This Week in Google 700, 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. Stacy's here. Jeff's here. Ant's here. We're going to start the show by talking to a Google employee who was just laid off in kind of an unpleasant manner. What's it like to get laid off? What are his plans for the future, and why does he think these cuts are happening?
I wanted to get a personal look at all these layoffs of so many people, as many as 200,000 people have been laid off in tech this month. We'll also take a look at a very big lawsuit against Google from the Department of Justice. This one might have some merit. And, of course, section 230 under attack. I think I've changed my tune on this. It's all coming up next on TWiG.

Announcer:
Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte:
This is TWiG, This Week in Google. Episode 700 for Wednesday, January 25th. 2023, Impecunious Mods. This week in Google is brought to you by HPE GreenLake, orchestrated by the experts at CDW, who can help you consolidate and manage all your data in one flexible edge to cloud platform to scale and innovate. Learn more at cdw.com/hpe.
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, the show that has very little to do with Google. Actually, this week it might be different. Facebook, the Twitterverse, Elon Musk-averse. We got to come up with a new name for Elon. I'm seeing so many good creative names on Mastodon for Elon Musk, Space Karen. Anyway, all of that stuff. Let's say hello to our panel. Joining us from her lair on an island somewhere up north, Stacey Higginbotham. Staceyoniot.com, gigasstacy on the Twitter. Hello, Stacy.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Hello, y'all.

Leo Laporte:
Looks good out your window. Looks like a beautiful day on Evil Island, Wvil Dragon Island.

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, it's just cloudy, but it's bright and cloudy.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's bright, and the plants are happy. We're getting ready for a super bloom here in California, thanks to all those rains. Jeff Jarvis, he is the super journalist at buzzmachine.com. At Jeff Jarvis on the Mastodon. His new book about Gutenberg comes out early... No, early this year. I forgot. It's this year now.

Jeff Jarvis:
June, this June.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, this June. Bit.ly/buygutenberg [inaudible 00:02:58].

Jeff Jarvis:
... Did the proofreading.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's the worst part. You don't have a lot of post-it note flags in there. Mine was loaded with that.

Jeff Jarvis:
I had the sheets out to PDF them to the type of...

Leo Laporte:
Oh, good lord.

Jeff Jarvis:
And I tweeted a segment today, and then I saw another missing comma, I've got to go back in. It's just torture.

Leo Laporte:
Ah, those missing commas. He's the Leonardtown professor for journalistic innovation who never misses a comma at the Craig...

Announcer:
Craig, Craig, Craig.

Leo Laporte:
Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Jeff Jarvis:
New York.

Leo Laporte:
New York. Also, a hands-on photography host, our club manager, Ant Pruit in the house, at TWiT.tv/hop

Ant Pruitt:
Hello, sir.

Leo Laporte:
You brought a friend.

Ant Pruitt:
I brought a friend, but I don't know if it's the best of news.

Leo Laporte:
Not in the best of times. So we talked [inaudible 00:04:00]

Ant Pruitt:
So I sort of feel bad.

Leo Laporte:
Well, no, actually I'm really glad because we talk a lot of, we've been talking for the last couple of weeks about big layoffs in tech. 12,000 people at Google, 11,000 at Microsoft, Facebook. But there's no face to it. And I always try to say layoffs always terrible, and then we always talk about why and the companies and so forth. Let's bring a face to it. One of the things I've been noticing over the last couple of weeks on Twitter is as Google lays off people, I'm seeing farewells on Twitter and Mastodon from Google Engineers, many of whom have been there for years. And this kind of, it's not a...
Stacey. Are you wrapping presents?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, I'm so sorry. I have cough drops and I just had to... I was putting them away. I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte:
Are you that person...

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm really sorry.

Leo Laporte:
... In the movie theater, who takes 10 minutes to open the package? Are you that person?

Ant Pruitt:
Holy cow.

Leo Laporte:
Would you like...

Ant Pruitt:
No, I was like, "I need to put the cough drops away so I can do my job." But I'm also like, "But the cough drops make me feel better."

Leo Laporte:
Would you like a Junior Mint? They're curiously refreshing. Just don't drop it into the open corpse of Richard Hay, okay?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte:
Richard Hay is here. He is the face of all of those layoffs. Google cutting 12,000 jobs. And first of all, I don't want to say condolences, but I'm sorry that it happened. How long were you at Google, Richard?

Richard Hay:
Well, I was at Google from July of 2007 to Friday. Well, and technically we're still employed until March 31st.

Leo Laporte:
You learned of this in a very unpleasant way.

Richard Hay:
Yeah, they did send a company script form letter type of, you try to log in and it redirects you to a, "I'm sorry to inform you that your dog died." But actually I heard about it before that email I saw because one of the software developers in Belgium sent me a message on LinkedIn and said that he saw that I was impacted and was I okay. And I didn't even know there was a layoff yet.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, sonuva.

Richard Hay:
Well, but see, you'd rather hear it from a friend than the script that you get. And I later asked him, how did he even know that I was impacted? And he said they had created a group inside of Google of all the people that were impacted, and he was just looking through usernames and he saw mine. And so that's how he knew it.

Leo Laporte:
So there was a spreadsheet somewhere or something?

Richard Hay:
Well, I guess throughout the course of the day, they actually blocked access because they didn't want people doing that, but he got it before they blocked it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Timezone.

Leo Laporte:
Richard, I had breakfast with a friend at Google's by happenestance yesterday, and he said that his boss has hundreds of employees and didn't know.

Richard Hay:
Oh, my boss [inaudible 00:07:03].

Leo Laporte:
... That it was done. Your boss didn't know?

Richard Hay:
Yeah, my boss, I mean, I called him, I said, "Did you?" And I just had a meeting with him on Tuesday and there was no inkling of anything like this on the horizon. So the decision was made on a whole 'nother level than us.

Leo Laporte:
So layoffs are always unpleasant. Google, like a lot of tech companies had done a lot of hiring during the pandemic, and in my mind I thought a lot of this was just kind of retrenching after excessive hiring. And Wall Street Journal said something that Google had increased its headcount by like 47%. So I was very surprised to see how many senior people were let go as well. What were you working on, Richard, before the end?

Richard Hay:
So most recently I was working on some internet edge operation troubleshooting for cloud customers. But probably more interestingly, right before that, I was working for about 18 months on scaling and deploying the backend infrastructure for Starlink, SpaceX, Starlink, the space internet thing.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, cool.

Richard Hay:
Now, they eventually figured out how to do what we were doing for them without us, so they moved off of Google's backend, but that was pretty cool to work on that.

Ant Pruitt:
Nice.

Leo Laporte:
So for fiscal year, this is from the Wall Street Journal ending in September, 2019... I'm sorry, beginning September, 2019 to September, 2022. That one-year period, Amazon doubled employee count. This is because the of pandemic, I think. Microsoft went up 53%. Alphabet up went 57%. That's a huge growth. Meta, 94%.
And my initial reaction, as I said to this was, "Well, yeah, the pandemic's over, and there was a big boom, and now there's some retrenching." Did they explain to you why you were cut as opposed to somebody who had been hired in the last year?

Richard Hay:
So that is very unclear. I don't know what rubric they used to determine who it was. And I got to admit, I had seen the same news that everyone else had been seeing about Amazon laying off people and Microsoft laying off people and all these articles saying, "Oh, well Google is... People are worried about layoffs at Google." But I wasn't worried about it, but apparently I should have been.

Leo Laporte:
Well, normally they'd go to your boss and do some stack ranking or something, as brutal as that sounds, and say, "Well, who can you lose?" But your boss didn't even know about this.

Ant Pruitt:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Doesn't Google do a lot... Not via algorithm, but I imagine, and then my hunch is they tend to get rid of people who... Not are replicable. I'm not trying to say that you are replicable, but who have roles that are replicated across the company. And then they might be just...

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, or...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. And you might just be the more senior and paid the most, whereas someone who's just come on.

Ant Pruitt:
I mean, there's that.

Stacey Higginbotham:
The longer you've been in a job, unless you're in charge of things, you're at a risk because you're expensive.

Richard Hay:
And they probably can find someone else that does what I do for less money.

Ant Pruitt:
I know that happened to me.

Leo Laporte:
Is the stuff you were working on deprecated? Maybe that had something to do with it too. I mean, maybe they didn't want to pursue that line. I know at Microsoft, all the HoloLens people are gone and the [inaudible 00:10:39] people are gone.

Richard Hay:
Yeah, no, by the beginning of my career, I worked on building, and deploying, and developing all of the data center switching equipment that's in every data center in the world. So I worked on that for about eight years, but then I left that team. So lately when I did go to the Starlink thing, that was more operations and not as much engineering.
And then it's possible that I... And I had even been looking around for other opportunities to go back into engineering. So it's possible I wasn't a good fit for that role. And just something in that made them decide, "Well, we can do the ops stuff with other people and we don't need him." I don't know.

Leo Laporte:
How hard was it to switch roles like that in Google, Richard?

Richard Hay:
I switched different roles about six times. So I worked on the platforms team for about eight years, but then I decided I wanted to live in Texas because my wife, she said, "My friends are in Texas, my mom's in Texas, my sisters are in Texas."

Leo Laporte:
"And we're going to Texas."

Stacey Higginbotham:
[inaudible 00:11:47] barbecue.

Richard Hay:
Well, 'cause I was in Texas when I was recruited in 2007 and they forced me to go to California. I did switch to Google Fiber for a couple years because they said, "Hey, do you want to live with your kids?" Which is a strong pitch.

Ant Pruitt:
That's when I met you is when you were with Fiber.

Richard Hay:
Right, I was with Fiber at that time and once I decided to go and work in a team that was doing private LTE stuff and deployment of sensors to detect aircraft carriers on the east and the west coast. So that's a pretty fun thing. You're in Mountain View on a promo committee deciding who lives and who dies, and you run into one of your old buddies and he's like, "Hey, do you want to help me detect aircraft carriers?" And I'm like, "Well, can I live in Austin?" And they're like, "I don't care where you live." And then it's click, click, click, and you're on that team. So it's not that hard to switch teams. And that's one of the other reasons why I had no real concern that this sort of... Because they've never done anything like this.

Leo Laporte:
No, this is the largest layoff in Google history.

Jeff Jarvis:
Richard, before we got on, and Leo likes to keep things live so that everybody can see what's going on back behind the scenes, you were telling me, you were talking about the difference in culture at Google over the time you've been there. It's be really interesting to describe life at Google over the time that you've watched it.

Richard Hay:
Oh, yeah. Well, when I started there were 7,000 employees.

Leo Laporte:
Geez.

Richard Hay:
So it was a couple years after the IPO. And I think every resume was personally approved by Larry Page, and you would get into the company and it wasn't all jumping on trampolines, it was actual, real work. And in 2010, there was an incredible meeting where Eric Schmidt stood up and said that because the company was doing so well financially, they wanted to share that large S and that benefit with the employees. So he said everyone was going to get a 10% raise.
So it wasn't like we're going to do a spin in or give these people bonuses, but just them, this was across the board. And I was in the room when he said that, and that was in Mountain View and it was just an amazing... And he even said he thought he'd never been able to say anything like that when he was the CEO at Sun or any of the other places, at Nobel, I think. So that was an amazing opportunity for him.
But now part of the reason was because there were only 27,000 employees at that time that that's why they were able. Now, he couldn't say anything. They're not going to say anything like that now. So then just contrasting that with what happened on Friday, that's kind of like what all the other companies do.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Friend of mine said who used to work at Google, he left a couple years ago, he said, "Oh, people don't understand that Google is highly hierarchical and like the Marines. Would you agree with that? That the structure started coming in and Schmidt always said, "Our biggest challenge is going to be we got too big." Which I think is part of the problem

Richard Hay:
I think that is part of it. So one of the senior vice presidents is a Swiss fella named Urs Holzle. Urs used to run the platforms team that I was on, and actually he was kind of brutal. But he would have these meetings every six months where you had to justify your product's existence from a business case or he would kill it.

Ant Pruitt:
What's wrong with that?

Richard Hay:
Well, I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying... Well, I mean you have to [inaudible 00:15:23].

Ant Pruitt:
Cold-hearted Ant.

Richard Hay:
I'm just saying...

Ant Pruitt:
Well, no, look, we've said, at least I've said a gazillion times on here, Google needs to be more focused and just being all ADD with this product and that product, that's why stuff is dying off because there's no focus. That sounds like he was focused.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Urs is on the infrastructure team. So yes, this was on the infrastructure side, right?

Ant Pruitt:
No, no, I'm just saying in general. In general, just the approach of, "All right, this isn't helping us. Let's trim the fat and..."

Richard Hay:
No, I'm just saying that you would kind of go in the micro kitchen of the guy that just spent two years of his life that he'll never get back. So there were some casualties of this sort of thing. But yes, I do agree. I missed that whenever he got promoted to a level where he wasn't involved in the day-to-day management anymore, and they backfill with a bunch of academics who are fake-it-'til-you-make-it guys, and then you basically get things that should have died but didn't die because they're like, "Oh, well we have the money to do this, let's do this."

Ant Pruitt:
See?

Leo Laporte:
And then [inaudible 00:16:25].

Stacey Higginbotham:
You're not talking about Diane Green, are you?

Richard Hay:
I'm not going to say anybody in particular that I might be talking about. Whatever.

Jeff Jarvis:
I miss Google Plus, Richard. Geez.

Richard Hay:
Yes. No, I had 12,000 followers on Google Plus.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, Google Plus. Bring it back.

Richard Hay:
Yes, I miss it. It was a nice platform.

Leo Laporte:
What's your sense of how they went about this? Do you have any idea or was it a black box?

Richard Hay:
I'll be honest, I have no idea because obviously I did not expect this to happen. I mean, I have about a thousand of these little tip notes that I write to myself about how to do things that were tied to Google Keep on my corporate account that I'll never be able to access [inaudible 00:17:10]. If I'd have known this was going to happen, I would've like... Because there's no company secrets in there, it's just me telling myself, "Now me tell two years from now me how you type in the thing to do the thing."

Jeff Jarvis:
When is my mother-in-law's birthday? Oh, no!

Leo Laporte:
That's good. No, I understand that. I have a note somewhere that says how to set up an SSH public-private key set logins.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That is kind of like a get out of...

Leo Laporte:
I can never remember, so I kept it in a note and then I just pull up that note. And so I understand that. They gave you no time to do anything. I guess they don't want you writing nasty farewell in that.

Richard Hay:
Well, I think that Sundar even said that from the reason that they did it like this was because, obviously, Google is protecting a lot of very private information.

Leo Laporte:
I understand that.

Richard Hay:
Of billions of consumers and they didn't want any... Whatever they think of you as an individual, they don't even want the risk of someone malicious trying to [inaudible 00:18:12].

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, we do the same. I mean, I hate to say it, but if we've had to fire people, we've done the same thing. You cut their account access off.

Ant Pruitt:
Pretty standard operating procedure of as most places.

Leo Laporte:
As quickly as you can. This has got to hurt. You said you have some severance time. Did they make you sign... Apparently, they didn't make you sign an agreement not to talk to the media?

Richard Hay:
Oh, well, I haven't seen that agreement yet.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, good.

Richard Hay:
I think since I'm technically an employee still, I mean, I think there's like a thing they ask you when they do this [inaudible 00:18:50].

Leo Laporte:
What are they going to do? Fire you?

Speaker 1:
They could take away... Could they take away your Cobra or something?

Richard Hay:
They might be able to do something. I mean, obviously I don't want to be... And just as a legal disclaimer, I am not trying to give away any secret [inaudible 00:19:06] things.

Leo Laporte:
No, no, no. And in fact, we're not trying to get those out of you at all. We're just trying to put a human face on something that is so inhuman and so easy to report on. But when you say 12,000 people lost their jobs, that's a lot of people going through a lot of hell. And I really wanted to have you on so that people could understand. So what's your plan now? What are you going to do?

Richard Hay:
Well, I will say I've been incredibly humbled by the response of so many of my friends that when they found out that they've reached out to me to offer me other opportunities to do new things.

Ant Pruitt:
Good. That's awesome.

Richard Hay:
So that does dull the sting whenever you're being reached out by other people to say, "Hey, do what you do. Just do it for this other outfit." And there are a couple of really interesting opportunities there. I'm not saying I'm going to go work for the Saudis, but whatever.

Ant Pruitt:
Not on air.

Leo Laporte:
On the other hand, they got some money and if they called... Sounds like your skills are particularly in networking, yes?

Richard Hay:
Yes. One of the things there is really no substitute for experience. Essentially, I've seen many, many, many things fail, and I don't know if you're familiar with this, but all the technology companies have what I just proverbially called the WTF meeting. Whenever you have 500 switches crash and 70,000 servers go offline, instantly and without warning...

Ant Pruitt:
Postmortems.

Richard Hay:
... You have this meeting where the service owners that are negatively impacted by this event, they come in and they look at you. And the way I like to describe it is it's like in the original Superman with the guys on the wall where they're all like, "Guilty, guilty, guilty." And then it has to be unanimous, Jor-El, and then he lights the stick and they're in the Phantom Zone. Anyway, so it's like that in the meeting. And then they say, "Dude..."
And then most Google services are actually dual homed so that your Gmail is in two clusters and your calendars in two clusters, so if a cluster dies, you can still access your email. Most users don't notice that even something bad happened. So you can have this postmortem and something horrible happened, but since nobody noticed, then you get to play VA, if a tree fell in the woods, do the other trees laugh at it? "Google down" isn't trending on Twitter, so this is the nothing burger, that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte:
If Elon calls, I think he might need some networking help. Would you consider going over there?

Richard Hay:
Well, since I did work on Starlink, which is one of his little babies...

Leo Laporte:
That's right.

Richard Hay:
The only way you can sustain, by the way, a 10,000 satellite constellation in low Earth orbit where they degrade and fall back into the atmosphere and they die within five years, is if you can dramatically reduce the cost of putting things in space, which they have done. It used to cost a million dollars a pound to put something in space, and now it's 10.

Leo Laporte:
Wow. $10?

Richard Hay:
Whatever you want to...

Leo Laporte:
From $1,000,000 to $10. Wow.

Ant Pruitt:
Dang, that's crazy.

Richard Hay:
Whatever you want to say about Elon and his crazy antics, you can say that the Falcon 9 is a machine.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, no kidding. Wow. That's an amazing multiple. So how much severance did you say you got?

Richard Hay:
Well, I didn't say, but they're going to pay me for the better part of a year.

Leo Laporte:
Oh [inaudible 00:22:51].

Jeff Jarvis:
We Actually have Sundar's statement on that.

Richard Hay:
Right, and so basically they pay you 16 weeks plus a couple of weeks for every year you worked at the company.

Leo Laporte:
Worked And you've worked there so long. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, good.

Leo Laporte:
We should [inaudible 00:23:06]. So according to the Wall Street Journal layoffs reach as high as the vice president level. They completely laid off the entire area 120 team, their blue sky R&D team.

Jeff Jarvis:
All? I thought it was just eviscerated. It's all?

Leo Laporte:
I think they laid everybody off. I'll have to verify that.

Jeff Jarvis:
What does that say about their R&D?

Leo Laporte:
Well, the people they didn't lay off were people who'd created a product that had then been incorporated into Alphabet.

Jeff Jarvis:
But where's the next one, and the next one, and the next one?

