This Week in Google Episode 648 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for twig This Week in Google, Stacey Higginbotham, Ant Pruitt, Jeff Jarvis. The whole gang is here. We'll talk about Google's FLoC. They're replacing it, but there is the replacement any better. The IRS wants to use ID.me for your face scans. Is that a good idea? It's why is Amazon getting behind the legalization of marijuana? It's all coming up next on twig.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:00:22):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:35):
This is twig. This Week in Google episode, 648 recorded Wednesday, January 26th, 2022 ban saws and butt joints. This Week in Google is brought to you by Wealthfront to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/twig and by imperfect foods, imperfect foods is catching the food. That's falling through the cracks of our food system by sourcing quirky yet delicious foods. Right now imperfect foods is offering our listeners 20% off your first four orders. When you go to imperfect foods.com and use the promo code TWI and by compiler and original podcast from hat discussing tech topics, big, small, and strange. Listen to compiler on apple podcaster anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Leo Laporte (00:01:32):
It's time for twig This Week in Google. The show where we cover the latest from the world around us. How about that? That's really what we're doing. Taking a look at the world around us with Waldorf and Satler. Here's my Satler, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Hello, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis (00:01:49):
Hello? Is that the grumpy one? That's the, I think they're both grumpy. Both grumpy, grumpy. Well, I'm fine. That's me. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:01:56):
The Leonard Tow professor for journalistic innovation at the graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York. Looking good today.

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:10):
I wonder what my, my family thinks outside the door there. They hear you making that racket. Wow. <Laugh> yeah's not on the PBC. Watch this.

Leo Laporte (00:02:18):
Also here, Ant Pruitt from hands on photography. He's the community manager at our wonderful discord. And you got, you did a bunch of stuff this week.

Ant Pruitt (00:02:33):
Yeah. I've been a little busy. We got a event coming up work, miss Georgia Dow. It's gonna be a lot of fun. That'll be fun. Yeah. And and we got Mike ELGAN coming up in a couple of weeks and it's gonna, it's gonna be good. It's going good. Discords back up the dis yeah. Discord was down today. The API was broken. Yep. But I think it's pretty. What has that happened when it's distributed? It's not distributed. That's the illusion that you have. Oh, I see. Everybody has a server, but they all run on discord. Discords own hardware. So it's really, it's just, oh, I never understood that. Yeah. I never understood either until I got one. And then I realized, well, it's just, you know, it's all running on their hardware. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So it's like any other have your own like Twitter.

Leo Laporte (00:03:14):
Yeah. But it's just like Twitter, really? Anything else? Right. you just can have a closed little club, which is great. Also with this she's back Stacey. Well, she wasn't gone last week, but she is, I was supposed to say I was here yesterday or last week, last week. Host of Stacey's book club, Stacey Higginbotham from Stacey on iot.com and the IOT podcast with Kevin TOFL. Hello, Stacey. Hello. Y'all half of your eyes look one way, half the eyes looked. The other, her husband. Oh, really did her right eye today. <Laugh> in a beautiful moment of togetherness. That's really sweet. I should get Lisa to do my makeup sometime. I think that's a nice idea. Do you do I bake up? No, of course not. I did used to for years, I was gonna say you do TV. Yeah. I have my own makeup kit with, I know what my shades are and all that.

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
And my contour and Phil and the minute we'd started doing these podcasts in video, I said, I am never, I'm not wearing makeup. Sorry. I did my eye makeup today too. You <laugh> fabulous. Did you paint on those eyebrow? I think you did. No. You painted them. That's just focus peeking. You did <laugh>. Were you around Leo? When, when HGT V came in and they started doing the air. Yeah. Brush thing was doing live with regs and Kelly and the makeup artist. You go there and you get made up before the show. The makeup artist said we're we we're using air brushes today and she painted my face with an airbrush.

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
Cause if you just use regular foundation and powder, you could see it there's enough detail. You could see the powder. Yep. So they on the, on H on HD? Yeah. An HD, they, and apparently Kelly had brought that on. She had a TV show. I can't remember their name of it, but she had primetime TV show and they were using it there. So they wanted to try it on it. They didn't stick with it. It was back to the no, no, I haven't seen it a long time. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need that.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:10):
I had my makeup done for Fox TV once and oh my

Leo Laporte (00:05:13):
Did they paint you? Right? I looked,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:16):
They did, but they, I walked out looking almost the same as I normally do, but a little better.

Leo Laporte (00:05:22):
Yeah. that's what you want

Stacey Higginbotham (00:05:23):
When you, they took like 45 minutes. I, I still don't understand what all they were doing

Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
With my face. Oh, we used to have hair and makeup tech TV. It would, it would literally take you 45 minutes. You'd have to come an hour early to get hair done and makeup done. And then they, and, and then, and they'd do your nails. They'd do the whole thing. Nails, nails. Well, we were, yeah. That's not showing products. Oh, I see. You're a hand model, George. Yeah, yeah. Was George? No, it was Kramer. Kramer was a hand model and, and I, yeah, Kramer used to lotion his hand. So I got good at going, you know, rub you, you rub the outline. If I were showing this phone, you would you cuz you don't wanna just go look there's the phone. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> you go like this. That's

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:02):
Right. Get through. Bados like the

Leo Laporte (00:06:06):
Price is right. Yeah. You just slowly stroking it. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:11):
Have no idea. How many times queen Pruit gave me crap for

Leo Laporte (00:06:16):
Bad

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:16):
Fingernails. Yeah. If, if I did a product demo and you know, we do the B roll of me showing the product, then my, I didn't have the manicure done. Okay. You want a tip? She let me know. You want a

Leo Laporte (00:06:27):
Tip. I'll give you a tip, everybody. This is gonna be your tip of the week. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Cuz we, I, for a while with tech TV, I would go and I would get my nails done. And I went to a place. It was 20 and eventually they stop. They said, you're paying too much. You <laugh>, you need to go to the $5 nail. I said, I'm not going to the $5 nail salon.

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:45):
I'm sorry. You fungus's and stuff. I, well,

Leo Laporte (00:06:48):
It just, you know, I said really 20 bucks a week. You're not anyway, I stopped. But I did it. My and I asked and they said, look, all you need to do the, the manicure, get a good nail brush every, every day in the, when you shower, whatever, you'd use the nail brush, scrub, scrub, scrub. And then you put a nice little cuticle oil on your cuticles oil. Yep. And you're good. And you know, you can cut obviously, but you're good that, that means your nails will look good enough that you can do the hand modeling, you know, have you maintained this toilets? I, I still do this. Yes. Every morning. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:19):
I get lax on it and she lets me know because we have all of that stuff here with that being her professional. Oh, that's her job

Stacey Higginbotham (00:07:25):
Does she does manicures. That's her job. I remember when I first met her, she was like, she looked first at my nails and commented on that before anything nail grateful. I had just had them done

Leo Laporte (00:07:38):
Nails. She's done my nails. Actually. I went, when she was at the manicure shop down here and went down, got my nails done. Now who would think,

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:45):
Who would think this

Leo Laporte (00:07:46):
Would be our topic, the lead story today? I don't know how we got here. Our lead, you know what? Our lead story should be. Goodbye. Floc, FLoC you. We never got to say hello to FLoC. Yeah. Google says, and I think this, this is really an interesting story said yesterday. They were gonna replace, as you remember, they had announced no more third party cookies. Everybody hates 'em good. That's fine. But we do need some way to sell targeted advertising. So we're gonna have the federated learning of cohorts, which was a kind of retro them, awkward, retro them, cuz everything in this area had birds, bird themed. So this FLoC would essentially watch what you do, what you just the same way as Google always did. But instead of having a unique identifier for you, they would put you in a cohort of people with similar interests. And we, they never really explained how big this cohort would be. But the thing that I think upset people was then when, when you go to a website, your FLoC cohort would be sent to the website like at, at, you know, hi, here's Leo, he's 39 94 dash seven. And people didn't really like that. It wasn't clear how big the cohort would be. I think there's also, it's funny because they're in trouble with the EU that a Springer, our favorite heavy has sued them for and cookies. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:16):
Yeah. Springer is the one who led the fight against Google used their political clout, got the EU to go after Google everybody's screaming, privacy, privacy do stock shuts, get rid of cookies. They are evil. And then, and then after Springer says, oh, oh we can't target any ads. No, don't get

Leo Laporte (00:09:32):
Rid of cookies. That's very confusing. The E theft did not like FLoC because there was this concern that as always with these things that are so called anonymized, it's possible that de anonymized and they were a little worried that if people started combining your FLoC ID with other profile information, they might actually be able to figure out who's who and all of that know Google has. I think in response to the EU, I don't, I don't know, really in response to privacy advocates. I think there was a lot of reasons because a lot of people were unhappy with FLoC and yeah, so they were coming up with topics, topics. It was just a proposal. I mean they never implemented, it was only be right. So now it's topics, topics, which is topics are so Ben Galbrath who's direct senior director for product acknowledged privacy concerns with FLoCs said topics was easier for users to understand.

Leo Laporte (00:10:34):
It would also make it easier for Google to remove sensitive topics from being targeted. So then so topics let's advertisers target online users based on a topic they might be interested in fitness or travel Chrome does this automatically. Now it is not, by the way, this is all proposal not implemented yet. Chrome will generate five topics based on your browser history with, and this is important, participating websites. It then sends three topics. One from each of the past three weeks to participating sites to share with their advertising partners, topics like FLoC are not permanent. In this case they're stored for three weeks, then deleted, there are 350 topics. But, but Google's saying by doing this, instead of saying what your interests are in FLoC, we're saying what your interests are, but we could also just ignore things like I don't know, whatever's, you know, mental health issues, my searches for mental health, three sources.

Leo Laporte (00:11:38):
Yeah. Guns, that kind of thing. So topic data is stored on your device. Manicures, manicures. Yeah. They, well, that this'll be a good test. Not sensitive if I get a bunch of manicure information in my Instagram feed, I think we'll know. Yeah. <Laugh> so it's never stored on its Google. Unlike third party tracking cookies, which allow PE companies to use tracking pixels so they can go cross site. This can't really go cross site. You will be unlike FLoC. You'll be able to see what topics you are being, you know, flogged with they're being sent to sites. If you don't like a topic, I think I like this. You can. It is great. Yeah. Yeah. You, you know what? I'm not interested in tennis rackets. I am interested

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:25):
For my, for my wife and I don't play tennis rock. Yeah. I'm too old. I play pickle ball and, and yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:32):
And Google says users will be able to disable the feature completely, which is really interesting. I think Google does Google wants to maintain its ad model, but they really do want to respond to people's privacy concerns. Yeah. It's a way to add it. It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:48):
A value. Add advice.

Leo Laporte (00:12:50):
Go ahead. I'm sorry. Ann, think so.

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:52):
You said this is stored on the device and Chrome is just reading it. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:12:56):
That way. Well, Chrome generates it and then stores it in its, you know, store

Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:01):
It, stores it back pocket, wherever it stores cookies back pocket. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:13:04):
It back pocket. <Laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:06):
It's back pocket, but it's stored locally on your device. It's not sent up to the cloud like associated with your IP address. Correct.

Leo Laporte (00:13:12):
So they announced, yeah. That's your, that's the key, right? It's anonymized. Yeah. Although, and they also in a way associated with your IP address, cuz when you go, let's say you go to what's the, you know, some bass fishing place <laugh> and, and it sends out let's, you know, you go to sporting goods website and it's it's say, well, here's the three things. Here's the three topics Leo's interested in. But, but is getting that plus my IP address. So that's why they have to expire them on a regular basis. Right. So they can't start building a picture of you. The other

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:49):
Interesting thing here, what could be done? Go ahead, Stacey. Sorry.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:13:53):
Oh, I was gonna say Google says they also are gonna send fake topics to about 5% of the websites to make sure the topic generation is actually random, which I thought was kind of like, does that mean like 5% of your ads? Aren't are they gonna give people a discount of 5% like that? Oh, from the I get where they're coming from this perspective's kind of weird.

Leo Laporte (00:14:13):
I, I, I mean, I'm a little, I'm a, of course I've been a little skeptical because Google has its own way of tracking who you are and, and all of that. But I think that Google is really is I'm gonna give him credit for trying to find a system that users can tolerate that gives the advertisers some of the information,

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:33):
Which might actually give you more relevant. A here here's a question. Do you, did you receive anything? Whether, whether an advertiser can do or not, that's how it got abused on Facebook, right? If, if, if I, if I decide I want to advertise this thing, but not to people who like hip hop as a way, you know, this job as a way to not

Leo Laporte (00:14:52):
Have yeah. Kind of redlining in other words,

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:53):
Well, that kind of stuff. Right. and, and the knot was an issue there, which I think was the primary one. I

Leo Laporte (00:14:59):
Don't think that Google can control the knot because they're gonna send here's a here's on the Google feed, blog, small sample. They're gonna send out, you know, this, you know, Jeff's interest and autos and vehicles, books, and literature, comics and animation and rock music, team sports. There's no reason, oh, rock that sports. Couldn't see, oh, rock. I don't want anybody's interest in rock. And just say, you know, we won't advertise to that person. The point that Google's making on this GRA diagram is you don't know, you can't tell what's in that cookie. It's a, you know, it's code, but you can see very clear cause Chrome will show this what your, what interest is sending to advertisers and you see that X, you can delete them. So I think this is, I, I like this solution. Let me here's Google's it could be useful. One minute video to describe this here. Are you getting audio 

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:51):
You didn't test your audio. Leo left. Left, right, right. Left. Right? Right.

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
Yeah. So maybe there's no audio in it. We, we heard the TikTok. Oh, okay. Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:06):
Introducing topics. Thank you. Privacy sandboxes, newest proposal to help you preserve your privacy online while enabling sites, the show about vessel with topics, your browser will note topics related to participating sites. You visit, let me

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
Do the cause. I'm a train professional. For example, if you've recently visited sites about sports, the browser may note that sports is one of your topics. Your topics, the easy page will help determine the ads you see, and a site won't need to know who you are to show you an that about sports. They just know you like it. You have no control. Oh, sorry. You do have control over your topics and you can remove topics in the browser or you can turn 'em off altogether. I'm cold reading it, man. <Laugh> with topics. The specific sites you visited are no longer shared across the web. Like they might have been with third party cookers, third cookies. We're testing topics soon to get feedback from the industry so that it works together with all of the other privacy sandbox proposals to protect your privacy and keep the internet a valuable source of free information for now in the future. And that's the balancing act. They wanna support advertising, which is what supports free internet content. But they also want you to comfortable with the information they share. I don't know, negatives. Stacey, can you see a negative here?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:17:20):
No. I mean, I think it's mostly positive, especially if they make it easy for you to look, cuz then you can also, I mean the negative for an advertiser is I could go in and I could be like, I'm so sick of seeing all these high price coats because I keep buying them. So then I'm, I am not interested in high fashion and then I would stop buying high fashion because of advertising. Google

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
Is that's really not a problem published interestingly on GitHub the details about the API, if you wanted to, if you wanna start getting ready as a, as a web site designer to, to support this. Yeah, I think it's 

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:57):
I, I think there's a further opportunity is to let me pick my

Leo Laporte (00:18:00):
Topics. Oh, isn't that interesting? Tell you,

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:03):
I want the car.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:18:05):
You might, I mean, I will say that as, so, especially because it's short ranged, like three weeks, let's just go with every time I binge watch a show, I start Googling like mad to hear like, right. Who's the actors where have I seen this person? Right? Yeah, me too. So it captures, it captures that, which is a very fleeting interest, but might be interesting for an advertiser. And then it goes away when I'm probably no longer interested in it. If I had to manage that, I'd just be like I'm interested in IOT and clothes.

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:35):
But the interesting thing too here is Google's always, always sussed out topicality, right? From the very, very beginning of advertising. So how are they gonna know an expensive coat site? I guess that's pretty obvious their coats and their expensive, but how, you know, what, how topicality determined is gonna be interesting to see. Cause we've never had transparency on that before why this ad appeared on this, this page. It

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:00):
Would always make, if you are, it almost makes it look like they have a access to the history, even though they say they're not

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:06):
Looking at you history of which the user or the site end the use it,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:12):
But they, they are very obviously looking at your history. I mean, if I look at like my Google newsfeed, for example, I mean, all I have to do is search like one freaking I don't know, like hot tub chemicals and for the rest of my life, I'm reading stories about hot tubs. So I, yeah, that is annoying. This it's gonna be built on. I mean, that's easy for Google, right?

