This Week in Google 785 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 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on this Week. In Google, I, micah Sargent, am joined by Jeff Jarvis, as you might imagine, but also by Stacey Higginbotham yes, stacey is here for this episode. We start by talking about the right to repair, but for your body, yeah, it's all about DIY pirated medicine. Then we talk about how Google and the Internet Archive are working together to make sure that old versions of web pages are a little bit easier to access. We talk about Stacy's work on making sure that older gadgets stick around for a while longer, so that those bricked smart home devices don't remain bricked. The AI fix for essays and our conversation surrounding understanding when something is written by AI versus written by a human. Plus so much more, including driverless cars and the awesome permission slip app from Consumer Reports. You are not going to want to miss this episode of Twig, so stay tuned for lots of fun.

0:01:09 - Stacey Higginbotham
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twig.

0:01:19 - Mikah Sargent
This is this Week in Google, episode 785, with Jeff Jarvis, stacey Higginbotham and me, micah Sargent, recorded Wednesday, september 11th 2024. Froggenize your phone. It's time for this Week in Google, the show that is ostensibly about Google, but very rarely about Google. I am Micah Sargent filling in for Leo Laporte this week, who is floating on a boat somewhere or something. I honestly don't know what he's doing at this moment, but I am pleased to say I'm in the driver's chair today, the driver's seat today, and I am excited to welcome back a face that you will be familiar with because he's here, um, almost every week, if not every week it's jeff jarvis can't get rid of me.

0:02:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Hello there hi, jeff.

0:02:15 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, this is the part where, where you say the long title.

0:02:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Except I don't have the wrong title in front. We do is sing craig newmark, and that's it. That's the important. Oh, good, okay, good, craig, craig.

0:02:27 - Mikah Sargent
Craig Newmark, beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, benito.

0:02:33 - Stacey Higginbotham
Wait, did the title get longer?

0:02:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Kind of, but now it's actually shorter than that, because now I am emeritus, which is Latin for old.

0:02:42 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, and I don't know if you heard that voice, but it is not the typical welcome back stacy.

0:02:52 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh, I'm so excited to be back and I'm excited to do a show with you, micah, because usually we only get to talk about like the smart home and random android phone, so this is so much like super fun I agree, I'm very excited and for folks who are listening to the show, um, I just want to say that you should totally check out the video at some point, because stacy has the coolest bandana on so fashionable, everybody needs to say as ever that's, that's how I roll.

Well, maybe you can do like for your socials. You could be like snapper, photo stacy and the bandana boom, there you go.

0:03:23 - Mikah Sargent
and uh, by the way, we say hello to Paris, who is in Croatia, or at least was a couple of days ago, so we will see Paris again.

0:03:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo and Paris and I had lunch in New York on Friday and then Paris flew out that evening for Croatia to sit on beaches, and then Leo and Lisa went on to a ship to go up to Canada after a meetup they had on Saturday which I didn't make it to, but it looked like it was rather wet than a photo walk.

0:03:55 - Mikah Sargent
It did look very wet. Yes, Hopefully the photo walk was. I mean, I guess you could take really cool artsy photos with raindrops all over lenses or something, or you could just go on the subways.

0:04:09 - Jeff Jarvis
They were going to go into Grand Central and then they were going to go down to the PATH train. That looks like a station, that looks like a dead whale. So there's fun stuff you could do there. Oh nice, okay, yeah, you can get out of the rain.

0:04:17 - Mikah Sargent
I guess that's true. Well, let's kick off the show this week with an interesting look. I don't have strange Bitcoin names to talk about or really wild internet topics. I've got to say. That's usually something that at least every time I've hosted the show, that's what the show is kicked off with.

0:04:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Stacey, the last time that Micah hosted the show, we embarrassed him hugely. I can't remember what the topic was.

0:04:46 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's true, Because we were talking about a robotics. Basically, they had found a way to make human skin kind of make a face with robotics, and it was all about figuring out how to put skin over a layer of robotics and have it attach and be able to move naturally. But for some reason we got onto the topic of where did they get that skin? And I'm not going to say where they got that skin.

0:05:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris went looking and it was a little embarrassing.

0:05:20 - Mikah Sargent
It was a little embarrassing, but Paris's journalistic techniques were incredible and came up with a frightening answer.

0:05:30 - Stacey Higginbotham
Anyway, speaking of, could you tell your children about it, or is it not fit for children?

0:05:35 - Mikah Sargent
If you, speaking anatomically, yes, you could tell your children about it.

0:05:39 - Stacey Higginbotham
Right, but you wouldn't want them thinking about that for too long because they're young, right, because they're young, yeah, yeah. I feel like I know, and that's exactly where I thought this was going to go.

0:05:49 - Mikah Sargent
Well, that's where it went.

0:05:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
Which means I'm broken inside. How exciting.

0:05:53 - Mikah Sargent
It's a little frightening that you went there right away, because I did not go there at all until it happened and I thought is that where we get it? Anyway, there's conversation now about the right to repair for your body.

0:06:07 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, how appropriate speaking of the need for skin out of nowhere yes, oh, my god, um, so this is.

0:06:18 - Mikah Sargent
This is an interesting conversation, because when I first heard about this, I thought that this was going to be about, um, you know, getting uh robotic parts and needing to a little bit like uh, what is that? That repo man, uh movie? I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, but, uh, it's essentially a movie about people who need hearts or or kidneys, or livers or whatever it happens to be. They get them, but they pay for them over time and if they stop paying, then the repo man comes and takes away their kidney. This is about the rise of DIY pirated medicine, and I don't know about you, but I have to say the thought of pirated medicine.

0:07:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, this really struck me as odd.

0:07:19 - Stacey Higginbotham
Terrifying concept. No, and there is like one thread of that is there's this whole community of biohackers that are both hacking, that build drugs for people and therapeutics for people and maybe body parts, I don't remember and kind of talks about. Basically, it's the same as the open source model for security, which is like if you throw it out there, enough people will review it and rank it and tell you if it's good and so things get more secure over time. It's kind of like that idea with like biohacking and or building your own drugs, and so you had in the book people who were like credible and they could charge a little more, but it was still less than like the big drug companies.

0:08:02 - Jeff Jarvis
anyway, but is it? Does it produce the drugs that you otherwise would get, or is it a whole new drugs that we thought of that?

0:08:09 - Stacey Higginbotham
you should try. There were both, I feel I and forgive me, it's been like two to three years, but yes, in this case they are doing both. Right, they're doing, I'm doing. I was going to say back alley abortion drugs, oh no. I was going to say back alley abortion drugs, oh no. But they're trying to. We made up with her.

0:08:30 - Mikah Sargent
I mean that's, yeah, they're making Misoprostol. Yeah, Misoprostol, Thank you, Misoprostol which is sold for $160, but they were able to manufacture it for 89 cents and then provide it for free to folks. They also worked on the hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, which is sort of generic name is Sofusbuvir or something like that, like that. But they talk about how other drugs that treat viruses they kind of suppress the virus. Sivaldi actually cures the virus. Your body fights it off, your body fights it to a standstill and then you just kind of have it in your system for a while. But with Sivaldi it actually goes in and what they say drains the viral reservoir.

Those pills for Sivaldi are patented. They cost $1,000 per pill. So you have this instance of something being very expensive and and I can understand how, in this case, you would want to have someone be able to have access to a drug that you know, until it becomes a generic offering, is much more costly. Make it so that it can be used for the people who need it. Uh, instead of having to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, uh, they say just a little under $70, 83 cents per pill. Um, to give the person like the, uh, to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. So, yeah, they're teaching people how to make medications that cost so much money to purchase, but there's a lot of trouble. That comes in here, right.

0:10:34 - Stacey Higginbotham
There's a real clear cut. There's several clear cut issues. One we have the FDA for a reason and the manufacturer of drugs is like this clean room, it's like semiconductor manufacturing. There's clean rooms, there's like super processes in place to ensure the purity of your drugs. And if we want to see what happens when we don't have that, look at like the supplement market, which you can argue doesn't kill people on the regular, but you can also argue it does put lead in your turmeric or whatever, also on the regular right. Two, this is straight up IP theft and if our issue is that you know we have let drug companies charge too much for drugs because of, maybe, the healthcare system that we have, maybe there's some other reasons for that.

That's something we can tackle. But straight up saying this stuff is too expensive, then it's not going to go through medical prescription and advice.

0:11:52 - Jeff Jarvis
And so you could get something that may be bad for you. Without the structures there, the manufacturing as you just said, stacey could be off, and there's IP too, all of which doesn't cure the problem that our drug manufacturing system is horrible and greedy and awful in so many ways. I went to give a keynote at a major pharmaceutical company in Switzerland some years ago, and what got me when I got there is the entire talk is it's an entirely an industry of we find molecules. That's it right. We find a molecule, we test it like crazy. We see whether it works.

In the testing, most things fail and there's difficulty like finding test subjects and so on, which is very expensive, and now they're using AI to try to find new molecules, and that may be helpful. Find new molecules and that may be helpful. They don't share terribly well across the industry, so people end up making the same test with the same failures, without the knowledge as in the academe where they would share it. There's all kinds of reforms that I do think we need in pharma. So I get the spirit behind this Absolutely. I get the desire to make medications cheaper and lifesaving for those who need it, but I think what it really says is this is not the right system. It tells us how bad our existing system is.

0:13:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think that who opens a lemonade stand to raise money for their mom who has cancer, and then it gets all over the news, the local news, and then the person makes you know $80,000 because people are paying $100 per cup of lemonade. And on the face of it you go, wow, look at what's able to happen when people come together. And then you look at the underlying thing there, which is holy cow, we don't have the health insurance necessary to make sure that this mom who has a child or children can't get access to the healthcare that they need because of, again, the healthcare industry. It is a second take kind of thing. I also think about the folks who were convinced that they needed to get doses of what is that horse Horse?

0:14:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Ivermectin.

0:14:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Ivermectin, you know everybody was. I've got an Ivermectin source. I can get Ivermectin here. I can get Ivermectin there.

0:14:36 - Jeff Jarvis
The poor horses didn't get it anymore.

0:14:39 - Mikah Sargent
None for the horses, those poor horses. But it makes me think of, yeah, folks who have sort of clinical and now I'm forgetting the term as well where you start to believe that you've got these different conditions and you're trying to treat those different conditions.

0:14:56 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, thank you.

0:14:57 - Mikah Sargent
Hypochondria. We are your thesaurus. Thank you very much. My brain is somewhere else today, for sure. You very much. My brain is somewhere else today, for sure. Um, trying to get access to medications they don't need to take, but because it's easy for them to do so, or easier for them to do so. Then they're like oh yeah, I probably have hepatitis c because I read it on the internet and now I'm taking this drug that would otherwise require a lot of process to actually get access to. Yeah, not to mention drug interactions.