Leo Laporte:
It's not cutting to the bone when you're cutting only 6%, but it's cutting a lot. This was my real surprise was because the statement for Sundar Pichai is, "We really grew, but the economy has changed, so we have to shrink a little bit." And it implied that it was going to be the people that grew, but it isn't, it's across the board at a lot of different levels. And I'm so sorry, Richard, that you were one of the people hit by that. It sounds like you're going to be okay.

Richard Hay:
Well, the way I look at this is there are two billion people in the world that make a dollar a day, so this is a first world problem.

Leo Laporte:
But it's still a personal thing.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And you do live in the first world.

Leo Laporte:
When you work for a company for that many years, I saw one person tweet after 20 years, when you're with a company for 20 years, or in your case, what was it? 17, 12, 15?

Ant Pruitt:
16.

Richard Hay:
15 years.

Leo Laporte:
Especially a young guy like you, that's like a big part of your life. A huge chunk of your life. You probably started there before your kids were born.

Richard Hay:
I did start there when they were two.

Leo Laporte:
Two.

Richard Hay:
So they don't have any memories of me not working for Google.

Leo Laporte:
And I think that, I don't know, for me, it was always the case that a lot of who I was and how I valued myself in the world was my work. So it hits hard regardless of the financial impact or it's very philosophical view to say, "Well, I'm doing better than those other two billion." But still, I don't think we should ignore how hard that must be to suddenly without any warning be told, "Yeah, you don't work here anymore."

Richard Hay:
Yeah. That is very difficult. I will say if I'm sad, it's mostly I'm sad for the fact I mourn the company that Google is no longer that company. So that is the thing that I'm sad about, I mean that [inaudible 00:25:45].

Leo Laporte:
Characterize that, what is the old Google compared to the new Google?

Ant Pruitt:
That's what I was going to ask, because I picture Google as the folks running around with bicycles, and lollipops, and ice cream cones, and just fun time while they digging into the code and so on and so forth. Has it become a little bit more, I don't know, structured and squared off, if you will?

Richard Hay:
Well, and I kind of feel like to some degree, the unicorns and magic rainbows was not going to last forever. Every company goes through phases. So it was almost an... And Google had expanded from the 7,000 when I was there to almost 200,000 employ or whatever it is now. So that whenever they cut 12,000 people, that's 6% of everybody. But that's still a lot of actual, real people that got impacted. And of course the way they did it, even though I don't even know if there's an easy way to do this.

Ant Pruitt:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So having been let go suddenly from a company, very publicly, being part of something like that is probably better than just being fired randomly one day, all on your own. But having everybody realize, being able to say it very publicly actually allows a lot of cool opportunities to come your way where people never would've talked to you beforehand because they thought you were happily employed. I really hope that that comes and happens for you because it is kind of cool to be like, "Guys, I'm free. Anybody like me?" And then a bunch of people be like [inaudible 00:27:25].

Leo Laporte:
And you know, Stacey, because you were there. You were at [inaudible 00:27:31] when it dissolved. So you've kind of been through this.

Ant Pruitt:
Richard, have you seen any communities like what's been happening with the Twitter engineers where they leave and they've gone somewhere [inaudible 00:27:45].

Richard Hay:
I think there was a Discord or some other things that they were talking about where you can go and I guess commiserate about, "Well, yeah, this sucks." "Yeah, it sucks," whatever. But I admit, I wasn't really... I mean was in the Core cadets at Texas A&M, and it was always a suck it up and drive on kind of place where you can cry about spilled milk, but what's the point? Anyway, so that's the way I'm approaching it is that this is actually, now I can write that book.

Leo Laporte:
Are you? Are you going to write a book?

Richard Hay:
Well, I mean, I figured that some of these things, like the WTF meeting, maybe not everybody knows that those things happen.

Leo Laporte:
Right. No, I think that'd be very interesting. Yeah.

Richard Hay:
So you screenplay a little. You change the names and the incidents, and then you make it based on true events, but not actual true events. And then you could even make a movie out of it. Because these are companies that everyone interacts with every single day, but they never really see what happens behind the curtain on the side of how do you keep the wheels on the wagon?

Leo Laporte:
I don't know if you've gotten to this point yet in your stages of grief, but can you look back now on your 16 years at Google and summarize what it meant to you? And if there was a lesson to be learned? Except don't keep everything in your Google Keep account.

Richard Hay:
Yeah. Well, other than that, for sure.

Leo Laporte:
Oops.

Richard Hay:
Well, 'cause I never thought I was going to be a cutoff abruptly like this, so if I would've done things differently. The backup early and often in more than one place, and it's the cloud, it's dual homed, it's all good unless they cut me off.

Leo Laporte:
I think a lot of people think, "I will always have my Google Docs." This is a good lesson.

Richard Hay:
Right, yes. There is a lesson to be learned. Maybe you still have that other account or you just make a dummy account and you just copy everything into that account. So if this account ever gets blocked, you still have that one. That type of thing.

Ant Pruitt:
Ask our very own Jason Howell [inaudible 00:30:05].

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, I was going to say, even if you're a normal person, we're seeing people get chopped out of their Google accounts for... Oh, there's Jason's thing. There's the whole anti-pornography thing where people talked about on the show with parents taking pictures of their kids.

Leo Laporte:
A lot of things can happen, including a mistaken identity. Any other lessons learned? Any other thoughts you have about all this?

Richard Hay:
Well, so I actually was asked to go speak at a funeral last week for a friend of mine's father who passed away unexpectedly. And he had worked at NASA where he worked on Apollo 11, and he developed the camera system for Apollo 11. And he worked there for several years, but then he decided he wanted to impact people's lives. So he left that after about three years, and he went and became a high school physics teacher for the rest of his career with his wife, and she was also a teacher. But my...

Richard Hay:
Rest of his career with his wife, and she was also a teacher. But my takeaway from that was working at NASA and working on Apollo 11 was amazingly impressive, and it was just an amazing thing that he had done, but it wasn't his life.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Richard Hay:
And so I kind of feel that way about my time at Google. It was a good run. Obviously I'm disappointed in the way it ended, but it was an amazing thing that will always be part of my life, but it is not my life.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've got a great attitude, Richard. I'm sorry that happened to you. I'm glad you could kind of be with us and people can hear what it's like and what the experience is. And it's probably good warning to all of us not to tie our personalities up with our job, that they probably should be two different... At least not our self-worth anyway. Richard, good luck to you.

Jeff Jarvis:
Indeed.

Leo Laporte:
Appreciate it.

Richard Hay:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte:
Have a great...

Richard Hay:
Yes, I will...

Leo Laporte:
Have a great day. Stay in touch. Let us know what happens.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Richard Hay:
Thanks. I will let you know whenever I land. Wherever I land, let you know.

Leo Laporte:
Appreciate it.

Ant Pruitt:
I'll give you a ring later on, brother.

Richard Hay:
Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Richard Hay.

Richard Hay:
Take it easy, Ant.

Ant Pruitt:
See ya.

Leo Laporte:
Ant and Richard worked together at Gina Smithson [inaudible 00:32:15] dot com, where Richard was a science editor and that's how you know him. And actually now I realize that's how I know him. I didn't realize at the time. I remember reading his stuff. Yeah. I mean, a real shock for a lot of people, I think at Google. There was, according to Business Insider, a contentious town hall meeting on Monday with such Pichai and remaining staff and Google's Chief People Officer, Fiona Cicconi, was there as well.
They were at great pains to say that it was not a random layoff. That the layoff was based on factors like the company's highest priorities, the employee's skillset, experience, productivity, performance history. Not every leader was told about this. Cicconi said, "In an ideal world, we would've given managers," like Richard's boss, "a heads-up, but we have over 30,000 managers at Google. We just didn't have time to do that."
People were a little upset, apparently, according to Business Insider. One employee asked about the communications strategy saying many employees didn't know who else was impacted. Google did not share a list of people based on a principle of respect for people's privacy. This is Rick Osterloh speaking, who is Vice President of Devices and Services. He said, "The company wanted to let people share their information on their own terms." Which is why I guess I saw so many Twitter posts from people saying, it's a shock. I'm not at Google anymore after all this time.

Jeff Jarvis:
Leo, one thing I heard is that not everybody in the company knows, because in Europe you've got to go through a whole different process.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
A place like France and Germany, their people are still waiting for axes to fall.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. This is what Elon Musk learned to his own chagrin, that it's a lot harder to fire people in Europe than it is in the US. So I mentioned, Jeff, and here's the follow-up. Google lays off most employees in the Area 120 incubator. TechCrunch says there are less than a hundred employees left, but my sense is those hundred people are people who produced a product that Google is now selling. So this is the TechCrunch headline. Google's In-House Incubator Severely Impacted by Alphabet Layoffs.
People may not know what Area 120 is. It was kind of their R&D, right? They did a lot of interest... A lot of the interesting, weird things that we talked about.

Jeff Jarvis:
The Bell Labs of Google.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. A spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, "The majority of the Area 120 team has been winded down." Or maybe they mean winded down, I don't know. "Only three projects from the division will graduate later this year into Google product areas. The spokesperson would not say what projects were being shuttered and which were being graduated."

Stacey Higginbotham:
Guess you could figure out by going and looking and seeing who was left. But that would be...

Leo Laporte:
A lot of people on LinkedIn. That's another place you could go is search for the ex... They call them Xooglers. They got Nooglers when you start.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Xooglers.

Leo Laporte:
Xooglers. Former Ooglers. Yeah. It's hard. It's really hard. And our sympathy to all of the... It's now more than a hundred thousand people who have been laid off in tech over the last two weeks.

Ant Pruitt:
Mr. Laporte, was it like early 2021 when there was news of Big Tech going on a hiring spree or what have you, or was it early 20...

Leo Laporte:
Because of the pandemic, yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
And then all of a sudden... Right.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And remember that these companies collectively made more than a trillion dollars in increased value during the pandemic. Pandemic was very good to some of these companies.

Jeff Jarvis:
They were very necessary to us.

Leo Laporte:
And good to us. That's right.

Jeff Jarvis:
Scaled quickly.

Leo Laporte:
That's why. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
To do that.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Among people getting laid off at Google, 27 in-house massage therapists.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
24 of [inaudible 00:36:39].

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's terrible. I mean, because that's not a job you can like...

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I think you could find another job, but you start your own practice or whatever. We have, I think Petaluma...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. But that's much...

Leo Laporte:
Petaluma alone has thousands of massage therapists.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay. But in a rough economy right now.

Leo Laporte:
No, I agree.

Stacey Higginbotham:
People are going to skimp on that.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I mean, it's probably rare to be an in-house massage therapist, but it's probably a pretty cush job.

Leo Laporte:
I bet it is. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, I wonder what other freebies they're going to get rid of. I was thinking the other day, they can't get rid of meals, 'cause that's just too ingrained.

Leo Laporte:
Boy, that's the first thing Elon did though. Those free gourmet lunches at Twitter.

Jeff Jarvis:
Gone and all those coffee machines sold.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Bologna sandwiches for everyone.

Leo Laporte:
And bring your own toilet paper. Yeah. All right. Anyway, it's...

Jeff Jarvis:
You want to hear some breaking news?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Breaking news. Now this in from the professor of journalism.

Jeff Jarvis:
Facebook and Instagram are reinstating Donald Trump.

Leo Laporte:
Well, we knew that was going to happen.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
We knew that was going to happen. So he's been reinstated now on all the main social platforms. The issue for Mr. Trump is he has an agreement with his own company, Truth Social, not to post on these other places. He's apparently trying to get them to let him out of that.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, part of this, John Patel said on Mastodon, he said, this is really about the ads. Trump needs to raise money and Facebook wants the ad money, and that's the essence of it. So his ads can now reappear on these platforms, which couldn't before.

Leo Laporte:
Well, and also if you're running for president, much better to be on a platform like Facebook or Twitter than Truth Social, which I mean, frankly, anybody who's on Truth Social's already voting for you. So...

Jeff Jarvis:
You're cursing to the choir.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not surprised. I mean, I think there are actually far worse people that Elon has brought back to Twitter.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, one came back and then was gone a day later.

Leo Laporte:
Well, Kanye for one.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, well, that's one. But also Nick Fuentes came back this week.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, is Nick Fuentes already banned? He didn't take long.

Jeff Jarvis:
Already banned again.

Leo Laporte:
Wow. Amazing story. I'll tell you, he was the Holocaust denier, the anti-Semite.

Jeff Jarvis:
And worse. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
And so what did he get banned for? He just was up to it again.

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't know. The story is down there.

Leo Laporte:
What do you think if you invite somebody like that back...? You invited [inaudible 00:38:57] back. What do you think's going to happen? Twitter suspended the account of white supremacist and Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, listen, 24 hours after his reinstatement on the platform, according to The Hill. He posted a picture of his suspended account on Telegram on Wednesday morning with the caption, "Well, it was fun while it lasted." The 24-year-old leader of the American First Movement had his account reinstated Tuesday. In one of his first tweets, he posted a short video of Ye.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh God.

Leo Laporte:
Let me see... It says, if The Hill... This is from The Hill. Let's see if they say why he was booted.

Jeff Jarvis:
Billy B says, shared a Ye 2024 logo morphed into the message def con three...

Leo Laporte:
On Jewish people.

Jeff Jarvis:
Which a reference to the disgraced rapper's tweets.

Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah. I actually have mixed feelings. I mean, honestly, we know how horrible Nick Fuentes is because he's doing it in public. Right? So to some degree, we talked about this on Twitter on Sunday, and I know, I think Jeff, you probably also had this opinion as I did that well, this'll be good because we'll lift the rocks and the sunlight disinfects and we'll know who these people are. We just didn't expect that they'd find so many followers.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's the old Northern wet liberal versus southern bigot argument, that at least... This is the argument when I was growing up. At least you know what George Wallace is and you don't know the Northerners.

Leo Laporte:
It's true. There's a lot of covert racism in northern towns like Boston.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Boston is not covert racism. Most overt racism.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Okay, nevermind.

Ant Pruitt:
Stories I've been told. Woo.

Leo Laporte:
Nevermind. Amazon is closing Amazon Smile. This was the... Go ahead.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I wish they had just said, look, tough times. We're closing this down. We've given a lot to a bunch of places. It's time to stop this.

Leo Laporte:
They made up all sorts of...

Stacey Higginbotham:
I mean, that's not a terrible message.

Leo Laporte:
They made up some mealy thing like well, there's...

Stacey Higginbotham:
They were like, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Too many people and too little money.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, they were like, these charities couldn't... We couldn't raise enough to make an impact on everyone. And I'm like, you know what? Because I had Amazon Smile for my kids' school and they got like $3,000 a year, which for Amazon was like, that's nothing. But for the school...

Ant Pruitt:
It's huge.

Stacey Higginbotham:
$3,000 a year is great.

Ant Pruitt:
Yes. Exactly. How do you define what's impactful?

Leo Laporte:
A spokesperson, Amazon Smile was launched in 2013. 0.5% of the purchase price would go to the charitable organization of your choice. I choose Doctors Without Borders. I have to point out though, the real reason why Smile exists, and now I can't guarantee this is the real reason, but there was a thread on Reddit by a former Smile executive, which was then later confirmed by another Smile executive who chimed in that really the reason Smile was created was because a great many people were searching for products on Google, seeing the Amazon ad, clicking that and buying it, which meant Amazon had to pay affiliate fees to Google of several percentage points.
So Amazon's profit... There's a whole group of people that these executives are part of whose job is to maximize profit. They said, well, this is a problem because we're paying Google millions and millions of dollars every year because people go to Google first. How do we get people to go to Amazon first? They came up with this. Amazon Smile only works as you know, Stacy, if you go to smile.amazon.com, in other words, if you begin your search on Amazon, the money goes to your charity.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, that's how it works.

Leo Laporte:
So by giving a... 0.5%, a far smaller amount of money to these charities, Amazon saved a much larger amount that it was giving to Google. So this is the reason Amazon Smile existed. Hey, that's fine. It worked. Everybody wins. The charities win. Amazon saves a lot of money. Actually, Google doesn't win, but Google's got other ways to make money. I don't know though. I wish these executives had explained why they were killing it because presumably... Maybe people aren't doing... You know what, maybe they're not doing that search through Google. Although I notice I do all the time.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. They've solved the problem.

Leo Laporte:
Maybe they solved it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
But don't you still... I certainly do, when I'm looking for a product, I Google it and then it goes to Amazon.

Jeff Jarvis:
How old is Smile? How old was it?

Leo Laporte:
2013. 9, 10 years old now.

Jeff Jarvis:
So yeah, I think you got a point, Stacy. At that point it was different. Now since people are in the habit of going to Amazon.

Ant Pruitt:
So Mr. Laporte, if it's something that you assume is already going to be on Amazon, you don't just search inside of Amazon? Cause that's what I do.

Leo Laporte:
I do.

Ant Pruitt:
There's some things I don't expect to be on Amazon. So then yeah, I'll go to Google. But other than that, I just go straight to the Amazon site.

Leo Laporte:
I remember going to the Google lobby many years ago, and they used to, in the old days, they'd have a board in the lobby that said what the top Google searches were. Remember? I don't know. You remember? Did you ever see that, Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, they're kind of more random going by...

Leo Laporte:
Oh no, when I went there, it was like the top 10 searches on Google and number one was Yahoo. And I'm thinking, what?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
And then I realize how normal people use their browser. They don't type yahoo.com. They type Yahoo and then initially Google would give you the result, Yahoo. But after a while, Google realized, oh yeah, you mean yahoo.com and we just push you to yahoo.com. I think still plenty of people, if I'm looking for... I want to get a 300 count bottle of Advil, type it into their Google, and then, oh, it's interesting, I'm getting Walmart first. Maybe that's first. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that's the problem.

Ant Pruitt:
Google got smart.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Then there's Amazon after that. Amazon does beat Walmart's price by 20 cents. No, 25 cents.

Ant Pruitt:
But we all know you're not normal, sir. So that's [inaudible 00:45:27].

Leo Laporte:
Isn't that how people do it? Isn't that how people do it?

Ant Pruitt:
I'm asking you.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Dude, you just googled it into a Neeva search engine, so...

Leo Laporte:
Well, no. Pay no attention to the fact that I don't use Google, but it's the same effect. Right? Actually, that's a good question. Let me see, if I go to Google, what I get. 300 count Advil. That's a really interesting question. Do you think I'm going to get... Oh, I still get Walmart and Amazon. Walmart's first.

Stacey Higginbotham:
All right.

Ant Pruitt:
But again...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Do you get different pricing?

Ant Pruitt:
When you're shopping...

Leo Laporte:
Same prices.

Ant Pruitt:
...for Amazon stuff?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay.

Ant Pruitt:
You don't go straight to Amazon and search? You. I know that normally.

Leo Laporte:
No, I go to Google. I think normal people go to Google for everything because they're not really going to Google. They're typing it in their browser...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Or they just type it into their browser. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. That I get.

Leo Laporte:
And on most browsers, that's why Google pays 11 billion dollars last year to Apple. Because on most browsers, including Apple's browsers, typing in the browser bar is the same thing as Googling it. And Google makes so much money on that, that they pay Apple 11 billion dollars last year.

Jeff Jarvis:
The traffic to google.com homepage, go there for that search box has to be small now.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Nobody goes to google.com.

Jeff Jarvis:
Nobody goes...

Leo Laporte:
But I watch my wife...

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 00:46:43] show I'm researching the show every week?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Because if I go to Google News and type in Google, it's not so good. I go in to the search bar and I type Google and Google thinks I'm stupid, like you can't find Google on Google? But when I do that and then hit the news button, it's a far better version of news.