Leo Laporte (00:19:35):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:19:36):
Yeah. It may not be accurate. So I can go in and be like, please stop showing me ADSS for

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
Hot tubs. I mean, Google look, Google's not gonna make privacy advocates and advertisers happy. So it's a con it's like any compromise there's there's not gonna be perfect as a, I I think as a user I'm satisfied with this, will advertisers feel like they're getting enough information? I mean, honestly, if, if you're sporting goods and it says you're in, I don't know, pickle ball is probably too granular. That's the problem. So it might say you're interested in racket sports then they, I mean, maybe they'd like more granularity. I don't know. I haven't heard from advertisers. I don't. Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:13):
The other interesting piece here is, is the correlations that occur. I remember early on I'm forgetting the name of the company that was bought by AOL long ago. They found for example, that service people in people in the army and Navy and so on correlated very highly with big screen TVs. So you might be wanting to advertise a big screen TV, but you go toward military interest or vice versa. Right. And, and that's because you have your own data as an advertiser that says these are, these are the useful correlations that we have.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:49):
Yeah. But that's okay. I mean, that's been happening for a while, so yeah. I don't have issues with that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:56):
I mean, I,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:20:57):
But we're cool with that. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:59):
Right. We, we, we are, but we gotta think about you know, how does this let's let's here, here's the test. I think if I'm a job site and I'm advertising jobs, am I using some topics to get rid of oh, people who may be less desirable for my employers, people who are on a

Stacey Higginbotham (00:21:17):
Culture fit.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:19):
Yeah. Right. And, and, and so that's gonna, they're, Google's gonna have to test out and they're good at this, right. Going back to Matt Cutts, they're good at, at sussing out bad uses of things, but far better than Facebook ever was of seeing how could this system get misused and, and it, it will be, it surely will be no doubt about it.

Leo Laporte (00:21:40):
Okay. Anyway, big topic. I com I commend them for trying to find something that makes people happy. And I'm sure the, I haven't seen the FF yet. Let me see if the EF is already up in arms over this.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:54):
Well, but also the Washington post of the New York times, I put it in this tweet. It's rather than saying a new way to target ads, a new way to track you.

Leo Laporte (00:22:03):
Yeah. But

Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:05):
Remember, I don't think that's a problem. I think it's important to explain to bold that these companies are tracking them. I have a really interesting tracking story that it's not on the thing, but

Leo Laporte (00:22:14):
Let me just say this, talk about it. It, and then let's do that, but it's not tracking the common

Stacey Higginbotham (00:22:18):
Person's understanding. It's what it's not tracking with you on the, the New York times, headline scaring. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:22:24):
But, but is let Leo defend me. I'm gonna defend you. Cause so third, so cookies as Google pointed out, track you in the sense that you, the Facebook like button sees multiple sites that you've been on. This is a very different system where the Chrome browser, which sees those sites anyway, then extracts from that and interest five interests, which you can see what they are. You can turn them off and sends that to the website. That is not the same thing at all. That's not really tracking you. No, it's in my opinion. Now maybe do you think Stacey consumers will see that mechanism that the browser then says, this is what media you're interested in? Is that, will that be seen as tracking? I don't feel like that's tracking. It's not following you in any way. <Affirmative>

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:13):
Anytime something pops up and tells the average person, Hey, I think you like this, or I know you like this. Yeah. Right. And they're correct. They don't like that. That creeps people out. Yeah. They don't care that it follows them. Other places. That's a real subtle distinction. Most people don't care about.

Leo Laporte (00:23:28):
They should. Cuz that's the problem. That's why we are. That's why we don't like third party cookies,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:23:34):
But how sophisticated does someone have to be to? So, okay. Can I tell you my tracking story? Cuz I, I, I think this is interesting please. And it ties to this. So I read it. My daughter is a sophomore in high school. So she's looking, we're about to start the whole college thing. So we, we got a book by a wall street journal reporter about like getting money for college. And in that book, he talked about how colleges are now using pixel trackers on emails to track when applicants open their emails, how quickly they respond, how many times they open it and they use that information. I thought that was owner. Okay. But they use that information for, in getting a sense of how interested someone is in the school and for allocating scholarship money mm-hmm <affirmative> and I was like, oh crap. I gotta get my dog out a proton mail because I don't want, I don't want her casual searches or interests in something to cost us money.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:24:33):
Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> and so I think it's old news that yes, there are pixel trackers in email. Right. We might all be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. But when you think about how those are being used, it's kind of like holy crap in ways that might surprise you it's well, and that's what I mean, like people are not sophisticated or it's not even not sophisticated. We just don't think everything through to that level because my God we'd have, we sound like paranoid, crazy folk, I guess. But anyway, that's, that's why I've been thinking. Yeah. Normals

Ant Pruitt (00:25:08):
Air quote, normals. We do sound paranoid when we start talking about privacy and security, even though it's pretty blatant, what's going on.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:17):
I think Google has an opportunity here. And this is me just speculating to, to, to your point, Leo, about, about the awareness of people in to York point, Stacey and and Ant about the, the, the, the nervousness is to, is to be very strong of saying control your advertising. Control what topics you have control, what topics you don't get. I've always argued. I wanted on, on the sites that, that I ran when I ran them, I wanted the opportunity for somebody to say, don't show me this advertiser and sell data to the advertiser. These people don't wanna see you. You figure out why, but, but that's valuable. You're wasting your money trying to get to these people. So stop going to those people, right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I think there's an opportunity to become I hate using this word very proactive and allow users to in not just feel in control, but be in control. It's gonna generate more data that is actually valuable because it comes from it's a permission to system that says, yeah, I am looking for a car right now. No, I was looking for my daughters who already bought the car, stopped with the car ads, please stop wasting your money. And my eye space. There's a lot of opportunity there. I think they were

Stacey Higginbotham (00:26:30):
<Laugh> well, and there's always people who are gonna be like, not everybody wants to be proactive with advertisers. Many people might be like, ah, I'm gonna tell it. I want data about

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:40):
That's kind of

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:42):
My thought is

Leo Laporte (00:26:42):
That really the people object to this, it's not about tracking. It's not about cookies. It's not about any of this. They object to advertising and, and they just, they don't want advertising that knows anything about them, which has never been by the way, never been the case. Advertising is always targeted to some degree, if you buy better homes and gardens, you're targeting the reader is of better homes and gardens. If you buy ads on this show, you're targeting them based on their interest in this show. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I think where people got upset is they just don't like advertising

Stacey Higginbotham (00:27:14):
<Laugh> well, I think advertising has gotten more manipulative, so, oh, it's not

Leo Laporte (00:27:19):
More manipulative. Micro targeted. Think about the advertising. Oh, you know, in the, in TV ads where the, the, the, your coworker put a bottle of scope on your desk, cause they didn't want to tell you, you had bad breath. I mean, it's been manipulative since four outta five doctors recommend bacon for breakfast. I mean, it's it's always been manipulative. I think it's maybe less manipulative now.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:41):
I mean most more than sorry, Stacey.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:27:45):
No, no, go ahead.

Jeff Jarvis (00:27:47):
More than half the ads in newspapers in the early days before the Lineo type and, and, and the explosion more than half in major newspapers were for patent medicines.

Leo Laporte (00:27:56):
Advertising was crap. Yeah. From the beginning feeling tired. Snake oil. Yeah. You need snake oil. So yeah. <Laugh>, I mean, I already stay with people. Hate ads. That's probably part of the reason people hate ads, but ads, we even do ads. We, you know, marketing is important to businesses. We gotta, they got, somehow we have to get the word out. Right?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:28:16):
Yep. It's it's not the ads. So advertising yes is manipulated. But I think the fact that it's coming at you in so many plays, places in ways might feel more manipulative. And I say that because again, I'll just use my fancy coats as an example, I can watch the fancy coats on television, but when I'm watching them on the internet, they're chasing me over every freaking story there is. Right. So my, the ratio of time I spend looking at fancy, the coats is, is pretty high and maybe that's what feels so

Leo Laporte (00:28:49):
I don't, I think, I think, well, so really debate is how sophisticated are people when they say I don't want to be tracked. And I think, you know, the people who listen to this show are the privacy advocates who are into technology are really saying, I don't wanna, I don't, I don't want you know, cookies tracking me from site to site. I don't want my location information to be available. I don't want you putting little subpixels in my emails so that, you know, I've opened it. That kind of thing is the intrusive tracking people are talking about. And for, I don't think this is, this is not the at, they may still not like it, but this is not, this is much more benign. Will

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:30):
They do a good job of explaining this to the public? Or will the public still, and, and media will, again, as I go back to the narratives, gonna come from the Washington post and New York times saying they found a new way to track you. Yeah. Evil Google. Yeah. And it's gonna be real hard to say we're actually trying to improve advertising. And if we don't, media are borked folks borked.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:29:50):
So what if, what if we say a less intrusive way to te

Leo Laporte (00:29:54):
Well, here's the headline in the times Google introduces a new system for tracking Chrome browser users was

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:59):
Post is.

Leo Laporte (00:30:00):
And if you, well, but even if you just read the headline that's yeah, that doesn't sound

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:04):
So good. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> right. Yeah. And it block so called cookies. Yeah. Like, oh, why don't you put your put scare quotes around cookies. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:16):
I will tell you though, when I ask normal people every now and then I'm like, Hey, you know what a they're like, oh yeah. There's that thing that it's on the web.

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:24):
It, it follows you, it, it keeps popping up

Leo Laporte (00:30:25):
On the screen. <Laugh> here's the I mean, seriously. Yeah, no, here's the here's the Washington post. Google pros is a new way to track people around the web. Again, that's not even accurate. Wow. Yeah. It's good. Old click bait right there. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:43):
Yep. Moral panic. And I gave you the warning. It was time for the moral panic. <Laugh> you fell apart. Geez. Yes. Producing

Stacey Higginbotham (00:30:50):
The show. Jeff, come

Jeff Jarvis (00:30:51):
On, man. I'm not, I'm not producing today. No, he's not. He had plenty of time to do it. He pushed the

Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
Button. Nevermind. I was trying to help you in, there was a changing of the guard at the TriCaster and they didn't catch it. So Ant, would you Ant, would you push the button again? And the, and the folks who push the buttons on the other side of the room, maybe they'll push the button at the say, there go.

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:11):
There we go. Go. I feel so good. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:31:12):
You, Anne. We go, Ant has

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:15):
It's a bow on the top of the discussion. It does

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):
Need, cause remember most of the audience is not looking. They're only listening. Yeah. So really

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:22):
Have to work on that.

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
What would be the 

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:26):
It's it's gotta real music. No, it's more like it's jaws. It's yeah. I'll dig through my library of sounds. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:31:40):
Here. Turn that up. Burke. Is that sinister enough? Do it again here.

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:52):
I don't hear it.

Leo Laporte (00:31:55):
Moral panic.

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:56):
Oh yeah. That's good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:59):
I'll buy you. I'll buy you that. Here's another one. Let's try this here. One moral panic.

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:08):
I think you need a little more panic in your voice. Leo

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:11):
<Laugh> I think, I think you need the moral give

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:15):
And then

Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
The Don oh, time it better. I, I think,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:18):
Yeah, time it

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
Moral panic, moral panic, moral

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:30):
Panic. <Laugh> we'll work on that. We'll workshop that I like giving Leo notes. That's good. That's good. We

Leo Laporte (00:32:37):
Have way too much fun on this show. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:39):
We have way too much time in our lives. More. I was much

Leo Laporte (00:32:42):
Say I think it's panic. Moral panic, panic.

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:52):
Oh, this is about to be so happy. <Laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (00:32:54):
I, I, I think we need to cut the sound a little short and then we'll get there.

Leo Laporte (00:33:01):
I will, I will fix it on my end. When will we three me game in fire? Like in panic. <Laugh> okay. You want a heartbeat and a shark sound and yeah. All right. We can, I can work on that shark sound. I was a radio production director for many years. I could put some something together. We get that. We get those notes from the morning guy. I need a moral panic sound. <Laugh> got

Stacey Higginbotham (00:33:31):
It for you. Yeah, go. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there you go. You know, a lot of people listen to the show. We should be aware and, and try to give them some fun as well. By

Leo Laporte (00:33:40):
The way, the other Washington post headline that caught my eye. Why Amazon is ramping up its push for legalizing marijuana. So there <laugh> now that's link BA I see this. I clicked on that one right away.

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:54):
It also explains, I think this story explains why they stopped testing their employees for M

Leo Laporte (00:34:01):
Why they stop testing it? Who cares? If they're high? I saying, let 'em be high. Why?

Jeff Jarvis (00:34:08):
Well there's a business angle. What's it go. Explain that story to Stacey.

Leo Laporte (00:34:11):
Okay. Legalizing pot could also open the door to a lucrative new market for the online retailer, but Amazon says it's not interest students selling pot. They just wanna remove hiring impediments, which disproportionately impact individuals of color. So,

Jeff Jarvis (00:34:31):
And they wanna sell a few bombs and

Leo Laporte (00:34:32):
A few bombs. Yeah, there are more, we can't, they can't Petaluma has not allowed legal marijuana as legal in California, but they've not allowed stores to open selling pot in in town. But they're about 800 bong stores. <Laugh> I dunno. It's like right, go outta town, get your, get your dope. But come back to buy the pipe. I that's very strange go 10 minutes away. And then come back to town. I'm deeply Elizabeth Warren. I'm deeply skeptical that Amazon's lobbying is anything more than a self-interested move to monopolize. Another market. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Potentially blocking black and Latino entrepreneurs from an emerging industry. Oh God. Why aren't people associating race with marijuana use that's seems not so good.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:23):
Well, it certainly has been happening in the justice system where people who are thrown age in jail for marijuana sales are disproportionately people of color.

Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
True. For instance, I feel like, I mean, in Washington

Stacey Higginbotham (00:35:35):
State, many of the owners of the marijuana dispensaries are not people of color.

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:41):
Yeah. That's and that's the issue is people suffered from this industry when it was underground and now the opportunities should be given to those communities that were made to suffer by the justice system. Oh, that's interest they're.

Leo Laporte (00:35:53):
That's interesting. Okay. That seems, yeah. It's a little,

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:57):
So I think that's what she's not saying. That's what's your point.

Leo Laporte (00:35:59):
Yeah, it is. It is a little bit. What do you think, Ann? Yeah. I, I mean, you are a person of color. Sorry. Seems like I muted myself. Seems. Yeah. Were you swearing? Okay. That's good. <Laugh> our

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:11):
Work. No. Yeah. I agree. It is totally disproportionate. I said, I wanna say, I mentioned this the other week, where if somebody gets in trouble for a marijuana charge or what have you, and they get, they literally get the booked on at 'em and they get these ridiculous

Leo Laporte (00:36:28):
Thing. Its disport disport,

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:30):
You know, that's the thing. Well, prosecution

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:32):
Too. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:36:35):
Okay. FLoC here's one from protocol. Floc is dead, but topics won't fix Google's ad targeting problems. It just seems like rearranging deck chairs on the sinking ship of targeted ads.

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:49):
I like that

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
Headline better. Yeah. It's not as bad. Is the is the ship sinking of targeted ads? I guess maybe it is well listing to port heavily.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:00):
Yeah. This I, I can use my number more regulation.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:37:04):
Oh, go for it.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:06):
Okay. All right. Thank you. So, and I've talked about this before, but, but Instacart under Fiji CMO, former head of newsfeed at, at Facebook the new CEO there is gonna go heavily advertising makes sense, right? It's a low margin business grocery, and we can push you no buy the Pepsi end this week. Right? So advertising there makes sense. Amazon has built tremendous and quietly built a tremendous advertising business. That's challenging. Google best buy now sells floor space. Brent south floorspace marketing best buys is an advertising medium.

