This Week in Google 759 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.

0:00:00 - Paris Martineau
Hey everybody. It's this week in Google. Leo's out and I'm filling in. We've got Jeff Jarvis as usual, and a special guest at Zitron this week on the show. We talk about AI and the new groundbreaking legislation that EU passed. We also talk about TikTok. Will it end up being forced to shut down or be sold? We also talk a lot about Cara Swisher and this great New York Times story about how automakers are sharing consumers driving behavior with insurance companies. All that and more coming up on the show. Stay tuned.

0:00:38 - Leo Laporte
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twig.

0:00:50 - Paris Martineau
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 759, recorded Wednesday, march 13th 2024. The posters will rise.

0:01:02 - Leo Laporte
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0:02:48 - Paris Martineau
It's time for twig this week. In Google, as you may have guessed, I am not Leo Laporte. In fact, I'm Paris Martinome. Leo has abandoned us this week, fleeing the country to the shores of Cabo. In his stead, I have seized the means of podcast production and God only knows what will follow. Laughing over there is you know who's not in Cabo this week? Jeff Jarvis.

0:03:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm never any place fun, and I, I for one, welcome my new master.

0:03:14 - Paris Martineau
Thank you, he's the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the school of journalism at the city university of New York. It feels so powerful to be able to cue that up.

0:03:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And it is right away. He just said Christ, I'm going nowhere, yeah.

0:03:36 - Paris Martineau
I was about to say speaking of people who are just right immediately on the pulse of the show. We've got Ed Citron here, ceo of EZPR and host of the Better Offline podcast. Ed, welcome.

0:03:48 - Ed Zitron
What's up? Thank you for having me. I will be Leo Laporte this episode.

0:03:53 - Paris Martineau
That's really important. We all, at some point, are going to need to take turns. Being Leo and you know, you never, you never are going to know which one of us is going to suddenly become an AI accelerationist, and that's really important, yeah.

0:04:07 - Ed Zitron
That's definitely what I'll be doing.

0:04:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

0:04:11 - Leo Laporte
When I messaged Ed to see if he wanted to come on the show.

0:04:14 - Paris Martineau
I was like we need a contrarian perspective to balance out the amount of shows we've had that are like AI should have access to everything.

0:04:25 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, no. Also, even if it did, what's it going to do? It doesn't do anything.

0:04:30 - Paris Martineau
Doesn't do anything. It's a great, great point.

0:04:34 - Ed Zitron
Well, the information just had a story about that, about how they're trying to tamp down the enthusiasm because it isn't doing enough.

0:04:43 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, earlier this week, my colleagues at the information reported that Amazon and Google are quietly trying to tamp down expectations around generative AI, and they are basically saying that the hype about the technology has gotten ahead of what it can actually do for customers at a reasonable price. Surprise, surprise.

0:05:05 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the sound of a balloon being blown up, ready to pop.

0:05:11 - Paris Martineau
I know somewhere out there on the beaches of Cabo, Leo is shaking his hand going, but my, you know, cool chat GPT thing for Emacs. Well, Leo, you're not here this week, paris.

0:05:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I'd love to know the background of the story, because they're trying to let air out of the balloon Right before it gets poppy. Was that the journalist saying? How do I ask this question? Are the companies putting out an active strategy of lowering expectations, or did the journalist kind of just hear this among investors and among others? That cool a little bit, oh.

0:05:56 - Ed Zitron
I actually just read this, so I'm very excited to talk about this. So a lot of it appeared to come from direct sales calls and conversations with internal people, from what I can understand, saying that they're having to do this and they're having to make people step back. And the weirdest one was this KPMG bought access to Microsoft Copilot for like 40 something thousand people, but when asked why, they were like I don't really know why we're using it. But you know, if our customers ask any questions, we should really know. Which is just complete nonsense, like this isn't the balloon. I don't even think the balloon is being deflated. I think these companies are trying to quietly deflate it while keep it publicly interesting.

0:06:44 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I think there's three ways right that they're deflated. One is well, it can't do everything we said it could do. Two is well, the impact won't be as profound as we said it would be. And three is the revenue won't be as earthshatter as we hinted that it would be Right.

0:07:02 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, and I think the thing that people don't realize is the media is kind of not helped with this exactly either is, even if it gets, the biggest problem isn't just that it's not doing enough, it's that even when it gets profitable, when it helps people get profitable, I should say what if it's only doing like two to four percent more profit? Well, how about that? Because Generative AI right now is exceedingly unprofitable, very, very unprofitable for the companies to run.

0:07:29 - Paris Martineau
It's so costly.

0:07:30 - Ed Zitron
And all of it is flowing back to Google and Microsoft. Open AI and Anthropoc are basically in the pocket. They both agreed to their own versions of exclusive contracts with them. So, by the way, this is all a system where just Microsoft invested what? $10 billion to basically buy $10 billion of revenue. Same deal with Google and Anthropoc for about $3 billion. But the other thing in there was they mentioned this Clana story that Clana saw $40 million of saving in there. It's not what Clana said. Clana said there was a specific word that I'm not going to bring up for you because this is really important and very strange to not seeing this one use. It was let's see profit, profit improvement, an estimated drive of $40 million USD in profit improvement to Clana in 2024. So, by the way, that does not say profit and it does not say savings. It says estimated in 2024, which is the year we're currently in.

0:08:32 - Paris Martineau
And what does profit improvement mean? I've never heard that.

0:08:37 - Ed Zitron
It means that it could theoretically save money somewhere that could contribute to the top line profit at some point in some form to a company called Clana that's already not particularly profitable because their entire business model is based on people getting free money and then making affiliate dollars.

0:08:54 - Jeff Jarvis
So all the very off 700 people and blamed that on AI rather than on management, Dave.

0:09:01 - Ed Zitron
And blamed it on AI management or perhaps not giving everyone 0% interest loans all the time, right, right. So it's the same real credit checks, it's the same problem that a firm is facing. It's just it all feels like we're being conned on some level.

0:09:20 - Jeff Jarvis
This is interesting because if you look back at the 2000 crash, it was about using VC money to buy audience that wasn't really legitimately there. Yes, so now they're using VC money to buy what?

0:09:34 - Ed Zitron
Well, that's the interesting thing. They're using VC money to find a new way to make money from their customers. It's the same deal. It will actually take a step back. Who is they in this question? Because, if it's Microsoft and Google, what they're doing is investing money in AI companies that then become dependent on them for their models to run. So all Microsoft and Google are doing is buying revenue. They just that. Most of the 10 billion that was invested in open AI was cloud credits, and Thropik agreed just before they took 3 billion from Google to be exclusively using Google's cloud. So they're using AI services. So in their case, it's just they've created a new money stream. It's kind of akin to like the cloud boom in the 2010s.

0:10:17 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's an old model's equity for revenue.

0:10:20 - Ed Zitron
Yes, but in the startups case, I don't know. I don't know what these people there were some really like. There was some very niche like AI things that are kind of cool, but you see it in Snap, you see it in these big Facebooks talking about generative AI. What's it going to do for Facebook? My bigger theory is that Google wants to replace Google search with generative AI anyway, but that's a whole other point. Yeah, no, no, no, wait. I wrote a whole thing about Jeff. You got read it. I thought it was interesting.

0:10:50 - Paris Martineau
In the article my colleagues wrote. They mentioned that at AWS they recently gave their sales people kind of a reality check on the tech. They had an analyst come in during annual kickoff event a couple of weeks ago and say that the industry is at the peak of the hype cycle and that he anticipates the hype could veer into quote a trough of disillusionment in the coming years as customers realize generative AI's limitations. Damn we have a downer tone for a company presentation about selling AI.

0:11:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I had this vision that at the headquarters of the information there's a big dial and the BSometer.

0:11:34 - Paris Martineau
No, that's a really good idea for our interior design. It is.

0:11:39 - Jeff Jarvis
And so how far on the BSometer? Now, I mean it does because I'd imagine, especially the information you two had. But it's a larger organization of all the wealth and resources the information has. But at some point you just all have conversations saying is this real, is this going anywhere?

0:11:56 - Ed Zitron
I don't know if I want to comment on that. Well, on that one, I got some thoughts about some of the major decisions, but I'd be very curious what the information has to say if Facebook moves into generative AI. I'd be looking forward to Jessica Lesson's coverage around that.

0:12:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean I can't speak to her or any other individual employees' thoughts on it, but for me, I think it's I think I've been quite clear on the podcast I think it's quite a lot of hype. It reminds me of the you know whole metaverse craze or the crypto and NFT crazes. It is just the hype cycle of the moment and I haven't yet really seen any evidence that this is a revolutionary technology in the way it is being described, and I assume that this is just kind of the first moment where we are starting to see the eventual fall of this.

0:12:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo's running down the beach right now to get back on the show and scream.

0:12:52 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say Leo is pulling up a big phone and trying to dial in to tell us in Leo, Leo, Ed for context has been radicalized ever since he went on a walk with an unnamed AI acceleration as to convince him that in five to 10 years, AI will be everything.

0:13:10 - Ed Zitron
Did he take anything with that person? Because that's like an ayahuasca. No, I'm joking.

0:13:15 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's what I'm only saying. It could be.

0:13:18 - Ed Zitron
The big difference, I think, between this and like metaverse and crypto, is there is a product here, but the problem is that everyone's kind of in on the idea of AI being big, in the same way that I don't remember Paris, like early 2010s, you had the big software as a service push and everyone loved it. It was a new way that we could make money off of software that people you could sell into the enterprise. There was actually the thing that tech never really had consistently with the enterprise was a structured way to sell a contract based thing that had an obvious bill of sale. You could sell an SLA on it. It was great. Ai feels more like the cloud boom, which was good, until you realize the same level of hype from the metaverse did stink on it, which is AI is going to automate everything. Ok, how Well, it will. Ok, but how will it do that? Integrations and API awesome, great, but what does that mean? I do not know. Are you paid $35 million to me? I work for McKinsey. I was just here to tell you that AI is good, but the thing is with the valley right now is right now.

Everyone likes this idea because it's a new thing. It's a new thing everyone can do. It's a new thing that everyone can integrate. It can see a way you can think through how will I apply to a business I work at? Here's the thing I don't like I can automate that. That makes sense. That's a logical thing to think of no-transcript when you really sit and think about the actual technical side, can it? How much of the thing you're trying to automate Couldn't be messed up?

Because that's a big but messing up things is a big part of generative AI. And then, even if you work out A way, this can directly help you and integrate it. It is expensive, it is unprofitable for the service provider. Reliable way, it's unreliable. But even if you find the boundaries and there's a hilarious Wall Street journal article a few weeks ago when they were saying, yeah, amazon and Google, that open AI and Google are trying to sell their generative AI solutions and they keep running into the problem of hallucinations and then they said what could we do to fix this?

I think Darryl was like, yeah, we could just tell the AI not to answer if it isn't confident, which then led to another quote from someone saying, yeah, but at some point the AI will just go. I don't know what. I can't. I can't help you, man. I'm sorry, I don't trust myself. It's just so strange because Everyone there was this insane amount of money. No, mark Andreessen should be laughed at publicly for the money that went into, like character AI, but not as hard as the money that went into flow without a new man, I should add. But so much money's gone into these systems, but Where's the actual thing? Where's the? Where's the thingy? Where's the thingy that I use now? Where is the essential thingy now?

0:16:03 - Paris Martineau
I don't see what you don't think. A chat GPT is the creme de la creme. I.

0:16:09 - Ed Zitron
Don't know what it's for. I would love someone to tell me how this would trick. I am lazy, I don't want to do stuff. If the computer can do the thing for me, I'd be so happy.

0:16:18 - Paris Martineau
But I've used chat GPT for anything you. I've tried, I've tried, I've tried to use it for exactly one thing I was. I forget what I was trying to look up something maybe related to niche Healthcare industry terms for a story I was working on and I was having a really hard time summarizing it like a human person Right, eventually ask chat, gpt, a number of different questions and it kind of helped me.

0:16:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I used to do the same thing for the second time. Today, my best use and I've said this on the show before is to summarize Stratetry.

I just put it all in there and it gives me two nice paragraphs. You know and I think I think your point is something here that Part of the presumption and presumption of that and that information story is that so many people see AI as a method to To efficiency. That's the mistake, because that presumes that this general machine can do things we do right. Somewhere in the rundown I put up Zach Seward, who's the head of AI and the newsroom at the Times. Now he did a really good presentation at South by Southwest, which I haven't been to for years. It had no FOMO for all these years, but I would like to have heard that. But as I put it up, and it's all about Finding anomalies and data, that's a journalistic way to look at it, but you know, analysis of data and finding anomalies and patterns Now it seems to work pretty well because you're it's you're giving it to yourself for judgment, but replacing jobs. No efficiency, so you can write more power points. That's not efficient. That's spamming the world. I Don't know what the efficiency comes from.

0:17:52 - Ed Zitron
I agree, and I would love it to apply my date, my PR firm job. There's a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of boring documents, a lot of anodyne copy. You think this would be what these things were for, but every time I ask it to do stuff, it gives me Possibly the most half-assed work I've ever seen. Just like you have all of it, like you're throwing several zoos, 100 cats and a few trees in there just for this query and you can't even give me like a filled-in spreadsheet. I can I can't upload a spreadsheet and have you tell me what's in it. I thought this was the very basic Thing this could do. It's not quite as infuriating as crypto, where there was nothing.

