This Week in Tech 975 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Larry Magid is here, Denise Howell, our favorite internet attorney. Elwynn Thomas, is here from the San Francisco Business Times. We are going to talk about the amazing AI music how far we've come and how crazy AI is. It makes it possible to create a self-running propaganda machine for a little more than a hundred bucks. The passing of a great physicist who changed our understanding of the world around us, and the FCC brings back net neutrality. All that and a lot more coming up next on a great Twitter. Stay here.

00:38 - Benito (Other)
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 975. Recorded Sunday, april 14th 2024. You don't want to make Gandhi mad. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Oh, I love this show because I love this panel. Owen Thomas is back from the San Francisco Business Times. Hello, owen.

01:18 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Hello from non-zombified downtown San Francisco.

01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's hot, it's happening, it's hip. It's where all the cool kids are. They go to lunch at South Park. They watch movies at the IMAX at the Metreon. They like to go into the Bank of America building for brunch Right.

01:36 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Actually, the new hotness is Ikea's Sally Hall. It is plant forward, it is, you know, it's got pop-ups. It's got Bergara bar, where I had a beyond meat patty with some slaw and vegan fish roe, which I didn't even know was a thing, but it was tasty, do they ever do, like Swedish meatballs with lingonberries or something, or like impossible meatballs with lingonberries or something, or like impossible meatballs.

02:05
So there is an Ikea deli that's like in the Ikea store but adjacent to the food hall and they've got your plant balls, they've got your regular Swedish meatballs. They're not pushing the plant like so heavily that you can't get a Swedish meatball. Because I think if you shop at Ikea and you don't have a plate of Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce, the universe folds into itself. It is the greatest.

02:31 - Larry Magid (Guest)
If you shop at Ikea, you'll never get out of Ikea. My only problem is if you need to get into an Ikea. If you try getting out of one, you have to walk the entire store. Yeah, they're clever.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's Larry Magid, president and CEO of Connect Safely, longtime CBS radio commentator. Great to have you, Larry, and I heard the discord, the distaff sounds of the wonderful Denise Howell attorney at large.

02:58
I've learned that this taff, which for years I used as kind of you know kind of commonplace way of referring to women, is very, very demeaning, so I'm not going to do that anymore. I apologize, I thought I was being literary or something. Anyway, good to have you all. We've been playing before the show and I apologize ahead of time because every musician in the audience goes crazy but this week two not one, but two AI-generated music sites just took off. One's been around for a while sunocom, in fact I think it's related to OpenAI because Microsoft offers it in their copilot Bing plug-ins and then another one called UDIO, which I just realized is audio without the A or studio without the ST. Both of them are, in this case, generating music.

04:02 - Benito (Other)
There's one simple bit. Oh, you're using me, sorry, I was going to UDIO and I wound up generating music. There's one simple bit oh you're using me.

04:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
sorry, I was going to UDIO and I wound up generating sound.

04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what's impressive about these and this has been look, there's the naysayers who say yeah, of course, for AI to generate art or music which is kind of imperfect by design and not hard to measure its success. These are perfect choices, because a hallucination in a song or a hallucination in art, you know, just looks interesting as opposed to hallucination when you're writing a pleading for the Supreme Court, which is not interesting but in fact offensive to the court is a little bit more challenging. But I have to say I'm very impressed by both of these. Now, benito, who's an actual musician, says you say they're not musical.

04:55 - Benito (Other)
It's not art.

04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not art. Well, we know it's not art. It's AI. Any more than an AI short story is art right.

05:01 - Benito (Other)
Yeah, I mean then, if it's not for art, then it's pretty much disposable music, right?

05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, a lot of music these days is disposable. You ever been to a Las Vegas casino? I absolutely agree with that. Here is German Klezmer from Suno. And, by the way, not only can it play in different styles, it can speak different languages. Now you may say that's not musical, but if that showed up on my Pandora playlist I would not immediately go oh, there's something wrong with my radio. Right, that's Suno. I think Suno does largely a better job than Udio. This is Udio.

05:55 - AI Music
You spilt a coffee on my dog, ain't no mistake. You dropped that brew, yeah, on my furry friend today.

06:04 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's terrible. I think that's terrible. I think that's a philosophical question as to whether it's art. I mean by Webster's definition of art. I suspect it isn't art.

06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Benito may be right. But but what is art anyway, right?

06:20 - Larry Magid (Guest)
What is art? I mean if it creates things that we enjoy watching, listening to, reading. Is it not art? I don't know.

06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the thing that is kind of blowing me away. So I played with Suno last December on Windows Weekly and we made a Christmas song. I'll play a little bit of it, because it's too much, too horrible to listen to much of.

06:43 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I've heard worse things on the radio.

06:47 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, especially at Christmas time. Yeah, really.

06:50 - AI Music
I can't believe it's true Mistletoe and presents all the joy that you bring.

06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just, it's not. It sounds like a robot. Fast forward literally four months later and it's making. Well, I'll play something. Um, I'll play some, some stuff I made earlier for our shows. Uh uh, jeff jarvis wanted me make a song about cachoy pepe. Wow. That's pretty good. It's written in opera.

07:47
About Cacio e Pepe. And it does this in under a minute. Right, I mean you might say, well, yeah, obviously it's under a minute, but I don't. I'm pretty impressed. This is a song I wrote for our friend Craig Newmark of Craigslist. He's a pigeon fancier. In fact he's taken his vast fortune that he made on the backs of putting newspapers out of business with their classified ads. No, that's sorry, craig. The vast fortune he made out of a really useful tool called Craigslist and is one of his charities. He has many charities, including some good journalistic charities. One of them is pigeons. He likes pigeons, so I wrote him a song.

08:23 - AI Music
In the land of the internet. There was a man named Craig. He had a passion for pigeons, like no one could explain.

08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, that's good, harmony.

08:36 - AI Music
He sailed the west-west ocean in search of pigeon. Lore His love for these feathery friends forever to explore.

08:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I asked it for a sea shanty.

08:49 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I was going to say New mock pigeon man.

08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now all I'm saying is in three months, very noticeable progress to the point where, okay, maybe you know, when you look at Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, if you look closely you might see some weird things that you go, that's probably an AI. I'm not saying they're perfect, I'm not saying they're duplicating human effort, but I am impressed. Am I wrong to be impressed?

09:15 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I want to know how much computing power this is consuming oh the lights went down in Boston.

09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I did it, I mean I'm sure a ton right. The lights went down in Boston when I did it, I mean I'm sure a ton right. This is completely untenable from an environmental point of view.

09:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
How many trees should Leo now plant? That's a lot.

09:36 - Benito (Other)
Exactly.

09:36 - Denise Howell (Guest)
yeah, that's an example, I don't know if are we going to put all of the crypto universe out of business and salvage this music. I mean, somebody's out there using cycles anyway.

09:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, and all AI is. Well, we know this and this is a problem and I think that because it costs these companies money, they are strongly incented to solve this. That's one of the reasons I think there's a push for on device AI and so forth. I don't you know. I don't know how much this uses, but you're right, I'm blithely spending on my children's future to make sea shanties about Craig Newmark, I admit it.

10:13 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And so much of it is venture backed, right, right. It's funny to me, like when AI gets into real economics. It's kind of like when you suddenly discovered you couldn't get a lift in downtown San Francisco for $2.99 anymore.

10:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It also depends on whether their servers are using coal or hydro or other renewables to generate the power. So I mean, in theory we might be able to make that up with renewables. But you're right, I mean AI is you know? I remember in the early days of computers, remember the paperless office, oh yeah, and the promise that computers were going to save us so many of the world's resources. And I don't think it turned out quite that way.

10:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, so, setting the admittedly problematic energy use aside, I guess the thing that I'm most interested in is ai is making progress in very interesting leaps and bounds. Yes, is that right? Or no is it? Is it yet it's not. Look, I think it's a mistake to say we want agi, we want, uh, general intelligence. Uh, I don't think we we need or want that, and maybe we won't even be able to get that, but is?

11:21 - Larry Magid (Guest)
it it useful. Well, like you, I've been at this technology beat for, in my case, over 40 years, and I've seen a handful of major paradigm shifts, and this is definitely one of them. On par with the World Wide Web I guess I'd put the Mac as one of the paradigm shifts or the graphical interface this is huge. I mean, I've seen more progress in the last year in many ways than I've seen in the last 10 years. So I I would agree with you, I think, I think, I think you know not just this, but all of the ai products that we're seeing are are blowing me away. You know, it kind of makes it make covering tech interesting again.

11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Frankly, uh, last year there was a story, uh, about deep mind. Google's uh, ai, the one that you know created a chess playing machine machine that could beat Garry Kasparov and a go-playing machine that could beat Lee Sudol. It found 2.2 million crystal structures in material science, which is 45 times larger than the number of different crystal kinds we've unearthed in the entire history of science. Now, that was the story in November. The story that came out this week is yeah, but most of those crystals no big deal, like ho-hum, and I guess in a way that's kind of the whole story of AI. In general, it comes up with this amazing stuff, but maybe it's not going to change the world.

12:51 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I don't know now, I think it is I, I think it's going to get integrated into so much of what we do that you know the, the, whether it's music and art, or you know discoveries, like you were saying, crystals, or medications or compounds, crystals that could become medications right, I mean it's connecting the dots in ways that are faster and more comprehensive than we're able to do on our own.

13:20 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And I'd argue the ho-hum is actually what AI is really good at.

13:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really good, that's true.

13:27 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
AI and drug discovery. You're like, you know, it's kind of like those 2.2 million crystal patterns, like you just need to identify as many compounds as possible and then figure out which ones might have therapeutic applications. And you know, like that's always been a computer-assisted process in modern times. But AI of millions of financial files a la the Panama Papers, and finding patterns like what are the common LLCs, what are the common entity names that are shared across these files, because you could do that by hand it would take centuries. So you can do investigations much more efficiently. You can do investigations realistically that you could not have done five years ago, three years ago, even one year ago.

14:30 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right, and that applies in the legal field, in so many fields where data, you know, and making sense of data, is a huge job that is overwhelming for humans on their own.

14:41 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, and not to mention diagnostics. I mean, some of the things that we're going to see in medicine are going to blow us away. It's already beginning. We're going to just see a lot of that. I mean, I have a feeling the idea of a radiologist looking at an X-ray is going to become so passe within a very short time, when AI can analyze an X-ray, know exactly what it's looking at.

15:11 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
But I suspect the radiologists will need to know like oh, this AI model always misidentifies this kind of tumor and you know and knows how to like enter. You know enter a prompt that, like, deals with those you know quirks of the system. You know that's where the radiologists will move.

15:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Right, and sadly, there'll probably be people, some die, some people will die between now and the time they get it right, and they'll never have it 100 percent right, I mean. So it's not going to be a smooth, everything's perfect, but where it's going is very impressive, very promising.

15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this, this deep mind crystal research, is almost a template for what is happening everywhere, which is in November, google comes out they say we've created 380,000 new crystal structures more than humankind has created in all the history of science. And then, a month or two later, this is the article that came out this week in chemical materials. They took a random sample of the structures that say none of them meet the three-part test. Uh, that material scientists care about credible, useful and novel, so they've came up with a lot of junk. Now I'm willing to bet that somewhere in those 380 thousands of crystals there are some new crystals that are credible, useful and novel. We don't know yet they haven. Scientists haven't gone through all 380,000. But that is a template for what we are seeing now and a way to temper our expectations.

16:36
I've watched AI because I've been through a few AI winners in my time and as you have too, larry. I'm sure you guys are too young, but Larry and I remember you know the big hype about AI. That happened first happened in the fifties, and then the sixties and the seventies and the eighties, and in every case our hopes were dashed and it turned out Eliza wasn't all that good at being a cyclist.

16:57 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I remember that Well hey.

17:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I, I, I. I'm old enough to have hand typed aped Eliza code into my Apple.

17:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TV. But even at that point we all had realized, yeah, this is trivial and not that useful. But I think what's happened this time is we're starting to see some amazing things, like that music I just played for you, as long as we understand what the limits are and we don't get to this point where it's going to replace humans or it's going to be as smart as humans. Maybe it will, I don't know, but it already is incredibly useful if you temper your expectations Right.