0:15:24 - Stacey Higginbotham
I mean, there's a reason doctors prescribe drugs lot of process to actually get access to. Yeah, not to mention drug interactions. I mean, there's a reason doctors prescribe drugs and there's a reason they go to medical school for like a really long time.

0:15:34 - Mikah Sargent
What do we say, though, to the people who are, who would call us, in this instance, gatekeepers, because we're, you know, we are?

0:15:42 - Stacey Higginbotham
we are. I mean, I mean, look, the world is complicated and nuanced. We are gatekeeping because the risk of harms, of letting anyone through the gate is pretty high in this situation. Right the in, we will be gatekeeping against some very legitimate cases and users and right now the whole system's gatekeeping. So it feels great to come and storm those gates but it's probably it's not the way to go. I mean.

0:16:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It proves a point that's valuable, but I'm not taking the drugs.

0:16:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, somebody said hey look, I've got this. It's good. I'd say no.

0:16:24 - Stacey Higginbotham
Think about the potential for manipulation. So think about how easy it would be in this world to, let's say, you're a big competitor and you have no regard for human life. You could actually poison the well in terms of putting out a bad recipe and then blaming whatever. Drug is your competitor, right? So there's a lot of opportunities for people. Drug is your competitor Right? So like there's a lot of opportunities for people to behave really terribly, yeah, yeah, absolutely All right.

0:16:54 - Mikah Sargent
Let's go ahead and talk about something that I think is near and dear to all of us here on this show, which is the Internet Archive. It is a source of the history of the Internet and has been a tool that I have used for years and years to find earlier versions of webpages and find things that have been taken down, journalists, it. And then, of course, on top of just being that way back machine tool, it is also so much more in the sense that it is a, a database of so much of what humans have created online and, unfortunately, online. And unfortunately, the Internet Archive did lose its appeal over ebook lending.

I just had Kate Nibbs of Wired on Tech News Weekly to talk about this appeal and kind of what all happened here, and it was an interesting conversation, because one aspect of this is that the internet archive doesn't necessarily does. It is, it does not make a profit, um, and it is a not for profit organization. However, uh, part of the heart of the ruling that was involved in all of this was the prominent donation button on the Internet Archive's page, by providing access in this case to books, and bringing people to the site and giving them a way to provide money to the organization that actually played a role in the decision that came through. I wanted to hear how you two are feeling about this, what you think about this and where things stand for you, at least if you feel like this was the right choice during this appeal.

0:19:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
Stacey.

0:19:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to let you go first, abid. I love the Internet Archive. I mean in full disclosure. The book I have coming out on sale next month Web 20 Discount Code is from Hachette and Hachette brought this and I'm really unhappy about that connection. Frankly, they're a publisher, they're all publishers, they all agree about all this stuff, but I want my books to be read. I want it there. It's not in their interest, but I officially own the copyright, but I license it to them and I lose control over it. That's the essence of copyright.

It was not done for authors and all this talk about how, oh, this hurts the authors terribly, it doesn't hurt the authors. The sales that may be affected by Internet Archive probably increases sales. We know that when the Internet made books available back titles were sold more and more because they were discovered more and more and I don't think the data are there to really say what this actually did in the marketplace. So I'm very upset about the decision and as a researcher air quotes researcher, not a real PhD or anything you know, just a fake professor but when I do my research for my books, I use the internet kind of like crazy, not for current books, but for older books, which I hope stay.

The reporting is that 500,000 books have to come off Internet Archive and I've got to believe that some of those are, you know, in the last century and they're now ridiculously extended copyright terms we have and that they're books that I would need and want to use and I'm lucky I have access to an academic library. But for anybody out there who's trying to get information, it just became harder. It became harder to discover the books. It's a kind of ridiculous greed and the thing that I point out, and I write about this in my books, is that copyright was not intended to benefit creators. It was intended to create. It was demanded by the booksellers and the publishers because they wanted content to be a tradable asset, and that's why that's the same thing that's happened here. It's the publishers that came and did this. It doesn't benefit creativity. It pisses me off.

0:21:21 - Stacey Higginbotham
Since you asked, yeah, no, that's good. I'm a little bit middling on this only because one. So yes, literally the only way I can find probably like 80% of my entire work product is on the internet archive, because I've worked for several publications that have gone out of business.

0:21:43 - Jeff Jarvis
That too.

0:21:44 - Stacey Higginbotham
Love it. When it comes to the books, I don't feel that like I do think Hachette did an overreach here. The books that they have are not pleasant. They're not like eBooks. They're digital scans of, like a physical book. Right, they're not. They're like.

It's like saying that you're getting access to, like microfiche, where you're sitting there like scrolling through on this awful thing, and you would do it for only research purposes. So I don't think this was the right decision for something like that. I think when they did launch a program to like freely lend them out to people and make it more available, maybe that drew attention to something that was ultimately used more for research, something like that. I think when they did launch a program to freely lend them out to people and make it more available, maybe that drew attention to something that was ultimately used more for research than for gaming the system. So maybe the best way to do this is rethink or develop a licensing scheme that works for this, because even today, the way eBooks are licensed is really punitive.

For libraries. It's not awesome, and if you look at the e-book space, it's a veritable monopoly. So it's not like we're getting innovation and licensing from any of the players. So I guess that's what I'm like. I'm like the world is this way, but I would like it to be this way. It's going to be like the theme of me being here to this week.

0:23:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the same argument we hear about news. Can't we just have micropayments, which doesn't work as a business model? There's all kinds of reasons it doesn't work, but we need to figure out, especially as we move into the AI world, how people and companies can read more fluidly. And relying on a law from 1710 in the UK and 1790 in the US just doesn't take into account these new realities.

0:23:37 - Stacey Higginbotham
And access to trusted information is going to be more crucial than ever. Amen, sister, is there a copyright exemption? So every three years you can go before the copyright office and get an exemption for certain things? I don't know if there could be an exemption for this. Maybe I'll look into that.

0:23:57 - Jeff Jarvis
The other thing about this is that the extension of copyright was bad enough. Thank you Disney. The copyright was bad enough. Thank you Disney. But the real issue to me is that when copyright became automatic as opposed to having to apply for it, and so it just put the umbrella out over everything immediately, if copyright was still the subject of granting, if applied for it would mean you have to go to the effort to apply for it and and renew it, and I think that would be a fairer system for books that are out of print, that you can't get otherwise, that that we need to be able to get through mechanisms like this. That's the main use of this. It's it's an inconvenient way to read Harry Potter.

No one wants to read Harryry potter anymore. Don't worry, that's true too, that's true too. Apparently y'all talked about this last week yes, this is what I'm learning as well, um, but we still went on in all kinds of different ways.

0:24:59 - Mikah Sargent
that was the first topic of last week, so I apologize for that, um but. But what's new and is still about the Internet Archive that I found interesting is that, as of, I believe, today, google has announced that it will link to the Internet Archive to add more context to search results. So Google is working with the Internet Archive directly to give you historical context in your search results. So Google is working with the Internet Archive directly to give you historical context in your search results. Now we know that in the past Google has had that little cache feature. So I do find this interesting that in this case what we have is the company kind of I don't think it's going to necessarily farm out that feature. I imagine that we'll still see Google cached pages. But to have full on internet archive pages and for this to be like an actual partnership, they say, and I quote we know that many I quote nine to five Google, that is quoting Google.

We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That's why we've added links to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, to our About this Page feature, to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through search. I think this is great because, yes, I've indexed it before, or I've looked at indexes before through Google Search, and sometimes then I still have to take it to the Wayback Machine, and so now you'll see site first indexed by Google and it'll show you when, and then it says see previous versions on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. So I think this is great because, again, with the Internet Archive kind of going through this whole appeal process and they're being kind of tumult, it's nice that we have, you know, big Tech and the Internet Archive kind of working together to make the Internet better.

0:26:57 - Stacey Higginbotham
And they did the same thing.

0:26:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Go ahead, Stacey.

0:26:59 - Stacey Higginbotham
I was going to say it's kind of nice, since Google has totally screwed up their search results from an AI perspective and from a sponsorship perspective, although I would worry that people will look at like sending someone to the Wayback Machine. Depending on how they do it. It might just look sponsored and not as trustworthy, which would be unfortunate, just because I know when I search Google now, I'm like I don't search Google now. I don't use it very often because it's terrible. Ooh, what's your search?

0:27:27 - Mikah Sargent
engine of choice.

0:27:29 - Stacey Higginbotham
I go back and forth, like right now I'm doing DuckDuckGo still and it's not great, and I even use Bing, which is really not great.

0:27:37 - Jeff Jarvis
How weird.

0:27:39 - Stacey Higginbotham
It's not terrible. I tried some of the paid search engines and that's fine, but I really am very sad about it. Anyway, I'll go on.

0:27:52 - Jeff Jarvis
But my theory, stacy, is, it is that Google has done some things wrong. But I think it's. The problem is not Google, the problem is the web. Web is being just crammed full of crap. Well yeah.

0:28:08 - Stacey Higginbotham
Incentiv of crap. Well, yeah, google incentivize that. Yeah, google incentivizes that in. I mean, yes, yes, everything about the web is no longer as good as it once was. I mean I'm, I'm now like the old lady. Oh yeah, aren't we old? Back in my day, the internet was full of joy and fun. Um, but I am trying, like my goal when I go on the internet.

Internet is to search for accurate and relevant information and that I can trust, because you know, that's what I'm doing, right, you can trust yes, and I can get two out of three, maybe on Google, and that's not sufficient for me.

0:28:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you related all Well, two things, not sufficient for me. So have you related all two things? One I think that Google, by using Wikipedia, which is open source and they had the perfect way to do so, I think brought a lot more attention to Wikipedia and people who use it and, I hope, contribute to it, and I think it was a good thing that Google did and it was branded, so you know what you're getting and I think that's clear. Do either of you ever use the HathiTrust, the who, the what? Hathitrust, hathitrust, h-a-t-h-i Trust, oh, hathi, no, I've never heard of that. So it is the outpouring, the outcome of the Google Book Scanning. Oh, and it's quite wonderful because I find all kinds of publications and books on here that have been scanned in university libraries across the country that you otherwise just couldn't get to. Conchological illustrations.

Oh, it's great stuff, it's phenomenal stuff. And this again goes back to Google. This is this Week at Google, so we're trying to be justified here, where you see, it's a university library and they scanned it and now it's available to you and you can search this text. If you have a library access, you can download a whole publication. That's hard to do throughout, unfortunately, it's a page at a time, but you can read it here and it's amazing. It's a tremendous resource that is possible only because of Google Book Search.

0:30:06 - Stacey Higginbotham
You know they say they pulled some of their data. They pulled some of it from the Internet Archive.

0:30:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually, which is there's cooperation there. Yeah, yeah.