0:18:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.

0:18:31 - Ed Zitron
Yes, absolutely nothing same with the metaverse, and I grew up and I think about MMORPGs, nfts as well. This thing does something. But at the same time, despite everyone losing their nut over Sam Altman, conning the nonprofit board into reinstating him with several other bebop and rock steady style cronies, everyone lost their Reverbial over that. But this company is yet to prove itself. I saw a journalist say it's so beautiful. By the way, on the night that Sam Altman was brought back felt sick to my son.

0:19:07 - Paris Martineau
Oh my god, disgusting disgusting.

0:19:10 - Ed Zitron
It's disgraceful to be like that, especially for like a goblin like Sam Altman Got a really nasty little man. I'm sorry, sam Do the nasty also, by the way. Redditors, they made nothing off the IPO, nothing off the reddit IPO. Sam Altman gonna made a couple hundred million dollars. It's nice to see the good guys win, huh.

0:19:29 - Paris Martineau
Of course. I mean, I think, part of the issue is that when people are talking about AI, they describe it. People much like our gone host, leo gone, describe it as a thinking, almost feeling, machine. They humanize it in a way and Project intelligence onto it and with it is just completely right, untethered from reality.

0:19:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. I use this, this phrase, today right at a new Premise or beginning for my book, the group reprithesis, on sale now in paperback this fall. So I had to write about that and I called it the literate, more in our reaction to it than the reality. But we see it as the literate machine. But oh, it can, we can speak to it and they can speak to us. And that's what's so shocking to humans and media is just that it uses our language not always well, not our Lord knows, not accurately.

0:20:26 - Ed Zitron
But, but it doesn't know anything, it's no, I agree.

0:20:29 - Paris Martineau
I agree it doesn't. It doesn't know what it's saying.

0:20:31 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, I'm agree. Just to be clear, I'm agreeing with you. Like it's, it doesn't know anything. It's why everyone's like, oh well, the future versions of Sora video generator will look so much better. Now, they weren't, they weren't. They're not gonna look bad. Why? Because of the hallucinations, which are a Feature, not a product. These things don't know if you can't tell it that a monkey has four leg, sorry, two arms, two legs.

0:20:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm a Lead.

0:20:56 - Ed Zitron
That either yeah, I'm just regular stupid. I meant to be able to learn things.

0:21:02 - Paris Martineau
It's not making any claims about being intelligent here.

0:21:04 - Ed Zitron
I think, yeah, no one has that mistake, but it's gonna keep making these errors because even if it makes it and this is the thing that's helpful with the AI generated video Especially, it's we don't realize how perfect the world around us is and that the world around us as we interpret it through basic semiotics, science of science, and we know what a thing that we know what a monkey looks like. If a monkey had three horns, we'd be like what the hell? That's a strange looking monkey, but we know it was a monkey based on some of the features. But when you get down to basic things like how a human being walks, how something we know moves, and you try and do that and you make even little mistakes, people know that people aren't stupid and I actually think that that's a big thing that Generative AI people aren't realizing. People are not done.

0:21:49 - Paris Martineau
They're gonna see, they see it's not do anything, and this is this is also one of the problems I have with the claim that Sora is going to replace filmmaking and generative AI is going to completely, you know, wipe out the filmmaking industry. As we know it, filmmaking is a to be a director. There's a very high bar. Directors of major movies are particular when it comes to the shots that they have. You're not going to be able to, you know, describe a Very specific shot as well as get the sort of performance from your AI actors with the same ease you would just, standing in the room with two humans that you have hired for a specific role. It's not going to be more complicated.

0:22:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Imagine tiktok with Sora. Right, there's stuff that that in in in lay hands Can do more than it could. I think that all of this should. It's not a business, but I think it would have it all been put out there as a creativity machine and that's all it does is make stuff up and you can make stuff up with it, and it's gonna be good or bad and you can have fun with it. That's cool. I got a problem with that. I think there's a lot there, but it's this efficiency machine that's gonna replace search and replace people with jobs and be smarter than us is such. Yes, I got to be on the Dan Libertard podcast this morning. French for the bastard.

0:23:14 - Paris Martineau
That mean you've done now three podcasts today in one day.

0:23:17 - Jeff Jarvis
In one day.

0:23:18 - Paris Martineau
Yes.

0:23:18 - Ed Zitron
I am, I did four on a last Monday. I've been doing the promo tour for this damn show.

0:23:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, keep going so I use language there that I'm not allowed to use here. But you know they can they start asking about. Well, I know I sense all the big swinging Richard of the AI boys quite like this.

0:23:39 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, and I think the the reason I think that Google will do search with this is because is not because it's a good idea, but because I think that Google wants to. I think Google has made a big mess. They made a big stinky. They've turned the web into a big hole with their allowance of SEO and and the thing is putting aside AI spam. By the way, google is at fault because they are the ones that have catered to the freaks.

The SEO industry and the people in charge of the Media are the ones that have been trying to dance Google's song. Dance to Google song. I think Google will do a generative bot that turns them into a form of ISP. I think they want Google search to be much more controlled. I think they wanted to chew up and regurgitate the internet. To be clear, I think this is a horrible product, but I think that Google and Sundar Pasha in particular, have just become so scummy and so actively abusive of men, the people on the internet, the just. I think that this is their eventual endgame. I don't think it's good, I don't think it's Efficient, I don't think it's even right most of the time. But guess what? Google need more money. Google must show growth. The rock economy must survive. We must always have more growth in tech, even if it's unsustainable, even if it's horrifying for human beings and indeed the human capital working at these companies. Well, that's depressing, yeah, I mean, world is a vampire.

0:25:01 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it's part of what you get when you have to have companies that are always showing quarterly growth. That's right.

Speaking of AI. Today, european lawmakers approved what's being called the world's most comprehensive legislation yet on AI, setting out sweeping rules for developers of AI systems and new restrictions on how the tech can be used. It's called the AI act, and the rules are set to take effect gradually over the next several years and apply to all AI products sold in the EU market, regardless of where they were developed. Some of the notable parts of this include their prohibitions in the legislation, including a bans on the use of emotional recognition AI in schools, in the workplace and on untargeted scraping of images for facial recognition databases. The new rules will eventually require providers of general purpose AI models, like chat, gpt, to have up to date technical documentation and publish a summary of the content they use to train the model, and makers of the most powerful AI models which is what the EU is deemed to have kind of systemic risk will be required to put those models through a state of the art AI State of the art safety evaluations and notify regulators of any serious incidents that occur with the models and implement, I guess, mitigations for potential risks or cybersecurity production. What do you guys think about this?

Ed you first. I think the EU is the only force that can stop the tech industry. I don't know.

0:26:28 - Ed Zitron
I haven't read the Fundament of the Bill, but I do think regulation is now a big part of the technology, and I think, in particular, they need to start saying how these models are trained and what they're trained on, because it's pretty hard to make these things forget. You can't really do it, you just have to revert the training data, and I think that I'm surprised Sam Altman hasn't created the anti-butlery in Jihad against Europe for this, because this is anything that makes open AI responsible for the AI. Open AI responsible for their training data is fatal for that company. There's a reason that Mark Andreessen was freaking out about the idea of AI companies having to abide by copyright. Same reason that Open AI is so freaked out by them while they're paying people because if there's anything that sets precedent here, they're screwed.

You can't unring the bell of training. They will have to probably start again to make it. They can't really prove that it's not there anymore, and if you look at Sora, a great deal of it looks very, very similar to a lot of Shutterstock stuff too. So I think that I don't know if they have a relationship with them, but I'm pretty sure that all of these models are based on some form of plagiarism. The E-Rocks I love that they're doing stuff like this. It's better than the nothing we're getting over here, so I'll disagree.

0:27:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to say I'm finally, that I've finally summoned someone on this podcast.

0:28:01 - Paris Martineau
Who agrees with me?

0:28:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you want to go first. You go first. No, I'll hear your rebuttal. Alright, I think the legislation is better than it could have been. They were talking about outlawing open source, which would be disastrous. It would be regulatory capture they were talking about. I think that the reason Open AI is not screaming is because it is regulatory capture. The big companies with the big money will be able to deal with this legislation and regulation, and newcomers won't, and so that's why you always hear Microsoft just saying regulate us, yes, please, and that's what Zuckerberg says too. That's what Open AI says as well. So I think there's issues there. I also think that Europe constantly says we're ahead on regulation, but nothing else, and then they come back around and they whine why don't we have our innovative companies? Because they don't invest, they don't do it and they regulate reflexively the problem. I think in the end, I'm fine. We have some regulation. The regulation is not bad, but I also put it on.

0:29:05 - Paris Martineau
He says begrudgingly.

0:29:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's a little bit a lot worse. That's my view, but I don't think it's going to do much and I think in its later stages it's a very flimsy negligee on a. I'll stop that metaphor.

0:29:22 - Ed Zitron
It moves, but I'm not going to say that.

0:29:27 - Paris Martineau
Jeff immediately retreats. It's his third podcast of the day and it's gotten too much for him.

0:29:33 - Jeff Jarvis
So I put up this thing from AI, snake Oil, the Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, which makes the argument that I've made on the show before, that guardrails are impossible at the model level. They say that AI safety is not a characteristic of models, it's a general interest machine. It's like saying, gutenberg, you're responsible for everything coming off the press. It's like expecting Microsoft to tell us as we're using Word no, you can't type that. I'm programmed to not let you type that. You can't do that Obviously absurd, and so putting the responsibility level in the model isn't going to be effective, and so it's a veil that makes people think we're doing something and we're going to protect ourselves from this dangerous technology. The problem I have with it is that no, we should be honest about it that you cannot protect yourself from this technology and the bad things that people will try to do with it. Now deal with that.

0:30:34 - Paris Martineau
The thing I think that is kind of interesting about this legislation is it's kind of tiered. Originally, I believe, it was set to exclusively focus on developers of what they call high risk AI systems, which is kind of a catch all term that I guess. I'm going to break this down from a really interesting website I think the EU put together called Artificial Intelligence Acteu. That has kind of what looks like it's almost an AI generated summary of the act itself, but I'm guessing it probably isn't. But in their prohibited AI systems list, you see you've got a couple tiers. One is prohibited AI systems, where it's like AI can't be used for these sort of things, which is like compiling facial recognition databases, inferring emotions, social scoring, stuff like that.

But then most of what this act is targeting is developers of so-called high risk AI systems, which is like if they profile individuals or include automated processing of personal data to assess various aspects of a person's life, like work performance, economic situation or health, or if it is somehow related to EU law, if it is like the government is using something related to the system, which I think is kind of an important distinction. The vast majority of these regulations are focused on these type of AI developers and companies, which is a very specific subset for the general AI systems like a chat, gpt or something that is. The regulations being imposed here are of a much lower standard. It's like they've got to provide technical documentation and whatnot, and for free, which is why because I know I think Leo also often talks about how this is going to squash free, open AI initiatives. For free and open licensed AI models, they only need to comply with copyright restrictions and publish the training data summary, which I think is fair.

0:32:47 - Ed Zitron
Also, I think at this point you should realize Leo, you're not here, so of course, my perfect favourite argument where the person cannot respond. But very basic thing here is if you're worried about little AI models, you should already have realized they've already failed their screwed, these massive deals between open AI and anthropic and the major cloud providers and the fact that they can afford to buy these massive data sets 60 million dollars of Reddit, for example with Google, the war's already been lost. The little models can never train at the scale they never will be able to. But do they need to? Well kind of.

0:33:25 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the stochastic parents argument is that that was all big swinging Richard, that you didn't need to have the biggest models. But that's Sam.

0:33:33 - Ed Zitron
Orton. Who's saying that? Sam Orton is the one pushing back now saying, oh yeah, you don't need big models anymore, you need small models.

0:33:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Yann LeCun says the same thing.

0:33:44 - Ed Zitron
He is. One is just an extremely annoying character, and I disagree, nevertheless putting that aside, otherwise I'll just spend the whole time getting mad at them. It's just.

0:33:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, wait, a second wait, wait who's the most irritating person in AI? I want to hear each of you answer that oh what's his name?

0:34:05 - Ed Zitron
The one that said there would be a Bitcoin virus?

0:34:10 - Paris Martineau
Could be any number of people. I guess my answer is Elon Musk, even though I'd argue that he's not in AI. That's a cheat. It's the easiest answer and just because Grock, sometimes I'll just be alone at home thinking, should be thinking about normal things related to my life, and I'll just remember the existence of Grock AI.

0:34:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it exist? Here's a question does Grock really exist?

0:34:36 - Ed Zitron
Yes, grock exists on x slash rate minute stop is the Elon Musk website, and it's great, because every time you see a screenshot of it burning someone, you're like trying to roast them. It does the same thing. It says oh boy, where do I start? It's so bad. That's how you know it's a sick burn, ed.