Ant Pruitt:
Interesting. So you go to search bar and you type in...

Jeff Jarvis:
Google. In Google.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow.

Leo Laporte:
See, not everybody's like you, smart.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, they're they're weird.

Leo Laporte:
I'm hick. I'm not that smart.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They're just habit. They form habits and they stay with them.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I mean that's...

Jeff Jarvis:
My father, he hasn't been on, he's 97 years old next Monday, so he hasn't been on his computer for a few years, but he never got past understanding what a web browser was. It was AOL.

Ant Pruitt:
Right, right.

Jeff Jarvis:
It reminds me, I got to cancel that. Geez. I still haven't done that.

Leo Laporte:
You have an AOL account still?

Ant Pruitt:
That's not unusual. I've been here... They've, they're still getting...

Interviewer:
Eugene Mastodon, at one point was adding...

Leo Laporte:
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you interview with the founder of Mastodon.

Jeff Jarvis:
You want to stay to the end.

Leo Laporte:
I'm going to stay to the end. This is on Nightcap, which is on CNN business and the interviewer calls him Eugene. So I guess he's approved that use of his name, which you call Eugen. And I avoid the whole thing by calling him Gargron, which is his Mastodon handle. But here's a quick...

Jeff Jarvis:
Wait one sec, he just turned 30 years old.

Leo Laporte:
He's a young guy. By the way, Mastodon now has made enough money through their Patreon that they're hiring actual developers. Yeah. Isn't that great? So here is...

Interviewer:
Mastodon at one point was adding 130,000...

Leo Laporte:
Should I just skip to the end here because I don't want CNN to take me down?

Interviewer:
Twitter...

Leo Laporte:
Has he been doing a lot of interviews? I've never seen him before.

Jeff Jarvis:
No, he has not. I've never seen like this.

Interviewer:
You're the only full-time employee. And how many active users are there?

Leo Laporte:
10 million.

Eugen Mastadon:
1.6 million at the point.

Leo Laporte:
Oh no more...

Interviewer:
As you said, you're the one full-time employee right now, and as of now, you're the big competitor to a company run by one of the world's richest people. Do you ever think you would find yourself in that situation?

Eugen Mastadon:
No. It's kind of funny. I make very little compared to that man.

Interviewer:
If you had a message to Elon Musk, what would it be?

Eugen Mastadon:
Get off the internet.

Leo Laporte:
I agree. Get off the internet. Says Eugen, the creator of Mastadon. Just get off our internet, Elon.

Jeff Jarvis:
Kill your account, Mr. Musk.

Leo Laporte:
Really, we're not going to talk a lot about Elon. There's not that much news to report. We did mention, did we talk last week about the killing of the third party?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Ant Pruitt:
Yes, we did.

Leo Laporte:
Third party clients. That's official now. Twitter made it official at first by saying, you broke our rules to which Twitterific and TweetBot said, wait a minute, what are you talking about? We've been doing this for 15 years. And then they said, uh, and they changed the rules so that there are no third parties anymore. I understand that. He wants his advertising money, but I do wonder what the endgame is now. Twitter's being sued by everybody. The landlord in San Francisco.
The king of England is... Well not the king personally, but the Crown properties are suing Elon for the rent in London. The Crown estate, they call it. He's not paying his rent anymore. Millions and millions of dollars.

Jeff Jarvis:
King versus emperor. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So you know, you do that and you get kicked out after a while. What's the end game? Is Elon trying to go bankrupt? I've seen that increasingly...

Ant Pruitt:
Does he even have any more employees to manage that stuff?

Leo Laporte:
Well, no, they fired the entire accounting department. So one theory is that nobody knows those bills exist.

Jeff Jarvis:
Where's that checkbook?

Ant Pruitt:
Why are we expecting him to pay rent? He doesn't know anything about it.

Leo Laporte:
By now, I think Twitter knows that it owes rent, by now. It's a headline everywhere. King Charles Sues Twitter.

Jeff Jarvis:
Advertising was down. They were admitting it was down 40%.

Leo Laporte:
40%.

Jeff Jarvis:
December was down 70%.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
So he's talking about having an ad-free version charging, but if there's no ads anyway, what might put that on? He owes 300 million, I think...

Leo Laporte:
At the end of the month.

Jeff Jarvis:
Imminently.

Leo Laporte:
At the end of the month.

Jeff Jarvis:
But he's got a 500 million credit line. He'll make that payment. But the way I was thinking about it is, the creditors who will get the company if it goes bankrupt, will have bought it for 13 billion, which is not a bad price for Twitter. Probably the right price for Twitter.

Ant Pruitt:
How much you say? 13 billion?

Jeff Jarvis:
13 billion is what they loaned, they lent to...

Leo Laporte:
There is still a consequence. So if he goes bankrupt, most of that value is the other, whatever that is.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, the equity is gone.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, the 30... The remaining 30 is Elon's money or borrowed against Tesla.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's all gone.

Leo Laporte:
But does that not hurt Tesla? Does that not just kill Tesla?

Jeff Jarvis:
He's trying to, now... The new report is he's trying to sell 3 billion dollars in Twitter stock. You get a bridge too.

Leo Laporte:
Well, even if he got that... But even if he got that, that's a fraction.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So the latest thinking is...

Ant Pruitt:
That's just trying to reduce the...

Leo Laporte:
...his intent. He just wants out. Right? He's always wanted out. He didn't want to buy it in the first place. So the latest theory is he just wants to go bankrupt and just kind of get out of it. But there's going to be a cost, I would think. You know what? I don't understand high finance. This guy's operating... Anybody that rich is operating at a completely different level than you or I. So I don't get it. I don't know. But I'm just wondering if anybody has any ideas of what's going on.

Jeff Jarvis:
Stacy, what's your theory?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, Lord. I don't want to go into that person's head. Intentional bankruptcy. Sure. I mean, I really don't know. I don't pay attention. Sorry.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, but you're still on Twitter.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Inertia is a very powerful thing.

Leo Laporte:
Has your Twitter feed degraded in any way?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't go to it. I'm only on... I go to Twitter once a day just to... It's kind of like how I treat LinkedIn. It's no longer... And I haven't gotten a Mastadon because I've actually enjoyed not having, okay y'all... Here's Stacy's confession for the January month. I uninstalled TikTok. I go to Twitter once a day.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I haven't gotten on Mastodon. I'm not a Facebooker person.

Leo Laporte:
I think this is healthy.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm a lot happier.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Antisocial.

Leo Laporte:
I've been saying this for a while. I do go to Reddit still. I mean, part of my job is to follow the news so to keep up on the news, I'll check Twitter, probably like you, a daily check. I check Reddit a couple of times a day. But I also check places like Hacker News. I check Pinboard for the most popular bookmarked things. I mean, I'm looking for news besides tech meme. I'm looking for other sources of news, but that's my job. I don't really participate, even on Mastodon, I don't toot very often.

Jeff Jarvis:
David Carp wrote a good piece today...

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
That he said that it's a ghost town to him as he looked at the engagement he gets versus...

Leo Laporte:
On Twitter? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
And I'm curious with you, 'cause you've been the one who's defended Musk's intelligence. There's got to be something smarter here. What do you think?

Ant Pruitt:
I still think if the bills due, dadgummit, he needs to pay his bills. I think that's been his biggest problem is he's been able to get away with stuff in general, even all the way up to the, what is it, the SEC, with all of the tweets that he did.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, he's on trial right now for the acquisition tweet, that funding was secured for taking Tesla private. He's on trial for that right now. It's not looking good for him on that either. I don't think.

Ant Pruitt:
Well, I'll believe it when I see it.

Leo Laporte:
It's at least embarrassing.

Ant Pruitt:
I'll believe it when I see it because it doesn't seem like he's paid any type of price or penalty for any of his actions like that that caused some tumultuous stuff. But again, from an operational standpoint, if he feels like he can get some other folks in there to run that company and make it more profitable, more power to him. That's just what CEOs do. They put people in place and take credit.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It's his MO, isn't it? So he is done all along it at SpaceX and Tesla.

Ant Pruitt:
And I'm still in broadcast mode with my Twitter use. I don't necessarily check Twitter anymore either. It's literally stuff just being broadcasted out.

Leo Laporte:
Just tweeting.

Ant Pruitt:
If I do check it, I'm usually looking for something along the lines with my son or whatever about it now because I don't want to go in there and just sort of scroll through and just see what the suggestions are. Because I've learned in the last couple of weeks that it's just a bunch of mess that's depressing and I don't even bother anymore. As a matter of fact, I had to tell a couple folks, I'm sorry, y'all got my phone number or I'll check in here and there, but just don't expect a lot from me on Twitter from responding.

Leo Laporte:
He seems to have gone off his head lately. In the last 12 hours, he has changed his name to Mr. Tweet and then tweeted, "I can't change it back."

Ant Pruitt:
Hey, he's not supposed to be able to do that because he has a blue check beside his name.

Leo Laporte:
Mr. Tweet. Well, he can do anything he wants. And then he tweeted the bee emoji, all you can bee emoji. Be all you can bee.

Jeff Jarvis:
So banal.

Leo Laporte:
And then he tweeted a poem, half a bee philosophically must ipsofacto, half not be. This is either somebody who's smoking a lot of weed, trippin balls or has lost his mind.

Ant Pruitt:
This is my company and I can do what I want today.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, he's... I mean he's trolling everyone.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He's having fun. Oh, it's like a 10-year-old boy.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I agree.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Into the world.

Leo Laporte:
And you know what? Awesome. $44 billion worth of fun. He can afford it. This is the thing people say, oh my God, he spent so much money. He still has $132 billion. He could not spend it. He can't spend the interest.

Ant Pruitt:
If there's any type of crimes he's done, I would hope that he would have to pay the price, if you will.

Leo Laporte:
He could pay all the prices he wants. He's [inaudible 00:57:48]...

Ant Pruitt:
For whatever those crimes are.

Leo Laporte:
Whatever he wants.

Ant Pruitt:
Like any other regular person would do. The problem is he seems to just keep living life and doing whatever the hell he wants to do because he's got that, I hate saying it this way, F you money.

Leo Laporte:
He's got the Jack, man.

Jeff Jarvis:
And the FU money is saying F you to him right now. Well, just like mine is.

Leo Laporte:
But again, big deal. You know what, none of this will have any personal consequence.

Ant Pruitt:
At the end of the day, he keeps two billion after it's all over. What a luck that was. [inaudible 00:58:15].

Leo Laporte:
Give me two million, I'll be happy.

Ant Pruitt:
I don't have a problem with him being... Let me be clear. I don't have a problem with him being rich, and a billionaire. I have a problem with someone being rich and a billionaire and allowing them to not have to deal with consequences of their actions. That's all.

Leo Laporte:
I mean, think he knows he doesn't have to, so that's why he can do whatever he wants. There's a certain freedom. He's not hurting anybody, is he?

Ant Pruitt:
May be hurting some folks financially when it comes to dealing with shareholders.

Leo Laporte:
They knew it.

Ant Pruitt:
Things like that.

Leo Laporte:
Screw them. They thought they were going to get rich off him. They're the suckers. Right?

Ant Pruitt:
But that doesn't... Well, okay. Yeah. They placed the bet. Right?

Leo Laporte:
They placed the bet. He turned out to be a nag, not Secretariat. Life goes on. It's been good... It's been good and bad for those third party Twitter clients. Tap bots, which made a very popular client called Tweet bot, fortunately, kind of saw the writing on the wall and they've been working over the last few months on a Mastodon client called Ivory. They pushed it out this week into public. It's still, they say early edition, but it's available now. They do offer a free version, but most people will subscribe. I ended up subscribing to support them for 25 bucks a year. That's a very nice app. And it's interesting. We're seeing a spike on Mastodon since it came out. The biggest spike in a long time. A lot of people were waiting for tap bots to put out Ivory.

Jeff Jarvis:
Wow.

Leo Laporte:
And are now joining Mastodon. So many people, people like our friend Christina Warren saying, "Now I can use Mastodon on full-time."

Jeff Jarvis:
It's only the iOS though.

Leo Laporte:
It's only iOS. Well, no, they'll do... Well, maybe not. I think they'll get...

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't know if they will.

Leo Laporte:
Maybe not. Maybe there won't be. The thing is there's millions of Mastodon, not millions, but there's dozens of Mastodons...

Jeff Jarvis:
What do you like about it, Leo? Slick and smooth?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's nice. It's very slick. It's missing a few features, but it has a lot of nice features. There are other good apps too out there, like Ice Cubes just came out on iOS. It's very good. Mostly, I think it's familiarity for people like Christina who use tap bots for Twitter, use Tweetbot and Ivory used Tweetbot basically for Mastodon and they go, oh, I'm home.

Ant Pruitt:
Gotcha.

Leo Laporte:
That's fine.

Ant Pruitt:
That makes sense.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Got it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Again, inertia. Change is hard.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Spending brain cells... I mean it takes brain cells to change anything and spending brain cells on something like figuring out Mastodon. It can be, if it's not a crucial part of your job, I can see why you would wait.

Leo Laporte:
The Financial Times, which to great fanfare launched in Mastodon Instance.

Jeff Jarvis:
I patted him on the back and I said, how forward thinking of you? How smart of you.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They shut it down already?

Leo Laporte:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis:
You were brilliant, Financial Times.

Leo Laporte:
We tried to run a social media site and it was awful.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, here it goes. Here it goes.

Leo Laporte:
It was awful.

Ant Pruitt:
Everybody going to start taking a crap on Activity [inaudible 01:01:28].

Jeff Jarvis:
But what's fascinating about this... No, actually, Ant, what's fascinating about this, they're not complaining about Mastodon Activity Pub at all. What they're complaining about is regulation and intermediary liability.

Leo Laporte:
Compliance, security, and reputational risks are substantial and ever growing in unpredictable ways. I kind of understand this. I was little surprised when big brands started there on Mastodon. I don't know if there's an advantage to doing that. I'm as big as you could be and still get away with murder on Mastodon. I don't think it's...

Jeff Jarvis:
Don't tell them.

Leo Laporte:
Though largely hypothetical...

Leo Laporte:
Though largely hypothetical, these risks were judged serious enough to exercise management at the highest levels. Those people...

Jeff Jarvis:
And their lawyers.

Leo Laporte:
At the highest levels. I hear this in a poncy British accent.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes, yes.

Leo Laporte:
Those people have better things to do than clean up our mess. Legal side is all that again times a thousand thanks to some pretty draconian UK laws, which really are terrible. And I understand, maybe if I were in the UK, I wouldn't be running it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, when the Guardian started Comment is Free, which was their very open and pioneering effort to have comment. Their lawyers were scared to death.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Because of the libel laws in the UK and so on.

Leo Laporte:
But this is-

Jeff Jarvis:
And Al Rusbridger took a brave move to do it.

Leo Laporte:
This is a really good example of why section 230 in the US is so valuable for those of us want to run these things.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
The reason the FT doesn't want to do this, and The Guardian doesn't want to do this...

Jeff Jarvis:
Preach.

Leo Laporte:
... Is because they don't have section 230. So while they perhaps could defend themselves in court, they still would have to go to court. I have to tell you, if there were no section 230 protection, and we're going to get to that. There may not be in months to come. Then I wouldn't be running a Mastodon or a forums or [inaudible 01:03:23] forums.

Jeff Jarvis:
Leo, would you literally shut it down?

Leo Laporte:
I think I'd have to. Our IRC. I think I'd have to, because without section 230, if somebody posts something defamatory on Mastodon, I could get sued for it. But more importantly, if I pull down something defamatory on Mastodon, you've said this again and again, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yep.

Leo Laporte:
Section 230 protects our right to moderate as well.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
If I moderate, I could get sued by the person who got pulled down. I routinely suspend accounts. I suspend two or three accounts every week on Mastodon. Some of them...

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 01:04:01]. Nice. That's nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Stay active.

Leo Laporte:
No. Well, that's the job of a moderator. And I love it that I'm [inaudible 01:04:08]. And we have very clear rules and the majority of accounts are not on our server, so I just simply suspend our access to it. But occasionally they are.
There was some guy recently on our server, it was interesting. I shared his political beliefs, but he was very anti-religious. And he was posting, I think, very inflammatory things I happen to agree with weirdly. But very inflammatory things. And I thought, this is inflammatory. This is not something I want on our service.

Jeff Jarvis:
Not your curtain party.

Ant Pruitt:
Not what you want in your community that you're trying to monitor. I get that.

Leo Laporte:
So I suspended him. But without section 230, he could easily come back and sue us, and then I would have to defend it. Maybe I'd win, but it would cost me something, and it would be a burdensome. And if there were many of these, it would be too much. So maybe I would...

Jeff Jarvis:
This is what Google argued last week in their brief to the Supreme Court.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So we're waiting to see what the outcome of this, and I've changed my tune a little bit. This is the case the Supreme Court is hearing called Gonzalez versus Google. Family of a young woman who was shot in 2015 during an ISIS attack on a Paris club are suing Google. Saying, "Their algorithms promoted ISIS terrorist videos. And so they should be held liable to it."
Of course, they're protected right now by section 230. Last week, I tried to contend that an algorithm, especially an algorithm designed to make more profit maybe should be something they'd be responsible for. But I have been convinced otherwise over the week. Partly by you, Jeff, but also just in general.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yay.

Leo Laporte:
Because it's impossible to say what the intent of an algorithm is.

Ant Pruitt:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte:
And an algorithm is an editorial function. Editorial functions are protected, right Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, yes, but I'm always cautious about trying to define it as media and editorial. But basically short answer, yes.

Ant Pruitt:
But Mr. Laporte, you're not naive to think that that algorithm isn't in place because they're, "Hmm, let's figure out how we can blow more money." It's more like...

Leo Laporte:
No, they're there to make money.

Ant Pruitt:
... "Let's put this is in place so we can make money."

Leo Laporte:
And that bothers me.

Jeff Jarvis:
Leo could have an algorithm recommending the best stuff on Twitter that doesn't have money behind it, that makes all of his users just happy.

Leo Laporte:
Well, and there was an amicus brief from anonymous Redditors. The Supreme Court actually said, "In this case, an anonymous comment can be taken because these Reddit moderators want to preserve their anonymity for good reason." And the court agreed, which I thought was quite open-minded of it. They basically said, "We use algorithms to moderate and we need those algorithms to moderate effectively." And I think that that was persuasive to me. That just because something's an algorithm in my heart-

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. That wasn't and to add money.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
That was to try to make a better experience.

Leo Laporte:
In my heart, I feel like Google has some moral culpability because their algorithm, which is designed to monetize, promotes and seems to radicalize people. Or seems to make their videos more extreme because that's more engaging. And in my heart, I think they have a moral issue there. But I think they're protected, and as they should be because it's so hard to define what's a bad algorithm versus a good algorithm. Or what's a useful algorithm versus a profit focused algorithm. That that's a foolish task.
Courts shouldn't be expected to have to decide that or a jury, it's impossible. So to protect section 230, I think we have to protect algorithms.
It is very important. We all agree. That, I think, section 230 be protected.