0:30:15 - Mikah Sargent
I'm sorry, I'm busy reading the ice cream review. You'll have to call me back later.

0:30:21 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, no this is great.

0:30:23 - Mikah Sargent
This is really cool.

0:30:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
This isn't the sort of I mean like, like you know, in my job as a well, I'm not even even still in my job, but immediately prior to that, my journalist job, you know, for me google replaced the morgue, which is, you know, in your old school print publication. You had a room in the newspaper where you went and you had clippings and you would have to literally go through and find the files and read them and like I just had started as a journalist when search engines like got good, so like when google launched, and I had worked in a publication with the morgue and had seen the two things and it was just like a sea change in the way you could actually do your job, like it took hours off of writing something and all the way to now, and I'm like I spend more time just digging through crap online and I kind of miss the days of the morgue, which is saying a lot.

0:31:27 - Jeff Jarvis
But the morgue had librarians who literally clipped out everything and had their taxonomy and filed it for you. So they-.

0:31:34 - Stacey Higginbotham
Okay, I didn't work for the Times. When I started out, I worked for a local business journal and was an intern at the Statesman. The Statesman did have a library. Yeah, but your point being that that I had to go do it. I didn't have a librarian we had. We had a filing system, but but you had to go search through it I mean I'm with you.

0:32:00 - Mikah Sargent
I'm gonna leave this page because I will continue to read about found out anything interesting about ice cream there, Micah, Honestly it was just full of ads.

So it's just like the new web, apparently. Apparently, all we're talking about things have been great that ice cream review all it was was ad after ad after ad. But you know, yeah, do we forget that when we used to look through magazines, every third page was an advertisement? Just like the web. Uh, we talk about recipes online, having to scroll through pages and pages of stories about how, uh, you know, someone has had this recipe with their friends and you know, honestly, that's kind of how magazines were too. Anyway, uh, I appreciate you for talking about the HathiTrust cause. I had not known about that. Why was it separated out? Did it have something to do with the legal requirements?

0:32:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, once Google had all this stuff, it was a way to make the efforts of the book search public under this trust. I don't know the full story, but I think it was a way to well. I'll say it again, it was a way to make it more public. There was all the controversy in all the court cases, but this is a way that you can go to it and the access is limited in the sense you can't download everything unless it's absolutely free of copyright. If you have, if I had a certain university access I'm trying to fight to get my old university access back I could download whole publications and it was amazing. I'm doing research now on my Linotype book and it's invaluable.

The other thing you can get in places is just while we're wonderful libraries because I'm a teacher in New York, I have a New York Public Library card and it is amazing. I just did not realize this. There's a chapter of a book I need that they have there, because they have everything there up to 50 pages. You can request a scan and a very nice librarian will manually scan it for you and send it to you in a PDF, because librarians are wonderful and they're saints and these are the kind of resources. This is what we need as a society. Imagine if we had better access to quality information and history and studies and research, at least for those who go looking for it. We'd be better off.

0:34:16 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, especially if you didn't have to leave your house and go to the library and ask anybody, just send an email, wow.

0:34:23 - Mikah Sargent
You just sent an email Wow I've had. When I first moved into this place, we were curious about who had lived here before, etc. Etc. Etc, and I was able to use public document stuff to find out a little bit more, and I was pleasantly surprised at how everything was available to me via, you know, some sort of scanned in PDF. So I think there are ways to get to some of that information. Um, and I've, I've I hate that a lot of um, there's a big part of the web, there's a big part of history that is locked behind a very expensive uh subscription service and it is the part of history that is kind of the country's newspaper database that I've only been able to get access when I took advantage of some Black Friday deal for Ancestrycom, because they have access to all of those services.

Yeah, and I. It really bugs me that all of that is behind a very, very, very expensive subscription service, because I found out about relatives and you know stories for and all sorts of things of my ancestors and more recent ancestors, so to speak. To me it's a little bit of a crime that that's all so locked away.

0:35:58 - Stacey Higginbotham
It could be an employment opportunity for certain college students. I know that as a college student I had access to a lot of very expensive databases. So, um, people writing books and researchers would actually put out calls for college students to bring their. Lexisnexis subscription and become a researcher for them. I mean you, you did the work, I mean, but you also like that was a cheap way for a relatively cheap way for them to get access. Were you paid? Oh yeah, oh OK.

0:36:28 - Mikah Sargent
So you were paid and you just happened to come with a key to the kingdom Right. So you did the research and you had the key. Yeah it's, it's like no, I don't even, I don't even know if there's an analog, that's just like there's a very kind of unique thing that you pay someone who has access but who also does the job.

0:36:51 - Stacey Higginbotham
That's kind of cool and I mean I didn't do all of the. I mean like, basically, they were like find everything about this. And I'd be like here, are this you know, 16 different or not six? Here are the 600 different references to what you seem to be looking for. And they'd be like get me this, this, this and this you know.

0:37:07 - Mikah Sargent
And then it was not fun funny because one time I was um, one time I was tweeting, and this was back in the day when tweeting was great, um, when was that? I don't know, but it was and I was talking about how, because I used to have a subscription to the journal sleep, because I did a uh, sleep and and um, a sleep science and dream podcast, and so I was big nerd into I still am a big nerd into sleep science, but I don't have a subscription anymore because it was expensive, um, and so I was talking about how, oh, darn it, one of the articles from the journal sleep is locked behind the padlock, um, and I wish I could have access to this. And then a kind of distant friend of mine slacked me, and one of the slacks that I've been was like, hey, I work for a university, so here's that article from that journal. And I thought, ah, that's so cool, I want to go work for a university now, just so I can read all of these journals.

0:38:07 - Jeff Jarvis
That is the reason why I am emeritus. That's why I care, because that means that I am permanently associated with the university. I get an email address and I get library access. That's lovely.

0:38:17 - Mikah Sargent
And you can do other things with that email address too, like discounts, education discounts.

0:38:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I get Wall Street Journal, Otherwise I wouldn't pay for it.

0:38:29 - Mikah Sargent
We should take a break, because this is how we pay for this. I want to tell you about 1Password. We're bringing you this episode of this Week in Google. I love this question because I already know the answer to it. It's no, but let me ask you anyway Do your end users always work on company-owned devices and always work on IT-approved apps? Yeah, I didn't think so. So how do you go about keeping your company's data safe when it's sitting on all of those unmanaged apps and devices? How do you pull it off? Well, 1password has an answer to this question. It's extended access management. That's the answer. 1password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch.

Imagine your company's security. Like the quad of a college campus, there are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps and managed employee identities. And then there are the paths that the people actually take. We sometimes call these elephant trails or desire paths. These are the shortcuts worn through the grass. That are the actual straightest places from point A to point B. Greatest places from point A to point B. These are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities. You know, like contractors, that you hire Most security tools. They only work on those happy brick paths, living in this world of rainbows and unicorns, thinking everybody's going to follow those well, the yellow brick road. But a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts, on those little elephant trails. One Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all of those unmanaged devices, all of those unmanaged apps, those identities, under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we work today and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra, and it's currently in beta for Google Workspace customers. So check it out at 1passwordcom slash twig. That's 1-P-A-S-S-W-O-R R Dcom slash twig and, we think, one password for sponsoring this week's episode of this week in Google.

All right, we are back from the break and that means it is time to carry on with our topics here and up. Next, let me see where we I'm losing my place in show notes. I wanted to talk to you all about an AI story. Given where things stand in terms of self-driving vehicles, and we have seen companies kind of shifting focus between two places. One is the focus of trying to uh put cars out on the road that drive themselves around, right, and we've seen that with uh Waymo, we've seen that with um, some some actual, you know, large uh car manufacturers. But then we've seen a shift for some I believe Amazon being one of them to vehicles that are like semi-trucks that drive themselves.

And what's fascinating to me about this is it seemed like originally the focus was going to be on replacing human-driven semi-trucks with these autonomous semi trucks.

And then the shift, the focus quickly shifted from that to an idea that you could call up a car like you can with Uber, like you can with Lyft, except it wouldn't be driven by a person, it would just drive itself and you could get from point A to point B.

And I wanted to talk to you about that shift because with no pun intended, obviously because I think that something that's unique about this show too is the fact that about this show uh, too, is the fact that, um, the sort of underlying factors, uh, particularly sort of political underlying factors, always play a role in the conversations, and I think that I wonder how much lobbying played a role in that shift? Um, there's an ingrained group, um, there's an ingrained group, uh, interest group, when it comes to our nation's um, semi-truck drivers, our nation's uh, uh sort of much newer field that isn't quite dug in as much. And that is where I'm kind of curious if you feel like that has played any role in that sudden shift from semi-trucks that drive themselves around to something where the ground is a little bit looser and there's more place to kind of get your roots in, versus something that's so steadfast and true and has been for some time. Or am I just overthinking things? Stacey.

0:44:04 - Stacey Higginbotham
I don't know if I agree with your core premise that there has been this shift between individual transport. It sounds like Like individuals, ai for individual vehicles and AI for truck riders or mass distribution transport. So AI for mobility versus distribution maybe is a way to. I don't know.

Yeah that's fair and maybe it's because I've covered enough. There's a Swedish company called Einride who does trucks. They're actually just like a few weeks ago had actually sent out a letter to their investors saying like, hey, we need some more money. So I think we hear more about the consumer side of it, because we are consumers and that's what we care most about. Right, like few consumers really think a lot about like the flow of goods to their homes and stuff. I also think America is a terrible place for testing out AI, like distribution, because it's so big and you have to travel across so many different legal zones. I mean, there's the federal states, but when we're talking about autonomous vehicles, they do have to drive through cities and I'm not sure how that would work. So that's another kind of maybe we don't hear about as much here, so I don't know if I'm answering any of your questions.

0:45:38 - Mikah Sargent
No, that's fair, because I yeah, I see what you're saying in terms of maybe I just wasn't. I I didn't go deep enough to see that there was still a maintained focus on autonomous vehicles, and I think that you're right. I think it took more consumer-facing publications talking about autonomous trucks again, semi-trucks again for me to feel like the focus was coming back to that, whereas it sounds like you're saying it's been going on. It's just not something that we see because we're not part of that, we're not paying as much attention to that industry and it's not happening as much here.

0:46:17 - Stacey Higginbotham
So in Europe and in the most successful efforts have been around, like the way that it has been happening of late, like in the last five or so years, maybe even 10, I don't know is you have like a distribution hub and you send things out in a pretty predefined route, so it's a predefined AI route, with your trucks going this way. They're usually not. A lot of them are electric, because they're killing two birds with one stone, I guess, and so they're not hugely long distances. Are we seeing a lot of autonomous driving that isn't electric?

0:47:00 - Mikah Sargent
That's a good question.

0:47:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I don't know, are we seeing any? I don't think we're seeing any. That's not electric.