That's how you know. It's written by Elon Musk. Yeah, he's just like. This is a terrible insult. I'm going to say, oh boy, where do I start here? Um yeah, so I'm trying to find this guy because he was a less wrong guy and he pops up. He's like an AI face. God damn it. I'm going to be thinking about this for a while. I think Yann's a pretty good choice, but I think Sam Altman I truly think Sam Altman is the most annoying because he gets away with it. He also does not sound eloquent. I don't know if you heard Sam Altman speak, but for the smartest guy in the bloody room he sounds pretty dull. I don't even mean like dulling a, just not a good public speaker thing. He just doesn't. Oh, he kind of seems like Chad GPD. He's just kind of mediocre. He's like, yeah, we'll get big in like four years and everyone in CNBCcom immediately just copy paste the transcript, publish and it's just. It frustrates me. Sam Altman frustrates me a great deal. He's fallen. That man has failed upwards like seven times.

0:36:01 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it is still mind-boggling to me that he was ousted from the board, ends up getting reinstated and accumulates even more power.

0:36:12 - Ed Zitron
We still don't know why. We still do not know why. Nope, we don't, we haven't. It could be to do with his sister, we'll never know. Could be to do with any number of things. Well, hey, maybe it was the fact that he wanted to turn the non-profit wing of open AI into a profitable thing, and I put Larry Summers on the board, so no worries there.

0:36:32 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, this week Nothing at us. Bloomberg reported that. Oh sorry.

0:36:37 - Ed Zitron
Eliza Yudowski that Eliza Yudowski, eliza Yudowski, eliza.

0:36:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Yudowski, eliza Yudowski. He's a very annoying. Because not only that, he is the worst, worst, worst of the doomers In the Journal of Moral Panic, otherwise known as Time Magazine.

0:36:53 - Paris Martineau
That's where he writes his screams hey Moral Panic drink, drink.

0:36:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I think Gutenberg deserves a beer, and Moral Panic wine is my view here. Or vodka, oh God, diet Coke. So Yudowski is the one who's out there screaming that paperclips will kill us all, yeah, and that he's the worst of the doomers. He is the worst of the doomers. He's in the New Yorker story with 99.9% that it's going to destroy us and has to stop us.

0:37:23 - Ed Zitron
And he's just he would love that he's a big fan of Rocco's Basilisk, also known as the Weenies version of Pascal's Wager. God, this paperclips. What is Rocco's Basilisk?

0:37:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, this is beyond our podcast score here. I think this is oh.

0:37:40 - Ed Zitron
Rocco's Basilisk. Is this thing that we need to start building or working on or pleasing a theoretical machine, god, Before it comes into existence, otherwise it will punish us If we do not do so. It is such a dumb ass's story. It's exactly the kind of like dumb guys intellectual exercise Like what if a computer was scary? What if the computer was mad at me? Oh no, I'm so smart for thinking of this. It's a recursive intellectual exercise.

0:38:09 - Paris Martineau
I do think it's quite bold to reinvent religion in the year of our lord in 2024.

0:38:17 - Ed Zitron
It's the same thing, I just.

0:38:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Rocco's Basilisk is controversial for a few reasons. It relies on a lot of speculation about the nature of future AI and its motivations as if it has any motivations. The idea of AI punishing people in the past for not helping create it is seen by many as illogical. Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, but it's exactly the same. They're doing time travel too. I didn't know that.

0:38:43 - Paris Martineau
Wait, I'm traveling, then now.

0:38:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm into it, it's time travel, that's fun what a big way to time. That's just for you to add the time travel into the tea. Oh God.

0:38:52 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's really smart. I think we need to add more letters into test grill. I think we should make it more complicated. I dealing.

0:39:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah I. Your challenge while Leo's gone, is to get test grill in the title of the show today. That'll really be nice.

0:39:05 - Paris Martineau
Oh, he would fly back from Cabo to stop us.

0:39:08 - Ed Zitron
It's in the test grills.

0:39:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that.

0:39:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So wait, wait, wait, wait. So, kowsky, I didn't know this. I'm the co-founder of Less Wrong.

0:39:18 - Ed Zitron
Yes, great place If you want to find a bunch of libertarian guys Barely covering up their racism and talking about subjects with less articulation in the redditor or a stack overflow member and a little less anger than the average hack and use user. It's a very useless place to go If you want to meet a bunch of people that you'll never want to meet in real life.

0:39:44 - Paris Martineau
Wow, yeah, on the Wikipedia page, for Less Wrong, the first subhead under history is Rocco's Basilisk.

0:39:55 - Ed Zitron
The biggest thing they've created is a version of Pascal's Wager. That sucks. What's great is you? Go on there. Now let's read some of these titles Meta-honesty, firming up, honest, these edge cases. Oh my god, go outside.

0:40:12 - Paris Martineau
These people have never touched grass in their lives. There's another one that says no one in my org puts money into their pension Notes from the prompt factory. There is way too much serendipity, Okay.

0:40:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Jesus. Here's the problem. These people are getting huge amounts of money. They're using money on the major college campuses to do clubs and fellowships and classes around this crap. They're getting the ear of legislators and they have the ear of media and they're idiots.

0:40:52 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, honestly, it's like the J Rosen scam, but for AI it's kind of cool, just like you do.

0:41:00 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was gonna say you're talking to a. J. Rosen adjacent here.

0:41:08 - Jeff Jarvis
And why you shooting. You know.

0:41:12 - Ed Zitron
J Rosen is at least an academic, at least he has academic cred, at least he has spoken to reporters and knows them. These people are just like, yeah, thought about it really hard. Wouldn't be scary if the computer did this? And everyone goes what, god damn holy crap, what if the computer was smart? But if you look at the wider media, they're buying a not much more sophisticated story from Sam Altman. Sam Altman is like, yeah, it's gonna work everything. It could be super smart and it'll work all the stuff he's about that vague. I love these. Ha, I went on that's wrong.

0:41:46 - Jeff Jarvis
They're just wonderful. I want t-shirts for every one of them. How could I have thought that faster? The parable of the fallen pendulum. What could a policy banning AGI look like? There isn't any AGI, it's not gonna happen. Give it up. Notes from a prompt factory. Oh my lord the serendipity, one is a beautiful one.

0:42:06 - Ed Zitron
There's one about the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, because these guys love to think about stuff and get really close to saying something racist.

0:42:17 - Paris Martineau
Highlights from Lex Friedman's interview of Yama Lacoon. Yeah.

0:42:23 - Ed Zitron
Wow.

0:42:26 - Jeff Jarvis
What a how to have, paulie genetically screened children.

0:42:30 - Ed Zitron
Lex Friedman is so funny though.

0:42:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh he's awful Because he buys all the BS.

0:42:36 - Ed Zitron
Remind me who Lex.

0:42:37 - Paris Martineau
Friedman is.

0:42:39 - Ed Zitron
So imagine, if you will, a very pallid, boring man that nevertheless has become one of the most successful tech podcasters. I will depose him.

0:42:49 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's true, I have seen you tweeting about better offline rising in the ranks. You've got to take over Lex's spot.

0:42:54 - Ed Zitron
I will take him on by doing a good job. Unlike him, he does these two three hour long interviews with people.

0:43:00 - Paris Martineau
It gets Eala Musk, he got Jeff Bezos and he gets Bajali, of course, how many posts of the All In podcast do you think you could take in a fight at?

0:43:10 - Ed Zitron
How many members or posts.

0:43:13 - Paris Martineau
How many hosts? How many hosts?

0:43:16 - Ed Zitron
Couldn't take Shemath, Shemath's rib. I'll take Jason and David at the same time. Maybe you could beat them in a cookoff. Oh, absolutely those guys. You know those guys make some depressing looking food. But Lex Friedman, what he does is he does these three hour long interviews that are the most dot-n-a talks like this the entire time. He is also just one of the least articulate men to ever walk the surf.

0:43:39 - Leo Laporte
I want to read him actual.

0:43:41 - Ed Zitron
I don't know why people like him. I don't know why people like him at all, but let me read you this question, the transcript of the question he asked Jeff Bezos, and this is the exact way he said it you went to Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist. What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become? Why you're not Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist? Oh no, brother man, brother man, and to be clear, he is reading this question of a piece of paper.

0:44:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, slowly, slowly, slowly. He's a member of the slow talkers of America, maybe he's popularity.

0:44:25 - Paris Martineau
Maybe his popularity comes from the culture of people listening to podcasts on like 1.5 speed.

0:44:32 - Ed Zitron
I think it's that and, yeah, you could probably listen to this at like 8 speed and get it he thinks being slow makes you sound smarter. I think he's speaking slowly, because that's how fast the information comes out.

0:44:43 - Paris Martineau
Let me read you the description of his YouTube channel, Lex Friedman. Conversations about science, technology, history, philosophy and the nature of intelligence, Consciousness, love and power. Alright, dude. Speaking of which we're going to have to go to an ad break. So get your last Lex Friedman thoughts in Any final thoughts guys?

0:45:09 - Jeff Jarvis
You could play 30 seconds of him interviewing Tucker Carlson.

0:45:13 - Ed Zitron
No, I don't think we can do that actually, alright, but just to tie this up, he does these very long-winded things where he gives platforms to incredulous freaks like Bajali, like Tucker. He lets Elon Musk go. Oh yes, there's very big problems with the immigration and the works and he's so dull, but he's also a. He's basically a right-wing guy. He's basically just another right-wing tech guy and that is a problem. The two of the biggest podcasts are center, right, right wing. That sucks, that's bad. Anyway, enjoy the ad break. Enjoy the ads.

0:45:49 - Leo Laporte
This episode of this Week in Google, brought to you by Rocket Money, by the way. Thank you very much, paris Martino, for filling in for me while I'm on vacation. I did want to come back and tell you about Rocket Money because they have saved me. They've saved me enough to pay for this vacation. Come to think of it, did you know nearly 75% of people have subscriptions? They have forgotten about Subscriptions. Yeah, you know things like fitness apps and streaming services and delivery services. When I started using Rocket Money, I couldn't believe how much I was paying for that I completely forgotten about. I found campaign contributions from 2022 that I was still paying monthly and I I canceled it with Rocket Money. I found just the other day a WordPress subscription I'd forgotten about, got $300 back Thanks to Rocket Money.

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0:47:46 - Paris Martineau
Thanks, leo. This morning the House approved a bill to force TikTok to either cut ties with bite dance or be banned in the US. The bill is now moving to the Senate, where its prospects are less clear. Its passage to the House was crazy fast it was only introduced last week and passed by a House panel on a unanimous vote. Tiktok has tried to lobby against the bill, asking users. Whenever you use the app, you've probably seen the pop-up come up. It's asking users to call their representative to protest. Apparently, that's already alienated some Congress people who would have guessed. Biden has said that he'll sign it if it reaches his desk, but it's unclear if that will happen. If it gets there, implementation will likely be delayed because TikTok's expected to file suit to block it. Meanwhile, china's also expected to block bite dance as attempts to sell TikTok if it gets to this. Jeff, I think before the show you were saying you're going to get mad about this. So get mad, yeah.

0:48:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I actually heard someone on the mess that we see this morning say well, yeah, it was Mikey Sherrill from New Jersey who said TikTok is against free speech. So what are we going to do? We're going to take away the free speech. The House logic here is just awful. It's moral panic Drink, everybody Meeting political nihilism. It is ridiculous as morning Joe goes on about all the Chinese propaganda I don't see any Chinese propaganda there and give some credit to citizens that in a democracy we can hear it and laugh at it and get rid of it. We're not sheeple, and a lot of people and a lot of voices who otherwise are not heard in big old white mass media now have their stage and they're going to take it away, and so it pisses me off majorly.

0:49:44 - Paris Martineau
Could we get the moral panic clip to play folks? Nice, I got a bad feeling about this. There we go.

0:49:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you.

0:49:56 - Paris Martineau
It's a moral panic everybody.

0:49:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Cue the moral panic.

0:50:00 - Paris Martineau
I think one of the most interesting things about this is I mean, this isn't the first time the US has tried to ban TikTok, but apparently TikTok was blindsided by the bill. The Wall Street Journal reported that just two weeks ago, executives from TikTok's US operations flew to their company's headquarters in Singapore to meet with their bosses and tell them everything was A-OK with the app and that they totally weren't in danger of being banned. Obviously a big miscalculation Inside TikTok. Some leaders were apparently aware that lawmakers were working on legislation, but they didn't expect it would win so much support so quickly. Some of the people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

0:50:46 - Jeff Jarvis
What do? You think young voters are going to say about this.

0:50:49 - Ed Zitron
They don't understand the nuances of it and they're going to get mad that they can't watch it.

0:50:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, they're probably going to blame the Biden administration and be quite pissed. I thought it was interesting. My colleague, kaya Yuryaf, who writes our Creator Economy newsletter, was at South by Southwest this week and kind of did a little scene report from the various panels with creators. Apparently, creators are totally unfazed with this. A TikToker named Remy had said at a panel. A lot of creators are probably ignoring this right now because we've heard it so many times and it's possible that it could happen, which I mean I think that that's probably the approach that most users in the app are taking. This is not the first time. This happened many times over the last four years. That TikTok, the ooh TikTok's going to be banned, panic. I don't know. Do you think that they actually have the political clout to do this? This time? It seems unlikely that the Senate would approve this, but I also wouldn't have expected the House to unanimously push this through.

0:51:55 - Ed Zitron
I think there's momentum behind it. I'm not a policy guy, but clear the House surprisingly fast. It popped up surprisingly fast. I just don't know if any of the old people in the Senate really care. I think they'll be like I don't like China.

