This Week in Google 730, Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Twig. This week at Google, Mike Elgan joins us along with Ant Pruitt and Jeff Jarvis. Jeff was on the CBC. It seems the Canadian government's pretty mad at Facebook, but Facebook says, we told you. We'll also talk about some new features on YouTube to let you hum a song to find it, and the passing of a legend, a man who really helped build the computer era. Plus, we'll talk a lot about AI and Mike comes up with some pretty interesting AI tools, all of that [00:00:30] and a lot more coming up next on Twig podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:00:37):
From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:46):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 730, recorded Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023. Thank you, pec. This episode of this week in Google is brought to you by Pan Optica. [00:01:00] Reduce the complexity of protecting your workloads and applications in a multi-cloud environment. Pan Optica provides comprehensive cloud workload protection integrated with a p i security to protect the entire application lifecycle. Learn more about pant@pant.app and buy discourse. The online home for your community discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime anywhere. [00:01:30] We know because we use it. Visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free on all self-serve plans and by bit Warden, get the open source password manager that can help you stay safe online. Get started with a free teams or enterprise plan trial, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bit warden.com/twit.

(00:01:59):
It's time for Twig this week in [00:02:00] Google, the show. We cover all the latest Google. Google News. My Fous Day, Kalu Klay, Jeff Jarvis's knocking things over at his what? What Leo? He's an old grump. What? He's an old grump on the line. This is all because of this album Art from Joe Esposito Ant and the old Grumps. That's Ant Pruitt right there. He says, y'all get me out of this mess. Please, please, please [00:02:30] love Ant Pro. He's our community manager. But I didn't get to do the Oh, we got to go back. Yeah, because Jeff is, you don't have a jingle for yourself. I'm sure we should don't. Jeff is the Leonard Tau professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. A Hardy salute tour. Craig, right now? Yeah. Craig, what's going on with Craig? He's fine. He tweeted

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:59):
Something about me in the hospital, [00:03:00] but I emailed him and he says he's okay.

Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
Oh, okay. Good. Okay, good. Hope you're feeling better way. He tweeted a heart

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:08):
Thing. If he behaved, he could get a visit from a therapy pigeon.

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
Not a duff though. Not a duff. Not enough now, as you know. And if you didn't hear, I'm sorry to be the bear of Bad Ting. Stacey Higginbotham has retired, not just in this show, but from podcasting so that she could go to work as a consumer advocate at Consumers Union. The Consumer reports [00:03:30] fees. Yeah, I guess it changed the name. So to Consumer Reports. So yes. Consumer reports. So in filling in for Stacey Higginbotham, in the Stacey seat today, Mike Elgan, our dear friend who is in the Bay Area, briefly in between Gastro Nomad Adventures. Hi Mike.

Mike Elgan (00:03:50):
Hey, how you doing? Glad to be

Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
Here. So glad to have you. Always good. Yeah, I

Mike Elgan (00:03:57):
Got a whole bunch of friends at Consumer Reports. I got to [00:04:00] check in't

Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
Them and her. I'm so proud of her. That's such a great, I tell you anything anywhere else I'd be pissed off. But Consumer Union Consumer Reports. I'm working on policy subscriber for 20 years. Yeah, working on. It's perfect.

Mike Elgan (00:04:14):
It makes sense. I mean Toasters, which what they always review and stuff like that now have internet connections and computer chips and so bringing a expertise,

Leo Laporte (00:04:24):
Yeah, is really great. Fires continue in Canada, [00:04:30] fires just all over. Of course, yellow Knife has been evacuated. 20,000 people in the Capitol. Heritage Minister says it's all Meta's fault. You remember C 18 passed in the Canadian parliament, which required that Google and meta pay news publishers for links back to their sites. So if you [00:05:00] are on Facebook and you put a link to the Toronto Globe and Mail, you'd have to pay for that. Facebook would've to pay for that, even though it's sending traffic back to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Unbelievable. To which Google and Facebook said, see ya. So now without news links, by the way, Facebook pointed out only about 3% of our traffic is these news links. People don't get their news on Facebook. It's not a huge deal.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:26):
And by the way, nothing stops. The news organization from typing into [00:05:30] a post. Yellowknife is being evacuated and putting the actual information there. This is about the links only,

Leo Laporte (00:05:35):
And there are plenty of other places to get your news. But of course, so people may say when they first hear this, oh, shame on you meta because you're endangering people in Yellowknife because Facebook blocks those links. But I say shame on you Canada and the Canadian government, because this is a very cynical ploy to get [00:06:00] pressure Facebook to come back. Canada's heritage minister, red redoubled, her causes for meta to end its ban on Canadian news content. This is where the Canadian press and tr and now the Prime Minister weighs in as well. Dudes, you do this, you chase away. You've been warned. You've been warned. So

Ant Pruitt (00:06:25):
Facebook was saying it was roughly two or 3% from in their analytics [00:06:30] that they saw was news stuff for news. What are the news organizations seeing it? What are the folks in Canada, their analytics? Are they seeing it as 80, 80% of their traffic is coming from, was coming from, well, Jeff

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:42):
Lg, we quoted him a few weeks ago from Village Media in Canada who's a real innovator in Canada. He said between Google and Facebook together, and it's about 50% of his traffic. People start there and it's like, and of course it's not just links, it's the news organizations themselves linking to stuff, but it's also readers looking to stuff which you want, and they're cutting off their [00:07:00] nose despite their face all around

Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
Pascal Sahan, which weirdly is the heritage minister in charge of this, says this news block is putting people's lives at risk. But this guy named Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor of the city of some

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:14):
Loud mouth

Leo Laporte (00:07:15):
American University. Newark, tells the Canadian press news.ca. There is some onus on the Canadian government to back down, you said, to look for the reckless roots of this problem. Nice to sneak in some alliteration,

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:27):
Little liberation.

Leo Laporte (00:07:28):
It never hurts. The heritage [00:07:30] minister should look in the mirror. He says the bill is what's reckless, not Facebook. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Elgan (00:07:39):
Yeah, there's just two things about it. One is the abdication of responsibility by the government as if it's Mark Zuckerberg's mission to safeguard the health and safety of the Canadian people rather than the Canadian government, number one. Number two, by saying that [00:08:00] the meta removal of news links endangers lies. Essentially what he's saying is that meta providing the free service of linking to news in normal times was lifesaving. And so they're the ones who chased meta away. It's just ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (00:08:24):
Furthermore, meta has, Facebook has turned on their safety check feature, which is a great [00:08:30] public service that they offer where people can go to their Facebook page and say, I'm all right. I'm okay. I've got evacuated. Apparently that 20,000 people have been flown. I was just talking to Richard Thompson, sorry, Richard Campbell on Windows Weekly. He's in Coquitlam, he's in bc. He said that 20,000 people have been flown from Yellowknife down to British Columbia, hundreds of to get them out. But they can use meta [00:09:00] to say, oh yeah, I got evacuated. I'm in bc, I'm okay.

Ant Pruitt (00:09:03):
Yeah, that's good.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:05):
And they can post any

Leo Laporte (00:09:06):
Information they want.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:06):
Free service in a post. Yes. Yeah. I mean, the publishers said, how dare you link to us. And now they say, how dare you not link to us. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:09:14):
This is the problem with this. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:16):
It's been interesting. I did a C B C interview. I did the Canadian press interview. I did a couple radio interviews, the loud mouth American now on this topic, and I thought I would get a lot of pushback [00:09:30] from the interviewers, and actually I haven't. They kind get it.

Mike Elgan (00:09:36):
Don't tell. There's still loudmouth American on every topic. But I saw the interview. You did. It was exactly right. My curiosity is around public opinion in Canada. What are the Canadians think? Who are the Canadians blaming for this problem? Are they siding with the government or they agree that

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:56):
I think it's so arcane and inside [00:10:00] cricket, this thing inside hockey, I should say hockey, that I doubt that there's much public opinion.

Leo Laporte (00:10:11):
I'll tell you exactly

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:12):
What happens. The people who are affected are the first nations in

Leo Laporte (00:10:14):
Oh, that's sad.

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:15):
Northwest territories. Yeah. You were going to say something. You were

Leo Laporte (00:10:19):
Saying. I think what it really comes down to, and this is often the case in our polarized world, is, which you hate worse government or Facebook. And for the people who say yes, see Facebook sucks. [00:10:30] This is more proof. And for people who say, yeah, government sucks, this is more proof. And it has nothing to do with the facts of the matter. The

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:36):
Thing about this is an

Ant Pruitt (00:10:37):
Uproar one way or

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:39):
Another. I'm sorry, Ann.

Ant Pruitt (00:10:40):
No, I understand. It's just stirring an uproar one way or another. You mentioned it seemed like the people that were interviewing you were fair on this. Should they have been otherwise, isn't it their job to just try to report the facts and the information? I love you, man. No, I'm saying that the [00:11:00] problem I have with news today is they're not supposed to to come out and have their slant one way or another when it comes to a matter of actual facts. Right now, our folks cannot put this information in Facebook because Facebook has blocked it. Next sentence, Facebook blocked it because our government wanted to charge them for putting this in there, period. Those are the facts. It shouldn't have to have some type of political [00:11:30] slant one way or another. Facts. You're absolutely

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:32):
Right. And the other piece of this too, in terms of who's reasonable or not, is that Facebook and Google, but especially Google, have made clear, they'll negotiate. Google said that we just,

Leo Laporte (00:11:43):
They did it in Australia.

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:45):
Yeah. And they short circuited the law there. It didn't ever take effect. And in Canada, they've said, listen, you got to have a cap on this. You can't have some aluminum amount of money. Why? You've got to have a fair way to distribute the money. Who's deciding this? [00:12:00] You've got to guarantee the money's going to journalists because in this case, the major newspaper chain in Canada is owned by a hedge fund, an American hedge fund, and the money's fungible and it's going to go their bottom line. But the way the law was written and then passed, left no room, no wiggle room at all for negotiation. So now the government's stuck. They might try to, in the regulation, do things like put a cap on and stuff like that. But here's what I think is interesting, my friends, I think Google [00:12:30] will end up negotiating something with them. They'll figure it out and they get Google. But Facebook, I think that Facebook is going to say, you know what? Nevermind. We don't want any news there. You know what? We don't want any news anywhere. It's a pain. It's a pain commercial. Yeah. We've been waiting for this excuse. Thank you very much, Canada. We'll blame you for the whole world having fewer links to news, which does affect the news ecosystem. It does affect the citizenry. It's not good. But I don't blame Facebook at this point [00:13:00] for saying, eh.

Ant Pruitt (00:13:01):
I was wondering how long it would take for them to backtrack on this, now that this tragedy has happened and

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:07):
They've held firm,

Ant Pruitt (00:13:08):
Is this something that we see fixed at the end of

Leo Laporte (00:13:10):
The year? It hasn't fully become law, right?

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:15):
Well, it's been CI a law. It hasn't hit the date yet. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:13:19):
That's all. So they did this, but Facebook said we're doing it kind of proactively knowing that they were at some point going to have to do this. Mike Snicks headline, Canadian media organization said that meta linking the news [00:13:30] was anti-competitive. Now they say not linking the news is anti-competitive. Mike writes, that's the best, Mike. This is just so painfully obnoxious. The legacy news media spurred on by a welfare system that pretend free market supporter. Rupert Murdoch dreamed up and convinced governments to implement, whereby the government would force internet companies which had innovated and created new business models that worked to suddenly be required to pay for sending traffic to legacy news mega day organizations, which failed [00:14:00] to innovate its extreme corporate welfare egged on by a guy who pretends to be against all kinds of welfare. And I as a true liberal, I will add that welfare in this country is always for the rich, not for the poor. We don't want poor people to get any welfare. We don't want any subsidies for poor people. But oh, by the way, can I have some Please?

Ant Pruitt (00:14:21):
Thanks. Can you bail me out?

Leo Laporte (00:14:23):
Thanks.

Mike Elgan (00:14:25):
The other point that Jeff made that I thought was right on of course, is that we [00:14:30] have norms about how the internet works. You have hyperlinks that link to other content and nobody's paying anybody for those links. And that's the way it's supposed to work. And I was casting about in my mind for an analogy, and one analogy would be from the media. Let's say for example, you have a newspaper that has a restaurant review section. They recommend a restaurant that's like, oh, their chicken king is fantastic. You should go there. Here's the address. Should they have to pay the restaurant for directing people to that restaurant and providing the address of that restaurant and showing [00:15:00] pictures of the restaurant and showing pictures of the food and all that kind of stuff.

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:03):
Shocks me, Mike,

Leo Laporte (00:15:04):
Be down the way around.

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:06):
What shocks me Here, wait a second. What shocks me here, Mike, I just got to get this in here. Is that in your brain where you eat the most phenomenal food all the time, all around the world, your brain struggles to pick an example of food and you pick chicken all cane.

Mike Elgan (00:15:24):
Where

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:24):
Did that come from?

Mike Elgan (00:15:26):
Yeah, I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:15:27):
It's been in Morocco too long. [00:15:30] He Mrs. Good old American food. I'm just

Mike Elgan (00:15:32):
Trying to think about what Canadians eat. I dunno what they eat.

Leo Laporte (00:15:36):
Campbell's mushroom soup was trying to relate to us peasants. So Michael Geist, if you want the Canadian point of view, he is wonderful. He's been lobbying against C 18 since day one. He's Canadian research chair and international net and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, a member of the Center for Law Technology and Society. He writes on his blog, and this is actually a very good point. This is from the Canadian point [00:16:00] of view. The rhetoric about Bill C 18 has escalated in recent days in light of the awful wildfires in the Northwest Territories in British Columbia. In my view, again, this is Michael's geist. The issues associated with these tragic events have little to do with meta blocking news links and the attempt to bring it into the conversation is a transparent attempt to score political points. The reality is meta was asked about justice scenario at committee [00:16:30] and made it clear that it would not block any non-new outlet links. This is precisely what's been happening. In other words, they told everybody and the government's legisl legislative choices,

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:39):
But put up updates all they want

Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
Should be the starting point for understanding why compliance of the law involves blocking a very broad range of news links that extend even beyond those sources that are defined as eligible news outlets. In other words, this is all about political posturing, would a surprise and maybe deflecting some responsibility? The connectivity [00:17:00] with some Northwest Territory communities completely taken offline for days is somehow never mentioned Geist. The law has yet to take effect. There is room to address their concerns in the regulation making process. That's what the government and supporters of Bill C 18 are saying. He says, both of these claims are incredibly deceptive. Relying on the assumption most won't bother to read the actual legislation. If they did, they would see one, the law has received royal ascent [00:17:30] and can take effect any time. And two, the regulation making process addresses only a small subset of Bill C 18 issues with most of the core issues. They're done, they're finalized. In other words, the time to shape the law and address many of the key concerns was before the government repeatedly cut off debate in order to ensure that it received royal ascent before the summer break. So even this Canadian [00:18:00] News Journal interview that you did even there, the Canadian C P N Canadian Press news. Is that like a news service? Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:10):
It's the AP of

Leo Laporte (00:18:10):
Canada, the AP of Canada. Even then, even in this article, they said Bill C 18 is not in effect yet says St. Ange. This means meta is not yet on the hook to pay for any news sites. So what did they turn it off makes. But you know what? The reason I [00:18:30] bring this up, it's really got much more to do. It's not just Canada. This is in general the attitude towards big tech. The big tech is at fault. Whatever goes wrong, it's big tech's fault. And this is an easy, and we need to reign in the big tech companies, but it's an easy whipping boy for the flaws, the faults of the government. Let's blame big tech as a whole. Yeah. Or society.

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:55):
And it's also about what disturbs me as a journalist is you have news [00:19:00] organizations that are cashing in the political capital they earned through journalism to lobby for protectionist legislation. It's not only happening in Canada, obviously we know about Australia, we know about Germany, we know about Europe. It's also happening in Switzerland. It's also happening big time in Brazil. Some really new and bad legislation happening there and it's spreading around the world. And it affects everyone's speech. It affects our speech as

Leo Laporte (00:19:23):
Well. I will continue though, because it does then once you realize that [00:19:30] protect a little bit big tech and whereas they shouldn't be protected, there is definitely stuff to worry about with big tech. Sure. Just not this. And so it has a negative effect on our dialogue in two ways. One, it deflects blame from society and the government, all this stuff and puts it on big tech. But two, it kind of paints over the really legitimate things we should be complaining about with big tech and things we should be considering regulating surveillance [00:20:00] or fixing like big tech and Lio surveillance

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:04):
We think made us hate or made us be.

Leo Laporte (00:20:07):
I understand. I agree with you a hundred percent. But my point is that in defending big tech, I am not defending all of big techs companies, but definitely there are issues. Big tech has gotten so big. And actually our next story is relevant to this. We were talking about it before the show, which is the incredible New Yorker profile of Elon Musk, [00:20:30] oh boy, by Ronan Farrow, whose last topic was me too, of course. And he took down the biggest of me too offenders with his articles. Now Pharaoh is looking at big tech. He writes the title of the article, Elon Musk's Shadow Rule. That's, remember that how the US government came to rely on the tech billionaire and is now struggling to reign him in because government decided they [00:21:00] weren't going to spend money on space and other things. This has given entrepreneurs, tech entrepreneurs a chance to move in.

(00:21:07):
Take in effect privatizing. Privatize it. Yeah. Traditional government roles like space exploration. And now the government's scratching their heads because Elon for instance, and this is what Pharaoh talks about, the Ukrainian army is entirely dependent on SpaceX's, starlink internet access for their frontline forces. [00:21:30] And if Elon turns it off, Pharaoh says, and I think a lot agree, including Mark Melley, the joint chiefs of staff, it ends the war, the Ukraine loses because they have no battlefield communications. And so that gives one guy, one somewhat nutty guy, let's face it, an immense amount of power. And he even says, I've been on the phone every week with Vladimir Putin. That's terrifying.

Mike Elgan (00:21:59):
And so [00:22:00] the thing about it is, is that democracy is messy. Democracy doesn't satisfy everyone. And there are a lot of governments around the world that would love to slide into dictatorship or some kind of one person rule. And that's the problem. That's one of the problems with corporate ruler or this whole problem of Elon Musk's shadow rule, which is that Elon Musk personally can behave like a dictator, as you said. He can say, well, you know what, I'm going to [00:22:30] swing the war for Russia. Throw a switch. There it is. I'm going to blanket the country with charging stations that support Tesla only. Or he could choose any of these things like a dictator, a democratic government couldn't choose any of these things easily. Right. Let's say

Ant Pruitt (00:22:47):
He does this stuff though, Mr. Elgin, then what happens? Yeah. Does he suffer any consequences for his actions?

Mike Elgan (00:22:55):
Well, who knows? I mean 200 billion or 250 billion or whatever [00:23:00] he's worth. He could go anywhere. He could do anything. He's not going to ever want for anything ever, no matter what. He's proving that with the money he's wasting on Twitter. So he could just leave. I think it's an excellent question. Fine, because he's untouchable, he's cancelable, he's beyond anybody's reach. And I think that's the point that

Leo Laporte (00:23:19):
He made. And Ronan Farrow makes this point that Shanghai produces half of Tesla's all of Tesla's cars. So his financial fortune depends on the goodwill [00:23:30] of Chinese officials. He is treated like a visiting head of state when he goes to China, better frankly than a visiting head of state met with higher level people in China than our government has lately. Musk was welcomed to Beijing this spring with what Reuters summarized as flattery and feasts. So this guy has immense and growing power. But you really nailed it in a second ago, and I don't [00:24:00] know, it's not even mentioned in this article, but Jeff, you said he also controls elections and honestly, I'm starting to become convinced that he bought Twitter for one and one only reason is for political power.

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:15):
Maybe I

Leo Laporte (00:24:15):
Think you

Ant Pruitt (00:24:15):
Said that from the beginning back when this was a story of him

Leo Laporte (00:24:20):
Being, well, no one really knows. I was speculating, but now I'm starting to think this is louder. This is case.

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:26):
I want to go back to

Mike Elgan (00:24:26):
Your question. This is what everyone was saying when he was going to buy Twitter, I'm sorry Jeff, [00:24:30] step on you, but they were like, oh my goodness, is he going to change the algorithm on Twitter to favor the Chinese point of view? Those concerns almost seem quaint given what's happened with Twitter now. But if you want to take that to an extreme, imagine if the Chinese government invaded Taiwan and there was a Western alliance led by the United States opposing Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Elon Musk, whose side would he take?