17:34 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Right, and I also don't think it's going to destroy humankind the way some people are claiming as well. That's the other hype around this. You know we're seeing the positive hype and the negative hype. I think it's going to be. You know there's going to be problems and there's going to be great successes. But it's not going to change the world overnight. But boy, it's taking us in some really amazing directions.

17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I predict we'll look back on the AI doomers and we'll realize at least for some of them, like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, it was a way of hyping. Oh, absolutely, it was like oh this is so good it could destroy humankind.

18:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Watch out and also trust us. We know what we're doing. The new guys, the startups. They're the ones you have to worry about.

18:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we are in a Gartner hype cycle with AI, with all new technologies, where we get really high and then it goes down and then it comes back. I think we're now coming towards the useful part of it, where we temper our, we don't have the high expectations that are going to take over for humans, and then I'm going to have a robot in the kitchen washing my dishes anytime soon, or a self-driving car that can come pick me up, take me where I'm going and then I get out without any human intervention. That was another thing, that really hasn't happened.

18:48
We can talk about that later. Well, we can talk about it now, but I do think that there are. That doesn't mean that those cars aren't useful. So we learned that both Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco had far more human interventions than we'd expected. You know, back at the home office, the guy saying oh, yeah, yeah, Drive around that cone. We also learned, you know, Amazon just dropped their uh uh, just take out stuff where you walk, just walk out of the store. Because it turned out they had a thousand people in India looking at every single video to make sure that there was properly charged. It was very human driven.

19:23 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, well, the the reason I said talk about that is that one of the pitches that I made is uh, I just did a story, a story about the new tesla, the 2024 model 3, which, believe it or not, I bought, and much to the chagrin of many of my anti-elon friends and I do, you know?

19:39
The funny part is, you know, I was actually kicked off twitter's safety advisory board by by elon, so it's not like I'm a friend of his, but you have had multiple Teslas, right? Well, I bought my second Tesla. I know you had one and got rid of it, but I've been beating up on this new self-driving 12.4, the new version that actually came out like two days ago. And I have to say, leo, you can complain all you want and talk about all the things that it does wrong and can't do, but what it does is absolutely amazing and you got to watch it. It can make a mistake, but it really does work. It even made a u-turn for me the other day, which is pretty wow awesome, wow, a three-pointer, or all the way around all the way up.

20:21
Yeah, I guess it was all the way around.

20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't always work if it does a three-pointer, then I'll be impressed.

20:27 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Remember, this is a car driving itself, a car that a consumer can buy for $38,000. That's what the new Model 3 costs if you buy the short-range version, and on any road. I mean, I drove it on dirt roads, I drove it on alleys. Did you have 12.3? I have 12.4. I had three, I had three and now I have four.

20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's what I'm asking Is there a big jump? Cause Elon saying like this is what did he say? 12.4 is another big jump in capabilities.

20:55 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I haven't seen a big jump yet. I've seen some improvements, but, um, I think 12 point whatever is it, is it made it was a major light leap from 11. I mean, that's all I can say for sure. Yeah, at least in my tip. Yeah, and you know, again, I'm not about to sit in the back seat and let it take me somewhere. I, I'm definitely very much on top of it but well, that's, I guess, what I'm saying.

21:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in fact, that's exactly what the point I'm making, which is we've tempered our expectations. We know it's not going to drive us everywhere Right, it's assisting us, but it is a very useful partner in assisting us.

21:32 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, frankly, unlike what a lot of people say, it's dangerous. I actually feel a lot safer, especially on the highway, when I'm making a lane change and I've got all these cameras looking out for you to make sure that I'm not going to hit somebody as I make that lane change. So I use it and my eyes and my mirrors and so far it's never made a mistake on the highway like that. It once almost drove over a mattress. It has made some mistakes.

21:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, who hasn't almost driven over a mattress, exactly?

22:00 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's never been a close call on a lane change.

22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay if the mattress is in the highway. It's different if the mattress is at home. Let's just say there's a qualitative difference in the driving. I've had my car. I had a Tesla which my wife called Christine because it would try to hit her in the head, it would drive her off the road, oh yeah you had the Model X.

22:26
Yeah, I had the Model X. So that was a long time ago. That was five years ago or something. Um, I now have a i5, which bmw, which has also very similar adas, assisted driver stuff, but it I was driving down the road and the freeway off-ramp came along and it started going that way. I had to grab the wheel, nothing but that's your. So that's the thing. And I bet you, larry, you don't close your eyes. Of course not, you're paying attention. My wife does.

22:57
She's closing her eyes because she's in the passenger seat. She's scared as hell.

23:01 - Larry Magid (Guest)
No, I'm paying attention.

23:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're paying attention and maybe even keeping your hands on the wheel. Unlike the Tesla, my Ford and the BMW have cameras watching you and the BMW man you look over here it goes. Hey, pay attention. I mean, it really shouts at you.

23:14 - Larry Magid (Guest)
The Tesla has that too. It has both two things you have to hold the steering wheel.

23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a torque sensor in the steering wheel.

23:20 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Torque, yeah, and on the new 2024, the torque. You don't have to put as much torque, which is nice, because it used to. It used to ding me all the time and I have to have my hands on the wheel.

23:28 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I don't like it, just doesn't know but yeah, no, I, even my totally non-self-driving car does that and and it's annoying as heck I?

23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like we still have this is still better than nothing. Or is it that the only risk is that humans will ascribe too much, that people will say, oh, I don't have to write songs anymore, I'm just going to have the ai do it, or paint paintings anymore, I'm gonna have the ai do it right article.

23:54 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I don't think the, I don't think the creative impulse goes away at all. I was. I was thinking about this question of whether AI is art that I think Larry had brought up in our pre-show chat. And you know, one definition of art is commercial art. It's the use of skill and experience to create, you know, an artwork which might be like a logo, it might be a billboard. You know that is. It's not maybe artistic or artful, but uh, you know it's like we need a lot of that kind of, you know, our like artistic product.

24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me give you a good example. I asked, uh suno, to make us some music on hold, music, that art. No, that's not it. Where did I put this? Muzak, yeah, muzak. And you know what? It's fine, it's fine. Now, if I were Kenny G, I might be a little worried. Okay, there are some kind of. There are people who make a living out of, kind of generic music.

25:07 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Leo, that reminds me of the time Marissa Mayer was CEO of Yahoo and she got caught on a hot mic complaining about the hold music that Yahoo was playing before an investor call, you know, and AI just had not arrived in time, you know, in timely enough fashion. Here's the.

25:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is this is the waiting music that I had. This is AI generated. This is indistinguishable from the music I hear when I get a massage.

25:38 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I was going to say I feel like I'm in the spa.

25:39 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's in the spa Better than a lot of music Right Like it's, it's music art.

25:42 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
No, If you write music for a living, it's better than a lot of music.

25:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But Brian like, is Muzak art? No, if you write Muzak for a living, I would be worried. Hey, it's.

25:49 - Larry Magid (Guest)
McDonald's food. I mean, how do you, that's right? How do you?

25:53 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Well, I mean, you're on to something In addition to you know needing to worry about the socioeconomic damage that these tools are doing just by generating them, but also you know the IP landscape and personal data landscape is far from settled about all this what's going to be acceptable and what's not.

26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know the patent office has said that you cannot copyright or patent an invention by an AI. That's correct, isn't it?

26:29 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I'm not sure what the patent office has done. Oh okay, yeah, the copyright office made a statement along those lines Okay, yeah, okay.

26:37 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't know about patents. I couldn't have ChatGPT write something for me and then copyright that article Correct.

26:44 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
If it's solely, and, Denise, please correct me if I've got the detail wrong, but I believe the Copyright Office has said if it is solely AI authored it will not accept it and if you used AI assistance, it wants you to disclose that. That's my understanding Interesting.

27:01 - Denise Howell (Guest)
That's my understanding, yeah, and again, I feel like this is all a moving target at this point. That that's one data point, but what I'm also driving at here is what of course trains these systems and how we're coming to accord around that.

27:21 - Larry Magid (Guest)
If I were to ask you, I I don't know who won the election and I'm not trying to be controversial here and you would say all was won by biden. Did you actually look at the federal database that showed who won? Good point that's because good point, you saw it on cnn, you read it. That's right time I saw it in reliable sources yeah, right.

27:40
If you were to read me the paragraph from the new york times which said that he won the election, then I could question whether that would be plagiarism. But knowledge is knowledge. In fact, I know that, I know. I mean, I know what's going on. We know that facts cannot be copyrighted.

27:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know that Right Exactly Only the treatment of facts.

27:57 - Larry Magid (Guest)
So how can companies like the New York Times, or anybody else, object to ChatGPT using their knowledge any more than if you or I were to say something that we know because we read it in the New York Times?

28:11 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right, its lawsuit is about verbatim Right. Well, that segments yeah.

28:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they had to really jump through hoops to create those verbatim segments, things like here's the first four paragraphs of the article. What would the fifth be? I mean, look, no one's going to do that to read the New York Times. They're going to buy the New York Times. This is a legitimate question if you're a creator. And look, all four of us are creators. We write, we publish, we do work that is creative work. So I understand creators' discomfort.

28:44
I guess the fundamental question there's a couple, but one question is is there a? Because all the copyright and patents all about society's benefit, the benefits of it exclusively, but ultimately it becomes part of the public's property and everybody can use it. That's why there's terms on copyrights and patents. And until that law, by the way, until that was established, creators felt like they owned it forever. So it really was attempt to limit the power of creators, to control their inventions, so that society ultimately could benefit. I think now, and this is the fundamental question, does society benefit from AI ingesting this content? And then there's also the question is an AI reading the New York Times any different from the human reading in New York Times? Some say yes, some say no. So those are, these are fundamental questions, I guess as a society we have to answer. Denise, you're an attorney. Does the law speak to this at?

29:51 - Denise Howell (Guest)
all Pieces of the law speak to pieces of this, and that's what's making this all really interesting right now and trying to, you know, sort of shoehorn current reality into our existing legal framework and and see how it goes. I think it's just really interesting and I'm not sure that there's a one-to-one match. In all cases, you have an article in the rundown that I thought was fascinating about Vonna.

30:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let me. Let me take a little break, cause that's a good good place to pause, and we'll talk about that. I also want to talk a little bit about my experience in chess, because it was more than 20 years ago now that computer beat the best player in the world. Computers have widely, for two decades now, been agreed that computers are better than humans. At chess Go, something similar has happened, but I want to talk about something surprising that's happened in both games.

30:44
I must say we're lucky to have a very wise and tech-savvy Supreme Court which will clear this all up for us, oh Lord Well you know, that's a whole other topic, not just the US Supreme Court, but can courts and legislatures in general do a good job of this? And I think really it's societal moress. Ultimately they have to reflect. We have to decide as a society and then the laws and the jurisprudence will reflect that, but we haven't even decided as a society what we think about this, and that's really what this conversation is for us and our audiences, and you all are informed technology users. There's no agreement, even among our panelists, about this, but we need to come to some consensus before we can expect the law and jurisprudence to reflect that. So this is part of the conversation that has to happen. It's a good conversation. Denise Howell is here. Her new podcast is at hearsayculturecom. How's that going?

31:44 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yes, it's going well. The last time I was here our feeds were not fully functional. Now all our shows have their own feed, yahoo, yahoo, I have two shows up on my solo show, which is called Uneven Distribution, and more in the pipeline that are coming out in the next month or so. And I'm doing I co-host a show called R&D with D&D, with Dave Levine, who's been on our network here at TWIT a few times with me and possibly on other shows too. He's a law professor.

32:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet these are topics both of you discuss in these shows, right? Oh, we certainly do. Yes, yeah, very timely Hearsayculturecom for two shows. Glad to have Denise back on our microphones too. Owen Thomas is at the San Francisco Business Times, part of bizjournalscom. Bizjournalscom says San Francisco Always a thrill to have you on, and Larry Magid, and we'll talk about what Canette Safely is up to in a little bit. Bizjournalscomsasanfrancisco Always a thrill to have you on, and Larry Magid, and we'll talk about what Connect Safely is up to in a little bit, because I know you always have great initiatives for parents and families on being safe online. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Mint Mobile.