Jeff Jarvis:
Stacey, if 230 went away, how would it affect your business?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, we don't get that many comments. It wouldn't affect it very much because I could always just shut down or moderate the comments we get on our website. Because we're mostly a newsletter and podcast. It's mostly not user community.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Although I would miss the comments because we have some lovely commenters.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So you just turn them off. A big part of-

Stacey Higginbotham:
It would make me sad.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So from day one as a podcaster, even before that, as a just pure broadcaster, always thought that the real job was to build community. Not to build audience numbers, but to build a community. You have a community around what you do. We have a community around what we do. And I thought that to facilitate it, having a Mastodon, having forums, having a chat room, having all of that was a service that not only supported the community, but helped build the community.
And so it was very valuable to us. But if it's a risky thing, I don't think Lisa will let me do it. Maybe we'd wait till the first time we got sued, and then we'd take it all down. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis:
But then the community strategy you have now is a financial strategy, and that would hurt you.

Leo Laporte:
Well, that's an interesting point. Because yes, the one thing that makes Money's Club, TWiT. That's designed to support us. And as part of Club TWiT, we have a discourse. I guess we could turn the discourse off and still offer ad-free versions of the shows, and the TWiT plus feed and all that stuff.
The discourse is what we would get in trouble for because of the comments there. I feel a little safe. I mean, I always have felt safer in the discourse because if you have to pay seven bucks to be in there, you're not going to be a jerk.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
And that's so far held true, by the way.

Ant Pruitt:
Right.

Leo Laporte:
There will be jerks who are willing about below seven bucks.

Jeff Jarvis:
Leo, the Reddit thing you raise is that Scooter X is-

Leo Laporte:
He's liable.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
He works there for free.

Jeff Jarvis:
Sorry, Scooter X.

Leo Laporte:
It's not just Scooter X. We have-

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, I don't know.

Leo Laporte:
At least 10 mods in there. And those mods also would be libel.

Ant Pruitt:
Thank you, mods.

Leo Laporte:
Although, if you're going to sue, you don't go after impecunious mods. You go after the deep pocket.

Jeff Jarvis:
How do you know Scooter X isn't really rich?

Stacey Higginbotham:
What he was going to say.

Jeff Jarvis:
How do you know he's not worth a fortune?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Plus Scooter [inaudible 01:10:24].

Jeff Jarvis:
That's why he has the time to do this, because...

Stacey Higginbotham:
He's using his billions for good unlike Elon Musk.

Jeff Jarvis:
Exactly.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He's like, "You know what I'll do? I'll give back to the tech community that has given me so much."

Leo Laporte:
I imagine him saying, "How dare you call me impecunious."

Stacey Higginbotham:
I say, "Good day, sir."

Leo Laporte:
I say, "Good day."

Stacey Higginbotham:
I hate this job.

Jeff Jarvis:
Have you met Scooter X face to face?

Leo Laporte:
Oh yeah. Many times. I love him.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay. All right.

Leo Laporte:
I love all our mods.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Does he wear a top hat and a monocle?

Leo Laporte:
Yes, he does. He's a Cheshire cat and a monocle away from being an evil genius.

Speaker 2:
Evil genius.

Leo Laporte:
I've met many of our mods. They from time to time will stop by and sit in my lap and ask for presents.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh no. See, now that is just defamation right there.

Leo Laporte:
Except I have pictures of them sitting in my lap. So I'm not making that up.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh gosh.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh.

Leo Laporte:
No. I am ever so grateful to our mods. And there are people who just kind of step up and do it. For instance, in our discourse forums, Paul Holder has just kind of taken over under his wing. And I'm very grateful, Paul, to you for doing that. And he keeps the thing nice and clean and running. I never even asked him to do it. He just does it, which is wonderful.
So I think what happens is people love these things and they want to keep them going, and keep them gardens.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. It's part of their community. That's the key thing is that you don't-

Leo Laporte:
It's not mine.

Jeff Jarvis:
... Act like you own the community.

Leo Laporte:
It's theirs.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right. Right.

Leo Laporte:
In fact, I keep an arm's length from the IRC. I say, "That's not us. That's not us." In fact, that might be what we end up doing. We would cut them free maybe, and see. If section 230 were to go away. Just say, "Well, it's not us. It's just some fans run a place, so you sue them."

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay, Scooter X. There you go. All that good help.

Leo Laporte:
And that's how I show my gratitude for all you've done all these years.

Jeff Jarvis:
I think you just signed off. No.

Leo Laporte:
No. We wouldn't do that. But I don't know what would happen. This is why we can't let section 230 go away. What do you think is going to happen here? Supreme Court, interestingly, was also going to review the two anti-social media cases in Florida. And text their laws in Florida and Texas, which are blatantly unconstitutional, totally in contrary to the First Amendment. And they've deferred it. They've probably taken it off this year's docket by saying, "Well, we want to comment from the White House." What does the Biden administration think?
Which they, I know, don't care.

Speaker 2:
I don't they're going to say.

Leo Laporte:
They don't care, but it's a way of them saying, "Yeah, we're not going to do that one this year."

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, the Biden administration is also shooting for 230. The left and the right are both shooting for it.

Leo Laporte:
I know.

Jeff Jarvis:
One goes after the shield, one goes after the sword. And yeah, Texas and Florida, they're not, but it puts them in a difficult position.

Leo Laporte:
So I think the reason the left and the right are so adamant about this is they think Section 230 protects big tech.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
And the most important thing I would like you to take away from this and everybody listening, is that it isn't big tech I'm worried about. Now, I don't care if Google has to struggle, or Facebook or YouTube have to struggle. It's going to kill the small people like us.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
We are the ones who can least afford all the lawsuits that would come if Section 230 didn't exist. It isn't to protect big tech. It's to protect the internet and particularly the grassroots nature of the internet, so that's really important.

Jeff Jarvis:
I would sit in your lap right now.

Leo Laporte:
See.

Jeff Jarvis:
Because well, I want to say this seriously, is that, God bless you. Last week you were saying something practically the opposite, and you're open and you're flexible, and you're changing your mind.

Leo Laporte:
Well-

Jeff Jarvis:
And I respect that.

Leo Laporte:
What's the opposite of defense?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Offense.

Leo Laporte:
In my offense, I-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Or prosecution.

Leo Laporte:
I hadn't changed my attitude about 230, but I did feel like Google had some moral response. This is the problem, is they have some sort of moral [inaudible 01:14:45]. And this is also, I see the problem, is I understand why Congress and the courts might say, Well, yeah, but this is reprehensible that Google's promoting this content. What can we do about it?" Oh, let's get rid of this 230 thing. And that's why I want to kind of decouple the two.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
But I think you can't decouple the two. And that's really what I've come to the realization. As much as I'd like to, because I feel also that there's some moral responsibility that Google has not to promote this stuff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's kind of like child porn and encryption, right?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's that sort of issue.

Leo Laporte:
It's exactly like that. Yep. Very good. Anyway, we'll watch with interest. I don't know what the timeline is on the Supreme Court and section 230.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They don't-

Leo Laporte:
Have they heard oral arguments? No. They're just taking briefs right now.

Jeff Jarvis:
They've just got briefs, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And these oral arguments are not going to be the ones from the DoNotPay chatbot.

Leo Laporte:
Yes, right. The DoNotPay chatbot. Oh my God.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Hey, I think it's a great use case. It's an interesting test. And the fact that the DoNotPay chatbot is now going to actually make legal arguments in front of a judge in a case we don't know you about yet. I'm like...

Leo Laporte:
Lawyers are going to protect lawyers.

Stacey Higginbotham:
... What happens?

Leo Laporte:
And they're going to say, "If you're not paying a lawyer for your defense, then you can't do it." I don't know. That's interesting because the Constitution says you can defend yourself. You don't have to have a lawyer.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You know what they say about that? The person who has their own self as a client is a fool.

Jeff Jarvis:
Schmuck.

Leo Laporte:
Fool for an attorney. Yeah. There's currently no timeline as far as I know for these cases. The amicus briefs had to be filed by January 12th. That's why they were all filed. But I don't know if the court said when they're going to hear arguments. So I would [inaudible 01:16:39].

Stacey Higginbotham:
Do we want to talk about the government suing Google? Which feels like a big Google story, but do we also want to have an ad?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Thank you, Stacey.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Because I really need to go get a drink of water.

Leo Laporte:
No, get a drink. Have whatever you need. Get that stroopwafel, and we'll take a break. When we come back, we will talk a little bit about more legal action against Google. Not just here, but in the EU as well. The EU has really taken the lead on all this stuff.
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So yeah, it's interesting to watch both the EU and the FTC and the states all going after big tech. And really to some degree, at least in the section 230 case, we little tech guys are just collateral damage.

Jeff Jarvis:
Hot.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Which particular anti Google measure were you thinking about? Oh, Stacey's just getting back.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Sorry. Boiling water for tea.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Had to get that caffeine infusion.

Jeff Jarvis:
You didn't say, "Hot water."

Leo Laporte:
Mm.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I know. Well, he said it was a long ad. Okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, it was going to be. [inaudible 01:19:43].

Leo Laporte:
Did I say it was long? I didn't.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, you said it was going to be.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think it was the beginning of the show. I think it was a long TWiT social ad. My bad.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, that's coming later. I'll do that later.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes. This is. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte:
I'd have to say, on the one hand, I think we'd absolutely have to regulate any big companies. Forget tech. Big companies need to be regulated, otherwise you get an uneven playing field. And for the fair market to work, the playing field has to be equal. Everybody has to be able to innovate, compete fairly and equally. And when companies get big, they tend to take advantage of their size to basically unlevel the playing field.
So antitrust is, in my opinion, very important to having a free market society. If you're going to have capitalism, you also have to have this kind of regulation. But at the same time, because it's not just the US, it's all these other jurisdictions. I feel like it must be really hard these days to be a big company.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. Well, the one I know I was talking about was the action on Tuesday, which was the Justice Department in the eight states. And this is what Jeff and I talk about all the time with Google, which is where it actually does have a monopoly. And it can abuse it, which is in online advertising.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
In fact, they want Google to sell off. Was it double click the ad?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Double click?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, the ad.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, Stacey and I agree on this. I've always said that Google's vulnerable because where it holds a near monopoly is advertising, and it runs both ends of the marketplace. The buy and the sell side, and that's what really makes great efficiency. But that's the problem.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. This is the second-

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't know if they sold one side or the other. Would that be enough? I don't know.

Leo Laporte:
This is the second ongoing antitrust suit against Google. This is against Google's online ad dominance. And yeah, one of the things they want to do is have Google sell off it's ad business. Remember Google acquired Double Click, gosh, was it 2015? It was a long time ago.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. I'm not sure when it was.

Leo Laporte:
That gave it really a complete dominance in the online ad market, both as a buyer and a seller. Of course, the Senate tried to pass and failed the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Google was fined in France, agreed to a 391 million dollar settlement with state's attorney general for location tracking. This has gone on and on.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, Double Click was in 2007.

Leo Laporte:
Seven. Wow.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, that's when Richard was hired by Google. So we're talking what, 16 years?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
The guy who was on the shore.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I guess even if something's been part of your company since 2007, you could spin it off. I'm actually kind of sympathetic to this. I think Google is self-dealing because they're both selling the ads and buying the ads.

Jeff Jarvis:
And not transparent enough.

Leo Laporte:
And complete, yeah. The Justice Department says, "Google punishes websites that dare to use competing ad tech products, and uses its dominance in ad technology to funnel more transactions to its own ad tech products. Where it extracts inflated fees to line its own pockets at the expense of advertisers and publishers."
So they're screwing both the buyers, the sellers, everybody. I think there's some merit to this.

Jeff Jarvis:
There are competitors. There's AppNexus, actually started this business.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
But then Google buying, what did you say, Stacey, 2007? They bought Double Click.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes. For 3.1 billion dollars.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, what a buy.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
What a deal.

Leo Laporte:
So the government also alleges that Google has, "corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by seizing control of online advertising systems, and inserting itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace. By eliminating competition through acquisitions, and exploiting its dominance to push advertisers to use its products over those of others."
Google is the defendant, not any individuals. It also calls for Google to sell part of its ad tech business, which I'm perhaps-

Jeff Jarvis:
Is a part of. I think part of it's right to do then.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
I actually think that's correct.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Listen to me. I'm saying this about Google and about regulation.

Leo Laporte:
So this is the US-

Jeff Jarvis:
The whole shopping thing in Europe made no sense about antitrust.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
This is the antitrust case match.

Leo Laporte:
This is the strongest one, I think. Yeah. This is the DOJ along with the states of Virginia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. And Rhode Island and Tennessee. So that pretty much covers 90% of the big population states.

Stacey Higginbotham:
And I guess the concern is because there can't show harm to consumers, which has been our standard of antitrust action, that this will have a hard time. But it's also the FTC and the DOJ have been really forward about being like, we must rethink how we deal with antitrust.

Jeff Jarvis:
And Stacey, I think it's different in this case. Sorry, I interrupted.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, no. I was going to say, so it's really important. I think this will be a really important case to talk about that whole strategy. Do you think it harms consumers?

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, no. See, that's where I think it's different in this case, Stacey. I saw something today, and maybe it was Casey Newton, I can't remember who said it. Is that the consumer in this case is not you and me, Jane and Jeff Shopper. The consumer is the advertiser, the media company, the customer.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis:
So if the customer gets hurt, and I think that's why they have a decent case here. To say, "That in this marketplace, there is insufficient competition." That's the essence of antitrust, and the customer is hurt. So I think it actually holds to the old doctrine.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It may. I think the argument that I've seen some lawyers take, is that over time we have focused on the consumer as the consumer, as opposed to the customer.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So I don't disagree with you. It's totally true that the customer here gets hurt. But yeah, we haven't heard as much about that.

Jeff Jarvis:
Which is different from too big, which is more in Europe. It's just too big. We don't like big, and then it's impossible to define. In this case, if you can define a harm to a party, then you got something.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
They're asking for a jury trial. So I think this is going to go up against a bunch of normal people.

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 01:26:32].

Leo Laporte:
Here's the thing. I think the clearest statement of the problem from the actual pleading. DOJ versus Google. Google, a single company with pervasive conflicts of interest now controls one, the technology used by nearly every major website publisher to offer advertising space for sale, correct? Yes. Right? There are competitors, as you said, Jeff, but Google's totally dominant in that. Two, the leading tools used by advertisers, the buyers to buy that advertising space. And three, the largest ad exchange that matches publishers with advertisers each time ad space is sold.
Google's pervasive power over the entire ad tech industry, it owns the whole thing, has been questioned by its own digital advertising executives.
We've read this email, it was a smoking gun email from within Google. "Is there a deeper issue with us?" This is back when they were thinking of buying Double Click, I think. "Is there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the New York Stock Exchange and Robinhood."

Jeff Jarvis:
So devil's advocate here for a second.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Just devil's advocate to play Leo for a moment.

Leo Laporte:
Please.

Jeff Jarvis:
I think one of Google's arguments might be that because that auction is going on from the moment you open up the browser page until the ad is served. In those milliseconds, that the inefficiency of a truly distributed marketplace and trading floor, in essence, might itself hurt media because it would lower the price for the advertising. Or would lower the value of the advertising because fewer would be able to make it through. I don't know that I believe that. I think you can create a network that works. But they're going to argue probably that by bringing this efficiency to that exchange, they created more value.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, but as the DOJ points out, they create this friction-free, wonderful system and keep 30 cents on the dollar. This is from the DOJ pleading again. They keep 30 cents and sometimes far more of every advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through their ad tech tools. Google's own internal documents concede Google would earn far less in a competitive market.
30 cents on the dollar. That's a nice little business there.

Jeff Jarvis:
Apple's magic number.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah. 30%. Mm.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's just like the app store.

Leo Laporte:
I think honestly, the DOJ wins this hands down. The only question is, how long's it going to take?

Jeff Jarvis:
What's the remedy?

Leo Laporte:
And what's the remedy? Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
They apparently want them to sell off Double Click.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, I think they should sell off one side or the other.

Leo Laporte:
There you go. That's what I think too. They have to pick a side. They can't own the whole option.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's what I think is the issue here.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
The other interesting thing here is because back when they bought Double Click, I think their ad revenue was 98% of revenue for the company. That's now down to 80%. They have diversified a lot. Well, it's not because the ad revenue's gone down. It's because they have diversified through hosting and other things, which is really interesting to see how Google has changed as a company too.

Leo Laporte:
I'm not a lawyer, but if you read this complaint, it is, I think, pretty compelling. And the DOJ has lots of evidence, including emails that-

Jeff Jarvis:
If they just listened to Stacey and me, they would've done this years ago. Right, Stacey?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. We're totally qualified, right, Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
This to me is exactly how antitrust should work, frankly. This is where a government should step in and say, "Yeah. No, you can't. You got to divest."

Stacey Higginbotham:
And say, "Yeah, no." That is exactly what government [inaudible 01:30:41].

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, no, in a colloquial fashion. Yeah? No.

Jeff Jarvis:
But eight years ago, the tech companies were a lot more popular. Now it's a perfect time to do it politically because everybody's going after the big tech companies because they're too big.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
There's still going to be stupidity in this.

Leo Laporte:
Business Journal says, "The feds are saying Google has to be broken up." I think that's not quite what they're saying. They're saying, You have to stop double dealing."

Jeff Jarvis:
Is that the same?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I don't think that's breaking them up. But I think this is completely legit. I have to say, you're going to have to talk me out of the merits of this case.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm not going to.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, this seems completely legit.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We've talked about Google's layers.

Leo Laporte:
We've talked about this for years, about this kind of double dealing situation.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, and two, it's a case where if you're going to talk about monopoly situations. Again, monopolies are not illegal. If you earn your monopoly, you can have it right? But in this case, they're vulnerable because their controlled percentage of the ad market is so tremendous. Everybody concentrated on how much they control the search. Who cares.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
It didn't matter how big [inaudible 01:31:57].

Leo Laporte:
And they don't. They're rightly very worried about ChatGPT. We'll get to this a little later on. Ben Thompson's excellent piece in Stratechery. I think it's subscriber only, but I happen to subscribe.

Jeff Jarvis:
It is subscriber only, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
On AI and the big five, he calls it. We'll talk about this in just a little bit. This came out a few weeks ago, but he thinks Microsoft is best positioned to take advantage of things like ChatGPT.
We learned this week that the 10 billion dollar investment that was rumored that Microsoft was going to put into open AI, is actually in fact, the amount that Microsoft had started to open AI with a billion dollar investment. They're going to now add another 10 billion. And in return for that, they're going to put open AI in Microsoft products like Microsoft Office.
But Ben thinks the real strength will be in Bing, the Microsoft search. And that's why Google is saying, "Red alert. Red alert."

Jeff Jarvis:
I just disagree. I just disagree.

Leo Laporte:
Well, we'll see.

Jeff Jarvis:
I had breakfast with somebody, as I said, from Google this week. And he was...

Jeff Jarvis:
He was saying he's not involved in this. He's just some guy, some smart guy who worked at Google and still works there, who was saying that, "ChatGPT and such cannot be involved in science unless they give sources." I said, "ChatGPT doesn't give any sources." There's two questions there, right? There's the kind of, "Where did you get it?" Which is the discussion we had last week was this inspired by this artist or that artist. The second is, "If you present a fact, does the engine give you backup for that fact?" That's a whole nother process, which I think can be created.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, easily.

Jeff Jarvis:
Reportedly Google's doing that, but C as it is, is worthless.

Leo Laporte:
I showed you Neva, which does do sources. Nobody's saying that that's how Bing's going to do this. I think the only real question is, "does Google have a comparable product?" Is Lambda or whatever it is Google's going to be using, can they meet the effectiveness of ChatGPT like AI if Bing starts using it? I don't think Bing is just going to put ChatGPT on the front page.

