't know, it's sad to me. When, someday, we do the same thing for our studios, it'll be kind of... It's the end of an era.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow, was that a monitor arm? Really? That was on there?

Leo Laporte:
1500 bucks for this human scale M2.1 with M Connect monitor arms.

Ant Pruitt:
You've got to be kidding me.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, wait a minute.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, it's 200 of them.

Leo Laporte:
Oh my God.

Ant Pruitt:
There's 200 of them.

Leo Laporte:
In a bag. This is the kind of thing that you put on your sea wall to keep pigeons from landing. That's ridiculous. You'd have to figure out where every... Oh, nicely stored, Twitter. Do you think Elon came and just tore them off the wall and threw them in a box and said, "Sell that."

Stacey Higginbotham:
No. I think one of the people who he fired was probably in charge of that. Like, "F you."

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte:
Oh my goodness.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, sorry.

Leo Laporte:
You can say that.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's terrible.

Leo Laporte:
In this case, it's-

Jeff Jarvis:
No. Soon, YouTube will let you do that. It's going to be okay.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. YouTube was, for some reason, demonetizing people who swore in the first 15 seconds. It's okay, we're already more than 15 seconds in, so...

Stacey Higginbotham:
I didn't mean to. You can beep me out.

Leo Laporte:
No, we bleep you. We always bleep because we want it to be family friendly. A lot of those chairs... Some of this stuff. I don't want... 1300 bucks for a standing desk? No.

Jeff Jarvis:
Geez.

Leo Laporte:
Who's buying these? I guess some Repo Depo?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, they're commercial quality.

Ant Pruitt:
And all of this stuff is expensive.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Repo Depo is going to sell them in the warehouse.

Jeff Jarvis:
Where's the coffee machine for Ant? I want to know.

Leo Laporte:
It's gone. No, no, somebody got it. It's gone.

Jeff Jarvis:
But you can't even see what it went for?

Leo Laporte:
No, no. Once it's sold, they're gone.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh.

Leo Laporte:
So they're slowly dwindling away.

Jeff Jarvis:
The dregs. The dregs of Twitter.

Leo Laporte:
I don't know, it makes me sad. But Twitter seems to be continuing on somewhat. The biggest story this week is that they turned off the third party APIs, and there are some very upset software developers. Craig Hockenberry, who does... was it Twitterrific?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. They didn't tell anybody.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, they just turned it off last Thursday.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They were just like, "All right..."

Jeff Jarvis:
But didn't he say he was going to open it up? I can't remember.

Leo Laporte:
He also said he was going to quit.

Jeff Jarvis:
Who knows what's happening.

Leo Laporte:
He said, "I'll have a poll and I'll do what it says," and then he didn't.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So who the heck knows? But yeah, the guy who does Twitterrific was really upset. Well, so was Paul Haddad, who does Tweetbot, the Tapbots folks. They're doing Ivory, which is a Mastodon...

Jeff Jarvis:
For IOS.

Leo Laporte:
For iOS. But the Twitterrific fella quit in a huff. He was very upset. It's kind of tragic. That's sad, yeah? No communication still from Twitter's non-communications department. They fired everybody over there.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So...

Stacey Higginbotham:
That feels [inaudible 00:09:44] part of Elon Musk. He hates journalists. I mean, even Tesla for the long... Well, they had a PR person. Actually, it was a friend of mine. And then...

Jeff Jarvis:
Tough job.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. Then he left, and I don't know if he was replaced.

Jeff Jarvis:
So, I don't know what your feeds, if you're looking at them still. On mine, I'm mainly on Mastodon, but I still look at Twitter, and so now I get tons of Lauren Boebert whom I do not follow. But obviously because one journalist I know follows them, who I follow, then that is their excuse for putting her in my feed like crazy.

Leo Laporte:
I've seen a lot of people complain. So they have this new For You tab, which... They've eliminated the chronological feed as far as I can tell. Remember they used to have that little twinkling button and you could choose from chronological or latest tweets. Now they've got, very much like TikTok, a For You and a Following tab.

Jeff Jarvis:
Same as Post has. Post has that-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, my following is in...

Leo Laporte:
Is it chronological?

Stacey Higginbotham:
... chronological.

Leo Laporte:
So maybe this is this-

Stacey Higginbotham:
It is in chronological.

Leo Laporte:
Maybe this is roughly the same feeds as before. But I've seen a lot of people complain...

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't think so.

Leo Laporte:
... that the For You tab, which is not people you're following, it has gone completely right wing. I haven't had that experience, so maybe it...

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, I have.

Leo Laporte:
Maybe it's who you're following. I do see Eli.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I see less people I care about, 100%.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Mine is definitely not chronological, A. B, I have my list-

Leo Laporte:
Your following?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, following. I have my list of book history wonk that I love, as well as my COVID list. I used to spend an hour going through my book history wonks list. Now, I think all around it's showing me a lot fewer tweets.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Honestly-

Jeff Jarvis:
Cause there's not that many people [inaudible 00:11:30].

Leo Laporte:
When I go to Twitter, and I don't do it that often, but I mostly go to see what's going on. Not to see who's tweeting, but what's happening at Twitter. I'm mostly surprised at the people who are still here. I mean, honestly, really? I mean, I guess you're all-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Like Stacey?

Leo Laporte:
like the three of you are still there, so I just...

Ant Pruitt:
I'm still there. I will say this. I have been, I guess, quiet on it for at least two weeks now, and just been more of a broadcaster, if you will, over there. Because when I open it up, that whole For You stuff, or whatever this algorithm that's in place now, it's been a little bit more depressing to me and I just think I don't have time for it. It's either been more depressing or it's more stuff about celebrities who I could give two craps.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Ant Pruitt:
They're not doing anything for me, nor are they really doing anything for the world, so it's not important to me and I'm sick of seeing that. So I've just sort of been away, and I know people have been tweeting me and whatnot, and I'm sorry, I really don't have a desire to hang out in there right now. Same even with Mastodon, quite frankly, because as I scroll through Mastodon, I'm still putting in filters because there's just so much depressing news and commentary happening over there from me in my feed.

Jeff Jarvis:
You've got to follow some happier people, man.

Ant Pruitt:
I know. I got to find some people that are [inaudible 00:12:53], I guess.

Stacey Higginbotham:
When I go on Mastodon, I'll tell you and you can follow me.

Ant Pruitt:
Perfect.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm very cheerful.

Jeff Jarvis:
We're waiting for you, Stacey.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I know.

Jeff Jarvis:
We are waiting for you. It's nice there.

Leo Laporte:
We have some hosts... I try to encourage people, as you know, to move to Mastodon but if you don't move, that's fine. And I have some hosts-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'll do it eventually.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, no, that's fine. This is the beauty of Mastodon, there's no peer pressure, it's just if you want to, you can. But it's just there for you if you want.

Jeff Jarvis:
Hey, man, it's just there.

Leo Laporte:
Well, I kind of like that.

Jeff Jarvis:
I do too.

Leo Laporte:
I want to get away from this whole, I don't...

Jeff Jarvis:
Palm [inaudible 00:13:28].

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Crap. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Anyway, so that's the... We haven't done a lot of Elon stories lately because I'm tired of it and I know you are, but that is kind of... It's an interesting choice on his part. Even Jack Dorsey, who did this before, we talked about this before, when Tweet Deck was starting to be a threat and he was really worried that your buddy, Bill Gross...

Jeff Jarvis:
Bill Gross.

Leo Laporte:
... was about to buy up all the third party apps, Jack Dorsey cut off the third party API. And he says, now, it was a dumb move, it was a mistake, but a mistake that Elon... like all the mistakes that Twitter's ever made, it's destined, doomed, to replay.

Jeff Jarvis:
Make them again. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
And I feel really bad for people like Hockenberry, who does... I think it's Twitterrific, and Paul Haddad, who does Tweetbot, and the various folks who have third party apps, all of them have stopped working. Talon on Android. And especially weird because there's no communication. There was no, "We're going to do this." There was no, even, "We did this."

Jeff Jarvis:
Do you think that it was actually purposeful or something broke and now he's...

Leo Laporte:
The Information does.

Jeff Jarvis:
... using it as an excuse?.

Leo Laporte:
So, The Information got a peek at internal Slack messages. Obviously some unhappy Twitter employees sent them over.

Jeff Jarvis:
No. That wouldn't be hard to find.

Leo Laporte:
And the Slack messages were all about, "Okay, we're going to turn it off." It was the smoking gun, that they hid it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Here's the exclusive from Aaron Wu. "Musk's Twitter intentionally suspended Tweetbot third party apps, messages show." And they quote a number of internal... A senior software engineer in The Slack on Thursday night, "Third party app suspensions are intentional. This was in the internal Twitter command center, Slack, channel used by employees to handle outages and interruptions to Twitter service." So that's to let the other engineers know, "No, no, no. This isn't a bug, this is intentional." A Twitter employee working on product partnerships asked Friday morning when employees could expect a "list of approved talking points" for questions from partners related to "third party clients revoked access." There is no comms department so nobody to write those talking points. A product manager responding on Slack that morning said the company had, "Started to work on comms," but there's no estimate when it was ready. Clearly it's not.
Yeah. Nobody, none of the developers, as far as I know, have received any communications at all.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, same as I was a paying customer of Twitter with the old Twitter blue.

Leo Laporte:
You were just cut off, right?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah. Just disappeared.

Leo Laporte:
Have they taken away your check?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, mine said it cut off and it didn't cut off. It was still charging me, so I had to manually go in and fix it.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's almost worse.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. It was-

Leo Laporte:
I still have my blue check. Let me see what the... Well, it doesn't even do anything when I hover over it now. Didn't it use to?

Jeff Jarvis:
No, if you click on it. Didn't you have to click on it?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. You click it.

Jeff Jarvis:
There you go.

Leo Laporte:
See, I've gone back and forth between whether I'm notable or it's just we don't know and it's leftover. So I'm now currently...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, mine is leftover.

Leo Laporte:
... notable. I'm not currently notable again.

Ant Pruitt:
You are currently notable. Interesting.

Leo Laporte:
But I wasn't for a while. It goes back and forth.

Jeff Jarvis:
I might or might not be.

Leo Laporte:
And I violated... Look how I violated the precepts. I have the link to my Mastodon in my name.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, look at that.

Leo Laporte:
But I only have one tweet which says, "Going forward, reach me at twit.social," and it has a link to my twit.social. So I wonder if I'm getting special treatment.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow, interesting.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, in my mind... Are you ready?

Ant Pruitt:
You and Trump.

Leo Laporte:
Are you ready for the solipsistic interpretation, the self-centered interpretation? In my mind, Elon feels bad that he called himself Chief Twit, and he's being nice because he doesn't want to... He felt bad about that.

Ant Pruitt:
He doesn't want you to sue.

Leo Laporte:
Talk about self-centered [inaudible 00:17:29].

Stacey Higginbotham:
That was not to say he doesn't want... That man doesn't need a lawsuit, he's got plenty.

Leo Laporte:
He's got plenty, he doesn't need more. And I don't think he cares.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't think he worries about lawsuits.

Leo Laporte:
No, he doesn't worry about lawsuits. There is the beautiful planter, the at sign planter, which I can't remember...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, that's kind of cute.

Leo Laporte:
... but it went for tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know the exact price, but it went for a lot. Mostly because it's history.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Also, it's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It's kind of sad. It just is sad. Anyway, it's over now. Are you want to be scared by robots?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes, no.

Jeff Jarvis:
This is not scared, this is cute.

Leo Laporte:
This is cute?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, this is cute.

Leo Laporte:
Boston Dynamics.

Ant Pruitt:
[inaudible 00:18:09] Jarvis?

Leo Laporte:
It's time... Let me pause this and explain. This says it's... Boston IMX tweets, "It's time for Atlas," which is its bipedal robot, "to pick up a new set of skills and gets hands on." Do you have my audio? Let me make sure it's on and we will play this.

Jeff Jarvis:
The guy just says, "I forgot my tools." That's all.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, so...

Announcer:
I forgot my tools again.

Leo Laporte:
So he is pressing a button on a tablet. There's Atlas down on the ground, the guy's up in the air. Atlas is looking around with his laser pointer, finds a board, puts the board, backs up, then jumps and turns around. That's kind of cool. Puts the board on a scaffold. And now...

Jeff Jarvis:
Look how he walks. It's really kind of dainty.

Leo Laporte:
He runs. He picks up a little DEWALT bag with tools.

Jeff Jarvis:
Spirit in the step.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yes, he's...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Some pep in his step.

Leo Laporte:
He's got pep in his... Get on. Up, up, up. He throws the tool kit up.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow.

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 00:19:11] look first.

Leo Laporte:
Then pushes over a box, jumps onto the box, jumps...

Jeff Jarvis:
Wait, there's more.

Leo Laporte:
Whoa, does a flip onto the ground.

Ant Pruitt:
Man.

Leo Laporte:
I saw somebody tweet, "I am studying this carefully, looking for weak points for when the Terminators come. It looks like those ankles might be a place you could target."

Jeff Jarvis:
You could just try it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Achilles heel?

Leo Laporte:
Look at how skinny they are, the ankles. So, just tip for everybody, shoot for the ankles.

Ant Pruitt:
The ankles.

Leo Laporte:
Mm-hmm. The rest of it looks pretty impervious.

Ant Pruitt:
Not the gut, not the torso.

Leo Laporte:
No, definitely not the torso.

Ant Pruitt:
Hit the ankles. I would've liked to have seen the testing for this as it went up to push the wall down. What were some of the other situations that were right there? As it pushed the wall down and it knew, "Huh, I can actually land on top of that wall down on the ground." What happened if it tried to push, I don't know...

Leo Laporte:
I'm going to guess...

Ant Pruitt:
... pillow or something.

Leo Laporte:
... that they had the same guy direct it as directed the 2016 Tesla self-driving demo, and there might have been...

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, that guy.

Leo Laporte:
... a couple of takes. Okay? Might have been. So you remember, and this was tragic, the engineer in Silicon Valley who crashed into a divider and died in a fiery crash in 2018? His family is suing, and they got a statement from Tesla's director of autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy. Under oath in a deposition, he talks about the video that is still on the Tesla website. The video begins with the caption, "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons, he's not doing anything. The car is driving itself." This is the famous Paint it Black video, you see the Tesla Model X. By the way, I had a Model X at this exact time, and even I knew you can't do this. The heavily edited video shows a Model X driving around, stopping for road junctions and red lights. Nope. All the while the human has his hands near, but not on the steering wheel. Upon reaching a Tesla facility, the human leaves the Model X, which goes off to park itself, avoiding running over a pedestrian in the process.
At the time, Elon tweeted, "Tesla drives itself, no human input at all, through urban streets to highway to streets, and finds a parking spot." He went on to add, "Eight cameras, 12 ultra sonars and radar are all flush mounted and body color. Beauty remains." Well, in this deposition, Elluswamy said the intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. And again, as a customer, I couldn't get it. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system. 3D Master used to pre-program the root, where to stop, and during the self-parking demo, the Tesla crashed into a fence, which they edited out. I think this is going to be pretty persuasive to the jury because of course it was a autopilot error that killed-

Stacey Higginbotham:
My Tesla crashed into a fence.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, really?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Although...

Leo Laporte:
Was it self-driving?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, I was driving. It was a pedal error. This is a really terrible crash, too.

Jeff Jarvis:
Tesla did or you did? What's the responsibility here, Stacey? Blame the machine. Yes, we always want to blame the machine.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I know.

Jeff Jarvis:
The poor machine being told what to do.

Stacey Higginbotham:
By the way, if it crashes into a fence, it really goes all the way through that fence. It's a very powerful car.

Leo Laporte:
Wow. Was this in Austin?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Those people that... It was in Austin. It went over a parking hump. Again, pedal error. So it went over the parking hump, smashed... I'm so glad no one was on the other side. I'm so glad there wasn't a dog. And it took out that whole fence. They thought I was driving a Hummer. They were like, "Were you driving a big truck or a Hummer?"

Leo Laporte:
By the way, something to remember and somebody recently said this is a problem, these cars are very heavy, heavier than they look, because they're heavy batteries.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And there's a ton of... They come off the line super fast so you've got a lot of... What's the word I'm looking for?

Jeff Jarvis:
Torque.

Leo Laporte:
Torque. Yeah. If you accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake...

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's what I did.

Leo Laporte:
... it's not going to slowly accelerate, it's going to leap forward.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That whole thing. Because it's like 3000 pounds, so yeah, it was pretty awful.

Leo Laporte:
It's the big [inaudible 00:23:50].

Jeff Jarvis:
Was it at home or a what?

Stacey Higginbotham:
It was someone's home. And then I had to knock on the door, and they weren't home so I had to...

Jeff Jarvis:
The car hit your fence. I'm driving a Tesla, it's not my fault. Not my fault. The car did it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I did not tell them I was driving a Tesla. I just was like, "Oh yeah, it was just really scary. I'm so sorry."

Leo Laporte:
No, that happens a lot, people hit the wrong pedal. That's actually very, very common.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. It's just so much more deadly when you're driving one of these cars.

Jeff Jarvis:
Usually for very old people.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Hush your face, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Really old people.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Hush your face.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, how much damage was there to your car?

Stacey Higginbotham:
So much.

Leo Laporte:
Really? Oh.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I mean, not really, it was just expensive. You could drive. I drove the car away.

Jeff Jarvis:
Back over the hump.

Leo Laporte:
And how quickly were you able to get it fixed? That was one of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, there was a three-month thing.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. It was a lot.