Leo Laporte (00:37:41):
They've always done that. Grocery stores have always made more money by pricing product at I level or in caps right

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:49):
Now there's new players. Instacart's a new player. Yeah. Amazon is a new player in advertising. Best buy is a new player in this way. TV set makers. We talked about that in the show. Yeah. Finally occurred to me today in Twitter was that all these industries are going into advertising. As media is leaving advertising and media saying, well, we give up,

Leo Laporte (00:38:08):
We're gonna put pay. I'll give you a different perspective. All these industries are going into it as margins from their primary business drop. Yes, yes. And what they're doing is they're saying, well, look, you know, people will buy more to TVs. If we could charge a third, what we used to charge, we'll make up the difference in a putting ads on. And I understand that and its kind of in a way, consumers are telling them that drop the price. We'll put up with the ads.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:38:33):
Hmm. And they're meeting consumers where they're shopping. I mean, if I'm no longer, if Instacart, if I'm using Instacart, I'm not seeing what the in caps that people paid so much money to, to Kroger for getting their

Leo Laporte (00:38:45):
Stuff there. And how much of this space, how much of this also comes from to, to your point, exactly. Stacey people under 30 don't watch TV anymore. They don't read newspapers. Right. You know we get advertisers cuz there's no E week or PC week for enterprise companies to buy ads in. They're trying desperately to figure out how do we reach our customers. I understand that that's that makes sense. So it's coming from both directions companies trying to lower prices find another way to make money and advertisers desperate to reach an audience that that's. And

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:16):
So rather than fixing, rather than coming up with new models that make advertising work, the ad, the media business is basically giving up. They're all acting like apple, us, screw it. And, and so you have wall street journal and, and companies like that, trying to make it more difficult around advertising. That's why they're, they're, they're ganging up with odd here and, and media should be in the business and say, no, let's find new services for marketing to hold on to that subsidy. But they've, but they've just, they've just surrendered.

Leo Laporte (00:39:48):
So it's a, it's a interesting time we live in we are, you know, we've always been ad supported, but as advertisers have kind of, you know, COVID kind of drove advertising down diversity and podcasts drove audience numbers down. We've seen dwindling revenue. That's why we started club TWI as another way to support us. And it's interesting cuz we, we kind of consciously said, well, if you don't like ads, would you be willing to pay seven bucks a month for ad free content? And to this day it's still only a few percentage, maybe 2% of our total audience mm-hmm <affirmative> that is willing to pay not to have ads. So, and I'm not sure if that's a reflection of, and what's even funnier

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:33):
Is those that signed up. We still get a large percentage of them

Leo Laporte (00:40:37):
To say, we want the ads. I love the ads. I know that's the funniest thing. <Laugh> I know that cracks me out. I love the ads. It is just like

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:44):
We want, is that the one pitch?

Leo Laporte (00:40:45):
So some people wanna support us. Well, the pitch is support us as well as if you don't want ads that we don't. If you give us seven bucks a month, we don't need to play ads for you because you're giving us what we would make for, for you from an advertiser. So that's, you know, but, but it's such a small percentage. I have to think. It may also reflect the fact that people have figured out how to skip ads. People are pretty well not seeing or hearing ads

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:11):
And PR stations get six to 12% of their audience giving money to the station. And that's huge a law time. That's a huge, and

Leo Laporte (00:41:20):
They only do it by bugging the hell outta you a lot.

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:23):
Exactly. So, so no, it's the free get to 5%. It's the freak.

Leo Laporte (00:41:27):
That's all about the free tote bag to,

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:29):
I want my, I want my, you know what? I want a sweater vest. I want a twin

Stacey Higginbotham (00:41:33):
Sweater vest. Then I'll give money to you. Trust me. I wanna walk around. We all get you what sweater? Sweater vests. And bowties Bowers. Ashley. So adorable. I'd have to Ms. Ashley on the horn. I mean help you with,

Leo Laporte (00:41:53):
When I first started working in radio, I worked for a funky little station called K L O K clock radio, right. Clock radio. And it was all men. This is, you know, it was all men. And so the, the, the man, the men from clock and they all had mustard, yellow jackets with the clock Loco.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:13):
Oh, oh, oh no. Elitist. And there'd be

Leo Laporte (00:42:17):
Billboards. The men from clock and their, their mustard colored blazers.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:22):
So I'm gonna say no to mustard. That is an unflying color on a lot of peoples, but I'll wear

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
A blazer. Thank you. Miss Fazz is we could all wear FASES if you want on,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:42:35):
I feel like that could be culturally appropriate. <Laugh> we'd have to investigate that. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:42:41):
Even, I don't know. After at Turk said we don't want 'em. I think we can. Anybody there ever they're open to all well, yeah, open all. I wanna take a little break, come back with more with this, in fact, I am going to do something thing unheard of Stacey picks the next story. Wait a minute. Yeah. You

Stacey Higginbotham (00:43:01):
Democracy. <Laugh> maybe it's a sta a sta

Leo Laporte (00:43:08):
It's a sta that's the best kind. Yeah. Stacey see, coming up next, but first a word from our sponsor. And the thing is we, I like to choose sponsors that we like, that we have a relationship with. And I feel like it's not a an ad to kind of twist your arm. It's more like I'd like to introduce you to something. And I think this is, this is one thing I, I tell my kids this I want to introduce you to wealth front. So, you know, you know, when you're young, you, you, you wanna do the latest thing. I wanna do NFTs. I wanna buy Bitcoin. My daughter wanted to buy doze coin. I said, honey, that's fine. You know, you can play with that, but please would you put the bulk, first of all, are you saving for your retirement when you're 25?

Leo Laporte (00:43:55):
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Leo Laporte (00:44:47):
But without having you have to do everything yourself, you'll see. I, if you just look at the wealth from site, you could pick the category you wanna invest in, but then they'll do it, right? For instance, they'll do tax loss, harvesting the lower your tax bill. That's complicated. They help you do that. They will rebalance your portfolio. Do you know what rebalancing is? Did you know you're supposed to do that at least quarterly Wealthfront does it for you automatically. It's doing the right thing. That's the experts at work there. Now, now today, since we started talking about Wealthfront some years ago, 28 billion in assets, half a million people building their wealth at Wealthfront, it's easy to get started. $500 to get started, grow your wealth, the easy way, prepare for retirement or buying that house or the kids in college. All of this stuff you should be saving for.

Leo Laporte (00:45:38):
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Leo Laporte (00:46:32):
What did you, what did you, what caught your, I wanna talk about ID me and the IRS. Perfect. That's exactly what I was gonna talk about. Oh good. Cause it's great. Mind's really confusing. So the IRS and they've kind of backtracked a little bit on this, but I don't think the backtrack is real. I it's a little confusing that yes, I've seen on the site. Even if you go to irs.gov, they say coming this summer, if you wanted, there's certain things they want extra security, right? So they've con this is the troubling thing they've contracted with a third party. A company, a lot of states are working with called id.me. The states are doing it to try to fraud in things like COVID loans and and you know unemployment and id.me is a way of authenticating yourself. Okay. So there's the kind of the synopsis. Tell me Stacey, what you think of this story?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:47:32):
Well, originally I was like, what the, what? Cuz at first it sounded like the IRS was gonna make all of us upload our biometric information. And I was like, this is a bad plan for so many reasons. Right? And now it's coming in. Yeah. I'm like, and then now they're saying, no, you can still pay your taxes and do things. That's gonna be a little bit more onerous, but you, you can still not use this, but in totally separate news. And I'm still trying to figure out what the heck ID me is actually using. So they're saying they're not using facial recognition, but they are, and this is, this is where I'm like, this is why we're talking about this. Cuz I'm like still, there's still trying to

Leo Laporte (00:48:17):
Figure out things they could be doing with the IRS. You know, they're saying you take a selfie and sometimes they want it to be moving by the way. So it's not just a picture of a picture. So a selfie, hi, it's me. And we will use that picture of you to verify that it's you. But then they were accused, that's called one to one face, face recognition. Right. But then they were accused of doing something that is much more disturbing, which is called one to many face matching steps, which means it's the kind of thing that Clearview AI was using where I take a picture of Stacey and then I try to match it in a database of many people. And that's a lot more concerning because it's not then just about authentication. You're being added to a large database. They it's.

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
So in his LinkedIn post Blake hall who the CEO of IDB CEO says he made it clear as mud. We avoid disclosing methods. We used to stop identity theft and organized crime cuz it jeopardizes their effectiveness. Okay. Criminals are, he's got a lot of excuses. ID me uses a specific one to many check on selfies, tied to government programs targeted by organized crime to prevent prolific identity thieves. In other words, they're gonna match your picture against a database. It's almost like going to the police department and looking through the mug sheet and to see if you're a member of organized crime. He says, this step is internal to ID me and does not involve any external or government database. It occurs once during enrollment and exists to make sure a single attacker is not registering multiple identities. That kind of makes sense. The one to one would not register that.

Leo Laporte (00:50:09):
It wouldn't know if you've done this 12 times. This step is not here's his here's his out. This step is not tied to identity verification. It does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose than to prevent identity theft data. It shows that it sounds removing this control would immediately lead to significant identity theft and organized crime. The one to one face match step is the only step we use to verify identity <laugh>. But he's, it sounds to me like he's also saying, but we're also gonna do the one to many.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:50:45):
So it sounds, he here's what I'm wondering because like Brian Krebs went through the process to register his face. And he said, so as part of that, there was a, a person who actually registered. So that's the one to one and now Brian Krebs has his IRS ID me profile. Right? What I'm guessing is if Brian Krebs were a fraudster and tried to do it a and under the name of Pete Johnson, Pete Johnson when he went to try to do this, that would be a one to one, but they would have to check the face of Pete Johnson against their one to many database. Right. And they would recognize that Pete Johnson is also Brian Kreps. Right? That's what I'm hoping. They're trying to say.

Leo Laporte (00:51:27):
I think that's what they are saying. I don't. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:30):
Which is okay. That's that's

Leo Laporte (00:51:33):
Not terrible, but that means every single. So this is my problem. Every single time I set up an ID, me account, which I'm going to need to log into the IRS for certain things like paying your taxes or getting your refund. Well, you don't

Stacey Higginbotham (00:51:46):
Have to. That's what they, the, I said that you don't have to, but

Leo Laporte (00:51:51):
You're gonna be more convenient too. Sure. This is con it will be more convenient unless they've changed your policy. Cuz here's the page. Brian Krepps publishes. If you have an existing IRS username, please create a new ID me account. As soon as possible, you won't be able to log in with your existing IRS name and passwords starting summer 20. Now maybe they've changed that

Stacey Higginbotham (00:52:13):
Gizmodos story has an editor's note saying that you can still file and pay taxes without logging into an IRS account or providing biometric data, which contradicts information an IRS spokesperson previously provided. They also pointed out that this was a really frustrating correction. If you go down to,

Leo Laporte (00:52:36):
I think the thing is pay taxes, fine. If you're gonna give us money fine. You wanna claim a refund? You're gonna need to use ID dummy. There are, I think this is weel words. There are some things you don't need to use id.me for, but there are also some things you must use id.me for. So my problem, there are a couple, one is it's a third party. It's not, it's a, I guess, I mean, but they're gonna have a lot of face recognition information because with a one to many system, they have to store everybody face with a one-to-one system. They don't with a one to many. They have to store everybody's face. That means they're gonna have a database of every single person who logs into the IRS using system.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:53:21):
I DMI has that? Not the

Leo Laporte (00:53:23):
IRS. No. And ID. Well that's my problem.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:53:26):
Oh, okay. Well no, no, no, no, no. I get it. I get it. But ID ma ID E already has this database because well already has many people in database

Leo Laporte (00:53:35):
Me until I providing those services. Right? Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:53:37):
Well until you get your, okay, so your issue is you don't wanna, they

Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
Used to, by the way, companies, IRS used to use it. Cofax to do this <laugh> oh gosh. So, so that was a problem. They got rid of that because, and here's the problem. Why did they get rid of Equifax? Cuz they had a massive data breach breach. So now they got ID E and a data breach here would be 10 times worse because it wouldn't just be your social security number. It it, but your social security number and your face

Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:09):
And you're right. Like it's UN it's still unclear. If the IR I think what's happening is there's a lot of backlash and the IRS is suddenly like I don't know if we can force everybody. I mean, cuz you have to pay your taxes. You can't. I mean, basically you're legally now.

Leo Laporte (00:54:23):
No, that's why they're saying you can pay your taxes without it. They never implied that you couldn't pay your taxes. It's if you want to, there's some things that you have to do it for. And so well, so

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:33):
What is a good system for verified?

Leo Laporte (00:54:35):
Well, this is the problem. This is a good system.

Stacey Higginbotham (00:54:41):
Ideally you would have, I mean, would you make the underlying security aspects of it? Not open source, but like, I mean, yes, you need a database of faces and information. If you're gonna use faces

Leo Laporte (00:54:54):
For security, Krebs, Krebs looked at their security and he said, you know, they do all the security in depth stuff, blah blah, blah, blah. So maybe it is secure. Here's the real problem. There are, you can't change your face really or fingerprints when you're giving people biometrics, you're giving them something permanent. Even a social security number can be changed, but when you're giving biometrics, that's it it's over. And if that, if that leaks out that's becomes, and if it's used

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:22):
As a basis,

Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
An UNFI problem transaction. Yeah. It's an unfixable problem, right? It,

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:27):
The problem is that is not the data breaches. Everything is breached. The problem is using bad structures for transactions. And, and, and, and, and, and then that's the problem. It's like the social security number wasn't supposed to be used for everything. Right. But it became used for everything. So what if the face ends up being used for every banking thing, and then it gets misused.

Leo Laporte (00:55:45):
That's where the problem there's issue, because id.me looks like they've not been fully transparent on this at first they say, oh no, it's one to one. And they say, but we have to use one to many. Oh, now we're not gonna tell you, cause we don't got crooks to know. And this is what Caitlin Sealy George who's campaign director for fight for the future says, we already know this. Company's willing to say anything in order to get more government contracts. The CEO of id.me has been ping erroneous numbers about unemployment benefit fraud. But the fact that the IRS knew about this discrepancy is a big problem. The only responsible thing for the IRS and, and the other state of federal agency using id.me to do is to stop these contracts immediately. So

Stacey Higginbotham (00:56:30):
There's, that's part of the liar is like, well, here's my, here's my big worry and issue. And we're already getting there, but if you have a government entity, sure, this is the kind of services side of the government, but having a database of your face and all the relevant information about you in that it becomes centralized. That can be used across. I, my worry is it could be used across all government agencies to find you or to like it technically, I guess it already can. And we're already seeing that with like the nationwide ID programs, but understanding who has access to your face data and all the personally identifiable information associated that with that and what they can use that for. Can they use it for tracking you, if you haven't paid a parking ticket using like city cameras can they sell that to a private company to track? Like what stores you go in? I mean, like my concern is this is really rich, valuable data and I wanna see really hard rules about how it's stored secured and then limited in use. Okay, well, Stacey,

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:43):
It's not gonna be it's it's some, there's gonna be a breach. So then the next question becomes you're right. You said, the next question is then what if it is breached? What could be done with it? What else would depend upon the same data that could then be misused?

Stacey Higginbotham (00:57:58):
Well, I, I think, I mean, I actually don't think being breach is the worst case scenario. I think the worst case scenario is the government has given all this valuable data to a private company who could then turn around and sell that data to, I don't know somebody who like makes traffic cameras and then you suddenly have like, or parking lot cameras. So you know, where Stacey Higginbotham is based on camera data, wherever I am in my day, for example. And I mean, it's kind of like location data from, from phones, which we might talk about later. Cause there's a lawsuit about that. That that's more my concern. I mean, yes, it probably will get breached, but,

Leo Laporte (00:58:45):
Eh, yeah. And, and will the government's database, would that be any more secure than id.me? I mean, I think a lot of this comes, no <laugh> yeah. I mean, that's part of the problem is yeah. Who, who this is. I mean, I don't,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:02):
We keep assembling all this valuable stuff and we're like, yeah, we know this security is not a hundred percent, but Hey, let's take all of our gold, stick it someplace, break it, right.

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:13):
Throw the government of bone. They may secure it. I mean, we just had the whole COVID testing site go up that was hosted by the government that didn't crash as soon as we launched it. So maybe there's hope on security too.

Leo Laporte (00:59:27):
Well, and you know, the <laugh> the, the government may already have your photo because they, they use DMV photos. They do so. Oh yeah. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:36):
They started that with, they started now taking EMV photos in creating the nationwide database. Remember right? Initially it was statewide and then several states signed up to participate 20

Leo Laporte (00:59:49):
States nationwide and now ever 641 million drivers license and ID photos from 21 states went to federal law enforcement databases. And then we shared with other three 30 million

Stacey Higginbotham (00:59:59):
People.

Leo Laporte (01:00:00):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:01):
Why do we have so many driver's license? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:00:04):
That's a good point. There's more driver's licenses than there are people. I don't know. That's not right. This is consumer reports. I trust them. I don't know federal agencies. Okay. Sorry.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:16):
No, I'm just like, wait, we don't have that population.

Leo Laporte (01:00:18):
Thanks for the sanity check. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I mean, how many pictures have you had taken over the years?