Jeff Jarvis:
Jesus.

Leo Laporte:
ChatGPT just passed the Wharton MBA exam.

Jeff Jarvis:
An exam.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, it passed an exam given by a business professor.

Jeff Jarvis:
"Business professor", says Stacy.

Leo Laporte:
New research conducted by a professor of University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, which was Donald J Trump's alma mater, I might add, found that the artificial intelligence driven chat bot, GPT was able to pass the final exam for the school's Master of Business Administration program.

Ant Pruitt:
Dang.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't know. Business is not like... Critical thinking is not important there.

Leo Laporte:
You sound...

Stacey Higginbotham:
[inaudible 01:34:52].

Leo Laporte:
It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine.

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, I'm not saying it's not going to be fine.

Leo Laporte:
AI is not going to take over, don't worry. It's going to be fine.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I don't think the AI is going to take over. I think we will have to learn new ways, much like we've learned new ways to collaborate on search. We constantly have to adapt, that is what you have to do in life. Adapting to GPT makes sense and recognizing how to restructure a business exam so business students who are not necessarily kids, don't just use it without learning whatever you're trying to teach them unless that is what you're trying to teach them.

Leo Laporte:
Maybe the flaw is the exam.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's a productivity boost.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Maybe the flaw is in the exam.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, the whole point of the exam is out loaded. Clay Shirley, who's at NYU was interviewed on NBC today and was asked, "Should teachers panic?" He said, "It's a word calculator." Which I loved. I think it's a great way to look at it.

Leo Laporte:
It's one way to put it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Isn't it? Interestingly, Stacy, to your point, I saw there's this wonderful woman, I have it in the rundown, young woman who talks about AI all the time and she's just found a job listing for a prompt engineer with good pay, by the way.

Leo Laporte:
Nice.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's a skill.

Leo Laporte:
We said that what's going to happen.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's where it heads. That's where the educators...

Leo Laporte:
Here's the lead from a New York Times article of a couple of days ago while grading essays for his world religions course last month, Anthony Mannan, professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University read what he said was easily, "The best paper in the class. It explored the morality of burka bands with clean paragraphs fitting examples. In rigorous arguments. A red flag instantly went up."
Mr. Mannan confronted a student over whether he'd written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, and in this case, it had written the entire paper. Alarmed by his discovery, Mr. Mannan decided to transform essay writing for his courses this semester, he plans to require students to write first drafts in front of him in the classroom using browsers that monitor and restrict computer activity.in later drafts students have to, they can take it home, but they have to explain each revision. Mr. Mannan says that he also may forego essays and subsequent seminars and plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chat bots or services

Ant Pruitt:
That's the way to do it. That's the smart thing.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I also think as we encounter this more often, we will start to recognize a little bit. I feel like I now twig to win something, looks like it's... What's the ai, the vision one? Like stable diffusion or...

Leo Laporte:
Mid journey.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Mid journey or any of those. I feel a little antenna goes up and I'm like, "Wait a second, is this real?" I think we'll get that when we start seeing more and more ChatGPT, you'll start recognizing it for what it is. I hope.

Leo Laporte:
Here's Ben Thompson's piece, AI and the big five. His contention is that AI is introducing a new epoch. How do you say it? Epoch? Epic?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Epoch.

Leo Laporte:
I say epic, but I feel like it's

Ant Pruitt:
A always thought it was epic.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, let's find out.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I thought it was epoch. Okay, hold on.

Leo Laporte:
Let's see what ChatGPT says.

Jeff Jarvis:
ChatGPT has us.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I can't spell

Jeff Jarvis:
Google you'd have it.

Leo Laporte:
Miriam Webster says epic.

Ant Pruitt:
Epic.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Epic.

Leo Laporte:
I say that too.

Jeff Jarvis:
It might be British too.

Leo Laporte:
I say epic, but only because if I say epic, it sounds like E-P-I-C and I want to say epoch, which is also accepted.

Jeff Jarvis:
That sounds like it's a...

Leo Laporte:
Then you know what it is, E-P-O-C-H. A new epoch, a new era. Let's use the word era in computers. He says the first one was the PC that was a disruptor. Then the internet, he says cloud computing and then mobile. Clearly mobile disrupted everything starting with the Apple iPhone in 2007. Disruptive innovations do consistently come from new entrants in a market. Those new entrants aren't necessarily startups. Sometimes they're companies leveraging their current business to move into a new space. This is the question is ChatGPT going to transform, I think it is then a new epoch or era in computing. Who's going to be the winner in this? He talks about Apple, Amazon, Google, and META. He says, really, he thinks Microsoft is going to be the big winner.

Ant Pruitt:
Do you think the $40 a month bill that they were proposing, ChatGPT was proposing is okay? Seems like that's a little low based on previous discussions about how much compute power and cost of that it was to them. Seems like that's a little number.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's going to be a relicensed, I think.

Leo Laporte:
I Think we're over focusing on ChatGPT, there are plenty of other things that do this. There's tons of stuff. Let's not, let's say ChatGPT, but in general.

Ant Pruitt:
They just didn't build brilliant PR by releasing it the way they did.

Leo Laporte:
It's opened our eyes...

Ant Pruitt:
It's impressive.

Leo Laporte:
...As did stable diffusion. They opened our eyes to what AI could do. There's going to be others and there's probably going to be better. One of the things that ChatGPT lacks is it's frozen in time, but it's completely possible to write one that's constantly just like Google niddering the internet for new content so that it's always up to date. That would be another thing. Yes, that should cost more because that's an expensive process. The reason Ben thinks Microsoft, he says, is going to be the winner here. I'll read the whole paragraph. Microsoft, meanwhile seems the best placed of all compared to the other four. Like AWS, it has a cloud service that sells GPU. That's a big deal because current models require lots of storage and fast processors. Most people don't want to invest in those fast processors for something they're only going to do once in a while.
They rent it from Amazon, google. It's as a service. Microsoft is the exclusive cloud provider for Open AI. He says that costs Microsoft a lot of money. It's incredibly expensive, to your point, Ant. Given that open, AI appears to have the inside track to being the AI epochs addition to this list of top tech companies. That means Microsoft is investing in the key infrastructure of this new epoch. Bing, and this is the interesting one I thought, is meanwhile like the Mac on the eve of the iPhone, like the Mac, which was a driver for Apple until the iPhone came out. Yes, Bing contributes a fair bit of revenue, but it's a fraction of the dominant player, Google. It doesn't really amount to much in the context of Microsoft as a whole.
If incorporating ChatGPT, like results, and let's not say ChatGPT, but something like that into Bing risks a business model for the opportunity to gain massive market share, that's a bet well worth making. We know Microsoft has admitted that ChatGPT is coming to Microsoft productivity apps. They're already using ChatGPT and co-pilot on GitHub. Despite the controversies, it's been pretty successful, I think. What's important is that adding on new functionality, perhaps for a fee fits perfectly with Microsoft's current subscription business model. It's notable the company once thought of as a poster child for victims of disruption will in the full recounting, not just be born of disruption, but be well placed to reach greater heights because of it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Let's still look at it.

Leo Laporte:
I think we're going to wait and see, but I think just the threat to Google from Bing by itself is a big story. He compares Google to...

Ant Pruitt:
His house is going to become more valuable then.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Why

Jeff Jarvis:
Seattle Real Estate

Leo Laporte:
I should move up there quick. He talks about Eastman Kodak

Jeff Jarvis:
Your child, Stacy, he's coming.

Leo Laporte:
He says, says Kodak is often the poster child for the innovator's dilemma. For being disrupted. He said, in fact, Kodak did it, right. It took over 25 years from the time of the digital camera invention for digital camera sales to surpass film camera sales. It took still longer for digital cameras to be used in professional applications. Kodak made a lot of money in the meantime, paid out billions of dollars in dividends. They went bankrupt in 2012, but that was because customers had better access to better products and they didn't need them, but they...

Jeff Jarvis:
Could have done something different. They could have been Netflix and been in the distributing business.

Leo Laporte:
He says, not really. He says Kodak in fact had digital cameras at the very earliest, ut they would've been foregoing all of that 25 years of profit to have...

Stacey Higginbotham:
You're just saying get out as much money as you can while you can and then leave

Leo Laporte:
They weren't guaranteed to win that race, the digital camera race. They would basically, that's saying, I'm going to bet on this race and put all my money in digital. This is what Meta's doing, by the way, with VR, put all my money in and meanwhile forego all the profits really well of 25 years for this kind of weak bet. That's a pretty big gamble. He says, Kodak actually shouldn't be the poster child for failure. This is the best you can get when you're in a situation.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's very shareholder perspective. If you are the CEO of Kodak and working for shareholders, give it, but if you're thinking about the employees or somebody who's trying to create and operate a business.

Leo Laporte:
You'd had to fire all of those people doing film developing processing.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You could bring them through.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, yes.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You wouldn't have to fire everybody in 25 years is a long time. You could ease people out. The point is, under that rubric, yes, Kodak, is a success. I would say a better look at the innovator's dilemma would be something like Verizon, or actually, you know what a better example is Comcast in cable, in Verizon, like the broadband companies and the encroachment of broadband on their wire line business, which used to be their cash cow in profit center. They had put all this stuff in and they could just keep making money off of it. What you saw was them push as far as they could, making money from both, and then gradually expanding the market, like the pocket share that they had of your revenue from broadband as people cut their landlines. If you notice, you used to spend about 150 bucks a month for your landline and your cable and your broadband, maybe 200. Now you still spend about 150 bucks or 200. You just only have broadband.

Leo Laporte:
It's a good point. They've done it. Right. Dwindle asked, ChatGPT to write a story about us. Ready?

Ant Pruitt:
I see it.

Leo Laporte:
"Once upon a time, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Ant Pruitt and Stacey Higginbotham were all hosting a technology podcast together. They were discussing the latest advancements in the industry, when suddenly the studio's power went out. The four hosts quickly went into problem solving mode, using their extensive knowledge of technology to find a solution. They managed to fix the issue and continue the podcast without missing a beat. The end."

Ant Pruitt:
Que the PG and E cut, now.

Leo Laporte:
It wouldn't be us. It'd be Jammer B. It'd be bonito. It'd be Mr. Russell Tammany. It wouldn't be us.

Jeff Jarvis:
You have a generator there?

Leo Laporte:
No. When I worked at Tech TV, there was a lot of redundancy they had. We put in a building capable generator that would keep us on the air, et cetera. Then the power went out.

Ant Pruitt:
Running on diesel.

Leo Laporte:
Then the power went out. I remember vividly, because I'm standing on the set, we're in the middle of a show, live show lights go out, first sign of trouble. Then we had cameras on jibs that were on crane arms that were powered. Then the camera went... It just grouped. I thought, this is bad. I heard the generator in the back. This thing was a big diesel, like a Cummins diesel engine going, nothing.
Having learned that lesson, you spent a lot of money for complete redundancy. I decided long ago, John, that the twit was not mission critical. That if the power went out, we just go home.

Ant Pruitt:
IRC says otherwise, sir.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Wow

Leo Laporte:
If the power goes out, no harm, no foul. We go home. Now Lisa doesn't like this at all. She says, "but we got ads and blah, blah, blah." The cost of being fully redundant is insane. We just spent and I, against my better judgment, $23,000 to have, we had a power outage. I don't know if you remember the, it wasn't on the air, but we have a thing for our audio. Our audio is based on a system called Tellus Axis. The thing that powered it went, died. Burke was here. John was out.

Ant Pruitt:
It was late last year. One Sunday.

Leo Laporte:
Overnight, something like that. Were you here, John? Okay. It went out. Anyway, John runs in, everybody runs in. We cycle it. It's back. But they scared everybody. So my position was, so what? We just knock out the door, people, let's just off, we send for another one. The next day, FedEx exit. The next day we're back on big deal. Oh, no. So we just spent $23,000 to replace it with the latest and greatest, which we now have to wire up and stuff. I said after that, I was told, well, we're doing it. I said, but what about all the other systems for which we have no backup, including power, many systems?
What if the TriCaster dies? What do we do? Should we put the second TriCaster online? They all call in.

Richard Hay:
You know what we do, Leo? I'll tell you what we do. You use your laptop. You go find one. We all call into a Zoom call.

Stacey Higginbotham:
We broadcasted.

Richard Hay:
We actually, we do have.

Ant Pruitt:
You did that for Twin at one time.

Richard Hay:
Yeah, I did it well for the wildfires. When we thought they were approaching us, we made a plan that I would go home and do the show, and I even did the TWIT at home. Something actually was that when the power, that was when the Axio went out.

Ant Pruitt:
That's when the power went out.

Speaker 3:
The power outage. Then when we got repair unit bat, it didn't work, and that's when we got the

Leo Laporte:
This is not mission critical. It's not a hospital. No one's going to die.

Jeff Jarvis:
It is us, Leo.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm with Leo.

Jeff Jarvis:
Hell yeah. Give me the waffles.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm like, power out? Waffles, good.

Leo Laporte:
Hey, this is Breaking News. Just came in. This is a tweet from a divergence, Aaron, earlier this evening, Kevin Rose, who of course is a good friend of the network, one of the founders of one of the early guys at Tech TV, was fished into signing a malicious signature that allowed the hacker to transfer a large number of high value tokens. Here's a breakdown of what happened, our immediate response, our ongoing efforts. He was socially engineered into a false sense of security. Kevin has tweeted since I was just hacked. This was at 11:02 this morning. Stay tuned for details, please. This is really important to everybody. Please avoid buying any squiggles until we get them flagged.

Jeff Jarvis:
I know what that means.

Leo Laporte:
Don't buy any squiggles until we get them flagged. He lost 25 and a few other NFTs, including an auto glyph.

Ant Pruitt:
I'm sorry, I don't want to laugh at Kevin's

Stacey Higginbotham:
You know what? I will say in line with this, we saw one of, I was looking at, I get a bunch of annual reports and predictions from cybersecurity firms. One of their big predictions that they are starting to see and will continue to see, they think is people using ChatGPT to socially engineer people more effectively.

Leo Laporte:
I got a good one.

Ant Pruitt:
That makes sense.

Leo Laporte:
We covered this yesterday on Security Now. People writing malware, working malware on ChatGPT with ChatGPT. People with no coding experience, and it works.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Wow.

Ant Pruitt:
I guess if it works for that patch that he found the other week for, was it for last pass the

Leo Laporte:
That just did the gooey coding and stuff, but yeah, it can code. It can code fairly well.

Ant Pruitt:
Why not?

Leo Laporte:
I'm sorry, Kevin, that you lost, according to his friend Prager, as much as a million dollars, Kevin made $50 million selling Digital moon owls. I don't think he's going to be hurting. I'm sorry, but you know what? I feel like live by the crypto, die by crypto. This happens. This is an unregulated financial instrument, which is a non-stop hack fest. I'm sorry.

Jeff Jarvis:
He was on the cover of, what was it? Was it Business Week?

Leo Laporte:
Business Week, that was for Digg, the $30 million.

Jeff Jarvis:
What did he say he was going to be worth?

Leo Laporte:
Kevin always laughed at that because he's, it said he was worth 30 million with Digg ended up, I don't think he made a lot of money on Digg. He made a lot of money investing early in Twitter and other...

Ant Pruitt:
He was Angel, right?

Leo Laporte:
And other early stage companies. He was an early investor. He was an angel. He does fit fine. He was at Google Ventures for a while as a VC. I think he's at True Ventures now as a VC. Of late, he's really gotten into Defi Crypto, NFTs. He didn't make it, but his group,

Ant Pruitt:
Solana,

Leo Laporte:
His group made 50 million. The group include Beeple, who's probably the number one NFT artist. They made 50 million selling their digital owls NFT collection. Remember that? He made so much money that he had to make a video saying, "I'm not going to, we're put the, we're not, we're going to spend, we're going to do the, we're going to do." I don't know, he made some justification video. I feel bad for Kevin. I love Kevin as a person. I don't love NFTs Crypto, and I do feel like this is the way of the world with this stuff.

Ant Pruitt:
I still don't have a problem with NFTs allowing artists to get paid. My problem is to scam behind it all.

Leo Laporte:
It feels like the whole thing is a house of cards scam. I just, it's better you off. If Kevin could get scammed, anybody can get scammed. He's a sophisticated user.

Ant Pruitt:
True.

Jeff Jarvis:
The other thing too is Gary Vader, Chuck will make up in 30 seconds, make up a mouse and say, this mouse is going to be huge. Not imagining the actual creativity that goes into building a character and building stories and building everything else. I have a character. It's going to be huge. It's kind of offensive to all creativity.

Leo Laporte:
I find a little offensive. It's a little bit about...

Ant Pruitt:
Ape stuff offended me. I never really got down with the bored ape stuff

Leo Laporte:
It's the owls too. How can we take somebody's art and monetize fo the whole focus is, well.

Jeff Jarvis:
How can we create a scarcity?

Leo Laporte:
Well, that's the whole thing

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's creating an artificial scarcity or to hype up something that inherently doesn't have value. I won't say it, because who's to say a bored ape doesn't have value.

Ant Pruitt:
It has value to someone.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Not that level in...

Jeff Jarvis:
I think it's kind of the end of the copyright arc. This whole notion of creativity as a property versus an act, and that you can put a fence around it and make it into a tradable asset. What the NFT people say, the web three people say is, we're going to be own everything. I think the world's going a different way, and I think it's the last gasp of that worldview.

Leo Laporte:
I think we're, yeah. There's a lot wrong with the world today. That's all I can say. I said, I feel like I know. This is what happens when you get past a certain age. You start saying, Hey, the way it is not the way it used to be, and it's not good. I'm sorry, Kevin

Ant Pruitt:
Oldish when I say that

Leo Laporte:
No reflection on Kevin. I'm sorry that happened to you. That's terrible. I think it's a cautionary tale for all of us.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, I hope that he's reveals how he was...

Stacey Higginbotham:
Socially engineered.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes, maybe it's to help us all to cut off that tactic for whoever's doing it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It may be just truly good social engineering, so we just don't know.

Leo Laporte:
I'm sure we'll hear more about it. T-Mobile says for the second time, hackers have stolen a bunch of data. They promised it wouldn't happen again, but you know how those things are. 37 million customers, name, address, and account number, they say, and of course, I trust them. Credit card data and networks weren't affected, nor were passwords. They discovered the hack January 5th, were able to trace the source and stop it within a day. Well, but 37 million accounts were exfiltrated in 2021. The same thing happened. They got personal information, including social security numbers, driver's license information of 13 million active and 40 million perspective T-Mobile customers. They settled a half billion dollar class action lawsuit and said, oh, we're going to make sure that doesn't ever happen again. Enough said.

Jeff Jarvis:
They see a question.

Leo Laporte:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis:
On the story line 87 out of Las Vegas, the active cooling chip to get rid of fans. Is this real? Have you seen this?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I saw this. Let me look at it again, because I haven't seen this. Is this the jet blowing thing?

Jeff Jarvis:
No, I don't think it takes any air. It just manages to take the seem heat.

Leo Laporte:
It does seem like it is off a discord from someone.

Jeff Jarvis:
What did you say?

Ant Pruitt:
Seems like I saw this in our discord from someone too.

Leo Laporte:
I had been ignoring this story for a week, but I that's why I brought it up, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
No. Is it BS? Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Maybe not. Who knows?

Jeff Jarvis:
I would love to have no threat of fans of the future. That's why I'm asking.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Do I have to watch a video to see?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Let's say that story is solid.

Leo Laporte:
Buy all this crap.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay, nevermind.