0:52:10 - Jeff Jarvis
So yeah, sure who gives it damn being against child porn, being against China's on that list, I mean being against child porn is a unanimously agreed upon thing, I would hope.

0:52:23 - Ed Zitron
But the China one is kind of like that one is beginning to get, I mean, the Tom Cotton part of those hearings where he was just repeatedly racist against that one guy who was very much not, wasn't he like? I'm from Singapore? Oh God yeah.

0:52:40 - Paris Martineau
The bite dance executive. Who he? Was trying to accuse of being a Chinese.

0:52:46 - Jeff Jarvis
What are you talking about, man? Where are you from? Where are you really from?

0:52:50 - Paris Martineau
Where are you really from, I think?

0:52:53 - Ed Zitron
I'm a journalist. Should have gone all race purity on Tom. Cotton. They should have, like, traced his background back to another country that wasn't America just to mess with him, because that is the same thing. It's disgraceful that that happened, and this bill is kind of disgraceful too. It doesn't seem to actually be fixing any problems. It seems to be setting up standards to punish other apps. Well, also, yeah, if the CCP actually has access to tick tock data, that's incredibly dangerous, like I think the people need to realize that.

0:53:27 - Jeff Jarvis
But for the average citizen, how dangerous is it?

0:53:31 - Ed Zitron
I don't think harm, where's the danger? I don't think it's the danger Now, it's the danger that could be there. But at the same time, when they come and they'd I mean really but that's kind of like it is a good point Like, what can they do with that data? What does that data say? Now, the example given by one of the witnesses in the by dance, by dance hearings was that the CCP used it to chase down dissidents in Hong Kong. That's another matter.

And that is disgraceful, disgusting and could be bad, like I mean, doesn't China?

0:53:59 - Jeff Jarvis
have dissidents. Every Chinese student I've ever had is extremely savvy about this and very careful. It doesn't matter what the platform, it doesn't matter anything else, and they're not going to come on and say I'm going to, I'm going to criticize the regime on TikTok and think I'm safe. They know better.

0:54:13 - Ed Zitron
Does that mean that we shouldn't protect?

0:54:15 - Jeff Jarvis
them. Yeah, yeah, but I'm saying that there is presumption that that's how the Chinese government is going to use. It is naive.

0:54:23 - Ed Zitron
But it's how they've been potentially using it already.

0:54:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, we know we've had back in the day. One of the first horrible things that happened is Yahoo Dime 2018. Dissidents was, and he went to jail for many, many years.

0:54:36 - Ed Zitron
I just think. I just think that this is not the way to do it, but something has to be done, but I am not aware of what that would be, and the speed at which this has been pushed through and the way it's being pushed through is harmful for America more than it is harmful for China or TikTok and Jason.

0:54:52 - Paris Martineau
Koehler over at 404 media, had an interesting take on it today. I mean, yeah, the goat that the US the headline of the article was the US wants to ban TikTok for the sins of every social media company. Yeah, but that is a really relevant point here is that we wouldn't be in this place where we are today with this really coalesced animus towards TikTok, if it wasn't incredibly politically expedient for politicians on both sides of the aisle here in the US to be rallying their forces against big tech generally. I think we see this with every of these nonsense social media hearings, one of which are very on. Jeff Jarvis participated in it. I don't really know how we go back from this.

0:55:38 - Ed Zitron
I also think that perhaps I don't know. Here's an idea, so there was not. There's a executive order that was going out. There was going to restrict the flow of sensitive data through intermediaries like data brokers, to foreign countries like China. America's fine, though no need to protect Americans data from American companies. That's what's really bothering me about this. There are things that TikTok has done or might do, or theoretically could do, that American companies do today.

0:56:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and that's why. That's why it's. Canada. Canada wants to stop the data from coming here. The EU wants to stop data from coming here for exactly what you're saying, Ed, because because America does bad stuff.

0:56:19 - Ed Zitron
And it's just like how about meta? Why didn't we make Mark Zuckerberg divest from meta before it was called meta? Obviously, when Cambridge Analytica came out, why was there no?

0:56:30 - Jeff Jarvis
effort to do that. Don't get me going. Cambridge Analytica was a bunch of BS.

0:56:34 - Ed Zitron
Regardless, I mean yes, facebook has. Even when you put that aside, facebook has stopped providing a service. Facebook has stopped. Facebook has taken advantage of the people using the platform.

0:56:46 - Paris Martineau
I mean I assume executives that meta have to be salivating at the thought of TikTok being banned.

0:56:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I'm sure Could not be better for meta. I don't know. It's a precedent that they're not going to be very happy about. I think.

0:56:58 - Ed Zitron
Oh no, I think they'll like the idea that massive competitors cannot count.

0:57:01 - Paris Martineau
But I think, as a company who is their current focus is trying to get users to spend a lot more time on Instagram they'll speak to a TikTok clone.

0:57:10 - Jeff Jarvis
They'll run into the void. Yeah, that's true, that's true.

0:57:13 - Ed Zitron
It's just it's frustrating because this kind of shows that there's not real concern about the like. Like Jason Cobb was saying, these are things that lots of social networks do, and it sucks that the actual problem isn't that. The problem is China. It's just a kind of vague xenophobia. That's interesting.

Yeah, not xenophobia, that shit. What's the word God? Racism, xenophobia, just call it what it is. There is a degree here of just fear of China oh, the scary China it's. It's disgraceful. And also it isn't protecting anyone. No one is safer because of this. All it's going to do is allow Bobby God damn Cotic, who oversaw the destruction of Activision Blizzard, who oversaw multiple allegations of sexual harassment, a horrifying culture and Activision. Now he's saying, oh, I might buy TikTok, that's a better situation. You want to trust that greasy pervert that's? These are our saviors. It just frustrates. All of this frustrates me because it isn't being done for anyone other than a vague vibe of political goodness or social, not even social, just economic goodness.

0:58:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Cotic, the former CEO of Activision, is looking for partners at a dinner at an Allen and Co conference earlier this week the Wall Street Journal writes Cotic floated the idea of partnering to buy TikTok to a table of people. That included open AI CEO, Sam Altman.

0:58:46 - Ed Zitron
Right.

0:58:47 - Paris Martineau
Open AI could use TikTok to train, to help train its AI models. If a partner such as Cotic could raise the capital for such an acquisition, it all seems to converge by dancing in the selling.

0:59:00 - Jeff Jarvis
They're not going to sell.

0:59:01 - Paris Martineau
Of course they're not going to sell. And I mean, if this, if this someone's a passing the Senate and ends up on Biden's desk where he signs it, we're going to have a protracted legal battle before it ever gets to a place where yeah About the first.

0:59:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Effing Amendment.

0:59:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

0:59:18 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a matter of freedom of expression in this country. I guess I'll say more on that Is that?

0:59:25 - Paris Martineau
is it a matter of freedom of expression to company?

0:59:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, I absolutely think so. Not of not of bite dance, but of all the people, all the citizens on TikTok whose speech is cut off. There's a class action, I think, there, to say that you're taking away our platform, our means we actually will try to enterprise Um well, no different, and that's I mean.

I don't believe the internet is a medium, but now, putting that aside, it would be no different from saying that um, uh, Simon and Schuster is outlawed. Do the authors at that point by the government? The authors at that point have action. Their platform for speaking is gone. Take away WordPress, Take away um, um, an open source platform. It's a, it's a matter of expression. And we, we don't, you know, we respect books, we don't respect TV, we don't respect theater.

1:00:25 - Ed Zitron
We're not directly. We're not directly taken. I I am not a lawyer, Not sure any of us are. No, I had to call mine regularly, but for things that I said, that's a joke, Um isn't that the whole thing, Mr Krupp-Eshkodek? He's very sorry he didn't read it. Bc Perver is protected under free speech. By the way, I can call you that Bobby.

1:00:45 - Paris Martineau
It's his opinion.

1:00:47 - Ed Zitron
Email me, bobby, we'll get. We'll get you on the podium. Nasty freak, anyway, um I I thought the whole thing with the First Amendment, though, was that was restricting individual speech by banning a platform. With that count, I'm honestly would be fascinated either way there's a class action there. The fans at home this is tremendous content.

1:01:07 - Paris Martineau
I do think it's also interesting. My colleagues at the information reported yesterday that, uh, unlike all of the previous times that TikTok has been threatened with a ban, the investors aren't. It doesn't seem like they're coming to the rescue this time. Um, like few of the bite dance investors that had previously lobbied for TikTok are doing it now.

1:01:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm probably scared.

1:01:30 - Paris Martineau
I'm afraid they don't see any reason to speak out in such a polarizing issue, uh, and are afraid that they could be quote perceived as disloyal to the U? S if they come out in support of TikTok.

1:01:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Or do they think that the Senate is not, that this is all performative. The house wanted to get their yas, yas, the Senate's not going to pass it and so we don't worry about it they, it seems like they it's a couple.

1:01:54 - Paris Martineau
There's a couple of different parts here. One is they're worried about wasting, like venture capitalists, seem to be worried about wasting their like political clout and want to pick their battles because they say that they have a upcoming battles around AI and defense tech that they think are really important. They want to save their political capital to engage with. But they've also said and this is quoting from the article um that after four years of an on and off again discussion about the ban, there's a growing chance that TikTok will be forced to withdraw from the U? S.

The U S ban wouldn't end TikTok. The app could still operate outside the country, although its ability to make money would be sorely diminished, given the U? S is the world's biggest ad market and some VCs even play down the financial impact that Tic Tac talk has on bite dance, arguing that a Chinese, the Chinese tech company, might in some ways be healthier without it. Uh, I think it's very interesting that this seems to be a moment where some of the company's biggest supporters are also bowing to pressure. I wouldn't. I was a bit surprised by this sudden pivot too.

1:03:03 - Jeff Jarvis
The internet is very unpopular right now.

1:03:06 - Ed Zitron
I mean it is. But also I think that the venture capital firms might be a little bit scared of the government because if perhaps they went in, looked at how much money they put into things like crypto or metaverse, or how much money they put into just completely non-existent like, I think, like a weight loss start, I've got 450 million, 500 million in 2021. It's a lot of things that VCs did that definitely flaunted very basic due diligence Look at FTX, for example and I think that they're scared of the exposure and I don't blame them. I wouldn't want it.

1:03:42 - Paris Martineau
And also, yeah, especially after the huge boom time we're just coming off, where anything kind of goes. It is now crunch time.

1:03:49 - Ed Zitron
Also, tick Tock is not a sympathetic character. It's a multi-billion dollar monstrosity algorithm machine and Mark Zuckerberg hates it because he was never able to create an algorithm this good. But everybody's kid likes it, of course I'm not even. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying the perspective that people are coming from. I find it upsetting. It makes me feel 100 years old. I load it up.

1:04:15 - Paris Martineau
Do you use Tick Tock? I assume you don't make Tick Tocks, but do you watch them?

1:04:20 - Ed Zitron
I can't understand it.

1:04:22 - Leo Laporte
I use it and I see it.

1:04:25 - Ed Zitron
No, it really is. I'm getting old. I've never been good at video either, but also there's something that gives me anxiety that the feed never ends, that there's always more.

1:04:34 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's every website.

1:04:35 - Ed Zitron
now though no, but it's worse than that, but it's also I'm being fed stuff that I didn't ask for, which also really upsets me. I don't like the algorithm interfering as much as it does, or at least I like it to be a little less avert with it. Instagram is bordering on unusable for the same reason, but Tick Tock is just hyper-aggressive with it. I kind of respect the fact that they're so honest with it. It's just like yeah, we control this, you're going to see whatever we want. We want your little pig.

1:05:00 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, you use. You watch Tick Tock through the app, right? Yeah, I'm curious if you've had the same experience. I feel like the main point of Tick Tock is they hyper-curate your feed to be everything you'd want and more. But I've noticed the last maybe dozen times I've opened Tick Tock for the past couple of weeks, my feed is bananas. It is completely random. It is like all preferences they've previously had for me have gone out the window. I'm not seeing any more contact about the guy with the eelpit or the woman who was illegally digging tunnels, which are my two favorite Tick Tock subjects. Suddenly I'm just seeing random stuff out there. There are still cat videos usually, which is what's keeping me going back, or strange musical content. Have you noticed any change to your own?

1:05:45 - Jeff Jarvis
My theory? Yes, I have, but it's sporadic. I find that like every third day boy, it's feeling weird. Today and the next day it's stuff, I like. I think they try stuff out on you to see what happens and then they go back to what they want.

1:06:01 - Ed Zitron
I've never managed to get it dialed in, it's never engaged me. I've never been like I must watch this. But also, I just don't consume that much video Like. I'm not even saying it's a bad app, I just I don't like video that much, I don't.

1:06:14 - Paris Martineau
I am similar. I don't watch YouTube videos ever, is my famous statement in the podcast.

1:06:19 - Ed Zitron
I watch no YouTube videos or like 12 minute long ones, and but it's just this whole bill. I think we can wrap it up by saying who's it helped? Who's this actually protecting? Who does this benefit?

1:06:32 - Jeff Jarvis
The bill already.