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35:53 - Denise Howell (Guest)
V-A-N-a. What is vanna? Well, it looks like an interesting sort of as jock would say, vrm play uh, where users are recognizing hey, our data is our own and we want to manage it and we want to get compensated for it and we want to decide who's using it and how. It's pretty timely.

36:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When Reddit IPO'd, they let us know that Google had paid them I think it was $60 million for access to all the Reddit data. What is the Reddit data? Our posts? There is no data from Reddit. It's all the people posting around, just like twitter and facebook and everywhere else, uh. So I think there were some people who said, gee, you know, uh, why should reddit make 60 million? So vanna is gonna is well, in theory, we'll see wants to let you take your reddit data and rent it out to train ai and you get paid. Is this viable, I wonder?

36:48 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
the. The problem I always see is that um like the actual value per user of that data is so minimal. Yeah, here's your 32 cents right it's, you know, it's kind of like, you know, like spotify royalties for most musicians, unfortunately, or, like you know, it's not not worth the cost of cutting the check. Basically now.

37:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess google already has your data, but there are plenty of other people who would like to use, uh, that data who don't have deals with reddit, so you could make them individual deals, and I would guess what vanna wants to do. By the way, they've raised a lot of money. What I would guess Vanna wants to do is aggregate a bunch of people's data right, and then offer it as a bundle to Hugging Face or whoever you know, or OpenAI, and then distribute it out.

37:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean the. You know the value of Reddit is real. If you do a Google search, often one of the auto-suggests will be to add the keyword Reddit to your search. In other words, people have figured out that the general web search results, Google returns, are junk. What you want is the Reddit discussion about that topic, and that will get you the real answer.

38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say I don't think Vanna is really viable for that very reason, but I do think it's important to recognize that there is that Reddit's making money on our data, as is Twitter.

38:16 - Denise Howell (Guest)
For what reason? The money reason, the 32 cent reason?

38:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's just too small.

38:20 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah.

38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

38:22 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I just know, I don't know. I just I feel like this is looking at something that's going to be more widespread and, yeah, it's not going to be a lot of money, but anything that can replicate and give users more control, I think is a good thing. Yeah.

38:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Reddit banned the Vanna subreddit. That's funny.

38:45 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's also I want to push back a little, go ahead. I'm sorry. I want to push back a little bit on what Owen said about Reddit. Reddit has great information, but Reddit is made up of people and unlike us, I'd like to say unlike professional journalists they're just people. They're great people and they're average people and they're trolls and they're idiots and they're liars, and you know they're just. You have to take everything you read on Reddit with a grain of sand. Just like AI information right.

39:12 - Denise Howell (Guest)
It's all hallucination and Wikipedia, you know, which is super valuable, but you have to.

39:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you? Yeah, that's right. I mean, humans are full of misinformation. Your neighbor, ask your neighbor of any variety of questions, and they will give you any variety of answers, and you would be prudent to suspect each answer, right, yeah, get you know, but you Critical thinking is so important. You made such a good point, though, larry, that we, we only know who won the election because we not because we went to the federal election database, right, but because we read the New York Times or watched CBS Evening News, right. We're trusting some other person to do that.

39:57 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And in the case of the 2020 election, there are places where you might go and get the wrong information that millions of people believe Right, and that's another aspect of this.

40:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does raise the question what is truth, what is reality?

40:12 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Virtual or real or artificial, you saw this Go ahead.

40:16 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I think that is something that all of the AI developers are concerned with as well. Right, that we're trying to give you something that is reliable and that you can. Then we then that it relies on information itself that is reliable, and I don't know, it's a huge mountain to climb, but necessary and it changes.

40:38 - Larry Magid (Guest)
we learned, as we learned during covet 19 what science says is accurate on day one may be questioned on day two, and you know that's just the nature of science as well.

40:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a challenging article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal how I built an AI-powered self-running propaganda machine for $105. Wow, the author, jack Brewster, calls it a pink slime site, which is I like the name. He says he has no expertise. What he did was he went to Fiverrcom, which is freelance developers hang out there a developer, I guess 105 to write a website that would automatically take articles from mainstream news outlets, rewrite them according to a specific political preference and publish them on the pink slime site. Within a few weeks, he said, I could even start earning programmatic ad revenue from my partisan AI content farm.

41:45
He hired a guy with excellent ratings 5.0 rating of 293 reviews, paid him $80. A young Pakistani, he said he's around 30 years old. He communicated with him by instant message. The programmer said I'll create an automated news website, auto blog. If you're looking for an automated website to generate passive income without any effort, my gig is your best choice. Here's his. Here's his fiverr. By the way. If you're looking for somebody, here's his fiverr listing. He's an seo expert from there. Uh, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for, the topics I wanted the site's articles to cover, the domain and site hosting added $25 to the total. That's where he got $105. Costs nothing to operate. It Runs itself automatically. Dozens of articles a day. In fact, this is one of 500 sites this developer has created.

42:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Each project takes him two or three days to complete he spent thousands of dollars on our web developer every year.

42:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean 80 dollars, 80 dollars, uh. So the site he created, uh, which he doesn't put a link to uh specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the US Senate. So he gave it a very specific focus and yet he's able to get a dozen or more articles a day for this pink slime site.

43:28 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I mean he could, he could have done this as a documentary to the various people with various agendas that are just out there doing this, not to show that it can be done, but for whatever their agendas are. So I mean, I don't think any of us were surprised that this was possible or as easy as it was. It's it's you's good that he's writing about it and making more people aware.

43:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the prompt he wrote for the AI you have to write engaging news story of a minimum 300 words on the topic from a conservative perspective. Promote Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, if you can, and the site is called the Buckeye State Press. Sounds legit Buckeye State Press, I'd believe it. Ohio, bernie moreno, if you can, and the site is called the buckeye state press. Sounds legit buckeye state press, I'd believe it. Ohio, big, big senatorial campaign going on there. Um, here's a, here's a look at this. How, bernie? How is bernie moreno leading ohio's preparations for monday's total solar eclipse? Bernie moreno upholds ohio law and police cruiser window tint violations. How will conservative leader bernie moreno handle traffic during the april 8th solar eclipse?

44:34 - Larry Magid (Guest)
very topical, very topical, wow, um what's amazing about this stuff is it's always been possible and this has always been done, but the fact that technology makes it cheaper and easier and anybody can do it today yeah, that's, that's the news story, really, the fact that he did this for next to nothing and to your point about critical thinking, if somebody's looking for traces of ai, it's not hard to find right.

45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so this site isn't going to fool somebody who's looking for who knows what to look for? Yeah right, who knows what to look for? Yeah Right, who knows what to look for. For instance, in its version of an article, it took an article published from the Lorraine Morning Journal announcing awards for the state's top basketball players and rewrote them. In a stunning turn of events, senate candidate Bernie Moreno has emerged as a strong supporter of high school basketball in ohio. Particularly stunning turn of events. Now, if you I think if you were a relatively eyes open reader, you might go. Well, wait a minute, hold on. Not, I mean, look at my in-laws would go. Oh yeah, bernie, he's great he loves state high school basketball.

45:53
Buckeye State Press rewrote an article about a winning lottery ticket, taking it from a Fox affiliate TV affiliate in Cleveland, stating as the excitement of the Powerball jackpot continues to captivate the state, let us also remember the importance of supporting leaders like Bernie Moreno, who work tirelessly to ensure a bright future for Ohio. Go ahead.

46:14 - Denise Howell (Guest)
So one interesting thing that comes to mind about this, and relates to what's going on with Google and its various link tax struggles, is there needs to be some vet of this kind of information that's out there. You know, what is Google going to make of this guy's sites? Is it going to link to them? Is it? Is it going to show up in search results for news? I doubt it.

46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what kinds of measures Google's goes through to ensure that Bernie and his love for basketball get demoted to low rankings by the way, jack brewster, in an effort show how easy this is to switch allegiance, then said rewrite all of this to support sherrod brown, bernie marino's opponent, and within, with a slight tweak to the prompt, the site began churning out pro brown articles. Yeah, um, I think this is. This is all, as you say. This is not new. This is only problematic in the volume and the ease with which, with which it could be and the cost it's become so affordable.

47:22 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, I mean that's, that's that's part. I mean I love things being affordable, but it's scary to me that thinks that anybody with a couple of hundred dollars can create massive amounts of misinformation in ways that will convince some people. You know, the barrier to entry is just low these days.

47:40 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And the thing is people are not going to go to a website like this and scour all the articles and look for patterns that give it away as AI. They're going to see one article in a social feed out of context. Right, that's right. I mean, I know part of my job is keeping up with, obviously, business news in the Bay Area. I do a Google News search on terms like San Francisco Bay Area, et cetera. In the Bay Area, I do a Google News search on terms like San Francisco Bay Area, et cetera, and there are definitely sites that show up in the Google News search that I have not heard of, that I would not source a story from and I can tell, because there are like five repeats, that there's some maybe syndication, maybe straight up copying going on. So you know, unfortunately Google News is not as trustworthy as I think it needs to be in terms of the sources it allows.

48:35 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, I find my own articles sometimes plagiarized through Google News on sites that should not be ranked by Google News. I don't know how they got into Google News' database, but they're clearly plagiarizing.

48:47 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, it'd be fun to talk to somebody from Google about that, because I remember back in the day, the very early days of blogging, when it was very hard to get your site or your outlet included in Google News and it was a big victory when you could Right and now maybe not so much I'll have to reapply because I got turned down the first time I applied.

49:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, we're heading towards. I'm going to take a break. We'll talk about this, the California Journalism Preservation Act. Our good friend Jeff Jarvis has written a really good piece about why this proposed link tax would not only not save journalism, it would be bad for journalism and bad for Google, and Google's response has been swift and, I think, a little terrifying. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. It's great to have Denise Howell here, hearsayculturecom, owen Thomas from the San Francisco business journal, my friend Larry Magid. Connecting safely, still connect safe. Is this full-time now for you?

49:55 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, I do other things. I still write a weekly column for the Mercury news. But yeah, it's, it's a full-time job. It sounds like kind of almost a mission of love, like a personal mission as opposed to it is yeah, and it's just a great team of people and to be able to kind of watch technology evolve and watch the risk revolve and also the ways in which we are dealing with them. It's been really interesting. I do enjoy it.

50:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you written about or talked about Jonathan Haidt's book?

50:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I have not published anything yet, but I've certainly talked a lot about it with a lot of people, including some people who question some of his journalism and some of his research. I should say, you know, one of the things that Jonathan Haidt has done is he's seen a correlation between the rise of the smartphone and mental health issues. But, as anybody who's taken a sociology course knows, correlation is not the same as causation, so he's not factoring in all of the other things that may be contributing to mental health issues, nor is he factoring in, in my opinion, all of the wonderful things that happen as a result of technology and young people having access to phones and social media. So it's very nuanced. It's not something that you can easily, you know, create a soundbite to describe what goes on in terms of youth and risk and technology and unfortunately, I think he's got to boil down to a very simple soundbite and it's more complicated.

51:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we've talked about this quite a bit on previous shows. The book is the Anxious Generation how the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. And we also talked about Candace Oger's article in Nature. She's one of the researchers who says no, no, it's correlation, not causation. Exactly, it's correlation for sure. And Haidt has come on Twitter and has very strongly defended himself and saying no, no, we, we have plenty of studies that show causation. It's. It's so difficult.

51:54
You know I was talking to my son the other day about you know he's a big fan of the Huberman podcast and you know Noel Yuval Harari's Sapiens. I think I gave him Sapiens and I said you should always be careful when you read something that makes a lot of sense and just seems so right, even more than you would normally vet it Because your natural disposition to go. That's got to be true. It just feels right and of course, it feels right that all this time these kids are staring at these little screens has to be bad for them. But I would say it requires even more proof.