Leo Laporte:
Foray systems. This San Jose, California based company has been working on a project.

Stacey Higginbotham:
This is the air jet stuff.

Leo Laporte:
To build a solid state.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, it is.

Leo Laporte:
Piezoelectric based cooling solution, which works the use of ultrasonic membranes that run across the surface of a heat spreader, pulsing out the heat from a processor.

Jeff Jarvis:
That was supposed to replace my nose thing too, that was supposed to replace, there was supposed to be a little tiny thing I put in my nose that would get rid of my...

Leo Laporte:
I'll tell you in general...

Jeff Jarvis:
That never happened.

Leo Laporte:
In general, just my way of doing these things when they make a product, I'll talk about it.

Jeff Jarvis:
Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I talk about things ahead of the making it product. I am a former chip reporter, so that's part of what I do. I haven't talked to these people, so I would have to look

Leo Laporte:
A lot of, to me, having done this for 40 freaking years, I note

Stacey Higginbotham:
Only half as long

Leo Laporte:
I note that there's always a lot of excitement about new technologies, and people say it's going to change the world every, it's going to change everything. 90% of the time you never see another story about it for whatever reason. My general rule is if when it's a product, when they're actually close to ship, then maybe they're not shipping yet, but they're in the, well, the CES is full of stuff's never going to ship to, so no, when it's a product, I'll talk about it until then, it's a novelty. It's perhaps interesting. I've been bitten a few times. We talked a lot. Steve Gibson was so excited about super capacitive charging. That was, you know. I actually have a screwdriver that works that way, but it hasn't really done anything else.

Ant Pruitt:
A screwdriver.

Leo Laporte:
I was super cap screwdriver. It charges very fast, and discharge is almost as fast.

Stacey Higginbotham:
This company does have a hundred million dollars from Intel and from Qualcomm, which again, if you're going to invest in, they would be the people who'd invest in it. I think the technology is viable. Will it become commercial that's still to be DTBD, Jeff, how's that?

Jeff Jarvis:
That's the answer I wanted to hear. Thank you, Stacey. I wanted context, perspective, not an old man whining

Leo Laporte:
Now, my general,

Stacey Higginbotham:
It looks like,

Leo Laporte:
A general point of view is we can only cover about 50 to a hundred stories a week, and most of these are never going to become important. I just have an idle curiosity.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'll just say, this looks like it has to be built into the chip at some level, not, if not the CPU U itself. Then the like module, like the SOC, the whole kitten caboodle. It looks like a physical solution that is built on top of or into the thing, which means that it would be harder to implement because it would change the way these things are packaged and or manufactured.

Jeff Jarvis:
This is what I wanted with Stacy's perspective. Thank you. That's exactly what I was curious to hear.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So that is what I will give you now based on the 30 seconds

Leo Laporte:
Reading.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I have read.

Ant Pruitt:
I'm not sold. Sorry.

Leo Laporte:
Again.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You don't have to.

Leo Laporte:
We've now wasted five minutes.

Jeff Jarvis:
All right, like you don't waste time.

Leo Laporte:
This is not why it's not a democracy. I carefully cultivate the stories that we use. I've been ignoring...

Stacey Higginbotham:
I was excited to use my expertise to help Jeff out.

Leo Laporte:
I'm glad you can.

Ant Pruitt:
That part was great. Yeah, that part was great.

Leo Laporte:
Watch this. I'm going to type the last of us into Google search.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Why?

Jeff Jarvis:
Couldn't figure out why this was...

Leo Laporte:
There's a red mushroom. What do you think that means? Oh no.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, Spores. Really? This is more exciting than a whole new,

Leo Laporte:
At least it's real

Stacey Higginbotham:
Technology.

Leo Laporte:
It's real.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's just not commercial.

Leo Laporte:
It's real.

Ant Pruitt:
It is about Google.

Leo Laporte:
It's real. It's happening right now on my desktop. I don't know. I think this has to do with it. No, it has to do with some HBO show. I'm not watching.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's the last of a, it's the call. How do you say it?

Leo Laporte:
It was a game

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's the one that makes ant. Takes over their brains.

Leo Laporte:
It was zombies

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's the basis of the show.

Leo Laporte:
It's all freaking zombies. It's another zombie show. It was a game. It was a pretty good game. I like to game. Why people are interested is because they've turned a game into a TV show. In my opinion, another piece of evidence to the word's going to hell, but you know. Is there not a William Faulkner short story you could use? No, I'm just, I'm just kidding. Hey everybody. Leo Laporte here. I am the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I want to talk to you a little bit about what we do here at TWIT, because I think it's.

Leo Laporte:
I want to talk to you a little bit about what we do here at TWiT because I think it's unique, and I think for anybody who is bringing a product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do here at TWiT. We've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product.
Our mission statement as TWiT is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Already your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place. We do it by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services, with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host-read ads different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement.
We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us, and we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded ITProTV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, "We would not be where we are today without the TWiT network." I think the proof is in the pudding. Advertisers like ITProTV and Audible that have been with us for more than ten years, they stick around because their ads work and honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with TWiT. We have a very full-service attitude. We almost think of it as artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full-service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this.
We embed our ads into the shows. They're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ad saying, "Yeah, I love that." Or just the other day, one of our hosts said, "Man, I really got to buy that." That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people our audience trusts saying, "Yeah, that sounds great." We always over-deliver on impressions, so you know you're going to get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites, that's free for direct clients, gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working.
You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages, that really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too including mentions in our weekly newsletter that's sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans who really want to see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too. So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy, engaged tech audience, visit TWiT.tv/advertise. Check out those testimonials.
Mark McCrery is the CEO of Authentic. You probably know him, one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said, "The feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are going to work for a brand, they're going to work on TWiT shows." I'm very proud of what we do because it's honest, it's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy, they're dedicated to our network, and that's one of the reasons we only work with high-integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted. I have absolute approval on everybody.
If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today at advertise@TWiT.tv. Break out of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host-read ads on TWiT.tv. Visit TWiT.tv/advertise for more details, or you can email us, advertise@TWiT.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now. I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring.
Twitter now is down, according to CNBC, to 550 engineers. 80%. He said he was going to fire 75%. He's fired 80% of employees, headcount around 1,300. And of that, a little less than half are full-time engineers. So how's he making up the difference? He's brought in people from Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company. 130 people.

Jeff Jarvis:
What do shareholders have to say?

Leo Laporte:
Boy, I'd be pissed if I were at Tesla. It's like one more... What? Were they not doing anything over there? Why didn't you fire them?

Jeff Jarvis:
And who's paying them?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, who's paying them?

Jeff Jarvis:
Are they still being paid by Tesla?

Leo Laporte:
What do you think?

Ant Pruitt:
Well, Twitter apparently doesn't have an accounting department, so they ain't paying them.

Leo Laporte:
They ain't paying them. All right, let's see.

Jeff Jarvis:
When Jack did two companies, he had a pretty firm wall, right?

Leo Laporte:
Well, people were pretty that Jack was barely paying attention-

Jeff Jarvis:
But [inaudible 02:09:55] any time.

Leo Laporte:
On Twitter-

Jeff Jarvis:
But he wasn't using staff-

Leo Laporte:
I think that's why, by the way, Twitter was available and could be snagged by Elon, is that people were very unhappy with the way it was being run and more happy with the board, and it was just not a good... I guess it's important to understand Twitter's been in trouble long before Elon came along.

Jeff Jarvis:
What? Who boy.

Leo Laporte:
Oh boy. So the Academy Award nominations came out on Monday, and there was one big surprise. There were a number of snubs, Viola Davis, who probably should have been nominated.

Ant Pruitt:
Wait, she was snubbed. You serious?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You didn't hear about this?

Jeff Jarvis:
No. [inaudible 02:10:42] day.

Leo Laporte:
Are you being facetious or real?

Ant Pruitt:
No, I'm serious-

Stacey Higginbotham:
No. He seemed pretty upset-

Leo Laporte:
What was that? The Goddess, what was the name of the-

Ant Pruitt:
The Woman King?

Leo Laporte:
The Woman King. And apparently it was a amazing performance, right?

Ant Pruitt:
Yes. That sucks. That sucks.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Hollywood sucks, man.

Leo Laporte:
Well, there's a reason I bring it up, because instead of her getting a nomination, a woman named Andrea Riseborough got a name nomination for a movie called To Leslie that made $27,000 at the box office. Now, normally the way this works in Hollywood, and you know this Jeff is during this period of a few months, between November and January, there are ads everywhere, billboards everywhere-

Jeff Jarvis:
For your consideration.

Leo Laporte:
FYC, for your consideration. The movie companies trying to gin up interest in their movies so they get nominated because that makes a difference in Box Office. This movie was so small and the company that made it was so small, they obviously couldn't afford it, but somehow Twitter put them over the top. Kate Blanchett, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day Lewis, Martin Scorsese all tweeted saying, Andrea Riseborough's performance in To Leslie was quote, they all said this, "The greatest screen performance in the history of the cinematic medium." It worked. She got a nomination for best actress beating out-

Ant Pruitt:
I'll be damned.

Leo Laporte:
Viola Davis.

Ant Pruitt:
Wow.

Leo Laporte:
So there's some question about what was going on here. There was some kind of ground swell, maybe it was organic for this woman. Everybody says it was a great performance. I brought up only because it shows-

Ant Pruitt:
I have no problem with.

Leo Laporte:
Promotion. Twitter still has a lot of power.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, right. I had no problem with you using that platform for promotion purposes because it clearly works. But I'm still a little pissed Ms. Davis didn't get denied. She was good in that.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, the woman who was in Till was also snubbed.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. Now, I done forgot the name.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I can't either. But every year this happens that there are some snubs.

Jeff Jarvis:
I haven't seen a movie in three years.

Leo Laporte:
Actually, if you look at the nominees, I'm not impressed. Avatar, Top Gun? Normally-

Ant Pruitt:
Top Gun was legit good though.

Leo Laporte:
It was a good movie, but not the kind of picture that normally gets nominated for Best Picture.

Ant Pruitt:
No.

Leo Laporte:
A small German Andy Warf film, I guess. A remake of the classic All Quiet in the Western Front got Best Picture. It got a bunch of nominations.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So did, oh, what was it called? [inaudible 02:13:38]

Leo Laporte:
Oh, the, yeah-

Stacey Higginbotham:
And everything. Everything.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. But the number one nominee was, and I think Justly was Everything Everywhere, All At Once. Michelle, Joe and-

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Good movie.

Leo Laporte:
What an interesting, different movie. And I'm glad it got all the 11 nominations. I'm glad it got all of them.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's a lot.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that's a lot. Riseborough is an addict trying to break free from her demons in Michael Morris's debut film. She wins the lottery, then burns through the money. To Leslie begins seven years after that win when she gets evicted from the motel she's been living in. It premiered at South by, in March. Grossed only $27,000 in a brief theatrical rum. It is available for rent on all the platforms, Prime and Apple. I'll be watching it. That's why these things-

Ant Pruitt:
I'll give it a look.

Leo Laporte:
Right?

Ant Pruitt:
I'll give it a look.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. The campaign for it was a grassroots affair according to the LA Times, lasted only a few weeks, but so many people tweeted about it. There were even actors inviting people to come over to their house for a screening. Oscar Winter Gwyneth Paltrow shared on Instagram, she caught a screening calling the film a masterpiece on her Instagram account saying Riseborough should win every award there is and all the ones that haven't been invented yet.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Huh?

Leo Laporte:
It's interesting.

Ant Pruitt:
Okay. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, I mean, I would check it out based on, I'm like, all right, well, if these people who...

Leo Laporte:
Jennifer Aniston invited people over to her house to see the movie. You're not going to say no when Jennifer calls. She didn't call me, Anna.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I was going to say, did she call you?

Leo Laporte:
No. Kate Winslet at a event.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, that's a woman who can act.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, she gush. You should be up for everything. You should be winning everything. Andrea Riseborough, I think this is the greatest female performance on screen I have ever seen in my life.

Ant Pruitt:
Geez. Come on.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Wow. Okay. Well, I'll check it out now.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, I am now too.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I'm like, well, I mean...

Leo Laporte:
They went on YouTube-

Ant Pruitt:
And I'll give it a fair shape.

Leo Laporte:
They went on YouTube. Here's Kate Winslet in conversation with Riseborough and the director.

Speaker 4:
Hi everyone. I am. This is Kate Winslet. Hi.

Leo Laporte:
And I mean, that's support. Maybe it must have been the greatest performance of all time for them.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, that's what I'm like. I'm like, these are not people who...

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's enough of a wide variety of people. I'm like, well, shoot. Maybe they do.

Leo Laporte:
There a little upset. Viola Davis and Danielle Deadweiler is the other actress from Till who many thought were front runners for best actress, didn't get a nomination.

Ant Pruitt:
To their credit, this doesn't sound cooked to me.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, it just sounds like people, you know when someone loves a book and they're like, oh my God, you have to read it. You give it to everybody. It sounds like that.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So I don't think there's enough money in the world to get Jennifer Anton, Courtney Cox, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brad Whitfield, and all these people.

Ant Pruitt:
Really? You don't think so? We got to Guy-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think there's enough money in the world.

Ant Pruitt:
$44 billion-

Stacey Higginbotham:
But Kate Winslet on the other hand-

Ant Pruitt:
Somebody else's money-

Leo Laporte:
No. These people, they're not going to, they don't need a, "Here's $5 million. Would you plug our friend?" No.

Ant Pruitt:
It ain't $5 million-

Leo Laporte:
They must have all thought this was amazing. Right?

Ant Pruitt:
No, I agree. It doesn't sound cooked, but it could be cooked. But this doesn't sound...

Leo Laporte:
Doesn't it? Fascinating, but it does show, and again, that's the only reason I bring it up, that social media, including very much Twitter, but also Instagram, YouTube, and others can really have some power.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Well, within that small circle-

Jeff Jarvis:
I mean, here, I'm going to argue, it's not anymore the mass numbers. It didn't make a difference with the public. It made a difference with a very small circle of people. It's just like journalists talking to each other. This was their little echo chamber.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. But that leads to stories and things that get it to mass, and that's all that matters.

Jeff Jarvis:
We'll see how much more than $27,000 it ends up making.

Ant Pruitt:
What's it called again? Because I got to make a note. I'm trying to do better about watching actual movies.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I will watch this. This is not a blockbuster by any means. To Leslie. Here's Edward Norton's tweet.

Jeff Jarvis:
Let's check the...

Leo Laporte:
What's the Rotten Tomatoes? yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, 98%.

Leo Laporte:
Well, that's pretty, but you know what, lately there's a lot of 98 percents that I might not agree with.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I will say though, I watched Paddington because it had a perfect Rotten Tomatoes, and it was a great decision.

Leo Laporte:
Was it perfect?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Paddington? Yes. It was a crazy movie.

Leo Laporte:
So I realized this actually back with the Zigag guides, which were until Google bought them and kind of destroyed it, it was a great little slim red guidebook to restaurants that you could buy, and it was very reliable. Lisa and I used to do our own Zigag after we'd go to a restaurant. Was that a 27? Ah, there's more like a 23, but it was usually pretty reliable. But then I realized it really depended because it was all done by the public, on what public, right?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
So the Ziga restaurant guides in Peoria, Illinois, for instance, were less.

Jeff Jarvis:
Olive Garden is a great place.

Leo Laporte:
Well, according to Foodie's Food Week in Peoria, Illinois, the number one appetizer was the salsa and chips at Chipotle. So that's why I used Peoria in this case. But I realized that if you're in San Francisco, for instance, and a restaurant's 27, that's a different thing than if you're in another city and it's a 27.

Jeff Jarvis:
Bob. But yes.

Leo Laporte:
And I think it's the same with Rotten Tomatoes, because it's selective. The people who go see, I would never see Paddington, but I'm also probably the guy who give it a 43.

Ant Pruitt:
Right. Right.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, no, no. It's really an engaging movie. I mean, as long as you just...

Ant Pruitt:
I'm looking at the Rotten Tomatoes score and the audience score is just as high as the credit score for this To Leslie, that says a lot too normally-

Leo Laporte:
I think we have to see.

Ant Pruitt:
Very skewed.

Leo Laporte:
I see Leo-

Stacey Higginbotham:
We've got to see To Leslie in Leo, you now have to see Paddington.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, she made me do it. Stacy made me one.

Jeff Jarvis:
I have a rule ever since the kids got up past 13, I don't see animated crap at all, ever.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's not animated.

Jeff Jarvis:
Paddington is

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay. The bear. Okay, fine.

Jeff Jarvis:
The bear is-

Stacey Higginbotham:
[inaudible 02:20:23] a puppet.

Leo Laporte:
Covered. Stacey's soft side.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
We've discovered romantic species-

Ant Pruitt:
I'll honest, really, the real problem with Paddington, for me is the fact that when we showed Paddington having tea with Queen Elizabeth, that-

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, yeah. Effort was taken down.

Ant Pruitt:
That whole episode, it's still not up. The bastards at the Paddington, the Bear Consortium, took us down.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay. Well, I was not aware of that, but...

Ant Pruitt:
Studio Canal-

Stacey Higginbotham:
It was a delightful movie.

Ant Pruitt:
I will never see-

Jeff Jarvis:
About 2:30 PM, he'd be sued for calling them bastards.

Leo Laporte:
Now, wait a minute. Bastards is a matter of fact, isn't it? Jerks, I could say. You can't libel somebody with something that's an opinion, only with a matter of fact. If I were to say, oh, Studio Canal, those guys are extortionists, I could get in trouble because they're not. But if I say they're-

Stacey Higginbotham:
But a bastard has a literal meaning in that-

Leo Laporte:
Exactly. So I'm realizing I can't call them bastards. I can only say they're bad, bad people.

Jeff Jarvis:
They are.

Leo Laporte:
That was a good episode though. I have no-

Stacey Higginbotham:
They're heavy on the legal threats-

Leo Laporte:
I have nothing against them. It was Paddington Two. Should we see Paddington or Paddington Two?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, you should see the first Paddington.

Leo Laporte:
Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Paddington Two was just... Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
That was just a cheap attempt to capitalize on the joyous-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte:
Excellence of the original. You know what? I loved this book. When my kids were little, I read the book to them. I loved it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Andrew even liked the movie, and he's kind of a cranky person, like you. He thought it was delightful as well.

Leo Laporte:
He was being nice to you? He was humoring you. Stacey, did you ever think of that?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No.

Leo Laporte:
All right, Jeff, I'm going to let this be a democracy for one brief shining moment and give you a chance to pick some of these. Jeff put more stories in here than I did.

Stacey Higginbotham:
This does not surprise any of us.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. We've done a lot of them. We've done a lot of them.

Jeff Jarvis:
We've done a lot of actually this week.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
And last week you did a lot of them. I was very happy.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
I didn't want to point it out for the fear that you'd notice.

Leo Laporte:
In fact, I'm looking, and I think I've done them, almost all of them.

Jeff Jarvis:
You've done it, Gordon. There's a weird story. You want a weird story?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
A little weird story?

Leo Laporte:
The man who sued Chick-fil-A.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yes. Yes.

Leo Laporte:
How did I know?

Jeff Jarvis:
It's a wacky story.

Leo Laporte:
He is a Virginia man, is suing Chick-fil-A in San Francisco over sharing data with Facebook.

Jeff Jarvis:
Coming from a precedent, a law that was passed because of get to that part, last night.