0:47:06 - Stacey Higginbotham
It doesn't need to be, but yeah. So that's another area where you're like okay, you've got to recharge these things, and so in figuring out long-term distribution is harder and more challenging. I do think we'll get there because of the lack of people who want to take on those jobs today, but I think it will require our, our American transportation infrastructure is not optimized for that. Europe's is probably better.

0:47:38 - Jeff Jarvis
I know in Saudi Arabia they're doing a lot with that, but so I put a story in the rundown and the story was PR from Waymo, where they said that they've they've driven 22 million miles now and they have their accident report. Stacy's here, so maybe she can do the math, but I could not figure out, I could not get my little old head around it because it requires an algorithm, a formula, stacey. So they say how much, for whatever methodology. They compare their safety record versus human driving over some miles. Now how exactly they do that I don't know. But if you scroll down a bit, so it's 5.9 million miles in San Francisco, 15.9 million miles in Phoenix If you keep going a little lower there, thank you, right there. Fewer injury-causing crashes by 73%. The only hard number we get is 46 fewer.

0:48:44 - Stacey Higginbotham
So Stacey, does that tell us, how many accidents they actually? Have. So, they're comparing this to a human, like a single human driver or all human drivers Compared to a human driver over the same 22 million mile distance in Phoenix and San Francisco.

0:48:55 - Mikah Sargent
the Waymo driver had 73% fewer injury-causing crashes 42 mile, not 22 million miles, just to clear. Oh yeah, sorry, sorry, thank you.

0:49:09 - Jeff Jarvis
So I don't know how much it is. Now they're trying to argue. They're putting this forward, it makes them look good, but my point is well, how many accidents are there actually? Are those accidents ones that we consider? Is that what we tolerate? Is that okay?

What's the deal here and I've long been, waymo at least is, I think, more regulated than, pardon me, stacy, your Tesla owner or manufacturer, who I've had this rant before puts out allegedly self-driving cars without full regulation, without full testing, without really understanding the safety and efficacy, without reporting back data in an accountable way. That's what bothers me. We're sending this stuff out in the road and it may in fact be safer, it may in fact be better, but for God's sakes, we should know more about it and have some approval and accountability processes around this. But that's a lot of miles In four cities. That's a lot of miles. One lady famously got dragged under a car by GM's equivalent. I don't know. I just don't feel as if our regulators are. I wish they'd pay more attention to this than some of the other stuff they pay attention to.

0:50:20 - Stacey Higginbotham
So some things to think about here, and I'm not going to drag on this report exactly, but this table shows how many fewer crashes Waymo had compared to human drivers, regardless of who was at fault. So Waymos tend to drive conservatively. I've been around them in Phoenix and they're annoying as anything, so it's possible that that may benefit them. Right, they're very conservative. They stop when they probably shouldn't and people have to adapt to them. Is this compared to? So they call it a human driver, but they're also calling it human benchmarks, and I think it's also worth pointing out that Waymo is the Waymo self-driving algorithm is one thing, and human benchmarks are all of us, and some of us are drunk and some of us are good and some of us are terrible.

I do think that's worth considering, you know, because the idea is like, hey, if we let AI take over everything, we are eliminating all those drunk people, right, we're also eliminating the good people, and that's going to frustrate us, but you know, it's worth noting. So those are kind of the things that I'm like that jump out at me as like a skeptic, right, that I'm like, oh, I would like a lot more information on this.

Injury causing crashes, regardless of who's at fault. So and part of this is also the interaction between the two Like if you have, like if everything was Waymo, I actually think it might be like zero injury causing crashes, but then your ride time would probably go down considerably, you know cost per mile would go up.

0:52:07 - Jeff Jarvis
So I don't know. I watched a video the other day on the socials where somebody was behind a Waymo and the light, the traffic light ahead, the power was out, and so they're giggling on the video. I wonder what's going to happen, what's the Waymo going to do? So they stayed behind the car and I fast forwarded the video and they didn't know what to do. It just stopped.

0:52:31 - Stacey Higginbotham
To be fair, people don't always know what to do either.

0:52:35 - Jeff Jarvis
But everybody else had gone through, but the Waymo just sat there and said I don't know.

0:52:41 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know. That is what keeps me from ever. I have too much anxiety and I just think about being in one of those when it does something wrong, and then I will feel entirely, entirely responsible for it, even though I know I'm not. But like, where is everybody going to place their frustrations on the person who hailed this self-driving vehicle in the first place? And then it's like I'm sorry, I'm sorry that it's not listening to the traffic signal director right now and it's just doing what it wants to do. I have no control. I would just want to sort of slowly move down in my chair and I'm not here because, oh, that would just give me. Oh, I would hate that, I would hate that. That's what keeps me out of them and that, well, that's not all. I don't have access to them anymore.

But I had gotten before I left. Um, I had applied to be part of the you know pilot program or whatever in San Francisco, just because I wanted to try it. And I did end up getting an invite while it was still invite only, and said, oh, I'll make it into the city and do that at some point. And then I watched that video of a traffic signal director telling it what to do and not doing it and the traffic guy going, you know, at the person in the car and the person in the car is like I don't know, I don't control the thing, I don't know.

But at the same time I've also had two people who live in the city who say they regularly take them and are very happy with them and enjoy not having any social pressure to talk to the person in the car, to talk to right, right and just being able to get work done while they wait to make their way to the trip. And yeah, you know it's. We're only going to see on social media the times when the thing goes wrong. Compare that to all of the times when it goes right and there are likely a lot more instances of it just making it from point a to point b and maybe bothering the non-conservative driver. But if that's all that it's doing, I think it's okay. Um, but yeah, go ahead there's technology available.

0:54:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
So here's, we're going to take a trip down, you know, wireless memory lane for a second. All the way back in like 2015, 2016, there was a government effort to do v2v vehicle to vehicle communications right, um, and then v2v it's a vehicle to infrastructure I don't remember what the other one but like having your traffic infrastructure talk to your car. The automakers were actually kind of in favor of this. So was Qualcomm, because they were going to make a lot of money In, like I think it was 2017, the Trump administration threw all of that out. They were like you know what a case to be like that If our infrastructure was upgraded, you're you're very anxiety driven, like that traffic light could have explained explained to the car what was happening.

0:55:45 - Jeff Jarvis
And oh, I see what you're saying, Right.

0:55:47 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, it would communicate like look, I'm out now If the power's out, if your traffic light's malfunctioning, because the power's out, which happens all the time on our little island, you know, there's not necessarily like I don't know what the details were around backup communication there, but there is a case to be made that right now we're living in this messy. We're not even halfway there. We're like probably 20% of the way there in terms of automation and we're hearing all the benefits of like 80% automation, but we're totally not there yet in terms of, like, self-driving cars and this sort of thing. So I believe that eventually we will get most of the way there, but it's going to take a lot of money and time and I don't know about any of y'all, but I remember being told like 10, 15 years ago that this was going to be happening by 2025. And I think a more realistic thing would probably be 2050. Oh, dang it.

I'm sorry, I know I'm going to be like, but that's just in time for me to be so old you think you got problems with that date, think about me that's fair enough.

0:57:00 - Mikah Sargent
Oh dear, yeah, I'll be fine. I'm sorry it's. It's great, it's not? Stop complaining, you whippersnappers it's not a problem at all. Um yeah, but that would be super cool if the whenever you first said vehicle to vehicle, I thought, oh no, now everybody could be mean to each other. Can you imagine you're in your car and then the speaker is like why did you not take their? Stuff, but that's not what it does, so I understand that and your anxiety around driving is phenomenal.

I'm like I feel like I do a good job, and I don't want to. I'm a well. First of all, you haven't been here to know this Stacy, but one thing that really caught me off guard was learning that Jeff is taller than I am. I'm a very tall person, and when I learned that Jeff was taller than I am, it still boggles the mind. But what I was going to say is as a tall person.

As a tall person, I do not like to take up space, because, by default, I do take up space, and so I always like to be out of pathways and stuff like that. It's probably also the nature of my skin color as well that plays a role in me trying not to take up space and be noticed, because it happens by default. But anyway, what I'm getting at is so, in any instance where I am taking up more space than the part of my brain that thinks I should not is playing its role, then it drives my anxiety through the roof. So that's where being in one of these would be be troublesome for me, but again, that's where I actually think the anxiety reduction would take place. If all the systems are communicating with each other, then I don't have to worry about it and it's fine, I can let it go.

Um, yeah, that's that. Uh, folks, this is this week in Google. Uh, I am Micah Sargent subbing in for Leo Laporte this week. Uh, we have Jeff Jarvis, host emeritus, and uh, all around tall guy who knew. Uh, you know now.

0:59:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris is taller than you think too.

0:59:10 - Mikah Sargent
Oh really, how tall are all of y'all, I'm six, three. Oh really, how tall are all of y'all. I'm 6'3", oh, 6'4". Yeah, jeff's 6'4". I'm 5'8".

0:59:20 - Stacey Higginbotham
How tall are you 5'8?

0:59:20 - Mikah Sargent
1⁄2", 5'8 1⁄2" and Paris is 6'7". That's over normal right. No, I'm kidding. I'm above average, sorry, yeah, and of course we have stacy higginbotham, policy fellow of consumer reports, who's here with us this week. Welcome back to the show former tweaker.

Yes, indeed, now I am really excited to talk about this next, next story. I don't know, jeff, if you put this in, but I loved coming across a little piece, um by damon barras, um of who wrote about this in the atlantic, uh, kermit the frog and artificial intelligence. So look, ai, you know, we people, depending on who you talk to, they see it as this tool. That is just, you know going to destroy humanity on one end.

It's going to ruin the world. Or, on the other end, it's going to save everything and save everyone and everything's going to be fixed, etc. Etc, etc. And then some of us play around with it and we realize that it exists in a much smaller capacity of any of the things that we try to attribute to it. But sometimes it's just a delightful bit of amusement, and that was the case for Damon. Why don't you tell us a little bit about this, Jeff?

1:00:47 - Jeff Jarvis
So Damon was, I forget it was his kid. He was trying to just keep awake or something with his kid, or feed the kid or whatever, and so he had his phone, and so he decided he'd use AI to replace everything on his phone's home screen with a Kermit the Frog-themed icon.

1:01:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, so, yes, basically, um used being image creator, which is, in effect, using open AI's, dolly and uh, given that Damon has an iPhone although I'm I'm almost certain you can do this with Android as well Uh, you can replace the default icons for apps with a photo that you want through a little method, with shortcuts, and so Damon was just sitting there and replaced every app icon on his home screen with images of Kermit, and they are so great because each one is like custom designed. So, for example, the settings app has Kermit.

1:01:54 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the best one.