Leo Laporte:
There's a long... There was, when I had it, a long wait for parts, and I just didn't like that. I thought that... It made me nervous, so...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh. Scooter X says my Tesla actually weighs two tons.

Leo Laporte:
4,561 pounds. Who was it? I just saw a story about that, that Tesla's... And all of these EVs are heavy. That's why they want to ban them in... what state is that?

Jeff Jarvis:
Wyoming.

Ant Pruitt:
Wyoming.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's not why. That's not that. That's not why, Leo.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's not why. Although the heaviness is good because they don't flip as much.

Jeff Jarvis:
They're very low center of gravity.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They're nice to drive on the road.

Jeff Jarvis:
I love them.

Leo Laporte:
But you don't want to be hit by them. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, no.

Jeff Jarvis:
I mean, look at that bridge video we had last week. One car goes up, but the Tesla's an immovable object.

Leo Laporte:
It's an immovable object. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm not moving.

Leo Laporte:
It's why not everybody should drive one, so then you'd be safe.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's the SUV argument, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, that's the logic that gets us these incredibly tall SUVs and trucks.

Leo Laporte:
Right. Well, even better, everybody should drive an electric Hummer, then you'd really be safe.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Are there electric Hummers?

Jeff Jarvis:
I'll be back.

Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah. And the battery in the electric Hummer weighs more than most cars. Just the battery. It's huge.

Jeff Jarvis:
Geez. What's the range on that sucker?

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you're going to drive a Hummer, I guess it's marginally better to drive an electric Hummer. I've seen them. They're very big.

Ant Pruitt:
They're massive too.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So, can I ask you about Wyoming because I was curious about...

Jeff Jarvis:
Oil.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You can't drive through them or you just can't sell them in Wyoming?

Jeff Jarvis:
They want to outlaw selling them. It's oil. It's all oil.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte:
But it's just one guy in Wyoming. There are actually six of them.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Six [inaudible 00:26:40] law makers.

Jeff Jarvis:
All you have is 10 people there, anyway, so...

Ant Pruitt:
But one loud person is all it takes in a lot of this stuff nowadays.

Leo Laporte:
And I think it's a very much a GOP talking point, because in California they're going to ban gas vehicles so...

Jeff Jarvis:
So we're going to...

Leo Laporte:
... ban... The same year, by the way, 2035, sales of electric vehicles.

Ant Pruitt:
They're both bogus.

Leo Laporte:
Here are the very diverse group of members of the State of Wyoming's legislature.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, that's a hair dye job. Oh.

Leo Laporte:
That's real hair.

Jeff Jarvis:
But the beard don't... You don't dye the beard, it just doesn't work. And your hair's auburn and your beard is Goodyear tire black. No. No.

Ant Pruitt:
Goodyear tire.

Leo Laporte:
One of the senator's name is Brian Boner, and...

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, that's not funny because we are mature men.

Leo Laporte:
There's nothing funny about that...

Jeff Jarvis:
There's nothing funny about that.

Leo Laporte:
... but he was on Fox, that's how I know his name. He told the Cowboy State Daily... I am making zero of this up, I just want to say. He says, "One might even say tongue in cheek, but obviously it's a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion. I'm interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life, I just don't appreciate it when other states try to force technology that isn't ready. The legislature would be saying, if you don't like our petroleum cars, well we don't like your electric cars."

Jeff Jarvis:
Our petroleum cars.

Leo Laporte:
I don't think chances of this passing our very high.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You know what? Let them do it. Let them shoot themselves in the proverbial foot. I have no problems with that.

Jeff Jarvis:
In the proverbial tire.

Leo Laporte:
It's another one of those performative, sigh, legislative things. By the way, I didn't realize this but Twitter has admitted it's breaking third party apps because of our "long standing API rules." They didn't say what rules the developers had violated, but apparently Twitter is enforcing... This was tweeted yesterday, I missed it. I should check Twitter every day, shouldn't I?

Ant Pruitt:
You should.

Jeff Jarvis:
I put it in the rundown, too. If you checked that, you'd see it, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
That's where I saw it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh good.

Leo Laporte:
Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules that may result in some apps not working. So that's the talking points. They apparently have come up with them. Craig Hockenberry, creator Twitterrific, said, "We have been respectful of their API rules as published for the past 16 years. We have no knowledge that these rules have changed recently or what those changes might be." Tapbots says, "Tweetbot's been around for over 10 years. We've always complied with the Twitter API rules. If there's some existing rule we need to comply with, we'd be happy to do so if possible, but we do need to know what it is." This is bogosity. They're just making stuff up now. Did you know that Jennifer Lopez was the reason Google created Google Images? See, I saw this headline, Jeff, and I didn't even read the story. I thought, "That's link bait if ever I heard it." This is according to...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Google.

Leo Laporte:
... a well-known website called IFL Science.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know there was that. But at least it had a quote in it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, I know. Google admitted this.

Leo Laporte:
Google Images was created because of J-Lo. This was her plunging neckline dress from The Oscars.

Jeff Jarvis:
I want to say...

Leo Laporte:
No, no, it's the Grammys. See there, Grammys?

Jeff Jarvis:
The Grammys, I'm sorry. What year? What year was it?

Leo Laporte:
2000.

Jeff Jarvis:
2000.

Leo Laporte:
42nd Grammy Awards, a low neckline dress drew a baffling amount of coverage around the world. She said, "It didn't seem that out there to me. It was a good looking dress, I had no idea it was going to be such a big deal."

Jeff Jarvis:
It is.

Leo Laporte:
But it didn't just impact regular media, according to IFL Science. It had a lasting effect on Google's search engine because...

Jeff Jarvis:
Because...

Leo Laporte:
If you think about it...

Jeff Jarvis:
People wanted to just search for the dress.

Leo Laporte:
They searched the dress

Jeff Jarvis:
And Google didn't know how to look for dresses...

Leo Laporte:
This is a quote...

Jeff Jarvis:
... so it had to understand images.

Leo Laporte:
... from Eric Schmidt. He said this in 2015. "People wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammys, where J-Lo wore a green dress that caught the world's attention at the time was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted, which was of course a picture of J-Lo in that dress. Google Image Search was born." Well, if Eric Schmidt said it, then it must be true.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, that's good enough for me.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. No, it's totally true. They even talk about it... They referenced it recently in one of their IO presentations...

Leo Laporte:
Oh.

Stacey Higginbotham:
... probably... Yeah, they talked about...

Leo Laporte:
It's kind of a cool story.

Jeff Jarvis:
It is a cool story.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's why I put it in there.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm glad you noticed it.

Leo Laporte:
A Google engineer explains this, this is in GQ, a story from a couple of years ago by Rachel Tashjian. She wore this in Grammy's in 2000 and again in 2020 with Donatello Versace at the Women's Wear Collection. And she actually... In this article, in the GQ article, they actually quote an engineer, Kathy Edwards, Director of Engineering and Product for Google Images. She says, "It wasn't overnight but it was definitely the impetus. It's completely true," she said in the Google Hangout on Friday. "But it's also not the case that this happened and the next day we said, Oh, we should build an image search engine. At that point," she said, "The company was only two years old." 2000, it was only two years old. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis:
What?

Leo Laporte:
"With a very small number of employees. And everyone at the time was, Of course we need to build an image search engine, but they weren't sure how much priority to give it. When the Lopez..." Oh, I see. This was when it was only two. Not in 2000, but before then.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, okay. Thank you.

Leo Laporte:
"When the Lopez dress..." That makes more sense, because when did Google start? '90? I don't remember.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Eight? '98.

Leo Laporte:
So it was two years old. When the Lopez dress moment happened in February 2000, "It became so clear that this was important, but they didn't have anyone to do it."

Leo Laporte:
"It became so clear that this was important, but they didn't have anyone to do it." So Google hired, that summer, a recent college graduate, Huican Zhu, as an engineer. Partnered him with Susan Wojcicki, current CEO of [inaudible 00:33:17]. She was then a product manager and-

Jeff Jarvis:
I'll be.

Leo Laporte:
I'll be. And they worked together to build it. So Susan Wojcicki was one of two people who developed Image Search and single-handedly almost launched it in July 2001. Now, actually, that's of more interest to me than the fact that it was JLo's dress than it was Susan Wojcicki who was one of the developers.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. So Wojcicki, yeah. Because we're geeks.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
We care about that. Yeah. And she's now-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I also care about her dress.

Jeff Jarvis:
She's CEO-

Leo Laporte:
You care about the dress?

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's a pretty-

Leo Laporte:
It's a nice dress.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's a historical dress.

Leo Laporte:
Actually.

Ant Pruitt:
Is it common for executives to have started out as part of a development team? Is that fairly common?

Stacey Higginbotham:
When you're small.

Ant Pruitt:
I mean, I know we have Zuckerberg, but is it for all of these big tech companies?

Leo Laporte:
The Wojcicki family's kind of interesting because her sister, of course, is 23andMe.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. And who was married to Schmidt?

Leo Laporte:
No.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, no, no. Larry?

Leo Laporte:
Sergey. Sergey.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Sergey.

Leo Laporte:
Sergey. Which one?

Jeff Jarvis:
Both. [inaudible 00:34:25] Oprah.

Leo Laporte:
And there's three sisters. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
There's three sisters. The other sister-

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, and their mother is quite amazing too. I know her. She's an educator at Palo Alto High.

Leo Laporte:
Esther.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, Esther, she's wonderful.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, she's quite well known as well. In fact, it was in their garage-

Jeff Jarvis:
It was in their garage. Right.

Leo Laporte:
... that Susan and Janet first got started. They were high school students in Palo Alto. Yeah. It's actually kind of an interesting story, isn't it? So her sister... Is it Janet? Yeah. Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki was married to Sergey, and then she founded 23andMe. And then Susan, her sister, of course, is currently CEO of YouTube. And quite successful, I might add.

Jeff Jarvis:
And the third, I think is a professor or something.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They grew up on the Stanford campus, just like Samuel Bankman-Fried. See, you can go one way or the other.

Jeff Jarvis:
A new blogger, a new Substacker. He is.

Leo Laporte:
I can't believe he's got a Substack. Of course, he has a Substack.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I can.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, of course. Of course. Wojcicki's grandfather was a People's Party and Polish People's Party politician elected as a Member of Parliament during the 1947 Polish legislative election. And her grandmother was a librarian of congress responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the United States. Very accomplished family.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
And just for you, here is a picture of the 2020 version of the dress worn by JLo. And that's Donatella Versace she's going down the runway with.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. If someone handed me something I wore 20 years ago, was like, "Let's do this again," I'd be like, "No, thank you."

Leo Laporte:
JLo's pretty amazing in that regard, I got to say. Okay. I'm going to click on this. I don't know why it says "Leo's wake-up call."

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, we talked about this last week that you could get it in your other devices, but now they're going to allow you to do a custom alarm sound. So I think that, Leo, you should record an alarm sound people can put on their Google devices and you can wake up TWiTville.

Leo Laporte:
Well, in theory, it's allowing you to record your own voice.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know, but I think you should do it.

Leo Laporte:
I could offer it for download to our club members.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. Yes. Hey, folks-

Leo Laporte:
How would I do that?

Jeff Jarvis:
Exactly. You have all kinds of technical smart people around you.

Leo Laporte:
I don't know how to talk out loud into a... There was a Stephen Fry talking alarm clock where he would wake you up in his character as Jeeves. Do you remember that?

Jeff Jarvis:
No, I never saw that.

Leo Laporte:
Let me see if I can find the sound of that. It's the Good Morning, Sir, Talking Alarm Clock. Oh, it's no longer for sale. But he would say... Oh, it was so funny what he would say. I got to play this for you, because I could say this... but frankly, if I were you, I would... Here we go. Here's somebody playing it into their YouTube. You hear birds.

Leo Laporte:
Excuse me, madam, your horoscope advises a demonstration of courage in the face of adverse circumstances. Very good, madam.

Ant Pruitt:
Okay. I like that. I like that.

Leo Laporte:
Excuse the familiarity.

Leo Laporte:
Here's another one. My favorite one-

Ant Pruitt:
Okay, Jeeves is all right.

Leo Laporte:
My favorite one is him alerting the media. Wait minute. Let's see if I can find this. You would think the people selling this device for a hundred bucks would offer you some samples, but I guess they want you to buy it first. There's 126 different messages. "Excuse me, sir, I'm so sorry to disturb you, but it appears to be morning. Very inconvenient, I agree. I believe it is the rotation of the earth that is to blame, sir." Or this is my favorite, "Shall I inform the news agencies that you are about to rise, sir?"

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay, chat room, what do you want Leo to say to wake you up in the morning?

Leo Laporte:
I'd rather have Stephen Fry, to be honest with you. I didn't realize there was 126 different ones. That's kind of awesome.

Jeff Jarvis:
That must have been a fun recording session. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
No kidding. "I'm sorry to disturb you, sir-"

Ant Pruitt:
Is it morning?

Leo Laporte:
I want Jeeves. Everyone should have a Jeeves, don't you think?

Ant Pruitt:
It is morning.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, you know what? Someone in our chat room says they have those two alarm clocks for male and female, currently in storage.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, no. Oh.

Ant Pruitt:
Male and female?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, I guess, "Good morning, madam, or "Good morning, sir."

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, I see. "Good morning-"

Jeff Jarvis:
Why are they in storage [inaudible 00:39:39]? Why don't you use it for every morning?

Leo Laporte:
Because after a while, you get very tired of it.

Jeff Jarvis:
You get sick of it.

Leo Laporte:
ThinkGeek used to sell it and then they got bought.

Jeff Jarvis:
They're very ugly though, says [inaudible 00:39:50].

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I think they look pretty good.

Jeff Jarvis:
They look plasticky.

Leo Laporte:
I'm delighted to say you've survived another night.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's the best

Ant Pruitt:
You didn't get it for the look. You get it for the sound, right?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. You don't get it for the look.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I mean, it still has to sit in your bedroom somewhere though, so I can appreciate-

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. All right, moving right along.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. I think you should run with this. I think this is a new club benefit.

Leo Laporte:
[inaudible 00:40:17]-

Ant Pruitt:
I like the idea, sir. So let's get to it.

Jeff Jarvis:
127 different ways.

Leo Laporte:
The other day after the flooding in Northern California, we had to get home and we decided to use Waze to help us wind our way through the streets to get home. And a very pleasant voice was giving us directions. And I suddenly realized this, "Oh, that's me." Lisa said, "You didn't know?" I said, "Yeah, it just sounded like a nice... I didn't realize it was me because I had recorded it years ago." I'd recorded a whole set of directions for our Waze. In fact, I posted them somewhere. They were somewhere, so people could [inaudible 00:41:00]-

Ant Pruitt:
Unbelievable.

Leo Laporte:
... but I don't think anybody did. Yeah. "Wait a minute, that's me." I'm a little clueless.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, no. Wait a minute. That sounds... Is that one of those narcissist moments? "Oh man, this guy sounds good."

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's anti narcissism.

Leo Laporte:
I didn't say it like "That sounds good." I said in my mind... I do remember saying, "Oh, that's a nice voice they chose."

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte:
He sounds friendly. He sounds friendly. I like that guy. I don't know who he is. I like that guy.

Ant Pruitt:
I like me.

Leo Laporte:
I like me. So Twitter is not dead. In fact, it looks like dozens, according to Axios, dozens of media companies have content deals for 2023.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Jesus, could you believe it? Even the ones where they still haven't let... Twitter still hasn't let their journalists back on. They're still doing stuff.

Leo Laporte:
NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NASCAR, PGA Tour, CBS Sports, Turner Sports, ESPNN, Fox, Univision, Telemundo, The Wall Street Journal, NBCU, Reuters, Axios. Oh, Axios is in this list.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, yes. Snuck in there.

Leo Laporte:
Didn't mention, "Hey, we're doing it too." Bloomberg, Forbes, Conde Nast, USA Today.

Jeff Jarvis:
Amazing.

Leo Laporte:
Amazing. Paramount, Disney. Twitter for whatever it's going through, still... And this is, by the way, the answer to the rhetorical question. Why are you guys still on there? It still carries huge amount of cultural weight. It's not over.

Ant Pruitt:
Buzz. It's all buzz.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It's far from over.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, we're in the business of buzz. These are the houses that hype built. That's why they exist.

Leo Laporte:
I kind of feel very fortunate that I no longer have to worry about buzz and I can get off of there and it's not... Yeah, of course, I had more than half a million followers, although I know that number is dwindling so any sensible... My son's yelling at me, "What are you getting off there for? You got half a million..." No, because I don't want to be there and I don't have to-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm getting a lot of new followers that I don't think are real people, or if they are real people, I don't know if I want to engage with them.

Leo Laporte:
Isn't that funny that-

Stacey Higginbotham:
And I'm not trying to-

Leo Laporte:
For all Elon said about bots, it's done nothing to discourage them.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, because I'm just... half of them are MAGA lovers or something and I'm like, "Are you real? And if you are a real, why are you following me?"

Leo Laporte:
I am down about-

Ant Pruitt:
I said the same thing. I've gotten a lot of interesting followers.

Leo Laporte:
... 50,000. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
That I'm like, "What makes me interesting for you to follow me?" But then with the whole third party API access, shouldn't that kill some of the bots?

Leo Laporte:
Maybe it should, yeah. I'm down about 10%, which is fine. Like I said, since I have-

Jeff Jarvis:
I have not moved. I've been at 175 for light years.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it might be completely organic because I've said I'm not tweeting, I'm not doing it. So that might be completely organic.