Leo Laporte (01:00:28):
A lot about 2016, the center on privacy and technology reported about half of all American adult faces are already in police, facial recognition databases. So maybe this, maybe it's silly to worry about this cuz this, this ship sailed federal

Stacey Higginbotham (01:00:44):
Well, then we have to figure out rules for how they can use that. And

Leo Laporte (01:00:48):
You know, FBI uses DMV photos. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> ice uses DMV, photos I mean it's not, oh boy. Yeah. yeah. And actually this is a article in consumer reports from three years ago, but they even addressed this thing about the difference between a phone face ID on a phone, which is one to one and one to many. When we do what we do on a phone is authentication. We're simply comparing to face images, but when law enforcement is searching for a person of interest, this is has to search against a large database of millions or even a hundred million photos. And that introduces this problem, the accuracy of facial recognition goes down as the size of a database increases. That's one of the concerns about using it for criminal law enforcement is it's not, you know, and we've seen this people go into jail incorrectly because they were identified in a digital lineup. So anyway, yeah. So I'm glad you brought it up cuz that, that is exactly one of the topics I wanted to talk about. And I don't know what I think I want. I mean, we certainly want it to be more secure. Maybe the government already does have all those photos anyway, so, but should this third party id.me, be able, allowed to collect all these, how much fraud is

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:08):
There now? What, what's the problem they're trying to solve

Leo Laporte (01:02:10):
Big, apparently a big according to I, well, and this is the other thing id.me. CEO said, oh, it's big a problem. We're here. We are just here to solve. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:22):
So there's a lot of fraud for parents committing tax fraud against their kids. So they actually like mm-hmm <affirmative> but this wouldn't solve that. Cuz if you're the first person to authenticate as like, if I authenticated as my daughter, for example, then I become the canonical image for

Leo Laporte (01:02:38):
Her. I'm still ID me has said there's been massive unemployment benefit fraud. They say 30% of states have seen there's what is, what is the number they said, oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:02:48):
Washington lost like a billion dollars

Leo Laporte (01:02:50):
In I many states unemployment. This is from last year are seeing a 30% fraud rate according to id.me. And of course this is self-serving information and that's one of the things that she was referring to. When she said that he's been, you know, kind of misleading about this information 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:03:13):
We did get a lot of fraud. I, I mean, there is, there was a lot of unemployment insurance fraud, but I don't know how much IRS fraud versus unemployment

Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
ID says 400 billion in pandemic, unemployment fraud UN well unproven that's that's another

Stacey Higginbotham (01:03:30):
Case. Yeah. Well that's,

Leo Laporte (01:03:31):
That's another case UN unproven, but now that's the kind of stuff they, the states are using them for that, that was which at least gave AIO yeah. 400 billion is a lot of money by cyber criminal gangs. And then that number by the way, then parroted by the top Republican on the house weighs and means committee Kevin Brady. Yeah. So it suddenly become you know, truth.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:05):
Oh, Oregon paid only 24 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits during the pandemic, the

Leo Laporte (01:04:10):
Total amount of government payouts was 800 billion. So they're saying half of that money was fraudulent. It seems like a large number. California says 20 billion. <Affirmative>

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:23):
20 billion is what they paid out in fraud. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (01:04:26):
Fraudulent unemployment payments during the pandemic. 11% of what it paid out overall.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:04:33):
Yeah. We had 650 million yeah. In Washington. So that's a lot

Leo Laporte (01:04:40):
Halls by the way, says to this day, it's accurate. According to Bloomberg business week, he said it's confirmed in patterns. The data company, the data of the company has gathered through its work for California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and 22 other states. He says if state agencies are reporting far lower levels of fraud publicly, well they're wrong. <Laugh> Okay. He says, this is the largest cyber attack in terms of fraud in American history. And that's, that's, what's giving some people a little bit of qualms about ID me. Yeah. Are they overstating this to, to get this government contract?

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:25):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:05:27):
Wouldn't be surprised. I know, but we don't know. We don't know that's marketing. Right. That's sales ID me began 12 years ago as troop swap Craigslist knockoff for the military community.

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:40):
<Laugh> that's a pivot.

Leo Laporte (01:05:41):
Then they turned it into a Groupon style discount service. Then they realized the real asset of troop swap was the software which allowed veterans to prove their eligibility without presenting documents, bearing social security numbers. They, they said, Hmm. Hall and Thompson, both ex military, but neither of whom had a tech background saw an opportunity. <Laugh> I always

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:12):
Anybody who does a lot of deals with the government, I'm always like, Hmm, you're

Leo Laporte (01:06:16):
Sketch. <Laugh> you Obama administration. This is all from Bloomberg business week. The Obama administration had announced the national strategy for trusted identities and cyberspace, a push to get private sector companies to develop ID verification technologies. The troop swap team bought the id.me, domain rebranded, and one, a $2.6 million grant from the commerce department's national institutes of standards and technology.

Speaker 5 (01:06:46):
Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:06:50):
Anyway, there's more to this. This is a deeper story. I'm sure we'll be reading more of this. It's interesting. And you know, Yeah. Yep. There you go. There, you have it. What do we think about the end of the line for Google clouds? Gsuite free edition. If you have a Gsuite free edition, you're gonna have to upgrade to a paid version starting July 1st. They

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:21):
Should have long ago. And this is true for me. Cause I, I pay already. I hear me complain them all the time. G suite is presum is, is, is now built for big companies. Yeah. They should have a light individual or a family edition of it that says all you want is your own domain. Some here's the deal.

Leo Laporte (01:07:40):
And that's what, that's what it was used for. Right.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:43):
That's why I'm there. Yeah. You'd have custom domain then they've overcomplicated the hell out of it. On the high end. They've taken away features because it's so complicated. We can't get as, as Google users. And they shouldn't treat, you know, the individual who, who, who was grandfathered now. Like it company, it's only six bucks a month. It's not that bad. 

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
They stopped offering the free tier 10 years ago. Ago. Yeah. Yeah. 2012. But you were grandfather, but you still had it. So there's people who have been all along, they got a domain name. It's just them. They get get's my wife, they get a smaller version of G suite. So she's gonna have to start paying in July. Yeah. Yeah. How does she feel about that?

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:22):
She doesn't know yet. She'll she'll roll. Say what did you get me into? Me and Jake. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
No, I mean, that was a good idea. I'm kind of glad I didn't do that, but we TWI pays the, you know, we have, we use cause you run servers and things. Yeah. So we pay this six bucks per seat and everybody's got an@andtwi.tv is through that. That's the email, not the website, but the email and yeah. And we use, we use G suite. I'm sorry, workspace. I mean, I'm using it right now as a Google sheet that we use to share the inform, you know, the stories with all the posts and the following stories. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:58):
So Simon Bo sent me a thing from GitHub a G suite migration plan that goes into some detail about this. Huh? 

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
What line is that?

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:12):
It's not yet. It will be in a second. <Laugh> it?

Leo Laporte (01:09:16):
What good. Are

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:17):
You one 50 <laugh> so we're gonna make you scroll.

Leo Laporte (01:09:22):
Yeah. Why you make me, why you make me scroll? Okay. Because it's fun to watch that GitHub GSU migration. So this is software. They'll just move you over to a page.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:30):
No, I don't think no. This is the process.

Leo Laporte (01:09:33):
Oh God. Yeah. It's not. Doesn't look simple. It it's a typical Google process. Wow. Yeah. Gmail gradable yes. Gmail rules. Yes. Google talk Hangouts. No, this is sad. Well that's cuz they killed it right? Google drive. Yes. <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:55):
Butable

Leo Laporte (01:09:55):
To what? Right. Well you get Google drive if you pay the, oh he, this is if you don't wanna pay six bucks. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:02):
Yeah. I think so.

Leo Laporte (01:10:04):
If G-Suite account remains unpaid, Google convert the account to a Google identity. This is an incomplete Google account, which does not include Gmail and calendar. But for some reason includes Google drive. I'll tell you why they don't wanna delete your data. Well, many Google services work with Google identity. Its usage is inconvenient and one will be required to be logged into several accounts to use free Gmail. So you're gonna have all sorts of identities. So here's his, this is how to get out of G suite Google to free Google accounts and what tools you'll need and how you will do it is ah, I see. Okay. It's quite a few,

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:42):
A lot of steps

Leo Laporte (01:10:43):
There. Quite a few steps.

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:45):
Yeah. So six bucks a month. I, I think I'm missing the opportunity just to do a different offer, fine charges for the services I given for

Leo Laporte (01:10:53):
A buck. If you, if you only have one person using it, you know, a buck, I mean, we pay

Stacey Higginbotham (01:10:59):
What we pay $6 a person. I mean, you can't pay $6 or right.

Leo Laporte (01:11:03):
I mean, you're you get a lot for that money, by the way, I should say, yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:11:08):
You get like totally 15 gigs. So yeah. So I,

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:12):
You also get complications now that's my problem is because you entered in because then when I use this against my Chromebook and I want to add something, oh no, no, you must get the administrator to do this. And I, then I start screaming on Twitter and people have to calm me down. Some administrator. Yeah. I have the administrator. I mean I'm an idiot. What are you doing to me? And so that's the problem, Stacey is that, is that it's it's yes. Six bucks a month and you get a whole lot of services. Absolutely. But you also get headaches whenever Google introduces something new

Stacey Higginbotham (01:11:42):
And you can't well, you could most, I mean like I mark Google G suite administrator for Stacey and IOT. So there's four licenses out and I am the person and I, I have this, I have the same frustrations. You have Jeff. I, I don't yell as loudly on Twitter, but I

Leo Laporte (01:11:59):
Mean, I should point that I should point out that there are still you, this is not changing the free Gmail, the free Google drive. I mean, yeah, this is only, you want your own name, custom domain. So I have my name at.com. I have a Google drive under that name and all of that stuff. That's which you should pay for. No, it's free. No, I'm saying people wanting to go custom should be well actually cost. I do pay for it because I have a Google one plan, which means I mm-hmm <affirmative> so I have two terabytes of Google drive and blah, cuz what do they give you? 50 gigabytes or something. It's not usually run through that if you have Gmail.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:12:37):
So Google probably just feels like if you're sophisticated enough to run, to own your own domain and to want to run, run that

Leo Laporte (01:12:43):
That's pretty sophisticated through them.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:12:44):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, cuz you also have to have a server, so you're either running your own server or you're gonna hire someone to do it, you know? So that's pretty sophisticated. They figure you could be your own it administrator.

Leo Laporte (01:12:54):
If, if you want, there are a lot cheaper ways than six bucks a person per month. If you just want email at your own domain that's I also want my Gmail. I like that is true. Or if you wanna use, well, I can still use Gmail. I just have it forward to Gmail and then log into my Gmail account. You can still use that. So I have, so I have my own custom domains and for time email to me would go to my Gmail account and actually I had a really complicated stuff cuz I did that cuz I Gmail was good at spam. And then I would have it forwarded from my Gmail account to another mail server. So I was kind of running my mail through Gmail for the spam filtering

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:31):
You and Devor act. Devor act was insisting that he had better spam. Now I never had any spam. And you said, no, I got Gmail and works

Leo Laporte (01:13:36):
Fine. He used a some guy service <laugh> yeah, I get no spam. I think we even had a song <laugh> you did,

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:46):
Did

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
Knows. Yeah, he was famous for that. And I'm sure he must have gotten spam, but who knows? Anyway, Gmail was very good. Actually I stopped doing that cuz Gmail spam filtering is not that good. It's so good. Yeah. Oh's not. You don't think so. No, I get so much spam. My biggest problem is that I was, it was LA port at Gmail and that sounds French. So it's getting not only spam, but it's getting a lot of French spam. Oh right. Classy of you. <Laugh> right. Oh actually what did I get the other day in French? Oh, from my employer, iHeart sent me an email. They do every six months. Even though this is no longer the recommendation, they, they change your password. They expire your password every six months. So annoying. Cause I only log in once like every six months.

Leo Laporte (01:14:41):
So <laugh> they sent me an email. But what was weird is they sent it to me in English and French and I was trying to figure out, do they think I'm French? Clearly they do. Clearly they do. You gotta, you gotta make sure every, you gotta know all of that. Yeah. Or is it there's some sort of Canadian thing, but they're not a Canadian company, a Canadian. They're not a Canadian company. Are they a French company? No, it's was an odd thing. I have to ask my boss. Why did you send me this in French?

Leo Laporte (01:15:10):
Shaun look pass. Well <laugh> how about this? This actually let's take a break. And then I have a lot of how about this is coming up, but I want to talk a little bit about my food tomorrow. Our imperfect foods box comes. You said Stacey, were you? Somebody was using imperfect foods. I love imperfect. I've done it in the past. Yeah. I just blew me away. So imperfect. You can put the lower third up. It's okay. Imperfect foods. This is an ad. There you go. That's it. This is an ad. Imperfect foods was started because they noticed that a lot of foods were thrown away because the grocery wouldn't put cuz they want that beautiful display of perfect apples. But as you may know, if you've ever gone to an apple orchard, most apples. Aren't perfect. And in fact, I'll be honest with you.

Leo Laporte (01:15:59):
The small ones, maybe those are the sweetest. Those are the best apples cuz we used to go. We used to pick our apples and I knew which ones to get, not the perfect ones that have been stored in, in a, in a refrigerator and bread so that they could be store for their six months before they go on the grocery shelf. So in perfect foods said, we should really solve this problem cuz it turns out I didn't realize this about a third more than a third 35% of the food supply in this country goes unsold, uneaten. And because it's not perfect. So in perfect foods was started as a, as a delivery. So service so you could, you know, kind of be a good person and get delicious foods. I have to tell you we've been subscribing in perfect foods for some time now I've never had anything.

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
I wouldn't go. That's great. Sometimes I thought we were gonna get a lot of food that looked like Richard Nixon, you know like carrots with a big nose and stuff. But no there's a few sometimes or the pomegranates Aren as big as your head, they're only as big as your fist. Things like that. I think those are sweeter anyway. Now in perfect foods does a whole lot more. They do meats. They do dairy. They do snacks, all of it, food that w the grocers, they overproduced it or they didn't want it. It's great. You'll reduce food waste. It'll save you time in your grocery shopping and you will eat more fresh, delicious food. Plus you you're really helping the, the environment. So not only does that food not get wasted, right, but you're are also because instead of going to the grocery store, the imperfect foods delivers they bunch, all deliveries in your neighborhood together on a single day.

Leo Laporte (01:17:37):
So everybody in, in our area is Thursday. One truck. That means there's 25% to 75% fewer emissions. That if we were all going to the grocery store, that's awesome. On average in, at foods, customers save six to eight pounds of food with every order. But I don't want to emphasize that you're gonna feel good about doing good, but you're gonna get great food too. Look, go to imperfect foods.com check first to see if they deliver in your area. I don't wanna oversell this. If you can't get it, I don't wanna make you feel bad, but if you can trust me, you do it. Sign up. You could personalize your weekly grocery order with fresh seasonal produce pantry staples, yummy snacks. It'll arrive on the same day. Every week won't necessarily be Thursday. That's just my neighborhood, but it's nice cuz you know, that box is gonna be there.

Leo Laporte (01:18:24):
They're really good on packaging too. That's the other thing. Unlike some grocery delivery services, you get a hundred plastic bags. You could say goodbye to packaging, guilt and perfect foods is the only national grocery delivery company that makes it easy to return your packaging. After every order we do that, they don't do a lot of plastic bags. It's just it's you can tell it's thoughtful, it's thoughtful. And that's why I really like it. It is a great grocery delivery service that you will love. And I want you to try it. In fact, we've got a deal for you. Get your first four orders, 20% off, 20% off, not just for the first one, but for the first four orders. When you go to imperfect foods.com, but you have to do this for me. Use the promo code twig to get that offer T WWI G that way they know you saw it here too, 20% off your first four orders.

Leo Laporte (01:19:15):
That's up to an $80 value@imperfectfoods.com. When you use a promo code twig, we love it from my family to yours. I think you'll love it too. Imperfect foods.com, promo code twig. Good way to really feel good about what you're eating and has helped the environment and get delicious. I think it's perfect. Personally food. How does he Hank Hank do a imperfect foods challenge. Oh he should here Hank. Here's a box. He should. Ooh. What can you make with this? Exactly. We get, I'll tell you the one thing I really love. They have heritage chicken, which is a little smaller, cuz it's not, you know, doesn't have the big breasts, right? It's not the darling part of chickens. It's not all hormone. It's not all hormones. It's a, it's like a traditional small chicken and I made it last night. We ha it's so good.