1:01:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, holding a wrench and a screwdriver while smiling and looking at the camera. Um, the authenticator app has Kermit the frog in police gear, holding a billy club. Um, signal I love, because signal, of course, is a way for you to kind of be anonymous, or at least a little bit more. You've got encryption on both ends and so it kind of gives this spy effect because you have Kermit the Frog standing in front of what is some sort of light source. So it's a silhouette of Kermit the Frog as he's kind of. It almost looks like he's whispering into his phone.

1:02:34 - Stacey Higginbotham
It's like the people who are on the 60 Minutes, who don't want to be named. Yes, exactly.

1:02:41 - Mikah Sargent
And then the Instagram one is also fantastic because you have Kermit the Frog wearing a bikini and has very long sort of flowing platinum blonde hair and sunglasses and is holding up the phone taking a selfie.

1:02:58 - Stacey Higginbotham
They're just so stinking delightful and they're less obnoxious or they're actually easier to see than those. Google ones to distinguish between than the silly Google icons on my phone.

1:03:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yeah, you're so right. The Google icons all look so similar. And then also, to be fair, the Apple Photos app and the Google Photos app are both very similar to the Slack app, which is similar to the Authenticator app, and so trying to visually distinguish between the two is much more difficult than using Kermit's help.

1:03:34 - Jeff Jarvis
My favorite is the Gmail, where Kermit is happily buried in letters.

1:03:38 - Mikah Sargent
Just a pile of letters, yeah.

1:03:42 - Jeff Jarvis
It humanizes or froggenizes the phone. I agree, and it's just wonderful and I love this. I saw the story. I thought, well, this is the Atlantic, which tends to have a lot of moral panic. And I saw this. I thought, oh, what are they going to complain about now with the phone? And it's just delightful. Someone had fun with it and the post went crazy because people liked it, they wanted this. This is great.

1:04:05 - Mikah Sargent
It was a moment where I said the second I have a little bit of free time. I want to do something like this now because it's just so fun.

1:04:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So Damon Barris' post is 10.4 million views right now.

1:04:17 - Stacey Higginbotham
Wow, which character would you use, micah? What would you want your icon theme to be? That is a good question.

1:04:29 - Jeff Jarvis
If it's got to be a.

1:04:29 - Mikah Sargent
Muppet, I would choose big bird um, if it's a, because this is the tall self-image thing well it's. It's actually because big bird's. Second, I love kermit because kermit's green, which is my favorite color, but I can't do the same, so I would choose big bird, because big bird comes in second for me yeah, stacy, who would yours be? My.

1:04:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
My favorite Muppet is well, are we so? I was like my favorite Muppet is actually so Sesame Street Muppets. They're all Jim Henson, so I don't know how to find where do I go.

1:05:04 - Mikah Sargent
You can go full, jim Henson, I allow it. I can even include Frog O' Rock in there.

1:05:09 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yes, I would go with either Oscar the Grouch or Grover. Those are my two faves.

1:05:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm surprised, stacey, I'm glad you left mine for me to have, because we have to have our own unique ones, sattler and. Waldorf Nope, oh, stacey, stacey, jesus, so many old jokes today. No, it's the crankiness the Waffle Queen. I, jesus, so many old jokes today. No, it's the crankiness the waffle queen. I would have thought you would have picked Cookie Monster.

1:05:37 - Mikah Sargent
Oh Cookie Monster.

1:05:38 - Stacey Higginbotham
Cookie is like pure id man. I'm way too rational for that.

1:05:43 - Mikah Sargent
I'm surprised you didn't choose Sam the Eagle Jeff.

1:05:48 - Stacey Higginbotham
Wait, did you choose Cookie Monster? I did, I chose Cookie Monster. Oh, okay, I love Cookie Monster. Yeah, cookie Cookie, okay, cookie.

1:05:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Monster, yeah, cookie.

1:05:54 - Mikah Sargent
Cookie, cookie I also. I really like the Count, but I don't. I feel like the Count is pretty similar in looks to Kermit, like it's still that same sort of cone, face that beakiness, yeah, the beakiness.

1:06:10 - Jeff Jarvis
So anyway, if we go back a few years, somebody would be suing somebody for trademark violation. But the good thing is, I think everybody will look at this now and say that's cute, that's fine. I mean, obviously Sesame Street is not as awful as Disney.

1:06:24 - Mikah Sargent
Right, yeah, you notice that it wasn't a Frozen character.

1:06:28 - Speaker 4
I don't know the names of any of them, but I think Olaf is the snowman yeah sure Olaf or Elsa or Anna or I know, kristoff or Sven, oh Sven would be nice. Oh boy, which one is Sven? But the Muppets are owned by the Disney Corporation. Oh yeah, they are, Are they really?

1:06:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, that's right, sesame Street now also HBO has rights.

1:06:55 - Stacey Higginbotham
They have rights to the, yes, but the Muppets themselves are on Disney Plus. Oh, it's just, it's just.

1:07:02 - Mikah Sargent
It's all Disney. All the way down. It's my left kidney and they're going to come take it when I stop paying. Yeah.

1:07:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
I'm like all right sure.

1:07:16 - Mikah Sargent
Sorry, micah, it's been real actually you have another kidney, it's fine.

Yeah, we're good, we're good, I don't don't tell disney that I'd like to have both anyway. Um, let's talk about, uh, this other story that you've included before. Maybe we move from AI the fix for AI-generated essays, because I don't remember if we had an opportunity to talk about it on this show, but I did talk about a piece that had to do with companies who had hired writers it's like a freelance organization and they had hired writers to write stories and they were using tools to detect if any of the stories that the writer submitted were AI-generated. And what had happened in several cases was the tool came back with a claim that there was AI writing involved in the work that they had done. And these were writers who had worked with these companies for more than a year at the very least, and in some cases, several years, who were immediately fired because they had used AI quote unquote to write their pieces.

A couple of those writers were interviewed for the piece and said absolutely not, was any of this written by AI. I would not use AI to write my stories. I've been working for this organization for a long time et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and it had come to find out the people who were in charge of sort of intake of these stories were using those tools like written by human tools and misunderstanding them, because the tool would come back and say 72% certainty that it was written by a human and 28% certainty that it was written by a human and 28 certainty that it was written by ai, but they would only see the percentages and they would think that it meant that it was 72 human written, 28 ai written, and so people were losing their jobs because they didn't understand how to use the tools, because humans are stupid, and so it was kind of an interesting take on AI wasn't causing AI in terms of AI, writing the pieces wasn't causing the job loss. It was AI ingesting the AI that was causing the job loss.

But really it was just the humans who were causing it Stupid, stupid people? Yeah, and so you have this piece about from Kelsey Piper writing for Vox. There's a fix for AI-generated essays. Why aren't we using it?

1:10:01 - Jeff Jarvis
So what interests me about this, micah, was I don't know how these checking things work, so it's just a paragraph in the middle, but that's what fascinated me about how watermarking works at this stage. About how watermarking works at this stage. So, if I may, instead of having the AI generate the next token according to a random selection, the watermarking has AI use a non-random process favoring the next tokens to get a high score in a scoring function. It might, for example, favor words with the letter V just slightly, so that the text generated with this scoring rule will have 20% more Vs than normal human text, though the actual scoring function is more complicated and you wouldn't notice. And blah, blah, blah, and so that sounds to me so tenuous. I mean, it's kind of ingenious in a way, but if the decision is being made on the basis of such as that, it's scary to be able to fight it.

1:10:51 - Mikah Sargent
Then yeah, because what if my name is victoria? And as a child, uh, my parents got me a book that was filled with v words and pictures of those v items violin you constantly feel victorious.

Victorious, you're vivacious and you like to vindicate yourself yes, and so I am naturally prone to using the letter V more often and therefore I, you know, use V more than. But again, then that's just that one person who, if they got the job as the writer and this tool was used, then they'd be in trouble. My problem is just when we had a teacher or a, an education institution or a company just uses these tools and takes it as as a gospel. That's where the problem exists. I think we have to talk to the human beings.

1:11:49 - Stacey Higginbotham
And the other issue is and we saw this with search Once you advantage people for doing something, they will game the system, because we are humans and creative and as much of an algorithm and as much as we'd like to imagine that this is going to replace humans, it can't, because we're sly and creative and we will always gain things. So if a student figures out, we will look for ways. Like man, this is pegging all my stuff. Why might this be? Let me try this. And people? They may not consciously realize they're reducing their V words, but they are just like we trained the ai to play go. We're. We're optimizing for a certain result, which is not to get caught doing as little work as possible, right, or making as much money as possible, whatever. I mean. This is literally why google sucks now, because we've gamed that system and we're humans, again humans yeah, can.

you cannot pit humans against Algorithms, ai, robots. You just can't pit us against them at scale and let them go. You always have to come back and tweak it to deal with humans, because we're smart and creative.

1:13:12 - Speaker 4
Also have a question Did the person who messed up the numbers and reading the numbers wrong? Does that person still have a job?

1:13:18 - Mikah Sargent
That is a good question. That was not investigated in the article, but I bet they do, because they were probably far enough up the chain that it didn't affect them't. Uh, affect them.

1:13:35 - Stacey Higginbotham
We could also be better at math, as humans, that's like I mean we didn't have shame based education for math.

1:13:41 - Mikah Sargent
I think that that many humans would be better at math, but there's so much, uh, you don't know how to do this. And oh, come up and stand in front of everyone and get this problem wrong. And oh, you got that wrong for this. Don't get me, don't get me started. I just think there's a lot of shame-based teaching in math. Maybe it's changed since I was in elementary, middle and high school, which wasn't that long ago, but maybe it's changed.

1:14:08 - Jeff Jarvis
The other thing that's happened. I just got off a call with a professor at a university I'll probably be working with next and working on AI and education and language. The attitude has changed considerably. The New York Times had a piece a week ago where the chancellor of the New York Public Schools New York Public Schools when Chachapati came out, immediately banned it. No, no, no, no, no. We cannot have this. Well, now it's encouraged. They're encouraging the use of it. They're doing it especially for faculty, but also giving teachers the freedom to use it and figure out how to use it. It's a tool. The Modern Language Association I think I mentioned this in the show has guidelines for this and they say print was a tool and typewriters were tools and spell check's a tool, and this is another tool. If we can figure out how to keep people from being stupid with their use of it, then there's some advantages.

1:14:57 - Speaker 4
I remember when we weren't allowed to type out my essays in middle school. We had to handwrite them. It was considered cheating to type it out.

1:15:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I showed Benito. I was in my freshman year in college, my con law course, and the final was a blue book exam. Right, you had to do it in class itself. I showed him the professor's samples of my handwriting and I said you don't want this, I'll write it out in class. I'll give you the blue book. You can check against it, but I'm going back to type it. And he said thank you.

1:15:24 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, stacey, was there more you wanted to say about math education?

1:15:30 - Stacey Higginbotham
I felt like I interrupted you there. I apologize. Oh no, no, no, I've been jumping all over you, micah. I'm so sorry, but no, no, math education we should have more of it.