Leo Laporte:
Virginia man making the company the sixth to be sued in the last 35 days for alleged violations of an obscure federal statute. This includes Dave and Buster's Lazyboy, Mattel, Smuckers, Proctor and Gamble. All six of the cases filed by the same guy, Keith Carroll, who said each of the defendants illegally shared his personally identifiable information with Facebook. He wants $25 for each member of the six classes. Oh, he wants me to be a class action. Okay. This is the video Privacy Protection Act of Largely Forgotten Federal statute passed in 1988 in response to the public outing of the video cassette viewing records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Isn't that fascinating? You may remember...

Stacey Higginbotham:
That actually is

Leo Laporte:
... Way back when, that 146 videotapes that Bork rented. Bork, by the way, did not ascend to the Supreme Court. He got Borked. He was a Reagan nominee, I think, right? Or was it Bush? Bork revealed nothing salacious. Judge Bork favored Alfred Hitchcock films, spy thrillers, and British costume dramas. Bipartisan concern over the privacy issues resulted in a passage of the Video Privacy Protection Act.

Jeff Jarvis:
Which no one has paid any attention to.

Leo Laporte:
Because nobody rents movies from Blockbuster anymore.

Jeff Jarvis:
Right.

Leo Laporte:
The statute says any videotaped service provider who knowingly discloses personally identifiable information concerning any customer can be liable for up to at least $2,500 plus punitive damages and attorney's fees. So the theory is defendants have shared information about their customer's video viewing preferences With Facebook, though, the videos at issue are not obviously the full length movies you'd get at a blockbuster in the Smucker's suit, for instance, the videos are How To Brew Coffee. La-Z-Boy said, as a customer on video recounting her design story, the complaint alleges that Chick-Fil-A owns or controls a website at evergreenhills.com. And whenever someone watches a video on the website, defendants secretly reported all the details to Facebook sending them PII. Well, what's at Evergreenhills.com?

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, that's what I'm...

Leo Laporte:
Oh, it's a Chick-fil-A thing-

Ant Pruitt:
Clicked on.

Leo Laporte:
So at Evergreen. Wait a minute. We are investigating suspicious activity on some customer accounts.

Ant Pruitt:
Sure enough.

Leo Laporte:
So apparently-

Ant Pruitt:
We're committed to protecting-

Leo Laporte:
There's a chick-fil-A breach. So where's the videos? If I watch a video on here? Oh, here it is. I'm going to watch a video of a guy in a cow suit. I hate these ads, by the way. These Chick-fil-A ads.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, I do too.

Leo Laporte:
They're just terrible.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, Knowing what we know about this company.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Oh, the Chick-fil-A is so nice that when customers come in are poor, underpaid employees. Give them stuff.

Jeff Jarvis:
But we try to pay in food, not money.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So I would just watch that video and now Chick-fil-A is sending that information to Facebook according to this guy?

Jeff Jarvis:
Because of a like button or something, or a pixel set?

Leo Laporte:
So, let's see here. This is using a tool the Facebook calls, the Facebook tracking pixel. Once the tracking pixel is embedded and activated, by the way, people are always asking us, always advertisers say, can you embed a tracking pixel? No, you can't. It's a podcast. You cannot put a tracking pixel on a podcast.

Ant Pruitt:
All right.

Leo Laporte:
No, we do not do that. But apparently sites do. It reports the data to Facebook about the advertiser's customers on the site Visio. Oh yeah. So this is trying to do the same thing we do try to do, where they're matching people who saw a Facebook ad for Chick-fil-A with people who ended up on the Chick-fil-A site. And then Facebook says, see? Your ads work.

Jeff Jarvis:
Because we own half of the internet. We can tell you that.

Leo Laporte:
Right. And so the way we handle that, and I'm trusting it's going to work. We use a company that was bought by Spotify, so God knows, but the idea is, it's called Pod sites. A lot of podcasters use this. Pod Sites gets the IP addresses of all the downloads from us. They store those and keep them private and all that stuff. And then they do put a tracking pixel on the advertiser's site, and that tracking pixel sends them a list of IP addresses again, which they promised to keep private. They do a match and all they say to the advertiser is, 30% of the people saw your ad on Twitter, ended up on your website or whatever. They don't give any information to either party. We don't get the information about the tracking pixel. The advertiser doesn't get information about downloads.
And Pod Sites as an independent third party just gives them, the one thing they really care about is did the ad work? So I bet you that's what's going on here is that same thing.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Don't sue us because we really try hard. We very, very careful not to give up any... I asked them again and again, we went over this again and again, and they have covenants and agreements and contracts that say, yeah, no, no, that information stays private.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, this is somebody who just clearly wants to go after Facebook and the internet. [inaudible 02:28:32] and advertisers normally discloses information that is sufficient to permit an ordinary person to identify a specific individual's video viewing behavior.

Leo Laporte:
Interestingly, Facebook is not named, it's the advertiser that's named.

Jeff Jarvis:
But still, it's a way to attack part of Facebook's business, I think.

Leo Laporte:
In order to have standing issue in federal court, a plaintiff must have a concrete injury from the defendant's conduct. So we'll see if he has standing even. I don't know. This will be interesting. We'll watch that. We'll keep an eye on that-

Jeff Jarvis:
This one's a weird story. Yeah, I put that in there.

Leo Laporte:
All right.

Jeff Jarvis:
[inaudible 02:29:11]. I didn't read the whole story. You read the whole story and explained it to me for the service.

Leo Laporte:
You should just have the splaindomy section.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Leo Splain this-

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, [inaudible 02:29:20] or you-

Leo Laporte:
Stacy is splains Paezo electric current. What is Paezo Electric current?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, Paezo means to move, or Paezo's move, and I use them in energy harvesting. So anything that's powered by Paezos is harvesting energy from the difference in movement. Oh, Paezo is the American pronunciation.

Leo Laporte:
So I know, I get it. In my world, this is what happens when I wear corduroy pants. The rubbing together of my thighs generates electricity in the corduroy. If I happen to have a Paezo electric device to capture that...

Jeff Jarvis:
This is not happening.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, here we go. The Pizo electric effect is the ability of certain materials to generate an electric charge in response to applied mechanical stress.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Corduroy.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's actually what you're talking about.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. Corduroy.

Leo Laporte:
Corduroy.

Stacey Higginbotham:
All right.

Leo Laporte:
Wait a minute. All right. All right. Let's go back again to Websters.

Ant Pruitt:
That Analogy.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I got to turn my sound on-

Ant Pruitt:
It worked though.

Leo Laporte:
Got to turn my sound on.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh yeah. It's generating-

Speaker 4:
Paezo electric. Paezo electrically.

Leo Laporte:
So it is Paezo?

Speaker 4:
Paezo Electric.

Leo Laporte:
Not Pizo. Paezo. There's two syllables.

Ant Pruitt:
Interesting. I learned something.

Jeff Jarvis:
So You were right in the first place?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Paezo.

Leo Laporte:
I think I said Paezo.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think I may have said Paezo.

Leo Laporte:
I said Paezo-

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, I see.

Leo Laporte:
So what's the story with Menchu Regional High School, and why'd you put this story in the rundown? Jeff, you explained to me. It's time for Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
I thought it was a Stacy's story too, because it's what happens when Internet of Things goes completely bad.

Leo Laporte:
For a year and a half. A Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because they can't turn off the lights.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, no.

Leo Laporte:
It turns out-

Stacey Higginbotham:
This is from a lady-

Jeff Jarvis:
The joke over. That's all we needed. That's fine.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It turns out the software that turns off the lights has failed, and apparently there's no switch.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Better was it on than off.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, that's true. It uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs. When possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures, while staffers who shut off breakers now connect to the main system, but it communicates an image of profligacy. And besides, when you drive by the high school in the middle of the night, it's blazing bright. You got to wonder what's going on in there. There's hope on the horizon. That lights at Minichag will soon be dimmed. Paul Mastone, the president of the Reflex Lining Group, said, "The parts we need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory at China, and we expect to do the installation over the February break, and this time there will be a remote override switch, so this won't happen again."

Jeff Jarvis:
That will make more money from the district.

Leo Laporte:
Another story that I wasn't going to do, but Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
All right.

Leo Laporte:
Jeff, you're right.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, it's for your option.

Leo Laporte:
All right.

Jeff Jarvis:
I put it in there.

Leo Laporte:
It's gone on too long-

Ant Pruitt:
Exposure.

Leo Laporte:
It's gone on too long-

Ant Pruitt:
An exposure shot.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Wait.

Leo Laporte:
What?

Stacey Higginbotham:
I gave someone a wrong information. The do not pay robot lawyer apparently is not, they're postponing their actual court case because the state bar said no.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Judges are notorious about not liking this kind of thing.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. It was going to represent a client in court. Probably not on some big issue, some sort of small thing. But Joshua Brader, who fatted do not pay, says, after threats from the state bar, I've declined to do this. So, all right Postponing our court case.

Jeff Jarvis:
We did this. When he started that company, we covered that, the show-

Leo Laporte:
Oh, yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
He actually did quite well. For a long time there was parking tickets.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Let's do a quick Google change log and then wrap this thing up because Stacy's so sick of it. Google Change Log.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I think I'm just getting sick. I think that's my issue. Oh. Oh no. Google clock. 7.4 updates. Timer UI and test buttons for ending alarms. This just did.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, there's nothing of the change log this week, if that's the start.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Android 13 QPR Beta two, one rolling out with Bluetooth and 5G fixes for pixel. Google Meet is making it easier to share files during calls and ways now supports Android Auto's cool Walk dashboard. Actually, you want to see what it looks like?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, I should.

Leo Laporte:
That's the cool walk dashboard.

Jeff Jarvis:
Why is it called cool walk or driving?

Leo Laporte:
It's the redesign of Android Auto. Actually, I got to try this because I have, I'm going to try it tonight on my Mustang, I have Android on all my Mustang. Cool Walk is just the name of the dashboard. You get panels so you can see what music you're listening to while you're looking at the map and stuff like that.

Jeff Jarvis:
Why is it called Cool Walk?

Leo Laporte:
Explain that to me.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's it's name. Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
Explain it to me. Leo. They paid a very

Jeff Jarvis:
Explain it to me, Leo. Explain things to me.

Leo Laporte:
They paid a very expensive branding company millions of dollars to test with consumers a variety of names, including, The New Map.

Jeff Jarvis:
But you're driving. You're not walking, you're driving.

Leo Laporte:
It's true. I don't know. I don't know what it means. I don't know what it means, but that's what they're calling it. And that's the Google change log.

Jeff Jarvis:
GoodRx had nothing this week, man.

Leo Laporte:
He was barren.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, wait a minute. He found one thing. Nest Hub's new security page makes it hard to access live camera feeds.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh yeah, we talked about that on our show.

Leo Laporte:
Is it a big deal?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No. It is not.

Leo Laporte:
And I won't stop the forward motion of this show. I just want to remind everybody of two important details. First, take the survey. Last chance, I'm not going to mention it again. It runs through the end of the month, which means we're just about six days off from the final chance that the survey helps us so we don't have to track you. So we don't have to put tracking pixels in your podcast.
It's just the advertisers want to know a little bit about the general audience. Male, female, education, that kind of thing. Answer a few questions, it's completely optional, we appreciate it if you do. Twit.tv/survey23.
We also use it to learn more about you and make sure we're on the right track with the programming and so forth. So it's really the once a year thing we do to kind of get to know you. Twit.tv/survey23. Thank you in advance.
Also a plug, which I am told I should do more often, and I really want to, to join our club. It is a very important way for us to monetize. We only had one ad on this show. It means generally one ad doesn't cover the costs of doing the show, let's put it that way.
But how do we support this show? Thanks to you, your generous Club TWiT members. What do you get? Ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club TWiT Discord, which is a great community of really fun people. We have lots of time talking in there. In fact, I go in there not only during the shows, but during the regular week because we talk about everything. I go in the coding section a lot. Anime, autos, beer, book club, gaming, Hacking Ham radio, pets, software, travel and more.

Jeff Jarvis:
And gifts and memes to make you happy all day long.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, it is the key to memeing. Jason, Jason Howell's getting involved. All you have to do is give us $7 a month. That's nothing. You also get special events that we don't put out in public, special shows that we don't make available public, like Hands on Windows, Hands on Mac, our Untitled Linux show the GIZ Fizz. We've got some events coming up. Huyen Tue Dao, host of all about Android, February 9th.
We're going to do that Daniel Suarez interview for triangulation and ask the tech guys on February 10th, 11:00 AM. But club members will get to ask Daniel the questions directly. He's looking forward to that. I can't wait. Sam Abuelsamid will join us March 2nd. Lisa and I did an Inside TWiT, which is available on the TWiT+ feed. There goes Martin Sergeant trying to catch us on a bicycle. That's a good one. Where'd you find that, Patrick?
Anyway, it isn't much. We could, I think we could and should charge a lot more, but Lisa's really good about saying no, seven bucks. That's fine. That's all we need. If we could get, right now, I think it's about 2% of the total. We have about 700,000 unique listeners every month. If we could get 5%, 35000 members, we only have 6000, now get to 5%. It would make such a difference. Our financial future would be assured. The lights would stay on. Everybody would stay employed. We wouldn't have to do layoffs and we could launch new shows. That's all we ask.
If we got to 10%, we wouldn't even have to do ads anymore. I mean, that's a huge difference.
Huh?

Background speaker:
We wouldn't even have to do shows.

Leo Laporte:
We wouldn't even have to do shows if we had 10%. We'd all just go home and let him give us money for nothing. So this is John's dream.

Ant Pruitt:
Jammer B.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I love it.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, dear.

Leo Laporte:
Twit.tv/clubtwit. I mean in all seriousness, it's really a great way to participate in our community and to help us out. So thank you in advance.
Now, now it's time for our picks of the week. We'll start with Stacey, if you have a thing I'd like to know.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I do have a thing, but I thought I brought it in and I didn't, so I could just tell you about it.

Leo Laporte:
Just tell us about it. I'll pull up a website if you give me the info.

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's the Jabra 85T over the ear Bluetooth and wired headphones, because you can plug it on your head.

Leo Laporte:
Plug it on your head. Ooh, really wired. Is Jabra still around? I'm kind of amazed. They've started doing hearing aids, right?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, you know what? They have, oh, you know what? And this is another thing. I'll just throw this out here because Kevin did a review this morning on the Apple 2 Earbuds, Pros.

Leo Laporte:
Apple Pro? Yeah. AirPods Pro 2.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
Which I have and I like a lot. They're very good.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He uses them as hearing aids and he says they're better than the new [inaudible 02:40:31].

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, because Apple has a feature where you can use your phone as a microphone and it goes in the earbuds. You get ambient sound and stuff. And so if you are at dinner or something, you put the phone in the middle and you hear quite well. It's quite good. And they're comfortable.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, he actually doesn't, he doesn't use it that way.

Leo Laporte:
He doesn't even do that. Oh, he, okay.

Stacey Higginbotham:
He doesn't do that. What he did is he uploaded his audio graphic profile from a site called Mimi, and he then went into the accessibility panel and he now custom tuned his headphones to his hearing.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I'm going to have to do this.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, go check out. Okay. So this'll be my thing, because it's actually, I had no idea.

Leo Laporte:
It's on the podcast this week?

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's on Stacey on IOT. The AirPods Pro Two 2nd Gen as Smart Hearables puts a smile on my face.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, really? Cool. Oh, I'm going to, okay, so I have the AirPods 2. I'm going to have to try. They have noise cancellation. They also have the ability to mix ambient sound into the audio.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Why is my font so ugly on your computer?

Leo Laporte:
Because I'm in Linux. What font would you like it? Which font would you like it to be?

Stacey Higginbotham:
No, I just, I'm like, God, that's hideous.

Leo Laporte:
What font do you, that looks fine to me. What font would you like it to be? What's it supposed to be?
Tell Andrew to use Web Safe font. If he's using a font or not using a downloadable font. Yeah, I'm not going to see it. I'm using Firefox on Manjaro Linux. You could tell him that. And it's just a plain old Sans Serif, if it looks like Helvetica or something.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. Well, ours is. Yeah. It's probably, no, it's hideous. God, whenever I see you pull up my website, I'm like, cringing.

Leo Laporte:
Really? It's actually a little bolder. It's like kind of like it better.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh. Maybe the, it is bolder. It's just ugly.

Leo Laporte:
You don't know off, ask Andrew what font you use and I'll just make sure that that's the font I use from now on. I may not have it installed. If I install it would then do it probably. Here, later I'll look in the developer tools and see.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay, well I've switched my thing apparently to Kevin's review of the Hearables because we got sidetracked. But yes, the other thing is the Jabra 85. I'm just make it, hold on. I got to tell you what it's really.

Leo Laporte:
I'm looking at your site on John's MacBook. Oh yeah. That's nice. It's very thin.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte:
I like mine better.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Okay. Well, there you go.

Richard Hay:
We're old Stacey. You're young.

Leo Laporte:
Okay, the Jabra Elites-

Stacey Higginbotham:
These are old.

Leo Laporte:
The 85Ts? I have these, actually.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, they're great.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I just, I bought them. They're not new or anything like that-

Leo Laporte:
But not expensive.

Stacey Higginbotham:
In the sense of-

Leo Laporte:
140 bucks.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They were even cheaper than that, I think.

Leo Laporte:
No, nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
But yeah, they were like a hundred bucks.

Leo Laporte:
Oh wow.

Richard Hay:
Well, one of them, is it ear? One of them was a headset. What are you pumping here?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Basically. Well, my husband is in this little tiff because I wander around listening to audiobooks when I'm doing things.

Leo Laporte:
And he can't tell because this is inside your ear.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes and he gets so pissy. He's just like-

Leo Laporte:
Oh, you talking about the 85H-

Richard Hay:
[inaudible 02:43:42] to you Stacey?

Leo Laporte:
You talking the 85H? I had the T.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
Okay. The H.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Sorry. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Interesting.

Stacey Higginbotham:
But yeah, so now this is a visible indicator that I am listening to my audio. I mean, I'm like, look, if I am running around the house doing laundry and washing dishes, you can just walk next to me.

Leo Laporte:
Lisa does exactly the same thing. And I'm talking to her and she doesn't know I'm talking to her.

Richard Hay:
She happily ignores you.

Leo Laporte:
And I think she's ignoring me. But no, she's listening to a book. I probably do it to her too. So these are read over the year headphones that sound great probably, have better battery life.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They sound amazing. And I customize mine. These are Jabra's as well. So I customize mine and to my hearing, like my preferences rather.

Leo Laporte:
That is the key. So Android devices usually have that built in within their sound settings. But he goes to Mimi to do this. Do you customize them with Mimi or do you use a Jabra App?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, no, that's okay. So I use the Jabra app. I don't think I can bring in Mimi stuff. So yeah, these are two separate things that I'm apparently telling you about.

Leo Laporte:
No, but I didn't know about Mimi. So this is a new thing to me.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I've used Mimi to test my hearing too. I mean it's free so why not?

Leo Laporte:
M-I-M-I? It's a, oh, it's an app. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, it's just an app.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Little hearing app.

Leo Laporte:
I used this a long time ago. I remember this now. Yeah. It's just like the audiologist test.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. That makes sounds in your left ear, your right ear. And if you can hear it. Yeah. Okay. You should do it with the-

Stacey Higginbotham:
And Kevin-

Leo Laporte:
-with the device that you're using. But I didn't know that it could upload the profile to the profile.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So that's what I thought was really cool, is he could, he sends his audiogram to the iPhone. He hit the accessibility settings. And then there's a whole section that lets you tune the sound to your audiogram.