Jeff Jarvis:
But revenue, you'll see there is down 40%, a twitter executive told Twitter employees.

Leo Laporte:
Get ready. Donald Trump, according to NBC, is coming back to Twitter. So it's not just those-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I didn't follow him then. Won't follow him now.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, so not just those brands.

Ant Pruitt:
Wait a minute, so who did you say that was?

Leo Laporte:
It's this little company called NBC.

Ant Pruitt:
Again, it's all about buzz.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
They're going to broadcast something and people are going to talk about it good or especially if it's really bad. So why not be there? They're going to continue to get attention and eyeballs.

Leo Laporte:
If you're running for president, which Trump says he is, you got to be on Twitter. I note that Joe Biden posts all the time on Twitter, at least daily, right?

Ant Pruitt:
But what about Truth Social though, any word on that and it's-

Jeff Jarvis:
He's got a contractual obligation to stay off a competitor for a certain amount of time. But not that he ever pays attention to contracts, let's say that.

Ant Pruitt:
I wasn't going there.

Leo Laporte:
By the way, he's in good company with Elon Musk, isn't he? Who has not paid his bills.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. But there was a study, Leo, released December 7th, 2022 by Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwartz that had four... they looked at Twitter after Trump was kicked off. The toxicity of tweets sent by Trump followers relative to the representative sample, dropped by 25% after Trump disappeared.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
The effect is larger for pro-Trump tweets, of course. It reduced the total number of tweets, suggesting a drop in engagement.

Leo Laporte:
NBC also is saying that Trump yesterday formally petitioned Meta to unblock his account. Remember that the Meta Supervisory Board-

Jeff Jarvis:
Oversight Board.

Leo Laporte:
... say they should-

Jeff Jarvis:
Oversight Board.

Ant Pruitt:
Advisory.

Leo Laporte:
The Advisory-

Jeff Jarvis:
They said they should not make it an indeterminate and they should set a time when they decide.

Leo Laporte:
And I think that they said it was January 6th, 2023.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's about around now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. One year later the, or two years later.

Jeff Jarvis:
Just as Meta is trying to get as far away from any controversy in politics as they can, there was a big story a week ago about how they tried to get rid of all politics and it kind of backfired because it meant that only crappy outlets were there. But they're trying to get away from it. They just want puppies and parties and legless virtual human beings. That's all they want.

Leo Laporte:
A Meta spokesperson, according to NBC, declined to comment about Trump beyond saying the company "Will announce a decision in the coming weeks in line with the process we laid out." Again, their Advisory Board said, "You should reinstate him two years later," or they said-

Jeff Jarvis:
No. No, they didn't say [inaudible 00:46:56]-

Leo Laporte:
They said you should set a date and then-

Jeff Jarvis:
... set a date when you should consider... set a date when you decide.

Leo Laporte:
I believe Facebook said... this is, again, according to NBC News, ultimately decided to institute a limited ban on Trump that would come up for review after two years starting January 7th. So they're reviewing it right now.

Jeff Jarvis:
And the Oversight Board had another decision yesterday, which is interesting.

Leo Laporte:
What was that?

Jeff Jarvis:
That is that they said that you have to reconsider your, no naked female breast rule.

Leo Laporte:
This is why I let you tell us this story.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. Mainly in the interest of trans people.

Leo Laporte:
Wait a minute.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Not nursing moms?

Leo Laporte:
Wait a minute.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, that's already been there.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
They had people who were transitioning-

Leo Laporte:
Who wanted to show their breasts?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
And the board said, "Well, you ought to let them"?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yep. And you ought to reconsider your whole-

Leo Laporte:
It is kind of a double standard. I mean, a man can shows his breasts.

Jeff Jarvis:
It really is [inaudible 00:48:09].

Ant Pruitt:
Yep. I remember this story.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, it's a nipple standard because nipples are what's pornographic according to-

Leo Laporte:
But male nipples are not?

Ant Pruitt:
FCC or somebody.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Right. I mean, I get it.

Leo Laporte:
I mean, it's-

Jeff Jarvis:
It's very American [inaudible 00:48:26].

Leo Laporte:
... honestly, if you ever saw pictures of just nipples, you would be hard pressed to say that's a male nipple or a female nipple.

Jeff Jarvis:
True.

Leo Laporte:
In some cases.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Really?

Leo Laporte:
I can't remember who, somebody did that. I can't remember if it was Instagram or whatever and it was just like a bunch of nipples. I mean, if they're hairy, okay, maybe. I'm sorry we got into this conversation, really deeply regretting it. Oversight Board overturns-

Jeff Jarvis:
Because you're like Stacey in the car.

Leo Laporte:
See-

Jeff Jarvis:
You're going to try to blame the story or blame me. No, you did it. We were going fine. We were doing all right. And you went into the fence.

Ant Pruitt:
Went into the fence.

Leo Laporte:
All right. But what about this?

Jeff Jarvis:
Try another one.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Don't we have another story we could talk about?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. Yes. He's trying.

Ant Pruitt:
We are moving on.

Jeff Jarvis:
He's looking desperately for one.

Leo Laporte:
No, in fact, there was a story, and I don't have it in front of me, but I... Go ahead.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, I was going to ask what happened with the 2:30 News? Since we talk about that all the time.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, we could do that. It just was a related story that I saw on Techdirt. I'll find it. That it turns out social media didn't... the Russian who planned to overturn the 2016 election-

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. No impact.

Leo Laporte:
Didn't really have any impact. Now, they didn't say anything about Cable News, which I think probably had some impact. But as far as this study could tell, social media did not change anybody's opinion or vote.

Ant Pruitt:
[inaudible 00:49:59].

Leo Laporte:
Oh, it is in here.

Jeff Jarvis:
I thought you had it in yours.

Leo Laporte:
It's in mine.

Jeff Jarvis:
You just ignored it because you thought you had nothing.

Leo Laporte:
I did. I just went right to your stuff. Mike Masek writing, "No, of course Russian Twitter trolls did not impact the 2016 election." I feel a little vindicated because this was on my radio show back in November or December 2016. I said, "That's absurd. It doesn't make sense that a troll farm tweeting or posting on Facebook could change anybody's vote."

Ant Pruitt:
Can change the minds of people, right? How weak-minded and idiotic we are as society if that's all it takes.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Right. The study, which is-

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, that's the third person effect, which is "I'm immune. It won't affect me."

Leo Laporte:
Right. Wouldn't affect me but those jerks-

Jeff Jarvis:
... but all those idiots out there, it will affect them.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. The study published in Nature looked at whether or not Russian trolls on social media had any impact. They said, "Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure..." they didn't deny that there was a Russian foreign influence campaign.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
No, that's obvious. But they said there was no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to that media campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization or voting behavior.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's the same as the Cambridge Analytica, sheer BS. They had no impact on anything. And every researcher I know at the time said this is ridiculous.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. The problem with Cambridge Analytica was merely that Facebook allowed them to snake a bunch of information about us, but Cambridge Analytica all along have overstated their capabilities, actually.

Jeff Jarvis:
But it wasn't in violation of Facebook's rules.

Leo Laporte:
Right. Right. It was third party friends of friends information, which Facebook eventually did shut down. So yeah, I mean look, a study is only as good as the methodology and so forth. I don't know if-

Jeff Jarvis:
Josh Tucker's very good. This is a very good group.

Leo Laporte:
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know this group personally.

Leo Laporte:
Honestly, I always thought that it was in politics to say it, but I always thought... I think watching a lot of Fox News might have impacted you, but I think reading a bunch of tweets from a Russian troll farm... Yeah, I'm not surprised that didn't have much of an effect.

Ant Pruitt:
But then there's that whole element of something like a news source such as Fox or whomever are [inaudible 00:52:12].

Leo Laporte:
Trustworthy. It's trustworthy.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, they're pulling tweets. And I would also say the more people around you that are behaving in a certain way, that maybe it first it's like, "Ooh, that's extreme." But the more you see it, the less extreme it is and then Fox could pick that up.

Leo Laporte:
It does seem case.

Ant Pruitt:
Isn't that what they say about Q-anon on as well?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. Nobody said that Q-anon on was not influenced by social media. I mean, that clearly started in and was fostered by social media completely. Although I know guy who was in his yoga class, but-

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing.

Jeff Jarvis:
Let's not forget, there was another study that said YouTube was supposedly what took you down the rabbit holes. And a study found out that almost all of the traffic to these radical videos came from links from outside.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, interesting.

Jeff Jarvis:
It wasn't the algorithm that did it. YouTube was a repository-

Leo Laporte:
They were hosting them.

Jeff Jarvis:
... and that's a problem.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
But it wasn't YouTube that radicalized people. They came in radicalized looking for the good stuff.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Interesting.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm printing out tons of this research right now for the next book, so I'm going to bore you with-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't know. I mean, I see my child on TikTok and YouTube because once it figured out that they were a teenager, they started showing a lot of... Oh, what's it? There's a word for the anorexia kind of stuff.

Leo Laporte:
Eating disorder videos or-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. A lot of eating disorder videos and kind of stuff that I know that they have never been any sort of interested in or exposed-

Leo Laporte:
Do you think she might be influenced though by seeing a lot of those that maybe she'd say, "I should try not eating?"

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, they decided to uninstall TikTok, actually.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, wow.

Jeff Jarvis:
Good for her.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Ant Pruitt:
Ms. Stacey, so those videos, were they just warnings about the eating disorder or showing it as a fad or a trend?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, there are there girls who are showing what they eat in a day and then-

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, gotcha.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Talking about how much they exercise and tips, "If you eat an apple and seven almonds and then a gallon of water, you'll be full all day long."

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. There was #thinspiration. Yeah, hashtag-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Thinspo.

Leo Laporte:
Thinspo, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's what I was thinking of.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, #skinnychick. I could see, especially a young person could go, "Oh, I'll try that." I mean, I tried intermittent fasting for a while. It's easy to say, "Oh, that sounds good. That sounds reasonable. Maybe that would help me."

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, you did some crazy stuff.

Ant Pruitt:
TikTok still fascinates me.

Leo Laporte:
I still do crazy stuff. But mostly it's just the internet opens you to new ideas and some of them are not good ideas. Remember when people used to get in giant vats of super cooled liquid?

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, they still do.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They buy those now. The cold plunge pools are now a thing in The Wall Street Journal. You can read all about it.

Ant Pruitt:
I would love to have one myself. I miss them.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You just need a big old trash can.

Leo Laporte:
I'm not talking about an ice tub. I mean, I'm talking about really cold. Kevin Rose used to get in like 20 below... I mean, it wasn't just ice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, like cryotherapy.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Cryotherapy, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
They were cryo tanks.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, there's still cryotherapy, isn't there?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, but it was a fad. I think it kind of-

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, I never saw it as a fad.

Leo Laporte:
There were actually storefront places you could go, remember that?

Jeff Jarvis:
There's one near me.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
It's still around?

Stacey Higginbotham:
There's one... Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. There's a new one.

Ant Pruitt:
I know ball players do cryotherapy, but I mean it's licensed outfits.

Leo Laporte:
Well also, if you're a pitcher-

Ant Pruitt:
Some universities even have it there.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. If you're a pitcher and your arm is getting inflamed and you want to put an ice bath, I can understand that. Although there's more and more evidence that's not a good thing to do, but okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, really?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, I was going to say, and this will be my pro tip for everyone, if you end your showers with 30 seconds to a minute of cold water-

Jeff Jarvis:
No.

Leo Laporte:
No.

Jeff Jarvis:
No. No.

Leo Laporte:
No.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay. Just give me a second. Give me a second. It does make you happy.

Ant Pruitt:
I love it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It totally... And your hair will look amazing.

Leo Laporte:
It makes you happy when you stop.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, no. It'll make me so grumpy.

Ant Pruitt:
I love it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It helps with your mental happiness. It really does.

Jeff Jarvis:
Don't go to Finland. Fine. They do that in Finland. No, that's fine. I've done the sauna.

Leo Laporte:
Wait a minute. Ant, you do that?

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't do that part.

Ant Pruitt:
When I have morning showers and I do whatever I need to do in the shower, I always rinse off with cold as long as I could stay in there and I swear that first five seconds, it's painful. But then after that it's almost like just happy gas.

Leo Laporte:
Half of the-

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, you people are weird.

Leo Laporte:
Half of the TWiT team take cold showers.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes, but the younger half.

Ant Pruitt:
And I feel great. And then again, I love the ice bucket stuff. I miss those from [inaudible 00:57:09].

Jeff Jarvis:
Actually, Leo and I are 38, 39. We just don't take cold showers.

Ant Pruitt:
You jump into those, it's just healthy for the elbows and knees.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Exactly.

Jeff Jarvis:
We just [inaudible 00:57:15].

Leo Laporte:
Wait a minute. All right, I'll try it tomorrow. So what do you do here? You're in the shower-

Ant Pruitt:
For that five seconds-

Leo Laporte:
It's hot and then you just-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, but just the last 30 seconds.

Leo Laporte:
And then you just turn the knob all the way to the cold?

Ant Pruitt:
Yep.

Stacey Higginbotham:
All the way to cold.

Ant Pruitt:
And you just stay there. Grin and bear it.

Leo Laporte:
And you scream.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You may have scream.

Ant Pruitt:
And you don't scream.

Leo Laporte:
You do scream.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Scream if it helps you, just go-

Leo Laporte:
The scream is part of it probably, right?

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, because you will scream.

Leo Laporte:
Ah, sorry.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. Ask Queen Pruitt, she-

Jeff Jarvis:
That's your wake-up sound, folks.

Ant Pruitt:
Queen Pruitt has done it too-

Jeff Jarvis:
You can get that every day.

Ant Pruitt:
... and it's the funniest thing because she's never tried anything like that and I can remember her giving it a go the first couple of times and yeah, it got loud.

Jeff Jarvis:
She probably screamed, "Ant, you're wrong."

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Okay. So what do you think the mechanism is that makes this work?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, some people say-

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, it's the same as sauna stuff.

Ant Pruitt:
CNN say-

Stacey Higginbotham:
It activates the mammalian dive reflex, but I don't know if that's true.

Leo Laporte:
Dive. Dive. I'm going to dive. What does CNN say?

Jeff Jarvis:
It triggers the lymphatic system in the body.

Ant Pruitt:
Triggers the endorphins, central nervous system.

Leo Laporte:
So the lymphatic system is your kind of immune system. It's what fights off infection.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, this is from some from a site that's even less reliable than the one I gave you for JLo's dress.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
But it says that it allows for all toxins and body waste to be flushed out of the body.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, okay.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Stop. Stop. It doesn't do that.

Leo Laporte:
As soon as you say toxin, I don't buy that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, it does make your blood vessels-

Ant Pruitt:
Constrict.

Stacey Higginbotham:
... constrict. Thank you. I was like, this one. And I think it does put out some sort of endorphins because-

Ant Pruitt:
It does.

Stacey Higginbotham:
... you feel good?

Ant Pruitt:
It fires off... I don't remember if it's dopamine, but it's definitely some happy gas. You feel a difference. It's really weird but why I love it.

Leo Laporte:
Here's what NEVA artificial intelligence says-

Ant Pruitt:
Here we go.

Leo Laporte:
... "Taking cold showers can I have a number of health benefits including stimulating the immune system." That's that lymph thing. "Increasing resistance to illness, improving circulation, deepening sleep, spiking energy levels" that I believe "reducing inflammation and-"

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, get me out of here fast.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Potentially relieving depressive syndromes. Cleveland clinic's a good source. Let's read what the Cleveland Clinic says. Our cold shower's good for you. Now, this is a cold shower. I'm not taking a cold shower.

Ant Pruitt:
No, you don't take it. That's the whole point. You don't get in there and get comfortable. It has to be a shock for it to work.

Leo Laporte:
I will try it tomorrow. I will. I'll absolutely try it tomorrow. Stimulates blood flow. It's good for your overall health. Your skin gets clearer and healthier with increased circulation because the blood... okay, the blood jumps in, but there are better ways to get your blood pumping than don't involve shivering. Go for a 10-minute walk.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, have you guys done-

Leo Laporte:
I agree. I agree, there are-

Jeff Jarvis:
If you're going to do the torture part, do you do the sauna part?

Ant Pruitt:
I do. I like sauna too.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. Well, you take a hot shower and then... And also, it's great for your skin and it's great for your hair because it closes off your hair follicles so it'll close-

Jeff Jarvis:
My skin is still pink, and my hair is still white. I'm not going to [inaudible 01:00:19]-

Leo Laporte:
A clinical trial and the Netherlands found that cold showers... now, these are cold showers, not just brief ones but cold showers. 29% reduction in people calling off sick from work. Another study connected cold showers to improved cancer survival. On the mental health side, researchers found cold showers may help relieve symptoms of depression.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, that's why I started doing it and it does help.

Ant Pruitt:
That's happy gas.

Leo Laporte:
Happy gas? Okay, I'll try it.

Ant Pruitt:
That's what it feels like.

Leo Laporte:
See, now this, by the way-

Stacey Higginbotham:
And you can start with 10 seconds.

Leo Laporte:
This is exactly what we're just talking about-

Jeff Jarvis:
That's enough pain.

Leo Laporte:
This is exactly what we're just talking about. This was an experiment to see if Techdirt was wrong, that in fact you could be influenced by social media, and Leo has been.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Well, Leo is [inaudible 01:01:08]. I'm not doing it.

Leo Laporte:
Tomorrow, I'm taking a cold shower.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm not taking cold showers. I'm not walking on [inaudible 01:01:13].