1:15:38 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I agree, I think it would be good, wait, wait wait, quick question.

1:15:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Who here, benito included? Who here was good at math? I was, I figured, I figured.

1:15:53 - Stacey Higginbotham
I'm not actually good at the calculation, I'm good at understanding what's behind it, and then I would make stupid errors because I'm a little ADHD. But I get.

1:16:04 - Jeff Jarvis
That makes sense. I can see you that way.

1:16:06 - Mikah Sargent
I had a really good math teacher, but I just was. Yeah, I was not. I think I didn't practice enough Um, and so I could get the I. I felt like I'd get the concepts in the moment, and then, when the tests came around, it was much more difficult and I did fine, but I didn't do as well as was to my standard and as well as I did in so many of the other areas. And so, yeah, math was always my weakest subject, um, but yeah, that is in spite of the fact that the teaching was, I feel, exceptional. It was not shame-based teaching. That passion that you may have heard came from some of my siblings experiencing some pretty bad teachers, I think, more than anything else. When it came to math specifically, I've heard from people who were ashamed into not wanting to take, you know, the chance of, of, of you know, engaging in the class to try to get somewhere.

Yeah, what were you good at? Math?

1:17:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I think at the beginning was, but then we moved around and I kind of lost my, my train with it and then I I wasn't.

1:17:25 - Mikah Sargent
I'm thankful that computers do a lot of that for me.

1:17:29 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, there's a clear delineation at a certain level that kids become bad at math. It's different for girls and boys, but there is. There is a clear dividing line and as a journalist, I'm like for a journalist, I'm excellent at math. I actually got my first job because I knew the formula for percent change and that was yeah, that sounds silly, but nope, that's rare, that's awesome In my newsroom.

I actually had to write out the formula for literally everybody on. This was before we had actual Rolodexes, so I wrote it out on the Rolodex under percent change and I stuck it in there and they still would come to me. They'd be like oh, my God new minus old over. Oh, come on.

1:18:09 - Mikah Sargent
That's awesome. All right, let's see. Let's talk a little bit. Actually, we'll take a little pause. That refreshes here. We are currently recording an episode of this Week in Google. I am Micah Sargent subbing in for Leo Laporte, who will be back soon, but I am joined by the wonderful Jeff Jarvis and Stacey Higginbotham.

1:18:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I used the word wonderful. I thought you were going to go. Stacey, you're both wonderful, stacey's wonderful.

1:18:44 - Mikah Sargent
I think you're both pretty cool. You know, grumpy people are still wonderful. I have grandparents, hey hey, next age joke um, wow, anyway.

So, stacy, I want to. I you'll have to stop me if this is maybe. I don't see how this could be like any conflict of interest at all, because it's a praising of the organization for which you are a part and it is Consumer Reports Permission Slip app. I don't know how much you are involved in that or know about that, but it is, for folks who don't know, a wonderful app that everybody should get and what it does especially. This is where I have to stop and get frustrated for a moment. I moved out of California and there were a few things that were kind of frustrating about leaving California. One of those things. I won't go into all the rest of them. One of those things is suddenly not having the California Consumer Privacy Act as protection.

And immediately. You know when I'm having to sign up for new services and whatnot online, I'm realizing that I don't have that anymore and I can't do the. Do not sell your information stuff as easily as I used to automatically have consumer reports on your behalf. Reach out to companies and say, hey, I don't want you keeping my data or, in some cases, just saying, hey, tell me what data you have on me. There are loads of different options for setting it up exactly how you want it, and what I love is that it's always following up with me to let me know.

We automatically submitted the request to have your data removed from this place. We just added some new companies to the list. I get emails all the time from these companies saying, hey, we got that request for you to see what data we have on you. Here's that email that you can click on the link to learn about what data is there. And I go and I think, oh, my goodness, how did the Home Depot have all this information on me and why? The Home Depot, for some reason, is like really bad about having a bunch of data of all places, and so I just wanted to sing the praises of Permission Slip, because it's entirely free, which is wild and it's pretty incredible.

1:21:31 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, thank you. I did not work on it at all, but I work half the time with the team, the innovation lab, and we have some really cool stuff. We're preparing something called Ask CR, which is going to be our AI agent that we are developing in-house, where you can do things like hey, I have this brand of fridge and there's some weird let's make it a weird chunking noise and it'll be like oh, here's what we have from the product manual. Have you checked this, this or this? Oh, it looks like you're still under warranty for this. Do you want us to start like a customer? Service call.

So we're working on some really cool things, Um and yeah.

1:22:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I see, and I just think that it's amazing that this is just being offered to us for for free. And you know, this is where I will say hey, maybe, uh, it's worth making a donation to these organizations.

1:22:26 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, I was like please make a donation, because there's a lot of things that are happening that are good for everyone, and we'll see.

1:22:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah. So, speaking of Consumer Reports, you recently did something, yes, that is near and dear to my heart and I'm really excited about it.

1:22:44 - Stacey Higginbotham
You're going to hear about it?

1:22:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, tell us all about it.

1:22:47 - Stacey Higginbotham
Okay. So anybody who has witnessed me on the show from way back in the day knows that I am crazy about the smart home and I have dozens upon dozens of devices over the years that have failed me for various reasons, and we actually have a big push for ending software obsolescence. So this idea that you have a connected device and any sort of connected device it could be your car, your washing machine, your $30 smart plug, your garage door opener and the idea is that once you buy that, what are your rights as a consumer, as like an owner? Because right now, as it stands, you really don't have them, and we hear horror stories all the time about a company like going out of business and breaking it. Or maybe like remember the Revolve hub?

Revolve got bought by Google and Google was like okay, we're going to shut this down. And people were like but I just spent $300 on this thing, Do not shut it down. Going to shut this down, and people were like but I just spent $300 on this thing, Do not shut it down. We saw it actually recently with Spotify. They shut down their smart thing. So there's the bricking. Then there's also like taking back features. So maybe you paid for a physical device that, like your car and it had heated seats. And then one day, BMW is like you know what you really want those heated seats. We're going to charge you for them. Have a subscription.

Or finally, changing your ability to resell the product. So, like big, two big stories actually just in the last few months was the Snoo bassinet by the Happiest Baby. They changed like if you sell that now, you're not selling it your new buyer, if you resell that $1,600 bassinet, has to pay for a subscription to get the same features you used to have. The other example is Peloton, which just added a $95 activation fee. If you resell the Peloton to someone and they want to start paying Peloton money for a subscription, that is so annoying.

Isn't it? So we looked at all of these things. We decided to call it software tethering, which is the. It's actually Jonathan Zittrain. We took it from him and this idea that, because connected devices have this unique link back to the manufacturer, because they have software embedded in the device and your device has to talk back to their cloud that they have this tether that allows them to control your ownership rights to the product. And, as you can imagine, that doesn't always bode well for consumers. So we called on the FTC to basically create some clear guidelines around that and we asked them to kind of do five things. One is do a. Am I talking too long? I'm talking so long.

1:25:41 - Mikah Sargent
No, heavens no.

1:25:44 - Stacey Higginbotham
Do you want to ask me some questions about this before I go into my monologue? Okay, so we wanted them to do first big thing, and this is important for everyone Set a minimum guaranteed timeframe for how long you, as the company, plan to support the product, plan to support the product and, like, if you are building a car, tell me that you're only going to budget and allocate resources for 10 years to support my car. Right, so I know exactly how long this is going to work, cause right now, like I have a 2013 Tesla that I'm driving around in and any day it could just die, I have no faith that that my car is going to keep working and I would love to know that. So that's one.

Two promote, sorry, make sure any feature that is in the device that is important or core to the device works without internet connectivity and the software. So your oven should still preheat and heat and turn on, your car should still drive and presumably had air conditioning and, yes, you may lose some like super awesome features, but if we can talk about like what, that, how that could get legislated. But three is protect adversarial interoperability. Oh, I don't know if that's actually three or if that's four, but that's one of our five things and that's the idea that if you go out of business or lose access to the software, people can come in and adapt it so the product still works for them. Five is or sorry, four is, I don't remember right now. Do you have it up, micah?

1:27:28 - Mikah Sargent
We did have it up just moments ago.

1:27:31 - Stacey Higginbotham
I'll tell you what five is and we'll come back to four yes, five is my favorite because it's asking for the ftc to create this concept of longevity by design in building products, even software-based products, that will last over time. It it's kind of like CISA the Cybersecurity Infrastructure, something, administration. I think it's Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Administration. Probably.

They have secure by design. And we're actually formulating right now like this is literally what I'm doing in my spare time what it will take to build a connected product that lasts over time even if, like, a company, goes out of business. What are the, what are the parameters of doing that and making that real? And then hopefully the FTC will encourage people to have that. Oh, mike has given me the answer. Encourage tools and methods that enable reuse if software support ends. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Encourage tools and methods that enable reuse if software support ends. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. I like this one too. It's. This is basically like if you're I don't know, maybe not your oven, but if your smartphone, if, if it does get bricked, maybe I could sideload some software to make it work as, like, a video camera, or if something else breaks, how can I reuse the hardware so it doesn't end up as a waste?

1:28:51 - Mikah Sargent
was it samsung that? Um did that a little bit.

It was either samsung or google, but I remember samsung, so samsung had a recycling program that they talked up and then they did absolutely nothing with dang it because they were supposed to make you could turn it into a baby monitor or you could make it into a little probably a digital camera kind of thing, and I thought that was such a great idea. And I think too about the Pebble smartwatch how I think it was iFixit and a different third party that worked together to create firmware and software for the original Pebble smartwatch so that you could continue to use it.

1:29:27 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yes, and you still can actually use your Pebble today, so that's like actually a good example. A success Samsung yeah. They actually did that, yeah, and again that's a little less like. Some of these are for more of the nerdy people like adversarial interoperability and tools and methods to enable reuse. Those are going to be for, like, the super geeky people who kept their little printer working Right. But these other things are for normal people who don't want to like sideload something or flash firmware over to a device and then I have.

1:30:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like repairing yourself stuff. Oh, okay, If you have a laboratory and laboratory coat and 45 tools, you can Gotta have the lab coat.

1:30:09 - Mikah Sargent
It's actually important for electrostatic discharge to have the lab coat. I have a. It bums me out because a long time ago there was this cool company of course they love to say we're former Apple engineers and they were and they made a. This was back before the. I think it was NHTSA who said that every car manufactured out of the state needs to have a backup camera. So this was still in the time where backup cameras were less common, and they made this incredible backup camera that was a license plate frame and it had a solar panel along the bottom and then two cameras up top on top of the lightning license plate frame. And then there was an OBD2 thing that you plugged in and it created a local Wi-Fi network in your car and then you connected to it through the app and then you could use it as a backup camera with your phone Brilliant idea. And you could use it as a backup camera with your phone Brilliant idea. The company went out of business and when it did, we lost server-side access to the technology that made it possible to reset and set up the device again, and so from that point on I wasn't able to use it. I kept it for ages because I hoped that either one day I would suddenly become some sort of electrical engineer who could figure out how to repurpose it or that, you know, somebody would think of some way to sideload it or something. And it just didn't happen. And knowing this was possible would be very cool.