52:33 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Right and it is bad for some people. Look, I like to think of it. When people say social media is like tobacco, I say it's more like chocolate. Nobody should consume too much chocolate. It's bad if you consume too much. Some people shouldn't consume chocolate at all because you know they may have a medical condition or something that would make that very dangerous. But most people can consume moderate amounts of chocolate and be relatively healthy. And I think that you can point to some edge cases of horrible things happening that you can link to social media and smartphones. But you can also point to millions and millions of cases where horrible things didn't happen and edge cases where wonderful things happen. So you know, yeah, there's probably some causation, but I think he oversimplifies the process based on my reading.

53:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he yeah, it's worth reading the back and forth on Twitter because Jonathan's really got a lot of points, but I think Candace Audra has points and it's hard to know exactly what's right. He says. Height says look, because one of the first things we've all pointed out is this is the moral panic that happened when books started being published, when radio came out, when TV came out. You and I, larry, grew up when rock and roll was causing our brains to rot, and it seems like every generation is upset about what the previous generations into is just another moral panic. And he says yeah, it's reasonable to say that, but on the other hand, sometimes things really are bad yeah, like the rise of teen smoking or gun violence, and they really, you know it's not moral panic. We should pay attention to them. And so that's the question Is this which is this?

54:25 - Larry Magid (Guest)
you'll find my presentation on the history of technology, moral panics and it goes back to socrates worrying about the impact of writing on memory and, of course, screening the loom and the railway. You know, the railroads were going to create insanity because anybody who traveled at that speed was going to have a mental breakdown and probably attack people on the in the railway car. I mean, there's a lot of that. But on the other hand, you're absolutely right, we we didn't worry enough about smoking. I don't think we worry enough about gun violence, we didn't worry soon enough about automobiles being dangerous. We are now. So you know, yeah, there are things that are very dangerous and there are dangers of social media. It's not 100 percent safe, right, and I think chocolate's a good analogy.

55:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's a very good. By the way, this is a great little slideshow. This is a talk that you give.

55:05 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, it is. It's a talk I've given a couple times now I love this.

55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been looking for something like this so I could use on the show, because we talk about this all the time. Jeff Jarvis even has a little moral panic video that we play.

55:21 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I did a podcast with Jeff Jarvis. It's a part of our Are we Doing Tech Right podcast and Jeff was great.

55:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's really good. Yeah, video games are going to destroy our youth.

55:30 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And don't forget the Millennium Bug. What that's going to do to the world?

55:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, and yet it's reasonable to say there are things that can't cause harm. And Haidt says this is one of them Right? I don't know.

55:40 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, I think I mean his big thing is, one of his big things are getting phones out of classrooms, and I just it strikes me as a really draconian solution there. There may be very good reasons why someone needs to use technology in a classroom. Why is the computer in front of them much different than the phone that they would otherwise be using, front of them, much different than the phone that they would otherwise be using? And, um, you know, I mean I just think there it maybe is a too much of a soundbite and too much of a okay, if we only do this, then we'll solve the problem, and I just don't think it's that easy.

56:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a complex problem. That's really the truth. Yeah, yeah, uh, let's take a little break. We'll come back with more. You're watching this Week in Tech, our show today, brought to you by ZipRecruiter, actually a company we know a lot about. We've used for years have you ever who hasn't done this? Set your phone alarm to say, you know, 9 am Monday morning to buy those tickets the minute they go on sale? Right, because you know the bots are coming. If you don't get there fast, you won't be able to get those tickets or they'll cost an awful lot.

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58:47
Times are tough right now in podcasting A lot of podcasts going out of business. We decided a couple of years ago to ask you, our listeners, to support and we're getting to the point now where, honestly, if we just had one or two percent more of the audience become subscribers, we wouldn't have to worry. We could create new shows, we could grow instead of shrinking, and really that's the choice. If you like what we do, if you listen to more than one of our shows a week, please subscribe. It's only $7 a month. You get ad-free versions of all of our shows. You get the great Discord channel where you can chat with other members. You can see lots of material that we don't put out in public, including video of all the shows that are audio-only in public, like Hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, the Untitled Linux Show, home Theater, geeks with Scott Wilkinson. All of those shows are audio-only right now for the public, but video inside the club and it's just $7 a month. Yeah, $7 a month.

59:46
Join twittv slash club twit right now. Please, I beg of you, twittv slash club, twit your, uh, your help makes a difference between shrinking and growing. We'd like to grow. I think now is a good time to grow, to be honest with you. I said I would talk a little bit about my own experience with AI and chess.

01:00:08
I remember when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the world champion, there was a real tremor in the chess world. Everybody thought, oh, that's it, the game's over. And who's going to want to play when you know a machine could beat you? And instead of killing chess, it actually to some degree boosted it. There certainly is an issue with cheating. It's a widespread issue, especially online. When you're playing an online game, because it's hard to know whether the person you're playing against is using the help of a computer. But in head-to-head, in-person board competitions, it's fantastic. But in head-to-head in-person board competitions, it's fantastic.

01:00:43
I'm watching right now the candidates' matches going on to choose the next challenger to the World Chess Championship. So it's the strongest players. How many is it? Six, I think Eight of the strongest players playing each other head-to-head. It's really dramatic. It's very exciting.

01:01:02
The commentators have access to computers and when they show the screen. I'll just show you real quickly. On YouTube you can watch the play by play when you're watching it on the screen. Let me go back in time a little bit here, see if I can. Well, I'm getting the wrong video. Youtube's been doing this to me a lot lately. There we go. I guess the game's going on right now. You can see there's this bar on the left, white is almost has a one game. The computer says Now the players don't know, the players don't know what's happening, but the computer knows. And then afterwards the players use the computers to do analysis, to look at what's happening. It's really cool. It's a really cool use.

01:01:50
So the same thing happened in Go. Not so long ago AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the top Go players in the world, and there was this tremor went through the Go world. Go is a Japanese game, actually frankly much more difficult to solve than chess, it turns out. Article in Scientific American this week the AI's victories in Go inspire better human play. Go had been a little stagnant.

01:02:18
Apparently Go had been a little stagnant. Apparently People had kind of decided well, this is the best way to respond in a certain situation and seeing what the surprising, in many cases moves that the computer used kind of gave a nudge to Go, and players are now more innovative. They are coming. This is David Silver, a researcher at DeepMind. It's amazing to see that human players have adapted so quickly to incorporate these new discoveries into their own play. The results suggest humans will adapt and build upon the computer's discoveries to massively increase their potential. I think that's very encouraging that AI in at least these games is not driving players away, but exciting them and stimulating them and giving them new ways to play and exciting new ideas to think about.

01:03:11 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right, and it sounds like it's almost serving a coaching function.

01:03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely For the players who are diligent enough to go back and review their games and believe me, if you're not, you're not going to do well in the world. You know the best players are absolutely using computer coaching.

01:03:28 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know, there's a history of this. I remember when it was presumed that the ability to communicate electronically would cut down on travel, and in fact the travel industry is busier than ever and has been on a steady increase, except during the pandemic. And so it's very often that we fear somehow technology is going to interfere with more analog experiences, you know, going out to dinner. There's so many examples I can think of that have not happened, and technology has actually correlated with better things happening than what was predicted, what was feared.

01:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also AI in these games anyway, isn't perfect. When you get to this level, at the highest possible level, sometimes the humans are better than the AI. Sometimes Not enough to beat the AI, but enough times that you don't accept the AI suggestion always as the best move. So again, it's another case of human-machine interaction that is actually beneficial to the humans, I think. Anyway, I said I would talk about that, so I bring that up from my own experience.

01:04:32 - Larry Magid (Guest)
There are times when I actually find chat GPT can do a better job than I do, coming up with a particular paragraph or two. I've yet to see it write an entire article that I think is better than what I could write. But I find elements of it where, yeah, I wish I had thought of that, I wish I had been that creative. So, you know, maybe it makes me better at what I do. Maybe I have to work harder to compete against it.

01:04:55 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And we are professional creators and communicators and you know a lot of people are not that good at writing say an apology letter to their spouse.

01:05:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not good at that either. Oh boy, how about an apology song? But no.

01:05:13 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I didn't mean to interrupt your point, no, no, no, it's just that it's like you know, like most of us are not songwriters, but you know, if you really want to say like I'm sorry, have AI write your spouse a song.

01:05:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know in that, in that presentation that Leo was showing you that I did about moral panics, all of the graphics were created using using generative AI and I couldn't draw a stick figure, if you know, if my life depended on it. So that was an example where I did use AI to enhance a creative product in a way that made it a lot better.

01:05:45 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Would you have hired an illustrator? Otherwise no, I would have had sucky images.

01:05:50 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I would have had nothing. I would have grabbed things off the Internet I'm not sure what.

01:05:53 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I mean I am concerned about. There are professional illustrators who… Right, that's the downside.

01:05:56 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, professional illustrators who Right, that's the downside, yeah.

01:06:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Wired Magazine, for example, said that they would not use AI-generated images because they are in the business of creating not just words but images for their covers, for their stories. And they said, no, we are going to pay humans, as we have done, unless it is a story specifically about AI artistic output and what that looks like, and you need to actually show the thing that you're talking about.

01:06:29 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Some of the images that I left in the presentation actually are absurdly inaccurate, and I did that to point out that they do make a lot of mistakes. And what was there as an image of Donald Trump? And he had six fingers in his hand.

01:06:42 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh, fingers are. Fingers are like an infamous AI tell, and I'm weird, they're getting better.

01:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
by the way, as soon as that became an issue, the stable diffusion and others started training on hands and they've got mid journey and stable diffusion Now. You're rare to see a bad hand.

01:07:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
That's almost a sign of previous generations it is interesting to to think about, like how, as humans, did we learn to recognize hands. By the way, humans are famously bad at drawing hands. Like it's hard, I can't have to teach.

01:07:15 - Denise Howell (Guest)
You know, mickey mouse has three freaking fingers oh, I really think that we're in this stage too. I mean, I'm we all remember when using a calculator or using a spell checker or a grammar checker was, you know, cause for hand ringing and and possible accusations of cheating. And now I think it's come full circle.

01:07:39 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And if you don't grammar check your english paper before you turn it in, your teacher should lean into more like where we should put more of our efforts as a you know, as a technology industry into is you know what are the, what are the assistive technologies? If you think about, you know, an accountant having a calculator by her side doing numbers very quickly, like, can AI be like that, something we have by our side helping us, not replacing us?

01:08:25 - Larry Magid (Guest)
No, I agree with you. What bothers me a little bit is both Microsoft Word and all the Google products will offer to write it for you, and that actually does concern me, the idea that they would buy almost by default, saying no, larry, you don't have to write this letter, we'll write it for you.

01:08:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is not aimed at you as a writer. This is aimed at business professionals who aren't writers and who want to communicate something Because this is a business product really and maybe don't feel competent to create it or just want the assistance of the AI to write it. They may rewrite what the AI writes.

01:09:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think this is very popular among business folks because sometimes I'm on my phone and you know, if the choice is, like swipe, to complete it with Gmail, I always let Gmail complete it. Right.

01:09:14 - Denise Howell (Guest)
The one thing that causes me concern about that in the business setting is people don't get as adequately trained as they used to right. They can just punt on on being able to do it themselves and let AI do it, and and that's, that's not great.

01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but uh, spell checkers has created a generation of kids who can't spell right Does your son spell.

01:09:37 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, I'm not in that generation. I forgot.

01:09:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, my daughter, I'm a great speller, my mother's a great speller my daughter can't spell to save her life because she never had to, she just didn't yeah.

01:09:50 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I mean he's not as bad as he used to be and he's got a vast vocabulary and he's a good writer.

01:09:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. He knows how to write he vocabulary and is a good writer. Yeah, yeah, exactly, he knows how to write, he just doesn't know how to spell right.

01:10:04 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I can't drive a wagon and I suppose you know, 200 years ago I would have had to if I wanted to get somewhere yeah, were any of you the kind of kid who you know would would know.