Leo Laporte:
Okay. And Jeff was not. He is strong minded.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes, stubborn.

Leo Laporte:
Now, let's take a break and then we come back.

Ant Pruitt:
[inaudible 01:01:22] in our IRC does make a good point. Says ask your doc first. You may cause heart stress.

Leo Laporte:
Yes.

Ant Pruitt:
Hence, why only 10 seconds or so is totally fine because you'll feel a difference. But it has to be not a gradual turn of the knob to go to cooler temperatures, it has to be-

Leo Laporte:
If I am not here next week, you'll know why. All right. We're going to talk about the Supreme Court and Section 230. They haven't heard arguments yet, have they, on this? They're briefs coming... there's a brief from Google now, but arguments still to come. But they are hearing... You know what? This particular case is somewhat persuasive to me and I'll tell you what the debate is over when we continue in just a bit.

Jeff Jarvis:
Read the Google brief and you'll be persuaded the other way.

Leo Laporte:
No.

Jeff Jarvis:
You're obviously easily persuaded because you're going to go take a shower tomorrow in ice.

Leo Laporte:
I will tell you, the Google brief persuaded me otherwise, and I think it'll do the same with the justices, but I'll tell you why in a second. I do want to talk about... You've probably seen this and you're going to see signage and so forth. During the shows a little lower third pops up that says that the studios are brought to you by the great folks at ACI Learning. We've for years, in fact, since they were founded, talked about IT PRO, right? IT PRO is now part of ACI Learning. Together, IT PRO and ACI Learning are expanding their production capabilities. It's a match made in heaven. So now you get the content and the style of learning you need at any stage in your development.
If you want to get ahead in IT, there is no better way to do it. Whether you want individual training for yourself or you want to train your whole team, ACI Learning at IT PRO have you covered. 227,000 members of the IT PRO learning community. I suspect many of them are listeners here. We know there's a great overlap. 6,800 hours of content and now thanks to ACI Learning, there's new content in a lot of areas being added. It's pretty exciting. Of course, team training is available for CompTIA and Microsoft IT and Cisco and Linux and Apple and Security and Cloud and more. One of the most widely recognized certifications that most people start their career with is the CompTIA A plus. That's the desktop support cert. And the best way to get that cert, CompTIA courses from IT PRO and ACI Learning. It makes it easy for you to level up or your employees to level up, especially if they have... and you should have a vested interest in cybersecurity.
The most popular certs offered by ACI Learning includes CISSP, AWS, ISACA, I-S-A-C-A and CCNA. Other in-demand tech skills and certification courses offered are technical support specialist, computer user support specialist, information security analyst, and much more. I think as an individual, if you're listening, you're thinking "Those would be such great skills to bring to the job," and if you're a company with a security team or an IT team, you've got to be thinking, "I need my team to have those skills." Certs are more than just proving a skillset. They let customers, they let clients and employers see that you're committed to keeping your knowledge up to date. And if you've got an organization, it's a great way of showing your customers, "Yeah, we pay attention to this." ACI Learning and IT PRO are with you every step of the way with an IT PRO Business Plan. ACI Learning offers fully customizable training.
The dashboard is fantastic. You could track your team's results, manage your seats, assign an unassigned individual team members or group team members. You could access monthly usage reports. You'll see metrics like logins, viewing time, tracks completed and more. It's very easy to manage your teams too. You could say, "You need to study this. You guys, you need to study this." You can customize the assignments fully, keep an eye on progress, report on usage, which is helpful if you're showing the boss, "We're doing it. We're learning it." And your team will love it because it's such good quality content, fun, engaging, informative, they appreciate it. The assignments can be full courses, but they also can be individual episodes within courses and because there's transcripts for every course, you could find exactly that thing you're trying to learn or try to get your staff to learn and you get the best advanced reporting, immediate insight into your team's viewing patterns and progress. You can do it over any period of time. The reports can-

Leo Laporte:
Viewing patterns and progress. You can do it over any period of time. The reports can be very visual. Again, the boss likes pictures. Respected companies and government agencies around the globe use IT PRO and ACI Learning year after year to help them maintain their competitive edge. It's really the best name in training. Supporting organizations across more than just IT now, it's audit, IT, cybersecurity, ACI Learning keeps you and your team at the top of your game. From entry level training to putting people on the moon, ACI Learning has you covered. Maintain your company's competitive edge with ACI Learning. Visit acilearning.com. It's a great partnership, producing fantastic content that'll help you get ahead in the business and help your team learn the things it needs to know to keep your company safe.
Acilearning.com. We thank ACI Learning so much for supporting not only TWiT, but supporting the entire operation here with their studio sponsorship. We are coming to you from the TWiT Studios by ACI Learning. Thank you ACI Learning. All right, so let's first of all talk about the Supreme Court case, because it's an interesting case. It is actually about radicalization. Specifically, it is a suit against YouTube. Am I right?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
Which is why Google's brief is important. The issue is Gonzalez versus Google LLC, brought by the Gonzalez family who, let me see if I can find the facts of the case so I can... She was-

Jeff Jarvis:
It's in the brief.

Leo Laporte:
Is it in the brief? Okay, good. I'll go over the brief.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, you can find it there.

Leo Laporte:
She was one of the victims of that horrific Paris shooting, right? Let me open this brief up here so we can talk about it. Oh, it's many pages. Many, many pages.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's only 68, but it's got a handy table of contents.

Leo Laporte:
So her family is suing.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, actually it's not. It's not in there.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Petitioners contend that YouTube violated the Anti-Terrorism Act by displaying ISIS videos to users watching similar videos. In other words, recommending those videos to those users and thereby radicalizing them, causing them to become terrorists, causing this mass killing.

Jeff Jarvis:
Before that, they were perfectly normal. But go ahead.

Leo Laporte:
Well, it was in Paris. So here's the issue. Here's what I would propose. Here's what I would propose. I don't think Section 230 should in fact protect algorithmic recommendations. I want you to make the case for that, Jeff. I think Section 230 should protect me and Google against those videos on Google. But if Google says, or Twitter or Facebook, or even TWiT, if we start recommending radicalizing content, that is not... I don't believe that should be protected.

Ant Pruitt:
But where does the algorithm come from? They don't just appear on their own, right? Who's responsible for the algorithm?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Google.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, let me try to answer your question. I'm going to start not with 230, with the First Amendment. And this is a piece that I wrote in a British publication a week ago, that choice is speech. You choose who to have on this show. An editor decides, if Stacey's leaving, she knows she's in for a waffle time. It's the great thing about the Zoom thing, we can now see this. So I'll spend a minute.

Leo Laporte:
We have a gentleman's rule not to mention.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know we don't, but I think it's fun.

Leo Laporte:
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
So, because she knows, when Jeff gets going, I got four minutes, I can do it. So choice is self-speech, right? An editor, a publisher, a platform... [inaudible 01:10:16].

Stacey Higginbotham:
Jeff, I can hear you when I leave.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know, I know.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I want you to know that.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know that. I thought it was funny.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I forgot to get my water.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, water, huh?

Stacey Higginbotham:
And if you were going to explain how the First Amendment relates to Section 230, I knew I had plenty of time.

Jeff Jarvis:
You're out of here. Yeah. The point is, speech includes choice and the choice of what you choose to carry is protected by the First Amendment in this country and should be protected by the Supreme Court, forget 230. When you get to 230 and say, well, they shouldn't be protected from this, well, against what? To be sued for carrying it? Okay, but is it illegal speech? Then are they prosecuted? What do we say about that? But 230 protects them from the liability of others' actions. And I think it's absolutely vital because the point is at scale, algorithms are going to be necessary to give us what we want in recommending content. And not just [inaudible 01:11:29].

Ant Pruitt:
So that's what you're saying is because we're just trying, not we, people are trying to give their customers what they want, be it Twitter, Google, or what have you, and they're going about it from a level of code. The code should be protected and the people writing that code should be protected, the algorithm should be protected?

Jeff Jarvis:
I think so, yes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think you're wrong there. I think your argument is basically we have to trust this because it's the only way we can get content out to people at scale. So I don't think...

Jeff Jarvis:
The New York Times-

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's not right.

Jeff Jarvis:
Now uses an algorithm to recommend content.

Leo Laporte:
Here's the reason I don't. I understand what you're saying.

Jeff Jarvis:
So that's different from [inaudible 01:12:14] homepage?

Leo Laporte:
I understand what you're saying and you're right, choice is a First Amendment right, but I don't want to lose 230 protection because we went to the wall to protect the algorithm.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, that's a political question. That's not a principle question.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, but ultimately,

Jeff Jarvis:
You're negotiating already.

Leo Laporte:
But we need to negotiate because we're going to lose it. There's a strong risk of losing it. And I'll tell you what... So I'm not protecting somebody's algorithm, if that means I can't have a chat room, I can't have comments, I can't have a forum, I can't have a mastodon because none of that is any longer protected by 230.

Jeff Jarvis:
But it's not just the algorithm, right? I finally figured out a way to put this recently, is you have the left, well, you have [inaudible 01:12:58] in 230, so we're going to create a sword and a shield. A shield so that you're not liable for others' actions, a sword so that you are free to moderate and have a better discussion to get rid of junk. And we're going to give you both. Well, the left is going after the shield because they say, well, you shouldn't be protected. You should be going after this bad stuff. You should wear the bad stuff. The right is going after the sword saying, how dare you take down our bad stuff. That's our stuff. And we're going to require you in Texas and Florida to keep it up. And so it's part of that larger discussion. So I hear what you're saying, Leo, okay, let's negotiate this, but there's no negotiation with where this discussion is headed. That's the problem.

Leo Laporte:
But I've always said these algorithms are a bad idea.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, no, I disagree.

Leo Laporte:
I think they're a bad idea. I think there's a difference in editorial judgment, as in the New York Times picking what's on its front page. There's a very different thing from that. And something like what Meta, Facebook, Google, World of Warcraft do to generate more revenue by promoting extremist content, because it's,

Jeff Jarvis:
You know what? I miss the algorithm.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, you know what? Jeff, you talked about The New York Times algorithm like recommending stories to you, that's less offensive because the New York Times has an editor that puts up all of their stories. So if I'm saying from this existing curated list I'm recommending from an approved list of content.

Jeff Jarvis:
So only New York Times writers get protected, but we schmucks out here in social media and blogging don't?

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's why I'm saying with the algorithm,

Leo Laporte:
Well, wait a minute. The ISIS videos are not protected, first of all. In fact, one of Google's points is, oh, we took care of that a long time ago. The ISIS videos are not protected.

Jeff Jarvis:
And by the way, there's no proof that the people involved saw those videos.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
None.

Leo Laporte:
So okay, so maybe on the actual facts of this case, there isn't a case, but I don't want to go to the wall defending the right of these massive tech companies to use algorithms to encourage revenue growth through engagement, where the algorithms tend to point you in directions, and Twitter does this too, where you're more outraged. You just complained about what you're seeing, you seeing Lauren Boebert. The reason you're seeing,

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay. Let me answer you.

Leo Laporte:
Let me finish. The reason you're seeing Lauren Boebert on Twitter is because Twitter has decided,

Jeff Jarvis:
Because Elon Musk said so.

Leo Laporte:
Well, no, because I believe the algorithm says, look, you know what? See how excited and upset this gets Jeff, see how much more he tweets? See how many more hours he spends on Twitter?

Jeff Jarvis:
No, that's purely political.

Leo Laporte:
We need to do this.

Jeff Jarvis:
Purely political. I'm not seeing Bernie Sanders. I'm only seeing Lauren Boebert.

Leo Laporte:
Well, I would submit that Elon's right to promote Lauren Boebert to you is protected speech. The algorithm's right to promote Lauren Boebert to you,

Jeff Jarvis:
Let me give you a different scenario.

Leo Laporte:
To make more money is not protected speech.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay. Let's take economics out of this for a moment, if we may.

Leo Laporte:
We can't because that's why they do it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Wait, wait, wait, let's go to Mastodon. Now, in Mastodon, I miss an algorithm because there's stuff overnight that I missed that I wish I could see. I want an algorithm that says, "Hey, Jeff, here's the good stuff you missed." And I'm seeing some examples of this people are working on out there. The algorithm, an algorithm for algorithm's sake is not evil. An algorithm can be done badly in the case of Lauren Boebert and I guarantee you that's purely political, not economic, but whatever. But an algorithm, if we demonize algorithms, if we demonize math, if we demonize knowledge, that's going to be a bigger problem here. And I can see in an activity pub world where there may be five or six algorithms that I will choose to have because they find stuff that I care about and they're not economically motivated and I can choose them and they're optional and they're transparent. And I know what I'm getting. My point is algorithms aren't evil. So maybe what you're saying is advertising is evil. Well, that's a different problem.

Leo Laporte:
I think the fact that Jeff Jarvis is too lazy to scroll back through his feed is a lousy reason for us to defend algorithms on any platform.

Ant Pruitt:
I have no problem with the algorithms. My problem is the algorithms are being forced. I should be able to just go through chronological feed.

Leo Laporte:
I'll submit to you, the real problem with algorithms is what they're optimizing for. So if an algorithm is merely optimizing to surface the stuff that you would've been interested in overnight, that's benign. But if the algorithm, and I submit this is what it's being optimized for, is to generate more engagement and hence more revenue.

Jeff Jarvis:
But you just demonized algorithms as a whole.

Leo Laporte:
No.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
No.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's a business decision.

Leo Laporte:
I'm not demonizing algorithms as a whole. The problem is we can't impute what the intent is of an algorithm, but I can guarantee you that that's what happens. They don't algorithmize your tweets that you see overnight because, oh, I think Jeff would be interested in this. There's nobody doing that.

Jeff Jarvis:
Pre Musk, I liked the algorithm. I chose the algorithm over the fun. It was good.

Leo Laporte:
And understand how it works from a computer programmer's point of view. It's far too hard to write that algorithm, but here's an easy algorithm to write. How much time did Jeff spend on the platform yesterday? All right, let's tweak it. Did he spend more time? Yeah, let's tweak it. Did he spend more time? And that's how it does. Because no programmer is going to write in, well, this person's interested in A, B and C, so we should give him more dog pictures. He likes those.

Jeff Jarvis:
So let me tell you this-

Leo Laporte:
That's not how it works. It's much easier and this is how every single algo works on every single social platform, including TikTok, including World of Warcraft, including Google, Facebook. Trust me, I understand how it's coded is it's directly tied to engagement, directly tied to [inaudible 01:18:37].

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm going to give you a good algorithm right now. If you go to, @colarusso_algo@law.builders on Mastodon, this is an algorithm that goes through this guy's feed.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, but no business is implementing that because that's not what a business uses its business for.

Jeff Jarvis:
I told you, there's nothing wrong with an algorithm.

Ant Pruitt:
Its all about profit.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, profits, the New York Times makes a profits too. Profits not evil, you communists.

Ant Pruitt:
No, it's not evil.

Leo Laporte:
Absolutely. I'm not going to the wall to defend Google or Facebook or Twitter's right to keep us engaged by keeping us outraged in order to protect section 230. That is not going to happen.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, I think you've thrown the baby out with the constitution. You've just gone over the line, in my opinion.

Ant Pruitt:
Stacy, Jarvis, it would be fine, again, if the algorithm wasn't just spitting out. Again, I started the show saying, I'm not really on Twitter or any social media and much nowadays unless I'm just broadcasting because what's being presented to me is a bunch of depressing and angry stuff.

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't know how you get that because it's not happening with me, my friend. So I'm not sure what's happening.

Ant Pruitt:
I hate that. Normally I pop it open and I just see my community of people. But now what I'm seeing is my community of people are angry because they've been fed something and it's just a vicious cycle of so many depressing stories, or so many upset stories.

Jeff Jarvis:
You also don't like the news, right? You've said the same thing about news.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, right. And I could say the exact same thing about local news because if I turn on the news is pretty much the same way.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And just because the algorithm may be working for you, Jeff, doesn't mean it works for everybody.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm not saying it does, but it also means it doesn't not work for everybody. And so if you want to eliminate the algorithm for me too, you've taken away a tool that I find useful.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, they take it away. But, that's like arguing like, don't take away something that benefits me even if it harms others. That's silly.

Ant Pruitt:
No, no. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is,

Jeff Jarvis:
The speech we're talking about too.

Ant Pruitt:
Give me choice platforms.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you there.

Ant Pruitt:
Give me choice. Let me just do the chronological old school way of going back and seeing what people posted that actually give a care about versus just suggesting things to me because everybody else is talking about it. Give me a choice.

Jeff Jarvis:
Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard argued, I was in the room when he argued at the Facebook at, pardon me, Davos, when I used to get invited, where he said, you know what you should do? You should give everybody a dial. And if they want to choose the Disney algo that's all cleaned up, or they want to choose the Alex Jones algo, make that the responsibility of the user and then you're going to get in less trouble, by the way, because the users, they chose it. It wasn't forced on.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, but users are choosing it on an engagement. I mean, that's kind of what Leo's dial is, or Leo's thing is.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, and that's their right. They want to watch Alex Jones. Well, let them watch Alex Jones. I think he's awful.

Ant Pruitt:
It's a choice.

Leo Laporte:
No one's saying they can't watch Alex Jones or even ISIS videos. But what I'm saying is it shouldn't be promoting those completely. By the way, you need to understand how computers and algorithms work, Jeff, before you start defending algorithms.

Jeff Jarvis:
You also need to read some research on this that says that this is not what's happening on YouTube.