Leo Laporte (01:20:05):
I roasted at high heat using the cafe Zuni roasting me recipe and it is so good. It's just it's my favorite thing. Anyway, that's, that's that's free. I'll give that to you for free <laugh> <laugh> so this was a weird one from zippy.com was as an SEO company, we studied 81,000 page titles, Google rewrote, 61% of them for yes. Google did in the search results. So here's an example this at all, here's an example, Zippy product guides is the, you know, there's a HF title. That's how your that's your title for your tags? Yeah, it's a tag in your HTL. They rewrote it to support and product guide Zippy SEL, which probably is more to what you want, but they're just doing it. They're not asking, they're just doing it. So apparently if it's too short, they'll rewrite it. If it's too long, they'll obviously truncate it. We, they said, is this for ads? No, this is in the search results search results. Okay. ask Andrew about this. He must know about this. We mapped 80,000 titles by the number of characters to determine the likelihood of Google rewriting, each one, Google rewrites, both long titles and extremely short titles over 95% of the time titles

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:30):
Where where's the data from? Is it other, is it other metadata in the page? They just grab

Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
Instead if, and that's an interesting question. Hmm. They must, you know, it's a computer doing, not a human.

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:42):
That was one hell of a job rewrite that headline. Joe

Leo Laporte (01:21:46):
They said we've found a number of common scenarios in which it became more likely for Google to rewrite titles. I guess the really the moral of this is check, look at your search results, length if it's too long or too short using the same keyword more than once. So they'll just take that second version out because

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:02):
People were trying to do that to, to, to boost. Yeah, yeah. To that's probably where it started is they were trying to do SEO. I

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
Repetition. They don't like title separators like dashes or pipes. They'll take those out titles with brackets or parenthesis, identical boiler plate used across many titles missing or superfluous brand names and more so very interesting article. This is actually helpful. Yeah. That's, I'm sure the goal. Absolutely.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:30):
It, it is helping you out, but at the same time, dang, who gave them the, the right to just go in and change my stuff like that. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:22:39):
Here's another one where they took bracket updated 20, 22 and replaced it with parenthesis 20, 22 update. Well, that's that's well, but yeah, it's weird that they're doing this automatically. So is a good article Z Y P P y.com. You could read the it's in their blog and how you could use H one tags, Google considers other HTML elements when crafting page titles, beyond title tags, chief among these in the H one tags. So strategic use of H one tags might solve that as well. So interesting. I just thought that was an interesting insight into some of the things Google, could you imagine the scale that Google does this, that they're doing that it's amazing. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:23):
Yeah. How

Leo Laporte (01:23:24):
Quick is the is done. Yeah, but instantly is published and stuff. How fast does this go through their process? Oh, it's instant has to be, cuz they're constantly updating. Yeah. let's see, what else

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:37):
Can I,

Leo Laporte (01:23:38):
Can I raise one? Oh, I'm sorry. There's these, it's not just a cracy it can be a cracy as well. What would you like to? And

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:46):
I meant to put these two stories together in the rundown and I somehow screwed this up. I'm fascinated by, by auto driving cars, two, two stories of different views. One is that and I think we might have mentioned this last week. I can't remember that a driver was charged. Yes we did. Right. But then tie that in a British law group now recommends immunity for drivers of self-driving cars.

Leo Laporte (01:24:14):
I, you know, I think I said this when we talked about the story last week, the guy who was charged with, I think vehicular manslaughter mm-hmm <affirmative> was using Tesla self-driving <affirmative> and this was some years ago that he did this and it went through a red light and killed a couple of pedestrians. But at the time he was using it, it never, even though goo Tesla said it's full self-driving it didn't stop at lights. When I, my, the whole time I had my mono X, it wasn't supposed to stop at lights or stop signs or anything else, the mistake. I mean, if, if Tesla's to blame it's by calling it full self-driving, right. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it should be really, you know, a driver assist or, you know, cuz on the highway, it's great where there's no stoplights. It's great. And my Ford does the same thing. My Mustang does the same thing, but I would never take it on a city street cuz it wouldn't stop. So I think he's right to charge this guy. He, he was misusing the product, but Tesla does bear some culpability, I think, oh now there's saying he wasn't using self-driving it wasn't full self-driving in the I'm sorry, it wasn't full self-driving it was auto Tesla called it autopilot in those days. Yeah. But Tesla implies it's something's you know, gonna stop doesn't yeah. Tesla really

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:26):
Oversell what they're doing there.

Leo Laporte (01:25:28):
I apologize. Yeah. Not full self driving. That's what Tesla's doing now. And it does stop theoretically at stoplights. So that's the bigger question for than this guy is saying indemnity. The bigger question is if you trust what full self-driving that claims to be full self-driving and it isn't and it does something stupid. Are you liable or is it liable? <Affirmative> that's an interesting question.

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:49):
Right? So the Brits and, and, and here's my get ready an my moral panic analysis of this is that they love trying to blame technology for everything. So and, and so yeah, ruined my own punchline there, but, but should I get this reflex let's blame the technology company and, and make the driver blameless? Well, no, there's got to be some shared blame here. In terms of you, if you have the ability to override, you see something going on, you're still responsible your car and for the Brits to come on and recommend the law commission commission multiple to recommend that drivers should not face regulatory legal sanctions, if something goes wrong. Okay. There's there's liability on the, on, on the, on the software that screws up, but there should be on the driver as well. And this is a really odd thing to come

Stacey Higginbotham (01:26:43):
Out with. Well, it depends on how we view self-driving if I'm in a, I mean, especially because you know, the auto industry is pitching level five self-driving is something that won't even have a steering wheel, right? We're all just hanging out, eating

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:58):
Popcorn, then you don't have clearly

Leo Laporte (01:27:00):
Not live like upload on Amazon,

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:02):
But agree.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:03):
So I, I feel like, and people are people and this is why Tesla. I have so much iron for them for the way they've pitched autopilot. Because people, if you, if you give them the opportunity not to pay attention, that's

Leo Laporte (01:27:19):
The concern pay attention they're gonna

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:21):
Take. And we say, that's okay. Or do we say no, it's

Leo Laporte (01:27:25):
Not still responsible. That's why that guy should be charged. He was,

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:28):
That's why the Brits are saying the Brits are saying it's unrealistic to respect someone who is not paying attention to the road to deal with, for example, a tire blowout, T Y R E. I love it when they do that. So paying attention road sign. So, so Stacey, but

Stacey Higginbotham (01:27:41):
What they're saying is they're saying for they're, they're putting this because then the automotive people have to be much more realistic about what they're promising. I think here's what they're saying. Look, the blame is not gonna be on consumers. It's gonna be on you guys. Then they can't go to the consumers and sell them something that isn't actually okay.

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:01):
I think here's

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
What the mark here's what piece, here's what Pete Buti edge says. He's the secretary of transportation. He told the verge of this. I keep saying this until I'm blue in the face. Anything on the market today that you can buy is a driver assistance technology, not a driver replacement technology. I don't care what it's called. We need to make sure that we're crystal clear about that. Even if companies are not. And actually this is part of an article from the verge, talking about how the self car driving car industry is abandoning the term self-driving they don't want to use it anymore. Waymo, four Lyft, Uber and Volvo are, are saying, we're not gonna use they, the problem is Tesla's gonna keep using it. And, and there's some, some concern that Tesla they'll kind of let Tesla own that market, even if it's just a marketing term. 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:28:53):
But if Tesla is legally liable, then they might start. Maybe they would, they'll either stop selling it that way. Or they'll actually deliver real high quality stuff because they don't wanna be. And they can't right now, cuz it's not,

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
It's really up to, and I'm trying to remember if it's the NTSB or NITSA, but it's up to whatever that federal a, there is one of those two federal agencies. I think it's NITSA that says what is full self. What's not it's up to them to say that you can't use that term. They could do that by the way. But federal regulation, doesn't

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:26):
Law, but that's like level five. That's not like normal language that so like level five is us sitting in our car as a living room level four is everything up to level four is driver,

Leo Laporte (01:29:36):
But there's no such thing as level five right now. Right? And so to call level five apply full self-driving is level five. But

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:44):
Tesla doesn't call it level five. They call it autopilot. No, they

Leo Laporte (01:29:49):
Just assume that's they call it full self-driving F S D. That's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:29:52):
What they're selling to. Okay. Yeah. But that's but they don't call it quote level five, which is the actual words.

Leo Laporte (01:29:59):
Okay. But it doesn't full self-driving and imply if

Stacey Higginbotham (01:30:03):
It's, if it's synonymous, I would argue that, but a lawyer can get away saying, right. I mean, that's, that's the issue. So you've gotta really, is there something like

Leo Laporte (01:30:12):
Waymo several years ago, this is from the verge article Waymo considered developing an advanced driver assist system. Like Tesla's full self-driving version of autopilot, but ultimately this at it against it having become alarmed by the negative effects on the driver drivers would zone out. Yeah. Fall asleep at the wheel.

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:30):
Is there something in the Bill's that's that's like fine print that says, Hey, you still need to be alert. Oh yeah. And engage in these then.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:30:38):
Well they, they have it. Do they still do they still have the thing on the, the, so you have to touch the steering wheel then? Is that still

Leo Laporte (01:30:46):
A thing? This is, what's really interesting. I can't remember what somebody in the channel will tell us. We don't, we don't have FSG Teslas, but on the autopilot. Yeah. You had to torque the wheel a little bit four GM and others are coming out with their new self dry where you don't have to have your hands on the wheel. But in all those cases, there's a camera. That's watching your eyes to see that you're paying attention that you're there. Oh. And I don't believe Tesla's doing that. So I'm not sure how Tesla's verifying that. The driver's there.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:18):
Yep. Let's say they're not doing it. I think that's even in the sign of the contract that you're it, you allegedly read your contract and it says, Hey, once I engaged this, I am responsible for paying. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:31:29):
They pop up things on the, they, you know, they tell you. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's enough to put it in a contractor that Dr. Or the owner's manual. You gotta pop it up on the screen, but they could do that. This gets,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:31:41):
This gets to a problem we have, which is we're making, driving more boring by doing this, this little mid-level where like I highway driving is relaxed with like a Tesla and highway I've I've rented cars that have this and it's fine. But like, yeah. As a person who I need to be like really stimulated when I'm doing anything to keep paying attention to it. So it is a real problem for me to actually zone out. It's it's much easier for me to zone out. And if I'm not, if, if I'm in a half self-driving thing, so I get it, I think it's a really dangerous time to be driving cars.

Leo Laporte (01:32:15):
Here's what these features, here's what Tesla says right now. Autopilot and full self-driving capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment. While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous. So, but they,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:37):
So that documentation doesn't cover them legally from, from a liability standpoint.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:32:43):
I don't know. It's not in the UK.

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:44):
<Laugh> I mean, it says it right there.

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:48):
If you're ever gonna wanna regulate technology, this is the one to regulate. This is the one

Leo Laporte (01:32:53):
To set guidelines. Yeah. Yeah. I'm amazed. I, I, I don't know if you have to touch a wheel or not. Does anybody have a FSG Tesla in the chat room? I'm curious. I, I get the sense that you do, but but I don't know. I guess no, nobody we know has an FSD. Yeah. Nobody we know has an FSD.

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:17):
Brett con five has it in the discord.

Leo Laporte (01:33:19):
Oh, does he? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:21):
Take a look. Nobody trust,

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
Right? Con yeah, here he is driving his car.

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:26):
<Laugh> that's that's the automated traffic. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:31):
Nobody trust right? Con Bobby

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:33):
<Laugh> there's

Leo Laporte (01:33:34):
The system right there. Right there. Dog tired. Good night. <Laugh> I don't know. I don't know. I, I would hope there's some sort of mechanism. There is in the GM and Ford Ford's blue crews and GMs something crews there there's a camera. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:51):
I would hope that too, but I'm just thinking about our legal system and loopholes and all of that stuff. And if Tesla can just put something in writing, just like that, that says, Hey, make sure you're doing the right thing. When you're right. Engaging this, we warned

Leo Laporte (01:34:05):
You outta sync, says Tesla uses the interior camera for FSD beta to watch the drivers and will turn off FSD. If they catch you not paying attention <laugh> oh, they have to catch you. Oh, well, there you go. You have to earn FSD at at least right now you have to have a good driving. Right. You know, you have to drive perfectly and all that stuff. You know, and the other thing is both GM and Ford will only, they won't do it on city streets. They'll only do it on streets. They've mapped out highways. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:35):
How do you know then does it, does it look a little light? Come on saying you can use it now or it goes off.

Leo Laporte (01:34:39):
You can. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:34:42):
You know, what's fascinating. I'm just gonna throw this out here. Cuz it was in one of the short stories that I read in that book that I read about like AI in the future. Yeah. there, and this actually does happen already with automated fairies. So we'll throw that out there too. One of the premises was that for self-driving vehicles, when they hit weird situations, they automatically go to a remote person driver. So like a remote drone driver, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
Yeah. We talked about that. Right? Did we? Oh no, that was on Swiss. That was the one where, where it's like a video game and yeah. So

Stacey Higginbotham (01:35:17):
It was kind of like, yeah. The kids, in some cases it was actual kids doing a video game. So the, the car had the ability to recognize when it no longer could handle a situation, it would flip over to a remote control operator. So then the person driving the car still doesn't have to pay attention, but we don't have to plan for every X tonality, which would be impossible.

Leo Laporte (01:35:38):
Yeah. This is, this is, they showed this as CES, the halo H ALO self-driving car. And, and if the halo gets confused, like, I don't know what's going on a, a remote driver can take over, which is kind of cool. Yeah. We talked about that on TWI halo car, the electric car that drives to you, but there's human driving it

Stacey Higginbotham (01:36:03):
<Laugh> and there's a company called RI that's doing it for trucks in Norway. And then there's another company that's doing some Faires up there. Yeah. Where everything's remote controlled until it isn't. And then it's, but

Leo Laporte (01:36:17):
That's like, I told you, I could make a living playing video games. I told you, mom, what do you think of this? W B E Z in Chicago, public radio, we were taught, you said about four or what is it? Five or 6% of people listen to public six to 12, six to 12. That's all

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:36):
Six to 12, depending

Leo Laporte (01:36:36):
On the station that never was enough for the 'em to be rich. But you know what changed that podcasting cuz they could sell ads on podcasts and, and public broadcasting ads on podcasts are very, very much more expensive than Twitter. They're very, very expensive really? Oh God. Yeah. And their minimums are huge. And and, and their, and, and REM, I don't know if you remember this days of public broadcasting, you couldn't have a call to action. The, the, the, when you were buying it, you were supporting public broadcasting. You know, this, this broadcast of D a is brought to you by Archer Daniels, Midland making the world safe for, you know,

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:17):
We, we, we like

Leo Laporte (01:37:18):
Too. Yeah. Yeah. But it never could say call one 800 call archery, dins. But that all changed with podcasts. And you'll note all of public radio broadcasts podcasts have lots of ads in them. So suddenly I think they're flush with cash. So that's, that's the lead up to this w B E Z just bought the Chicago sometimes.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:40):
Oh. So I obviously I'm the one who put this in the rundown and it so happens last night, I talked to Matt move as in move synthesizer, who is the CEO of w B E Z. And so now he's in charge of a newspaper. We had a fascinating conversation about all of this.