1:06:33 - Ed Zitron
Yeah. I think that it helps centralization of power in the hands of a few guys white guys within the tech industry. It's white homogeneity pushed at scale. It's going to make rich men even richer. It's going to centralize the same tools. By the way, the same things are basically done using American social networks. Look at what Jason Cobler is tweeting right now and it sucks.

1:06:58 - Jeff Jarvis
It sucks because if there was a real problem, I'd love to see it and we should be doing a supporting open source, which is supporting mastodon and and pushing blue sky and even threads to open up. Blue sky just opened up its its moderation structure. Good name, ozone. I like that.

1:07:17 - Ed Zitron
Oh, that is quite a guy. Is this brilliant?

1:07:19 - Paris Martineau
I love it. I like it a lot. I haven't been posting there as much. I've been tweeting a lot lately getting back into it, but I've got to start. Blue sky.

1:07:30 - Jeff Jarvis
The problem is people. I like around threads, but I don't like threads as much it is a putrid place.

1:07:36 - Ed Zitron
It is like it's like someone created LinkedIn off the dark, which is not that fun.

1:07:43 - Jeff Jarvis
That sounds like someplace Jason Calis Caliconis would be. That is true. No, he goes on.

1:07:48 - Ed Zitron
Twitter and he goes. You know what Racism is bad, but if we thought about why and it would just be like a horrible thread where he's given credence to someone very racist he did a whole thing about Alex Jones where he was like why don't agree? But why don't I agree?

1:08:02 - Jeff Jarvis
And he does this.

1:08:04 - Ed Zitron
I'm just asking the questions thing, this bio right wing thing, like a classic right wing trope, and he's like I wasn't saying I even want Alex Jones back, but now he's coming back. Isn't that interesting? It's just, it's very frustrating. All the best stuff, completely different subject I realize Switching gears a little bit.

1:08:24 - Paris Martineau
There was a really interesting story from Cashmere Hill at the New York Times this week.

Yes, I'm glad you're doing this On how the auto industry is collecting reams of data about consumer driver consumers driving habits and sharing it with insurance companies. The opening anecdote in the story follows a guy named Ken Dahl who drives a Least Chevrolet Bolt and says he's a careful driver. He's been, he's never been responsible for an accident, and Dahl was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance skyrocketed by 21%. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high and one insurance agent told him that his Lexus Nexus report was a factor. Lexus Nexus is this New York based kind of global data broker. They catered to the auto insurance industry with this one kind of division. They have and it's traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets and like helps determine potential insurance rates.

From that, dahl wanted to know what was causing his insurance increase, so he requested info from Lexus Nexus under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Lexus Nexus sent him a 28 page no 258 page, sorry, 258 page consumer disclosure report and what it contained stunned him. This is from the Times More than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven their bolt over the previous six months, include the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn't have was where they had driven their car, and so, according to this report, the trip details had been provided to Lexus Nexus by GM, the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt, and a bunch of insurance companies had requested information about Dahl from Lexus Nexus over the previous month.

A quote from Dahl said it felt like a betrayal. They're taking information that I didn't realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance, and I think kind of the money quote in this story is automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say that they have driver's permission to do so, but the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read. As someone who doesn't drive, I feel it's inappropriate for me to react to this story, so I'm turning it over to the two. Why assume drivers in this? On this podcast today.

1:10:59 - Ed Zitron
Ed. I mean welcome to the machine. I mean, this has been going on since Metro mile came in, since they, progressive, over a decade ago, started doing an OMD thing. You click into your car that would lower your insurance. They've been collecting this date of forever. How do you think the insurance rates have changed over the years? They've changed because they've been collecting this data it's, I assume that Tesla, with their insurance, does the same thing. I'm fairly sure they do something like this. And guess what? This is the future. This is why having a car full of stuff, full of tech, full of apps, is actually a really bad thing. I don't like that much information out there. Yep, there it is. I hope. See this. So this, by the way, this feels like something that the government and the House and Congress need to get their up in arms about basic transparency and data collection and its use. That is a. This story should be bigger than tick tock, because this is affecting more Americans right now, today, the cost of car insurance is an incredible burden on the average.

I have a beautiful Volvo XC for electric car. It's got mechanical doors. They open and close. It goes forwards, backwards, side to side. It's an amazing vehicle.

1:12:16 - Paris Martineau
Does it have screens that does all?

1:12:18 - Ed Zitron
It has a screen that has a beautiful physical knob Fun little side. Steve was the other day and he was talking to me about how electric car sucks. They all have screens right, and now he hates lucid motors because they've got big screens and everything's got a screen. Mercedes got a screen and I think that that's part of the problem. The other problem is how much of that data, because a lot of them have like sensors about driver awareness, for example, driver, how engaged you are with the road. These are the real. These are the things that are going to really screw people. Don't be scared of China coming in through the tick tock app. Be scared of the American manufacturers that are currently tracking how on, how much you are seeing the road, how engaged you feel.

1:12:59 - Paris Martineau
These are the scary things especially because these tools aren't always accurate. I know, with the driver awareness tool, when I've reported on Amazon, they had kind of installed these in the cabs of some of their trucks and, you know, driver vans, and there was kind of massive wave of complaints from drivers, not because they were like, oh, we want to not pay attention to the road, because they're like I'll be sitting there driving paying attention to the road and it will ding me five times for inattention, perhaps because you know the person driving is Asian or just not white and the camera can't properly attune itself to their eyes.

1:13:40 - Ed Zitron
It's a slippery slope. Well, this is a smart car.

1:13:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, it's probably a middle school car, it's what? 10 years old, so probably doesn't have all of us. No, I had to spend $600 to get Android Auto added to it. What is that? Android Auto, same as your Apple, that I can look at the map on this on the car screen. That's the screen. Yeah, um, I think, first let's let's underscore, as we like to say, journalism. Great reporting by Cashmere Hill.

1:14:13 - Paris Martineau
This is the kind of privacy story.

1:14:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Journalism, yeah, instead of forever instead of doing the moral panic about, the internet is taking all of our data and I don't know my data and with it's non specific and not to the point. This is specific. It is a violation of your own space and what you do? Point one. Point two none of this required the internet. This is about evil data brokers and evil insurance companies, and the data is going to be out there. What's needed from legislators, as you say, and what's absolutely needed now, is for them to come out, but what they can do is they can forbid the use of this data. You can't. It's going to be collected for various reasons, for various things. Ok, whatever. You could forbid it being collected. You could forbid it being used for insurance. That's what legislators are for.

1:15:03 - Paris Martineau
Or even at the bare minimum mandate that they disclose it's being collected and give you the opportunity to opt out.

1:15:11 - Ed Zitron
But also to your point earlier, harris, remember connect Microsoft's camera like the thing for the Xbox. It couldn't see black people. The Panopticon systems that many contractors use, the ones that they use to tell if you're actually watching the screen they continually see things like dreadlocks or even just the hair of African-American people as things that suggest they're not there. These systems are biased. They are racially biased and that's before you get to the obvious like this is just invasive. These systems are biased against people, like many algorithmic systems, like the mortgage system. That was something like 80%. There was an insane amount of bias in the mortgage system. Using data sets to make calls like this is insane.

And, by the way, I'm correct, tesla does have a safe driving system for their insurance. They give you a score, kind of similar to Metro Mile. These companies want to do this and they're doing it because, guess what? They can now hyper justify how they judge you. But guess what? If these are the systems, then to be clear, there is a separate thing here. There is the I'm tracking where you're going and what you're doing. That is separate to racial discrimination and the engagement systems. Those I don't know if they're using that data, but just the very basic driving here. That is going to have a class issue as well. You're driving through rougher neighborhoods which, as judged by an insurance company, if you're driving in such a way that suggests your profile is now risky, which is racially biased. These systems are going to hurt so many people, and they already are, and yet here we are chasing TikTok.

I just I realized in the point it's just like this is a thing hurting people today. Kashmir does a great job at this. Kashmir has done great work on data brokers companies like Spokio and Telius. These companies are Axios.

1:17:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, axios, not Axios Axiom. Axiom there you go, I was like he's afraid to kill me. Can we do the next business model they have, who knows?

1:17:18 - Ed Zitron
But we got to do the help and these companies. These companies are actual scum. They're actually dangerous to Americans. Data brokers you can pay someone 25 bucks a month to look up everything. They can find out your phone number, your address. In many cases Sounds like a moral panic. It actually really isn't. Companies like a bean who made good money deleting that information from the internet. But there's only so much you can do. These are things to target. Companies shouldn't. Data brokers should be illegal.

1:17:44 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's the other issue. Well, two things. One, data brokers go way back. When I worked at Timing, we used data brokers like Crazy and that's how we did subscription models and all this kind of stuff. I used to scare students and say, let me go to Axiom, Not Axios, and I'd say, let me find out the names and addresses of just to be really creepy women between the ages of 21 and 35 who live within n miles of this place, who have a college degree and a car, and it'll give it to me Far more than the internet ever does, far more. But here's the other issue. I just said we need laws, we need legislators, but of course government is the worst enemy of privacy, because what's gonna happen is fine. This data doesn't tell the insurance company where you went, but it's discoverable and certain states are gonna come in and find out whether or not you went to an abortion clinic and the data's there, that's all right.

And that's the real issue. That's really happening Exactly, and so there needs to be transparency. There needs to be the right to erase it. It's not the internet, it's your car and the insurance company and your state's government that are the real problems here. Yeah, the internet can do stuff too, but it's more anonymized there. It's not in your personal space. This is about. I wrote a book about privacy called Public Parts, and so I learned about all this stuff.

1:19:07 - Paris Martineau
Wow, a rare drink opportunity. We never get private parts, another word.

1:19:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, public parts, public parts. Private, parts is.

1:19:15 - Paris Martineau
Howard Stern.

1:19:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, I dedicated it to Howard Stern as a result, because he was part of the title. Anyway, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. It was invented by the case law over time. It's something that and I believe in the value of publicness and being out there and talking. I believe in the value of privacy. We've got to protect it. But it's a and the problem I have is that when you have crap like Shoshana Zuboff and surveillance capitalism, it ruins it because it just goes overboard with I'm gonna say it again, moral panic in a way. That's not really about harm, it's not really about the real problems, it's a distraction, but it's this kind of stuff. Don't pay attention to Zuboff, pay attention to Kashmir Hill.

1:20:06 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, carl Bode wrote a really good breakdown of Kashmir's article in Tectur, which I'll quote from a little bit here. Again, like countless past scandals, this is the direct byproduct of a country that has proven too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era, too corrupt to regulate data brokers and obsessed with steadily defanging, defunding, understaffing and curtailing the authority of regulators tasked with overseeing corporations. The broad and reckless disdain for US consumer privacy and safety. I do think he has a point.

1:20:45 - Ed Zitron
Carl Rocks. Carl was Carl. Much nuts, that fella. He's absolutely ruthless. He's one of the few people who was on Elon Musk early. He really he was pushing very hard, of course not just want to be clear, like Laura Cologne very early on the Elon B Absolutely ruthless. Big up to Laura, yep. But Carl has done an excellent job of really getting to the heart of how angry you should be, because I used to, and I feel like this thing is a lot of.

What the tech industry does that leads to things like this is they turn everything into a very complex shell. They make it sound like magic goes back to the AI, I think goes back to tick, to call this. None of these centers could really explain to you why tick tocks back. They're just like China, right right, china, scary. They're in my phone. This thing with the cars sounds complex, was signed in the complex way, but is fairly simple. They are invading your privacy and I feel like there Should be someone in Congress House they're a say, even the president who could just say these things. Like Carl is called. Carl is actually very cleanly spoken and furious about the stuff, as he should be, and I feel like more people in tech should be, I'm. I'm angry every time I read about the stuff. I get angry because you see the world burning around you and you see the fire engines all rolling up to a house that isn't on fire and it's just yeah.

1:22:13 - Jeff Jarvis
But who wants to go after? You're going after, in this case, the auto industry, the insurance industry and the data broker industry, which all politicians use for all of their direct mail and course advertising.

1:22:29 - Ed Zitron
And so there's ballots, they can.

1:22:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, well, they're going to be.

1:22:33 - Ed Zitron
Well, that sucks.

1:22:35 - Paris Martineau
On another positive note, I think that we should use this opportunity to go to an ad break Jeff Jarvis, ed Zittron, everybody and now we're going to go to an ad break. I want to talk next about a great article that the New York Times did on taking a deep look into Musk's charitable foundation, and I want to also throw it to Ed for kind of an overview of this a little bit, because I know you just did a podcast episode about this where you interviewed one of the author of it, david Ferenthal. I guess can you tell me a little bit about the article and like what that was like?

1:23:15 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, absolute, absolute legend, david. He jumped on the phone the day after the article went out. What a legend. So long story short, elon Musk part about five, six billion dollars of Tesla shares. To be clear, he didn't buy them. These are just chairs he had in the Musk Foundation and nonprofit.

Now, part of the rules of doing this is you have to spend five percent of it every year To qualify for the two billion odd dollar tax break you got. He regularly fails to do so. He regularly fails to invest in it. Well, sorry, donate enough money to do so, but he also, unlike, say, larry Page's Foundation, isn't dump it in a donor advised fund which is kind of a black box for giving grants to people. No, he has no staff. He has two unpaid volunteers and he is the other person on the board and it isn't really obvious where the money goes. When it does go somewhere, it goes in either very small amounts and does very little, or very large amounts and also does very little. There is a school called Ad Astra which is literally inside a SpaceX compound where Musk's own children go. It used to be outside, now it's inside a SpaceX compound. They got several million dollars. He gave a hundred million dollars from the Musk Foundation to another nonprofit just called the Foundation Really firing on all cylinders.