Leo Laporte:
Well, I'm just saying it's a lot harder to write an algorithm and almost a fail, look at the recommendation engines, by the way, how poorly they do. Those do not work. What works really well is a feedback loop between your time spent, the amount of engagement, the amount of tweeting, the amount of tweets you read and the content. And it doesn't care about what the content is. It just says, well, when we serve him this, he spends more time here. So we should give him more of that. That's an easy algo to write. That's how TikTok works. That's how every algorithm I've ever seen on social works.

Jeff Jarvis:
I like my TikTok.

Leo Laporte:
The problem is, if you look at the Netflix recommendations, they suck. You know why? They don't have that feedback loop? They're trying to recommend something based on your interests. That doesn't work.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's also a lot of sucky Netflix programming. But that's another story. Sp depressing.

Leo Laporte:
I could tell you exactly how all the algorithms on the social networks work. It has nothing to do with goodness.

Jeff Jarvis:
But I'm saying, you're setting a precedent here, in wanting the Supreme Court to say, "Algo evil." You're setting a precedent that affects so much more. And so I'm not willing to die on that hill. You are, I'm not. You're going to take a cold shower. I'm not going to.

Ant Pruitt:
I don't want to say, algo evil. I do want to say allow me to step away from it if I want to.

Jeff Jarvis:
And I agree with that. I agree with that, absolutely.

Ant Pruitt:
And the recommendation stuff, that is a whole different ball of ice, like you said, Mr. LaPorte. I think that takes more effort on the consumer side of things because yeah, YouTube used to be pretty bad for me. Netflix was pretty bad. But the effort that I did with hitting those stupid thumbs up, thumbs down and all of that on the things that I watched, it did tend to make a difference after a while. So now the stuff that I get is useful. But everybody's not going to do that because most people have a life, I don't.

Leo Laporte:
You're gaming the algorithm and you can game the algorithm, but you can only game it temporarily. They know perfectly well eventually you're going to give up and just watch what we tell you to watch.

Ant Pruitt:
Their throw that, number one, what is it that says, number one in the US right now.

Leo Laporte:
Just because big tech does it?

Ant Pruitt:
[inaudible 01:24:12], I don't want to watch it.

Leo Laporte:
Just because big tech does it or doesn't do it, doesn't mean it's right or wrong. I think that is a mistake. I'm not going to buy into that. But they don't have an interest in promoting the social wheel. They have an interest in making money, and that is the capitalist way. And I don't think that that has anything to do with free speech or protected speech or Section 230.

Jeff Jarvis:
But well, what about every book publisher? What about your company right here? What about every newspaper? What about every magazine? What about every TV network? They all make money.

Leo Laporte:
Do you think they should have no liability for the social consequences of their algorithmic choices? Because that's what section 230 does, it takes away all liability.

Jeff Jarvis:
230 is wise. It doesn't take away all liability if you have liable,

Leo Laporte:
Well, it takes away the liability for those choices.

Jeff Jarvis:
For those things that are done by others outside on the platform and without that, as there's a great quote in the Google brief, which I have up on the rundown. We would end up with nothing but billboards. We'll end up with nothing but absolute pap and crap if this goes away. Because no one's going to take the liability of making choices.

Leo Laporte:
I completely agree with you.

Jeff Jarvis:
All they're going to go is collapse.

Leo Laporte:
That's why we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Screw Google, screw Twitter, screw TikTok and their creepy algorithms. Let's protect my chatroom, my mastodon, where it's not algorithmic, but I need to be protected so that I am not liable for things people post there. That is absolutely necessity. I agree with you. It would be the end of the internet if section 230 went away. Your attempt to defend an indefensible algorithm is the problem. Not what,

Jeff Jarvis:
Again, I'm going to go back to the research, and this is what Google says in the brief is that there's a lot of accusations being presumed here and made that aren't backed up by the facts. And so on that basis, on the basis of, get ready Ant, get ready Ant, Ant I'm telling you, get ready, on the basis of such moral panic, we can lose rights at a greater level. See, I think Ant didn't have a cold shower this morning. He was a little slow on the uptake there.

Ant Pruitt:
That wasn't me. That's this dag gum computer that,

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, you're blaming the,

Ant Pruitt:
[inaudible 01:26:32] at some point.

Jeff Jarvis:
The Tesla too. Huh?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Blaming the Tesla.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm sorry. I'm Sorry.

Ant Pruitt:
Blaming the Tesla.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm sorry. That's wrong. You confessed an embarrassing moment in life and I shouldn't [inaudible 01:26:47].

Stacey Higginbotham:
And you just kicked me while I was down.

Jeff Jarvis:
I did. I did. I'm sorry.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's totally, totally as I expected, no less.

Jeff Jarvis:
Or no more. All right, Leo. I think we've set our boundaries here.

Leo Laporte:
What else is going on?

Stacey Higginbotham:
We have not really, I mean, that was a Google story. I feel like we haven't talked about tech.

Jeff Jarvis:
We've got other Google stories.

Leo Laporte:
About which? About Heck?

Jeff Jarvis:
Tech.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Tech. Tech. Do we want to talk about all the AI? You've got a bunch of ChatGPT and stable diffusion stories.

Leo Laporte:
I did think Nick Cave's, take down of chatGPT is hysterical.

Jeff Jarvis:
Explain to the folks.

Leo Laporte:
So people have, I guess it's become a thing to post for some reason, lyrics written in the style of Nick Cave written by ChatGPT. So somebody asked Nick Cave, hey, look at this. The depths of the night, I hear a call, a voice that echoes through the hall. It's a siren song that pulls me in, takes me to a place where I can't begin. I am the sinner, I am the saint, I am the doctors. I don't know. Anyway, for whatever, Nick Cave responded on his personal blog, "What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary, but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is on the surface, indistinguishable from original, but it would always be a replication, a kind of burlesque."
Now, this is the important part, but by the way, this is completely obvious to everybody who has anything to do with this stuff. But Nick Cave, you deserve the right to say this, "Songs arise out of suffering. By which I mean they're predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation. And well, as far as I know, algorithms don't feel. Data doesn't suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being." Well, to which I respond, "Well, duh."

Jeff Jarvis:
Duh.

Leo Laporte:
It has been nowhere. So the reason people have embraced this, and it's gotten a lot of traction, is it's like an anthem for humanity in this world of machines.

Jeff Jarvis:
John Henry. I'll sing a song and beat you.

Leo Laporte:
"It has endured nothing. And it has had not the audacity to reach beyond its limitations like we do. And hence it doesn't have the capacity for a shared transcended experience." We should get John Perry Barlow's ghost to read this. "As it has no limitations for which to transcend ChatGPT's melancholy role is, it is destined to imitate and can never have authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become. Again, you're fighting a fight nobody's trying to fight.

Jeff Jarvis:
This is why they chose you to make fun of, through this mechanism. Because you take yourself too seriously.

Leo Laporte:
That's pretty funny.

Jeff Jarvis:
Stacy was heading this toward, I think the suits really do raise some, a lot of fascinating issues here. Because you've got Getty suing Stable Diffusion.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Because Stable Diffusion has many, many Getty Images in its database. And Getty knows this because the watermark is, it's Greeked, but it's there. So it's obvious. But of course, what's also obvious is all of those images were posted publicly on the internet.

Stacey Higginbotham:
What if Getty, what if I bought a license to Getty and used it to train Anette.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's interesting.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Because right now our IP laws don't have anything saying you could do that. I mean, we had an IP change, we rewrote contracts for the internet and maybe we need to rewrite our contracts for creating content for a ChatGPT era, Stable Diffusion era.

Ant Pruitt:
Good point.

Jeff Jarvis:
So the line, what is it here? The one where I say it's a point by point. Refutable? Rebuttal?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Thank you, Ant.

Leo Laporte:
82.

Ant Pruitt:
Good point.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. Goes down to exactly what Stacy's saying is that it raises issues. And the problem is the suit says that ChatGPT is a collage. And what this reputation is, it's anonymous, I don't know who did it. Says, no, that ChatGPT stores no photos. It looks at this huge scrape of the web and looks at stuff and abstracts from it, and then uses that abstraction to make stuff. And so copyright just doesn't bill for this. To Stacy's point.

Ant Pruitt:
What derivatives?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. can you say that, no, no, no, you're not allowed to be inspired by that. No, no, no. I have the right to tell you, I'm Nick Cave and you cannot be inspired by my song. You cannot do that. I don't know.

Leo Laporte:
No, I mean it's just like, obvious. I guess if you post it publicly and you get scraped. I mean, I feel for the artists. On my Google Home device, I have the Google Arts paintings and stuff on there. And there are a lot of classic old paintings rotating through. And all of them look like Stable Diffusion now to me because,

Ant Pruitt:
Or Ordinate Journey. They all have their own aesthetic now.

Leo Laporte:
Well, it isn't their own aesthetic. That's the artist's point. It's our aesthetic. And yeah, this is the problem with all AI. It's trained on data that it gets from somewhere, whether it's face recognition that doesn't have enough people of color in it, or it's using artist's images that it's scraping from the internet. It needs data to do what it does. I mean, I don't know if it's, I mean the courts, who knows what the courts are going to do. It's going to depend-

Jeff Jarvis:
They're going to get so confused by this.

Leo Laporte:
It's going to be very much of the points of view of the judges and juries that get to rule on this because [inaudible 01:33:14].

Jeff Jarvis:
So where's these truths?

Leo Laporte:
Advisors. Yeah. So I would say, and China's trying to regulate AI DeepFix. This is absolutely going to be for the next decade, a big arena of discussion. This is funny because we really thought it was going to be biotech that by now we would be roiled in court cases over genes, patenting genes, modifying genes. Should people be allowed to choose what sex their baby's going to be, let alone how smart they're going to be and what color their eyes are. And it didn't happen. It will, I guess at some point. But this is what happens with new technologies. We have to, as a society, figure out what surprises you. It surprises you, and now we have to figure out, well, what do we do about it?

Jeff Jarvis:
So let me ask you tech,

Leo Laporte:
I just want to say, I want to see more bare breasts on Facebook.

Jeff Jarvis:
See, you got away from it, Leo. You got away from it. And then you just, you couldn't help getting the pedals confused and you went through another fence. You didn't learn the first time you went through the fence.

Leo Laporte:
It's Tesla's fault.

Jeff Jarvis:
Let me ask you a question.

Leo Laporte:
Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone woke.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, I'm sure they can train it to be anti-Semitic soon enough.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, no problem. We can do that. I mean, there is a lot, of course, I'm not dismissing the issue. There's a larger issue. I mean this a whole issue of,

Jeff Jarvis:
Stochastic parents. Parents, we talked about that.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Gibaru brought this up. It's more than a year ago now.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, if you want to make it better, one argument, I did this just to be provocative on Macedon, then you could say that every single book should be in the learning set because books are better than the web of course, than Glick went after me on Mastodon, as a result.

Leo Laporte:
I'm kind of a fan of the idea of letting this, this is my personal opinion, this could be a judge's opinion that's going to decide it, or a jury's, but my personal opinion is, this is so new. This is kind of what you say about the internet. Yeah, they're hazards. But let's at least let this go and see what happens.

Jeff Jarvis:
Let's play it out a little bit.

Leo Laporte:
Let's play it out.

Jeff Jarvis:
What do you think about code and co-pilot. Is that different from being inspired by?

Leo Laporte:
No, it's exactly the same. Co-pilot is more obvious because it's lifting. But again, it's the same issue, which is, it's code that is put on GitHub publicly, so it's available to anybody who wants to look at it. And that's all it's doing is scraping that. And yeah, I mean, when you ask a co-pilot to write some code, it's somebody else's code that it's pasting in there. Something very similar to it. They're smart with, they've done something interesting with ChatGPT. It's more synthetic. I don't think it's quite as clearly lifted from somebody else.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. You're right.

Leo Laporte:
Now, Alex Kantrowitz, and we were trying to get him on Twitter. Unfortunately, he's traveling right now. We'll get him on and we have him scheduled in a couple of months. But he's the guy who does the big technology blog. And he had a very interesting story about getting plagiarized by what turns out to be a Substack written by an Ai. And he has the quotes to prove it.

Jeff Jarvis:
How close is it?

Leo Laporte:
It's a hundred percent. So let me see if I can, this is a big,

Jeff Jarvis:
Was it ChatGPT, or was it? Or was it-

Leo Laporte:
Well, we don't know because,

Jeff Jarvis:
Lesser brand?

Leo Laporte:
And by the way, I will also add, I got sucked in by it. I actually bookmarked the fake, it's a new subset called The Rationalist. And you might have seen this too. It published a post, which with a very, I thought, a very provocative title, which caught my eye, "The Creator Economy, the top 1% in everyone else. The Creator Economy's middle class myth, why only the top echelon of online creators are able to make a living." I bookmarked this. I bookmarked passages from it. I was going to talk about it on this show until...

Jeff Jarvis:
We could get into an argument about that.

Leo Laporte:
Until I saw Alex's post, in which he said, "Over the weekend, a new Substack called The Rationalist, lifted analysis in writing directly from Big Technology. It plagiarized a post on the Creator Economy, which we'd covered days prior." But here's why I saw the fake post. It went viral. It hit the front page of Hacker News, sparked a conversation.

Jeff Jarvis:
We know it was made by AI or just a bad plagiarist?

Leo Laporte:
Well, I think Alex, so what made the case of the, this is from Alex's blog post, or the Substack post. "What made the case of The Rationalist particularly striking though was its author, an avatar by the name of PETRA, admitted they'd used AI tools to produce the story, including those from OpenAI, Jasper, and Hugging Face. They said it said, or the human behind it said, well, English is not my native language.
So I asked these tools to help me translate what I was saying. But if you, here's the quote, for instance, from Big Technology, from Alex's story. "With the days of zero-interest-rate froth ending, the investments are becoming more difficult to justify."
Two days later, The Rationalist wrote, "With the end of zero-interest-rate froth, those investments are becoming more difficult to justify." I think that's a hundred percent plagiarized. It just slightly paraphrased.

Jeff Jarvis:
In fact, it's almost so bad, it looks human.

Leo Laporte:
Aha. Online content creation rights, Alex, is still mostly viable for the very top echelon of online creators. The Rationalists said, only the top echelon of creators are able to make a viable income. That's a little bit better paraphrase.

Leo Laporte:
...viable income. That's a little bit better paraphrase.
Honestly, the AI did a better job of link baiting me. I didn't see... I subscribed to Alex's newsletter, but I didn't think I [inaudible 01:39:14] this article.

Ant Pruitt:
I would have done the same thing.

Jeff Jarvis:
These damned algorithms.

Ant Pruitt:
I would have totally clicked on that article and read it.

Leo Laporte:
It's a great headline. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
It's fascinating, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Anyway, Alex was pissed. But as usual with Alex, he's not taking it personally. He's really writing about, "Well, this is an issue. Given The Rationalist's success," he writes, "more advanced efforts to copy and remix others' work with AI will likely take place. It should be easy to improve. The Rationalist was sloppy, lifting clauses word for word. But as publications with similar intent refine their systems," and I think we're getting close to that already, "they'll be able to remove all traces of the original writing," for which you could substitute painting, "and just pass along the ideas, and it shouldn't be hard to automate either."
Imagine-

Jeff Jarvis:
I bet this was more human than machine, but the point stands that the machine will do a better job of it.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. "Imagine AI remixing," he says, "the Financial Times' 10 most read stories of the day or the information's VC coverage and making the reporting available without a paywall." He also reminds us that... and we talked about this last week. And actually I had the editor-in-chief of CNET on on Sunday and asked her about it, AI is already writing stories, fresh stories, for CNET 75, stories for their personal finance section. She had... Connie Guglielmo was on the show and I asked her about it, and she said, "Well..." And she wrote a blog post about it. She said, "There are a lot of stories real reporters don't want to write because they're so boring and dull and mundane."

Jeff Jarvis:
True.

Leo Laporte:
"So what we did is we had an AI write them, then had a human review it for factual content and to rewrite it so it's better written."

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, this is the fascinating thing around education now, where NYC public schools, we talked about it last week, outlawed it and others are trying to outlaw it. But the smart educators are saying, turn out the AI stuff and then have the students judge it and grade it, and that's smarter.

Leo Laporte:
Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information, told Alex... By the way, note that I am quoting Alex's stuff verbatim, but I am giving him credit. That's what-

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
This is how we make a living, is we take... I don't do any enterprise reporting. We take other people's reporting and we comment.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We know.

Leo Laporte:
Thank you, Stacey. You do, I don't.
Jessica says, "Our competitors rip us off all the time, essentially remixing stuff and sharing the information. Subscribers are smart to get it from the source, but I'm watching all this with fascination of course." I am sure Alex and Jessica, both of whom have been on TWiT, know what we do and understand and I always attempt-

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, you're promoting them. It's just like the Google or Facebook, you're promoting them.

Leo Laporte:
I hope I'm promoting them.
I subscribe to both and I hope that others do and read the original, but we are commenting on it. We're kind of glossing what they wrote.

Ant Pruitt:
You're clearly psyched-

Stacey Higginbotham:
[inaudible 01:42:17] Yeah, that's like TV news. But as a written site, there is a vast difference between... At Gigaom for example, I would usually do a link to somebody's reporting and a quick insight, and then I'd go off and do... If you're writing three to five stories a day, you can't do original reporting on all five. It's not possible. But I still think you should still do some of your own original reporting.

Leo Laporte:
I'm not a reporter. That's not what I do.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, no, but you do have people... So your value that you do, is you test things out. So you play with devices and you figure out when... It may not be on this show for example, but you have shows where you've done what I think of as reporting.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. But mostly what I bring to the table is years of experience doing that-

Jeff Jarvis:
Experience and perspective.