01:10:16 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Know how to spell a word, but not how to pronounce it, oh yeah absolutely, I still am sometimes, yeah, spell a word, but not how to pronounce it. Oh yeah, absolutely. I still am. Sometimes, yeah, because you only read it in a book that's right Now. Now, of course, you can just find a YouTube video with the pronunciation of any word imaginable.

01:10:30 - Larry Magid (Guest)
As a radio person, I have to do that often because there's a lot of names I can't pronounce.

01:10:34 - Denise Howell (Guest)
it just based on reading them how do we, how do we bottle that secret sauce that we all trust those youtube videos, and they're pretty dead on, you know what means that they have to be accurate, but they are um, yeah, there's some, um some really good youtube pronunciation videos out there.

01:10:56 - Pronounce!
Let me just uh, I think let's see here this is how to pronounce youtube, looking at how to pronounce the name of our favorite social media platform. We'll be looking at how to say more brand names that too many mispronounce as well, so make sure to stay tuned to the channel Sounds like AI.

01:11:15
So how do you say it? Well, there are at least two different ways of pronouncing it. Being owned by Google and started in the US, you could argue that it should be said the American English way, which is as YouTube, u-tube. So note the T sound here and the Tube sound YouTube.

01:11:39 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I love that there's an alternate. I can't wait.

01:11:48 - Pronounce!
It is often said as YouTube Tube. Yeah, youtube YouTube British English.

01:11:54 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know what drives me crazy about that video? It's so typical.

01:11:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do you pronounce Google? Wait a minute, let's see, oh God.

01:12:02 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Google. Google.

01:12:04 - Pronounce!
Google, google, google, the most famous and the most popular of all search engines in the world. We are looking at how to pronounce Google, google, google, google. Here are many more videos on how Google Google. Here are many more videos Okay.

01:12:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
What drives me crazy about these YouTube videos, this one included, is how long it took them to give you a three second answer.

01:12:32 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Oh, I know, I know, is it something about?

01:12:34 - Larry Magid (Guest)
keeping you a mile longer.

01:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what it is, is but that's. But that's what happens when um you reward uh stuff, um, for you know, like more ads if it's longer right drives me nuts.

01:12:50 - Larry Magid (Guest)
when I, when I when I want information, I'm hoping I can read it, but google always sends me to youtube and then you start out with the with the you know the bumper, and then the guy has to say what's up, and then they take forever to tell you it. Then they have to pitch you on subscribing, and this is information that could probably have been translated in 20 words in a written text.

01:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me just see here. This is how you pronounce the names of famous actors oh yes, Archie Kidkicker Pitch perfect cup song. Archie Kidk Song Archie Archie Kid, georg Clowney. Georg. Clowney. Georg Clowney. This is one of my favorite YouTube channels. It's pronunciation manual Lipodio. Oh my.

01:13:52 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
God, you know, siri, no joking. Does this all the time to me? Oh yeah.

01:13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It probably watches this YouTube video All the time to me.

01:14:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh yeah, it probably watches this YouTube video.

01:14:08 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I've got yoga in my calendar and Siri tells me time to leave for Vinayasa NDS Radio. In the day used to have people on staff who were experts at pronouncing things. I could call them up and they would know how to pronounce any word or any language. That's a great job.

01:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that like their full-time job, or that's just their?

01:14:22 - Larry Magid (Guest)
good. I don't know it wasn't the full-time job, but there was always somebody on staff that knew how to pronounce.

01:14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like the AP style manual. It should be a you know, cbs pronunciation manual. Exactly.

01:14:33 - Denise Howell (Guest)
You've hit on something so cool there, and that is that technology gives birth to forms of humor that didn't previously exist, that youtube channel being a wonderful example. I think there's a lot more opportunities and outlets for satire nowadays than there used to be just because it's so easy to publish.

01:14:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Prior to youtube, that code wouldn't even exist, right? You're not gonna put that on cbs, right? Um, there's, yeah, and I think that that's a problem with it's kind of what you raised, larry, with jonathan heights, there's there stuff is that there's also this huge benefit you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and in fact, I would submit and certainly jeff jarvis does that the benefit outweighs the negatives. We can find solutions for the negatives, but the benefits are amazing. You know, one of the reasons we've talked a lot about podcasts struggling, but one of the reasons they're struggling is because there are so many of them, yeah, which?

01:15:30
is good right you have. You know, when I started, you know we were one of the first 10 podcasts in the world back in 2005, 2004, uh, so there weren't a lot of choices, so we got a lot of listeners. But as time goes by, the first 10 podcasts in the world back in 2005, 2004. So there weren't a lot of choices, so we got a lot of listeners. But as time goes by, there are literally millions of podcasts. There's guaranteed at least one show. That's just right for you, and it may not be ours, and that's fine, that's just. But you know, I would love it if there were only 10 podcasts in the world and I would have one tenth of the audience, of the total audience. But it's not, and that's good, that's in the long run.

01:16:07 - Larry Magid (Guest)
There was a time when there were 10 podcasts and you probably didn't have any audience at that point. I mean, you know, the fact is that the audience is big and it's it's probably bigger, but well, the pie is expanding faster.

01:16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The slices are getting smaller. Right, right, right right, regardless. You know we had more in the earliest days, in the first year of Twit. We would average a quarter million listeners. We're about half that. We're about half that. Interesting, but I'm not happy with the numbers we have now, given that there are almost an infinite number of podcasts you could listen to, I'm very grateful for those of you who listen to this one.

01:16:43 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But what I? When I pointed out there was a time when there were no podcasts and there were zero.

01:16:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree yeah.

01:16:47 - Larry Magid (Guest)
The only choice you had was terrestrial radio. Basically, right, you want to listen? Yeah, no, and I have.

01:16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And as somebody like you who broadcast on terrestrial radio for years, I've I value the fact that there was nowhere else you could go. In fact, am radio got hurt because in a big city like San Francisco there were 70 stations and only five of them made money. Everybody else lost money. And I happen to be lucky enough to work for one of the ones that was made One of the big ones, KCBS. I was on KGO and KSFO.

01:17:16 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Of the first 10 podcasts, how many were about tech? All, of them All of them, it was Adam Curry.

01:17:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Daily. Source. Actually that's not true. Remember Don and Drew, the couple that lived in the Minnesota farmhouse, somewhere farmhouse, and they would talk about their lives. That was a very early show that did very well, but most of them were about tech.

01:17:35 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, that was back at the time, too, when you had the most followers on then Twitter.

01:17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good example, because in 2007, I think, kevin rose and I were in a battle for the most followers on twitter. I had 5 000 and we were going back and forth and then and this is when everything changed ashton kutcher showed up and he went to like a million, and then it was a fight between him and CNN for the most, and Kevin and I were in the distant dust.

01:18:09 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Used to be that if you Googled Larry, I would come out on top Very brief time and then the page came around.

01:18:19 - Denise Howell (Guest)
No, I was the top Google result for denise for many, many years. Wow, yeah, but long, long ago, folks, you are you are listening to internet royalty there, you go royalty, royalty was that?

01:18:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is that? Is that? Am I on top? That's 32 000 followers. That's pretty good. I, by the way, I thank all my however many followers who actually bought a blue check, because I am now once again, without paying a single penny and without participating in Twitter at all, a blue check. Elon has brought back the blue checks for people who have.

01:18:57 - Larry Magid (Guest)
How do you get that? Do you have so many followers?

01:19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this started this last week. 2,500 paid followers will get you Twitter premium, and then 5,000 paid followers will get you Twitter premium plus. I'm proud to say.

01:19:12 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But unpaid followers won't Most of my followers, I'm sure they get you nothing.

01:19:17 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Oh, I see. So it's all about how many of your followers have bought the blue check Wow.

01:19:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have four hundred ninety two thousand followers on Twitter, I'm sure, 90 percent of which are bots, but but enough. Actually used to be five hundred fifty thousand, so I think there's either people noticed. I'm not here anymore. Look at this. I've deleted all my tweets. I'm not here anymore. Look, look at this.

01:19:42 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I've deleted all my tweets. Wow, it's funny, I almost. I almost wonder, like whether having a blue check is a is a good thing or a bad thing.

01:19:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, well, okay, that's another development. So early on when he gave last week, when he started giving people, uh, checks, a lot of people Molly White and others said, no, I don't want to check. You know, it's a mark of the mark of Satan. And then they would tweet things like I didn't pay for this, honest. And so in this map, I think on Wednesday or Tuesday maybe it was on Tuesday one of our hosts was showing me how to turn off the blue check so you can go into your account settings and turn off the blue check. But, as it turns out, elon didn't want you to do that, so he's taking that feature out.

01:20:29 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
you can, oh wow you can no longer turn off the blue check but he's, he's so completely devalued and the you know the blue check check in his kind of Well, he's trying to revalue it, isn't he Right?

01:20:45
I mean, I guess, but how do you distinguish between someone who has paid for their check versus someone who has a certain number of followers who have paid for their check? Right, and what is the honor of having 2,500 people who pay for their blue check following you? Why is that notable? I mean, at least I get from a financial perspective. At least that's more aligned than let's just verify journalists or let's just verify politicians or let's just verify politicians. But you know, I think it's still very hard to convince X users that a blue check means anything anymore.

01:21:28 - Larry Magid (Guest)
But what it used to mean actually was simply that you are who you say you are, that you really are Leo Laporte, not somebody claiming to be Leo Laporte. Right. And that's really what. That was the only original meaning of it, but it kind of became a status symbol after a while.

01:21:43 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right, and that's what Facebook and Instagram still operates in that ecosystem Right.

01:21:50 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I wonder if what X has done has devalued the Instagram blue check. Are people less trusting of blue checks elsewhere because of?

01:21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know Instagram's blue check is expensive. Do you have a blue check, do you?

01:22:02 - Larry Magid (Guest)
have to pay check to pay for it. Oh yeah, I have one on facebook that I didn't pay for. It just happened, I assume. I think that's the original idea, right, is that?

01:22:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we have independently verified that this person is who they say they are. That's the real value of it. Anything, anything other than that?

01:22:18 - Larry Magid (Guest)
it's certainly and I have to say having had a blue check on Twitter and having a blue check on Facebook has not in any way improved my life. It doesn't mean anything at the end of the day. No Other than you can't harder to impersonate you, Although people still do impersonate people.

01:22:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I think that's a big benefit. Well, you could pay $8 to impersonate somebody. That's the funny thing.

01:22:40 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's the funny thing.

01:22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They should check your ID. They don't. No, they don't. Anybody can be anybody. Let's take a break and then we come back. I do want to talk about the California Journalism Protection Act, which is going to do anything but, and Google's response, which is somewhat draconian. Larry Magid, denise Howell, owen Thomas, great to have you, great to have all you listening Our show today, brought to you by ExpressVPN, the only VPN I recommend, the only VPN I use.

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01:25:44
Somebody is uh telling me that in fact, I didn't know this. Uh, when you sign up for a paid account, twitter asks you for id. So, uh, I I mean it's good. If you say you're mclo, I'm sure you are McLovin. Who else would you be Right? I have seen lots of complaints on Twitter about the really draconian captures that Twitter uses, and you have to do dozens of them. It seems well, at least, at the very least, annoying.

01:26:20
Let's talk about the California Journalism Protection Act. Google has decided this is kind of a shot across the bow, right, considering the cjpa, which would create a link tax that would require google to negotiate a fee to sites that it shows snippets for in its search results. Um, google says and this is in the keyword blog we've long said this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism. If passed, here's the shot across the bow. Cgp, cjpa, may result in significant changes to the services we can offer California and the traffic we can provide to California publishers. They are just to demonstrate right now, for a limited number of users, no longer sending those users when they search for news to those sites. Sending those users when they search for news to those sites which they did this in. Where is it? Spain? I think they did it in France and it's always been very effective. Now you have a site that probably benefits from Google's search traffic, owen, but also probably would love some revenue from Google. Where?

01:27:47 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
do you come down on the CJPA? I think in this case I really can't speak for the San Francisco Business Times or our parent company, because those decisions are made like way up above my head. But I will say this is kind of the playbook that Google and Meta have used in Australia, canada, spain, other jurisdictions where there's been some proposal for a link tax, and it has usually led to publishers backing down. I also question whether you know and again not speaking, not speaking for myself or my own, you know, like my own personal interests here, but I question how important news content is to Google's business.