1:24:38 - Jeff Jarvis
It's so good. The Foundation, it really is good. And land.

1:24:44 - Ed Zitron
It bought a bunch of land out very close to a boring company site in Texas. Very cool, very good stuff there. He also donated fifty five million dollars to a cause of a guy who auctioned off seats on a SpaceX flight, who then immediately bought three more seats on another SpaceX flight.

1:25:04 - Paris Martineau
And I think one of the interesting things that David the reporter brought up in your interview is part of what is supposed to be happening here is, if you are getting this tax break from being a charitable organization, you have to do charitable things, meaning you have to do things that benefit the public good. And this article, the thing that it kind of hits again and again, is that it's unclear if any of kind of the Musk Foundation's investments or philanthropic endeavors, it's unclear who they benefit outside of Elon Musk or Elon Musk's employees and customers which is incredibly unusual for a charitable foundation.

1:25:47 - Ed Zitron
Well, a good one. He did as well as he said he was going to fix the water problem, the water contamination problems that played Flint Michigan. He actually tweeted at one point that he'd already done so and then deleted the tweet in 2018. He gave him about one point two million dollars, which is it's good. He did something they bought water filters for the school. They bought laptops for the school great idea. They then responded to him with a four page plan, basically saying here's how you do, here's how we will do the thing you promise to help us with, and then you can fix the water as you promised. He sent a Tesla development executive to Flint Michigan who gave people rides around the parking lot of the city hall. Hey, a ride in a Tesla.

1:26:34 - Paris Martineau
That's incredibly charitable.

1:26:36 - Ed Zitron
And then he said, hey, well, we might build an office out here. You'll never guess what happened. He didn't build anything. He didn't fix Flint Michigan at all.

1:26:50 - Paris Martineau
Some of the details in this story are just wild. I mean, as you'd expect from an Elon Musk story, some of them are kind of oh, quote from in here. Among the donations the Musk Foundation has made, there was a 55,. There was 55 million to help a major SpaceX customer meet a charitable pledge. There were millions that went to Cameron County, texas, after a rocket blew up, and there were donations to two schools closely tied to his business One that was literally physically walled off inside a SpaceX compound and the other, like you mentioned, is located next to a new subdivision for Musk employees.

I just want to go into a little bit more about the one you mentioned. Ad Astra, which is Latin for to the stars, ostensibly was founded by Musk as a nonprofit school to explore new ways to teach math and science and this is from the Times again. But that school, too, would serve a personal purpose for Mr Musk and it's first year of operation out of his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of LA. Five of Ad Astra's 14 students were his own children. The headmaster said the only criteria for admission were quote kindness and eagerness to learn and parents that worked at SpaceX.

1:28:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Company store. I just want to again underscore. I made fun of the New York Times using the verb underscore the other day for what reporters really want to say themselves, so anyway I'll underscore Cashmere Hill and David Farron Holt. The Times is driving me completely baddie lately with its credulous coverage of fascism and its Biden but his birthday polls and all this stuff. But the Times is also the repository for people like Farron Holt and Hill who do this kind of great work. And we just more of this, please, less of the other crap, yeah it's how I feel, and David was great as well.

1:28:39 - Ed Zitron
He was a real, he's a prince, but he was also very. He was very. He was very entertaining, like he was. He was very into the story, and you could tell it frustrated him, and you could tell he'd like physically gone out to where Ad Astra was meant to be, but he wasn't able to get any. There was a he said this in the podcast but there was just a sign basically saying do not pass. I forget what the nonsense they say. So it's like no, no, no, unauthorized entry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for a school, just to be clear, and it's just one of the more depressing things he said, though, is the people that would regulate this are like the IRS and other parts of the government that are underfunded, and it sucks. It sucks because Musk will get away with this. Musk will get away with this, and Ryan Mack, who was the co-reporter on the piece as well.

He did a good amount of payment pounding, and he basically found that no one talked to Musk about the foundation Sorry, the Musk foundation. I should say no one. He didn't bring it up. It was not something that he talked about, it's not something he thought about. It's just a big tax dodge. And something else that Farenhold added at the end of the podcast was he was saying and I mentioned it earlier Larry Page is the same deal. He just dumps it into a donor advised fund, but he doesn't invest as much as he needs to and it's just a way for them to get away with it, and I think that Musk probably doesn't want to spend that money on this. He doesn't want to liquidate billions of dollars of Tesla stock.

What's also disgusting is everyone who covered every single time he claimed he would do anything with this foundation, while nothing happened. Every major publication Wall Street Journal headline was Musk gives 11.6 million Tesla shares to charity, failing to put in that headline the words his own, failing to follow up. This stuff has been out there a while. This is a lot of money. This is a lot of this is publicly available stuff. We all cut lines Not my job and run a PR firm, but, jan, this should have been on this already. But I think there is, if not a fear of Elon Musk, there is still this want to believe that he means well, and Kara Swisher is being. I think it's the same sort of dynamic that we saw with.

1:30:55 - Paris Martineau
Trump, where it's like the traditional media apparatus is not equipped to handle a someone who manipulates the truth at such a, you know, regularity. They are.

1:31:11 - Ed Zitron
I mean they are equipped, but they refer to him as a con artist.

1:31:15 - Paris Martineau
But I realize I mean all you need to do is put his statements in context with reality, but I remember seeing this right after, I think, you know, when his star was rising with the acquisition of Twitter some completely asinine tweet or something that he'd put out, that Bloomberg or someone wrote a whole story about it as if it was true, and of course, it just ended up being something he tweeted and never ended up revisiting every Musk story, but it's every musk story and every musk.

1:31:45 - Ed Zitron
He was going to $6 billion world hunger. We neural ink customer. We put it in the first thing. Tweet I'm going to buy Wikipedia. Tweet.

1:31:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Every other, it becomes a story.

1:31:58 - Ed Zitron
Sure, except it's dumber. With Elon Musk. He is a like musk. Musk and Trump are both proven lies. They're both dangerous dangerous to society in both different ways. With musk, tech industry knows better, but I think the tech industry look. If you want to just be an enthusiast industry, that's fine. Be happy with everyone. No critiques or anyone. You can't critique some, but not all. Musk has posted multiple great replacement theories, thanks. He is continually doing this right wing firebrand nonsense, this anti-immigrant stuff. He is out and out racist. He posted something very racist against African-Americans a couple months ago to do with sex, which I'm just not going to go any further on, and nobody did anything. The great replacement thing was a few weeks ago. Nobody covered Nobody. But they will cover when he farts and says oh, I'm going to, um, I'm going to remove likes, I've improved the environment.

Yes, I'm going to. We're going to make the tweets go sideways now and it's. And the thing is, you know who actually has done a really good job on this. I'm going to give a lot of credit to TechCrunch. Techcrunch, who really did start off as kind of very rah rah for tech, has been damning on Musk Does. People like Amanda Silberling does an excellent job. Sadly, darrell Edvington's moved on from there now, but they're doing a great job calling out. But CNBC isn't CNBC other than Laura Colodney, who is absolutely amazing and does a hell of a job there. You can't also. You can't.

It undermines great reporting like that when you sideline it with just Musk's vague promises and outright lies and then you don't revisit them. And Paris, I get your point. The comparison with Trump is true, except Trump as a president, former president and presidential candidate. There is a difference there. Now he's still covered terribly, but there is a difference. Elon Musk is a private citizen worth billions of dollars. Rip into shreds, take his ass down. He only went after media matters because he knew they didn't have much money. He won't go after actual journalists Other than here's the thing the real abdication of authority with Elon Musk is in the hands of Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher should be raped across. She's doing a media tour for Burn Book right now, which is an astonishing book, and it's just the fact that she's being interviewed by Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman about her book. It's an insult to journalism.

1:34:24 - Jeff Jarvis
So you read it, so we don't have to say more.

1:34:27 - Ed Zitron
You should read Paris Marx's review of it.

1:34:29 - Paris Martineau
I was just Googling that right now.

1:34:32 - Leo Laporte
Another great guy.

1:34:33 - Ed Zitron
But with those he makes the point that she kind of acts like she criticized people but never really got down to it. She'd have him on and talk about his review. It's excellent. One short of Kara's book is yeah, all these people suck, but I was at their parties With Elon Musk. She only turned on him because he called her an asshole. And, to be clear, the thing he called her an asshole for was because he misread a tweet where she was supporting the US government paying him for Stalin in Ukraine, something he promised to do for free. People like Kara have the ability to stop men like this. They have the ability to say you are lying. They have a huge Scott Galloway same deal.

1:35:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, thank you, my bet noir, why he gets such fucking attention I want.

1:35:19 - Ed Zitron
I'll be honest, they shouldn't get that Better off lines, better show than their level.

1:35:24 - Paris Martineau
Well, I mean they get attention because they are hyperbolic.

1:35:28 - Ed Zitron
No, because they appeal to a very center liberal audience of people who don't really have morals but they do like posting Instagram things. They appeal to people who don't really want to believe in anything other than that which feels convenient and doesn't make them think too much. Kara is the arbiter of that kind of information and on top of that, with Musk, she was still defending his ass well into 2022. She was the one saying he's hard to unpack. Oh, he's hard to unpack. He's so smart and we no. He's a flippin' dullard. He's a big wobbling candle of boringness and he's not invented any of the things he claims he invented. His company's boring company Constantly goes to cities, doesn't do anything, burns people in Las Vegas. He's heard so many laborers in a very blue-collar city.

Elon Musk is a scumbag and calling him a scumbag and you don't even have to do it in the newspaper, you just say it in there in a talk. Maybe you don't give him Aaron Ross sorkin shouldn't be sitting there for the times and go like oh, elon, tell me about your things, tell me about your travails. No, sit there and roast him and if he won't do the interview, screw him. Say he won't do the interview. It's time to pay for accountable. Anyway, sorry, stop the great.

1:36:40 - Paris Martineau
No, this is fantastic. I could let you go on, but I was like we got it. We got to give.

1:36:44 - Ed Zitron
I don't know the moment to breathe.

1:36:46 - Paris Martineau
The great blog, I guess. Review of Kara's book. Burn book by Paris Marks is called Kara's Wishers reality distortion field. I posted a link to it in the discord chat and here's a quote from it. In the end, burn book is the story of one of Silicon Valley's most prominent access journalists who took a page from the billionaires she covered and created her own narrative to see and present herself as something else entirely. The story swisher is trying to tell Helps to distance herself from the decades she spent boosting companies that have now been quote Disasterous, as she herself admits. But it also works for the industry. Letting swisher present herself as a tough reporter allows Silicon Valley to pretend it was being held to account this whole time when really swisher was along for the ride and bought into the tech determinist world view guiding industry.

1:37:40 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you think of her?

1:37:42 - Paris Martineau
Jeff.

1:37:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I same problem. She blocked me long ago and I wasn't even saying anything. That was that awful. She's very she acts all tough and she's very Oversensitive to criticism herself. She, I Think she could have been a good analyst 20 years ago. I think she could have figured things out, but I'm not sure where it went south, was it? Was it pretty people in the red chair making a lot of money from that?

1:38:11 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I think that there is this like Version. I mean, it's something that many people are Can happen to many people is when you move from being a Down in the trenches Reporter to being a quote-unquote commentator with like a capital C and your job is to have Tech luminaries or luminaries in industry sit across from you at a you know a big conference and ask them questions. Part of what is going on there is your existing in an economy where your continued success relies on the fact that you've got to get those people to pick up your calls and come back for next year's conference, and I think that that causes a little bit of brain rot in the Hard to be Truly to be truly pushing the envelope in those industries.

1:39:04 - Jeff Jarvis
But I think Paris to have watched I've watched Galloway was a different case. I used to go to the DLD conference in Munich and he always did this, this spiel we are 100 slides and 20 minutes and I'm gonna be really funny the whole time. And then I was on MSNBC once with him on his first appearance on TV and I saw the drug shot right into his vein. He was a Gog at being on TV. It's no big deal. I was, you know, on daytime show that we see. Is it the man? My mother didn't notice. You know who cares, but he was. This, was it? This was the drug for him.

He wanted fame and so it wasn't. In his case it's a little bit different. He gets invited to give hugely expensive talks at places, but he's not an he's not an access journalist so much as he is. He's a foe Rye voice. And so the two of them together share that that BS of acting like they're tough critics of the world. He's a terrible predictor. He's wrong about crap. She's not a tough critic at all. It's an act and people buy the act, and that's the thing I think part of it.

1:40:08 - Paris Martineau
Obviously, I think they have are responsible for their own actions, bad takes and bad predictions and bad interviewing. But I also think that part of it is what happens when you are have chosen to exist within an industry that demands your constant opinions and hot takes on everything on a daily and weekly and monthly basis, like I mean, we've got this podcast. It's long, but it's once a week that I am expected to give commentary and opinion on a very specific niche amount of events that are changing. She and other commentators of that, like echelon, are doing this every single day. That is how their bread gets.