Leo Laporte:
Attaching that on top of other people's work. Should I stop doing what I'm doing? You think [inaudible 01:43:20] immoral?

Jeff Jarvis:
No. No.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't think it's immoral, no. You're quoting other people.

Jeff Jarvis:
I got a book coming out. I need this show to be around until it comes out.

Leo Laporte:
You see, he's the algorithm.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You're audience-

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm the capitalist.

Leo Laporte:
You know those ads where the guy plays Mayhem and-

Ant Pruitt:
Yes. I love those commercials.

Leo Laporte:
I love those. They're on football, that's why you guys don't see them probably. And he's like a mouse running around the house causing you to jump, and scream, and knock over the Christmas tree, and cause a fire or he's-

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, that guy. The insurance. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Is it Progressive? I don't even remember.

Ant Pruitt:
Progressive.

Leo Laporte:
I don't even know what the insurance company is because the ads are too good, I don't pay any attention. But I think somebody should do algorithm, and go around and cause havoc and mayhem. Maybe we can get that guy to do it. He's very good as Mayhem.

Jeff Jarvis:
Maybe we can. He was Tina Fey's boyfriend on 30 Rock.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I didn't know that.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh really?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes, he was.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He was Dennis. Was his name Dennis?

Leo Laporte:
Dennis. I think so, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, so Leo, are you scared of what Reid Hoffman demonstrated this week?

Leo Laporte:
I think it's wrong what Reid Hoffman did. But all right, let's talk about that.

Jeff Jarvis:
I was going to suggest we try to do it on this show. They beat us to it.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, yeah. Others have done this too. In fact, we-

Jeff Jarvis:
It's a gimmick. It's a gimmick.

Leo Laporte:
We played, I think on this show, a podcast featuring Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs that was generated by AI.

Jeff Jarvis:
But that was trying to fake you out, that they were them. Whereas Reid is talking to ChatGPT as a guest.

Leo Laporte:
Well, it wasn't though. The people who do that podcast, the whole podcast is generated and they say it's generated, and these are generated voices. See, this is where it's really going to get weird, when you get good enough to create the content artificially and make it sound real, or even in time, look real. So that you could be watching a show like this and not know if it's a human doing it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. But what Reid was doing was trying to interview the technology.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 01:45:13].

Leo Laporte:
Reid Hoffman is the founder of Netflix, who's now an investor.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, not Netflix. LinkedIn.

Leo Laporte:
LinkedIn, sorry. I confuse him with Reed Hastings, who was the founder of Netflix.

Ant Pruitt:
Hastings.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, he's LinkedIn founder, who is now a VC at Greylock. And the Greylock Greymatter podcast is an interview with ChatGPT. It's a gimmick. I mean, I wouldn't-

Jeff Jarvis:
It's a gimmick. He asked the question, it came back. He used artificial voice to come back and turn it into what sounded like a podcast.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. "Let's start with talking about the Turing test," says Reid. "Perhaps you can kick us off with a description and then the chatbot says- [inaudible 01:45:47]

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, you want to listen to it?

Leo Laporte:
Should I play a little bit of it?

Jeff Jarvis:
Do you want the voices? Just hear what the voices- [inaudible 01:45:51]

Leo Laporte:
Do you think Reid will take us down? I don't know. Let me skip that.

Speaker 2:
And identify patterns and correlations that may not be immediately apparent to humans.

Leo Laporte:
So... no stop.

Speaker 2:
Which can help to drive new insights and discoveries.

Leo Laporte:
Is that uncanny valley?

Speaker 2:
AI can also be used to develop and test hypotheses and models, and to optimize and improve existing hypotheses and-

Leo Laporte:
It's not bad. I'm going to guess that Greylock has an investment in the technology used to create that voice.

Jeff Jarvis:
I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Leo Laporte:
That's why I don't listen to podcasts from venture capital companies. They often have a hidden agenda.
Yeah, it's a gimmicky kind of thing, I wouldn't do it.

Jeff Jarvis:
No.

Leo Laporte:
We spent a lot of time reading poems written by ChatGPT and stuff. It's very interesting.

Jeff Jarvis:
It was fun for a while.

Leo Laporte:
I actually asked this on Windows Weekly earlier, and I'm wondering what you guys think. We've been talking a lot about, "Oh, it's going to be..." And I've been saying it's a paradigm shift, we're at an inflection point, it's a Cambrian revolution of AI, suddenly you see art and text being written very credibly by AI, suddenly we are having this turn. And I've been saying that, but I'm also thinking it could be just another AI winter we're just heading into blithely. This happened before. Remember, we thought cars would be able to drive themselves by now and they can't. As Stacey has proven.

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 01:47:17]

Leo Laporte:
What do you think Stacy, is this a turning point in the AI or is this just a gimmick? A magic trick?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm having the biggest allergy sneeze attack, so...

Leo Laporte:
That's why I... Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, I think this is legit and real. Kind of how we had this burst of innovation after 2012 when we finally managed to create viable image search. I think this sort of thing... it's easier than self-driving for one thing. So I think this is real. I think we're going to see a lot more benefits from it, and I do think it's going to be, I'll call it sudden, because I think it's going to be sudden compared to the launch of the printing press, for example. But I think in the next five years, we're going to see some real shifts in the type of content and the business models around content creation.

Jeff Jarvis:
Did you say Gutenberg?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I did. I did. Well, I just talked about the printing press, but yes, Gutenberg.

Ant Pruitt:
Gutenberg, yes.

Leo Laporte:
Well, please. If you're going to say the printing press-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I didn't want people to do shots. I'm rude, I know.

Jeff Jarvis:
Take a drink.

Leo Laporte:
I want a drink.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Drink.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. I think Stacy, really what the CNET story does, does it commodify... is it the final commodification of content. Everything in writing and content are special. Reporting's special to your point. But is writing, is blathering special anymore?

Leo Laporte:
No. Mandy [inaudible 01:48:49] says, and she's right. "Radio is a gimmick, until it wasn't."

Ant Pruitt:
Yep.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, true.

Leo Laporte:
Google and everybody going all in. Microsoft's rumored to be putting $10 billion into OpenAI. Satya Nadella speaking at, it might have been Davos, somewhere like Davos, admitting... he didn't say the $10 billion number, but he said, "Yeah, we're absolutely want to start incorporating artificial intelligence into all of our products."

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, they're going to add it into Azure. Azure? Azure.

Ant Pruitt:
Azure.

Jeff Jarvis:
Azure.

Leo Laporte:
Azure, and also into Office, rather. Microsoft 365. Here's Google's blog post, "Why we focus on AI (and to what end)."

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, it's new.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I would love a ChatGPT auto response that's polite to emails, that I could just be like, "Boom." I have talked about my, I wanted a macro for I will honor the embargo, but, "I don't cover this. I don't care." Or, "Yeah, let's go schedule this."

Leo Laporte:
I like this post from James Manyika, who's the senior vice president for Technology and Society. It's pretty thoughtful. They say, "We believe that AI is a foundational and transformational technology that will provide compelling and helpful benefits to people in society, through its capacity to assist, compliment and empower, and inspire people in almost every field of human endeavor." I would like to point out Google's very good at taking its money making efforts, and making them good for people. "It has the potential to contribute to tackling some of society's most pressing challenges and opportunities from the everyday to the more creative and imaginative. At the same time, we understand that AI, as a still emerging, technology poses various and evolving complexities and risks. This is what a high schooler would write when asked about, "Did slavery cause the Civil War?"

Jeff Jarvis:
You'd think the AI wrote it.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. "Our development use of AI must address these risks. That's why we as a company consider it an imperative to pursue AI responsibly. We're committed to leading and setting the standard and developing and shipping useful and beneficial applications, applying ethical principles, grounded in human values and evolving our approaches as we learn from research experience users in the wider community. We believe in getting AI right." Is this appropriate that this is what they would say? It's not-

Jeff Jarvis:
So the White House, remember a few weeks ago, put out a white paper on principles for AI, ethical AI. Five simple principles; safe and effective systems, protection from algorithmic discrimination and inequitable systems, protection from abusive data practices and agency about how personal data is used, knowledge of when automated system is used, understanding of its impact.

Leo Laporte:
That's very important.

Jeff Jarvis:
Ability to opt out of the automated system, Ant, or a human alternative. [inaudible 01:51:40]

Leo Laporte:
Could you make a law and should you make a law that says you must disclose when AI is used?

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, I used it in spell checker. I used it in translate. Where's the line?

Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's a good point.

Jeff Jarvis:
What does use mean?

Ant Pruitt:
Good point.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I do think having a human in the mix is key because as we've seen in all of these things, it doesn't capture everything, and people do get screwed over. And you look at things like loan approvals. You can look at even things like parole. I can't remember what state it was, but the judges didn't have the ability to overturn bail for the AI generated bail. So even if they looked at the situation, were like, "Hmm, this is not right. Or this might be kind of racist." The judges had no options. So I think making sure that you can bring a human in is essential for something like this, especially when it's still so new.

Jeff Jarvis:
But Stacey, Google search is an AI. Are you going to get on the phone and call somebody and say, "No, no, I didn't like this result. Could you send me... Joe? I want to talk to Joe."

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay, so then we think about the impact. So maybe it is only when it deals with dollar amounts, maybe? Dollar amounts over a certain amount. Because I think about things like... There's medical care, there's AI that says, "Oh, yeah, you shouldn't be screened for breast cancer," when maybe you should. Or maybe... There's-

Leo Laporte:
Well, that was my thinking-

Jeff Jarvis:
I think that-

Leo Laporte:
That's why I thought you should-

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 01:53:18] the jury to argue.

Leo Laporte:
That's why I thought you should have to disclose it, so that you as a consumer would be able to say, "Well, maybe I'll get a second opinion because-"

Jeff Jarvis:
But it's going to be so much in everything.

Leo Laporte:
That's the problem. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, no, and I see that problem, but we've got to figure out then the way we need to write a law, and that's doable, to make sure we don't screw people over and not let them have access to a human being in something that's really important.

Leo Laporte:
Hey everybody, it's Leo Laporte, the founder and host of many of the TWiT podcasts. I don't normally talk to you about advertising, but I want to take a moment to do that right now. Our mission statement at TWiT, we're dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts, that's our audience, and you I guess, since you're listening, by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. To do that, we also create partnerships with trusted brands and make important introductions between them and our audience. It's how we finance our podcasts, but it's also, and our audience tells us this all the time, a part of the service we offer, it's a valued bit of information for our audience members. They want to know about great brands like yours. So can we help you by introducing you to our highly qualified audience? And boy you get a lot with advertising on the TWiT podcasts.
Partnering with TWiT means you're going to get, if I may say so humbly, the gold standard in podcast advertising, and we throw in a lot of valuable services. You get a full service continuity team supporting everything from copywriting to graphic design. I don't think anybody else does this or does this as well as we do. You get ads that are embedded in our content that are unique every time. I read them, our hosts read them. We always over-deliver on impressions, and frankly, we are here to talk about your product. So we really give our listeners a great introduction to what you offer. We've got onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. We give you a lot of reporting, so who saw your advertisement. You'll even know how many responded by going to your website. We'll also give you courtesy commercials that you can share across social media and landing pages. We think these are really valuable. People like me and our other hosts, talking about your product sincerely and informationally, those are incredibly valuable. You also get other free goodies, mentions in our weekly newsletter that's sent out to thousands of fans. We give bonus ads to people who buy a significant amount of advertising. You'll get social media promotion too.
But let me tell you, we are looking for an advertising partner that's going to be with us long term. Visit TWiT.tv/advertise. Check out our partner testimonials. Tim Broom, founder of ITProTV. They started ITProTV in 2013, immediately started advertising with us and grew that company to a really amazing success. Hundreds of thousands of ongoing customers. They've been on our network for more than 10 years, and they say, and I'll quote Tim, "We would not be where we are today without the TWiT network. That's just one example.
Mark McCrery, who's the CEO of Authentic, he was actually one of the first people to buy ads on our network. He's been with us for 16 years. He said, and I'm quoting, "The feedback from many advertisers over those 16 years across a range of product categories, is that if ads and podcasts are going to work for a brand, they're going to work on TWiT shows." I'm proud to say that the ads we do over deliver, they work really well because they're honest, they have integrity. Our audience trusts us and we say, this is a great product; they believe it, they listen. Our listeners are highly intelligent. They're heavily engaged. They're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network, and that's partly because we only work with high integrity partners that we have thoroughly and personally vetted. I approve every single advertiser on the network.
If you're ready to elevate your brand and you've got a great product, I want you to reach out to us. Advertise at TWiT.tv. So I want you to break out of the advertising norm, grow your brand with host read, authentic ads on TWiT.tv. Visit TWiT.tv/advertise for more details, or email us advertise@TWiT.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now.
Oh, this is what-

Jeff Jarvis:
The transparency is critical.

Leo Laporte:
This is what you were talking about. The guy who founded Nest, with the-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes. Yes.

Leo Laporte:
Matt Rogers. There are a lot of these. I would do this. Now, they say it's 33 bucks a month. They take your scraps and feed them to chickens after composting them.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, you've got to mail the, well Stacey should explain it, better. She knows more than I do.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay, so this is a Wi-Fi connected, giant compost bin. It looks like a trash can-

Leo Laporte:
There are other similar compost bins that deodorize, and then you get a thing that you would then put on your plants or whatever, but it's designed for your kitchen.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
This one's a little different.

Jeff Jarvis:
Go ahead, Stacy. Tell us what's different.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So you pay $33 a month, and you scrap your food in there, and then the bin, whenever you put food in, it will dehydrate it and shrink

Leo Laporte:
It chops it up.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It chops it up and dehydrates it and shrinks it down into pellets that-

Jeff Jarvis:
Desiccated nothing.

Stacey Higginbotham:
When that gets full, it will generate a box sent to your home. You pack those pellets or powder or whatever it is in the box, and then you ship it out to somebody who feeds it to chickens. You would really do... Talk to me about why you would do this. This is not a product that would be great for me, but I'm curious how-

Leo Laporte:
In California, they passed a bill. It was signed into law, and it took effect, I think first of the year, that you have to compost. Everybody has to compost. So we got an extra bin. It's free. We only pay for trash that goes to the landfill, recycling we don't pay for. So we have two new bins. We have a green recycling bin for yard waste and stuff. We can throw food waste into that. And then we have another bin we could also throw into for composting. They take it. So we separate our food scraps out. It's a little messy because-

Jeff Jarvis:
A little smelly, right?

Leo Laporte:
It's a little smelly, a little messy. But every day we take the compost out of the house and put it in the bin outside where it is. We put the bin far from the door.

Jeff Jarvis:
A little ripe, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
It's a little ripe, but then they take it and they use it. And I don't get charged for it, but I presume that it's being used appropriately in giant compost heaps somewhere.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So we get charged. We compost too, we are charged $12 or $10 a month for our compost, and we also have a little bin by our sink. And then when that gets full, we empty it out into the big bin because it's cold here. We don't really worry so much about-

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's better when it's cold. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. But it's-

Jeff Jarvis:
But this new thing would deal with that, right?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, this new thing-

Jeff Jarvis:
It reduces the volume and smell and all that.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And you wouldn't have to put it outside. Now, our compost bin also takes leaf litter, and it's not just food and it takes things like paper towels. I don't think this one would do that.

Leo Laporte:
We put our paper towels in there in this one too. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So I'm having Matt come on the show next week, so he'll be our guest and-

Leo Laporte:
Oh.

Jeff Jarvis:
You can report to us next week. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think it's an interesting idea. I think there's a small segment of the consumer market that would pay $33 a month for this. I question the environmental benefits because you've got a truck coming to pick up your box of pellets up.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's true. Right.

Leo Laporte:
In California, it's against the law to throw food scraps into the garbage. First offense fine is $50-$100 dollars. Third offense and subsequent offense is $500. They're pretty serious about it. I think a lot of people don't do it. And I doubt our police officers are going around looking in our garbage.

Jeff Jarvis:
No.

Leo Laporte:
But-

Ant Pruitt:
I don't.

Leo Laporte:
You don't do it? Are you ready for that big fine?

Ant Pruitt:
The whole garbage thing and the recycling stuff. I'll just be frank. It seems like a really big racket out here with the recycling. I remember when we first got here and we were told the whole rules of recycling, and apparently I could never get it right, because they would not empty things because-

Leo Laporte:
No, they'll look in, they'll put a notice in there and say, "What'd you putting lumber in the yard waste for?" Things like that.

Ant Pruitt:
And I'm like, well... And they hand me a sheet and I'd read the sheet and-

Leo Laporte:
It's not that hard, Ant.

Ant Pruitt:
I swear I'm following it word for word.

Jeff Jarvis:
Ant, doesn't do woke garbage.

Leo Laporte:
You should send him a note saying, I'm from North Cackalacky. We don't do this.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. We burn it in the backyard.

Ant Pruitt:
And [inaudible 02:02:22] is like, "You can recycle this, but you can't recycle that." And I'm like, "Well, most people would recycle this, as well as recycling that."

Leo Laporte:
The thing that makes me a little angry-

Stacey Higginbotham:
For every-

Ant Pruitt:
And then the whole washing this and washing that.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, you have to wash stuff out, yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
You're wasting so much water washing this out, even though we're in a drought all the dang gon time over here. Yeah, I had issues with all of this trash stuff over here in Sonoma County.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, we do it religiously Ant. Lisa is absolutely adamant about that. We separate everything out. We washed it out. We try not to wash it with a lot of water.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's very Californian.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, but we're trying to do our good deed.