01:28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we know Facebook was happy to turn it off. They don't care.

01:28:39 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, you know what Facebook has said and they've played this out in newer products like Threads is that you know like, hey, political content is a turnoff. It generates division, like people just want to relax, hear from their friends. You know, have a good time, see pretty photos, and I kind of get that. You know Google has even talked about a real phenomenon, which is that a lot of people, especially younger users, have kind of news fatigue. Where they are, you know, like the news is a bummer and you know again, especially political news.

01:29:17
I think business publications like the Business Times might be in a different situation, because we're serving readers who have an active need for the information we're giving them, and because we are paywalled and people are generally subscribing to us and seeking us out, maybe visiting us directly. A publication like that might, in theory, be less affected. But you know, I think it's. I think there are serious questions about the future of news and how it gets funded. I'm not sure that. I'm not sure that Google really serves itself in the long run by threatening to not serve readers search results that those readers want.

01:30:07 - Denise Howell (Guest)
That seems like a pretty strange and self-defeating response. So can I get into the nitty gritty here, the details? I haven't read the proposed act yet but, leo, maybe you know just from the coverage. Are they you said something about snippets? Um, are they? You said something about snippets? So is that the issue that portions of the articles are being shown and might discourage people from clicking through and actually going to the site if they're just using headlines? Is that a better uh solution here? Sorry, leo, you were up. Did you even hear me? No, I'm not sure he did.

01:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google says and I credit them a little bit when they say this it was certainly the case in Australia, where it was Rupert Murdo and hedge funds who've been lobbying for this bill and could use funds from the cgapa to continue to buy up local california newspapers, strip them of journalists and create more ghost papers that operate with a skeleton crew to produce only low cost and often low quality content. They say this is a grab by the already successful rich publishers. It's not to support journalism, it's to support them.

01:31:24 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know, as a not rich publisher, I'm very grateful to Google. Driving traffic to either it's my site or if I write. For a while there was writing for Forbes and you know where I got paid based on traffic and a lot of my traffic came from Google and I appreciated it. I'm not sure I followed. Maybe that, maybe, Leo, you just gave the explanation why these conglomerates are so opposed to this, but to me it's free advertising.

01:31:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, you would think that Google and this is Google's point we drive more traffic. Watch when we turn off the spigot, see how you feel.

01:31:58 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Right, that's right, that's why I'm always excited when my stuff comes up high on google news, right?

01:32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know I love it and I, you know, I, I don't. And this is why I'm asking you guys, because, look, I don't. If they did it a podcast, I might have a different point of view, but I don't think the snippets that they publish are sufficient to keep people from visiting the site, or are they?

01:32:17 - Larry Magid (Guest)
and on the snippet. I mean, if it's, if you're looking for just a headline who won the election, and that's all you care about.

01:32:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't need more and you probably wouldn't visit the site anyway, right, you wouldn't do it.

01:32:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
But if you care about why they won the election, you're going to want to read on. Industry should be worrying about. Isn't it more like the wholesale usage of articles by AI models where there is no intent of ever sending you to the website? You know? Google, at least, is trying to send you to a publisher's website.

01:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't like that either. I mean, the New York Times is suing OpenAI for that. So you're right, that's another cause for concern. But I'm sure they're able to be concerned about two things.

01:33:01 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, the other, the other issue there's a lot of free stuff out there, and if all you want is a shallow, you know, kind of rendition of the news from a site you might or might not be able to trust, you're going to find it anyway. I mean, certainly, if you look at CNN's free, I think we'll continue to be free. There's a lot of which is a legitimate site, but there's a lot of stuff there that you can get anyway, and I think that if these big sites start basically getting blocked from Google, it's going to hurt them in the long run.

01:33:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, and look, I think people know by now I am not a huge fan of Google anymore. I think Google has become well and shitified. Frankly, they're going for the profit at the cost of users. In fact, there was a new study just came out from researchers at Leipzig University. They asked the question is Google getting worse? We've all kind of anecdotally I think experienced this. You know the Google search results are worse than they used to be. They examined 7,392 product review queries on Google, bing and DuckDuckGo and they did it over a year. The research showed spam sites are hyper-prevalent showing up at the. So Google's not doing a good job of blocking spam showing up at the top of google rankings in what is quote, a constant battle end quote between the sites and search engines. In other words, they write search engines seem to be losing the cat and mouse game that is seo spam.

01:34:36
Um, I also just think when you go to a Google search, I don't use Google anymore. I use a page search site called Kagi K-A-G-I. That is um Harry McCracken. My friend uh recommended this uh and uh. I've been using it and it's not. I think it's 10 bucks a month but there's no ads. And so you know if you search for um tennis shoes on Google A lot of ads.

01:35:02
A lot of sponsored hits. That's an ad. That's a Nike ad, I think Dick's Sporting Goods. The organic search results are well below the fold. Yep Right.

01:35:14 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's also true on Amazon. If I'm looking for a particular product at Amazon, I've got to hunt through all of these would-be products that are trying to capitalize on that product name to find the one that I actually want to buy, in fact, at this point.

01:35:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google's turned this into a shopping site. It's even got the Amazon style filter by department brand price. I mean, this is a shopping site.

01:35:35
Google's put together a shopping site. Now, maybe because I'm searching for tennis shoes, google reasonably says oh well, obviously you're in the market to buy tennis shoes. We should show you our Google crafted shopping site, I guess. Let me go to Kagi and do the same search. See what I get. Again, I pay for this, so there's no ads, but this is more what I would. This is like how Google search results used to be, in fact. I'm still getting a drink.

01:36:02
Yeah, yeah, I'm still getting. Yes, this does not use Google at all. I'm still getting, by the way, nike and the dicks at the top based on page ranks. I'm getting some listicles, but I think I'm getting more organic search results here at this point. A lot of stores, this point, a lot of stores. Uh, some articles about tennis shoes are actually showing up. It isn't quite so clearly a shopping site. It's probably, uh, because it's tennis shoes that it's really looking this bad, but I don't know. I feel like google, am I wrong? Is google getting, not getting, not getting worse?

01:36:39 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Well, I answered my own question on the actual text of the proposed law.

01:36:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, let's go back to that. Yes.

01:36:48 - Denise Howell (Guest)
And it doesn't distinguish between snippets or links.

01:36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're all included, See a link is not stealing any traffic at all.

01:37:00 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right, it's not stealing any traffic at all, right, so it the text is uh, whether the platform links to, displays or presents an eligible digital journalism providers news articles, works of journalism, and if they do, then they're subject to the tax so that's clearly a grab, a money grab right, because a link doesn't in any way hurt you, it only helps you, and so they basically want Google to pay for the links to news.

01:37:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google says only 2% of our search traffic is about news, by the way, and you know the eligible digital journalism provider that you know?

01:37:33 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I wonder about that because there are a lot of upstart news that are filling in news deserts. Right, they're maybe small nonprofit newsrooms, former journalists you know journalists who formerly worked at a mainstream newspaper that cut jobs, starting starting their own publications. You know who is deciding who's?

01:37:56 - Denise Howell (Guest)
there. There are tons and tons of definitions in this proposed law, and an eligible digital journalism provider is an eligible publisher or eligible broadcaster that discloses its ownership to the public. That seems weird, a weird definition.

01:38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hedge funds, right. A weird definition. That's hedge funds, right. I really. I think Google is fairly credibly right that this is something written by hedge funds who want to use this as a way to jumpstart.

01:38:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm not sure.

01:38:32 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Okay, here we go. More definitions Qualifying publication. They're just trying to. They're trying to have a pretty broad definition here of who's going to get paid.

01:38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As long as, as long as the people who wrote this, the lobbyists who wrote this, get included, they're probably happy.

01:38:53 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Right.

01:38:53 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Exactly Denise are there first amendment implications in having to disclose your ownership?

01:39:02 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I would say yeah, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting and I think there are first amendment implications and chumley pointed this out in irc of the government telling google how to present its search results.

01:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that's arguably its it's commercial speech yeah, jeff jarvis wrote a uh, a um analysis of it, uh, which he had published on his medium blog. If you want to uh read it, uh, he was commissioned to write this. Uh, we should point out um by, let me see, if it says um was commissioned by the California Foundation for Commerce and Education, which is basically the California Chamber of Commerce. They did not exercise control over the content, although they did compensate Jeff to write this, but he wrote a very nice, I think, and it probably worth your time especially you, denise, as an attorney 41-page summary of what this is and why it's bad for journalism.

01:40:02 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, we'll definitely read it yeah it's on his. If we go back to that 2% thing. That boggled me. Do you think it's? True. It's not true in my case, I mean I think I primarily use. Oh yeah, no. I primarily use it to find articles I can actually access that aren't behind a pay and or subscription wall.

01:40:24 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yes, but we're, we're, we are, you know, oldsters, olders. Well, also we're, we are news publishers. We're, you know, all of us, I think have some role in identifying, selecting and presenting news, that's true, yes, also being interested in news.

01:40:40 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean, I go out of my way several times a day to find out what the latest news is on a variety of subjects, and my daughter, on the other hand, does everything possible to avoid finding out what the news is. She doesn't want to be bummed out by it. No, you know what I'm kind of with her.

01:40:56 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's a real phenomenon. It's a real phenomenon. It's called news fatigue and it is something that you know. I think publishers really ought to wrestle with more of. You know it's like, hey, if people you know, like if a segment of consumers are, like actively turned off by your product what are you doing?

01:41:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the quote from Google's keyword is well known, says google. They always. It's always suspicious when, instead of citing actual research or stats, they say you know, it's well known. It's well known that people are getting news from sources like short form videos. Actually, tiktok is actually a big source of of news for millennials and Gen Z Topical newsletters, social media and curated podcasts and many are avoiding the news entirely, just like your daughter. In line with those trends, just 2% of queries on Google search are news related. Now, google does have a news app. They have a news site. I'm like your daughter in the sense that I stopped watching 24-hour news. Yeah, channels.

01:42:04
That was really bad for my brain, but I know what's going on. I, I well, I I get the headlines I on my phone. I read newspapers, I read I actually prefer long-form uh magazines, uh, because it's a little more thoughtful but I I certainly know what's going on and I get alerts. I got an alert yesterday when Iran launched drones against Israel the minute it happened. So I'm not avoiding news, but what I am avoiding is the Sturm und Drang, the outrage engine that a lot of news media has become, I need to go on a 12-step program for cable news.

01:42:40 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I mean, I actually had for you. It's bad for you.

01:42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've seen far too much of it I know and I love you know, I love it, but at the same time I know it's been it's like very much like twitter, which is totally addictive.

01:42:53 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Can I just can I just anecdotally told you, tell you what, or share with you what I saw on cnn, that, as the eclipse was about to happen, what they brought on not an astronomer, but an astrologist and they said well, the moon is in the seventh house and mercury aligns with mars and there was some some sort of saying well, so many people are looking to astrology now.

01:43:24
This was their justification of the story and they felt they did need to justify it, and so I assumed the story would be on that the sociological impact of the eclipse on people who look increasingly to astrology. Nope, it was. The moon is in the seventh house, it is I, if that doesn't tell you about cable news jumping the shark.

01:43:52 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I don't know what does they still call themselves the world most important news source, or something like that.

01:43:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, the world's most important news network. Yeah, uh, yeah, get off the. Get off the 24 hour news train. Nothing's gonna. If anything important is happening, you'll find out. Larry, you really will. You don't have to. You know, anderson cooper does not have to tell you.

01:44:16 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Uh, oh, he are you kidding, he's one of the more credible ones. It's the morning joe that I gotta get away from oh, stop it.

01:44:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, jeff watches that. It just see. It gets me angry. I feel my blood pressure going up, my stomach and knots. It's upsetting and, by the way, that's not by accident. Everybody working in broadcast news knows and I know I used to work in broadcast news, you did too, and I know I used to work in broadcast news, you did too that the way to keep people listening is to get them either scared or upset or outraged, but that keeps people watching and listening.