Leo Laporte (00:25:00):
[00:25:00] Well, not just Elon Musk, Tim Cook, don't go

Mike Elgan (00:25:06):
There. No, but Tim Cook is a, he's

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
The golden boy

Mike Elgan (00:25:09):
Here. The apple's owned by its shareholders, which are by and large American investors and so on. He's more of a reliable player who's trying to be publicly ethical on behalf of the company and so on.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:24):
But when you're trusting him as a personality that's apart from systems. I want to go back to Anne's question because Anne's [00:25:30] question was right on target is what's the accountability of Musk? And as you asked that question, I think that we have to come to the law and in anything that we have listed but must could do. I'm not sure that he is violating any law. I'm not sure that there's any,

Leo Laporte (00:25:46):
I'll give you one. I'll give you one right now to stop him from the Ronan Fair article. He wanted to launch F a A said, you cannot, we need to do a safety investigation. He launched anyway. [00:26:00] There have been no repercussions. The F a a issued no fine, mostly because they said it didn't see a fine would make any difference. That's been fine. But it grounded space for two months and that might've hurt him a little bit. But he honestly, that's why he moved his launchpads to Boca, Chica Texas to private property that he owns because he doesn't want to be beholden to any government agency.

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:26):
So if he turned off starlink in Ukraine, if he [00:26:30] supported China against American interests regarding Taiwan, if he turned Twitter entirely into Trump land, there is no accountability for any of those actions. So I think so, right? Even if he did violate law, he has so much money. He could go to some other country, he'd go to Russia overnight. But even apart from that, there's no check on him.

Leo Laporte (00:26:58):
And my point, the reason I brought up Tim Cook, [00:27:00] and you're right, it's more complicated with Apple, but the reason I brought it up is there really is no accountability for any of these big tech systemic and so companies, Elon is just an example of what is going on. These companies have gotten too big to fail. They have so much power. Google basically runs the internet. If you're not on the Google search engine, you do not exist right as a website or even as a business to be honest. Everybody's

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:26):
On. Well, so the answer to that, I go back to my shame [00:27:30] that I didn't follow your lead long ago and say there's trouble in this privatization of our internet. We've got to support places like Mastodon, as small as they might be on a matter of principle. The best thing we can do is to support competition to these companies. We talked last week about whether or not this money VC corporate thing was a necessary phase in the internet. I'm not sure either way, but in any case, the only answer is competition with these big guys. Well

Mike Elgan (00:28:00):
[00:28:00] In the United States, I mean China detected the rising power of tech giants and started in 2020 with a giant crackdown they cracked down on the ant group, no offense, ant tencent, baidu jd.com by dance, et cetera, and they, what's his name went into hiding? Jack, Jack

Leo Laporte (00:28:19):
Believe.

Mike Elgan (00:28:20):
Yeah, just vanished for, I dunno how long that was. And they really have demonstrated to the Chinese tech giants, you're not going [00:28:30] to even come close to challenging the power of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government. We wanting the make sure you

Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
Link by way. There may be some evidence that they did that at their peril this week. New York Times, as China falls into deflation, the mood turns dark. Chinese economy is tumbling,

Mike Elgan (00:28:49):
Their housing market is like half the economy and it's in serious trouble. So yeah, China looks like Japan in the nineties.

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:00):
[00:29:00] So Leo, back to Musk. I'm going to be fascinated. I put the link up in the twit chat, Walter Isaacson's authorized biography.

Leo Laporte (00:29:10):
Oh God, that's going to be such a geography. It's going to be terrible. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:13):
Think so don't you?

Leo Laporte (00:29:15):
It's going to affect

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:16):
His reputation. What

Leo Laporte (00:29:17):
Did you say, Isaacson? What? So Walter Isaacson

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:19):
Is an authorized

Leo Laporte (00:29:20):
Biography who's a well-known biographer. He best known as this most recent one he did on Steve Jobs, but he is also written about Einstein and others. I never thought he was. [00:29:30] Look at, I'm reading Robert Caro's amazing book about Robert Moses. I've read the L B J books. That's a great biographer. And by the way, extremely critical. And his whole thesis on both those series, the Carou book is so long, is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so compare that with Isaacson who basically gets all this access and [00:30:00] then writes a

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:01):
Well, me read from the Amazon, his father's impact on his psyche would linger. He developed a tough yet vulnerable manchild prone to abrupt, Jekyll and Hyde mood swings with an dec, exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. Okay, that's all true. But he says later that whenever he got there was trouble, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Playground.

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:29):
Now he had a [00:30:30] chance to own the playground. So it's a psychoanalysis of this nut job with I think, I don't know, we can tell this is just promotional copy, but it feels like more empathy than I want to give the guy. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:30:42):
Ashley Vance's excellent biography of Musk is recommended. Although he wrote it before Musk went off the deep end. I think it clearly there was something that happened that Elon, I don't think it's the same Elon of 10 years ago, but maybe it is. Maybe we just didn't know. Nevertheless, change the medication. I don't want to make it about Elon. [00:31:00] It's really, it's the structure. Its government has essentially pulled back ever since Reagan, the fear of socialism has gotten so extreme that private enterprise rules. And now you have these companies that are so massive, so big, they can't be challenged. They're doing everything

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:20):
They can within the bounds that they have. They

Leo Laporte (00:31:22):
Can't be regulated and they can't be competed with. And that's actually a big one because I don't think we've already seen many companies [00:31:30] try to do a better search engine than Google. And they have, but they failed nevertheless because Google's the default and

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:37):
You're still bitter about Neva. I know

Leo Laporte (00:31:39):
I'm very bitter. It was better and it was amazing, but didn't have a shot and an answer to question I've had for a long time, which is normally the answer would be, oh, there's a business cycle. Every company rises and falls. It's like i b m, they were dominant and then they weren't. And that's going to happen to these guys [00:32:00] too. And it's very shortsighted to say, oh, there's nobody ever going to challenge Facebook. Look at MySpace. But I started to think that it is possible for a company to get to a point where they are in fact not going to be subject to the business cycle, that they are so dominant that there will be no competition. And furthermore, they're too big to fail. So there'll be no regulation and

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:24):
That's where I have a little more hope than you. So Facebook I think we would all say is fading. [00:32:30] It's still powerful, it's still rich, but it's a lot

Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
Less, I would say, because it their own users, their

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:37):
Own stupidity. But that's a fact

Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
Brought it on themselves. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:40):
Google has lost a lot of mojo. It has huge competition coming up from Amazon and advertising. I think one area where the regulators never struck where they are going to strike and will have a case to strike is in advertising. They'll break up some part of that NY they have. That

Leo Laporte (00:32:58):
Will be the litmus test. I agree. [00:33:00] Yeah. If they can do that, then there is hope. It remains to be seen that they'll be able to do that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:06):
And I remain, I use all these Google services. I still basically like Google, I find they do fascinating things. I'm disappointed in their lack of momentum. I'm disappointed that they become better known for killing things and starting things. But I've always said the one area where they're vulnerable is advertising and that's the core of the company. And so we'll see what

Leo Laporte (00:33:24):
Happens. Well, it can't come.

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:25):
That's Lena Khan's test too.

Leo Laporte (00:33:27):
Yeah, it is. It can't come fast enough for us because [00:33:30] basically podcasting is dying thanks to Google and Facebook. It's impossible for us to get advertising because we can't compete. It's also

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:38):
Thanks to stupid advertisers who shouldn't be doing programmatic

Leo Laporte (00:33:41):
Should be doing higher value. Agree. Lisa said podcast movement right now and every time I talk to her every night she says, we're dead. Everybody's going. D a i direct ad insertion. Everybody wants metrics. Everybody's talking about how can we put pixels on your pages? How can we monitor your audience? [00:34:00] And I'm sorry, we're not going to do that. Podcasting is an R s s feed, and so we know very little about it. All our ads are context sensitive. They're not driven by the environment. Yeah, the environment. And she says, yeah, that's all anybody's talking about. A podcast movement. Oh man,

Mike Elgan (00:34:21):
It's active. I know you guys know this, but I don't know how much of the audience, the US audience knows this, but when I listen to podcasts abroad, [00:34:30] half the podcast, I listen to insert a local language podcast advertising. So I'm in Italy and all of a sudden the ads are all in Italian. I'm like, this just feels like a disconnect with the audience. That's

Leo Laporte (00:34:42):
By the way, going to happen to our shows too. When we don't this show, we will not, we've sold all the units for this show, but if we were short as we are often with this show and all of our shows, we open a slot for a company called Advertised Cast, which is owned by Libson. I have good feelings [00:35:00] about Libson. They started in podcasting about when I did. They're good people. I know them very well and I think advertise cast is very good. But yeah, you're going to get a Spanish language ad in Spain. That's part of why alternative d ai, because they may not know anything about you, Mike. They certainly don't know that you speak English and not Spanish, but they know that your IP address is in Spain. So they play or Italy or don't grab

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:24):
Any data they can get. So Leo, I had some years ago, right before the pandemic, [00:35:30] basically the inventor of programmatic advertising into an event about the future of journalism business at my school. And he lectured all the media people in the room who were high level executives and said, why the heck are you going to programmatic? It's not meant for you. It was meant to increase some direct response. What are you doing this for? You're commodifying yourself. And one of the CROs in the room said, I don't have any choice.

Leo Laporte (00:35:56):
There's no choice advertisers.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:57):
That's where the advertisers are. So that's where I have to go. [00:36:00] So a lot of the blame about the pressure here lays with the advertisers. Actually, nobody wants to argue with them.

Leo Laporte (00:36:06):
It isn't the advertisers really. It's the advertising agencies. Agencies, yes. And there's a lot of weird stuff. I mean, honestly, they don't give a damn. They're not the advertiser we can have when we have a direct relationship with an advertiser. It's always good and it always results in effective advertising. And it doesn't involve snooping, but that's, the

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:25):
Agency tries to stop you from having that relationship.

Leo Laporte (00:36:27):
Yeah, the agency, I understand if you're an advertiser, [00:36:30] you don't have time to go to every podcast and buy an ad. You're going to go to an agency and let them do it all. But that's where your troubles. We need

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:38):
Reform in people who like Shoshana Zuboff and Tristan Harris who say that advertising is a source of all the evil. Well, if we lost advertising, we lose a lot of content like this and we lose a lot of value like this. We've got to have a discussion about reforming advertising. But I don't know how that happens. If

Leo Laporte (00:36:57):
I were

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:58):
Foundation, I would put money behind that.

Leo Laporte (00:36:59):
What [00:37:00] you're going to get is what you're getting here, which is you're going to get ultimately a paywall or a subscriber service. I mean, the club has helped us a lot, but it's 1% of our audience. It's, it's a tiny fraction. It's not

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:11):
So voluntary. It's like a volunteer army.

Leo Laporte (00:37:13):
And I don't want to put up a paywall partly because with Tech podcasts, you, the audience is sophisticated enough to get around in paywall, so there's no point.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:22):
Well start your knitting podcast, smart

Leo Laporte (00:37:24):
Geeks. It's much better to do a knitting podcast much, by the way, it's interesting. [00:37:30] I was just reading the Hollywood reporters like top 50 podcasters and the movers and shakers of the podcast world, and it's all people like Emma Chamberlain and call her daddy, who are doing podcasts for normal people that are not technically savvy, and they're py walled behind Spotify. And of course they have a lot. One of the reasons Spotify does exclusives is because then you have to use their app. Then they have all the information they can want about you.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:58):
What's the latest with Spotify [00:38:00] in terms of what they seen? Well, it's flopped for wanting to take over the industry and then they kind of pulled back.

Leo Laporte (00:38:05):
So I mean, I'm not a genius in this, but my opinion is during Covid, there were a lot of celebrities who didn't have anything to do. Maybe during the strike. There aren't either. So they started podcasts. Every single one of them did. And Spotify saw this as a, from Spotify's point of view, they were trying to get out from another record labels. They had no control over their business because the record labels told them what to pay them. So they said, we've got to find some [00:38:30] content. So they went to podcasts and there were all these celebrities and they paid a lot of money, spent a hundred million dollars on Joe Rogan, spend $60 million on Harry and Megan too. Harry and Megan got all this celebrity content and none of it worked now to have made any money. And so they've fired much of their staff they've got, but unfortunately, they still have to pay. Joe Rogan still got to pay the talent. They still have to pay caller daddy. So yeah, [00:39:00] I think Daniel Eck now thinks in his mind this was a mistake, but I understand why he did it. He needs some sort of content. They

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:07):
Just announced some more stuff today for Podcasters, fool, customized pages, analytics, other controls.

Leo Laporte (00:39:14):
What they're trying to do is get, there is a vast podcast universe, nobody makes any money, but if you get a little crumb from every one of them, okay, you can be rich. So they want it's Google strategy. They just want to be the platform. Yeah, they want to be the platform. [00:39:30] Mr. Jarvis, I want Mike to, hold on a second. I want Mike to say something because we've been talking all over him and he's been trying to get it. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Elgan (00:39:38):
Well, no, just one point is that I just had a snarky comment about the celebrity podcast. They're all the same. They're all exactly the same. They have their peers on and they're like, how did you get famous? Oh my God.

Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
Oh my God,

Mike Elgan (00:39:51):
It's still boring. You're so wonderful. How I wanted to make, which is the internationalization of podcasting is coming very, [00:40:00] very soon. There's already tools out there where you can upload a video and what do is, it'll translate the entire thing into the language, any language that you choose from a menu, and it will even sync it up with a video I thought YouTube was already doing. And so this will be done automatically and at scale, and you'll be able to, the twig will be available in 50 languages automatically. And so you get this much larger audience. However, everybody's [00:40:30] going to be doing this. And so all the podcasts will be available in all the languages within a matter of two or three years, I think. Wasn't YouTube

Leo Laporte (00:40:37):
Already working on that

Mike Elgan (00:40:39):
Or, yeah. I dunno if it's YouTube, but there are some other tools out there like that, and it's kind of fascinating. I've been writing, I write for Foundry, one of the companies I write for Computer World is the main publication and they translate my columns into 20, 30 languages as a matter of course. And it's pretty great. I hear [00:41:00] from people in Korea, Germany, and all these other places who read it in the native language. But I think that's definitely coming through the magic of AI to podcasts. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:41:09):
We're actually looking at AI translations of many of our shows and too probably really, let's probably start with Spanish language. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (00:41:16):
It's a complicating factor for advertising though, isn't it?

Leo Laporte (00:41:19):
Yeah, we are looking at everything. Some of it's pretty good, some of it. The funny thing is really, I always, and maybe I'm just old, I come [00:41:30] back to fundamentals. The relationship you have as a host with your audience and anything that comes in between you and the audience is a negative. And that's why I thought the club was the best way to go, I think. I still think it is, but anyway, I worry. So get to get back. Screw us. What about big tech? About big

Mike Elgan (00:41:55):
Elon? Big Elon. Big

Leo Laporte (00:41:57):
Elon. I dunno, there's nothing more to say about Elon. Do read that [00:42:00] New Yorker profile? It's a little chilling only because he has so much power and there is no ability to control it. To answer your question,

Mike Elgan (00:42:10):
I would tweak that a little bit, Leo, and say, there's no will politically to control it. Nobody's doing anything about this. They're too busy sucking up to Elon to actually say, Hey, we have a problem. It's a systemic problem. These companies, Elon Musk is not the first American oligarch to have so much power. He won't.

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
[00:42:30] Glasses Rockefeller. We

Mike Elgan (00:42:31):
Need a systematic approach to this problem. And I don't hear anybody in Washington having this conversation

Leo Laporte (00:42:39):
So

Ant Pruitt (00:42:39):
Far. I was done with thinking he would ever get punished or suffer repercussions for his actions back when he was tweeting about Dogecoin and all of that back in the day, and he's still doing that now and making all kinds of things happen with the market based on his stupid tweets. And he didn't have to pay the price for any of that stuff that, yeah, [00:43:00] so I was done.

Leo Laporte (00:43:01):
Pharaoh writes, the meddling of oligarchs and other moneyed interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the first World War. JP Morgan let vast sums to the allied powers afterwards. John d Rockefeller Jr. Poured money into the fledgling league of nations. The investor, George Soros, open society foundations, underwrote civil society reform and post Soviet Europe casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel as part of his sport of Benjamin Netanyahu. But those are influence, [00:43:30] those are Mur influence, Murdoch, those are all influence strategies. Musk has gone past that. They need him now. Yes.

Mike Elgan (00:43:39):
Part of, yes. Part of the reason is that all these other wealthy companies and wealthy people were dabbling in the margins. Musk is involved in the national highway system in terms of the electrification of the fleet. He's involved in our space program. He's involved in speech communications, right, exactly. [00:44:00] With both X and also with starlink. And so it's really, I don't think that we've ever had a wealthy person who has so much control over the fundamental things that government historically has been involved. And we

Leo Laporte (00:44:15):
As the voters, because we know trust government have really made government turn away from that and turn to other issues. He, Pharaoh writes, in the past 20 years against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure [00:44:30] and declining in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk taking Brinksmanship and Caprice current and former officials from nasa, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me, Ronan Pharaoh, that a Musk's influence has become [00:45:00] inescapable in their work. Can you see the broad range? And several of them say they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. And so this is what worries me, is we're moving to a government of the technocrats, at least a shadow government of the technocrats, if not an actual government of the technocrat.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:22):
Hold on. Isn't technocrat a definition of someone who's in government?

Leo Laporte (00:45:27):
Oh, does the crap make it government?

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:29):
I don't know. [00:45:30] Better word

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
Would be technology. Crat.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:35):
No ponent or advocate

Leo Laporte (00:45:38):
One. One. Pentagon spokesman told Pharaoh he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official only with Musk's permission.

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:50):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:45:51):
We'll talk to you if Elon wants us to. He told me that much power. Somebody asked him in a podcast whether he has more influence than the American government. [00:46:00] Musk said in some ways the source for some of this is Reid Hoffman, who was one of the PayPal Mafiaa later founded LinkedIn. Pretty good guy. I think

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:12):
Reid

Leo Laporte (00:46:12):
Hoffman told Pharaoh. Musk's attitude is like Louis the iv. The state is me,

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:24):
Technocracy the government or control of society or industry by an elite of [00:46:30] technical experts. So you can have a technocracy inside government or outside

Leo Laporte (00:46:34):
Government. I think it's at this point, a shadow government and it's increasing.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:37):
I think it's

Leo Laporte (00:46:38):
When Tim Cook goes to both China and the White House, and both defer to him because of his immense power, but he must also defer to them, which is, that's part of it. It's his relationship. You know

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:51):
Who, but Musk has a different Musk can. Well, the two things he said in the last week is, one, I'm going to get rid of blocking, so I'm going to ruin public discourse far [00:47:00] more. And then two, he's going to get rid of headlines in cards, which either is something just plain stupid or it's something having to do with France. I won't go into that.

Leo Laporte (00:47:08):
I don't understand what he's

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:09):
Up to all, but he just does these things where he has the powers

Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
To

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:12):
In fact do these things. That's

Leo Laporte (00:47:13):
Truly, that's the word caprice in a nutshell. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:16):
Caprice. That's it.

Leo Laporte (00:47:17):
Let's take a little break. I'm sure there's some Google stuff we can dredge up somewhere. I thought I saw it at least

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:24):
One time. In the rundown.

Leo Laporte (00:47:26):
There's something, oh, that was just a title. Google. Somebody has [00:47:30] coined a new term in our I R C techno Gar. He's a techno ark. I like it. Nice one. An crat. Our show brought to you by Pan Optica. In this rapidly evolving landscape of cloud security, Cisco Pan Optica is at the forefront, revolutionizing the way you manage your microservices, your workloads, with a unified and simplified approach to managing the security of cloud native [00:48:00] applications over the entire life cycle. Pan Optica simplifies cloud native security by reducing tools, vendors, and complexity by meticulously evaluating for security threats and vulnerabilities. Pan Optica ensures your applications remain secure and resilient. Pan optica detects security vulnerabilities on the go in development in testing and production environments, including any exploits in open source software. It also protects against known vulnerabilities [00:48:30] in container images, configuration drift, all while providing runtime policy-based remediation as Cisco's comprehensive cloud application security solution.