Leo Laporte (01:37:53):
Now there's a no cash deal. Right, right. So it's not, and they're fat. That's not their fat wallet. That's buying this, but what are they giving? No, no, no, no,

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:02):
No. Well it's gonna keep us sometimes alive. Sometimes they, they, they wanted to stop sometimes being bought by one of the evil players and kind of the employees did that. This is safe home for it. Well, rock across the street, my old stopping grounds, the Tribune is now owned by Alden, which is the worst hedge fund. And by full disclosure, I used to be an advisor to digital first, which was also owned by Alden and left long ago. And so Tribune is pretty much hated now. So there's an op fascinating opportunity now. So

Leo Laporte (01:38:35):
I'm wrong in this? This is a, this is a, a sign of the times that these public broadcasting is now so flushed. They're buying newspapers. They don't, they didn't buy it. No, they

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:43):
Didn't buy it. They didn just took it over. They're gonna run. They, it a large newsroom. It's twice the size

Leo Laporte (01:38:47):
Ofri. So I apologize. B E I apologize. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:50):
Well, B B easy does, does really good stuff. And they make a lot of money from podcasts, right? This American life being primary there. But, but the point is the opportunity is to undercut Tribune and to create a free news equality ecosystem across Chicago land. As we, we, Chicago wins call it and, and undercut the Tribune and undercut Alden. So it's gonna be fascinating to watch in this one to one city. And you know, I, I bit, I, I broke. What do you, you, but your teeth? No. What do you do when you learn something? You,

Leo Laporte (01:39:23):
You bit your tongue. No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:25):
I didn't do that. That's

Leo Laporte (01:39:25):
When you talking comment,

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:27):
Cut teeth. I, I cut my teeth. I cut my teeth in, in Chicago journalism. I worked for Chicago today. The paper that had no tomorrow owned by Chicago Tribune. And when I was, were four papers, strong daily news, sometimes Tribune today, and now it's to, and it's gonna be a newspaper war of a whole

Leo Laporte (01:39:43):
New sometimes was storied. That's Annie and NACO work there. So did Roger Ebert, it was a storied newspaper. Yes. but hard times I remember they fired their entire photography staff. Sorry, staff. Yep.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:56):
Said, yeah. Murdock owned it for a while. Yeah. Told

Leo Laporte (01:39:59):
Him out to use smartphone. Is that yeah. Is that just, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:02):
They said, well, those before the smartphone even, oh, even was, he was, they were equipping reporters who were pretty stupid about cameras. Cause I'm, I'm one of 'em with cameras to go out and their own stuff. Like the one, one man band. So called in, in TV, the

Leo Laporte (01:40:16):
Credit, they,

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:17):
That producer by the car the other day was she was host her producer, her camera person or everything. So yeah, it's, it's, it's gonna be really interesting to watch she's okay. Yeah, she was okay. Yes, she's

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
Fine. But I didn't realize that was cuz she had to do it all.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:33):
Yeah. She, she set up the camera. She

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
Did everything so sad. I see that all the of time. And I said, oh, I'm so sorry. You had to work in media in this, these tough times. Philadelphia was donated to a nonprofit by its owner in 2016, salt lake Tribune and NAS plans to become a nonprofit in 2019. So this is a, the problem

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:57):
With journalists though, is they think, oh good. We're not for profit. Now we can, well, we have no problems. No, every person I know who runs a not-for-profit Matt move at w B Z. His predecesor go Shakela who just left WNYC. These people are the smartest business people around because they've gotta do it under more difficult circumstances and they've got to become sustainable. So you can't just say, ah, who cares about capitalism? 

Leo Laporte (01:41:21):
No. Well, you have to pay the bills. You have to run the presses. Yeah. Somebody's gotta buy the paper in the ink

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:27):
Or, or, well, actually not that am my recommendation would stop doing that as soon

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:30):
As someone has to pay the journalist to go out and hunt store. Oh that Yes, we have to eat too.

Leo Laporte (01:41:37):
<Laugh> the Chicago sometimes is, is a dollar in the city, $2 in the burbs. <Laugh> that's weird. I know the hardest working paper in America.

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:48):
<Laugh> it's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:41:49):
Kind of a weird, maybe it's more expensive cuz you have to pay for distribute.

Leo Laporte (01:41:53):
Yeah. Yeah. They have drive a truck out there. <Laugh> that's fascinating. So I, I didn't realize it was, I just thought, oh, they just had a lot of extra money and they thought, what can we do with this American life money? It's a rescue thing. Good. Yeah. Good. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, it's not the end of the line by any means. You still have to make it work. I 

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:15):
There's a couple Spotify stories that are

Leo Laporte (01:42:17):
Interesting. Yeah. Spotify mm-hmm <affirmative> in a lot of trouble because they're a hundred million dollar golden boy. Joe Rogan keeps putting people on who say like Eric Clapton, who says you're being hypnotized into taking the vaccine. And so there's a lot of heat to

Stacey Higginbotham (01:42:36):
Ask them about the vaccine. So this is, he gets these people on that. You know, Eric Clapton, maybe you don't ask Eric Clapton knowing his view. No,

Leo Laporte (01:42:45):
No. The guy he brought on that's controversial was December 31st is the doctor who, who claims he invented the N RNA vaccine who is saying, you're being hypnotized with subliminal messages. Clapton must have heard that episode. <Laugh> that's what, so Clapton is one of the people influenced by Joe Rogan.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:04):
Yeah. Oh, okay. I was like, I was like, he could just not ask them about this.

Leo Laporte (01:43:08):
No, no, no. He wants to no that's and in fact, Neil young, who is Provax has asked Spotify to remove his music and

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:15):
Spotify just announced they wouldn't. Wow. So they made a choice. They called his

Leo Laporte (01:43:19):
Bluff. Neil. No, no. They called his bluff. No, they called his bluff. They said sure. Neil, you don't want the money. Fine. Yeah. I think that's what it was more of. Yeah, sure. That's one less check for us to sign 270 physicians wrote all that data.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:43:36):
So it's not like Spotify is like, I mean, if Taylor swift said she, if Taylor swift had said this, they may have changed. I like

Leo Laporte (01:43:42):
That idea. That's a different story. Lot of Taylor it's up balls in your court now up to you. Yeah. 270 doctors, physicians and science, et ed educators. I like that. Educators sign an open letter calling on you're ANED man. I can I'm educated open letters calling on Spotify to take action against misinformation. This interview with a doctor and I put that in quotes <affirmative> named Malone, Robert Malone. He's a virologist says I'm one of the architects of RNA and you are being H Mo ized. Yeah, I think Joe says I'm a comedian. This is entertainment. It's the same thing handed. No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:33):
No, but he's not, he's not doing, he's doing, he's doing it seriously. He knows he's influencing people. He's a troll.

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
A lot of people under 30, including my son are big fans and probably do believe this when they hear it. We know <laugh> the green bay Packer's quarterback, Aaron Rogers, Aaron Rogers believed the vaccine information he got from Joe Rogan and parroted it back apparently. So does Eric Clapton and, and millions of other young men. So I understand you know why they're upset by this? On the other hand it's didn't we talk about this last week or maybe we did on Twitter. That's the problem. I confused the two I mean, Spotify is gonna say, well, it's free speech. Rogan can say what he wants. Right. How responsible are they?

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:21):
No, we did talk about this last week, but Spotify hired him and pays him. And so spot where I normally say that, that, that Facebook is not a medium. Spotify is

Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
Yeah. April 23rd, 2021. He Rogan said if you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I'll go. No, he also promoted ivermectin the dewormer as a treatment. I remember that ivermectin controversy anyway I, you know, I don't know. What's so Spotify said, okay, bye Neil. That's interesting. I didn't see that they had agreed. Neil young said you can have Joe Rogan or Neil young. You can't have both.

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:08):
You might find also this interesting down now all the way down to line 1 37 I've on this slightly interesting. A list of podcasts that Spotify trumpeted heavily that haven't been heard of since <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:21):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:46:22):
Spotify just emailed me again, asking for information on my podcast. Good for you. Feature or something. Wow. Well, no, I, it was weird just because Spotify and Amazon music both came at me on the same day in

Leo Laporte (01:46:33):
A was like, what's happening, but you're already on both. I'm sure we are. I mean every any, yeah. Yeah. We're on any platform that takes RSS feeds. We that's not an endorsement of Spotify. Should we say no, you can't have our, you can't have Neil young and you can't have TWI.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:46:49):
Oh no, no. I just, I, I think it's interesting that they're pushing that. They've clearly

Leo Laporte (01:46:55):
Here's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:46:55):
I don't wanna scraping the bottom of the barrel cuz I'm not the bottom of the barrel. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:59):
They're clearly

Leo Laporte (01:47:01):
You're not Megan and Harry let's put it that way. You're not. Yeah. I mean Megan and Harry signed up let's million dollar pound, sorry. Deal with Spotify in December of 2020, they did one show and that's it. <Laugh> Kim Kardashian west announced to pot pots, pot spice podcast. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:23):
You're you're the professional. Did

Leo Laporte (01:47:26):
You the good drugs? Leo? Yeah, 20 in March, 2021. She hinted she was ready to release her episodes. Nothing. This is from pod news, pod news done net Anna Duney array signed an agreement to produce a scripted, an unscripted podcast, January, 2021, stay tuned yet to be released. Warner brothers in DC signed a deal with Spotify. I first set of original podcast, June 20, 20 Batman unburied announced casting June 20, 21, no show. It takes a long time to make a podcast. I will be the first to tell you this show, which we are recording in 2022, won't be out for three or four years. <Laugh> got a so much work. Postproduction a lot of there's a whole bunch of 'em. Wow. Isn't it funny, mark and J du plus of dollars. Did they pay all these people or did they just make an announcement? Hope

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:22):
They have better lawyers than that.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:48:25):
Yeah, I maybe they did in advance. And so if they didn't

Leo Laporte (01:48:28):
Well, the interesting thing is, is Spotify's stock value went up when Megan and Harry announced 836 million. So they're getting the benefit of this.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:45):
I didn't. This is what churn and signed a deal in September 20, 20 promising more than 250 shows to transform into podcasts. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:54):
They've yet to release any shows. No shows. The Russ brothers. I hope they get

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:00):
Only of the

Stacey Higginbotham (01:49:01):
Building though. Oh wait, wait, variety. Just published a story saying Gimlet studio is hiring in-house producers for Harry and Meghan Markel's weekly podcast. Oh so, so we'll hear about shows. So basically they're like, clearly we can't rely on them to do this.

Leo Laporte (01:49:17):
Must hire more Gimlet is owned by Spotify. We should

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:21):
Point out speaking to podcast. If you watch, if

Stacey Higginbotham (01:49:23):
You wanna produce it, they're looking for two producers for a six month contract PO positions,

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:28):
Six month contract. <Laugh> doesn't sound very PROMIS. I know. I'm like, oh, see how it, it goes. Did you watch only murders

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
In the building? I have watched it. Yes. Yeah. It was very good. Wasn't it started it. It was fun. Yeah. I didn't finish it. Wait,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:49:40):
Don't spoil it. I

Leo Laporte (01:49:41):
Might come back to you. Don't tell Steve. I it's fine. It's okay. It's fine. It's fun. It was about podcasting, which I like. That's what I'm saying. It's about podcast. About Hulu folks, crime, true crime podcasts, a lot of good podcast. Are they still, by the way, that was the, all the rage last year. True crime. Is that still a thing? I don't know.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:49:58):
True crime

Leo Laporte (01:49:59):
Still loves true crime. All the people we talked to said, what, where's your true crime show? I said, we're a tech network. We don't you're right. There's

Stacey Higginbotham (01:50:07):
Some crazy times.

Leo Laporte (01:50:09):
Facebook world. No, actually I came, I literally sci angle came up with a treatment for a true crime podcast. We could produce that is right down our alley. Wow. But then I thought I'm not gonna pander to these bozos, so I didn't do it.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:50:21):
Was it the Broadcom sex dungeon?

Leo Laporte (01:50:25):
No, but that's intriguing. No, it was, he uses dungeon sounds. It was about, and I, I kind of almost don't wanna even talk about Adrian lamo who was a hacker know him. I knew him pretty well in the day he was autistic. He was a kind of a genius hacker died was I think it was ruled a suicide, but there were some very vicious circumstances around it, including the fact that he had taped onto his thigh, a phone number and a name. There were some very suspicious circumstances. So I thought that'd be a good, true crime podcast who killed Lama and it's right up our alley. We could talk about his hacking skills and yeah. And all that. So there, I just gave it away. Somebody should. Yeah. Megan, Megan and Harry should do it. It'd be great. <Laugh> is that 2 56 encryption?

Leo Laporte (01:51:16):
Can you imagine that conversation? <Laugh> there's yeah, I just, I know, I don't know. We are gonna cover Jason Howell has told me he will get up at seven in the morning cuz that's what it is. February 9th, the launch of the galaxy S 22 Samsung unpacked or whatever they call it. Samsung something unpacked. Unpacked. Is it unpacked again? Yeah. Yes sir. S 2222 plus galaxy S 22 ultra. It's interesting in the yeah, galaxy unpacked, the epic standard S then in the, one of the announcements, they said it's a notable product announcement and of course they are killing the note. So we think this will be a note like phone maybe with a stylist and all that. Oh,

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:06):
Oh, oh. It's like eight, no us later. Stacey's like, oh, I get it. I get

Leo Laporte (01:52:11):
It. <Laugh> I get it. And the 

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:16):
Did y'all see what's the, what's the deal? Cause I, I read some rumors about Google doing a foldable phone and you know how

Leo Laporte (01:52:22):
I'm obsessed. Yes. We've been reading these rumors for a long time. Yep.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:26):
Have we? But is there anything new? Did I thought I saw something

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):
New, so yeah. Is a rumor that they might announce it this year, along with a six, a maybe at the same time, but that's just rumor. I think somebody saw something in an FCC database. I think that's what kind of led to prompted it. All right. Yeah. I

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:44):
Think I mentioned it in the rundown. I produced a couple weeks ago

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
And we skipped it. <Laugh> oh. Cause it was that interesting.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:52:51):
It's cuz I wasn't here to be obsessed about the phones.

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
See, there's always so much good stuff in the rundown. I don't get to it all I try, but I don't North Korea

Stacey Higginbotham (01:53:00):
So much good stuff in the rundown. Yeah. And we always talk about Facebook.

Leo Laporte (01:53:03):
I haven't yet, you know, we haven't talked about Facebook in a week. You notice, have you noticed that, that I am being influenced by somebody? No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:11):
No, that's not true. That's not fair. It's not true. There's just not much to the story there. They're kind of boring. Now

Leo Laporte (01:53:16):
North Korean, we do have taken down by cyber attackers DDO right after their missile launch. All of a sudden the internet went down for six hours Wednesday morning. It came a day after North Korea conducted its fifth muscle test. Not sure if it's related hackers also took the bellow Russin railway system offline in an attempt to slow down the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And they said it, they admitted it. Yep. We we, we, we infected them with ransomware to slow 'em down. This is a new kind of activist hacking. May I call this is, this

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:54):
Is armies without countries. Yeah. Yeah. Without

Leo Laporte (01:53:57):
Gunpowder. Yeah. Very interesting and

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:01):
Good guys and bad guys, both don't we know from our election hacking and all that.

Leo Laporte (01:54:07):
So based NK pro a new site that monitors North Korea reported that log files and network records showed websites on north Korean web domains, largely unreachable because north Korea's DNS system stopped communicating the roots. The packets should take a DDoS attack. That, yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised. I've I've thought this for years they gave an interview like 15 years ago saying hackers are gonna be the next, you know, frontline of cyber warfare because they've got the skills and either nation states will use them as they are, or they will act on their own as groups like anonymous have done. I think it's very, you clearly

Stacey Higginbotham (01:54:49):
Did not read my book pick from several episodes ago. Anna knows. This

Leo Laporte (01:54:53):
Is how they

Stacey Higginbotham (01:54:54):
Autonomous. No, this is, and this is how they tell me the world ends by Nicole Perla. That

Leo Laporte (01:54:59):
Was literally what it was. That was a good book. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:55:03):
It's like, oh no, no. I did read it. Stacey.

Leo Laporte (01:55:05):
I'm just parroting her point view. Manufacturers have less than five days supply of some computer chips, according to the us department of commerce. This just in time thing is not working out so well way for thin inventories, leave factories vulnerable to shuts. If shift deliveries are interrupted by anything like weather or COVID 19.

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:30):
And I've also seen that, that that production seems to be back up on chips. Is that

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
What you're hearing? Well, what's happening is they're building fabs like crazy. Intel's got a big one, $20 billion fab they're building in Ohio. TSMC is building in Arizona. But the problem is it takes a while, like a year or two to build a fab. So according to the commerce department, there's another problem. Yes.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:55:53):
So the second problem is not only do they take a long time to come online, but a lot of the shortages aren't on the most advanced chips, which is what these

Leo Laporte (01:56:01):
Fabs are gonna be. The legacy knows. Right? Yeah. They're not even solving that problem.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:07):
So I did this. So if y'all care about this, I'm just gonna pitch, I'm sorry. Tomorrow's show we talk for like 15 minutes about it. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:56:13):
Good. Go. Oh good. No, that's a great pitch for the IOT show with Stacey and Kevin a respondents to the Washington post said they didn't see shortages going away in the next six months. Some say it could last into well into 2023.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:56:33):
Yeah. And the, so the commerce department is also they, so some of this is a little self-serving. I, I know surprised politics self-serving there's the I administration is pushing the chips act, which is a $52 billion allocation for funds for chip development to happen here in the us. And so that's part of what they're doing. Some of this, like some chip inventories, like it historically they, they have kept pretty limited inventory worries because the supply chains haven't been messed up. So in some ways this is not a story. And the solutions that we're proposing, aren't quite the best solutions. Simply because like I said, we don't need new FA I mean, yes, we do need new fabs, but what we really need are more transparent supply chains. And what we are going is a, a shift in the way the supply chain for chips is going to be managed, I guess is the way to think about it. So instead of just like going to the store and being like, oh, I want all these chips now we're having to like order our chips in advance. Does that make sense?