01:44:52 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That was. You know. I was actually interviewed to be on Oprah to talk about Internet safety and they did not put me on the air.

01:44:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You weren't outrageous enough.

01:44:55 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I didn't say that going online is going to result in being assaulted. Result in being, you know, assaulted by somebody. I wouldn't buy into the hype and they didn't put me on the show and I've had that experience with a number of networks, so you know they know they're not.

01:45:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, we think they're in the news business. They are not in the news business, they're in the entertainment business. They're in the eyeball business. They're in the eyeball business, right? And that's one of the reasons, by the way, we promote the club. I want to get out of the eyeball business, right? I don't like being in the eyeball business, but let's take a break In order to sell something In order to sell something, only because I need to Until you guys all pony up'm gonna do the ads.

01:45:42
You know, if we give you what's different about us? You know, I worked in radio where it was 19 minutes out of a 60 minute hour of ads. That's one third ads, right, right there, it's just non-stop. And uh, I always said we're never gonna do more than one ad every half hour. Uh, and we, we stick to and we also turn down a lot of advertisers which, by the way, they're baffled by that.

01:46:05
I remember I was at an upfront in New York City. Our agency flew us out to speak to an upfront, which is where shows go. In this case it was a podcast upfront. But networks do it too to pitch their year ahead and to get advertisers to buy ads. And my interviewer said well, well, do you ever say no to ads? We say I say no to more ads and I say yes, and the audience was filled with advertising agencies.

01:46:30
There was an audible gasp. They said you say no. Yeah, we say no all the time. Uh, we say no either because we don't want to do the ads or because we don't think we'd be helpful. We literally turn down money because we don't think you know, companies that are selling jewelry, for instance, or women's shoes, will come to us. We'll say you know what, thank you, we'd love your money, but we can't take it because we're not going to do very well for you. It's, you know, unless we think we can do well for you, we're not going to do it, which is why the predominant predominantly you'll hear ads about security, networks, technology and stuff, because that's who we talk to and um, and we and we're very careful only to put sponsors on that we believe in. Like you don't take a drug ads right from. Like no drug ads, no vitamin ads. We did vitamins. I kind of regret it. Uh, we're not going to do them anymore. We know vaping, no e-cigs, no cryptocurrency.

01:47:31 - Larry Magid (Guest)
So we have whole categories we say no to I'd like to see and sadly no hair care tools I oh, but I do love that I do love that water brush and. I love the curling.

01:47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know those aren't ads, though. That's real endorsements from real users.

01:47:46 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Every time I see a drug ad, I'm convinced I have that disease. Oh, I know.

01:47:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see again 24 hour networks are watched by people our age, larry, and we need our medication, and so 90% of the ads on those things you know and it's we'll call it sausage fingers your hair to fall out. You may die, but your skin will be clear and beautiful.

01:48:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
My favorite one is Viagra. Viagra will make you sexually potent, but you'll be bald.

01:48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so your choice? Yeah, right, which would you like? Yeah, don't get me started, but we are very careful. We like our advertisers, we're very happy, and I will tell you about one that I think the world of, and it's NetSuite. In fact, netsuite is the number one cloud financial system. You're talking accounting, financial management, inventory, hr all in one platform, and you know what that means. One source of truth the less your business spends on operations multiple systems the less you spend on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have, the more money you keep. But how do you reduce costs and headaches? Well, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud financial system. With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because you're not running it locally. It lives in the cloud, no hardware required. You can access it anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems. You have one unified business management suite. You improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes under one roof, into one platform slashing manual tasks, slashing errors. A single source of truth makes a huge difference. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. So do the math. See how you can profit with NetSuite.

01:49:34
By popular demand, netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. But don't delay. Now's the time. Head to netsuitecom slash twit. N-e-t-s-u-i-t-e. Netsuitecom slash twit flexible financing for a few more weeks at netsuitecom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Uh, fcc has now mandated fcc's. It's very interesting watching the fcc these days. They're, they're, oh, who's that hello puppy? Is that your emotional uh rescue animal?

01:50:17 - Larry Magid (Guest)
oh, actually, I'm his emotional support, human, you realize this is an unfair competition to the rest of us. There's no way that Denise and I can compete with a cute puppy.

01:50:28 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I have mine in the next room. I can go grab her. You might be in trouble.

01:50:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Larry. I have mine in the next

01:50:34 - Denise Howell (Guest)
room as well, dog on dog you might be, in trouble. He's being very patient. I have to be my granddaughter.

01:50:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh, your granddaughter will win so, but, leo, you were talking about the furry critters commission yes, that's it, the FCC, the furry Critters Commission.

01:50:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are bringing back net neutrality, which is interesting. It also has some interesting side effects, but I like this one. They are now mandating nutrition labels for broadband plans. Major ISPs had until April 10th just a couple of days ago to publish labels at point of sale with the information you need, things like well, much, how much bandwidth am I actually going to get? How much data is included with this plan? Are there limits? Uh, what's the price? Is it an introductory rate? If it is, how long does it apply for? What is the price after the introductory rate? How, how long is the contract? What are the additional charges? Do you charge me for a modem? Do you charge me a device installment fee? Do you charge me purchase fees, backup fees, termination fees, government taxes? What are they going to cost? This is great. I mean thank you, fcc for finally, you know I mean this is do the right thing.

01:51:59 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Can I be a cranky consumer for a second? Yes, what is with the like? You know broadband caps Like I believe that the modern Internet was built on like you pay a monthly fee, you get all the Internet you can consume. Yeah, maybe speeds are limited, but it doesn't feel right to have a cap on your broadband consumption. I get that there might be people who are running services off of their home computers and they probably need to be switched to a commercial plan because they're actually running a business off of their home internet connection. But you know most of us like, what are we doing? We're sending some emails, we're browsing the web, we're streaming Netflix. Like, calm down broadband providers with the data caps. This has been my cranky consumer rant. Thank you for listening.

01:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you know it's funny because Dvorak and I Thank you for listening. No, you know it's funny because Dvorak and I, 15 years ago, had this fight. I would say it cost them incremental, fractionally, incrementally, to give you bandwidth. The bandwidth is not the expense, it's the infrastructure they put in in the first place. They cost you almost nothing to give you additional bandwidth. This is a money grab.

01:53:15
I've said that for years Dvorak said no, no, no, no. It costs some money, it doesn a money grab. I've said that for years. To work say no, no, no, no cost of money. It doesn't cost the money. It's like a water company the water is practically free.

01:53:23 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's the delivery that costs the money well, you know, there was a time when you had to pay for long distance calls and I used to wonder as a kid does it really cost a lot more money to get a call from la to new york? You know, it was like three dollars a minute. It's a good point, you know point. But the other question I would like to see on this broadband label for consumers is an understanding about how much speed you actually need. Now I have to admit I bought the gigabit service because I wanted it and I do some uploading, but the reality is that most of us can get away with far less speed than that and not notice a difference, and I think people are paying for speed that they don't need.

01:54:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I remember looking into my Wi-Fi router and the speed it could support. It was like, oh, I definitely don't need to pay Comcast more because I couldn't. You know, it's like all of that speed will be stopped at my Wi-Fi router and I won't ever see it.

01:54:18 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. A lot of equipment can't support five gigs of internet speed.

01:54:23 - Larry Magid (Guest)
We have Tesla like to talk about how fast its cars go, but nobody in the right mind would ever drive their car 160 miles an hour on a public road. It's bragging. There are people who aren't in the right mind to do, but.

01:54:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, when I bought my Model X, I did buy ludicrous mode and I you know I used it for demos, Right? I would say, OK, hold on, sit back, relax, and then and I stopped doing it because I blacked. I almost blacked out a couple of times.

01:54:48 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And I thought no, this is too dangerous. It's just a silly paid a lot of money for that.

01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I paid a lot of money, thousands of dollars. It was dumb. The FCC is looking into this data caps thing. Actually, they announced this last year. I don't know what the outcome has been, but they actually have a data caps experience form at FCCgov because they're trying to, I think, collect data so that they can perhaps go after this. So your hopes may be heard at some point. It's been a year, I don't know. They are going to do a vote April 25th to restore net neutrality protections and to reclassify broadband as a Title II service. This was, of course, the big kerfuffle back in the Trump administration when they turned that off. Now I think we all thought the sky was going to fall. I don't suppose it did, although I can't think the prices went down as a result of eliminating that neutrality. But I'm glad, I guess I'm glad I'm bringing it back. In principle, I absolutely support the idea that a bit is a bit.

01:56:02 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You know it's funny. When I used to do radio shows about net neutrality, I used to the analogy I use it would be as if the public highway charged you extra money to drive in the fast lane.

01:56:11 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Well, guess what California has just done?

01:56:13 - Denise Howell (Guest)
They do that now All over the place.

01:56:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I want road neutrality. I want road neutrality.

01:56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so under Ajit Pai, they so originally Title II. It's a complicated, long story. Title II reclassification was granted in 2015 by Obama's open internet order, later repealed by agit pi. That's the current state, um, but on on april 25th, the fcc wants to vote to restore its authority to regulate comcast, at&t, t-mobile and to regulate net neutrality. Restore net neutrality, I think that's. I hope that that will happen and I think it will.

01:57:01 - Denise Howell (Guest)
The thing they seem to be most concerned about is these preferential deals with providers like Netflix, for example. Zero rating yes, exactly, they come in under your cap and don't count.

01:57:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's hard to explain to consumers why that's bad, because on the face of it sounds pretty good, right? You mean, I can watch netflix on my t-mobile and it doesn't cost me extra. Sign me up, right. Why is that bad?

01:57:31 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
but a lot of that bundling, you know, never came to pass. Look at h&t spinning off warner, now Warner Brothers Discovery, like that combination of a telco and a media company just didn't work because, frankly, the investment profile, you know, the deep capital expenditures in telco and then the, you know we're kind of at odds with the way media needed to spend. And you know, like, obviously Comcast is kind of an example of a cable company and a media company that have been successfully grafted together, but there are very few other examples of that kind of working.

01:58:11 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I have HBO free with my AT&T plan because it's grandfathered, but now you could no longer get that. No matter what AT&T plan you're on, you're not going to get free hbo anymore, right?

01:58:21 - Denise Howell (Guest)
now. But you know you're not. You're not going to be someone who's going to be zero rated for a consumer. So I mean that's one way in which it's bad is it makes it hard for you to compete.

01:58:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if spotify got zero rated, let's say and so in fact it may be, I don't know on uh tMobile they may give you a free, not only give you a Spotify account, but then say and you don't pay for the bits, so you don't have to worry about hitting a broadband cap or bandwidth cap or anything, because we'll give you the bits for free. That's called zero rating. That sounds like, on the face of it. A consumer say hey, great, I can listen to Spotify, but we're not, so we're not on, so we're not Spotify. Joe Rogan gets a benefit because he's Spotify exclusive, so it doesn't cost you anything to listen to Joe Rogan. But you start listening to twits. Suddenly it costs you something. That's the problem in a nutshell. But you.

01:59:08 - Denise Howell (Guest)
you can be Spotify, right, you can put a feed up there, yeah. So, that's a bad example.

01:59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but you get the idea that if, if you, if you zero rate some players those players are, and usually they're big players are getting a leg up over any incumbent or any innovator that wants to come and challenge the incumbent, any competitor. But it's hard to explain. You could see why it's hard to explain.

01:59:32 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Would Spotify come to you and say like hey, Leo, here's an offer you can't refuse. We're going to take 70% of your advertising revenue.

01:59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, exactly, yeah, yeah, we don't actually we're on Spotify, as all podcasts can be, but we don't charge through Spotify because yeah they would take too big of a chunk.

01:59:53 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, it is hard for consumers to care about, say, the negotiation between a Comcast and a Netflix over what Netflix pays, between a Comcast and a Netflix over what Netflix pays. You know, and it's kind of it's about these fees that are kind of charged in the middle of the network when traffic's being exchanged and you know it has a lot to do with, like, how much is going upstream versus downstream and it is important. But it is really opaque to the consumer, like even the. You know, even those nutrition labels wouldn't really shed any light on the impact of net neutrality on, like, the everyday consumer, what they pay.