(00:48:42):
Pan Optica ensures seamless scalability across clusters and multi-cloud environments. It offers a unified view through a simplified dashboard experience, reducing operational complexity, fostering collaboration among developers, SREs and SecOps teams. Take charge [00:49:00] of your cloud security, address security issues across your application stack faster and with precision, embrace Pan Optica as your trusted partner in securing APIs, serverless functions, containers and Kubernete environments allowing you to transform the way you protect your valuable assets. Learn more about Pan Optica. Go to Pan Optica app. Pan Optica. How about that? P A N O P T I C A Pan optica.app. It's [00:49:30] pan across Optica view view across Pan Optica app. Right? It comes from the panopticon. I'm sure Mike Elgin knows what the panopticon was. This I did not know. Do you know what the panopticon is? Anybody? Sure. It was invented by English philosopher and social theorist, Jeremy Bentham. [00:50:00] Oh, I know Jeremy. You remember Jeremy? He's a cool guy. So the whole idea, Jerry to you, this was in 1791. The whole idea was to build a prison where jailers could observe the prisoners without being observed themselves. So the prisoners would never know when they're being watched or not. So they would always assume that they were being watched or could not assume they weren't being, so they would be careful and nice. The Panopticon prison, Jeremy [00:50:30] Bentham.

Mike Elgan (00:50:31):
They also designed it. The idea was also for hospitals or any number of institutions where you have lots of people that you want to watch.

Leo Laporte (00:50:39):
It's better with prisons though. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Only on this we can Google. They actually build them. They built some, yeah, you can Google it. Panopticon. And

Mike Elgan (00:50:51):
There was a novel by Jenny Fagan called The Panopticon. See, I knew you'd know. Which I did not read.

Leo Laporte (00:50:57):
Yeah, I knew you'd know. [00:51:00] What's the good word, sir? What's the good Google word?

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:07):
I think Mike put, so why do you put one in about YouTube?

Leo Laporte (00:51:11):
I'm exhausted now. I'm just so tired. I just want to go back to bed. YouTube. I put this one in in our, this is the change log. Which one are you talking about? With YouTube.

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:28):
Oh, that one.

Leo Laporte (00:51:28):
The search

Mike Elgan (00:51:29):
Feature. I put two in one [00:51:30] is a feature where you hum music.

Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
But wait a minute.

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:36):
Didn't watch McCall it do

Leo Laporte (00:51:37):
That? Yeah. I thought watch McCall. It did that. Hey, watch McCall it Shazam. Call Shazam. That only works if you whistle into the mic

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:50):
And irritate the listeners.

Leo Laporte (00:51:52):
No whistling SoundHound and music matches

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:56):
In newsrooms. In newsrooms. It was [00:52:00] a major superstition that you could not whistle. You did not whistle. It was like whistling in the graveyard. Really? And editors would throw things at you if you started whistling in the newsroom.

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
Wow. I feel like that's like a sailor's superstition too. Like don't whistle. It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:15):
That kind of thing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:17):
And nowhere middle allowed loud. YouTube announced a new experiment on Android devices. Should I try it on MYP pixel that determines the song via humming [00:52:30] apple's. Shazam does this as noted on YouTube's support page. Video sharing platform is testing by a search by song capability on the Android version of the app that it allows users to figure out a song on YouTube. Is it YouTube or YouTube Music? It says YouTube. It just says YouTube in the story. Okay, lemme try it. Here's YouTube users who, oh, you have to access the experiment and then toggle from YouTube voice search to the new song search [00:53:00] feature. Huh? Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:02):
You're going to end up on terminal. I know it.

Leo Laporte (00:53:03):
Yeah. Here it comes. Let's go to the terminal. Yeah. Anyway, so you can turn it on. But you have to, it's an experiment. So I don't know. I don't know where I,

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:18):
Well, there's another story story.

Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
Google to go for Google. I'm sorry, I got distracted. There seems to be a lot of bikini rich content in my Googles

Ant Pruitt (00:53:26):
Only yours. Leo, I agree with Scooter. Yours. It seems like this is something that they've [00:53:30] been working on for a while, and we talked about it previously, but now I guess it's ready.

Leo Laporte (00:53:36):
Google says it's ai. Oh, I see. Of course, it ai, the search by song capability is only available to a small portion of Android users, so don't count on it. It's another one of those experiments.

Ant Pruitt (00:53:48):
Mr. Scooter has found a link, sir, in our IRC blog.google dot product search hum to search.

Leo Laporte (00:53:56):
Yeah, but does that mean I can turn on or

Ant Pruitt (00:53:58):
That's from 2020.

Leo Laporte (00:54:00):
[00:54:00] Oh, that I that, yeah. From 2020

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:04):
Old news.

Leo Laporte (00:54:06):
But it is new news because

Ant Pruitt (00:54:08):
It's because it's now quote ready, right? That's it.

Leo Laporte (00:54:13):
This is Google in a nutshell. Well, we forgot we did that two years ago.

Ant Pruitt (00:54:20):
I'm glad Mr. Elgan is here because he can go ahead and go on his rant about leadership and Mr. Phai. So whenever you're ready,

Leo Laporte (00:54:27):
It's all Sundar's fault.

Mike Elgan (00:54:29):
Just replay the [00:54:30] old one.

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:31):
Well, that does lead to the other Google story, which is a roundup of all the executive changes there, which when you look at it's a

Leo Laporte (00:54:38):
Lot. Oh boy. Well, we know that Ruth Poot stepped up or sideways up, I guess Susan Waki left. S Hoel employee number eight. Left Waki, one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley in February announced she was stepping back after nine years. This is from C N B C after [00:55:00] 25 years at Google. In fact, she met Larry and Serge when she lent her garage to them to use their first office. She's going to start a new chapter, I imagine a chapter

Ant Pruitt (00:55:15):
On one of her

Leo Laporte (00:55:16):
Boats that it's made out of a thousand dollars bills

Mike Elgan (00:55:19):
Going to go back to renting the garage.

Leo Laporte (00:55:20):
Yes. Yeah. That was a good business there. Rupert, Robert Kinsel, you remember left quite a while ago. He was their chief business officer [00:55:30] became c e o of Warner Music Group. Why anybody want to run a music label is beyond me.

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:37):
Well, they're a better shape than it used

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
To be, I guess. So, yeah. This is to reach

Mike Elgan (00:55:42):
Your,

Leo Laporte (00:55:44):
I think this is pretty normal. Normal. You can do the same thing about Apple, certainly about Microsoft, especially once companies, I'm hoping,

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:51):
Give Mike some

Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
Hope here. Once the stock gets to a certain point, people start to look at their balance and say, okay,

Ant Pruitt (00:55:58):
I'm good.

Leo Laporte (00:55:59):
How many hundreds [00:56:00] of millions does a guy need? Really? Yeah.

Mike Elgan (00:56:04):
The biggest of these, I think, and it's not the latest, but Susan Waki was at Google for, I think she was c e o for nine or 10 years, something like that, which was a long time. She

Leo Laporte (00:56:14):
Did a good job at YouTube, I have to say. She did.

Ant Pruitt (00:56:16):
You

Leo Laporte (00:56:16):
Can really credit her boy with a good job. A job well done.

Mike Elgan (00:56:20):
And by the way, just as a trivia point,

Leo Laporte (00:56:22):
Her sister is the head of 23 and me.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:26):
Yes. Founder. I dunno

Leo Laporte (00:56:27):
If you guys know that. I did know that. Yes. [00:56:30] Their mother is a major influencer for

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:32):
Raising

Leo Laporte (00:56:33):
Successful children.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:36):
Well, I know her well. She's a's the journalism teacher at Palo Alto High.

Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
Yes. Yes. Oh, Ann and Susan's mom. What's her name? Do you remember Esther. Esther, that's right. Esther. She's the teacher. Mrs. Jarvis teaches journalism.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:50):
Yes. High school.

Leo Laporte (00:56:52):
She should teach what to do with your garage, how to make money renting your garage.

Ant Pruitt (00:57:00):
[00:57:00] Tex used to cite me.

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:07):
And

Ant Pruitt (00:57:08):
You got on britches. You got

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
On. Those aren't my britches. I don't own any britches that look like that. He's got somebody else's

Ant Pruitt (00:57:15):
Britches denim

Leo Laporte (00:57:15):
On another sticker, another stick people

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:18):
In the club. You'd know what we're talking about.

Leo Laporte (00:57:20):
Yeah. Yeah. You got to be in the club to see the stickers. Jeff, you've posted a few unpopular opinions about ai.

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:30):
[00:57:30] Yeah, nobody cared. Nobody paid attention. But I thought I'd try to get it here. So I wanted to mention it because it was inspired by my conversation last week with Jason on his upcoming AI show. So as we were talking through a bunch of stuff before, Jason did a great demo of something. I come to wonder whether or not chat, G b T and Company will give all of AI cooties. Now, anything that generative AI does and does stupidly or is misused [00:58:00] or lies or hallucinates in the misnomer of the world is associated with ai. I think it's going to come to the point where people just aren't going to trust ai. Well, it messes up. It's

Leo Laporte (00:58:11):
More crappy ai.

Ant Pruitt (00:58:13):
I think you get in a little bit of that, A lot of that right now, in my opinion.

Leo Laporte (00:58:18):
We were talking about this yesterday at the editorial meeting, and was it you bonito or somebody? Maybe Victor said, yeah, I immediately sensed that this is AI written and I just skimmed right off. Skip right over. You've [00:58:30] developed a radar for ai. What we were debating though was kind of interesting, and I actually have to have amend my thoughts. So what I was saying is we were looking at a way, because our show notes are all over the place. Some shows are very good, some they're not. It depends on the hosts, and I don't do anything. So it's not my, it's not me. No

Ant Pruitt (00:58:49):
Comment.

Leo Laporte (00:58:50):
So I just talk. I don't write. So we were looking at AI taking the transcripts of the show and generating useful show notes, and [00:59:00] we had a sample and I said, I could tell it's written by a machine. It has no point of view, it has no voice. It's just kind of generic. And I said, I think people are going to quickly start to recognize that kind of writing and tune it out, which is good for us. To the extent that we do stuff that humans create, we're going to stand out. And I think it's because AI doesn't just whistle out of nowhere based on humming. We do that. Well, I was wrong. So really it was an issue of prompt engineering. [00:59:30] Anthony Nielsen, our AI wizard here, just basically added one line to the show notes, try to include the hosts and guests positions on the topic and the show notes.

(00:59:42):
Suddenly, I don't even know how this happened. They suddenly got emojis and they got. This is from yesterday's Mac Break Weekly, and I thought this is better than anything we could write on this week's info pack, Mac Break weekly. Because really the whole point of show notes, there's twofold. One is to get people to listen [01:00:00] to the show. The other is when they've listened to the show and they want to find something to be able to find something. So that's what the show notes are about. Our show notes are going to be written this way too, by the way, this is awesome. On this week's info fact back break weekly, Leo and the guest dive into the latest Apple News and rumors, including whether you should disinfect your bacteria ridden Apple Watch iOS 16 I macOS updates speculation around Apple acquiring Disney, the evolution of corporate hype presentations and much more. So here's the bullet points. So at first it just said, should you wash your Apple [01:00:30] Watch band? Then now the new one has an emoji of a bacterium and says, should you sanitize your bacteria ridden Apple? Watch the host say yes to good hygiene, but question this news. Isn't that good? That's good.

Mike Elgan (01:00:46):
What would improve that further is that I love the prompt, one of the best prompts, people who are doing this sort of thing can you use is say to specify that you want it in plain language because chat G B T tries to be creative and it's weird bacteria ridden [01:01:00] Apple. Watch the word ridden. Is it weird? That feels like a chat G B T kind of word. It's not a great word there. Here's the prompt. It's just here's in your

Leo Laporte (01:01:08):
Tracks. I think Anthony's gotten really become the prompt. Yeah, he's expert at it now. He says this is the prompt we gave, and by the way, it's not chat G b T, it's something called Claude, right? Claude. I dunno who

Mike Elgan (01:01:19):
Claude is. Claude is better than chat. G B T, this sort of thing for sure.

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
Oh, you know Claude,

Mike Elgan (01:01:23):
Claude ai. Claude is the new version is really good.

Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
Oh, the company. Is it philanthropic?

Mike Elgan (01:01:30):
[01:01:30] Yeah, I throw up, yes.

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
Here's the prompt. You are a producer for a tech-focused podcast network writing, detailed, engaging, and he added click worthy notes for this episode of Mac Break Weekly hosted by, and he gave the hosts names, which helped because then it was able to say the names using the attached AI generate to transcript. Write the show notes in the following format, a short paragraph summarizing the episode's most important topics, followed by a bullet pointed list of every topic discussed in chronological order. Try to include the hosts and guest positions [01:02:00] on the topics. That was the prompt. So it tells the ai, pretend you are and do it in that voice. And I think it actually

Mike Elgan (01:02:09):
Did.

Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
Did okay. So it did get one thing wrong. We talked about the Vision Pro headset and I think because the training data from Atropic was before the Vision Pro was announced because it said developer leaks, top secret M two MacBook Pro details. It was not, it was a vision pro. But did this major [01:02:30] N D A break really reveal anything? Juicy? Leo LaPorte is skeptical by the way. I was. It was. And the other thing Anthony was puzzled by, he said, I don't know how it knew that was you. We did not annotate it. It just says Speaker one, speaker two. Speaker speaker four. So it inferred, oh boy. Somehow inferred. I mean obviously that information was in there somewhere. Here's how

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:58):
Somebody addressed you

Leo Laporte (01:02:58):
As Leo. Here's how it wrote [01:03:00] the discussion about Disney and Apple. Apple acquires the mouse house. The prospects of buying Disney debated with Jason Snell laying out cases foreign against and Leo doubting apple's interest. That's good

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:17):
For your entire staff. Society is not having to write show notes.

Ant Pruitt (01:03:22):
No, it's not. No.

Leo Laporte (01:03:24):
The

Ant Pruitt (01:03:24):
Whole point of it is using these tools,

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Humans are going to still

Ant Pruitt (01:03:27):
To help us get a baseline [01:03:30] to start.

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:31):
It's drudgery, right? It drudgery to have to go through it. All

Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
These shows go on and on and on. No one should have to listen to them. Wait,

Ant Pruitt (01:03:38):
Hold up now. Hold, hold, hold. Hold up. Hold up. Sarah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:41):
You got to pay

Ant Pruitt (01:03:41):
A, we do need to have these downloads

Leo Laporte (01:03:44):
Everywhere.

Ant Pruitt (01:03:45):
Please. And thank you. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
You shouldn't have to pay attention if you are forced to listen to 'em. You shouldn't have to pay attention. Alex Lindsay plays with trippy ambisonic microphones for surround sound experiments, but can it enhance their show audio? Those are [01:04:00] good. That's good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:01):
Okay, so the real test is, can it make any sense of this show?

Leo Laporte (01:04:05):
Well, we'll find out. I think we're not going to roll, we're not going to do it all at once, but I think we're going to, at first I said I don't want to use these. These are too odine. They're just boring and bad and I completely was wrong. It was just a question of getting the right prompt, I guess. I

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:21):
Wonder if you also gave it the rundown knew where sources came from and

Leo Laporte (01:04:25):
Things like that. No, no, it's working.

Mike Elgan (01:04:27):
You don't mention some of the things in the rundown.

Ant Pruitt (01:04:29):
Yeah, [01:04:30] that's a whole other,

Leo Laporte (01:04:30):
Anthony, did we give it the rundown? I think it came totally from the transcript.

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:36):
Yeah. I'm saying you could also give it the rundown. Oh, you

Leo Laporte (01:04:37):
Could give it the rundown of things. Well, I don't want to want to confuse it. It's just a machine.

Mike Elgan (01:04:42):
But it has to be said that a year ago today, nobody was thinking or talking about any of this stuff, right? It is so early in

Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
The life of these tools. Mike, you haven't been around, but I have been extremely skeptical. I've been saying it's a parlor trick. It's [01:05:00] bss. We're going to tire of it just as we did a Bitcoin and VR and mixed reality and on and on and on. I

Ant Pruitt (01:05:06):
Couldn't say that. I

Leo Laporte (01:05:08):
Did not say

Ant Pruitt (01:05:08):
That after I saw what was happening with Photoshop and Lightroom and Premier Pro and everything, Adobe's sensei AI was. I was like, yeah, there's a place for AI in the creator space, whether it's a podcaster or whatever, content creator. Just use those tools to help get things started and get things cleaned up and the repeatable stuff done faster [01:05:30] so you can continue to create content. I mean, doing show notes, notes takes time.

Mike Elgan (01:05:36):
In fact, Leo, I am going to go out on a limb and say that one of my AP picks of the week is a tool that I think you are going to use every time you do a podcast from now on. Oh, challenge. That's my prediction and I think you're going to really get a lot of value out of it, but we'll get there. I look forward to it. The mix of the

Leo Laporte (01:05:54):
Weak part. Nice tease. See a machine, such

Ant Pruitt (01:05:57):
A daggone pro, he's

Leo Laporte (01:05:58):
Such a machine. Wouldn't do that. No, [01:06:00] wouldn't do that. So a few unpopular opinions, bad ai. Jeff, summarize for

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:08):
Us' not going to remember them. Jesus.

Leo Laporte (01:06:10):
Okay, below he says, well, I got it in front of me. I will share. He says, my unlikely unpopular opinions. He says about large language models, he says how they should not be used searcher news, how building effective guardrails is improbable. And here's how we know that Jeff wrote it. How we already have enough [01:06:30] content in the world. I hope

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:37):
So. I say that it shouldn't be associated with search, it shouldn't be used to write news articles. I think writing show notes is something very different. And the last thing the world needs is more content. We already have enough damn content. We have to tell the machine to S T F U.

Leo Laporte (01:06:53):
Well in this case, this is exact opposite. This is taking, this is

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:57):
The opposite. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:06:58):
An existing corpus [01:07:00] and synopsizing it, which is very useful,

Mike Elgan (01:07:02):
Right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:04):
And we talked about that. That's the notebook lmm that you were talking about, Jeff, that was doing Yeah, exactly.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:08):
That augmentative help is wonderful. I think there's a huge potential there, which I say in this piece.

Mike Elgan (01:07:14):
So actually Jeff, I'm going to push back on two of the things you said. I think that there are tools that are better than search that are based on generative ai, one of which is find.com. I think I've recommended it on the show before. P H I [01:07:30] N d.com, which is so good for search. It gives you both the search results and the generative AI result, and it tends to be pretty good. It's for developers that it works for us non-developer types. And the other thing about writing is that I was coming to believe that writing P H I N d.com, I'm coming to believe that AI can improve not only your writing but your ability to write yours, the young people. But I actually have another pick of the week that is right down, and [01:08:00] it's from Google too. So that's stay tuned.

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
Don't give it away. Summary. Respond to you got to give the results of this thing.

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:07):
I think that a augmentative things, absolutely B things that are my problem is if you take binging or take Google and you have that blank search box and people expect back something authoritative, either a list of sites, the one true answer Wikipedia, and we know that generative AI at large language model, large language models on the whole ether [01:08:30] of human speech, they don't hallucinate, they don't lie. They have no sense of fact. They have no understanding of anything and we know that. So to associate them with an automated response to the public, I think is irresponsible. On the content side, I talked to an editor at one company, I won't name. Well, we got to use this stuff in war to get more reviews out there. So we're going to use this stuff to make more meaningless reviews out there. And there's so much of that. [01:09:00] I absolutely agree with you about, I've written a piece about this, about how I think these can extend literacy, they can help people write. But also talking with Jason on the AI show, which I've now managed to plug three times, which is the whole point of writing this piece by the way, brilliant, thank you.

(01:09:17):
Is that I wonder that if LLMs had been released as fiction machines, they said, wow, look at this parlor trick, Leo. It can write a short story, it can write a song, it can write a poem, it [01:09:30] can do all of that. I don't think there'd been the fuss about the fear of it, but also there wouldn't have been a business because creativity doesn't pay. So they had to associate it with tasks that it can't do well. And I think that's capitalism. Boys and girls, Mr.

Ant Pruitt (01:09:46):
Jarvis. Let me push back though, just an example of you said the editor was like, we're up against it. We got to get more of these reviews out. What about said photographer that's [01:10:00] doing team photos for the local NFL team? Heck, they are the NFL's photographer of choice. They have to go and snap these images of the players, rip the players off that background, stick them onto some other background, all within a matter of a couple hours, and then jump on the plane and go to the next town and do it all over again. And the N F L is giving them a deadline of fright right now. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:21):
Augmentative. That's fine. You're using it. You still took the real picture of the person and you're using it to help you do the task. Like show notes. I'm all for that.