1:40:51 - Jeff Jarvis
They have to get on TV. To do it, you have to get on TV and you've got to get clicks and it is.

1:40:56 - Paris Martineau
It rots the brain, it's attention economy. It is attention economy.

1:41:03 - Ed Zitron
I think you're right, by the way, but there's one other there, which is skill issue. In the last, in the last months and a half, I've done maybe 25 interviews. I have had to come up with opinions from my newsletter for free for years, all right, I've written 3,000 words pretty much every newsletter, the least the last 12 of them. I do this while running a PR for Cara. The job's not that hard, it just doesn't.

And when you're pretending and I'll go on TV. I've done tons of podcasts. The second one I did today, did a bunch yesterday, did a bunch last week. I'm not boasting, I'm just saying boo bloody who, if the if your problem is. But also, it's one thing to be a commentator and that's fine if that's, and that's all I am. I'm not pretending to be a journalist. I'm not doing investigative reporting. I'm raising up things and saying my opinions that I say as such.

Cara Swisher was Her last things, that all things digital back in 2020, 2013 even were things like funding announcements and tech stocks and stuff. You can't be a news source while also Doing what she does, because she's not stupid. Cara Swisher is a great broadcaster. Scott Scott Galloway is a C plus. At best he's dull. When I saw him on the John Oliver Elon Musk thing I was so angry, so very angry, because he's a boring sod. No one needs a what spot go anti-union freak Talking about how he got into boxing so that he could get woman loser anyways, back to Cara. She is Better than this. I think that really is it. She is better than this, and had she stopped pretending that she was some sort of Objective arbiter, that she was friends with these people. Fuck. Does a great job with this. No one believes that park is Is not friendly with the billionaires. They're all in with them. They know it. They're upfront with that. I like it's why we get interesting stories.

The British media is a lot like this as well. They're relatively in bed with sources, but they'll rip them to shreds. People will go. He used to go on Jeremy Paxman and get their asses lit up by Paxman, because they had to, because that was these were the terms that the media offered you. Cara Swisher could have offered those terms. She could be Doesn't even need to be endlessly tough, but sit there and give him a little more push, little more sizzle, and, frankly, there are other journalists who haven't done that as well. I want to give a big shout of respect, though, to Kevin Russe, who is very wrong at the times when it came to crypto, but he had Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz on their podcast, ripped him to shreds, called him to account. We need more stuff like that, but also mixed on Russe I am also mixed on Russe.

I believe he likely lost many people a lot of money by supporting cryptocurrency in the way he did in a shocking Abdication of his responsibility as a journalist and I think his coverage of chat GPT was Shoboting in the worst sort.

1:43:57 - Paris Martineau
You're referring to the front page New York Times story that I'm forgetting the exact name of, but it was right when chat GPT was first coming on the scene, where he published an quote-unquote interview with chat GPT or perhaps it was a different chat bot.

1:44:14 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it was chat GPT.

1:44:15 - Paris Martineau
He was saying oh chat, gpt Asked me to divorce my wife, or something like that I tried to convince him he was unhappy with his wife.

1:44:23 - Jeff Jarvis
He forced, he, he tried again and again and again to get chat GPT to go to its dark side. And then, when he finally succeeded after after the guardrails popped in multiple times, he finally got it to go to wacky places. Then he wrote I couldn't get to sleep that night.

1:44:40 - Paris Martineau
I mean things chat, but was, but it was yeah which is so funny.

1:44:45 - Ed Zitron
Don't put in the newspaper that Bing Did a sigh up on you. Come on, man, you go. You Kevin's smarter than that. But that's the thing. You can, I believe, cover this tech industry and be excited about it. You can say I find chat GPT really interesting. You can. The Times has people that have this approach to tech coverage. Brian Chen Fantastic his repeatedly like with the Apple Watch. He was originally quite negative from the Apple Watch Wall Street Journal. Joanna Stern one of the best tech journalists working out there. That's some amazing written.

1:45:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Today had an interview with the CTO of open AI and it was a good interview and it was straight on, but the headline was Makes me some amazing videos and it freaks us out. No, it doesn't have your lines clicks.

1:45:32 - Paris Martineau
I know, but you lie.

1:45:34 - Ed Zitron
But you are. You are obfuscating the truth, which is, you should say, initially impressive but on closer look, looks bad. Because that's the story. The story is not Right what it, it's what it does, but also what it can do. And in the event that they don't feel it, if the company leaves the gap for the journalist to fill in, the journalist has to go. I don't know or say, or maybe not give the most preferential answer. I still think Joanna does an excellent job.

1:46:00 - Jeff Jarvis
She is the reason the interview was very good.

1:46:02 - Ed Zitron
It was the, it was the other, and she remember, and but a lot of this comes back to what are you doing there? If Kara was just a pure commentator, if that's all she did, if she only claimed to be an opinion person who did entertainment, I'd fully respect it. I'm serious. If it was all it was was just entertainment, she's like I have my biases, I have my things. I'm gonna roast them as much as Michael.

1:46:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Laryngen.

1:46:28 - Paris Martineau
In the day right.

1:46:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sorry, I'm not defending him, but I'm just saying he was what he was.

1:46:33 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, I yeah. If Michael Arrington, if you're saying he was unashamed in what he was, you correct? I'm saying he that's all I'm saying, okay, that's fair.

1:46:40 - Paris Martineau
Okay, a brief aside to give Kara a little, a tiny bit of credit. Today she did get a scoop on a topic that I think is interesting this talked about. She tweeted early today that she tweeted out a scoop which I'll put aside my judgment on that about Don Lemen. Specifically, the Don Lemen had partnered with X and Elon Musk and X had agreed to throw its financial support behind the creation of lemon's new venture called the Don Lemon show. But what Kara tweeted out today is that the first interview for the show was publicized as being between Don Lemon and Elon Musk and today, after the interview happened, elon Musk sent a terse text to lemons reps saying contract terminated.

The show is off because Lemon did a tough interview and I guess the interview happened last Friday. That was not to Elon Musk's liking. It included questions about his ketamine use and and other subjects. I mean this seems pretty obvious that Someone like Don Lemon should have seen it coming, but of course now he did and I think it's really nice that Don Lemon interviewed Kara Swisher about her book burn book at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

1:48:06 - Ed Zitron
I Think it's interesting that I wonder if she asked him about the sexual she did she says in her tweets on this.

1:48:13 - Paris Martineau
I told Don that this is exactly what would occur at a recent Wow thank you, kara.

1:48:19 - Ed Zitron
Ask him if he's a perp. Seriously, I'm just. I'm going by the British standard where these questions would get asked. Come from the Paxman school. You got to ask the questions and you need to. When they answer them, you need to ask further questions. I get that it's difficult, but guess what these people will? They have to talk to the press. They have to even musk. Even musk has to musk and run skib, but he needs the press to an extent. Also, by the way, do you ever when Sam Altman was out at open AI and Kara Swisher was getting scoops and it was very obvious, it was just like it was a mixture of bollocks and Greg Robin just texting it directly? Yeah, it's just. That's what I don't get. She has this opinion gig. She can just go on whatever and get a bunch of money for speech. It's access man.

1:49:06 - Jeff Jarvis
It's access, it's it's fame. I get it, but just enjoy the fame.

1:49:11 - Ed Zitron
Stop trying to pretend like you're like doing journalism. It sucks. She's not stupid, she's a great broadcaster. Why can't she, I, can't she do better? That's the thing. This isn't a case where someone's rubbish at their job and they're incapable of doing it. Is this that fun? Is this fun? Does this?

1:49:28 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it seems to be lucrative at the very least, sure, but you just as lucrative to actually do a good job.

1:49:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, she's tried to be the other thing about her career. She, she, she's like a human NFT.

1:49:42 - Paris Martineau
She'll that's the. That's the wildest description I've ever heard you use.

1:49:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the short-tentions man. I'm a Hard-ass journalist, I'm a host of events, I'm a podcaster, I'm a columnist, I'm a podcaster again. I'm a this, I mean she's a public brand. Yeah, but she, she. So along comes the New York Times and makes her a columnist. If you're a public brand, that's not a bad gig, no, but then she just doesn't keep it up very long. She has a short-tentions ban. It's just, it's not of great value.

1:50:16 - Ed Zitron
It just sucks because she does know a lot. She's not stupid like she has great context for this entire industry, decades worth, and have burned book had been just her saying, I don't know what I've become. Had it been something like that, have this thing come out and she would have been quite interesting.

1:50:32 - Paris Martineau
I don't know what I am compared with these folks, yeah.

1:50:35 - Ed Zitron
Well, also, just even if she's like I don't want to lose these friendships. She just said that if she was just like I don't know what I am now compared to what I was before, I would have a deep avoiding respect for her. I really would. I would Genuinely be impressed at the introspection and an acceptance of what has happened, because I be again pathetic with her. She taken away by fame. She also was doing the best job. Human memory is very cruel, as is watching people on video. You could say, oh, at the time maybe she thought she was being Pressing. Maybe to her that was at the time and bystand the standards of the tech industry it was quite critical. Still say back to British press was doing better 20 years ago. But if she had the introspection to see what she was instead of lying because the way she talks about Elon Musk and always being a critic is a lie, that's disgraceful and that is misleading people and it's teaching people that you can just get away with that, both the sources and people in society.

1:51:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll give you an example of a journalist doing it. Well, I think Sophie Schmidt, eric Schmidt's daughter, went to North Korea with her father on a you know, a privileged trip with the State Department 10 years ago and Oddly we kind of wonderfully ironic she put it up on Google and then Google, of course, killed that feature, so it was gone. So somebody at rest of world, which is a wonderful, amazing site that she started, resurrected the piece and then she wrote a piece today about all the way she was wrong. I respect that.

She showed off something she did 10 years ago she was kind of embarrassed about in some ways because it was kind of naive in the situation. And then she came back and she talked to experts about it and said here's where I was wrong. That's the kind of model to show she's rich, she doesn't have to do any of this. She doesn't have to do any of this, she's. I think rest of world is spectacular. She could rest on those laurels, but she came out and did that and that's what Keras was sure is never gonna do.

1:52:27 - Paris Martineau
Why doesn't she do the? What I missed when I went to North Korea 11 years after her Pyongyang trip? Rest of worlds, founder, read rocks how she interpreted the company, its people and their culture.

1:52:38 - Ed Zitron
That's turn and, and what I wish Kara would do is the tech equivalent of smartness. If, if you can get these people game on a podcast, chat nonsense for an hour, let's see what they say. If they're not willing to do it, they're not friends. Or If you're not willing to push them to do it, you're not being, you're not doing your job, you're not putting on entertainment. If it's just entertainment, show these people what they are. Because, also, I think the other thing is most of these guys are terrifyingly boring. Kara can be quite interesting, she'd be quite electric. I think Scott Galway is boring, but she's interesting. But the people she talks to are so terrifyingly dull. Sam Altman, read Hoffman, even mock Benny off. Oh god, the same different versions of everything's. It's like chat, gpt, given life. They all say the same kind of things. They all mumble themselves. Mark Zuckerberg, what a dollar Good Lord. Steve Jobs, by the way, scumbag. I just finished doing the behind-the-bastards series on.

1:53:39 - Paris Martineau
With Robert Evans about and oh, I love that podcast these jobs.

1:53:42 - Ed Zitron
By the way, one of the worst people to ever walk the surf that they beat. Dad who had to be sued by the Dishonored California to pay.

1:53:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Walter Isaacson wrote a fair and balanced biography. I'm well you know.

1:53:53 - Paris Martineau
Never written an unfair Biography ever. And speaking of Elon Musk, I want to shift gears a little bit, yeah.

1:53:58 - Ed Zitron
Yeah, sorry.

1:53:59 - Paris Martineau
Another. I mean, listen, I'm sure everybody loves hearing about Kara Smith's wish, or as much as we love talking about her, but, um, another story in the rundown is a Trump. This week the Washington Post reported that Trump asked Elon Musk if he wanted to buy truth social, and Unsurprisingly the idea went nowhere. But it's still kind of interesting that Trump and Elon have kind of continued to communicate more and more. This comes after, I believe, last week, where either the post or the Times reported that um Trump had Came to Elon Musk to potentially get him to try and invest in his presidential campaign.

1:54:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, so I think that's a different story. I my theory on that is because must said, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna contribute to any candidate. Well, trump needs something else. He needs a few hundred million dollars bond. Yeah and I think that's what he's going after people for. We don't know where he got the the money for the first bond he had put up. He has a much larger bond he has to put up. That's why I think, with Elon, however, not being smart enough to realize that Elon probably has very little liquid capital.

1:55:12 - Ed Zitron
Yes, everything's tied up in Tesla stock. Also, why isn't anyone talking more about this Elon Musk Chancry court thing? Like if he has to reorganize the board of Tesla, he's screwed. They will they would any. He's current group of people look kind of like Jim Henson creatures. They're all just like weird cronies of his that have like transparently crooked deals with him, and that's why the chance record judge ruled against him, because they were like yeah, there's these people like have no control over you. That is the biggest story in tech right now. You're right. Elon Musk loses billion, tens of billions of dollars of stock options. The richest man in tech won't be able to create the world's most anti-woke AI.