Ant Pruitt:
I recycle things, but man, you... [inaudible 02:03:00]

Leo Laporte:
You know what bothers me and actually I have a friend who's on the commission for Petaluma-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Garbage?

Leo Laporte:
Garbage, yeah. And I asked her to look into it because they say we will take plastic bottles. And as far as I know, that's just a lie from the plastic industry.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right.

Leo Laporte:
90% of plastic is not recyclable.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, different municipalities have different vendors that they use. And vendors can change their policies, especially when China stopped accepting everything.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. They claim they recycle it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, Europe has now just passed a law saying you can't have recycling imperialism, you can't export the problem.

Leo Laporte:
No, that's right. Make little Chinese children burn your garbage. It's not okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
Exactly. Exactly.

Leo Laporte:
I Agree.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So, Ant, I would say coming from North Carolina, the South is not very progressive in terms of its recycling.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh no. I know that hands down.

Stacey Higginbotham:
California's good. I think even if we don't like it, we're going to end up doing more of it, Ant.

Ant Pruitt:
But that's the thing, I do try. We do make an effort, but when I first got here, it seems like for the longest time I was not doing it properly.

Leo Laporte:
You have to learn how to do it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's actually good that-

Leo Laporte:
It's not easy.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And it's good that they're telling you that they won't accept it, because if you put bad stuff like crappy trash in, it contaminates the whole load.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it contaminates it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So it's actually probably a good indicator that they're very serious about recycling as much as they can.

Jeff Jarvis:
The other issue is that-

Leo Laporte:
We have taped on... Lisa called them and got them to send it. We have taped on our refrigerator all of the exact list of what they take and don't take and what thing to put in and all that.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, I had done that too. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
You have to because it's complicated

Ant Pruitt:
I did the same thing, I put it right there on the wall where we have the bin, and I also had it outside on the bin outside- [inaudible 02:04:56]

Leo Laporte:
They say they take plastic bottles, which as far as I know... The plastic industries loves to pretend it's recyclable, they put the little symbol on it and stuff, but nobody as far as I know recycles it, but apparently- [inaudible 02:05:07]

Ant Pruitt:
The last I heard it was hard plastic that was recyclable, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, the one and two plastic are the only ones our place will recycle now.

Leo Laporte:
They make benches out of it and stuff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, that's what they do with the bags. But the real issue that's raised here by Stacey's upcoming guest is the sin of food waste in this country.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, and this doesn't make me feel better about-

Jeff Jarvis:
And this doesn't solve that.

Leo Laporte:
Well, he claims it does in this article with CNBC.

Jeff Jarvis:
How does he prove that?

Leo Laporte:
"Mill now makes easy for people to get rid of food waste and reduce their carbon footprint," by feeding it to chickens.

Ant Pruitt:
And you don't have to worry about me and food waste. Not in this house.

Leo Laporte:
I eat my food waste.

Ant Pruitt:
I eat my... And I tell you one thing, everybody in this house, they better not have a problem with leftovers. We eating every day [inaudible 02:05:56].

Leo Laporte:
We eat all our leftovers too, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We try to... But it's not just leftovers. I know when I got sick, for example, when we all had the flu, none of us wanted to eat whatever we had in the fridge.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Stuff wasted, it goes bad and... yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, now know what my thing will be this week. For all you Californians.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Good. Well, I can't wait to hear your interview with Matt because I really...

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. [inaudible 02:06:23].

Leo Laporte:
I would even pay 33 bucks a month if I thought it helped the world, because I care.

Jeff Jarvis:
And if it reduced the cheesy smell out in your driveway.

Leo Laporte:
It is very...

Ant Pruitt:
Cheesy.

Leo Laporte:
It is a little stinky.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's not cheesy. It is gross.

Jeff Jarvis:
Like blue cheesy.

Leo Laporte:
Nah. I like blue cheese.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's more like... It smells like-

Leo Laporte:
Something died.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Bad spinach. It's real gross.

Jeff Jarvis:
It smells like team spirit.

Ant Pruitt:
That's more accurate.

Leo Laporte:
All right, I think we're done. Oh, wait a minute. We didn't do the change log. Play that...

Stacey Higginbotham:
We have a change log. So.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, we have one. Yeah. Yeah. Play that, whatever thing. Change log.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's not much. This will be quick.

Ant Pruitt:
Google's like, "You doing a change log?"

Speaker 3:
The Google change log.

Leo Laporte:
The Google change log. Boom, boom, boom. YouTube is testing a hub, a hub free cable style channels. It's so funny. We wanted disaggregation now we're just aggregating it all right back up again.

Jeff Jarvis:
Funny how that works.

Leo Laporte:
Yep. Company is reportedly and talks with media companies to feature their shows and movies. Free V is the hot thing, right? Amazon had FreeVee. There's Roku TV, Fox has Tubi. Paramount has Pluto TV, and now YouTube wants to have its ad supported free TV channels. The service is said to have team [inaudible 02:07:58] gadget teamed up with the likes of Lionsgate ANE and Film Rise. YouTube already offers ad supported movies. You've probably seen that, but this would give you even more with channels like there'll be Dr. Who, South Park, Frazier, eh, that's fine. Did I say YouTube TV? It's not their YouTube TV service. It's YouTube itself.

Ant Pruitt:
It's YouTube.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
Right.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. That's the difference. You're a Google Stadia controller. We mentioned this last week, but I'll mention again. As of today, Stadia is no more, but your controller is still usable. If you download the tool that turns it into a Bluetooth controller. The last day for Stadia. They also released a snake game called Worm Game that you could play even without Stadia. Most-

Ant Pruitt:
Stadia dies, but snake lives on.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, thanks. Most of the games on Stadia apparently have given you a way to cross save, migrate your characters and your saves to another platform. You probably should do that, but today's the last day. Stadia is done. Done, done, done. The Google home app's, new TV remote adds, volume and play controls. Gee, seems like that's something a remote should have. You can... What?

Ant Pruitt:
It is new. That's new. That's change log worthy.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Apparently didn't have volume or play controls. I don't know what it was controlling at all. It's just for Google TV. So you have to use those TVs, I guess, that have Google TV. That's just silly. By now, you've already given up trying to use that remote. I'm almost certain.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. Because it doesn't do anything.

Leo Laporte:
It doesn't do anything. Google is getting in on the air tag business. Actually, I don't know how good this is for Apple. Apple sells these AirTags that are trackers. I put one of my luggage, I put one of my keys. Google says that they are going to, well, actually, I shouldn't say Google says it. A Android researcher, Kuba Wojciechowski has spotted code for a Google Bluetooth tracker code named Grogu. Grogu. Is this a Mandalorian character? Grogu.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Grogu. It's the name of the child.

Leo Laporte:
Is that the baby weasel?

Ant Pruitt:
Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
He's a weasel, right? Yoda's a weasel. Isn't he? Grogu. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. Wojciechowski found references, that check nearly every major box who would want a Bluetooth tracker. It has a speaker, UWB compatibility, so you can name your phone and figure out where stuff is. Supports Bluetooth LE. Being built by the Nest team. They're going to face a lot of the same criticisms Apple got for its AirTag because people were using it to stalk exes and so forth. One of the regulars who's on our All About Android show, Mishaal Rahman also has posted recently about a locator tag option in Google's fast pair developer console. Mishaal's very good at finding this stuff. So-

Jeff Jarvis:
There's more Androids out there than iPhones, right?

Leo Laporte:
Exactly. Well, worldwide, it's a vast market share. So yeah, this will be interesting. I will be very curious. One of the reasons the Apple AirTag works so well is there are a lot of iPhones, in the US anyway. There are a lot of iPhones, so everywhere I go, if an iPhone sees this, it can phone home. It could say, "Oh." I can go onto my iPhone, I can say, "Where's my AirTag?" And it's-

Jeff Jarvis:
So is it doing that constantly, Leo?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Is it...

Jeff Jarvis:
Is that doing that constantly, Leo?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
So why is there not... So talk to me about the privacy pieces of this, the surveillance piece.

Leo Laporte:
Well, Apple put a lot of features in to keep... Well, first of all, the government can't see it. Only I can see it. And when another phone sees this, it is not identified as mine. They have a system, I think a very good system, of relaying that information back to me completely anonymously. I put them in my...

Jeff Jarvis:
Couldn't the government subpoena that? That linkage?

Leo Laporte:
Well yeah, but my phone also is following me around. I mean, it's not like they don't... And it isn't where I am, by the way. It is wherever I've attached it. So I for instance, whenever I travel, I have one in my luggage. And we've seen many stories of people who... There was a guy at Delta Airline said, "Yeah, we don't know where your bag is." And he says, "Well, I do. It's actually in London. I can tell." And, so there've been a lot of stories like that. I do keep one in my bag. I keep one on my keys, more for me, because that's the one thing I have to leave the house with.

Jeff Jarvis:
But if you are... Let's do a murder mystery here. You're a murderer, you turned your phone off so you don't get tracked but you forgot you carry the tag with you.

Ant Pruitt:
Your keys are with you.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. Well then that can be...

Leo Laporte:
People seem to be much more worried about the fact that I could slip this somebody's pocket.

Jeff Jarvis:
Into a girlfriend's...

Leo Laporte:
And follow her home, and that has happened. It ignores the fact that there are already GPS trackers that are actually much better at doing that, that are not very expensive, in fact less than an air tag. But Apple's done a lot of things. For instance, if you're being followed around by an air tag that's not yours. If you have an iPhone, the iPhone will say, "I see a foreign air tag following us. Is that yours?" And this is the problem. If you don't have an iPhone, there is a app you have to install on your Android phone, which works kind of not so great. That it'll do the same thing. But you'd have to remember to run that app and all that. Google's going to run into these same problems. It'll be interesting to see how Google handles this. I think Apple's handled it as well as you can handle it.

Ant Pruitt:
And it's safe to say Google is just going to try to follow the same suit, right? I mean they both sort of borrow from each other's features and ideas.

Leo Laporte:
Now it's time for Scooter-X change log because he's much better at finding stuff than I am.

Ant Pruitt:
He's way better.

Leo Laporte:
Google Translate now supports 33 new languages and it does it offline. Look at these.

Jeff Jarvis:
Wow. Scooter-X has like 40 things here.

Leo Laporte:
I know he's really good. Basque, Frisian, Hawaiian, Hmong, Igbo, Javanese, Khmer. Wow. I mean the languages of the world. Zulu, Aruba, Yiddish, Wegerif.

Jeff Jarvis:
All of which is AI you're using.

Leo Laporte:
You didn't hear me my excellent pronunciation. Ossa, Ossa, Ossa.
There are only 24 languages in the repertoire that do not yet support offline, but they're working on it. That's impressive. Fitbit step and heart rate data is appearing now in Google Fit. Good news. Remember Google bought Fitbit but now they're able to get it into the Google Fit tracker. Digital wellbeing preps, focus mode holidays and removes work on live paper. Don't know what it means, but it's in the change log.
I'm just reading them now. Google messages end-to-end encryption for group chats is currently limited to 21 people. Our car dealership lost our keys. Oh no that's not it.
I should just read the chat someday. Just...

Jeff Jarvis:
Way too fast for his Scooter-X.

Leo Laporte:
Clear calling on the Pixel 7 is like noise cancellation for hard to hear phone calls. ChromeOS 109s rolling out with a tweak to how Android apps launch. Now Scooter-X is like challenged. She's going to start cranking them out big time. Google's bringing new features to older versions of Android. Android auto redesign rolling out draggable seek bar music apps. Google Discover rolls out three-column UI ahead of Pixel tablet. Android 13 is running on 5.2% of all devices five months after launch. And a story that's not Google. Firefox has found a way to keep ad blockers working with Manifest V3. Remember Google...

Jeff Jarvis:
So Scooter-X... Do you have this all ready for the show? Just doing this moment.

Leo Laporte:
Oh no his just fast.

Jeff Jarvis:
Every week.

Leo Laporte:
He's good. He's like Mr...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Scooter's very. Yeah. Scooter-X is very fast.

Leo Laporte:
It's amazing.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, I know that. I just, wow. That was this.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Singularity his has like already, he's already achieved it.

Ant Pruitt:
He says I has tabs.

Leo Laporte:
Googly moogly.

Jeff Jarvis:
Scooter-X is ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte:
I often wonder. And that's the Google change log. We're going to wrap this up before you can come in with some more. That was exhausting. Before we get to our picks of the week, I just want to give a little plug for our fabulous folks in the club. Twit. I thank you. Club Twit members, square X is one of them for supporting everything we do. It is very much appreciated. Stacey had a wonderful book club. I hear...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Dude, what happened to you man?

Leo Laporte:
The My Tesla drove into a fence and I couldn't... No, I got up early because I knew it was a nine o'clock thing last Thursday.

Jeff Jarvis:
If you had a cold shower right then.

Leo Laporte:
I should've.

Jeff Jarvis:
I told you that's how [inaudible 02:17:29] Should've okay.

Leo Laporte:
Because I had a cup of coffee, I got geared up for it and then I thought, well I'm just going to lie down and close my eyes for a minute.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh no.

Leo Laporte:
I woke up at nine 45 and I thought...

Ant Pruitt:
Famous last words little.

Jeff Jarvis:
You needed the Leo wake-up call.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I didn't. "I'm Sony sir, but it's time to wake up and smell the roses." I apologize I'm so sorry. Did it go well? Did you have a good time?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, I mean we had fun I think.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I'm sorry. I love that book. I would've loved to have participated. Have you selected a new book yet for the club?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I...

Ant Pruitt:
Not yet.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We have our...

Ant Pruitt:
Closes. I think the vote closes next Wednesday. I can't remember.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, what are the can day dates? Let me go. I'll go to, if I go to a book club in our. Book club poll for our next read The School for Good Mothers, The Sea of Tranquility or Tell Me an Ending.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Going to be close.

Leo Laporte:
You want to talk about those?

Stacey Higginbotham:
The Sea of Tranquility is the most literary and it's really good. It's about time travel and space.

Leo Laporte:
Never read any of these.

Stacey Higginbotham:
School for Good Mothers is AI and it actually ties into, should there be a human in the loop. When AI is making decisions about people in this case moms.

Leo Laporte:
There you go.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And then the Tell Me an Ending is...

Leo Laporte:
Black Mirror meets Severance in this thrilling, speculative novel about a tech company that deletes unwanted memories. The consequences For those forced to deal with what they tried to forget. And the doctor who seeks to protect her patients from further harm. Jo Harkin, the author of that Tell Me an Ending, School for Good Mothers is by Jessamine Chan and Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

Stacey Higginbotham:
She's the one who did, what's it called?

Leo Laporte:
Station 11.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. Thank you.

Leo Laporte:
Nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't...

Leo Laporte:
Nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I have no brain.

Leo Laporte:
So if you are in the club and you participate in the book club, you can go to book club in our twit club and vote, because there's only a few days left. The rerun of the project, Hail Mary Twit book club. Stacey's book club show that I missed. Is available in the TWIT plus feed. That's by the way, this is all benefits to members of the club and I really encourage you to join seven bucks a month and we'd really... Thank you, Anne and Stacey and everybody who bends over backwards to put some really great stuff together, some really good programming for the club. You get all of the shows ad free. You get the shows on Twit plus. Plus shows that we don't put out in public. Like Hands on Macintosh, Hands on Windows on Ted Lennox show. You also get these special events.
Tomorrow four o'clock, Lisa and I will do another inside Twit. We haven't done one in a year or two, so that'll be fun. Win two dow will do one in February 9th.

Jeff Jarvis:
 Only for club members.

Leo Laporte:
Only for club members. And I'm very excited Daniel Suarez will be joining us. Talk about his new book, Critical Mass, which is all... I love this stuff. Yeah, he's going to be great. So the way that's going to work, we're going to do it in the club, but a portion of it will appear on in the Ask the Tech Guys show. And then the full interview will be available as a triangulation show. So everybody will get to hear that interview. But if you want to ask Daniel questions, we're going to have a Q&A in the club. Sam is doing a AMA on March 2nd, just added. Thank you Ant.

Ant Pruitt:
My pleasure.

Leo Laporte:
Great job you. Yeah, really great. Seven bucks a month gets you all of that. Plus the discord. And we have great conversations in the Discord. I hang out in the coding section. We have lovely little back-and-forths in the coding section. We also have a Let's play section. We have a couple of really interesting Minecraft servers. You have to be a member to join. So again, I think there's some real benefits for your $7 and it really helps us. Someday I would love it if the club, was it. That was the whole kitten caboodle. We're not there yet. But...

Jeff Jarvis:
No ads, no algorithms.

Leo Laporte:
No algorithms, no ads. Just content. The algorithm would be whatever the club wants to do, which is not so bad. Go to twit.tv/clubtwit if you're not yet a member and join the fun. It's a great group of wonderful people. Stacey, you said earlier, "Oh, I have something to talk about." What is your thing this week?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, I have two. One's really easy though. One, since you mentioned composting and since we've been composting for four years, since we came here to Washington where we have to.

Leo Laporte:
Been four years now?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Wow.

Ant Pruitt:
She hardly has any accent left at all.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, just yesterday you were a Texan.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I talk to Kayla Texan, I guess. Anyway, this is the OXO makes a really good compost bin. The reason I like it, and I'll just tell you all about. It's really smooth on the inside, so it's very easy to wash, which is important in a compost bin. And it's small, so big enough for one meal prep.