Ant Pruitt (01:10:30):
[01:10:30] Okay. Alright, cool.

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:31):
All for that. I think to make it out of whole cloth illustrations, I'll push back on you now. Who needs a photographer? When everything on the internet, every blog post, everything now has to have an illustration, which was never true in newspapers. Right? Very few of the stories,

Ant Pruitt (01:10:48):
But now you need to thumb,

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:49):
So now everything has to have something. So screw it. Use the machine to make illustrations then Who needs a photographer to go out and shoot stuff a lot cheaper?

Mike Elgan (01:10:58):
Check this out. It's true. So I do [01:11:00] massive research on AI technology and something, it feels like 20 30% of the articles are churned out by AI by this site called Fagan. Have you heard about this?

Leo Laporte (01:11:14):
No sir.

Mike Elgan (01:11:15):
So Fagan Wani technologies, F A G E N W A Ss a n n i.com. All of their art is created with generative AI and all of their articles. And they don't, as far as [01:11:30] I know, they don't say that it is. They don't admit that I've contacted them. They're ghosting me. They don't get back to me. I think they're basically

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:40):
Because you're trying to talk to a machine and it would appear

Mike Elgan (01:11:42):
By Oh, exactly. But they churn out huge numbers of articles and they're terrible article. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:49):
They're awful.

Mike Elgan (01:11:50):
And

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:51):
We thought that the people who copied about.com and made content farmers were bad. Now it's going to overload the world with popcorn peanuts. And [01:12:00] so it's going to fully commodify content, which again goes to the point of why shows like twins are more important, that it comes from fallible human beings

Mike Elgan (01:12:13):
Like us. But it makes us appreciate that's, it makes me appreciate well-written articles more even than I used to, although

Leo Laporte (01:12:20):
Which be to concentrate on quality, you are going to flood the zone with non quality mediocrity. So that might have a bad [01:12:30] effect. Although that's kind of what the

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:34):
Internet's so

Mike Elgan (01:12:35):
Far, Google can't tell the difference. So I have a lot of Google alerts and things like that and it's just flooding me with this, whatever it is, Fagan wani stuff. And Google just sends it to me

Leo Laporte (01:12:47):
Like it's real legit to

Mike Elgan (01:12:48):
The Atlantic. I would

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:49):
Love to hear from Matt cuts on this. I would love to hear how you, because he stayed ahead of all the spam monsters all [01:13:00] those years.

Leo Laporte (01:13:00):
Forever. Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:02):
How would you,

Leo Laporte (01:13:03):
Has he retired? No, no. With the governor. He's still there. Yeah. Okay. Or no? Actually no. I was thinking of, no, no. I don't know what he's doing. You think Danny

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:10):
Sullivan?

Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
I was thinking of Danny Sullivan. I think Matt is Danny too enjoying life. Danny's still working from Scott. Google. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:17):
Let's go ruin his day and have him on the show.

Leo Laporte (01:13:20):
Okay, Jason, make it so, and the AI Jason will now take over. Boy, if we could get an AI [01:13:30] booker now, now we're talking. I'd have some very happy, does that look like me? I don't think that looks like me. Does that look like me? Those, my slaps a little bit too big to be yours. So I took my face, I took my face, added that. I don't know why I keep saying I'm a man. I don't know why I keeps doing that. It

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:53):
Knows the real you, Leo. It

Leo Laporte (01:13:55):
Does. It knows your feminine. This somebody put this link in for those

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:58):
Of you, I put that up there from Benedict [01:14:00] Evans. He had it up there with

Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
Human, he's called the human generator generated photos.

Mike Elgan (01:14:06):
So

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:07):
For those of you who are listening, Leo asked it to make something and it turned him into

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
Wonder Woman. Linda Carter. Yes. Yeah. Wonder Woman with my face. So that's not, it is

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:16):
Kind of his face though. It is kind of like it's the fifth illegitimate cousin that he

Leo Laporte (01:14:22):
Had. Yeah. Well let's put it this way, it Dustin Hoffman said in Tootsie, he said, the only art thing about being a [01:14:30] woman was how ugly I was. It doesn't seem to want to make me be me. So interesting. Maybe it's, I'm a, see I keep clicking mail and it keeps, what models is this based off? Oh, it's a full capacity. What I

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:51):
Saw originally,

Leo Laporte (01:14:52):
We just broke

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:52):
It. We didn't make wacky things like this. Nice. That's the twit. It made real models kind of people You could believe

Leo Laporte (01:14:59):
They're very believable.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:59):
Leo made [01:15:00] it unbelievable.

Leo Laporte (01:15:01):
I dunno. I believe it. I'd like to meet her.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:06):
That's incest. I

Leo Laporte (01:15:07):
Think. I don't dunno what it is. It's like, yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:10):
You're doing yourself.

Leo Laporte (01:15:12):
As Woody Allen said, what's wrong with masturbation? It's sex with somebody I love. I'm full

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:19):
Of Leo's greatest

Leo Laporte (01:15:20):
Hits. I'm full of them. Aren't IRI shots. There was

Mike Elgan (01:15:24):
A comedian who had a tour called I'm the One that I Want.

Leo Laporte (01:15:27):
I'm the one that I want. Same thing

Mike Elgan (01:15:29):
By the way, [01:15:30] just circling back to Matt Cutz. Matt Cutz was at the, he still is at the US Digital

Leo Laporte (01:15:34):
Services. No, he retired. He retired. He retired and he's now on the beach as far as I can tell. He handed that over Canada about a year ago. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much of his personal life is public, so I won't say, but there was a death in the family and I think that he perhaps has just taken some time.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:55):
He's since found

Leo Laporte (01:15:57):
Love happiness. Oh good. I'm glad to hear [01:16:00] it. Which

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:00):
Makes me very happy. Just the nice

Leo Laporte (01:16:01):
Love math. We love Matt. He's brilliant. And yeah, he did a good job during Covid at the United States Digital Services. Really good job there. Let's see, we were talking about ai. This was the AI segment in case you didn't know what else New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI. So a judge ruled, supported the US Patent and Trademark Office that AI [01:16:30] could not copyright its creations.

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:33):
So that was a limited case in which whoever brought it made it specific that no human was involved. It was strictly from the machine, I think, to test the

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
Idea and the patent tree mock office. And the judge upheld that a machine's not a human. So absent human involvement, no, you can't copyright it. Only a human can apply for a copyright. I guess that's Well, but

Mike Elgan (01:16:57):
This is problematic. This is obviously so problematic. I mean [01:17:00] obviously human is involved and so

Leo Laporte (01:17:06):
Well, you could copyright the prompt, probably copyright the product. Well,

Mike Elgan (01:17:11):
The software supposedly, and historically you can only copyright the expression, not the information. So this is problematic with the New York Times story you mentioned, and also with this idea that something has been generated without human involvement. If somebody just refers to an AI tool while they're writing, if they [01:17:30] have it, generate some content and then they don't use that. Did they use the ai? Yes, they did. They used it as a tool. And so it's very, very complicated. And what the New York Times is suing over is the extraction of New York Times content to train their models. And they're saying, well, that you're stealing. But if the output doesn't expressly phrase things the way, if it doesn't actually plagiarize, that's

Leo Laporte (01:17:56):
Fair. Use the words, it's

Mike Elgan (01:17:58):
Then how is [01:18:00] that copyright?

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:00):
That's another of my unpopular opinions.

Leo Laporte (01:18:02):
No, I don't think it's unpopular. I think legal experts widely agree. This is transformative use.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:09):
Well, the question is whether or not was it acquired legally? Did they subscribe to the New York Times? Did they pay pass the paywall? Right? But in that case, it's not so much theft. It's theft of on the paywall side, not on the AI side.

Mike Elgan (01:18:22):
Well, there's a related scandal where they're harvesting books and of course Sara Soloman and other people are suing because it's [01:18:30] harvesting books. And it turns out that they're not even buying the books. They're

Leo Laporte (01:18:33):
Pirate.

Mike Elgan (01:18:33):
They're training their models on, well, there's a

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:36):
Big model out there. Books. Book three.

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
Yeah, book three. We actually talked a little bit about this. We've had a very good twit on Sunday with Cory Drow and Rebecca Giblin, she's a professor of law.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:44):
Did you get in three words?

Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
I didn't need to. I was happy.

Jeff Jarvis (01:18:48):
That was the whole idea.

Leo Laporte (01:18:49):
A happy disciple sitting at their feet. Rebecca's a professor of law at the University of Melbourne, and of course Corey not only is brilliant, but he's also an author himself, science fiction and [01:19:00] nonfiction. And we talked about this, think I can't remember. I think they basically agreed with what we've just said

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:15):
Because Corey's going to knock down copyright whenever

Leo Laporte (01:19:17):
Corey puts all of his books online for free and legally downloadable. So presumably all of his content has been ingested by Books three, and he didn't seem to mind that. [01:19:30] He was more concerned. What was he concerned about? I'd forgotten. Now anyway, you

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:35):
Don't have the show notes. If I'd

Leo Laporte (01:19:36):
Only listen from the AI show, I would know. See, this is a problem so damn long. I

Mike Elgan (01:19:42):
Mean, he's very much into corporate exploitation of, that's his employees and authors and stuff like that. I

Leo Laporte (01:19:51):
Think that's his,

Mike Elgan (01:19:53):
Yeah. He wants to make sure that everybody who did creative work is compensated for their work and [01:20:00] that it's not just taken, stolen on you by these companies.

Leo Laporte (01:20:03):
He's reading the chat G P T summary of Choke Point Capitalism, Corey and Rebecca's book. And that's exactly right. I think that was his final conclusion is that's not the issue. The issue is the gatekeeper themselves and how they extract value from creative work and he doesn't like. So yes, exactly right. He says, copyright doesn't solve this.

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:23):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:20:24):
Copyright solves nothing. JARAs has said that copyright [01:20:30] has been appropriated by these big companies as a way of protecting their rights. The music industry's rights, the film industry's rights, not creators rights. It's their choke point. And so yes, he's not, not a fan. So anyway, we'll see if a federal judge finds that the open AI folks see these are weasel words illegally. Copy the Times, articles to train the model. What does that mean? How would it be illegal? The court could order the company to destroy chat GT's dataset, forcing [01:21:00] them to recreate it using only work that's authorized to use. And this was what Corey would say is, well, this is just the owners of the choke points fighting over who gets to use the output of creatives.

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:14):
Well, and if at some point we say the machine may not read, my fear is it sets a precedent that the humans may not read that we'll

Leo Laporte (01:21:21):
Be told we do the same thing. What

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:22):
We're not allowed to know, if somebody cuts out a newspaper article and gives it to us, we didn't pay for it, but my friend gave it to us in [01:21:30] first sale doctrine. Oh, no, no, no, no. You printed it out. You distributed it.

Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
Everything we talk about in this show comes from somebody else's article. I try to give him credit and can be scraped. Bobby Allen wrote this piece for NPR R, so I give him credit. But yeah, if we were not allowed to reuse this content as fodder for the show, well we probably wouldn't have. What would we say we humans do

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:56):
Then the rest of the, we

Leo Laporte (01:21:57):
Have to do, I'd have to say, Jeff, did you read that [01:22:00] article N P R about the New York Times? No. You could say Yes, I read it. That was a yes or no question, sir. I can't say. Could you summarize? I could say, what do you think? And you could say, I think it's a bad idea. And I can say, I think it's a good idea. What idea. What idea. We

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:17):
Can't say the idea. One can't say. We

Leo Laporte (01:22:19):
Can't say the idea. We can only, it's not a good, well,

Mike Elgan (01:22:24):
I was heavily persuaded by Jerome Lanier's view in the New Yorker that, and we talked about this on the show I think [01:22:30] last time I was on, which is that generative AI and it's harvesting, this is a way to automate the collaboration of many, many, many humans. And as such, it's like, it's sort of the equivalent of the conventional wisdom, but at scale in a very high detail. And it's also true that everybody gets a different result. So I dunno. What I worry about is if [01:23:00] thoughtful intelligent organizations are more likely than dumb unintelligent organizations to use whatever means they have to prevent their content from being hoovered up into the generative AI training models. So that just means to the extent that that's true, the content is junk, right? If the really high quality content, the Atlantic and other [01:23:30] high quality publications are not allowing their information to be brought in, but these AI generated garbage or whatever is brought in, then we're just going to have bad information in those generative AI models.

Leo Laporte (01:23:44):
What happens is we, how would the Atlantic block their stuff from

Mike Elgan (01:23:49):
Well open AI just recently came out with a system that is blocked like anything else,

Leo Laporte (01:23:55):
Text

Mike Elgan (01:23:56):
And New York, the New York Times is now using that. And [01:24:00] so the organizations that care will use that sort of thing and the ones that don't care won't use those things. And so it just biases all the information we have toward the less quality information. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:24:13):
Well remember that in order to make sure a human is using a website, sites put up caps to see if you're a robot or a human who turns out AI bots are so good that they're 15% better at identifying captures [01:24:30] than humans.

Mike Elgan (01:24:31):
Just to rephrase that, the non-humans are better at proving that they're humans than humans. Human job

Leo Laporte (01:24:39):
Well said, Mike. Well said.

Mike Elgan (01:24:42):
We are not human.

Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
We are

Mike Elgan (01:24:45):
Subhuman. And this was predicted by Google,

Leo Laporte (01:24:47):
A study conducted by a group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, E T h Zurich and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, one from Microsoft, showed that AI bots are now better than humans at decoding caps. [01:25:00] They even create an impression of humans being more robots than the bots. So the researchers recruited 1400 participants to test websites that use those evil caps. I mean, that's about 120 of the world's 200 most popular websites. The bot accuracy ranges from 85 to a hundred percent with a majority above 96%. These captures are so bad, and you know this, we know this, that humans only do about 50 to 85% accuracy. [01:25:30] We fail at these all the time, but well, because the traffic light is hidden, you only got this half right, so you must be human. And furthermore, the bot solving time significantly lower. Of course, they're faster. Humans take an average of 18 seconds to solve these. Huh? What? I'm supposed to click where you spend 15 seconds cursing about having to do it. Oh, hate these wealth. Just let 'em in. Just let 'em in. They're still sitting here. Send this [01:26:00] study to everybody who uses captions because it ain't working. Who owns Capcha?

Mike Elgan (01:26:06):
Google. Google. Well, why don't they fold?

Leo Laporte (01:26:09):
That Capcha was owned by somebody else. Then there was a team at Carnegie Mellon. I think Capcha was Carnegie Mellon, and originally they did it as they also did Duolingo. Their whole idea was to use human effort on stuff like this to build these smart engines. Duolingo, or I don't [01:26:30] know what they're doing with capture. Google replaced capture with recapture. But in fact, even predicted when they did this that it wouldn't be long before machines would be better at it. That was 2019. It only took four years.

Mike Elgan (01:26:45):
The other thing, I have two other beefs with recapture, one of which is that they essentially punish people who use VPNs. Everybody should be using A V P N. Everybody should encourage that. Google in fact, builds a VPN technology into their phones. They claim [01:27:00] caveat to say that they want everybody to use a v pn, but how does punish, they punish you.

Ant Pruitt (01:27:05):
You use your V P N and start to do a search and your phone just crawls, but you switched to Googles, your search will just

Mike Elgan (01:27:14):
Zip on through. I mean, I use Express v pn, which is great sponsor. Google punishes me and says, okay, you have to do this capture. There's something weird about your activity. So I do the crosswalks and then it gives [01:27:30] me the lights, and then it gives me the buses, and then it gives me the, I have to do, sometimes I have to do four or five captures. That's so annoying. The other thing is I disagree with them about, they'll say, oh, pick all the motorcycles. And then they have these little Vespa scooters. That's not a motorcycle, but bikes

Ant Pruitt (01:27:44):
There are. It's a motorcycle somewhere.

Mike Elgan (01:27:47):
They dunno what the word motorcycle means. That's not my problem anyway, moped. It's frustrating. It's time. It's time for, I want video of Mike Tween captures

Leo Laporte (01:27:57):
Swearing,

Mike Elgan (01:27:58):
Squaring riveting.

Leo Laporte (01:28:00):
[01:28:00] Yeah. Yeah. Google actually acquired recapture.

Mike Elgan (01:28:10):
I thought so.

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
Yeah, they did not invent it. They acquired it in 2009

Mike Elgan (01:28:14):
And they use it to train their visual ai like street view. Yeah. It's

Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Not a surprise. AI's good at it. It's been trained on captions.

Mike Elgan (01:28:25):
So this is an example. The most offensive thing is that this is an example of [01:28:30] them just they're getting us to do labor for them for free. Right. So annoying. I dunno why we put up with it.

Leo Laporte (01:28:38):
I agree. It's never really been a good, I think that's the main purpose, because it's never really been a good way to prove that you're human. No, not at all. Okay, so now what else can we be cranky about? How about creating real estate fly-throughs with ai?

Mike Elgan (01:28:57):
So I just put this up there just because I thought it

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:00):
[01:29:00] Uses AI to smooth it out. That's not a big deal, but I would love to see it fly through for the studio and offices. Oh,

Mike Elgan (01:29:06):
It looks beautiful. I mean, look at this. It looks so good.

Leo Laporte (01:29:10):
So they generated it with your phone as you can see

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:13):
The guy in the mirror there. So yeah, you're using a phone, but it's just the app

Leo Laporte (01:29:15):
It out and it's it takes, takes it. All right. That's on the app store. I'll make one. I'll do it for you. Just for you.

Ant Pruitt (01:29:22):
I already have one out there.

Leo Laporte (01:29:24):
Luma ai.

Ant Pruitt (01:29:26):
Let me see. I'll pull up. I got one on YouTube that I shot

Leo Laporte (01:29:30):
[01:29:30] Years or so ago. But you

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:32):
Did it. Don't you get the theme of the show? We're replacing you.

Ant Pruitt (01:29:35):
Look here, dude. Not happening. I'm here. See,

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:37):
You're not going to do show notes. You're not going to take photos anymore. We're going to have an illustrator

Ant Pruitt (01:29:45):
And I want to say I did it 360. Yeah, I did do a 360 1 3 years ago

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:51):
When 360 was hot.

Leo Laporte (01:29:53):
What camera did you use for that?

Ant Pruitt (01:29:56):
Was it the Insta or the Vs one

Leo Laporte (01:29:58):
Of, oh, you used one of the 360 cams.

Ant Pruitt (01:29:59):
Yeah. Yeah. [01:30:00] So I'm going to put it in our Discord and I R C. So here it is in Discord, and then here it is in I R C and it looked okay.

Leo Laporte (01:30:09):
I like the smoothing. I guess that's the main thing that Luma does. This kind makes it feel like you're swooping and that's key. I'm getting it right now.

Ant Pruitt (01:30:17):
And what Insta 360 is doing with their software, pretty much just the same thing that this is touting

Mike Elgan (01:30:23):
And if you

Ant Pruitt (01:30:24):
Have a good editor like Mr. Nielsen, because he understands the

Mike Elgan (01:30:27):
Application is right on because they're trying to replace in-house [01:30:30] visits for real estate. This is marketing, right? And they want it to not just give people a technical understanding of what the house looks like inside, but make them feel like they're walking around and it's the feeling part of it that this is really helping with and I think it's just a very powerful technology and real estate people when it comes to the marketing of homes, they jump on this stuff. They were really early on drone video and stuff like that. So they're going to be all Henry

Leo Laporte (01:30:58):
This used of technology to [01:31:00] do that before he got into Salt. Hank cooking food. He does a drone pilot for real estate. I remember that. And he would do all those videos, right? Yeah. This looks like you've got a drone, one of those. It looks

Ant Pruitt (01:31:12):
Like an M P

Leo Laporte (01:31:13):
V. That's what I was trying to remember. I wonder

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:14):
What the raw material going into it look like, but I don't know. Yeah, I thought it was just fun. I'll do. It was also better.

Mike Elgan (01:31:20):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
I like it. It ain't free.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:22):
Oh, sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:31:24):
Well that's all right. I'm made of money. You know that.

Ant Pruitt (01:31:28):
How much is that?

Leo Laporte (01:31:30):
[01:31:30] Well, all the negative reviews are, oh boy, I didn't realize how much this is going to cost.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:34):
Oh, okay. Well nevermind. We'll see. Not that good.

Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
Well, if you're selling it to, you're selling a home, spending 50 bucks on a fly-through is worth it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:44):
$50

Ant Pruitt (01:31:45):
Percent. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:31:45):
I dont know. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. You do not have any fly-throughs yet, already have an Illumina account. Yes I do. What's my username? I don't know. Yeah. [01:32:00] Alright. Well I won't do this now, but you know what, before the next show I'll do a, you want a studio tour? I will do. Oh, create your first fly through. Okay.

Mike Elgan (01:32:09):
Just make sure you don't accidentally sell the studio. I

Leo Laporte (01:32:11):
Would like to sell it. You'd be fine to sell. I would be happy to sell

Ant Pruitt (01:32:16):
It. Wait a minute, don't

Leo Laporte (01:32:17):
Do my ideas. No need for gimbals. AI generated camera moves. Capture indoor spaces. Access. Yes. Allow you to record videos. Yes. Okay. Use [01:32:30] to tag with location metadata. Allow while using app. Yes. Yeah. This is just an Apple app. Make sure you have good lighting. Do we have good lighting?

Ant Pruitt (01:32:37):
Some days

Leo Laporte (01:32:40):
It says plan your route in advance. Open all doors. Clear moving objects. Oh, Lily, get out of the way. Where's the dog? Avoid fast motion. Find good vantage points. Focus by the time I do all this, turn your phone sideways. Okay. You might as well have hired an ant. Okay.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:00):
[01:33:00] Yeah, they got

Leo Laporte (01:33:00):
You. Porch landscape. Okay, ready?

Ant Pruitt (01:33:06):
Go ahead and run around.

Leo Laporte (01:33:07):
Okay, I'm going to run around. I'll be back and take the, gosh, open all doors

Ant Pruitt (01:33:13):
Opening. Remove all roadblock. Tell Lily to get out of the

Mike Elgan (01:33:17):
Way. Everybody finish up in the bathroom. He was coming.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:22):
Again, if you have instantly I want to see the

Leo Laporte (01:33:25):
Coffee machine.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:26):
You're going to be able to get these results already, but I get the fact [01:33:30] that they're saying, Hey, just use your phone instead of using it 360 camera. That is a good thing. Makes

Mike Elgan (01:33:35):
A lot of

Ant Pruitt (01:33:35):
Sense. But he never did say how much this thing costs. I don't have any problem. He's going to

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
Find out where gets back. He's going to curse me.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:43):
It's okay to pay for apps people, but if it's 40 bucks for something like this, I don't know if that's

Mike Elgan (01:33:51):
A real estate professional For sure. It's worth it. But I think they should also, hopefully they do allow you to upload video because that way you can stitch together [01:34:00] drone and phone video into one seamless video. That would be nice. You can do the whole outside and fly around and

Ant Pruitt (01:34:07):
Yeah, he's still singing y'all Here he comes back.

Mike Elgan (01:34:12):
Here he comes

Ant Pruitt (01:34:13):
Coming back. He's not whistling into the mic.

Mike Elgan (01:34:18):
I wonder what they're going to do with people. How they're going to munge people into fucking aliens. Did you

Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
Say anything while I was

Ant Pruitt (01:34:24):
Gone? No sir. I didn't say a word.

Mike Elgan (01:34:26):
Dead silence the whole minute.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:27):
This was radio silence without

Leo Laporte (01:34:28):
You we're mute.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:30):
[01:34:30] Worst podcast time ever.

Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
Okay, now generate fly through. Okay.

Mike Elgan (01:34:38):
Alright.

Leo Laporte (01:34:39):
Alright.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:40):
Yeah. We're still concerned about how much it's going to cost.

Leo Laporte (01:34:43):
Well, so far nothing. Just a little humiliation and you want to download

Ant Pruitt (01:34:49):
It. It's $40 too much. You think Mr. Elgin doesn't think it's too much for real estate if it's real

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
Estate? No, I think they could. I mean, how much are they going to make on that sale? Yeah, so that's the problem. If they're smart, they [01:35:00] won't charge you unless you're going to download the video. They'll let you see it be like, oh, I love that. That'd be good marketing. Oh, I'm sorry. It says Your fly-through is being processed with our generative neural networks. It'll take about 45 minutes, son of money. Oh geez. When generation is complete, you'll be able to download and share. I only shot for a minute. Wow. Wow. Are you shooting in eight K? Good grief. I got an idea. Let me do a 45 minute commercial and when we come back, woo. Sponsors, we'll have the video. [01:35:30] Just thinking it won't be 45 minutes. I promise. People pushing the real club members fast forward right now.

(01:35:38):
No, don't fast forward. You know what? I want to talk to you about your community. There's one thing we really understand in podcasting is it's all about the community. I used when I was in radio. I'd call it your audience or your listeners. No, no, it's not. It's a community and it's very important, whatever your business to build a community, a community of dedicated fans around [01:36:00] your business to provide them with support, to allow them to interact with you. And for that, we use the best forum software ever Discourse our show today brought to you by Discourse. Discourse is the online home for your community. It is already for ours, it has been for years at twit. Community Discourse has been around for 10 years. I first discovered it when he had John O Bacon who wrote the book on community on the triangulation episode, and he said, if you don't have a forum, I said, no.

(01:36:28):
He said, get Discourse. [01:36:30] Discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities by harnessing the power of discussion of real-time chat. Even AI discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime, anywhere. And I know because in the twit.community all the time, all the time, all the time I go in there every day, it's fantastic. If you would like to have a community around what you do, your business visit Discourse, D I S C O U sse.org/twi, [01:37:00] you can get one month free right now and all self-serve plans. It's trusted by some of the largest companies in the world effect more and more as now that I know discourse, when I go around and I sign up for stuff, I say, oh, they're using discourse too. Everybody uses it now because it's solid, it's secure.

(01:37:16):
It is very easy to administer. Oh look, there we are right there. That's neat. There's our Twit Discourse. Discourse is an open source solution. I love that. It powers more than 20,000 online communities and I use [01:37:30] the discourse hosting because they do such a good job of keeping it up to date secure. I always have the latest features without any effort on my part. If you're just starting out or you want to take your community to the next level, there is a plan for you. The basic plan is for a private invite only community, your bowling club, your P t A group. There's a standard plan. Fantasy football, fantasy football. It's great for that. Yes, there's a standard if you want a public presence and unlimited membership. And then I think we have the business [01:38:00] plan. This is for active customer support communities. It's not expensive though.

(01:38:03):
I have to say. Jonathan bva, who is a developer advocacy lead at Twitch, says, this is high praise and I agree with it. Discourse is the most amazing thing we've ever used. We've never experienced software so reliable ever. One of the biggest advantages to creating your own community, oh, there's Jonna Bacon right there with discourse is that you own your own data. You will always have access to all your conversation, history and [01:38:30] discourse will never sell your data to advertisers. It's yours. You own it. Discourse gives you everything you need in one place. Make discourse the online home for your community. And all I could say is having run this for a couple of years, it's me and Paul, a volunteer. We do it together and that's about it. And you come by, other hosts come by. It's the easiest to use. I set it up to approve all new members.

(01:38:55):
I want to make sure that they're part of the community. It's not spammers and stuff, and it's worked fantastically. [01:39:00] It's so easy. Every morning I just go. I check it out. I don't have to do much work. One person can minister a fairly large instance. Discourse gives you everything you need in one place. Make discourse the online home for your community. Don't confuse it with the other one. Discord. This is discourse like conversation d i s conversation, C O U R S E. Visit discourse.org/twi. You'll get one month free on any self-serve plan discourse.org/twit. I am a huge fan. I [01:39:30] love it. Of discourse.

Ant Pruitt (01:39:31):
Yeah, that's it. It's always fun to go in to twit community on a Monday morning or a Thursday morning,

Leo Laporte (01:39:41):
Monday

Ant Pruitt (01:39:43):
After morning, after Sunday's twit or on a Thursday. Thursday

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
Twig

Ant Pruitt (01:39:47):
After Twigg or Windows Weekly because people are fired up about something fired

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Up,

Ant Pruitt (01:39:54):
Fired

Leo Laporte (01:39:54):
Up such we post on YouTube and we used to have YouTube comments and no one can [01:40:00] manage that. No one can. It's no safe and easy way. It takes hours and hours of moderation. So I said, we're going to have the Discord. Every show will have an entry there. It does, as you can see, and people can go there and talk about the show and we can respond. And it's so much better than having any other kind of common engine, right? It just really works. Really,

Ant Pruitt (01:40:22):
Really. It's been really, really, really fun because again, people are quite passionate and [01:40:30] educated when it comes. It's good to the topics in there and it's really good discussions

Leo Laporte (01:40:34):
In there. Lots of themes you can customize. I have it personally set as a dark mode of course, but there's lots of other themes and there's so many features. This is really good. Look at this. I also get all these stats. Oh, I have the monthly business plan. Okay. That's what I have. They even give you, this is good advice on your current site setting so I can update some of my themes I guess [01:41:00] are ready for updates. I can look at my community health, the engagement, DAUs, maus, all of this is huge. Very valuable for building and maintaining community. Thank you. Discourse. Let's see. Pre-processing. Yeah, it's going to take 45 minutes, but by the

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:20):
End of the show. That's

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
Crazy. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. It's cool. I like that. So

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:25):
Leo, have you applied for your meta money?

Leo Laporte (01:41:28):
I should get meta money. [01:41:30] So I was a member until Friday's, the deadline. Okay. How do I do that?

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:34):
It's up there. It's on the rundown. Let's see here. Where was it? Mr. Jarvis? Can you explain

Leo Laporte (01:41:40):
Meta money?

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:41):
So there was the

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
Cambridge gentleman, you know what meta money is

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:47):
Led to a settlement and you have until Friday to apply. And if you were on meta at all between I think 2006 and 2022, it was just

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
A huge. Really? Really? Yeah. And I'm in there long

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:00):
[01:42:00] And all you have to do is say, yeah, I was on it and here was my username. Oh, I don't remember my username. Here's how you want

Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
Paid amp through it. Okay, here we go in Ray Facebook incorporated, consumer privacy, user profile litigation in case US District Court submit claim. August 25th, 1150 9:00 PM That's it. And then I just fill this out. Did I reside in the us? Yes. Was I a Facebook user? Yes. Are you filing [01:42:30] a claim for a current account? Deleted account? It's a deleted account and then you have to know the profile information. I think it was son of a, I don't remember username. Oh, it was probably Leo LaPorte, right? Oh, I have no idea what my start date.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:45):
That's how they got you. You think for leaving

Leo Laporte (01:42:49):
What? And then I have to give them, oh, I can have 'em Venmo me the money. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And how much money Jess's

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:55):
Did it? I don't know. I don't know. I'll find out.

Leo Laporte (01:42:57):
It's dependent on how many people ask for it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:59):
Two [01:43:00] and three quarters since,

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Right? Probably my experience, I once got a bag of pop chips as a son. Did you not? Oh, you won somewhere. The average give

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:12):
$35.

Leo Laporte (01:43:13):
$35 says beita the average. Oh, nice. I'll take it. That's a quarter take. I'll

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:19):
Buy drinks next time.

Leo Laporte (01:43:23):
Okay, good Drinks on Jeff. Well let us know how much you get, Jeff. I don't do do I have to know [01:43:30] my, they going to verify. It says approximate.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:34):
Oh, okay. Then

Leo Laporte (01:43:35):
Make something up. Yeah. How could I figure that out? I could probably,

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:40):
Dude, I got no idea your Instagram

Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
Out, but I'm not even on the same Insta account. I've been, go into Gmail, go into Gmail and search and go all the way to the beginning of when you started getting email from Facebook. From Facebook. Oh, you are so smart, right? So it'll be, you are so smart. I see a video seven or something like [01:44:00] that from

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:00):
2010. Leo LaPorte deletes his Facebook account

Leo Laporte (01:44:04):
On your YouTube. So thank you. So that's when I stopped

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:07):
The thumbnail with me screaming at you. Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:44:10):
Why are you doing that as

Ant Pruitt (01:44:11):
So far? You're quite helpful Mr. Jarvis.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:13):
And then there's another one. Leo LaPorte quits Facebook 2018.

Leo Laporte (01:44:19):
Oh Lord.

Ant Pruitt (01:44:20):
So you were on between 2010 and 2018 at some point.

Leo Laporte (01:44:24):
Really? 2018. But

Ant Pruitt (01:44:25):
Before that we're not so sure. [01:44:30] I don't remember. I can't remember my IDs because I didn't tie Instagram to Facebook. I purposely split it off. I was just testing.

Leo Laporte (01:44:40):
You're playing the show, aren't you? Of me quitting Facebook?

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:42):
Yeah. Episode 42 42. Episode 42, 2010. Neo deletes.

Leo Laporte (01:44:49):
I was probably really peeved at the time and you shouted at me like, don't do it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:56):
Well, the thumbnail has me

Leo Laporte (01:44:58):
48 episode 48 you [01:45:00] said? 42. 42. All right.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:02):
It's a five minute. Let put it in the chat.

Leo Laporte (01:45:05):
I can,

Ant Pruitt (01:45:05):
Somebody's got it in our discord. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:45:07):
Because

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:08):
It's the snippet

Leo Laporte (01:45:09):
Of it. Oh, but it was audio only, wasn't it? No.

Ant Pruitt (01:45:11):
Mr. Howell's got the video and Discord

Leo Laporte (01:45:13):
There. Oh, Mr. Howell. Mr. Howell's on top of it. Here he is. Leo LaPorte deletes his Facebook account. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:23):
Such a dorky thing. I

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):
Hate Who made this up? I love this. Who came up with that theme? I love that song. Permanently deleted a Facebook account [01:45:30] that talks about some important steps. Make sure you remove your Facebook Connect logins if you've been using that exclusively on sites like dig.com, you want to create an account

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:39):
Below resolution there

Leo Laporte (01:45:40):
That dig.com. You want to see, you want to see the studio

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:44):
Am back by God,

Leo Laporte (01:45:46):
Doc, doc. Like anything, Gina,

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:49):
We have such baby faces

Leo Laporte (01:45:51):
Accidentally log in because it'll say, oh, and then Jeff, you were in your office. Be

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:56):
Really interesting to see if he can talk. He's the new product manager and see what they're [01:46:00] thinking at Google, because this is their opportunity now. They've got an opening. They've been nowhere on social, nowhere on identity.

Leo Laporte (01:46:06):
Did Google plus Google

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:08):
Question

Leo Laporte (01:46:10):
This

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:11):
Fault? Mike said, now

Leo Laporte (01:46:12):
It's your fault. Mike's going to get all said, there would be no Google Plus without Jeff Jarvis urging them was by

Speaker 6 (01:46:16):
Saying, don't worry, we're just, that's Google's opportunity is to

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:20):
Have

Leo Laporte (01:46:20):
You. Oh, I don't think I actually deleted it. I just showed you There are already, oh, wait a minute. I did. There you go.

Speaker 6 (01:46:25):
Like we have to start sitting Shiva for you.

Leo Laporte (01:46:27):
So that's it. [01:46:30] I think you're right. What I will do is create a Leo LaPorte account. So there you

Speaker 6 (01:46:33):
Go. Feel we have to start sitting in Shiva.

Leo Laporte (01:46:35):
I think that your account now, because Remember, has been deactivated and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log in, your account will be reactivated. I must have logged in and reactivated. There

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:48):
You go. Look, we have to start sitting Shiva for you.

Leo Laporte (01:46:50):
So that's it. I no longer that's the right thing. Do I think you're right? What I'll do is create a Leo LaPorte account. So I guess I had another account, huh? [01:47:00] So Facebook, so you could file for two. Oh, maybe I get two pop chips. The Facebook user privacy settlement.com, Facebook user privacy settlement.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:15):
For those of you who are listening to the show next week, sorry, you're a little

Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
Late. Too late. That's why you got a midnight

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:19):
PT

Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
This Friday. Download immediately. Meanwhile, meta has this week, supposedly Threads [01:47:30] is going to get a web-based interface. That's really the big thing holding me back, right? Yeah,

Mike Elgan (01:47:36):
Me too. Me too.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:37):
I have the Android app running on my Chromebook. I could do that. Hey Chrome. It's a little flaky, but it generally works. But the engagement on Threads is just nowhere. Blue Sky is so much more

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
For me,

Mike Elgan (01:47:53):
The key,

Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
I'm curious. For me, that's the key for me. What do you use, Mike?

Mike Elgan (01:48:00):
[01:48:00] Well, to get at Threads, I use my iPad.

Leo Laporte (01:48:04):
No, no. What do you use? Do you use 'em all?

Mike Elgan (01:48:07):
Are you still using X? Yeah, Instagram, Facebook. I use CK Notes. Blue Sky, Mac it on T two, LinkedIn, Tumblr.

Leo Laporte (01:48:14):
Wow.

Mike Elgan (01:48:15):
Do you

Leo Laporte (01:48:15):
But see is a creator use a product you spend an hour each day posting to each of them? Mean,

Mike Elgan (01:48:22):
What I do is my routine is that while I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in the morning, I go through all of 'em and just check, see if anybody [01:48:30] replied or commented on something or whatever. Engagement. And by the time I'm done with my coffee, I close 'em all and I try to ignore it all day. And then during the day, I'll pretty much only post on Sub Stack notes, which I'm the only person in the world who uses Stack Notes. So it's just me talking to myself mostly. Oh, that's,

Leo Laporte (01:48:48):
It looks like an ex clone. Right?

Mike Elgan (01:48:52):
But Sub Notes is the prettiest social network.

Leo Laporte (01:48:56):
It's Macon, isn't it? Isn't it Macon?

Mike Elgan (01:48:59):
No. [01:49:00] Nock notes. No. That's one of the problems with it is

Leo Laporte (01:49:04):
Proprietary Medium has a MAs on it's medium.

Mike Elgan (01:49:06):
On Medium does, yeah. Yeah. And I think Tumblr is also on the Fedi verse, but CK Notes, I use it because that's where my newsletter is. And on CK and I makes sense. A lot of smart people. And just like last week, I think it was, they added the ability to follow people instead of having to subscribe to their newsletter, which is, I have the default set for my newsletters [01:49:30] that I subscribe to on CK to come to my email. So every time there's somebody I just wanted to follow on notes, I would've to subscribe to them and get their email into my inbox just so I can interact with them. But now they have follows. So it's a regular social network. Nobody cares. It's not part of the conversation about social networks. But I like it. It's pretty,

Leo Laporte (01:49:54):
My heart is still with Mastodon, but if you're really looking for a Twitter replacement, [01:50:00] I think Threads or Blue Sky, those are the two.

Mike Elgan (01:50:04):
Well, like Jeff said, I mean from the engagement front, like Jeff said, blue Sky is more consistent. You more consistently get engagement on Blue Sky. In that sense, it's more Twitter. I use Macon. I use the basic Macon server of instance, and it's either the engagement is kind of low or it's massive. [01:50:30] If something takes off on the Fedi verse, it's just gigantic. I get hundreds of re-shares and comments and all that kind of stuff, which is great. But it's far less consistent than Blue Sky. They're both great for engagement and both of 'em are better than Twitter these days for engagement for sure.

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
So here is Mark Zuckerberg's post on Threads, actual footage of me building threads for the web rolling out over the next few days. He looks [01:51:00] a lot younger than I expected to be, and I didn't know he sat like that with his knees up.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:05):
He has a phone's,

Leo Laporte (01:51:07):
That's a HP 35 calculator, which is hysterical. Look, what's the drink you think? I don't know. I think he made it into a bong. A lighter right there. I don't know. What kind of

Ant Pruitt (01:51:19):
Laptop is that? I wonder. I can't

Leo Laporte (01:51:21):
Remember. Oh, look at that weird wrist rest. Yeah, this is obviously Mark in the early days of Facebook and he's just taking threads and put it on top of it. It's in

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:28):
His college dorm

Leo Laporte (01:51:29):
Room. Yeah, [01:51:30] actually it's a great, yeah, it looks like a Harvard desk. God, they had crap making

Mike Elgan (01:51:34):
Hotter not or whatever that thing

Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
Was, right? So I don't know how you get to Threads Web.

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:42):
If I go to Threads net, it just says download the app. I can't find a link

Ant Pruitt (01:51:47):
For threads.net/your user handle will take you to your profile. But at least right now for me, there's still no option to create a post here in the web.

Leo Laporte (01:51:59):
Not yet. I don't

Mike Elgan (01:51:59):
Think [01:52:00] the doesn't, right.