Leo Laporte:
Nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Or you can choose sounds.

Leo Laporte:
Nice. I'm going to do this. That's great.

Stacey Higginbotham:
So go check that out.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And you all should check out the Jabra 85H Elites noise canceling. Are they noise canceling?

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, they're noise canceling.

Leo Laporte:
I like the white one.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They also hear through.

Leo Laporte:
I would get the white one. Those look pretty.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I got the titanium ones because they were 50 bucks less because I'm cheap. Mine are black and silver there. That's mine.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Because they were, I think they were 150.

Leo Laporte:
Nice. These list for 250. Nice.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah. I think I bought mine for 150. I mean, again, I've got some devices that are not that, but I can't tell.

Leo Laporte:
I think it's so cool that you care so much about Andrew thinking you're not paying attention to him, that you wear these just so he will know.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Well, he just gets so cranky. He's just... I just can't handle him when he's irritable.

Leo Laporte:
I know. Lisa hates it when I'm irritable too. I understand. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Irritable husbands.

Leo Laporte:
And also go to staceyoniot.com and read this article about turning your AirPod Pro 2 into Hearables. Nice. Hearing aids. Mr. Jeff Jarvis number of the week.

Jeff Jarvis:
Can I ask you a question first real quick? You have a Pixel 7, right?

Leo Laporte:
Right in front of me. Right here? Yes, sir.

Jeff Jarvis:
Have you turned on clear calling?

Leo Laporte:
No. We were going to talk about this and I'm curious.

Jeff Jarvis:
You had it in the list. I'm just curious because that might even make me buy one.

Leo Laporte:
All right, I'll turn it on next week. I'll give you a report back.

Jeff Jarvis:
So here's my thing. A couple things real quick. So if you go to, so see my office here, 10 out of 10.

Leo Laporte:
Beautiful.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'll write my Skype-

Leo Laporte:
Beautiful. Well-done.

Jeff Jarvis:
I have kind of a vaulted ceiling here, which leads to I'm, I'm bringing in the carpenters next week.

Leo Laporte:
No, don't do this, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis:
I'm doing it. I just can't wait.

Leo Laporte:
Don't do this, Jeff. Don't do it. Look what he wants to do.

Jeff Jarvis:
This is a story. It's [inaudible 02:47:41].

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh Lord.

Leo Laporte:
Don't do it.

Jeff Jarvis:
This mountain building engineer had a collection of 70,000 books, likely the largest private collection in all of Germany, in a single family home. And for those of you who are on audio, he built a shell, in a vaulted ceiling. It is completely filled with books. There's wood slats to hold them in. And they're obsessively sized, and covers the entire ceiling, every wall, plus one bookshelf. 70,000 books in one house.

Leo Laporte:
So I'm going to guess he never looks at the books in the ceiling. I mean, what does he have to do to get to that book?

Jeff Jarvis:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte:
It's pretty well locked in. And he doesn't live in earthquake country like we do, because that is a recipe for death.

Jeff Jarvis:
Problematic.

Leo Laporte:
Problematic. That's the word. I'm scared of my books, my normal bookshelf.

Stacey Higginbotham:
You don't have them affixed with the little things?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You've got to strap them to the wall and everything. Yeah. I can't remember if we did that or not. There's always-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Mine's strapped in.

Ant Pruitt:
There's something in the host office there, like a shelf. And I remember Mr. Burke when I first got here going in and doing some type of reinforcement on that thing. And I'm like...

Leo Laporte:
I'm going to-

Jeff Jarvis:
You have to do it for kids too.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. I'm going to have to get Burke to come to our house and do this.
LG recalled 52,000 86-inch TVs because they fall over.

Jeff Jarvis:
Whoops.

Leo Laporte:
So, you got to pay attention to that stuff. We have our hot water heaters strapped, stuff like that in earthquake country. Yeah. You got to attach stuff to the walls so it doesn't fall.

Jeff Jarvis:
Also, if you have little kids, the dressers and bookshelves, they fall over.

Stacey Higginbotham:
They pull them over onto themselves.

Leo Laporte:
This is-

Stacey Higginbotham:
I have a permanent bump on my head from pulling a chair over onto my head when I was a kid.

Leo Laporte:
Aww, this. Aw, that could explain a lot, actually.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, that's, that's a joke my family makes quite a bit.

Leo Laporte:
You don't have to worry about toddlers pulling books off the ceiling.

Jeff Jarvis:
No.

Leo Laporte:
But I don't know how you get books off the ceiling.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's every inch.

Leo Laporte:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's just amazing.

Leo Laporte:
But can you imagine the sound? The sound quality in there must be great. Must be so deep.

Ant Pruitt:
That's the done [inaudible 02:50:08] .

Stacey Higginbotham:
I was going to say, can you imagine the dust in the, like what if little worms get in there.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah.

Richard Hay:
What worms? Literally.

Leo Laporte:
Well, he's German. He probably doesn't have any of those.
All right. That's Jeff's pick of the week. Mr. Ant Pruitt, your turn.

Ant Pruitt:
My pick. I wanted to talk about this on my show, but then I did a bit of a, I guess you can say, unofficial survey and figured probably wouldn't fit for my particular audience, but maybe this, we can Google audience because they're, it's pretty pricey.

Leo Laporte:
Wealthy. Yeah. Ooh, look at that. Look that, that just looks good. I like how that looks. What is it?

Ant Pruitt:
This is the Stellar Pro Reflex S light. This is a constant light, but you can also use it as a strobe and have it connect to your camera to be a flash instead of just a constant light. The beauty of it that I enjoy is the fact that I can take this standard trigger here. This is just an old [inaudible 02:51:08] trigger that I could put on my camera. It costs maybe $60 for this, and it will fire this reflex S off.
And if I want to shoot 10 frames a second, it will do it. Click, click, click, click, really, really fast. Instead of having to do what they call HighSpeed sync. Because only certain flashes allow you to have HighSpeed sync, where you can shoot at a certain shutter speed and be able to get the maximum amount of power out of your strobe.
All of this is just sort of built-in. You don't even have to think about it. Just set it up either with the Bluetooth connection or use the transmitter and set your channels and things like that. It's super cool. But yes, it's a little bit pricey for most people that listen to my show. But this thing is pretty freaking badass. And it's about a hundred watts.

Leo Laporte:
I think Twig listeners are loaded. Is that the thinking here?

Ant Pruitt:
That's pretty much what I said. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis:
You all join the club as a result.

Leo Laporte:
It's all, because-

Ant Pruitt:
That's what I said.

Leo Laporte:
It's all because of Scooter X. He's really brought the average out.

Ant Pruitt:
But it's bright. I mean, again, if you want to use it as a constant light, you can use it for a video light. So it's a hundred watts power. If I wanted to use this for the show, I could. And it'll be a nice key light.

Leo Laporte:
There's two reasons I like this. It's the old school, remember the photographers? They'd put the hood over their head and they'd hold up the gunpowders strobe, and they'd go watch the birdie. You could do that.

Ant Pruitt:
You could, because this only weighs about a pound and a half, two pounds max.

Leo Laporte:
You need a hood. But other than that, watch the birdie. But then the other, and of course, off-camera flash is always better than on-camera flash.

Ant Pruitt:
Off camera's always better.

Leo Laporte:
So even arms length would be better, right?

Ant Pruitt:
And this allows you to connect like a [inaudible 02:52:55] mount on the front of it. Because this is just an LED light, but it's modular. You can put a [inaudible 02:53:00] mount on the front of it. It's powered by USB-C. So you can charge it up with USB-C.

Leo Laporte:
How long does it last?

Ant Pruitt:
Or plug it in. If you want to go full power, constant light, it's like 6000 aluminum, I believe. And it'll stay on for half an hour. But you don't need that much light. Just turn it down.

Leo Laporte:
Is it my imagination? Was there like a Jimmy Stewart movie where Ernest Borgnine's a bad guy and is trying to stab him, and Jimmy keeps flashing his strobe at him and he goes, ah.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh man. That'll kill you.

Leo Laporte:
Is that it? Is that something I just dreamed?

Jeff Jarvis:
No, you're right. You're right. It was, what movie was that?

Leo Laporte:
I feel like, I don't know what the movie was.

Ant Pruitt:
I don't know the movie, but it will kill you.

Jeff Jarvis:
Chat room was too young to remember. Yeah.

Richard Hay:
We need more old timers around here.

Jeff Jarvis:
Oh, well it was, no, yeah, I know what it was. It was Rear Window.

Leo Laporte:
Was it Rear Window? Was he a photographer in Rear Window and he was in a big hip cast.

Ant Pruitt:
I don't know what y'all talking about.

Leo Laporte:
And who was the bad guy?

Stacey Higginbotham:
It's an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It's a good movie. You really should watch.

Leo Laporte:
It's about a photographer who broke his leg. He's got the best girlfriend ever. She was the princess of Monaco. Grace Kelly. And he-

Stacey Higginbotham:
That's not part of the plot. I just felt like he might be confused.

Leo Laporte:
She's really cute. And there's a cute scene at the beginning where she takes her jammies out of her purse. But that's another thing that's stuck in my mind. But it's really about a photographer who is kind of confined to his apartment, and he looks out the back window and he thinks he's seen a murder. And don't get the one with Christopher. That's not it. No, there was, get the 1954 Classic.

Ant Pruitt:
Rear Window?

Leo Laporte:
Rear Window. Oh my God, was this a great movie. I can't believe, I'm jealous that you haven't seen it. Especially as a photographer.

Ant Pruitt:
1954?

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. That's probably why. It's an old movie, but what a great movie it is. And yeah, there is a scene there. Is that, is that correct? Raymond Burr. Raymond Burr was the bad guy. He was the guy who he, Jimmy Stewart thinks committed murder.

Ant Pruitt:
Curtis Kelly. Thelma Ritter. Raymond Burr.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, such a good movie. And I love Jimmy Stewart.

Ant Pruitt:
I'll add that to the queue as well.

Leo Laporte:
Do you watch old movies?

Ant Pruitt:
Wow, 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Leo Laporte:
Do you see old movies ever?

Ant Pruitt:
No, sir. But again, I'm going to do my best to try to watch more movies this year.

Leo Laporte:
This would be a good one because the hero's a photographer, a war photographer. Body Double is the same idea. It is the same idea. And a great movie is in its own right. But I think Rear Windows is the classic, just because I think you'll like it because of the way the sets are constructed. Because it's a Hollywood movie. It's not filmed on location.

Ant Pruitt:
Of course.

Leo Laporte:
So yeah. So it's very, it's interesting. I think you'll enjoy it. And then watch for the moment when he blinds Raymond Burr with his strobe. Which you could do with your reflex.

Ant Pruitt:
Yes. The Reflex S, now on sale for 767 bucks. Got a budget now.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, you're making my stuff look cheap. I like it.

Leo Laporte:
You're pretty well equipped over there, Ant. You got some-

Ant Pruitt:
I got a lot of gear. I do. So, I never shy away from a gig.

Leo Laporte:
Do you do weddings or things like that, or?

Ant Pruitt:
I'm staying away from weddings because I don't want that pressure. I'll just-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Most people are crazy.

Leo Laporte:
I don't blame you.

Ant Pruitt:
It's one person's one shot. And we don't get any do over. So I don't want that. But I am going to pitch someone for some event stuff here. I got to feel her out here locally.

Leo Laporte:
So Lisa and my, our wedding anniversary's coming up on Sunday-

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, yeah. And you have hair.

Leo Laporte:
And I have hair this time. And you know what's sad? I was thinking about this because yeah, I had shaved my head for, to raise money-

Stacey Higginbotham:
A bet.

Leo Laporte:
It wasn't a bet. It raised money for UNICEF and we did. I also have a tattoo I'm not proud of, but that's another story. But the sad thing to me is, so we got married seven years ago in a beautiful place in Napa that has since burned to the ground. It's gone.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh no.

Leo Laporte:
I was thinking about the wedding photographer. He was wonderful. We had a great wedding photographer, but all we have is the pictures. That place is ashes. It's gone.

Ant Pruitt:
That's ass.

Jeff Jarvis:
Is that the place you were also going to before the fire. They said, don't come?

Leo Laporte:
Yes. We got there. It was smokey. We started to check in. They said, oh-

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, I remember that two years ago.

Leo Laporte:
We might have to evacuate. They did not cancel our reservation. But thank God the desk clerk went, we think we might have to get evacuated, I probably wouldn't check in.
As we're driving back down the long road to it, we get a text message saying, go home. We're closed.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So we got out of there. But that it did not get burned down that time. It got burned down in a second wildfire a couple years later.

Jeff Jarvis:
That's mean out there.

Leo Laporte:
It's tough.

Jeff Jarvis:
God says, California shouldn't be lived in it should be visited.

Leo Laporte:
We should not be here.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Abandon CA.

Ant Pruitt:
I like it here.

Leo Laporte:
I do too. You and your whole family move out from Northtown.

Ant Pruitt:
The whole no humidity here, man. That's what I'm talking about.

Leo Laporte:
The climate here is superb. Even when it's cold, it's superb. Even when it's pouring rain, it's superb. Even dare I say, when there's an earthquake and your ceiling full of books hits you in the head, it's superb. Anyway.

Jeff Jarvis:
It's not superb, but you got to go over a bridge that might collapse because it's only in fair condition.

Leo Laporte:
That's a good point.

Ant Pruitt:
Fair condition.

Leo Laporte:
That's a good point. Mr. Ant Pruitt. Hands on photography, twit.tv/hop. What's coming up next?

Ant Pruitt:
This week I'm finally diving into drone photography and drone [inaudible 02:59:03]. I'm going to share some insights on that. I've gotten questions in the past, but never been able to really get around to them because other stuff pops up. But I want to talk about using a drone for photography. And should you use a drone for photography and video?

Jeff Jarvis:
We teach that at our school.

Leo Laporte:
Really?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Travis Fox does that. You should look them up because-

Leo Laporte:
I have that Mavic Mini Pro, whatever it is. I really like it. I hardly ever use it because I can't think of a reason to, but yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah. That's part of the discussion.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Well, once you take-

Ant Pruitt:
That will be part of the discussion.

Leo Laporte:
Once you take a bunch of videos of your house from the air, you're kind of done.

Jeff Jarvis:
Well, Richard Jinger at Google adores his. He takes them everywhere and he loves the seashore.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, it's so pretty. I'm going to watch, because I feel like I need some inspiration to do more stuff with my DJI Mini. So my-

Stacey Higginbotham:
My child actually watched your HandsOn photography for pet photography, believe it or not.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh, with Captain Nick Anderson. Oh, that's good. Thank you.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Yeah, so there you go.

Ant Pruitt:
Captain Nick's awesome. He's so [inaudible 03:00:15] cool and really good at what he does.

Leo Laporte:
Thank you. Mr- oh, wait a minute. Let's talk about [inaudible 03:00:20].

Ant Pruitt:
One more thing? Yes. Hardhead here. If you click on that link and go to his Instagram page, you'll see a photo of him. But if you look over there, up under his name, there's two words there.

Leo Laporte:
He's making money selling shoes. So, oh, these are good shoes these Adams.

Ant Pruitt:
So I want to give a shout-out to him and a shout-out to Adams, because Adams, remember I got some shoes from them sometime last year.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ant Pruitt:
'Cause they were big enough. They reached out and asked if I would want to shoot and not, and I said straight up. I said, you know what? These shoes are way too nice for me, too nice for Ant Pruitt, but I don't mind working with you all, but I'd rather you all work with my son and you pay my son.

Leo Laporte:
I can't believe your son is a full-grown man now.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte:
You can't believe this. He's like a grownup. He also has acquired your bad habit of wearing black socks when wearing it, working out.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh no. Black socks is the way to go, baby. That's it.

Leo Laporte:
I thought-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Like you're working out?

Leo Laporte:
I was always told, in fact, I remember when I was a kid in gym in PE, they said, no, no, you have to wear white socks. No black socks allowed because, and then they implied the dye in the socks would seep into your bloodstream and kill you.

Jeff Jarvis:
They had to make up ridiculous [inaudible 03:01:42].

Ant Pruitt:
Oh gosh. That's a bag for you too, Mr. Laporte.

Leo Laporte:
So, but I wear those white athletic socks. So the tube socks-

Jeff Jarvis:
You wear them with your sandals too?

Ant Pruitt:
All of my athletic socks are black. I haven't had white athletic socks in, I don't know, decade or so. They're all black.

Leo Laporte:
Are they are athletic socks or just dress socks?

Ant Pruitt:
Yeah, they're athletic socks.

Leo Laporte:
They're special socks.

Ant Pruitt:
They're athletic socks.

Leo Laporte:
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah, that's all I wear is Nike black socks, yeah.

Leo Laporte:
You too?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Do I look like an old man when I wear white socks?

Jeff Jarvis:
Yep. Especially when you have your shorts and your sandals on.

Leo Laporte:
When I wear my sock white socks and my birken stocks.

Ant Pruitt:
Please don't do that, sir.

Jeff Jarvis:
They're Crocs.

Leo Laporte:
I have those too.

Jeff Jarvis:
Most uncomfortable thing I've ever had on my feet in my life.

Leo Laporte:
I was very upset because I thought you could wash those in the dishwasher and they shrink.

Ant Pruitt:
Oh boy. Oh gosh, dude. Really?

Leo Laporte:
My Crocs shrink. They're not supposed to shrink.

Jeff Jarvis:
We need [inaudible 03:02:46] of Stacey doing just what she's doing now.

Leo Laporte:
We have them. We have them if you're in our club TWiT Discord, we have a Stacey hand in head icon that you could-

Stacey Higginbotham:
Oh, we do?

Leo Laporte:
Oh gosh, yes. Let me see here. There it is. There it is right there.

Stacey Higginbotham:
I've never seen that.

Leo Laporte:
There it is.

Stacey Higginbotham:
That comes up a lot.

Ant Pruitt:
It does. It does indeed.

Leo Laporte:
Another reason to join Club TWiT, ladies and gentlemen.
Okay, thank you Ant. Twit.tv/hop. See him in the club. He's our community manager. Stacey is at Stacyoniot.com. The IOT podcast, @gigastacey on Twitter. Thank you, Stacy. Appreciate it. Always great to see you.

Stacey Higginbotham:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte:
Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Of course, we know him. Frank Sinatra called him a bum. Ray Crock called him a Nickel millionaire. He is the director of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, at the City University of New York.
What is that? Was that like bagpipes?

Ant Pruitt:
Wait, what? Yeah, what just happened?

Stacey Higginbotham:
What was that ominous music.

Ant Pruitt:
Sorry.

Leo Laporte:
Can we, all right, here's a challenge to all of our listeners, a bagpipe version of the Craig Newmark.

Jeff Jarvis:
There we go.

Leo Laporte:
We'll call it Amazing Craig. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do this week in Google every Wednesday about 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 22:00 UTC. You can watch live at live.twit.tv or listen live, we stream both.
If you're watching or listening live chat live@irc.twit.tv, open to all, or in our club TWiT Discord after the fact. You can get on demand versions of the shows from the website, twit.tv/twig. There is a dedicated YouTube channel to this week in Google. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player, which would probably be the best thing to do, if you will.
If your podcast player allows reviews, give us a five-star review. Let the world know about the best dang show on Wednesday afternoon they could ever possibly listen to. That's it for Twig. We'll see you next time. 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