Leo Laporte (01:57:42):
Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:44):
I was like, did y'all go away? Oh my God. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:57:47):
What

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:47):
Were you? This happens all the time at parties. When I talk about semiconductors. What'd you

Leo Laporte (01:57:51):
Say? <Laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (01:57:54):
People just leave

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:56):
<Laugh> oh, GE you need to drink. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Oh, sorry. See, I will let you right back start. Don't don't keep your spot. Keep your space. Don't don't would change

Leo Laporte (01:58:07):
<Laugh> I should do a change lock.

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:12):
Well can I, can I do a tease?

Leo Laporte (01:58:14):
Can I do a tease tease before the change lock? Yeah. When we come back from the change log. Yes. And probably a commercial too. Yes. We can wait this long. Yes. We're gonna find a musical. That Ant actually likes. No <laugh> <laugh> <laugh> and now it's time for the tuck. Changelog changelog you no longer have to say, Hey, Gug, to get the assistant to shut up. This is an old story. I don't know why this, I don't know why discovered this. Cause I think that

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:51):
They did a, just did a blog post say I almost put it in. And I said, no, this is old. They did a blog post that says by the way, remind people, Hey, you can do that. And then I've been saying

Leo Laporte (01:58:59):
Forever, that's new. No, it's not. You can just, no, it's not. When the alarms going off or a timer's going off, you just say stop. Yeah. So, okay. I see the difference. Google smart home devices have had a version of this feature for years. Oh no, no. This is the verge. Just not using this thing cuz no, you've always been able to say so you know what? Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (01:59:23):
A lot of people don't know all the features, so there's always an audience for when you discover something to be like, that's so nice if you

Leo Laporte (01:59:30):
Discover this it's it's it's that's the problem with the change log is sometimes it's not ugly a change. There's no change pixels, big a on

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:40):
It's finished. There's no new Google it's over. It's not gonna change anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:59:44):
It's over rename this to it is what it is. Okay. The stopped worked for timers. Scooter X says it is new cuz now it works for other things. Okay. It's still really a boring. It always worked for alarms. Not always, but it's been working for a while. Cause I've been shouting at my, when

Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:02):
I ask Google, like tell me about Abraham Lincoln and Google say stop, Abraham Lincoln was born and broken. You're like,

Leo Laporte (02:00:08):
Okay, if you're bored, stop. Yeah, you can for weather. Okay. That's the biggest difference is it stop has been expanded to stop at in more situations. Okay. And they've been rolling this out on the pixel six with quick phrase. Quick phrases. Let you do certain things without saying, Hey, you know who? The feature that's rolled out. According to the verge on Google smart home devices is in a universal stop making noise command for your smart speaker. You still have to say, Hey Google, if you wanna stop a song, you can't just shout stop. Okay. All right.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:00:48):
If you were,

Leo Laporte (02:00:49):
I like stop what I, you know, Lisa swears at it. In fact she says the, and she wasn't able to demonstrate it for me. So it might have been a one off, but she swore at the Google and the Google said, that's not nice. And you shouldn't swear at me at which point she, she swore even louder. And it said, do you wanna file a report? And she said, yes I do. And she said, I wanna tell you guys back at Google, it's a machine. It's okay to yell at it. <Laugh> you don't have to be polite. Thanks there. No, you good? Dayr you agree with that? Right? You don't have to be polite to a virtual assistant. It's just a, I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:01:28):
Am polite to, to my

Jeff Jarvis (02:01:29):
P

Leo Laporte (02:01:30):
Coming after her. You're polite. No, no I,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:01:34):
Well, I,

Leo Laporte (02:01:35):
I polite and normal

Stacey Higginbotham (02:01:37):
Cause practice. Yeah. I'm polite to normal people. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:39):
Yeah. So be polite to your robot.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:01:43):
Well basically if I'm talking and I yelled at Madam a I I, and sometimes I yell at Google when it goes on and on. So stop is very helpful, but yeah, in general,

Leo Laporte (02:01:53):
Like if I'm defaulting person. Yeah. Just, you don't have to think about it. I'm talking to somebody. Yeah. I'm a nice person. I'm nice to my little bots. But if you know what, if you say I'm not gonna donate my kidney or anything. No. And if you say a few, it's not the end of the world either. So don't, don't don't time. Google. Right? Big pixel's big attic glance upgrade. Are we still talking about the pixel six? Good Lord starts rolling out with more Google clock and fitness integrations. Okay. Okay. Who,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:02:24):
Which fitness integrations

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
Your assistant shows you what you need right? When you need it on your home screen and lock screen bedtime, your upcoming bedtime timer and stopwatch info from clock activity info from your fitness app. So go into your attic glance settings and you'll see at least three new settings. Google could, should be adding several more capabilities to attic glance at a store shopping list and Google pay rewards cards, connected devices, connection, status, and battery info for your Bluetooth devices. Apple does that nicely with their EarPods. Doorbells shows you. Oh, I will like that when I can see who's at the door. I think we talked about that last week. Flashlight. This is good. Do you really need a reminder? <Laugh> when your flashlight is on <laugh> I guess you might actually turn it off. Yes, actually. Yeah. And a safety check countdown from the personal safety app.

Leo Laporte (02:03:26):
So get ready. Look at this useful. Here's a QR code with your flight information on the attic glance. That's kind of neat. So nine to five, Google says more coming check your attic glance settings. Google chat. Yes. There is such a thing. Adds rich text formatting on the web. Rolling out. Now. Who uses Google chat? Oh, just somebody sweet. I use Google chat. Do you? Oh, well you just G people, right? You can make a bold it's G suite bold word or an italic word or underline it or kind of thing. That's cool. Wow. That'll be, everyone will get it in the next 15 days. Turned on by default with no opt out settings for admins. So stick it. Youtube music will soon work for supervised kid accounts, enrolled with a family link. Do you use family link Stacey? No, probably not kids under 13 YouTube music. <Laugh> yeah, we don't use YouTube music. Ah, so this was a feature that Google play music had. If you were under 13, you could have your own library. Now YouTube music will be adding this. No, we just have to. Yeah. And that's the Google change login. Anything else before we get to our picks of the week? We're we're getting on. Did you see mark Cuban? I don't know long. He's gonna stay with this cuz

Jeff Jarvis (02:04:58):
He doesn't tend to stay with things. He's

Leo Laporte (02:05:00):
A drug thing. It's yeah. He's he started his own online pharmacy pharmacy thing where you just he's charging basically for generic drugs, a penny or two above the cost. I think he's gonna have trouble with the name, the cost plus drug company. There is a business called cost plus, but okay. But

Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:17):
It's the world market.

Leo Laporte (02:05:19):
Well, yeah, but it is a market anyway. I looked it

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:23):
Up. There's no insulin, which would be a real benefit to

Leo Laporte (02:05:27):
The world. Some, some of the, yeah, because and the

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:29):
Price differentials. Aren't that great in most of what I looked at. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:05:32):
Okay. Here's one. So it's

Stacey Higginbotham (02:05:34):
15% above generics. The price of shipping. And it may not be that the price is much greater in many cases. Cause like a lot of like Walgreens and many of the supermarket chains as part of their like pharmacy efforts, they've been doing what he's doing basically. They've just been doing it for their pharmacy. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:05:56):
Okay. Yes. Go on. Right. So yeah. So I don't know. I mean he's, he's making it like a cliche, not like a business, like I'm gonna, he says I'm not gonna make any money at this. I'm just a, I'm just a good person saving the world. Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:11):
You know what more power to him. It drives people to think about this issue. Yeah. There are a couple drugs that are actually like one of my mom's drugs is actually like $50 cheaper per month, which is really, I mean, that's great for her. That's like going out to dinner. So,

Leo Laporte (02:06:28):
But so I, I understand if you don't have insurance that covers this stuff, then it can be very expensive. Does your mom not have insurance or is it cheaper for her to buy? It is expensive with insurance. Some of it,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:06:41):
Yes. Sometimes cheap. So it's cheaper to buy it out. Okay. And it's also just easier in some case, like sometimes insurance doesn't pay for certain drugs, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:52):
Right. Okay. Insurance can be a pain. Interesting. Interesting. You let us, you

Jeff Jarvis (02:06:57):
Wanna laugh at Facebook? You wanna laugh

Leo Laporte (02:06:59):
Facebook? You wanna do a Facebook? No. You wanna end this show show? Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:03):
Okay. The meta, no Facebook for Verizon. The me ad is for funny. I thought

Leo Laporte (02:07:09):
For horizon horizon, not meta has built an AI supercomputer or meta killing line 48. You know, we do have a Facebook section here. It is the meta Allen for horizon. When

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:25):
You started the quicktakes it's very confusing

Leo Laporte (02:07:27):
To know where to put this is what is horizon. So we know. Oh I've that's their, we saw this ad when this came in. Oh, okay. Nevermind pages ago we did. Yeah. No legs, no legs.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:37):
What is it with no legs.

Leo Laporte (02:07:40):
I think the more modern versions of this have legs don't they? The one mark showed us had legs. I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:47):
Don't think this whole idea has legs <laugh> or this isn't Kristin bell. Isn't you

Leo Laporte (02:07:55):
It's been old. It's a fake Kristen bill. Is it Kristen bell? Yeah.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:07:57):
This is offensive on so many levels. Let's go to the end of the show.

Leo Laporte (02:08:00):
Okay. <laugh> Stacey's

Stacey Higginbotham (02:08:02):
Offensive if we're not gonna talk about Facebook's super computing. I'm not here for it. Well, you

Leo Laporte (02:08:07):
Want that. If you'd like, why are they building a supercomputer? They're building the world's fastest computer you. Right? Why are they doing that? Why <laugh> you're fault Stacey. Why Stacey? Why we'll be right back with more, just a little bit. Our show today brought to you by compiler. It's a podcast original podcast from red hat, discusses tech topics, big, small, and yeah, a minute, a little bit weird, little bit strange. You you may be familiar with red hat's, other podcast command line heroes and other of our sponsors, which we love this one hosted by Angela Andrews and Brent Semino is I think a brilliant idea for a podcast. And I say that because I'm very jealous that they thought of it first, what they, what they've done is they've actually stood order to look at the things that red hatters are asking in their, you know, messaging platform or whatever it is that they use probably slack or something like that's questions that they go.

Leo Laporte (02:09:06):
That's interesting. What do you think technology can be big, bold, bizarre, complicated compiler unravels, industry topics, trends, and the things you've wanted to know about tech through interviews with people who know it best on the show. You'll hear chorus of perspectives from diverse communities beyond the code red hatters, tech them big questions. Like what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? Which I thought was quite interesting. Episode two. What can video games teach us about edge computing? The internet is a patchwork of international agreements and varying infrastructure, but there's something coming to change. The way we connect. And this episode of compiler hosts explore what edge computing could mean for people who enjoy video games and what this entertainment could teach us about. The technology episode nine are tech hubs changing. You know, usually you go to Silicon valley, right?

Leo Laporte (02:10:06):
Or, or San Francisco, if you wanna get into career in tech, but that's definitely starting to change the hosts of compilers. Speak to a few of the change makers who are thinking outside of the physical and social dimensions. We've come to associate with innovation. You may not need legs in the future, right? To learn <laugh> to learn more about compiler, just go to R E d.ht/twi. That's their URL shortener, R E d.ht/twi. It's really well produced. I love it. That it has a variety of voices talking about the topic, not all in agreement. It's a very nice kind of survey. New episodes just came out. You can download 'em at any time. So if you heard the early episodes, as I have, maybe it's time to go back and listen to some of the newer ones listen to compiler I an apple podcast, or anywhere you listen to your podcast.

Leo Laporte (02:10:55):
And I will put a link on the show's notes page there. So you can click that as well. At twi.tv, we thank compiler for their support. It's nice. One, one podcast can help another podcast along learn more@red.ht slash TWI. You can listen there as well. And we'll put a link to the latest episode up on the show notes. Thank you, red hat. Thank you, compiler. Welcome to the family of of podcasters. Oh, here's the picture <laugh> of Elizabeth from Knoxville holding an onion in her, in her cloth while she was claiming to have been maced was lovely. I was maced. Yeah. Can we just mention

Stacey Higginbotham (02:11:39):
The keyboard scarf?

Leo Laporte (02:11:41):
Which I like the scarf Elizabeth, nice choice. She she's kind of funny. She, she looks at the onion, dabs her, by the way, there you could see in the towel dabs her, her eye with it <laugh> that says I was <laugh> with onions, onions, but you know what a cure for me to be honestly honest. Even if she was maced while storming the capital. I don't think he deserves it. I don't think that's such a bad thing. <Laugh> could have been shot. Yeah. Mean the law. You you're breaking into the federal building. If you, if you were, if you were a black man, you'd be shocked. Oh yeah. You'd be gone long, gone. No onions involved. All right. Let us start with Stacey's thing. You wanna talk about your range cuz you did actually, I'm gonna give you a plug cuz you did actually do a good article about your brand new range, which you talked about a couple of weeks ago on the show. Actually. Maybe it was last week. Was your pick of the week, last week, your smart range. I move quickly. Yeah, you do. <Laugh> I'm really jealous cuz I really want an induction cooktop. So it is so good. But this is actually about the and you use with your new range. Yeah. So

Stacey Higginbotham (02:12:58):
Today's thing

Leo Laporte (02:12:59):
Of the week she can't lift it cuz she's got a dead arm. I I I'm

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:03):
I'm I'm only using my left hand and it's a heavy

Leo Laporte (02:13:06):
Pot. Oh that is the big one at that. I have the do straw Stacey, look at that slider slider without the lid I got, I tell you <laugh> well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:18):
It is well, it's just

Leo Laporte (02:13:18):
A heavy, so it's just a stain spot. It's a nice pan. It's good pan. It looks like, like a pot pein actually makes really good just regular pans. But these are the new hetic. This is pay attention to yeah. Oh I can't.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:30):
I might not be able to hold it in unscript so this guy right here is where the battery goes. Yes. My pants battery

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:36):
In your pan. What,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:13:39):
What <laugh>. So this pan connects to my phone and by range via Bluetooth. And what it does is on its well on its own and it doesn't do anything, but on the proper induction cooktop, what it will do is it measures the, it talks to the range, the cooktop, and it has sensors in the pan that measure the temperature that the pan has reached. So what you can do is you can tell it either a, I wanna maintain a 204 degree pan for clarifying butter. And it will do that for you. Or you can alternatively say, I want to cook chicken and it, there are pre-programmed recipes that it will just cook the chicken for you. So we have made Jeff, this is for you Cacho Pepe. Ooh. Oh

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:30):
Yay.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:14:32):
Ooh. Their recipe was a little rich for my blood, but it turned out perfectly and we did have some snafus. So the pan only connects to one account, which I think is a problem because in my family we all cook. Right. So we need to connect it to our iPad and we need to connect the range to our iPad. So if you don't have like a dedicat home computer, it's kind of an issue. So that's that's thing, one that we learned. But my husband freaking loves it. He loves it because he is like the most I cook by throwing stuff in and smell. He cooks by following the recipe. Exactly. And engineer sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes his recipes don't turn out, always so great. Simply just because, you know, he's he's like they only said to cook it for 10 minutes. I'm like, but it clearly isn't done. And he's like, but it said 10 minutes <laugh> so this is helpful for him.

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:28):
Stubborn engineer. Yeah. I'm oh, the computer told me it's done. That's fine. I'll take it off. So Stacey, I don't understand one thing the pot, this one is geez. No, I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:41):
There's a lot going on here. That wasn't a, that wasn't like a you're stupid. That was a, like, there is a lot happening in this situation. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:48):
Why?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:15:49):
Oh, why I no, no. Sorry. That was not meant to be an assault on you

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:54):
This time. I, I you've probably gone through it, but I, but I, but I, Hey, I'm on Twitter the whole time. So so why would, why would the pan need to be smart? Isn't just a stove. All you need to be smart.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:07):
No, it needs to be

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:11):
<Laugh> no, I had Leo <laugh> no, you want the, the pan knows how hot it is. The stove doesn't know how hot. So does the stove, the

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:19):
Stove stove is like an extra insurance policy, but every pan is a little bit different. Right? So you're dealing with both the pan, the environment, the food that's in it. Mm. So like,

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:30):
And the pan, when I, when has to be connected to the stove, right? You have a pan compatible stove for

Leo Laporte (02:16:36):
This. That's the keys. You have to have a stove. That's smart enough Heston. The Heston QS originally came with a smart, single burner cooktop. Right. Right. And then you could still buy that. Yeah. Yeah. I have that. So like

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:48):
I'm not the, I've got the questions yet. Yes. Oh, okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:16:51):
Oh, tell me the question. Well, here let me answer. So this is a good use case when you're heating oil to fry anything, let's say chicken. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> you've got your oil at a set temperature, but when you add the chicken, it's gonna lower the temperature of the oil a little bit. And the pan can tell that and have the oven compensate. So that's why you that's

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:10):
Cool. Okay. That's cool.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:13):
Go the oven or the cooktop.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:17:15):
I'm sorry, the cooktop. I'm sorry. Okay. Think it. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:18):
You threw that in to test me. I know. I know what you were doing. I get it.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:17:24):
You're not on Twitter. You pass.