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:01):
That's existed for a while,

Ant Pruitt (01:52:03):
But they're rolling it out. So I was like, well at least look here and see if they put a button

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
There, so I can't. He said in the next few days, of course he also said that was him. So

Ant Pruitt (01:52:15):
It was him.

Leo Laporte (01:52:16):
I know it was him, but a long time ago. Blue Sky is exactly like Twitter. And there is the promise. Both have promised to be part of the Fedi verse. Neither has lived up to that promise. Not yet. We'll see. We're watching at [01:52:30] least they got a web interface for threads. Blue Sky has never promoted the web interface. But you told me about it. Staging dot BSK app. Let's use it in the

Ant Pruitt (01:52:40):
Web. I got an invite. I'm going to put it in the irc. Somebody in our IRC mentioned,

Leo Laporte (01:52:45):
Yeah,

Ant Pruitt (01:52:47):
Dorian

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
Wanted to invite,

Ant Pruitt (01:52:49):
I'll put that invite in here.

Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
Dm, don't put it in public or it'll be,

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:53):
Because then everybody's going to use

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
File.

Ant Pruitt (01:52:55):
Oh, I don't know how to, oh, let's see. Message. Was it Doran? Yeah, it was Doran. [01:53:00] Okay. Do we'll see if this works.

Leo Laporte (01:53:02):
I would love for one of these to be the incumbent. But this shows you why it needs to be centralized. Because unless it's centralized, you don't get critical mass. If you don't get critical mass, it's not Twitter.

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:15):
Don't think we know that yet, Leo. I don't think we know that yet.

Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
Good. I hope you're right because as I federation, I support the federation.

Mike Elgan (01:53:21):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:53:23):
But I mean, I don't mind that Mastodon is a quiet little backwater. That's fine with it. That's [01:53:30] great. And we run our own twit social.

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:33):
I have very good engagement on Mastodon,

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
So it's interesting. What do you think is, you said Mike, that it's sometimes high and sometimes not. Is it based on the content or?

Mike Elgan (01:53:45):
Yeah, based on the content. I mean, it is hard to predict what will go viral, just like anything else. But what I mean is that sometimes I post stuff and it's crickets, which is fine. And then sometimes I post stuff and it just launches into the stratosphere. [01:54:00] And that doesn't really happen to me. On Blue Sky, I get one or 2, 3, 4 or five comments on every post. I get a somewhat predictable number of likes. I'll get minor bumps. But when things go viral on Macon, they really go viral.

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:19):
Yeah. Mike, I wonder if you find this. So when I read the papers, the papers, air quotes in the morning, and I find links I want to share, I'll hit the Twitter button because it's convenient [01:54:30] on the Washington Post. Copy and paste that, put it into a blue sky, put it into a mask on once in a, all I'll put it into threads, but Threads doesn't always want me to copy whatever paste. What I find is that the same exact item letter for letter can take off on Blue Sky, but not master Done. And then on mass dumping up Blue Sky or then on both,

Mike Elgan (01:54:51):
Right?

Ant Pruitt (01:54:52):
Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:52):
No run through. Totally

Mike Elgan (01:54:53):
Unpredictable.

Ant Pruitt (01:54:54):
Yeah, I see the same thing with mine. For me, the engagement ranking is number one. Twitter [01:55:00] number two, Instagram number three would Bewi Social. Yeah, social. And is that

Leo Laporte (01:55:09):
The only way to rate one of these things though, is how much response you get to your post?

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:14):
No, it's not. It's just one way. No,

Ant Pruitt (01:55:16):
It depends on who you ask. Because if you're a brand, you want see some

Leo Laporte (01:55:22):
Response. And that's one of the things I like about Masteron. It's kind of not a brand thing. [01:55:30] But see, this is the problem. A lot of the reason I would go to Twitter is as a read only site to see what's going on. When people are talking about, to laugh at people and what they're saying about the Golden Globes or the Super Bowl, all of that was fun. And that required a massive people. And Macon doesn't do that. Blue Sky and Threads could maybe, I don't know. I don't want to support Threads. Meta Blue Sky, at least it's still Jack Dorsey. I'm not a fan, but at least it's kind of [01:56:00] with more

Ant Pruitt (01:56:02):
Openish

Leo Laporte (01:56:03):
Idea. I want that mean. Honestly, to

Mike Elgan (01:56:06):
Me, I think it's the quality of the engagement, not the quantity quality and get high quality engagement on Macon pretty regularly. On Blue Sky, I've stepped on some landmines of Blue Sky where just the jackals just came after me. Really, it's kind of political

Leo Laporte (01:56:26):
Talk

Ant Pruitt (01:56:27):
Or what happens with me on Twitter, if it's anything [01:56:30] that says remotely political, even though I didn't intend on it to be, but it strikes a nerve and that's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
What about the other ones? What about T two? Is that still in the

Ant Pruitt (01:56:41):
I have the account. Haven't launched it. I just got the account.

Mike Elgan (01:56:46):
The engagement there in my experience is not, not super. I don't have a ton of followers there. This

Leo Laporte (01:56:51):
Was started by his former Twitter employees,

Mike Elgan (01:56:55):
So it's

Leo Laporte (01:56:56):
Very Twitter like.

Mike Elgan (01:56:58):
Yes, [01:57:00] there's not a lot of activity there. It's just kind of, to your point, Leo, I don't think it's

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:06):
At all about quality. It's just do you find yourself in an interesting conversation? Did someone say something interesting in return? That's how I would define

Ant Pruitt (01:57:14):
Engagement. Most of my conversations would come on Twitter. Granted, I try not to pay social any attention just for my own mental health. So I go in there periodically to at least look for someone that [01:57:30] replied, because otherwise it's just auto post stuff coming out from my computer. I generally stick stuff in this scheduler and walk away. It's just better peace of mind instead of trying to figure out I need to post right now, need to post right now, no baloney.

Mike Elgan (01:57:49):
But for those who are looking for the engagement on their own posts, I find that it's less than half of what it used to be from a year ago. It's just a lot of people [01:58:00] wandered away. A lot of journalists have been disillusioned and wandered away. So many people. Well, what I found, go ahead.

Ant Pruitt (01:58:08):
For me, the Instagram engagement, I ranked that number three. It's funny to me because most of my posts on there are, I'm actually trying to post and I'm only posting to stories. I'm not even put in the actual grid thing. I'm putting it to stories for people that actively follow me. So I'm like, [01:58:30] why does that matter more? Because most of the time it's not even photographic, it's just a caption of something or something random that I saw in the house with the dogs. But that stuff gets a decent amount of engagement more so than my

Mike Elgan (01:58:44):
Photography does there on that platform. It really does, and people want to know about you and your life on Instagram. So interesting thing, I was off Instagram for years and then when threats came out, I wanted to try it and you have to have an Instagram account, [01:59:00] an account. So I launched a new Instagram account last month or something like that. And so I have just a couple 300 followers or whatever it is, and I'm just posting, I'm just using it for photography, just like here's a picture that I like and I'm not trying to put any other kind of content and the engagement is pretty good and I'm actually kind of enjoying it and Threads is like that as well. All that. I don't put the pictures on [01:59:30] threads, but it's like the engagement on Instagram is pretty good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:35):
So Mike, to your question about people leaving, this is from my numbers of the week, nature Magazine reached out to 170,000 scientists who were or still are on as Leo would like us to say X.

Leo Laporte (01:59:50):
Well, that's

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:51):
What, it's not. 9,200 responded, which is just a lot. So it's among the respondents, more than half reported, they've reduced the time they spent on the platform, [02:00:00] just under 7% have stopped using it altogether. 46% have joined other social media platforms such as Master on Blue Side Threads and TikTok. So there are bits of flight going on from X

Mike Elgan (02:00:16):
I think it mirrors what's happening with journalists as well. I think it's not satisfying because you want everybody to leave or nobody to leave. If nobody left and they could keep talking to each other, it's a right,

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:27):
But this job sucks, so we're ready to go,

Mike Elgan (02:00:29):
But [02:00:30] lots of people left, so it's like worse, but it's still not, and everybody went to different platforms, so it's like it's been a dispersal of scientists.

Leo Laporte (02:00:41):
The problem is in Covid, we knew where to go. You all go to Twitter or in my case, Reddit, Reddit. Reddit still, even despite the problems they've been having, still is a place people use. And that was where I was getting the best covid information. In fact, Jeff, you had that great Twitter list of Covid experts that you [02:01:00] could follow. I wonder how

Jeff Jarvis (02:01:00):
Many of them are still on. I still go to it, but I don't

Leo Laporte (02:01:03):
Know. There is no place like that now. There really isn't. I just read it. That's has survived it's thing, and then now here I am on X and look, there's a great picture of Micah and Lisa and Max and Ryan, our sales team, and Micah's helping them out at the podcast, move it in Denver. So see, there's still some good people on X, not me. Although I should come [02:01:30] back and say, Hey, now that I'm not competing with the name, I like it. No, I'm not going to do that. I don't have to worry about Chief Twit anymore though. Right? No, you should post that just to see what happens because people would fall over if anybody was still there. Hey, speaking of all this, I want to tell you, September 10th, Taylor Loren is going to be on Twitch. Yeah, I finally got her. Its hard to get her book. Yeah, she's promoting her book, which is fine. In fact, I'm going to try to read it [02:02:00] before she comes. What's it called? Always online, something like that. I can't remember the name, but I will find out before she's on. I promise you. In fact, I will get a copy of it. Extremely online, extremely

Jeff Jarvis (02:02:12):
Untold story of fame, influence and power on the internet.

Leo Laporte (02:02:15):
It'll be great. She is a lightning rod for this stuff, and yet I don't think there's any reporter who covers it as well as she does. She's as a reporter. I mean there's people like Dana Boyd who do a better analysis of what's going on, but as a reporter, she's very good and kind of [02:02:30] an internet native, which I think we got to listen to the internet natives on these. Well, let's take a little break. I didn't do the change log. Maybe I'll do the change log then we'll take a little break. How about that? I don't want to keep you, you're both the Google change log change log. Pretty heck behind it. YouTube is testing a much smaller skip ads button. Well find it if you can. Yeah, find it if you can. This is [02:03:00] from Search Engine Land. We're testing and updates as Google to the design of the Skip ads button across all platforms. Our goal is to provide a more consistent user interface experience in line with the updated look and feel on YouTube, which would last. What we really did is we just don't want you to skip any ads, so we're going to put this little tiny little tiny button on there.

Jeff Jarvis (02:03:20):
It is irritating how you can get rid of a takeover ad, but they hide. It's like the worst cap. They hide where you find it's a box, it's ale, it's [02:03:30] a this, it's a

Leo Laporte (02:03:30):
Hidden state button. They have always said, no, this is good because then advertisers don't pay money for somebody who's not interested in their product. We get feedback about which ads are working, which ones are not. We like the skip ads button and advertisers like the skip ads button. Maybe that wasn't true. Oh, maybe they weren't true. Hey, good news podcast lovers. YouTube music is going to support using r s s to subscribe to podcasts. They've really got a lot of podcasts in YouTube music. [02:04:00] It's this whole tab dedicated to it and stuff, which I'm not crazy about. I don't don't use YouTube music. I use it for music. Right, but you use Spotify for music too, but I don't use Spotify for podcast. I should say neither do I. A lot of people do, but some people do. This was actually at podcast movement this week in Denver. YouTube's podcast Lead revealed that YouTube music is expanding r ss s support. They're also testing the ability for creators [02:04:30] to upload podcast episodes via an r s s feed with YouTube creating a video version for audiences outside of YouTube music. We don't have any audio only shows or do we used to?

Ant Pruitt (02:04:44):
No, sir. We used

Leo Laporte (02:04:45):
To, and when we do it, do we just put it up on YouTube with a hard title

Ant Pruitt (02:04:48):
Card? Yes, sir.

Leo Laporte (02:04:50):
I think a lot of people do that. Yep. Feature will launch fully end of year also confirms podcast. We'll go live in YouTube music in more countries through the end of 2023, globally [02:05:00] available by the end of the year. Right now it's US, Canada and Latin America.

Mike Elgan (02:05:05):
I like this. It's good news because it's not about podcasts. It's about r s s. And so you have a major, major, major embrace of R S s. I mean, I think Google damaged R ss s when they killed Google Reader, and I think to a large extent, when companies like Google embrace R S Ss in a big way, this, it's sort of like it makes the world safe for R sss. [02:05:30] If State Warn

Ant Pruitt (02:05:31):
Would say, if it ain't on r s s, it ain't

Leo Laporte (02:05:33):
A podcast. Thank you, Dave. On Spotify. That's not a podcast. It's not a podcast.

Mike Elgan (02:05:38):
But r s s also is important for non podcasts, right? For content generally. We're always talking about social networks and how they're failing us and all stuff, but as a source of news, you don't want to get your news from social let's a terrible place to get your news. R s s feeds are way better because you can curate them carefully, you can control it, and it's not algorithmically, not necessarily algorithmically [02:06:00] controlled. And so I just love anything that boosts R S ss and makes it more of a force on the internet.

Ant Pruitt (02:06:08):
Mr. Elgin, I hate saying it like this, but do normal people get what an R s S feed is in your experience?

Mike Elgan (02:06:18):
Probably not. Probably not.

Ant Pruitt (02:06:20):
That's the thing, but normal people know what it was around Facebook is and what Twitter is and say, oh, so-and-so posted in News story on Facebook. So that's where I'm going to get [02:06:30] my news. Well, some folks, not everybody,

Leo Laporte (02:06:35):
I'm not quite as purist as Dave Weiner is. Of course, he created the RSS standard, so he has a strong Yeah,

Ant Pruitt (02:06:42):
Wonder why he would be a purist,

Leo Laporte (02:06:45):
Honestly. In fact, it's one of the reasons I don't even like the word podcast that much. It's just content on the, it's audio or video content on the internet, and if you want to watch it on YouTube as a video, that's fine and we put it [02:07:00] wherever we can. I love R Ss s. I'm with you, Mike. I think r s s is really important and I use an r s s reader and so forth, so anything that supports r s s is good, but I think it's unfortunate that we have this notion of, well, what's a YouTube video then? Is that a podcast? So it's silly. It it doesn't matter. It's content on the internet and you get it however you get it, and whatever's convenient for our audience, that's what I'm going to support. I'm not going to, the

Mike Elgan (02:07:29):
Content is what matters. [02:07:30] Content and flexible delivery is matters.

Leo Laporte (02:07:34):
That's it. Yes. Make it easy. Yes, exactly.

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:37):
And your choice. I think that's Dave's point is that when Spotify and yours too, when Spotify tries to take it all over, so you have to use Spotify,

Leo Laporte (02:07:44):
Then it's not podcast. It's that's terrible. That's bad. And r s s has real advantages. No one owns it. It doesn't give information about you back to the podcast, your private, when you use it, there's a lot of real advantages to it. I think

Mike Elgan (02:07:59):
Real advantages, [02:08:00] and since we're griping about the use of the word podcast, what really bothers me is when podcasts shorten that to pod, oh, last week

Leo Laporte (02:08:09):
Pod, it really

Mike Elgan (02:08:11):
Bothers me because podcast is like the iPod and the medium, right? The medium on an iPod. That's the origins of podcasts, right? The pod part is the device and the cast part is the medium. If anything, they should shorten it to cast. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:08:26):
Mike, like an old man, Mr. Elgan. Thank [02:08:30] you. Alright, I going to tell you a little story.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:32):
It's a net cast. It's a net

Leo Laporte (02:08:34):
Cast. Well, first of all, I agree with you a hundred percent, Mike. The other day, Lisa and I are talking, actually, we're in bed. We're conversing at night and she calls 'em pods. I've never done that. And she calls 'em pods a lot and I kind of grind my teeth. I finally said, why do you call 'em pods? I don't like that. She says, she got mad at me. We had a fight. She said, everybody calls 'em pods. What's wrong with pulling pods? Doesn't make it right. No, I said, [02:09:00] it just bugs me. I think I said, Ew. And she's right because after she said that, I said, does really? Does everybody call 'em pods and yeah, everywhere. Even sad to say in the New York Times and elsewhere, you'll see the political

Mike Elgan (02:09:17):
Podcast.

Leo Laporte (02:09:17):
People call it a lot. Maybe that's where she gets it because she listens to the Daily and to Pods Save American, all that, and they call 'em pods

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:25):
When people call a blog, and Ariana Huffing was the one who started this. When you call a blog [02:09:30] post a blog.

Leo Laporte (02:09:31):
I brought that up crazy. I brought that up. I said, it's like calling a blog post a blog. The

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:37):
Blog you lost is the

Leo Laporte (02:09:39):
Old container we've lost. I'm an old fart. That's what I basically came down to is I guess I'm just old fashioned, but that's just, I also like the Harvard comma and I'm only kidding, Mr. It's Oxford, just so you know. All right, Oxford, call it whatever you want. I like it. It was the Yale comma myself,

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:57):
Uppity Americans.

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
[02:10:00] Google photo is, oh, wait a minute. Google's new feature. I like this, ensures your pixel hasn't been hacked. You have this on your Chromebook, a little C R c or some sort of a hash that says that the firmware hasn't been modified. Google calls it pixel binary. Transparency. Transparency. If you have a pixel, it proves that the pixel handset is as intended [02:10:30] as delivered by Google, not one that's been modified at the software level. This is the existing Android verified boot feature does the same thing. So in other words, not route it.

Mike Elgan (02:10:46):
Yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:10:46):
The difference is that, go ahead.

Mike Elgan (02:10:49):
The difference is that this is a tool that you can just arbitrarily say, Hey, you know what? I'm going to check to make sure that it's still an unmodified software [02:11:00] in my system. Nice. You can just do that arbitrarily and not just when you're downloading it, whatever. So it's great. It's great for security minded high-end users. Essentially, the great unwash will not be using this feature.

Leo Laporte (02:11:18):
So the Android verified boot, the instant Android device boots up, it looks for a software signature verifying that all's well the software's untempered with the boot process continues. [02:11:30] I guess the pixel binary transparency you're saying is on demand, right? Yeah. So that's good. You need both. That's good. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So I have to say, Google does a good job of security. I always trusted their security. I don't trust their economic motives, but I've always trusted their security.

Mike Elgan (02:11:54):
I like their security and their transparency. Things like Google takeout, all that kind of stuff where they [02:12:00] tell you exactly. They'll show you everything you ever said to Google assistant and so on. They're good in that sense. Better than average. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:09):
Although, have you ever tried to use a Google takeout download? Yeah, I have not. You got the data, but it's not exactly form you.

Mike Elgan (02:12:21):
It's there, I guess.

Leo Laporte (02:12:23):
Yeah,

Mike Elgan (02:12:24):
I got everything from Google Plus and it should have been sitting there.

Leo Laporte (02:12:28):
Yeah, I have a bunch of [02:12:30] xml. I unzipped it and that was it, but I haven't opened it. Yeah. Oh boy. So I have twice downloaded my entire Google Photos data set once manually unzipped it and processed it and had a bold bunch of scripts and stuff. That was a pain. One of our sponsors, my Leo imports some directly does all that directly and it actually does it. But unfortunately, and this is, I'm sure Google's doing, it's lost the creation date on this thing. So the creation date is wrong. So my pictures are [02:13:00] sorting based on download. Yeah, it's got all the Google photos have a recent date. Google Photos is rolling out new editing tools for the web. This is one thing that always got me angry is Google bought Picasa saying, oh, we're going to incorporate all those tools into Google Photos. And then they did and did a little bit of it at the time. Now there's a new editor. It's Google's nine to five Google blog, posted it, saw it, noted it on Monday. Look at the suggestions tab. There's [02:13:30] preset color options, granular image adjustments, aspect ratio tool has been enhanced. Basically it's the same editing ability on the web now that you had on the mobile app. So there wasn't always parody. There is now the web editor is available to everyone except for the dynamic option, which is only available if you're a subscriber to Google one. So play with your photos. Google.

Ant Pruitt (02:13:55):
Recently I was trying to use one of those magical tools of Google Photos where [02:14:00] it would fix the focus for you, and my tools are not showing up on my phone. What am I doing wrong? I go to the photo inside of the camera app and the camera roll. I go to Google Photos and look there. It's not there. And I'm like, what happened?