Leo Laporte:
I actually have this.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. I mean the one downside I will say is when you've got something yucky on the bottom and it's stuck and you whack it against your big bin, that lid might fall off. So just be aware of that. But everything else about this is lovely

Jeff Jarvis:
And into all the goo.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh no.

Leo Laporte:
It's very small.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah that's why...

Leo Laporte:
I haven't been able to get anybody to use it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, I love the...

Ant Pruitt:
And that's where you throw your food scraps, right?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Its pretty on your camera.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah that's the idea.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah that's where you put food...

Leo Laporte:
And it seals so you don't smell it and then you empty it. You have to empty it every day. Because it's small. But it should be small. You want empty it every day.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. You don't want to keep a big compost. I mean, I know it's kind of inconvenient, but you want it small enough, big enough to hold a full meals prep, but not too big because then it just sits there. Anyway so that's that.

Leo Laporte:
Do you line it or you just put stuff in there? You don't line it?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No. It's so smooth. It's so easy to clean. I mean, we washed it out maybe once a week or so.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh a long time.

Leo Laporte:
I think I got, the bigger... This one was three quarters of a gallon. I think I got the little bit bigger. Yeah, this is the one I got one, 1.75 gallons. Just a little...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. That was too big for my counter. And we're a small family. If you make a lot...

Leo Laporte:
We're a small family. We're the same number, three people. So we should probably use that if I can get people to use it. Because right now we put it in the regular garbage and it gets soggy and we line it with the plastic thing, but we can't throw the plastic thing in the compost. It's kind of not a good...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah that sounds.

Leo Laporte:
They won't let us put any, even though there's compostable bags or anything, they won't let us put those in the compost. It has to just be food. Food and nothing else.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow, see I didn't know that either.

Stacey Higginbotham:
But my actual thing that I had planned was because Kevin did a review on this because his wife bought this, and Barb does not buy anything that's smart. It's a smart kettle. And I never even...

Jeff Jarvis:
That makes it sound like Julie buys [inaudible 02:24:49]

Stacey Higginbotham:
No she just... Anything that's connected Barb's, like...

Ant Pruitt:
She only buys terminals.

Leo Laporte:
So what is this kettle?

Stacey Higginbotham:
This is the Govee Smart Kettle. And I don't know if I would've chosen the Govee just because it is a Chinese company. They do have good privacy policies. I don't know about their...

Jeff Jarvis:
Wait, what could they know about your tea?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, it's on your network. I'm less concerned about the privacy. And also...

Leo Laporte:
Security is really the big issue. Anytime you put anything on your Wi-Fi. It has the great for over kettle spout though. I like that.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It has that gooseneck spout, but this is... I want this, you can tell Amazon or Google, "Power on the kettle." To whatever temperature you want. And it'll just... You can also remotely start it from the app. But who wants to open an app to start...

Leo Laporte:
So you just want to make sure there's always water in it, obviously. But it's induction. So that's burn or anything.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes. And apparently Kevin, he tried to... He said his turned on when there was no water in it. But Govern says that it won't stay on. So Kevin May not have tried for long enough.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. So does it not boil over as well? Because that's my problem with my gooseneck. Sometimes I forget a few minutes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
There's a max line and you don't want to fill over the max fill line.

Leo Laporte:
And it will turn itself off when it boils it doesn't continue to boil. That's the beauty of this.

Jeff Jarvis:
But ours, we have a Breville kettle. It's not online, but it does all of that. But the one thing it doesn't do is turn on when you're in bed, you have to get up and...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well Kevin created a good morning routine. And now as part of that, it turns the kettle on to heat the water which...

Leo Laporte:
Did he write it...

Ant Pruitt:
Shower.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Leo wakes you up and tells you that the tea is on.

Leo Laporte:
Good morning, sir. The tea is on. The world is fresh and bright.

Jeff Jarvis:
Your cold shower is ready for you.

Leo Laporte:
Your shower...

Jeff Jarvis:
Your tea.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And the price for this is, well, Barb got it for 65. I think it's on sale most of the time. It's like $70.

Leo Laporte:
It's $80. But I see a $15 coupon on my Amazon. So I think you could get it for what, Barb got it for, 65. The Govern Smart Electric Kettle, Mr. Jeff Sharp.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think its Fellows makes, oh, sorry. I was going to say, I think it's a knockoff of the Fellows Kettle, which is like 165.

Leo Laporte:
Oh.

Stacey Higginbotham:
There you go.

Leo Laporte:
Nice. Govern makes life smarter.

Ant Pruitt:
Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They make a lot of knockoffs.

Leo Laporte:
Oh really? They're the kings.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte:
They have an electric space heater, smart humidifiers.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Their lights are like, all their smart lights are straight up Hue replicas.

Leo Laporte:
Oh wow. China, amazing.

Ant Pruitt:
[inaudible 02:27:45] China.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, they're amazing. Mr. Jeff Jarvis, give us a number.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, I just today I got the type set version of the book. I now get to spend my weekend reading my words again and again and again. And you know how much I love Serifs. We talked about this. Oh no, it's...

Leo Laporte:
It's too bright. I can't.

Jeff Jarvis:
So I love Serifs. I use the Dub's font in the Sabon font from here with vice from Glenn Fleishman.

Leo Laporte:
I think for books. I think you should have a Serif font idea.

Jeff Jarvis:
I think you should. But the State Department is going to phase out Times Roman in favor of the Serif Less Corroborate 14 point. And it's a good thing.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's called Sans Serif.

Ant Pruitt:
Well, I don't know about that.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's because it's for accessibility.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, okay. Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Secretary Blinken sent a cable. They're still sending cables, sent a cable to all embassies today, directing staff not to send him any more papers with Times New Roman, the subject. The Times New Roman are a changing. They want you to use Calibri, which used to be a cigarette lighter, but I guess now it's a Samsara font in 14 point. There is actually a new font designed by the Braille Institute. To be more legible for people with low vision. And actually I bookmarked it because I'm a font... Like you, like Glenn Fleishman I'm kind of a typeface guy. I like to collect typefaces. Let me see if I bookmarked it so I could download it later.

Jeff Jarvis:
There's also one that's being recommended for the dyslexic.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And I don't like that one because it's very much modified. It's for dyslexic people. But I think, let me see. The Braille Institute font actually is very usable. They recommended it for websites and others because it's called the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font. And it's free. And they show, as an example. This is the font above. But if you have low vision and you, it's very blurry, you still can distinguish, for instance, the one from the capital I. From the lowercase I from the L.

Jeff Jarvis:
I see.

Leo Laporte:
You see? But it's a good font that anybody would use for anything, because it's a good Sans Serif Font. But if you wanted to make it accessible for people with low vision, this Atkinson Hyperlegible is available from the Braille Institute. Four fonts, two weights, 1,340 total glyphs and accent characters for 27 languages.
So I think that's a good thing for the Braille Institute to do. So speaking of fonts, Calibri. I don't like Calibri, to be honest.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm not crazy about it either.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Does Microsoft use it a lot or?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I think it comes with Windows. This is a subject we could go on and on about. But programmers collect mono face, monotype face fonts for their programming. And we all have very strong opinions. I am currently...

Ant Pruitt:
That's shocking.

Stacey Higginbotham:
What? Programmers have strong opinions.

Leo Laporte:
I am currently a fan of Iosefka. Don't tell me otherwise. Ant Pruitt, what's your pick of the week?

Ant Pruitt:
Oh man. Well, my pick that week is a book that I've been listening to because I've had a little bit more time. Since Project Hail Mary was one that I had already read and I'd been off of social media, so I had more time. And I wanted to check out Tom Segura's book, I'd Like to Play Alone, Please.

Leo Laporte:
Oh I like him, he's funny.

Ant Pruitt:
Very, very funny comedian. He tells a bunch of funny stories in here, including his journey to being a big standup comic now. And gives all the details of how it got started and the pain and trauma of that. And funny anecdotes as far as how we are as people socially, and do some really quirky things and can turn it into comedy if you want to.

Leo Laporte:
This is on audible, so you're listening to him. Let me play a little bit of it so you can hear his voice.

Ant Pruitt:
Yep. He narrates it.

Leo Laporte:
Because you'll know. You'll know when you hear his voice. "We have different middle names." Maybe.

Jeff Jarvis:
So I'm not a junior. Something he's pointed out to me his own son, no less than 4000 times.

Leo Laporte:
I like it when comics do their own books. It just comes alive I love it.

Ant Pruitt:
And it also has some PDFs in it. If you get the audio version where you can pull it up an app and look at some of the pictures that he's describing with hanging out with celebrities and whatnot. It's a pretty funny book so far. I'm almost done with his. It's fairly short.

Leo Laporte:
His last book Thrilled has my favorite cover.

Ant Pruitt:
I never saw that. Oh man.

Leo Laporte:
It's the...

Jeff Jarvis:
It's a playgirl pose.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's the Michael Jackson thriller.

Ant Pruitt:
Micheal Jackson Thriller album.

Leo Laporte:
His take on the Thriller album.

Ant Pruitt:
The severity of that. He is not exactly a Michael Jackson supermodel.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He's not a svelte man.

Leo Laporte:
Not a svelte man.

Ant Pruitt:
He's so funny. His dad is a white man and his mother is Peruvian. So he tells a lot of stories about their relationship and him growing up learning to speak Spanish and just... And then being in the south and having that dynamic in with his family. It's all pretty funny stuff. So I...

Leo Laporte:
Now this other one, I think you just put this in because you're trying to get me to take a cold shower.

Ant Pruitt:
Well, speaking of cold tubs, I talked about Kevin Hart the other week. Well I've been diving into, because YouTube knows how to recommend to me. Because I do thumbs up on things. And he has this show on LOL network called Coldest Balls, where he interviews celebrities, but they do the interviews in a locker room and there's a cold tub and they start out with their feet in the cold tub.

Leo Laporte:
Oh Lord.

Ant Pruitt:
And as interview goes on, they sit down in the cold tub and as it goes further along, they fully put the water all the way up to their neck in the cold tub.

Leo Laporte:
This is a whole genre of podcasts were your torture your guests.

Jeff Jarvis:
Torturing the guest, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
And I really like the hot ones.

Ant Pruitt:
It's so good.

Leo Laporte:
Not the cold ones.

Jeff Jarvis:
I preferred your wine version last week.

Ant Pruitt:
It's so good though. It's so good. Cause Kevin Hart is so funny, but I love his premise. He says, "You know what, you're going to be in this cold water and you're going to say some stuff that's pretty funny and we're going to catch it."

Leo Laporte:
Oh my God, it looks so cold. I can't believe he would do this to himself. That's what I don't get. Oh God, that looks awful. Just awful, Marsha Lynch she probably is used to it.

Ant Pruitt:
Those things are great. I'm telling you.

Leo Laporte:
Really?

Ant Pruitt:
Those cold tubs are great.

Leo Laporte:
With ice in it, that cold?

Ant Pruitt:
Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh my gosh. I'm sitting here looking at that now and thinking, man my elbows would feel so much better right now.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I feel great. Nice and toasty and warm.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
That's how my elbows feel.

Jeff Jarvis:
Good.

Leo Laporte:
Say, "Don't you get in that hot tub, that cold tub. I have a hot tub I get in, not a cold tub."

Ant Pruitt:
I get in a hot tub too, but man, something about a cold tub is just....

Leo Laporte:
When our boy sets the, when Michael sets the hot tub to like 102, I said, "What's happening? It's cold, it's too cold." In the summer for some reason he sets it lower temperature. I was like, "I don't want it to be a hundred degrees that's cold."

Stacey Higginbotham:
What do you set your hot tub too?

Leo Laporte:
Well, unfortunately, in the state of California, we can't set it to hotter than 104. And I've been begging hackers to come over and hack my tub because a hot tub should be 106. But they don't want me to die. I can have a bathtub that's 106, but I can't have a hot tub, that's 106.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Huh?

Jeff Jarvis:
Seems wrong.

Leo Laporte:
What do you say your hot tub too?

Stacey Higginbotham:
102 or 103 in the winter.

Jeff Jarvis:
Lukewarm.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And then.

Jeff Jarvis:
Lukewarm.

Leo Laporte:
104 is the max.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Then in we...

Leo Laporte:
And I can't even set...

Jeff Jarvis:
I think that's the legal limit they won't let you.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think so, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Because I don't want you to boil yourself to death.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It seems reasonable.

Leo Laporte:
No, that's the nanny state telling me what I can do in my own hot tub. We need a section 230 for hot tub temperatures. Protecting the right to boil.

Ant Pruitt:
California, man.

Jeff Jarvis:
Nowhere else in this country do you debate hot tubs. It is such a cliché. It is pure California cliché.

Leo Laporte:
I heard Mike says...

Jeff Jarvis:
But I lived there. It was a joke and it's still a joke.

Leo Laporte:
I love my hot tub. Revere Mike says, I set my hot tub to 1977.

Ant Pruitt:
He's got a hot tub time machine.

Leo Laporte:
Ladies and gentlemen, we are done for the day. Thank you so much, Stacey Higginbotham staceyoniot.com @gigastacey. Don't forget her podcast with Kevin Toefl, the IOT podcast featuring Mr. Compost this week. So that'll be fun.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh this week is not Mr. Compost, next week is Mr. Compost.

Leo Laporte:
Next week, Mr. Matt Compost.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Sorry.

Leo Laporte:
Matt Compost. Well, this week, what's this week? Something great too. I'm sure.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's a little bit more industrial.

Leo Laporte:
Industrial sounds good.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's like, it's the CEO of a company called Once. They have a really cool business model. That's all I'll say.

Ant Pruitt:
Love that theme song right there.

Leo Laporte:
Look at this look at her discipline. One hour and one minute long, that is discipline.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh.

Leo Laporte:
Did you feel...

Stacey Higginbotham:
This was a long show. Kevin and I were a little crazy this morning.

Leo Laporte:
Did you feel bad because you went one minute longer than an hour.

Ant Pruitt:
One minute over.

Stacey Higginbotham:
No. We aim to not go too far above an hour though.

Leo Laporte:
Listen to this. Hour before 57 minutes, week before an hour three minutes. Week before that, an hour one minute.

Jeff Jarvis:
How do you do an hour-long podcast.

Ant Pruitt:
She's the higgin bot. She's a machine.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Is that too long?

Leo Laporte:
No. Too long. How long is ours? I asked.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, we got twice as many people.

Leo Laporte:
Oh.

Ant Pruitt:
Maybe that's why.

Leo Laporte:
That's a good excuse.

Jeff Jarvis:
We all want our air time. [inaudible 02:38:21]

Leo Laporte:
Thank you, Stacey. Jeff Jarvis. This cat right here, man, Frank Sinatra called him a bum. Ray Crock called him a nickel millionaire. He lived in tomato fields in his youth and he is trapped in the jungle gym of life. But furthermore, the director of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig.

Choir:
Craig. Craig. Craig. Craig.

Leo Laporte:
There's a lot of Craigs in this. Wow original of journalism is pretty. [inaudible 02:38:58] University of New York. We think our listeners for sending those in. Please send in... I would like a C-shetty version of Craig Newmark, if you don't mind.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh that'd be nice.

Leo Laporte:
Wouldn't that'd be good?

Jeff Jarvis:
That'd be good.

Leo Laporte:
Ant Pruitt hosts Hands on Photography, twit.tv/hop. Hop on over and listen to the latest episode. What are you talking about this week?

Ant Pruitt:
Okay. I'm finally going to talk about another option for macro photography this week. I put it off last time and this week that's going to be the discussion and save some folks some money to be able to take some cool macro photography shots.

Leo Laporte:
Should I be saving up my toilet paper rolls just for this episode?

Ant Pruitt:
No toilet...

Jeff Jarvis:
Toilet paper and tin foil.

Ant Pruitt:
No tp-rolls.

Leo Laporte:
No, okay.

Ant Pruitt:
Required, sir. Just get yourself a good flashlight and yeah, we got some tips.

Jeff Jarvis:
Excellent, excellent.

Leo Laporte:
And also as a community manager of Club Twit it does such a good job and we really appreciate that. We will be on track twit tomorrow, Lisa and I. I think you could take the day off. Lisa and I can handle this, I think. It'll be fun to hear us fight, but you don't want to be there. You don't want to be in the middle of that. We will be doing that at four o'clock tomorrow Pacific, seven Eastern, and I hope you will tune in for that. New Club Twit members. I thank you so much for tuning in for this weekend. Google, we do this weekend, Google every Wednesday. Wednesday at 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 22:00 UTC. You can watch us do it live at live.twit.tv. Chat with us at irc.twit.tv. That's open to all or in our club Twit Clubhouse.
If you are a Club Twit member, we also have versions of the show for your listening pleasure after the fact. It's called a podcast. If you go to twit.tv/twig, you can download a copy there or you see those buttons. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the program and you can watch it there or listen to it there or share clips of it from YouTube. Which is always a nice way if you hear something you like and you want to tell your friends about it. Just share a clip from YouTube so they can discover the goodness. The goodness gracious that is this week in Google. Well folks, we'll be back next week if the Good Lord's willing and the Creeks don't rise. Have a wonderful evening and we'll see you next time on Twig. Bye-bye.

Jason Howell:
Don't miss all about Android. Every week we talk about the latest news, hardware, apps, and now all the developer goodness happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell, also joined by Ron Richards, Florence Ion and our newest co-host on the panel, Huyen Tue Dao, who brings Her Developer chops. Really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform we love so much. Join us every Tuesday, all about Android on twit.tv.