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:26):
So what sensors are in the pan? What is it measuring? Just temperature alone or? Sure.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:17:33):
I believe it's just temperature. Okay. But don't, that's, that's all that I have seen it measuring, but if someone else knows, like

Jeff Jarvis (02:17:42):
I, and then last question, which is a lie, it'll be one more. So how do you, is there a way to check its progress, right? Cause cuz your M tells you something on the screen, on it, your stove, does your stove have a screen that tells you the chicken is almost done? Or does your, does your iPad do that? Or how do you know's it's done now.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:01):
Your microwave just tells you how much time is left that you set some

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:05):
Mean is done. It's something.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:08):
Well, if you wanna do that, just, just turn on your stopwatch when you throw something. But

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:14):
That's the microwave tells me when it's done. How

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:18):
Ons remaining it. Tell me when it's done.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:20):
Done. Well, it's finished. All I did was what you told me to do. And you're controlled now the pan and the stove have taken over from you. You're now IM so

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:29):
Sorry, Mr. Lao. I'm so Sorry, miss Stacey.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:36):
How do you know when the chicken's done? There's a, there's a,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:18:39):
There's a Heston Q app and it will talk.

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:43):
Okay. That's what I was a simple question and yeah, no, I know

Stacey Higginbotham (02:18:47):
It was just really killing you man. I was just gonna let it happen. I'm like, I'll just answer later

Jeff Jarvis (02:18:53):
<Laugh> but yeah. Okay. Thank you Stacey. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:18:58):
Are you all done now?

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:01):
Okay. Oh wait. I should tell you, so this pan, sorry. One more thing. This pan is I think 2 99. I got it on sale for 2 55. This is a chef's pan. There are five different pan options. You, you can choose based on the sorts of things you wanna cook. It's not a non-stick chefs pan, which I'm feeling kind of sad about, but

Leo Laporte (02:19:19):
What, and I don't think they have any as I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:22):
Remember, they have one non-stick fry pan. Now do they? Its an 11 inch fry pan that's non-stick that's our next purchase.

Leo Laporte (02:19:28):
Yeah. I have those Heston cues and I used them a few times and then I just thought I know how to cook <laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:37):
I, I am not as excited about this as my husband.

Leo Laporte (02:19:40):
It he's, he likes to be told what to do. Probably

Stacey Higginbotham (02:19:43):
It's like the June of, and he loves that thing. I mean, I love it too. Like

Leo Laporte (02:19:47):
He's Lisa came around on the June. She doesn't like it. That you have to tap like three times to cook something. Yeah. But it does such a good job on the brussel sprout. She kind of came around on the, on the June mm-hmm

Jeff Jarvis (02:19:57):
<Affirmative> does it kill them beyond a shadow of recognition?

Leo Laporte (02:20:00):
No. Chris way cook them. No. Yes. What's so perfect. She does not. She grew up with boiled brussel sprouts and, and Toby. I will never eat a brussel sprout. Ooh. And then once she, we tried this nice roasting thing and they're crispy and they're delicious. She said, oh I love, she makes it all the time. Which is too bad. Cuz it really stinks up there. <Laugh> it's really crisp. It's Chrisy large. Jeff, do you have a number of the week?

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:31):
Well, no. I kind of gave it before, but I'll do another one. I'm gonna continue a rant from last week. Yes. Even word I hate

Leo Laporte (02:20:38):
Or I'm really enjoying it. Why don't you play it

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:40):
Then you would make it cause it's spams every, no I'm not doing that. You're not gonna pull me into your cult. No. Is this

Stacey Higginbotham (02:20:46):
Primely tell me it's primely

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:49):
No, no. So a bot came along to say

Leo Laporte (02:20:52):
Oh later. Yeah. Yeah. To

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:56):
Terminate one said the bots. People don't care about your mediocre linguistic exes escapades to teach you a lesson. Tomorrow's word is Ooh

Leo Laporte (02:21:05):
And

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:05):
Twitter killed the bot. Not all the damns

Leo Laporte (02:21:08):
They should because that's cheating about that completely wrong. And by the way, how did it know what the word for tomorrow was? That's what everybody cause an algorithm can do it. Oh it found the list probably. Okay.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:21:20):
Well didn't Kim Zeer said that you could just because it's written in JavaScript. You can just see it. You can show the no

Leo Laporte (02:21:28):
You cheap, but why would you do that? You're only cheating yourself because it's a dumb

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:32):
Game that spams everybody. That's why you would it's

Leo Laporte (02:21:36):
Look games. Don't spam players. Spam <laugh> yeah. Yeah. The game is not cheap. You spaming nobody. You gotta talk to people on your Twitter stream. Who keeps spaming their word? I do. And they

Jeff Jarvis (02:21:49):
Talk. I don't like

Leo Laporte (02:21:50):
You've never seen my word score. John's never tweeted his word score. I've never tweeted my word score nor goodbye. I got yesterday's in two. Ooh, whoa. That's

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:01):
Worthy of a tweet. You just did it, John. You just did it anyway. That was a live spam word. Spam.

Leo Laporte (02:22:07):
Yeah. But was got it in two. That's pretty impress. But you know what? I have to think. That's pretty nice. When you get into that's just luck. Let's be honest. What's your first word, John. What's the word you start with with, do you have a regular word you start with from TWI? What did, what did Ashley Eske say? Audio, audio. I always use audio used a lot of vowels and the word yesterday was sugar. So I got the a and the U and the U was in the right place. Oh. So I couldn't put the, a anywhere else. I put the a where it goes and sugar. It was the obvious one. I got sugar, but it took me four.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:39):
Oh, what did I start? What did I start?

Leo Laporte (02:22:40):
What's your start? What? Where do you start with Stacey? What's the first one. You have one? Don't play Wordle. Oh, yay.

Jeff Jarvis (02:22:48):
Stacey. Do I

Stacey Higginbotham (02:22:49):
Like to? I just, I, I

Leo Laporte (02:22:51):
Don't. If you're a member of club TWI, you may be happy to know that there is a Wordle group in our club, TWI. <Laugh> where you can post your word scores and what have you done?

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:02):
Oh, it's okay. You know what?

Jeff Jarvis (02:23:04):
There did not put that there

Leo Laporte (02:23:06):
That's that's good by popular demand. I'm happy with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually kind of fun. Look at you. Y primal. They show what's primal.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:18):
Oh, okay. Google primal. P R I M E L. Oh God.

Leo Laporte (02:23:23):
Shut up. Google. It's PRI numbers. It's it's prime numbers. Okay, here we go. Primal. So you have to what? Come up with a prime number. Yep. Every guest has to be prime.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:37):
Every guest has to be prime and you have to find

Leo Laporte (02:23:39):
The prime. That's hard. This is,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:41):
Oh yeah. No it's for like the hard, but you know what? Our audience, I

Leo Laporte (02:23:45):
Can see people I'm six tries. Yep. You can't do that. You won't see that tweet it, but I could write a program to do it. Maybe I'll do that. Yeah. Oh, look at you. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:23:56):
Some, some people like have generated. You could use a list of prime numbers. I, I just thought, you know, it feels very engineering, math. Oh, I could see

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:03):
Next week's show. Leo's gonna be showing us the code. He

Leo Laporte (02:24:06):
Does. I am. I'm gonna do a primal solve. That's easy. Do it. Trivial. <laugh> trivial. Just generate that that's assignment for next. You could probably very easily generate the entire set of five digit prime numbers. It can be that big. And the solver would be a lot easier than prime solve. Your head is hard. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'll just a lot more words than there are five digit prime numbers. <Laugh>

Stacey Higginbotham (02:24:31):
And if you're looking for it, y'all it's prime E L. So PRI L

Leo Laporte (02:24:36):
Yeah. Like not primal prime numbers. It's at convergence converged.yt/primal. Yeah. Primal solver. That'd be fun. Thank you and Jeff, for whatever the hell that was and ran, it's a rant. <Laugh> it was five.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:54):
The number was five

Leo Laporte (02:24:55):
For five letters. Five cuz of word and troll

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:58):
Is a five letter word. That's what everybody who sends me, this, this word crap is doing to me. Your

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
Troll. I like, I like word it's fun. I will, I will do it. First thing in the morning just to get me, my brain started. I think it's a good way to start Ant. What's your pick of the week? This week?

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:15):
My pick of the week is a podcast. I was a guest on it's called because we make hosted by a friend of mine. I've known for quite a while now. His name is Vincent Ferrari and his co-host Ethan Carter. And Vincent says to you, Mr. Jarvis, he says, hello. Cuz he, hello, joked about checking checking in on you with some funny Twitter conversations of, of your, if you were these, his to tell you hello. But yeah, I was a guest on that and we just talked about some of the stuff I do here at TWI and my show and just you being a maker, content creator stuff. Yeah. I love this show because it's it's it's yes. It's geared towards makers. I'm not a maker. I couldn't tell you the first thing about a, I don't know, bands saw and butt joints and I, none of that, but I still listen to it. It's just good conversations that they have every week. So that's so

Leo Laporte (02:26:09):
If you want more band saws and butt joints, because we make.com <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:15):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:26:15):
The, what? The fact that you even know the word butt joint. You're way ahead

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:18):
Of me. I heard him mention it on that show. I'm like, what are you talking about? But points and huh? Huh? Tap and die. I don't know any of that stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:26:28):
Tap and die, baby, tap and die. And here's the picture. Here's you put this up of the reporter, getting the poor predator.

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:36):
You're talking about the news folks that earlier today and the dedication,

Leo Laporte (02:26:41):
They, their producers, their editors and they're reporters all at the same time. So she sets up her camera. She turns on her lights. She gets the microphone. She goes on the other side of the camera. Camera's recording. Or is she live? I guess it's just on, was water

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:57):
As live. It was water being break

Leo Laporte (02:26:59):
Cold temperatures. So she's out poor poor woman at w S a Z channel three and Dunbar West Virginia. She's out there. It's her last

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:07):
Week. She's about to move up

Leo Laporte (02:27:08):
To a bigger station about time. And there's a car just runs right into her and she runs right into her camera. I shouldn't laugh. That's horrible. I just got

Speaker 6 (02:27:17):
Hit by a car, but I'm

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
Okay, Tim, the camera's on side. We're all good. And of course being low news, they stay right with the shot. We got hit by a car

Speaker 6 (02:27:28):
In college too. Just like that. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:27:30):
I, so it's not her first time. It's wait. What's

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:33):
Funny. She's been hit more than once. This is awful.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:27:36):
This poor

Leo Laporte (02:27:37):
Woman, she is this awful. And then she has to set this up again. She is. So wait, what she says to

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:41):
The driver.

Speaker 6 (02:27:43):
You are so sweet and you are okay. I am is all good.

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:47):
You know, isn't that nice of her. She forgives the driver immediately. Cause she's standing in the road. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:27:53):
Tomorrow morning. She wakes up. Yeah, she's gonna know. I thought, oh gosh. It's yeah, I hope she gets a better job there. You see she's moving the camera. I hope she gets a better job. She did already.

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:06):
She and she got tons of attention. Well,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:28:07):
But this is, but this is, I mean, one of the things I thought was interesting about this story is this is so common now. And they were talking about like some female reporter didn't wanna go out at like 11 o'clock to report on a rape

Leo Laporte (02:28:20):
In that area. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah,

Stacey Higginbotham (02:28:22):
Mm-Hmm yeah, you shouldn't have to do that.

Leo Laporte (02:28:25):
This is, this is not notorious. You know, you get a, you get a hurricane and who has to stand out there in the hurricane. The weather guy from channel four and, and location shots are worthless. We've talked about no information. There's no reporting there. It drives to me nuts. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> nothing there. It's just good pictures. That's all. Well, it's a visual medium one last plug for the hard head.

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:49):
Yep. I just wanted to give him a shout out and say good luck. This past weekend was supposed to be opening weekend for track and field indoor season for him. And he sent me a picture, actually sent the family a group of pictures when I saw it, it just made me cry.

Leo Laporte (02:29:06):
He's running for the university. The Pacific was hot.

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:08):
Dang man. That's my boy. Great school. But yeah, I'm just wondering, wish him well and say, Hey, keep kicking man.

Leo Laporte (02:29:16):
UOP up there in weed, California.

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:19):
<Laugh> weed.

Leo Laporte (02:29:21):
They're not weed. Okay. They're in Oregon. Okay. They're in

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:25):
Forest Grove, Oregon. Why did I

Leo Laporte (02:29:27):
Didn't you go to stopped? Yeah, we stopped on the way. Okay. Okay. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:33):
Cause that, that town fascinated us. <Laugh> yes, as

Leo Laporte (02:29:36):
It should. Thank you, Ant Pruitt. Twi.Tv/Handson photo slash O P for his latest. What are you, what are you covering this week on ho P this

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:47):
Week? I have a special guest. The one and only Mr. Scott born

Leo Laporte (02:29:52):
My buddy from Mac Blakeley back, back in the day, back in the day, know Scott born. What's he doing?

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:57):
Well? You know, he's a amazing bird photographer, but he's pivoting into some other things now and it it's I'll just say, grab your iPhones and get ready.

Leo Laporte (02:30:07):
Okay. How fun Scott born fish. We say Ant

Stacey Higginbotham (02:30:12):
Cavs. Do we have a book?

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:13):
Yes we do. It's the unauthorized bread. That's the wedding vote.

Leo Laporte (02:30:17):
Oh great. Corey Dr. Rose. Unauthorized bread will be the book of the month for Stacey he's book club. When is the event?

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:26):
We'll figure that out tomorrow. Oh no yet. <Laugh> OK.

Stacey Higginbotham (02:30:29):
Stay tuned. We're just like leading you on. But now you have, now

Leo Laporte (02:30:32):
That we know it's a novel. So whether it's Wordle or Stacey's book club, there's plenty of reasons to join club TWI. Best of all your community manager, miss Ant Pruit club tweet is seven bucks a month, as I mentioned, but you get a free versions of all the show. You get all the fun you get the TWI plus mm-hmm <affirmative> TWI do TV slash club TWI. Thank you for giving me a chance to plug it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and thank you an for being here. Jeff Jarvis is the director, ladies and gentlemen of the town nine center for entrepreneurial journalist, Craig Newmark, graduate school of journalism, new at the city university. Ooh, of New York. Soon to be a mini musical coming to a stage near you. Yeah, we don't need it. We got it. <Laugh> we got it. Outstanding. And thanks. Of course, to Stacey Higginbotham Stacey on iot.com is her website, her podcast, the IOT podcast with Kevin TOFL sign up for the newsletter.

Leo Laporte (02:31:30):
It's free sign up for events. They're free to thank you, Stacey. Thank you so much. Thank you all for be in here. We do twig every Wednesday, one 30, I'm sorry, two o'clock Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2200 UTC. And you can watch us do it live if you want it live.twi.tv. If you're watching live chat, live@ircdottwi.tv or in the discord there's live chat there for every show as well. You can also will get on demand shows after the fact that the website twi.tv/twig or on YouTube, there's a dedicated channel or in your favorite podcast player. In fact, if your podcast player supports reviews, please give us a five star review so we can share the word, tell the world, tell the people about twig. I'll see you on our twit community forums, twit.community on our Mato on instance, twit.social. I'll see you in discord and I'll see you next week. We all will. This Week in Google byebye,

Jason Howell (02:32:32):
Don't miss all about Android. Every week. We talk about the latest news hardware apps, and now all the developer goodness, happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell also joined by Ron Richards, Florence ion, and our newest co-host on the panel. When to Dow who brings her developer chops, really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform. We love so much. Join us every Tuesday, all about Android on.tv.