Leo Laporte (02:14:17):
Mike? You use Google Photos a lot. I know. I subscribed to your nice book, and when we did the Gastro Nomad tour to Oaxaca last Halloween, you posted all those photos there, which was [02:14:30] a great way for everybody to share their photos. Do you use the editing tools there

Mike Elgan (02:14:35):
Or I do. It depends on how important the picture is. So for experiences, I use Apple Photos and other tools on my MacBook Pro for just snapshots and just random things. Maybe I'll just boost something a little bit in Google, built in tools on the iPad, which have been until now better [02:15:00] than elsewhere. But yeah, the thing that's bothering me about Google photos these days is it seems to be getting slower and less capable.

Leo Laporte (02:15:10):
Sometimes it sounds slow, it just, I'll do

Mike Elgan (02:15:11):
A search and it just goes blank, right? And then I have to restart it and it's just getting slower and more bogged down and I just feel like they're kind of neglecting it, not throwing the resources on it. So this nice book was what I built to replace Facebook and tried to share it with as many people as possible, and I still like it. [02:15:30] It's still, oh, it's wonderful. I still use it and it's just for friends and family and whatever, and it's just slices of life that has no other place to go. So yeah, I recommend that people do that. Although I have some disgruntled Apple users who don't want to get anywhere near, they can use the web cough, Nadia

Leo Laporte (02:15:53):
Cough.

Mike Elgan (02:15:56):
But yeah, other than that, it's great. I have [02:16:00] a bunch of albums that I use.

Leo Laporte (02:16:01):
My favorite feature is the partner sharing. So when I take pictures of and Lisa's in them, it'll automatically, Lisa will get 'em in her Google photos automatically. I'd have to think about it. She would always say, oh, send me those pictures you took. Now it's just automatic. Same thing with my daughter. She wanted all the pictures I've ever taken thousands. So I just made a,

Mike Elgan (02:16:22):
I share with Amira, I got all of hers, she gets all of mine, and it's just super convenient. It's like you become indifferent

Leo Laporte (02:16:28):
To who takes the picture. [02:16:30] I do not use Gmail, but maybe if you do, you've noticed occasionally a new verify it's you prompt. This is happening. When you attempt sensitive actions, either creating a new filter, existing filter, import editing, existing filter importing filters, when you add a new forwarding address from the forwarding and pop IMAP settings, when you enable IMAP access status, because bad guys might do it. So [02:17:00] here's what you might see a critical security alert and attempt to set up forwarding and Gmail, Google stop this attempt, but if this wasn't you, someone else has access to your account and then you can click a box that says, oh no, that's me. Verify it's you rolling out starting this week. Good. I don't have a problem with that. Email is the single most vulnerable point of attack [02:17:30] for everybody, and your email account should be as secure as you can make it. Google TV is getting an update, which includes N F L Sunday ticket integration just in time for the season. Yes,

Ant Pruitt (02:17:42):
Sir.

Leo Laporte (02:17:43):
And more free channels. I like Google tv. I use the $35 Chromecast with Google TV is great. That's good. It really does a good job. If you're looking for a four K streamer, you don't want to spend $180 on an Apple tv, which is probably that [02:18:00] or the shield, the Nvidia shield, which is even more expensive. Those are probably the cream of the crop, but this for the price, there's nothing better. I think it's better than a Roku. Even Google TV getting an update for the big N F L

Ant Pruitt (02:18:15):
College. Hardhead just left for college and I had to get his Google account to log in so he can watch YouTube TV up at college. I had to log in at home. So it says, okay, he's in his home [02:18:30] address, log out and then he could fire it up in Oregon and it says, okay, now you can watch it for three months.

Leo Laporte (02:18:37):
Yeah, I think, by the way, that's the best deal of YouTube TV is you get six family members can use it. So everybody in my family has YouTube TV access and their own D V R and all

Ant Pruitt (02:18:46):
Of that. Whenever that little prompt comes up, you just got to let me know. Hey, can you log in at the house for me?

Leo Laporte (02:18:51):
Okay. That's the big, so I was wondering because that's the geographic what's, are you in your home area? Is this your new home area? We

Ant Pruitt (02:18:58):
Trying to

Leo Laporte (02:18:59):
V P N. Are [02:19:00] you in Oregon? Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (02:19:01):
So just logging in definitely.

Leo Laporte (02:19:03):
So he'll text you and say, dad, can you log in at home just so that they know that you haven't

Ant Pruitt (02:19:09):
Moved. Just log in and let a video play for a few minutes and that's it.

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
So expensive. I wish Google tv. I mean YouTube TV weren't so expensive.

Ant Pruitt (02:19:17):
Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, it's expensive.

Leo Laporte (02:19:20):
It's basically a cable subscription, so turn off the cable, but I only

Ant Pruitt (02:19:24):
Have it for five months.

Leo Laporte (02:19:26):
You're just doing it for N F L? Yeah. Smart. Just for five months. Gmail for Android [02:19:30] and iOS has a new translate feature. Again, I don't use Gmail. Have you seen this? A native translate capability, so it's on the server side, so when you get something in a language you don't normally speak, you can detect it and translate it. That's pretty cool. You probably get a lot of Spanish email and stuff, Mike. I do. Or you do too. Yeah, I used do. Go ahead.

Mike Elgan (02:19:58):
Majority of the stuff that I get that is in another language [02:20:00] is fraudulent email of so or another. I mean even though we travel a lot, everybody that I interact with via email speaks English and does not only can but does use English. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:20:13):
I was on that. I guess there's a

Mike Elgan (02:20:14):
Couple of exceptions.

Leo Laporte (02:20:17):
I was on East

Ant Pruitt (02:20:18):
Asia list. I still get some of their, the vendors from C E S Asia from time to time.

Leo Laporte (02:20:24):
Some of it's because my last name is French [02:20:30] and my email is laport@gmail.com. Do you get a lot of love letters? Yeah. I don't know what this means. Vnu RA Magazine. I don't understand. Store. You can show this. It's okay to show this. You have notice it says Uli I know means forgotten. You have forgotten. Have you forgotten me? Translate message. Have you forgotten us? Dear customer, your store would be happy to offer your new loyally points to your next visit your [02:21:00] store team. I don't know who the store is, even team, but my notes, see what I mean? It's garbage, but I get a lot of French garbage. I got a whole French one and I hit the translator and it was just instant. Yeah, yeah. I love watch. Here's a long one. Watch this. Go ahead. Show it. Translate message.

(02:21:25):
Hello, Mr. Hello, Mr. LaPorte. I'm sending you this email as part of your health guarantee [02:21:30] and your online quote request. Are you still looking? I never looked. I'm in the United States mate, so I don't know why Sarah Pommier is emailing me cross-border, C M U or Lamar. Everyone's health and welfare needs orthodontics, private room glasses. Oh, the big three. Wait a minute, those are the big three. Orthodontic, private room and glasses, accident, death and funeral. Those are the second big three. I don't know what this is, but now I can read it [02:22:00] and by the way, from now on, always translate French is something I can so always, always translate French. It's pretty cool, which is really not the right thing now. It's all going to be translated. You don't know if

Mike Elgan (02:22:12):
It's what language it was originally

Leo Laporte (02:22:14):
In. Right? Bet the button will still be there saying it was translated and you can see the original will it? I'll always know. Okay, I'll bet. I have an autoresponder on here saying I no longer use this address. In fact, it actually says if you're sending [02:22:30] me a message thinking I'm French, I am not, and it still doesn't stop them. If you're sending this email to anyone other than Leo LaPorte of Petaluma, California U s A, you may have an incorrect address, and then I don't tell 'em what the new address is. I say, please ask me for my new address because you're going to know me, right? I still get so much spam [02:23:00] and that's the Google change law. Every time I look over to your screen, I see this disturbing image. That's a disturbing image of Rudy Giuliani. Really intently playing with his PSS five, I think, or is that an Xbox I,

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:17):
While we went on Ari Melbourne two hours ago, I think I had some great segment. The whole thing was mugshots from history. It's just mesmerizing [02:23:30] to see them all go by.

Leo Laporte (02:23:31):
I just want to know Twitter, who this is and why she's so happy that she's being booked into the Fulton County jail.

Mike Elgan (02:23:36):
Well, I know why she's so happy. You're consultants tell you to smile in the mugshot. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:23:43):
Yeah. You don't want to look guilty. It

Mike Elgan (02:23:45):
Doesn't look like a mugshot. Right. If you look sad and morose, then it's like all your opponents will use that endlessly.

Leo Laporte (02:23:54):
Wow.

Mike Elgan (02:23:55):
They always say smile, like do your hair wear, man.

Leo Laporte (02:24:00):
[02:24:00] Feel like you're just so happy to be there.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:02):
Fatal attraction, Rudy does not. Sidney Powell is like Fatal Attraction.

Leo Laporte (02:24:05):
Yeah. Yeah. That is by the way, blue sky. So yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:13):
The Meg shots are going already going

Leo Laporte (02:24:15):
All over the place. T two, not so many. Really. Maybe I'm not following the right people.

Mike Elgan (02:24:22):
They announced that their process in Georgia is that they give the height and weight and so on of everybody they book and they're going to [02:24:30] be, and so booking companies that take Betts for sports and stuff like that are taking bets on what Trump's weight is going to be.

Leo Laporte (02:24:40):
Do they publish the weight? Yes. Oh God, they do.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:44):
That's going to kill him.

Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
Oh God. What'd you think about 2 85? Yeah, 2 85. That sounds about right. Yeah, about 2 85 because he is a tall dude. Two, right? Yeah, he's pretty tall. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (02:24:54):
Well, I think his height has been exaggerated as well, so that's another point of,

Leo Laporte (02:24:59):
Oh, well, we get the height too. [02:25:00] Oh, that's a prop bet.

Mike Elgan (02:25:02):
I've already predicted on social media that whatever the published numbers are for his height and weight, he'll deny it and say it's fake news.

Leo Laporte (02:25:11):
Riverside.

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:13):
So now your M S N B C report, because the TV's on in the background. Rodan Farrow's on talking about his musk.

Leo Laporte (02:25:19):
Oh, I'll have to watch that with

Mike Elgan (02:25:21):
Joy. He did long interview on CNN as well, which I saw before the show, so

Leo Laporte (02:25:27):
It's a boy. I led with it because [02:25:30] it's a little concerning. It's a little bit, I just printed it out, the whole thing to read tomorrow. Yeah, it's well worth reading, but you have to have about eight hours. Like this show, I put it

Mike Elgan (02:25:40):
In. I put that article into Insta Paper and it gives you an estimate of the reading time and it said it's a 37 minute

Leo Laporte (02:25:45):
Read. Oh, that's not bad. Well, its not bad if you're not distracted by T two. Every two minutes, 37 minute read. Is that too long for these, for people these days

Mike Elgan (02:25:56):
For a magazine article? That's pretty long.

Leo Laporte (02:25:58):
You're not supposed to sit on the [02:26:00] toilet for more than a few minutes, I think. Why are you? It's my New Yorker time. Don't bother me. Our show today, that's not my TikTok time's. It's TikTok time this. Oh God. Now I don't want to look at any TikTok time. This episode of this week in Google is brought to you by, actually, this is serious. Everybody should pay attention to this. Brought to you by the password manager. I recommend Steve Gibson uses We [02:26:30] all use, now we're going to even use it corporate wise. I got to tell you, first of all, job one, get a freaking password manager. Stop reusing passwords all the time on the sites. You're going to be subject to a credential stuffing attack. Somebody's going to break into a site, get your password and try it on every site that you might be a member of.

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It turned out one of the big ones, one of our former sponsors wasn't encrypting the sites you visited, so there was a whole record of every site you had a password for. That's not good. Bit Warden encrypts it all. Bit Warden is the best. In fact, in the summer 2023 G two Enterprise Grid report, they [02:28:00] solidified their position as the highest performing password manager for Enterprise leaving competitors in the dust. That's why we're switching into work. Bit. Warden protects your data and privacy by adding strong, randomly generated passwords for every account, but it goes another step farther. It also will do a unique username for every account. They have a username generator and you can even create a dummy email address. Now, you might say, but I need that address to work. Yes, it works with our sponsored Fast Mail [02:28:30] and I think four other, including Firefox email providers.

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So they integrate in with FastMail and FastMail goes, oh yeah, we'll create a random address and we'll make that your login and we'll make sure that mail gets to you. But that's great because then the bad guy not only has to guess a password, they have to guess a weird email address. And because it's open source, you can look at every bit of the code on GitHub, not only public to the world, but it's also public, and they do this every year. [02:29:00] Third party professional audits, and they publish the results publicly on their website. So this is open source security you can really trust. You can just verify that it really works as advertised. They have lots of nice features. We're going to use the Bit Warden Enterprise Organization plan. That's $5 per month per user. Bit Warden also has a teams organization option $3 per month per user.

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Jeff Jarvis (02:31:35):
Oh, we need one tribute.

Leo Laporte (02:31:37):
A tribute

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:39):
To John Warnock.

Leo Laporte (02:31:40):
Yeah, and we did a long one yesterday on Mac Break weekly. John Warnock, one of the founders of Adobe with John Gki. It's actually a great story. Go look at his Wikipedia. He passed away this week at the age of 82. Warnock was working, I think it was Evans in Sutherland, and [02:32:00] he created, postscript eventually brought that to Xerox Park where he met gke. Postscript, of course, was the foundation for the portable document format.

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:11):
Postscript was the end of the Gutenberg age.

Leo Laporte (02:32:15):
Oh, interesting. When letters

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:16):
Weren't letters anymore, they were descriptions. They

Leo Laporte (02:32:18):
Were code. They were code. He actually was a mathematician. His earliest publication, the subject of his master's thesis, a proof. [02:32:30] This is in 1964 of Ethereum, solving the Jacobson radical for row finite matrices. Thank you, John. Fun guy. Fun guy. In 1969, his PhD thesis, the Warnock algorithm for hidden surface determination and computer graphics. Now in 69, this was really, all the graphics were just lines where they were outlines, and he, because of this, made it possible for a computer with very limited capability to create surfaces. It was because of that [02:33:00] we could see solid surfaces. Plus,

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:02):
I think he also used, if I remember correctly, and I could be wrong and someone will correct me, but there were some auto design as in automobile design software that enabled the description of curves and things, and that at least in part inspired Postscript.

Leo Laporte (02:33:19):
Yeah, postscript. I actually remember it was kind of fourth. It was a stack based language. It was a weird language, but Apple Postscript. No, no. I thought you said something else. Fourth. It was fourth [02:33:30] like, which is a stack based language. It was the language for the Apple laser writer. This is really what ended up Bloomberg here, and you could write code. Where's the Stack Gum fly that gum fly. It's been

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:46):
Bothering self. Haiti. Leo was hitting himself.

Leo Laporte (02:33:48):
You could write code.

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:53):
No, Leo, don't hurt yourself. It's

Leo Laporte (02:33:55):
Okay. You could write code that would actually print something. [02:34:00] It was kind of fun. It was kind of cool. That became PDFs in 1986. His wife, Marva was a graphics designer. You might be old enough to remember these, Jeff. Remember those weird curvy plastic rulers that you would use to do ate curves? She would pull out the ruler and be doing curves, and he looked at it. I said, we probably could do that in software Invented something called Adobe Illustrator that would actually do those curves for her. He did it for his wife [02:34:30] in the late eighties. In 1991, he outlined a system called Camelot, which eventually became PDFs, and of course, which we

Jeff Jarvis (02:34:40):
Might curse on the one hand. On the other hand, it really changed publishing tremendously. Absolutely. It created a standard that anything could be produced anywhere and made a big

Leo Laporte (02:34:49):
Difference. One of the pioneers of the computer industry a great, and I think certain younger generations don't really know these names, [02:35:00] but you and I do, Jeff, because we've been around a while and we're old, and it's really important to mention them. These don't come out of nowhere. There's somebody who sat there and invented it and it's pretty amazing. And he was one of the greats, so we thank him. John Warnock died at the age of eight, and CRE

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:21):
Cancer takes another

Leo Laporte (02:35:22):
One. Yeah, we're all in Cancer's waiting room. Jeff,

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:27):
Tell me about it.

Leo Laporte (02:35:28):
You actually got invited in, [02:35:30] I believe. Leave let us do our pixel of the week, I think. Yes. If there's nothing else to, I'm glad you mentioned Warnock. I definitely want to mention that I'm getting

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:45):
Hungry, so I didn't want to

Leo Laporte (02:35:46):
Extend catch you a paper time.

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:49):
I think it's important. It's

Leo Laporte (02:35:50):
Important. Yeah. Just be glad you're not getting mugshots. Five o'clock. It's really five o'clock. What's it? Five o'clock. John

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:59):
Flies [02:36:00] when

Leo Laporte (02:36:01):
You're having fun. Well, to me, that's always, people say, why do you let these shows go so long? Because having fun. I don't know how long it's been, Mike. Mike, we're going to give you a name for your, we used to call it Stacey's thing. We're going to call it Mike's Goods. I got the goods, man, give me some goods. You said you were going to give us something big.

Mike Elgan (02:36:25):
You got the goods. So I got three things. We'll start with the most frivolous. [02:36:30] So if you use generative AI tools to create images with text prompts, and if those images contain words or letters, it's gibberish. The AI is dumb. It doesn't know what a word is or what a letter is when it's doing visual ai, right? So it creates things that look like letters and it puts it in your image. Image. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:36:51):
They're terrible though. Yeah, use that. That's one of the giveaways of an AI generated graphic is that the text looks like Greek,

Mike Elgan (02:36:59):
Right? [02:37:00] So there's a new AI tool called Texty. So you take one of those images that's been generated with ai, you put it in here, and then you tell it. You can give it actual words in place of the fake words that it has, and it's just a way to turn to make more fake news and deep fake mike more fake news, right? Real words in it. And you can say where you want the words really good Mike side, the size and all that kind of stuff. So this is useful for if you've ever [02:37:30] been frustrated by an image that has gibberish words in it, you can put now real words in it or no words, you can replace it. And that's what that's for. So texty do Astoria ai.

Leo Laporte (02:37:42):
So here's an example, and then what do I do? It's 51%. You

Mike Elgan (02:37:49):
Sort of select the gibberish.

Leo Laporte (02:37:51):
Oh, I have to say, this is what you should fix,

Mike Elgan (02:37:54):
Right? You have to cover it completely and then you type in the words you want and it puts it in that typeface. Oh, [02:38:00] with the background,

Leo Laporte (02:38:01):
I can tell you use command line. You're horrible with a mouse.

Mike Elgan (02:38:08):
Yes. So I dunno what the caption of that would be. See what

Leo Laporte (02:38:14):
This does. Okay. And then Funky que.

Mike Elgan (02:38:22):
I like that the way it is, but no.

Leo Laporte (02:38:29):
Okay. [02:38:30] I think Coin Pick used to be a webify manufacturer,

Mike Elgan (02:38:35):
And it gives you options. It gives you multiple versions, and of course, it's using AI to do this, so

Leo Laporte (02:38:40):
It's slow. So it's

Mike Elgan (02:38:41):
An AI tool to compensate for another AI tool. Nice. Text you in 45 minutes.

Leo Laporte (02:38:48):
This is my next week's show. We'll see it. astoria.ai sst, O R I a.ai. And here we go. There we go. We can just see. Let's just see what this, but [02:39:00] it did change the background. Ask the docs. It cut it off a little bit. That's interesting. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (02:39:05):
Sometimes it better, better than other times that's on you. It depends on, I screwed. If you're more precise with the drawing the box, I think it does a little better, but it's something to play with in some way to quickly improve. That's cool. Those kind of images. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:39:21):
Stop. Stop. Whatcha doing? I'm trying. I need a command line. Good grief. Let's go to the terminal. All right. Also, here's one from Google, [02:39:30] right? You want to do that one? What do you want to do next?

Mike Elgan (02:39:32):
Before we get to the Google one? Let's, okay. Say that one. I want to do the one called Unled. Now this is the one I predict you want to use during shows. Okay. So what this does, oh

Leo Laporte (02:39:42):
Gosh.

Mike Elgan (02:39:43):
Dirty shows. Yes, because when you're, let's say I'm trying to

Leo Laporte (02:39:48):
Read something that I've never seen before and understand

Mike Elgan (02:39:51):
It. Exactly. Yeah, you're very good at reading and talking at the same time.