Do you remember, stacey, that story about the person who called in? I think it was maybe even my cue. It may have been another garage door opener, but whatever garage door opener, it was the person called in to support and they said look, I'll admit it, I did not show up as my best self during that call. I was rude to the person and they tried then to access their garage door the next day and they couldn't get in and it turned out that the support person had bricked their garage door remotely because of the horrible exchange that had taken place and in that moment it was like kind of a deserved situation. But it's still a bummer that like that's possible.

1:32:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
And that actually happened, like I think this year, this year or last year. There was actually a gentleman who, an Amazon delivery driver, thought that they heard him say something racist from his video doorbell and told Amazon about it and Amazon shut off his ring cameras.

His amazon, amazon, madam a devices, echo devices for a whole week while they investigated the claims and he was like, and it turns out he did not say anything racist, the no one in his house was home and I guess his yuffie doorbell had an automated response that the guy misheard. Yeah, that sort of thing. Oh yeah, stacey, can I?

1:33:10 - Jeff Jarvis
ask you about oh sorry, Go ahead.

1:33:12 - Stacey Higginbotham
No, go on.

1:33:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I see this letter you sent. It has the background, it has recommendations and it also has gathering others to the cause because there are many signatories to it as this goes, so I presume this is kind of the first talking to this as this goes forward. I got involved in policy around legislation, around the newspaper industry and stuff, so I'm new to all this and I watched how lobbyists write full legislation. Does there come a point in this process when you propose a written version of regs or statutes from your perspective?

1:33:56 - Stacey Higginbotham
So this is a good question and I'm not like a super genius when it comes to policy. A strategery is hard for me. So what I am doing is I am writing a longevity by design document to give to the FTC to influence, hopefully, their thinking. I will also be sharing it with everybody and I'm talking to people within the industry because there are real technical issues at play in terms of designing a product that is software connected to last forever. You've got to, not forever, but for the physical life of the product or close to that.

We went to the FTC because writing rules, about writing like a law and getting Congress to pass a law around this is hard. Well, it's not just that it's hard, but also the FTC has theoretically in an ideal world, it has more flexibility, it has the investigatory resources to actually implement something. You could argue that all of these come under unfair and deceptive trade practices, which is one of the things the FTC looks at. Trade practices, which is one of the things the FTC looks at. I mean, to me, the core issue for anybody who's buying some sort of connected device is right now you're buying like a hope, you're hoping you have no sense of how long.

Like how long, I'll just ask each of you how long does a video doorbell last? What is the lifespan of a video doorbell? What do you think? Five years, five years, all right, jeff.

1:35:35 - Jeff Jarvis
No idea, don't have one.

1:35:37 - Stacey Higginbotham
I would have said three years. Amazon actually does list how long it plans to give security updates to their products, so you can actually find out how long they plan to. I think, amazon it's between three and four years.

1:35:49 - Mikah Sargent
So, micah, you're wrong, see there's that hope that I was buying.

1:35:54 - Stacey Higginbotham
I thought five years, See that's like we can't, and actually just like a week and a half ago, samsung said they were going to support their Tizen-based smart TVs for seven years. That's great. Now when you buy a Samsung TV, you're basically buying something that you can count on for seven years to get feature updates and security updates right. So now you know, awesome. They don't actually do that for any of their appliances. So when you buy a Samsung smart fridge, is it seven years? Consumer Reports Research says that the average consumer expects a fridge or a large appliance to last between 10 to 12 years. I can almost guarantee you samsung's not releasing software updates for that long?

1:36:36 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, we don't know. Yeah, that, actually, speaking of that, when moved into this place, the um, the washing machine has some quote unquote smart features. Um, they're a little silly. Uh, it's not. It's not like a full wifi connected thing.

It's uh, hey, if there's an error, you can hold your phone up while the app is open and it'll read the NFC tag that will have a special error code and then you can kind of and, um, I was kind of looking into it and the app that was supposed to do that isn't even updated anymore. So it's like, yeah, I, I've actually been especially mindful of that when I'm making purchases. There's, um, you probably uh, saw that brilliant, the company that makes the like on wall panels was scooped up by um, the company that makes the on-wall panels was scooped up by another company, or I think it might have been two strategic investors, but regardless, apparently they're going to be staying around for a while, but they're pivoting to builders, to the builder market, to that side of that, that side of of of uh, smart home and told them they should do that when they launched oh, did you really?

I? I think it's a great idea, but it also bums me out as someone who thought that the brilliant was brilliant and that the brilliant panel was was such a great idea. And then again you're buying into this, this thing that may not be around for as long as you're expecting it to, and especially when it comes to stuff that you are installing in your walls. To me, for some reason, that carries a psychological weight of this is going to be around for a while, versus something that maybe you hang on your wall or you just plug in and sit on your desk. It feels like it should last longer and continue to operate longer, even if that's just some weird idea that I have, and so I love that you're saying FTC, let's do something about this, let's fix this. Because, yeah, what about the? It was a white hub and you plugged it into your router and it.

They basically tried to charge a bunch of money for a subscription service for people who had bought the device at $129 and it worked fine. And then they were like, actually that thing that you've already paid for, you're going to have to start paying a subscription to access, and then they quickly ran out of business, but it's wild that they were able to do that and, yeah, I agree they shouldn't be able to do that. It's not okay and that stupid, stupid, stupid transfer fee for the Peloton is just wrong verizon used to try to charge you if you bought a new phone.

1:39:31 - Stacey Higginbotham
Verizon would be like oh, we're gonna charge you five bucks or ten bucks to to change to a new phone. And I'm like you, mfers, that is not okay. I'm still on your freaking service you don't have to do anything. I'm physically putting in a SIM card. That is literally all that's happening. None of the billing information is changing. But they were like, yeah, we're going to charge you a ton of dollars.

1:39:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you see, kids, I'm old enough to know. The only way you could get a phone was to rent it from Ma Bell, and you were not allowed to attach anything else to the wires.

1:40:05 - Stacey Higginbotham
So we're better. Oh, are we about to talk about Carter phone?

1:40:11 - Mikah Sargent
Is that about?

1:40:12 - Stacey Higginbotham
to come up Carter phone was the decision to allow things to attach. Okay, so it's not coming up.

1:40:17 - Mikah Sargent
I brought it up, yeah, carter phone.

1:40:24 - Stacey Higginbotham
That's. That was the name of the like suit. Yeah, if you, if you, wikipedia you'll'll see it'll be like oh, carter phone it. It comes up in my life a lot because I write about telco. I used to write about telcos are you enjoying policy? I miss being a journalist. I like being in politics, like not in politics, but you know, I like doing this and it does feel very purposeful, but at the end of the day, I'm I'm a little prickly and I think I'm a better journalist person.

1:40:56 - Mikah Sargent
The end of the day. I'm a little prickly.

All right, I think that means that we will get down to the end of the show that's because he doesn't want to get too close to the prickly line no, it's okay, having been warned, having been warned about prickly no, no, no, um, I just am noticing that we are uh approaching the end of the hour and so it's a it's a perfect time, uh, to head there. This, of course, is this Week in Google, the show hosted or paneled this week by Stacey Higginbotham, jeff Jarvis and Micah Sargent, as Leo Laporte is out and about. At the end of the show, there are picks. I did not prepare a pick because I forgot about that part of the show, but, jeff, can you kick us off with your stuff?

1:41:53 - Jeff Jarvis
There's so many choices, I can share them. Stacey, do you have one? You can do that book review if you want to.

1:41:58 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh well, I was actually going to show a little trick. I have an actual tip or trick.

1:42:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Nice, I know, why don't you go ahead, and then I'll pick one.

1:42:08 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh, okay.

1:42:11 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't mean to violate.

1:42:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Micah's management here. Yeah, thanks a lot Step it on my toes.

1:42:14 - Mikah Sargent
No, it's fine, Stacey.

1:42:17 - Stacey Higginbotham
I would love it if you went first. Since I'm the only one who's prepared. Yes, oh.

1:42:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm overprepared. Stacey, he's got a lot.

1:42:25 - Stacey Higginbotham
It's special for me. Normally I was always like Leo would turn to me and he'd be like and Stacey? And I'd be like, oh crap, what do I have? Okay, so this is just something. I don't know if y'all know this, but I snore. I am not a delicate lady and I snore. So I've been trying to track that and I discovered that Google if you guys are not aware of this on your Pixel phone, if you plug it in, you can actually set it up to track your snoring under the digital wellness section. So they have this whole section on your Pixel called digital wellness and if you go there, you can turn on bedtime mode.

1:43:09 - Jeff Jarvis
That sounds like it's going to tell you a story.

1:43:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
And when you go to bedtime mode it will you turn it? I have mine set to turn on while charging after 10 PM and before 7 AM, which is good enough for me, but you can customize it or you can use a schedule it sets up do not disturb all these things. And it also, if I give it permission, will track my coughing and snoring during the night. And then it takes a lot of clicks to get here every day. But it's kind of nice because sometimes my husband's like, oh, you snored so much, and I'm like, sir, I only snored for 32 minutes last night 32 whole minutes, though.

1:43:46 - Mikah Sargent
32 whole minutes, the whole time.

1:43:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
But they were the wrong minutes because apparently, he was awake right, so like I get it, I know.

1:43:55 - Mikah Sargent
I did a snore last night because I can still remember the feeling of a foot kicking me and jostling me from sleep and I woke up facing the ceiling and that's how I know I was snoring, because I rolled to my side and then I usually don't snore because I try to be a side sleeper, but sometimes I end up on my back. But yes, I distinctly remember last night. Thank you for the reminder, so now I can go razz my partner about that. But yeah, I must have been snoring last night.

1:44:26 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah. So if you, if you want like evidence, like of how bad we're not. I mean, like man, if I've had a few drinks or I take like a muscle relaxer cause I've had a migraine or something, man, it's like five hours and I'm like Whoa, that is a lot of snoring.

1:44:38 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm probably like dying but yeah, so that's my, my trick. It's, it's free, it's on your Pixel If you have a Pixel. If you don't, then this is absolutely useless to you, and this is this Week in Google. Okay, it is your turn now. So it is my turn. I want to make sure, because we talked about this before we got on the air. I just want to make mention of this for Stacey's fans that I found. I was very proud to find Stacey Bate a book review about when a Smart House Turns evil, so I'm hoping this will be on Stacy's book club at some point, just because it's too perfect, but that's not my pick.