1:56:05 - Paris Martineau
Rock being funded by tens of billions of dollars, where are we gonna get our contrarian news from?

1:56:13 - Ed Zitron
I don't know that, many other news outlets that seem to be willing to post right wing stuff critically because they're incapable of I Don't know, I've jit. I find the whole Twitter thing very depressing as well. I find the whole Elon Musk thing very depressing. But I'm British, that's how we roll.

1:56:32 - Paris Martineau
Let's do the Google change log.

1:56:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's not take about two seconds.

1:56:40 - Paris Martineau
It often does.

1:56:43 - Jeff Jarvis
And, by the way, I have to confess to you, I put those both in there with irony.

1:56:48 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I assume that's the only way that Google change log can happen breaking news was my ironic comment on how no. From CNET new Google messages feature. Lets you turn your blue chat bubbles green or orange or purple if you're feeling particularly.

How exciting Google is testing the addition of color and background customization for its Google message app on Android phones Another way the internet giant hopes to distinguish its RCS messaging services, this time with some pizzazz thrilling. Moving on to Jeff's seemingly ironic breaking news Published one day ago, google's updated sign-in page appears to be rolling out widely.

1:57:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, hey, how's that for you?

1:57:36 - Paris Martineau
You've tried to sign into a Google product, you may realize that the sign-in page looks a little differently, and I'm sure there's quite a lot of teams of people got paid quite handsomely to do that and for that we salute them.

1:57:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Where's my or?

1:57:52 - Ed Zitron
what we need her the Google change law. She's running a calendar app.

1:57:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, she is or is the contacts app? Now she has contacts to the contact oh.

1:58:02 - Paris Martineau
Huge, huge. We're gonna go to an ad break, after which we'll come back with our picks the week. Guys, and we're back. Jeff, what's your pick this week?

1:58:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh you got to pick on yourself first pick on myself first.

1:58:18 - Paris Martineau
Alright, my, you know I'm the boss, but yet I clearly don't have a strong sense of self because I immediately deferred to you. Um, my pick this week is a new short film out I guess a normal-sized film, called the disruptors Out. Taylor Lorenz did a interview this week with the writer and director of it, adam frucci, and the headline of it is a new satire takes another whack at Silicon Valley and the men who fund it. I. This is a perhaps a little bit of a preemptive pick, but I saw, jeff, you'd included this story in the rundown so I kind of had to highlight it as my pick because the people behind this film and the two main actors are Both kind of creators that are prominent in the dropout cinematic universe. Dropout for people who've been listening for a while, is this indie streaming service and content kind of creation. I guess.

Studio, that I've been a huge fan of. It is by the former college humor people and is one of my favorite things in media right now, and basically what this movie is about is. The plot is that a Basic, an uber driver played by this guy, grant O'Brien, decides to try and scam um, a venture capitalist, into giving him lots of money by making up a fake, uh start-up idea. And I love this interview with the director and writer because it, I mean it is a really interesting look, because basically the washington post and Taylor Lorenz asked me like, oh, like, why did you? Um, what like led you to do this satirical critique on silicon valley? And he basically says venture capitalists are some of the most powerful people on the planet and these basically every job I've had has been ruined in one way or another by venture capitalist or the tech industry. Um, which I think is a really interesting uh take on it.

2:00:28 - Ed Zitron
I just think it's cute that someone did a movie about creating something that is basically symbolic capital to raise money From venture capitalist which is otherwise known as venture capital in 2021. Yep.

2:00:40 - Paris Martineau
Yep.

2:00:41 - Ed Zitron
Yep.

2:00:41 - Paris Martineau
Very cute. Sorry. Jeff, I got.

2:00:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll. I'll keep going on. The capitalism is evil and private equity and venture capital and hedge funds are ruining the world, including journalism, with two little notes One is that the associated press, which we thought would have standards, is done a deal with the evil tabula, the company that Junks up every damn web page with. And you won't believe and they're gonna do a commerce site with tabula. Have they no pride?

2:01:13 - Paris Martineau
Have they tabula. Yeah, famously is uh the chum box that you see below Articles where it's like one weird trick, gets rid of fat fast.

2:01:24 - Ed Zitron
You won't believe. And then it's something that's just made up.

2:01:28 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, have you guys ever clicked those links?

2:01:31 - Ed Zitron
I have done once and. I was just like and you just go no, this isn't real, this is. It's not obvious how they're making money, but you know they are, so you just close the window.

2:01:44 - Jeff Jarvis
So then, the second thing is speaking of private equity and and bad people. The Los Angeles Times, uh investor, investor media now owned by patrick suon shiong, ruined by uh previous owners at alden they are closing levinson.

You could. Yes, you can play this video without the sounds. We won't get it taken down, if you'd like. This is the last press run at the la times of huge, amazing olympia press hall, and After more than 30 years it's going on business. Look at they, look at the size of these presses, these magnificent. Where are they printing it now, though? Well, that it's going to alden, which owns now san diego and orange county, and so the evil alden hedge fund will get the printing business and make money off the la times. Very cool, wow. So the last I loved press. You know I'm old enough, I'm old enough. Uh, line of types of presses. I, when I worked at the Chicago Tribune and san versico examiner, at a certain hour you would feel the floor rumble as the press starts. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to go down and watch it and smell it. Ooh, it's gone, it's going I don't regret paper going away.

It's. It's like horses went away and so did their crap. It's okay.

2:03:07 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, I have a dumb question for you, but in your first journalism job, were you using computers or typewriters? Ah, here's how old I am or using a stone tablet and just Just a tablet and a bird that said it's a living.

2:03:21 - Jeff Jarvis
So uh, this is uncle jeff moment here. So, uh, I'm old enough that my first typewriters were not electric. When I was at the Chicago Tribune I was in the job, called. I was a rewrite man Sorry for the sexism of that and I would sit on rewrite on deadline stories. And there was a Prison break in indiana. Reporters are calling in me with stuff, I'm calling people to get notes, I'm calling up the clips on other prison breaks and then we would write.

I would write the story on what we called half books, half a sheet of paper with mini carbons and I would type the first paragraph, the lead of the story, I would rip it out of the typewriter quite dramatically and scream copy. And somebody two years younger than me would come and copies of the copy would go all around creation and it would get edited by the cdisk and then edited by the copy desk and then it would get pneumatically tubed down to the composing room where we set in, led down there while I'm still writing. So I'm writing the next paragraph and the next paragraph of the next paragraph and I've got and I keep one copy for myself, I've got to find out whether or not. Did I make that first reference? Did I? Did I say who the da was? Did I say the first name? And if not, I've got to find a way to write that in because I can't get it back. It's being set in type oh my gosh, and so on.

That story, um, I always remember Ralph Hallenstein Sorry, you're gonna get an uncle Jeff going here with his old days. I was the newsman lost in your stories. Um, uh, he was a mondo smoker and at the end of the shift.

Oh yeah, the back. Yes, I was old. We used to smoke inside and um, at the end of the shift, honest to god, the the next shift would have a ghoul pool about how many cigarette butts there were in Ralph's um. So ashtray. A Ralph, of course, died from lung cancer.

Then In came the first computers in the Tribune newsroom and I was on the midnight shift waiting for somebody to die a horrible death so I could write about it. And I was the kid who wasn't scared of them, so I played with them. They couldn't do anything yet and so, come the day when they were going to turn them on, I was the only person who wasn't scared of them. I trained the entire newsroom in the first computers. I and Get this right on your head.

I had to say, well, this is a cursor, but you have to put the cursor where you want to do something. I, no, no, no, don't hit return. The end of the line. Trust me, just keep typing. No, no, no, keep typing. It's smart, it'll do it Right. So I learned computers early, early on. That's what got me old, dirty, and my final bit of uncle Jeff moment Is that because I wrote so fast and rewrite, it changed immediately the way I wrote, so I would write as fast as I could to get a draft down, and then I spent every minute until deadline editing, and so computers fundamentally changed how I thought and wrote. And that's what fascinates me, because there's a book that I absolutely love by a friend of mine named Matthew Kirshenbaum. I called track changes. It is a history of word processing.

2:06:20 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's fascinating.

2:06:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to order wonderful, it is really wonderful. Matthew is a English professor at umd and if you're into this stuff about how it kind of changes the way we look at things, it changes the way we write and we think so. Sorry, paris, you asked me a simple question of uncle Jeff and uncle Jeff couldn't stop.

2:06:39 - Paris Martineau
Well, now I want to ask a question of ed. I don't know how old you are, ed, but do you was your first job? Did you use a computer for it?

2:06:46 - Ed Zitron
Yes, though I was, I was Didn't really need a job. When I was a kid my parents paid for school, so, like I, just I was a games journalist, so I was just writing on computers. But I do remember, when I was like nine, walking around my dad's office, my dad's dad was a public housing management consultant of sorts, and so he had a Reuters terminal on the old Reuters terminal and I was fascinated by this thing and I now know that those things were probably worth like 100 and feet, like way too much crazy. But I was just fascinated by this idea that the news would come through during the day. Just as a kid you were just like, oh, the news exists only on television and on paper. But then they know the computer has news and they always had more news. Yes, it's remarkable, I didn't break that thing.

Yeah but I tried. I well. I mean I was messing around with it a great deal, but it's fascinating. That was like my Probably my most formative computer memory was messing with that terminal, Because it was just like the idea that information came through in this manner and it was good information. It wasn't just like.

2:07:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Someone like this was clearly thoughtful, carefully done stuff, right right right, cool, well, and also the the the year near, you're on top of something. When I started my first news sites in 1994, my kid jordan, just as the browser started. Um, we got, I got the ap wire and I started this page where it would. It would update with the entire ap wire every minute, gave us page views and the public loved. It was hugely popular because it was the entire ap feed and you could get whatever you wanted. It was like dave weiner says, it was a river of news, no judgment, nothing else, you could just see the latest news. Readers loved it. The ap Effing hated it and they fought and fought and fought and finally killed it.

2:08:37 - Paris Martineau
Wow, I was going to say my first reporting job used google docs, slack watch you twitter.

2:08:46 - Ed Zitron
That's fine.

2:08:48 - Paris Martineau
Ed, do you have a pick of the week for us, something you like?

2:08:50 - Ed Zitron
is it okay if it's not like news or anything?

2:08:53 - Paris Martineau
Yes, it's very okay I believe my pick of the week once was the phrase consider the humble corn maze. So anything goes.

2:09:01 - Ed Zitron
Okay, so it's about that normal. So 2003, metallica released the album sent anger. It was not pretty much universally panned. They said that the drums weren't right in it. There were no solos. It was classically considered the death of metallica for quite some time.

A few months, three weeks ago, a guy, michael shea on youtube and not enough people have found this yet michael shea on youtube he re-recorded and recuts the entire album. He used david have, few james hatfield, even jesus james hatfield's original vocals, but he re-recorded most of the album. He finessed parts. He added bass lines, rhythm guitar, he I talked to him briefly about it because I'm that kind of guy to go and say like this is amazing. And he was like I'm not a great guitarist but I know what good sounds like. And so he basically took this album that kind of sucked and made it really good, like it's a very good album now. Lyrics are still Dumber than dog poop. It is still very much a metallica album, but he added depth to an album that, when I was, was 2003, so quite some time ago.

I was in high school. At the time I remember listening to just an abject sadness and I wish I could go back in time and say it will get better at, you'll be able to do a job on the computer and sent anger will be fixed. But it's so weird because this album is re being redone a lot there. Uh, three years, two, three years ago, someone did a one where they re-recorded and they actually re-sang it as well. That one did it wrong because they didn't accept the problem, the inherent problem with sent anger, which is it needed to be re-recorded? The song ideas were good, but the actual fundament Needed to be re removed a bit, and this guy, michael shea, has done it.

It's genuinely a good album. Now, invisible kid, which is one of the worst metallica songs ever, now actually has some depth to it. It's such a good album. I love it. I've listened to it so many times. I've listened to the original a lot for More mental health Reasons, just like it was just something that I damaged myself with. But now this album is actually good, that's, and it's called sent banger On saint banger.

Yeah, good title too.

2:11:03 - Paris Martineau
Great pick, a banger of a pick. Well, thank you guys both so much for being here on my twit, on my twig takeover. Thank you, jeff jarvis. As always, you're always here. And thank you so much, ad zitron, for coming and joining us here in the leolas void that exists on the internet. Um ed, where can people find you? What do you want to plug?

2:11:29 - Ed Zitron
Okay, so you can find me, uh, on twitter slash ratemanudesbiz at ed zitron's edz iti ron. You can find me on blue sky zitron dot b sky dot social From a newsletter at where's your ed dot at, and the podcast better offline at betterofflinecom and you click podcast and we have all the links. You don't have to ask me where the spot if I think it's all there, please don't ask me just great tweets too I did. They're some top drawer posts.

2:11:58 - Paris Martineau
A real poster's heart, and I think that that's what that's what it's all about.

2:12:03 - Ed Zitron
And that's who I am. Like that's I grew up on the internet. Posting Like this is. This is at my core, and I feel like the posters will rise.

2:12:11 - Paris Martineau
The posters will rise again and uh, thank you so much everybody for listening to this. Thank you club twit members for Subscribing and making this podcast possible. And uh, thanks everybody, good night.