(02:39:58):
But this might be an easier [02:40:00] way. So Riddle is a place where you can either use it as a text editor and it will do AI based. It'll fill in the blanks, it'll finish your sentences. It'll do all the things that AI text editors do, but that's not what you would use it for. So the second option is something called upload. So you can upload paste text in. You can give it a U R L and it'll get the text from the U R l, or you can put in A P D F. So let's say you have a story and you have a very complex story about legislation around tech or something [02:40:30] like that. You can put in three or four stories by copying and pasting it into the same item on the list on the left. And then instead of going through all this text trying to find the date when so-and-so was appointed the head of this agency or something like that, you just ask,

Leo Laporte (02:40:45):
You just

Mike Elgan (02:40:46):
Document, say, Hey, when did he leave? When did this happen? Summarize this, explain this to me like I'm five. It'll take a gigabyte of text and it'll give you a paragraph that gives you the main points and then you can interrogate that paragraph. [02:41:00] So it's a way to rapidly get and extract data and summarization and all those things out of a document. But the best part for doing this during a podcast is that each story can have its own thing, and each thing can have as many articles as you want. You can put in Wikipedia pages, you can put in all this kind of stuff. And that's the topic of that discussion, which you can interrogate all of it at once very quickly and get summaries [02:41:30] that are ready for. And again, this is not treacherous like OpenAI. This is not just all the data. This is just the data you put in there. And so if you put in good data, you're going to get good output from this. So I would recommend trying this during a show and seeing if it's faster than actually talking and reading at the same time, which

Leo Laporte (02:41:51):
I like this. I can take a 10 Q financial filing and have it and ask queries of it. Did Nvidia make [02:42:00] money this year based on this balance sheet? That's cool. Well, it's free for a small number.

Mike Elgan (02:42:08):
Yeah, very small. You have to pay at least 16 bucks a month for thisd to have it be useful. Riled

Leo Laporte (02:42:15):
Ai.

Mike Elgan (02:42:16):
Riled ai. Okay. The third one is from Google. So I'm a big proponent have become a big proponent of using AI to improve your writing and improve your ability to write well as opposed to the opposite. So instead of just doing what [02:42:30] some of these sophomore and high school kids are doing and just having chat, G B T write their essay and they put it in, and when the teacher reads it, it says, as a generative AI text bot, I believe, blah, blah, blah, and then they're getting flunked out of school. No, don't use AI like

Leo Laporte (02:42:44):
That. They should be,

Mike Elgan (02:42:45):
Yes. To me, the number one benefit of generative AI for a writer is that it can help you discover your blind spots. That the things that you're missing, like about a topic, it can suggest [02:43:00] areas to investigate. It can improve very quickly. Your ability to write. Another way to do it is you want to use AI as a sounding board. And so this tool from that they came out with earlier this month called Text fx, basically lets you take a word say and say, okay, you know what? Create similes about this word exploded into similar sounding phrases. And it's [02:43:30] kind of directed at rappers actually. But it's also good for writers. It helps you explore. Because too often people are lazy writers and they say, okay, how would I say this? And they type what they would say. That's not a good way. If you want to be a thoughtful writer, words have histories.

(02:43:48):
They have implications, they have connotations, they have all this. Every word in the English language comes with all this baggage That's helpful for a writer if you want to really paint the right picture. So it helps you [02:44:00] bounce off all these ideas. It'll show you, it'll give you a list of alliteration, it'll create acronyms for you. It's a way to take words and phrases and play with them and to see how that sparks your mind to improve your writing and improve your ability to write. So this is a really actually fascinating, brilliant tool for writers that doesn't just write it for you. It actually improves your ability to write.

Leo Laporte (02:44:27):
So create an acronym using the letters [02:44:30] of a word mugshot. I dunno why I'm thinking that. And now it says cappers. My ugly grin shines here on this. Very nicely done. Yeah. Wow.

Mike Elgan (02:44:50):
This is good for creative headline writing. This is good for if you're a fiction writer, you want to get into descriptions, [02:45:00] you want to paint pictures, you want to have it, you really want to explore language. This is really, really an interesting tool, and I think it's fascinating.

Leo Laporte (02:45:11):
As Mike Elgin says, elegant language generates artful notes. Yes. That's an, that's

Mike Elgan (02:45:16):
What Elgin stands for.

Leo Laporte (02:45:18):
Elgin stands for. Wow. This is with Google experiment. So this is really interesting. Yes. Google experiment. Yeah, the Text FX project at Text FX with google.com. [02:45:30] Interesting. Really interesting. Yeah, a lot of these are toys. This feels like a toy, but I guess it could be a tool if you

Mike Elgan (02:45:44):
As a writer, I often find myself, there's a word in my sentence that lands with a thud and I don't know what to do with it. I don't like the way it sounds. I don't like the way it feels and looks. And so I want to just put that word in and just [02:46:00] inspire me to think differently than I'm thinking right now. And I think it's useful.

Leo Laporte (02:46:03):
Yeah. These are prompts to get you evaluate a topic through different points of, or build a chain of semantically related items. So email and then see what an email, computer, keyboard, letter, post office, letterbox, mail mailbox. So it's like a thesaurus would help you, frankly. I use the Oxford English dictionary to understand the deep nuance of a word. [02:46:30] I guess I could throw those out now because, well, what I

Mike Elgan (02:46:33):
Used to use or what I still do use, I think one of the most powerful tools is etymology dictionaries. The

Leo Laporte (02:46:39):
Oxford English. Yeah, love

Mike Elgan (02:46:40):
It. Etymology dictionary. Because the etymology is where

Leo Laporte (02:46:43):
That's really what the O e D is for. When was this book first used? So I asked to give me a simile about bird books. A bird book is like a door to a secret world opening up a whole new realm of possibilities for the imagination. That sounds very [02:47:00] ai. That sounds very ai. And what's this temperature thing? Do this slider. I have no idea. No one does

Mike Elgan (02:47:10):
Turn up the temperature and run

Leo Laporte (02:47:11):
It podcast. Just like the sliders and stable diffusion that. Yeah, it's just a thing. Have no idea what they mean. Yeah, but you don't need to know. So podcast, let's get a simile. A podcast is like a warm blanket on a cold night. It's comforting though, informing and always there when you need it. [02:47:30] A blanket

Mike Elgan (02:47:31):
Isn't really informative, is

Leo Laporte (02:47:32):
It? It's an informative blanket. It's not just any blanket. It's an informative blanket. It's

Mike Elgan (02:47:38):
Like a blanket with text on it.

Leo Laporte (02:47:40):
But this gets you thinking about similes, right? For rappers. Break a word into similar sounding phrases. Diaper, let's see, that's a good

Mike Elgan (02:47:53):
Word for a

Leo Laporte (02:47:53):
Rap song. Rapper do appear. Hang out with a friend. A diaper's here, but I got amend. There's a hole in the bottom [02:48:00] and it's leaking out. I don't know. I just talking about, I just got a little wrap going there. That's I'm freestyling Freestyle. Yes. Me and Lil Wayne. That's enough. That's enough. That's quite enough. Nice. Nice. How about you, Jeff Jarvis, what do you got?

Jeff Jarvis (02:48:14):
I'm going to be quick.

Leo Laporte (02:48:17):
You're hungry. One number now. Are you taking Stacey's waffle ground? Is that what you're doing now? It's going to be him that's hungry all the time. No,

Jeff Jarvis (02:48:25):
It's all right. It is eight 15. Eight 16 here. And I got to be up at five. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:48:30):
[02:48:30] God. Quickly,

Jeff Jarvis (02:48:32):
Dakota, Philadelphia. Again,

Leo Laporte (02:48:34):
On the whole, I'd rather be dead.

Jeff Jarvis (02:48:37):
I got third prize. Yeah, I love Philly. I'm just joking. This is all, sorry. Sorry. I love Philly. To our twit flight earlier, a quick mention that LinkedIn is cool now. It says Bloomberg, 41% more content on the network.

Leo Laporte (02:48:56):
You know why year over year know why? Because it's all AI generated [02:49:00] now. I think a lot of people, Lisa loves LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn. A lot of people like,

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:05):
Yeah, I've

Leo Laporte (02:49:06):
Using it more to it's book and stuff. It's better than the hot stuff that's out there. Yeah. Good. And very

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:12):
Quickly, TikTok Corner after last week's discussion about Duke

Leo Laporte (02:49:15):
Mayo. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:17):
Verified here that Duke's Mayo, your right aunt is the thing to

Leo Laporte (02:49:21):
Use.

Ant Pruitt (02:49:21):
Damn right. It is.

Leo Laporte (02:49:22):
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you some guy eating mayo.

Speaker 7 (02:49:27):
The simplest ingredients. It has to be an heirloom heritage [02:49:30] tomato,

Leo Laporte (02:49:31):
Fully ripe. Where do you see how white the bread is? Oh my God. Yeah. That's good ingredients. That's the whitest Duke's

Speaker 7 (02:49:37):
Mayonnaise.

Leo Laporte (02:49:38):
Yeah, because it matches your bread. The same colors if

Speaker 7 (02:49:40):
You want. But to me, that's just a heavenly expression of summer.

Ant Pruitt (02:49:45):
Not a sponsor, but I

Leo Laporte (02:49:46):
Dig it.

Speaker 7 (02:49:46):
There's quite like it. And those types of bread. I love tomato sandwiches. Ones that really do,

Leo Laporte (02:49:50):
But I don't put it on that

Speaker 7 (02:49:51):
Bread, tomato sandwich, sourdough bread or some of the more refined types of bread. They just don't cut it for a tomato sandwich. Tell it

Ant Pruitt (02:49:59):
Brother.

Leo Laporte (02:50:00):
[02:50:00] Tell it. It's got to be you're wonder

Ant Pruitt (02:50:04):
Brand out of here. Nothing.

Jeff Jarvis (02:50:07):
I found that for you. An

Leo Laporte (02:50:09):
There you go. TikTok meets Duke's mail. And now ladies, gentlemen, we'll close things out with Ant's. Thing of the weed.

Ant Pruitt (02:50:16):
My thing, very quickly, I've spoken about Vegas Pro the video editor before. Very

Leo Laporte (02:50:21):
Powerful.

Ant Pruitt (02:50:21):
Yeah, it is continuing to get updates. The price is, you can get it now for 300 bucks for a perpetual license, just like [02:50:30] DaVinci Resolve. But in the latest update they have integrated with another company I've spoken of is Boris Effects, which has their chroma keying tools and their tracking tools, which is really, really, really good. So all of that integrated into the package just really helps step up this product and make them worthy competition in my opinion. And lastly, a shout out to my man, Mr. Harry Williams. He's doing the Freeform Living Light Expo this weekend in downtown [02:51:00] San Francisco, featuring one of his friends is an artist, and he'll also have some of his photos there. So if you're interested in checking out some art, feel free to check him out Saturday in San Francisco. But I'd rather you drive on up to Petaluma on Saturday. At the same time for our photo walk here, we

Leo Laporte (02:51:20):
Got us a photo

Ant Pruitt (02:51:21):
Walk in downtown Petaluma. So check that out. Six o'clock Saturday, right there in the little park next to Petaluma Pie Company.

Leo Laporte (02:51:30):
[02:51:30] Are you going to stop and get some pie on the

Ant Pruitt (02:51:33):
Way? No comment. Alright.

Leo Laporte (02:51:35):
Here is, it costs me $9 and 99 cents to export our fly through. Okay. Are you ready? From the Twitch Studios to your ears, what happened to me? Look at you. Look at, oh geez. He's invisible.

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:49):
Man. Allowed.

Ant Pruitt (02:51:50):
I disappeared.

Leo Laporte (02:51:52):
Yeah, things are disappearing. That was John running away. See him disappearing.

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:58):
Oh, that's weird.

Leo Laporte (02:51:58):
But it does smooth it out [02:52:00] very nicely. It's

Ant Pruitt (02:52:00):
Pretty,

Leo Laporte (02:52:02):
Yeah. This is the HD version for $10.

Ant Pruitt (02:52:05):
Man. This looks like old dude. Dude from, what's his name? Thanos

Leo Laporte (02:52:10):
Thanos is dissolving the TWIT Studios. I had to take a look at Burke's Nest. Oh, it's weird. What's happening? Oh, it does some weird

Ant Pruitt (02:52:19):
How much of it is from the original? Do you know?

Leo Laporte (02:52:22):
It took out, let's see, the original was a minute 37 and the final was 57 seconds. I mean,

Ant Pruitt (02:52:28):
Cropped out from the sides and the top.

Leo Laporte (02:52:29):
Oh, well [02:52:30] I, dude, look at your head. Are

Ant Pruitt (02:52:31):
You Benito? Are you

Leo Laporte (02:52:33):
Okay? I got to say the result is not impressive. Not impressive. No.

Ant Pruitt (02:52:38):
Maybe you went too

Leo Laporte (02:52:39):
Fast. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I'm probably, it's my fault. Sure. Holding around. Sorry for the 10 bucks he just went through. Hey, for you, anything that is Mr. Jeff Jarvis. You know, he's the director of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, [02:53:00] new Gutenberg and to the University of New York. If you want to buy his book, Gutenberg, what is it? The Gutenberg. Gutenberg parenthesis.com. Dot com. D do read it. It's actually great. It's great reading because the audio book isn't out yet. Lisa makes me read it to her every night to go to sleep.

Ant Pruitt (02:53:18):
I got new reading glasses. Thank you. So I could read it. Did you Really? Good for you. And started reading it last night.

Leo Laporte (02:53:24):
Ann's website, aunt pruitt.com/prince Get the prince because he's a prince [02:53:30] among men. Thank you Mr. Pruitt. Also doing great work in our club Tuit with all of the events that Dan Patterson event last night. I tell you what, we got some good ones coming up. If you're not a member of Club Twit. Oh

Ant Pruitt (02:53:41):
Yeah, club T. We a lot coming up the rest of the year, sir,

Leo Laporte (02:53:46):
You've been busy, busy, busy. That photo walk Saturday. Stacey's book Club. Daniel Suarez and Hugh Howie's fireside chat. Luca. You got John Scalzi

Ant Pruitt (02:53:56):
And Mr.

Leo Laporte (02:53:58):
How'd that

Ant Pruitt (02:53:58):
Happen? Mr. Scalzi? [02:54:00] He will be one the chatting with us in October,

Leo Laporte (02:54:04):
One of the greats. Wow. I'm looking forward to that. And then Anthony Nielsen will explain. He's our prompt master. He's amazing. An A m A with the great Renee Richie. And then December 7th, a day that will live in infamy, the old farts fireside. Chat with me, Jeff and Docs a day that will live in infamy.

Ant Pruitt (02:54:26):
I'm really looking forward to that.

Leo Laporte (02:54:28):
Thank you. Appreciate all you do in the club. [02:54:30] It's fantastic. Thank you, Mike. So great to see you. You are off for. Great to see you. Where next? Milan. Milan?

Mike Elgan (02:54:38):
Yes. Nice. And we're going to take a train across Italy and go to Venice and yeah, looking forward to it. As always. We have a lot of friends in Italy. Yeah, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:54:48):
Stay in touch when you're at somewhere with good internet. We'll get you on the show again. Outstanding. Yeah, I

Mike Elgan (02:54:53):
Would love to. Yes. Can I plug experiences?

Leo Laporte (02:54:57):
Yeah.

Mike Elgan (02:54:58):
Is that okay? Okay. [02:55:00] So if you, I don't know, my wife does gastro, nomadic experiences. These are food and wine experiences that typically last a week and the next one's coming up. We're all in Latin America, so we have Mexico City in November. We have Oaxaca in December, and we have El Salvador. First ever El Salvador

Leo Laporte (02:55:17):
Experience. I did the Oaxacan one Day of the Dead a couple of years ago. It was unbelievable. I cannot recommend these more highly. It's a small group. Mike and Amira are most wonderful [02:55:30] hosts. You'all staying in a beautiful mansion that they book. They take you to the best restaurants in town, the best chefs, the best wine, the best mezcal. It is unbelievable. And this is your first El Salvador trip. Of course, Amira, your wife is from El Salvador, so that's going to be pretty impressive.

Mike Elgan (02:55:48):
We've been looking forward to this for a long time and it's finally going to happen. So Latin America, like a lot of people are, if you're not familiar with Mexico City, Oaxaca or places like El Salvador, it's a little bit intimidating [02:56:00] to go to these places. We take you right into the center of the culture where we have all these friends that there's Julia and we also know everything. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. So if you'd like to join us on any of those, we'd love to have you. And those are the ones coming up next.

Leo Laporte (02:56:17):
Nice. Gastro nomad.net. It is. I cannot recommend it. It's not tourism, it's travel in the best sense of the word, where you're really in the community [02:56:30] and you get to be part of something warm and wonderful. And Michael will guarantee you that in none of these

Mike Elgan (02:56:34):
Experiences will you have chicken pot pie. Imagination one. You're correct, sir. You are correct. Or chicken La King. King. No

Leo Laporte (02:56:41):
Chicken. A

Mike Elgan (02:56:42):
King, king. It's not happening. Nope. Yeah, it's not happening.

Leo Laporte (02:56:46):
We had the best food in Oaxaca I've ever had. It was unbelievable. I still dream

Mike Elgan (02:56:50):
About it. So good. That's where I'd like to go. So good, so good. And the food in Mexico City, I can't wait, is comparable and excellent in its own way. In fact, [02:57:00] two restaurants in Mexico City are in the top 10 in the world for restaurants, two highest rated in North America or Mexico City, and they're both oaxacan influenced restaurants, which is I think is interesting. So thank you for that, Leo. And also a quick shout out, we talk a lot about ai. My son has a product chatterbox. If you're an educator, hello

Leo Laporte (02:57:21):
Chatterbox. Hello,

Mike Elgan (02:57:24):
Hello. If you're an educator or a parent, go to hello chatterbox.com and check out my son's product. [02:57:30] It's an excellent way to introduce kids to AI in a safe way that it's not going to lead to them being exposed to inappropriate material or them cheating or anything like that. It's all about learning about ai, which is very, very important we think for kids. So hello chatterbox.com.

Leo Laporte (02:57:45):
Yeah, he couldn't be better positioned for this AI revolution. It really is a way to learn, and you've added chat G P T Mid Journey, so kids are going to safely get to learn what these are and what they aren't. And [02:58:00] voice assistance too. It's really a cool project. Hello chatterbox.com and especially they

Mike Elgan (02:58:06):
Build the tool and then the student and or the teacher can use the tool for education on any subject. So it's really brilliant.

Leo Laporte (02:58:14):
This would be a very good gift to a local school. If you've got kids in an elementary school or you want to support your local elementary school, take a look at the classroom bundle. This would be such a great thing for the curriculum. [02:58:30] Yes. I just really think this is the kind of education, technology, education we really, really need. It's a K through six mostly. Can you do older kids?

Mike Elgan (02:58:41):
He typically looks at eight and up, and so it's usually middle school and up. And he actually has a lot of adults who use this universities in Europe that

Leo Laporte (02:58:54):
Use it and so on. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Thank you. Mike Algin. Thank you. At Pruitt. [02:59:00] Thank you, jj, thank you. Go have something to eat and thank you all for joining us. We do this weekend, Google every Wednesday, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 UTC at live twit tv. There's always something going on on twit Live. You can ask your assistant, whether it's a Google Assistant or an Echo, I suppose, Siri, I don't know. It might say, I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but you say, I want to listen to Twit Live. And you might have to say on YouTube or Tune in or something, but it'll play it for you. [02:59:30] And then you can listen. You can just have it on when we do the show or any other time. If you're watching Live Chat live IRC TWIT tv. Of course, club Twit has its own Discord, a great place to be.

(02:59:40):
We've recently reorganized that. I know it might be a little jarring to the existing Club TWIT members, but it's really better. You'll figure it out. We talked a little bit about it earlier. Maybe we'll record something so we can put it up there so people can see how to use the new Discord organization, same content, new organization. And then of course, after the fact [03:00:00] on-demand versions of this show at TWIT tv slash twig. That's our website, TWI tv slash twg. Or you can go to YouTube and look for this week in Google. There's a whole channel with every show on there, the video, or subscribe to audio or video in your favorite podcast client. The best way to get it. That way you get it automatically the minute it's available. Well, you've heard me mention Club Twit. If you're not in the club, please join. We'd love to have you. Twit tv slash club twit. Hey, that's it for this week in Google. [03:00:30] Have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Rod Pyle (03:00:35):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in Chief VAD Astor magazine. And each week I joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space. Books and tv, and we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to a slot in Elon's [03:01:00] Mars Rocket, join us on this in space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.