1:45:15 - Stacey Higginbotham
I've got to tell you what's the name of the book. Oh yeah, Come on, man.

1:45:19 - Jeff Jarvis
I got to look it up then. Jeez, okay, here I had it, william. An intelligent robot begins to lead its feckless creator to terrible places in the name of freedom.

1:45:32 - Mikah Sargent
Freedom for whom?

1:45:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Exactly, I'm not a horror fan anyway and plus I don't like dystopian AI stuff. I'm sick of that. But I thought it would be fun for Stacey, all right, so I threw this in at the last minute. Actually, I didn't know this. Somebody in the chat for AI Inside told me about this Notebook LM. This is going to replace us all folks. Notebook LM's audio overview feature. You can put stuff in a Notebook LM LM and it can build various things. Right, we know this. It can make an index, it can make a glossary. Well, now it can take the material and turn it into an engaging audio discussion with two AI characters, ie a podcast.

1:46:25 - Stacey Higginbotham
I saw this and I'm really interested in Notebook LM because I have so much data and notes and I'm like yeah, and it's great. And the idea, though, of doing this, I'm kind of like I'm totally going to try it out.

1:46:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you got to try it. You got to try it. When you open a notebook and go to the high level guide, it lets you create a FAQ, an FAQ, a table of contents, a briefing doc and more. There will be a new generate button. Two AI hosts air quotes will have a lively air quotes back and forth discussion. They can summarize your added sources, make connections between topics and bark banter.

1:47:05 - Mikah Sargent
That's okay.

1:47:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Some banter going on, some witty banter if they've downloaded uh twit, uh shows over the years, they'll probably banter about waffles and not understand why the machine is doing that waffles and being old.

1:47:21 - Stacey Higginbotham
I feel like that's the consistent thing that we talk about.

1:47:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It is I found that just absolutely interesting and a joke for a podcast show. And not terrifying.

1:47:33 - Stacey Higginbotham
What if it? What if it replaces us all Exactly?

1:47:36 - Mikah Sargent
Honestly more power to it, yeah.

1:47:40 - Stacey Higginbotham
Mike is so done with this. He's like no fine Enough, banter.

1:47:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm over bantered, stacey are you still?

1:47:51 - Stacey Higginbotham
are you still carrying a fold?

1:47:52 - Jeff Jarvis
phone? No no, I've got the 8, the Pixel 8. So Huawei is coming up with a tri-fold phone. It's like the origami of phones. Come on.

1:48:00 - Stacey Higginbotham
Why no? The origami of phones would be like a little crane, oh yes, yes.

1:48:08 - Jeff Jarvis
And then actually from my picks. I found this interesting. A guy StoryMaps is a wonderful application. You can make all kinds of great maps with. It is mapping all of the ships that went down in World War II More than 20,000 ships sank during World War II and he's been going to get all the possible data that's available. And if you scroll up on this thing, it's just gobsmacking, of course, when you see 20,000 ships and think of all the people who were on them, sunk in the war, but then all kinds of other interesting things that he added in Axis versus Allied colors, how many per year? Uh, all kinds of fascinating things. So it's just data.

1:48:50 - Mikah Sargent
Data are wonderful and, um, you might have fun so many ships, but yeah, isn't that amazing and these are just the ones that are historically like that we are aware of historically they're not the secret spy ships yeah, right that that.

1:49:06 - Jeff Jarvis
But yeah, he used. He wasn't just necessarily a known location, it was what was known about it from news reports or whatever data he got this is so much work yeah this is incredible it is, didn't it?

1:49:20 - Mikah Sargent
wow, look at all those ships. Yeah, um, the. I guess the tool that I'm going to talk about this week is something that I learned. Again, there's always a case that, um, different experiences that you have require learning new things, and moving is one of those things where you just come across new stuff, and Instagram was serving me up some new um accounts to check out because, probably because of my purchases on Amazon, it figured out that I was, you know, buying different home stuff. I think it's probably how this got on it, and so I started getting recommendations of different home builders and, uh, there was a property inspection uh, property inspector for the Portland area, and so I've been watching a lot of his videos and he said that one of the most common causes of house fires that he comes across is, uh, because of what he calls the fart fan.

Now, the fart fan is the exhaust fan in the bathroom. Um, that people have never heard it called that. I have never heard it called that either, and so I was really caught, caught off guard, but you knew exactly what it was. Yeah, when he said it, I was like oh, that's the fan in the bathroom yeah, I've never heard it called that before.

This is the first time. But anyway, the fan that it's usually turned on if I take a shower and I'm trying to get rid of the yeah, that's why you turned I thought you were going to use a different s word.

1:51:02 - Stacey Higginbotham
I was like you take a shower Sure, take a shower.

1:51:08 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I didn't even think of that. Oh, that's funny, Stacy's back. These fans A are not meant to be running for as long as people will turn them on, and then they don't turn them off and they just keep running, and then they overheat and then they catch fire. And then, on top of that, when they're installed, people do that really poorly, and so sometimes there will be wires sticking out of the edges of them. Sometimes they don't put the grommets on the holes where the wires go through, and so as the fan vibrates, it's slowly vibrating against the sheath on the wire, which eventually cuts through the sheath which against the sheath on the wire, which eventually cuts through the sheath which touches the bare wire to the metal, which causes arcing which causes a fire.

Yes, so get those inspected, first and foremost, but the other thing is what I'm recommending, which you don't have to get this brand, but I just really trust this brand Leviton. Get this brand, but I just really trust this brand. Leviton makes a and again many brands do a humidity sensor switch, and this is a device that you replace your fart fan switch with, and this will. It's got a hygrometer built into it and it just turns on when it recognizes that there's a lot of humidity in the room.

1:52:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it presume that farts are humid?

1:52:28 - Mikah Sargent
No, it does not do anything for farts.

1:52:30 - Stacey Higginbotham
This does not solve that problem, it is not for that.

1:52:32 - Mikah Sargent
Only the shower problem Only the shower problem.

1:52:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Farts are humid, I would imagine.

1:52:36 - Mikah Sargent
However, I'm not going to dignify that with a response no.

1:52:41 - Stacey Higginbotham
You know why they're not Okay, sorry, I'm not going to go into that.

1:52:44 - Mikah Sargent
No, stacey, oh, you have to now.

1:52:46 - Jeff Jarvis
You have to Stacey's Science.

1:52:48 - Mikah Sargent
Corner. Well, hold on, we can come back to Stacey's Science Corner, but I want to finish here by saying that when the humidity gets to a certain point that it turns on. When it gets to a certain point it turns off. You can also set it for timers and stuff like that. But now it's become something I'm very mindful of, that I was not aware of before, and what ScooterX says, and I think this is a good choice. Scooter says I replaced the motor and the fan in the bathroom here when I moved in.

It was a motor used in many oven vent fans and it can be a good idea. The way that you test if an exhaust fan is working as it's supposed to is you turn on the fan and you take a tissue I mean the ones that you put to your nose, not a paper towel or not toilet paper, but a tissue because they're thin enough A Kleenex. A Kleenex, thank you. There's the proprietary eponym and you put it up against the fan and if it stays, then your exhaust fan is working as it should. If it falls, then you need to at the very least clean your exhaust fan. But you might need to check on if the motor needs oiling, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, have somebody, if you don't know how to do it, also check the wiring and make sure it's good to go. But there's that humidity sensor. Now I don't know, do you want to talk about why it's not humid?

1:54:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh no, I have to know, it's not why it's not humid. It's how you like this is so, oh gosh, okay.

1:54:20 - Mikah Sargent
When I'm on this show, it always ends with something inappropriate.

1:54:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It always does. Yes, it always does.

1:54:24 - Stacey Higginbotham
Okay. So you know how, when you're outside and it's cold and you can see your breath and that's a function of the temperature outside, the humidity in the air and the amount of moisture in your breath. So when I was younger I was like, if you can see your breath, can you see your farts in the cold? Because that's a very logical question.

1:54:50 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that's a fair question. This is why Stacy needs to visit the labs.

1:54:52 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, this is why she's a lab person.

1:54:53 - Jeff Jarvis
That's how she thinks.

1:54:54 - Stacey Higginbotham
I did some research and the answer is your farts are not humid enough to show, so that is why you really did run an experiment on this.

1:55:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I didn't actually wander around.

1:55:10 - Mikah Sargent
You talked to a librarian who pulled out the necessary documentation to tell you.

1:55:14 - Stacey Higginbotham
I had a conversation with my science teacher and that was something that he was like well, yeah, let's learn about this, and we did.

1:55:22 - Mikah Sargent
Interesting. I wonder why there's less humidity there than there is in the lungs.

1:55:30 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well there's. I mean, your mouth has more moisture. Oh true, I was like we could do this, but I don't know if we want to.

1:55:39 - Mikah Sargent
That's okay, folks. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of this Week in Google. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of this Week in Google. I appreciate you all for being here with us. If you are not currently a member of Club Twit, could I invite you to join the club? It's a weird club. You'll love it. It's twittv slash club twit $7 a month. And joining the club helps us continue to do these wonderful, important things we're doing here on the network.

When you do join the club, you get access to some pretty awesome benefits. Every single Twitch show ad free. It's just the content. You also get access to the TwitPlus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show special Club Twit events get published there and access to the members only Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit. If that's not enough, there's also access to the video versions of our Club Twit exclusive shows, so checking those out is only possible by being a member. Again, $7 a month. Twittv slash Club Twit. We'd love to have you join us, stacey Higginbotham, if folks want to keep up with what you're doing where do they go to do that?

1:56:56 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh, I'm on Blue Sky as Giga.

1:56:57 - Mikah Sargent
Stacey probably is the best place to find all of me, awesome, awesome and anything else you want to pitch. Should we just put good thoughts out into the universe for your darling that you have sent along to the FTC, so to speak?

1:57:09 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, stay tuned because I will be releasing new research, like like, maybe this week, maybe the beginning of next week, on kind of this topic and also if you are in a position to think about longevity by design, feel free to share your thoughts with me, because I want to hear them.

1:57:29 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. And Jeff Jarvis, what about you? How do they get in touch? How do they get your book? Where do they go.

1:57:37 - Jeff Jarvis
So for the current books that are out GutenbergParenthesescom with discount codes there, and as soon as my son Jake does my site, I'll have all three books on one place, but I don't yet. So if you want to Google the Web, we Weave in my Name, you will come to the Hachette site and there, if you put in the code WEB20 to preorder, you'll get a 20% discount. It goes away when it's published next month, so you might want to do it now.

1:58:02 - Mikah Sargent
Hop on it, folks. You can find me at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or head to chihuahuacoffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thanks again for being here this week, and, um, I think I will. Oh, no, no, no, I will not be seeing you all next week, but we will have an awesome host of the show nonetheless. So thank you, and I'll catch you again in the future. Bye-bye.