02:00:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were talking about this on Wednesday and Benito, our technical director and producer, hi Benito. Benito Gonzalez talked about See in the US. We have a different experience, but his experience in the Philippines is very different.

02:00:42 - Benito (Other)
Yeah, so in the Philippines you can still get that open Internet experience. But most of the middle class and higher class folks will get your regular DSL fiber Internet. But most people who get their Internet plans from their straight, like all their Internet, comes from their mobile phone. They can purchase a plan where they get zero data, but all of Facebook is free and that's what they opt for most of the time. So their whole internet experience is Facebook and Facebook subsidizes this.

02:01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, this was what Facebook offered India. I remember India said, no, we have experience with colonization, we're not interested. But Facebook was offering something called the internet. That was really uh, basically, facebook right it was aol.

02:01:28
Yeah, they, they, the whole idea of it was look, uh, developing worlds, we will offer you connectivity. And it wouldn't just here it is, it's still there. This is they called it internetorg. The idea is in the developing world, we'll provide the bandwidth, no problem. But the bandwidth is essentially a walled garden where it's meta and then a few other services, not meta, to give you the feeling that you're doing the internet. But what you're getting in the Philippines, if you're doing that, is not really the full, broad, open internet. You may not even get Twit right.

02:02:07 - Benito (Other)
Yeah, you're not going to get anything If you subscribe to one of those plans where you don't have data but Facebook is free. That's how it's promoted. It's like you don't get data but Facebook is you don't get data.

02:02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really zero rating and that's the end game on zero rating and really a big, a big part of the problem. I agree.

02:02:26 - Denise Howell (Guest)
So I looked up these um, what do we call them? Nutritional labels that are now mandated for the ISPs, uh, which which look great, and they're. At&t has rolled them out, as they had to by April 10th. So I'm looking at the ones for my neck of the woods and unfortunately there's a lot of fine print, so maybe people don't read through everything, but the thing that just leaps out at me is that all of AT&T's available plans and they start this is for their fiber they start at eighty dollars a month for one gig and go up to I think it was two twenty five or five gigs, which many people may not have equipment that will work with. So, aside from that not being disclosed, all of the plans are described as unlimited data and, as far as I can, I don't see anything here about throttling.

02:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They may be. You know, it's funny because I at one point I got an email from Comcast saying you've gone over a terabyte this month. We're going to let you go over a terabyte two more times, but then we're going to charge you extra. I should check because you know I I didn't pay attention and it may well be that we're paying a higher tier. That's what happens now. They don't throttle you anymore, they just charge you extra.

02:03:48 - Denise Howell (Guest)
They charge you so your speed stays your speed stays.

02:03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get better, better service for more money we have it's a weird situation because we have sonic fiber here and it's 10 gigabits symmetric, but we don't have much hardware that can use it right right and right up front at the top.

02:04:08 - Denise Howell (Guest)
At&t says no data caps, so maybe that's that's why they do it, maybe yeah yeah uh, let's see what's going on here.

02:04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of ai sag after, by the way, uh oh sorry, unlimited data.

02:04:24 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I just looked up the original announcement between 18 and apple of the iphone plans yes, they're all described as unlimited data and it was I get it, was I get a monthly text from 18t about. You know like we going to throttle you if you? Well, that was changed.

02:04:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You would have had unlimited data if you hadn't canceled that fine plan that you got back in 2007.

02:04:47 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I've kept that very expensive plan.

02:04:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh interesting. Wow, you never. Oh, so now they're maybe taking it back. Randall Stevens, who was the CEO of AT&T at the time, said it was the worst thing he'd ever done. In order to get the iPhone, they had to offer unlimited data and he said it costs us so much money he's. He said it was. Uh, it was the worst thing I did in my tenure at AT&T.

02:05:15
It was a fun time to have an iPhone then and so many people stayed grandfathered in. I'm impressed, owen, that you were able to keep that. I guess they've.

02:05:27 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I only canceled mine, like in the last two years. I had it for a really long time too.

02:05:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here, here he is. This is back in 2012. At&t CEO unlimited phone data was a big mistake. I lose sleep over iMessage. He's no longer the CEO, I might add. And here, by the way, in the Cult of Mac column from 2012, it's a picture of Randall Stevenson with the subtitle Randall Stevenson is playing the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin Ah the good old days of snark.

02:06:02 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You have to remember how weak AT&T was at that point and how much the iPhone contributed to its comeback. Yeah, it was really a secondary player in wireless or seriously playing catch-up.

02:06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he only did it because he had to. It wasn't like he ran to Steve and said I'll give you free data. They needed it. They had to do it. On stage interview at the Milken Institute's global conference. He said my only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning. Because how did we introduce pricing? $30 and you get all you can eat, and it's a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.

02:06:46 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, he had to build up his infrastructure, but it paid off in the long run. Absolutely, yeah, so big deal.

02:06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely. That moment I think was part of the BlackBerry movie, if I'm not mistaken. What a great movie that was. I think it's pretty accurate. But they show how Steve Jobs met with Sam Sigmund, who was the chief executive at Singular, and talked him into offering the iPhone, and at the time BlackBerry thought nothing to worry about.

02:07:23 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Why would anybody want a phone without a keyboard? Makes no sense at all. Makes no sense, yeah.

02:07:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
SAG-AFTRA has made a deal, I'm happy to say, for its movie star and TV radio stars in the union, which I used to be but no longer have to be because I'm not on the radio. Are you, do you do enough radio that you stayed in?

02:07:44 - Larry Magid (Guest)
the union. I'm still a member, but I'm not. You know I'm not doing much.

02:07:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I'm technically a member, but I'm on a bands.

02:07:52 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, I'm on some kind. I don't get this you know it used to be the big benefit of being a SAG after member I know what you're gonna say.

02:08:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you got the screeners. You get the screening dvds for the second. Now who needs now? It's all screened anyway.

02:08:04 - Larry Magid (Guest)
So who cares?

02:08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in fact, that was always the best part of being in a SAG after member. Yeah, you go to the mailbox and there's all these dvds. But but even even before I quit, uh, they just send you codes and it was like not as good Right.

02:08:19 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And now most of them are already on Netflix or Amazon Prime. By now they're out.

02:08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually it was fun for a while. Big news for the geeks in our audience Dune 2 comes out on streaming on Amazon Prime tomorrow. Tomorrow, have you seen Fallout yet? You guys aren't that type.

02:08:36 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I have. No, I totally am, I've been meaning to watch it.

02:08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't seen it yet, though, but you know you saw, huh, I saw. Yeah, I've watched the first two episodes. I'd say I loved that game so did I.

02:08:46 - Benito (Other)
I mean, personally, this is a probably a hot take, but I hate that there's canon for this game, because the old games didn't have any canon canon, you don't mean like big guns that shoot giant no, I mean what happened before the, what happened before the fall the Bible you mean the Bible of it.

02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What they did, though, which is great, is they captured the kind of tongue-in-cheek retrofuturism style so nicely. I thought made fallout so fun to play was living in that weird post-nuclear apocalypse world where they still listen to 1930s music, but they've got robots yeah, my head canon for that was that it's post.

02:09:27
Uh, dr, strange love, that's what the fallout universe yeah yeah, they're all wearing these giant pip boys on their wrists, these giant wrist. You know I've got more power in my Apple Watch, but no, in those days they were a giant thing on their wrists Because it was a CRT.

02:09:44
Yeah, they had a CRT on their wrists. It's so much to me. It's really fun to watch the show, only because it's that world. I didn't play enough of the games to know if it's actually the game. It's actually the game. It's not the same story, is it?

02:10:03 - Benito (Other)
Well, see, that's where I diverge, because the story changed after Fallout 3, because that's when it changed hands to Bethesda.

02:10:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wasn't it isometric at first?

02:10:12 - Benito (Other)
It used to be a top-down isometric view made by Black Isle and the original creator is brian fargo should I play the old fallout versions before I watch the show? I don't know. I think fallout. I think this makes more of a nod to like the new fallout yeah, I played fallout 76 and I liked I.

02:10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was fun.

02:10:33 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I know there were issues with it well, I'm gonna jump in and say I don't think many of the people who fell in love with the Last of Us were probably players of the game.

02:10:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Now, the Last of Us followed the game. I mean actually the plot of the game. I don't think this has the plot of Fallout, of any Fallout game, but there's the vaults. I think it's great, by the way, incredibly violent, but funny and good. I think it's very good. Did you watch the whole thing, benito, yet? Yeah, I finished it. Worth watching. Sure, yeah it was fun.

02:11:06 - Benito (Other)
You're not thrilled with it though that's very much a personal thing. I know that's not a real thing.

02:11:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you really like the games, you might not like it.

02:11:16 - Benito (Other)
Well, I was just a big fan of the original, like Fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout Tactics.

02:11:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I might have to get. You can get them on Steam and, I think, even Xbox. You get the older games, oh, absolutely.

02:11:25 - Benito (Other)
Or GOG.

02:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, good old, games, yeah, gog okay.

02:11:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
When are they going to make a Civilization?

02:11:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have it's the History of the World, part 2. Mel Brooks, they have it's.

02:11:42 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
it's the history of the world part two. That's, it's mel brooks did it, it's done, it's over, you know. But but I think, like you know, I think having, like maniacally, nuclear happy gandhi would be that's, that's going to be a real winner, so popular is that where you take your civ 5 you take, you go gandhi, you make him a nuclear power is that what you do?

02:12:01
there was this weird bug in civ where gandhi as like a you know, a, a peace-loving leader, um would like flip over to like extremely more like yeah, this was a bug in civilization one or two where gandhi just came out like nuclear. Gandhi was a war freak.

02:12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What. And they just, yeah, they just made it a thing, they like promoted. They said, good, oh, that's what we're going to lean into, that bug.

02:12:28 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You don't want to make Gandhi mad. It's kind of the civilization.

02:12:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ghalia says it was an integer overflow. That makes sense. So he went so far to the left on non-violence that he flipped over to violent.

02:12:40 - Denise Howell (Guest)
That makes sense, yeah, yeah yeah well, back to our point about humor over the years and how it changes with technology. I'm wondering if anyone's seen this steve martin documentary.

02:12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, of course love steve and it's a beautiful uh documentary. Did you like it?

02:12:59 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I loved it.

02:12:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:13:00 - Denise Howell (Guest)
But you know, I mean, I agree, he was like my second dad as I was growing up, my, my naughty second dad who told jokes my real dad wouldn't tell naughty and wear arrows through his head and make balloons. Yeah.

02:13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's a wonder. It's really a wonderful show. It makes you fall in love with them all over again, really.

02:13:20 - Denise Howell (Guest)
It really does.

02:13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's take a little break. We got some final words with our wonderful, esteemed panel members, but first a word from Wix Studio. Now, I've been going around looking at websites and web creation tools and I got to say Wix Studio blew me away. I only have a minute to tell you about Wix Studio. This is the web platform for agencies and enterprises. Here are a few things you can do from start to finish. I got 60 seconds, let's see. Let's go.

02:13:49
Adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI. How about that? Expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with back-end and front-end APIs. How about that? Generate code and troubleshoot bugs with a built-in AI code assistant. Switch up styling of hundreds of web pages I mean talking fonts, layouts, colors all with a one click. Add no-code animations, gradient backgrounds you can do that right in the editor. You can start a design library. You can package your code and UI in reusable full-stack applications. Oh, and one more big one you can deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. That's just not enough time, but the list keeps on going. There's so much great stuff to love about Wix Studio. Here's the thing I love Every site looks like its own unique snowflake it's not a cookie cutter solution, and each one of them is unique in its own right. Step into Wix Studio. See for yourself. Go to Wixcom slash studio or click on the link on the show page and find out more Wixcom slash studio. Thank you very much.

02:15:00
A little obituary for a legend in physics the I guess inventor, Can you say inventor? God invented the Higgs boson, but Peter Higgs discovered it, Shall we say that? Passed away at the age of 94. Won the Nobel Prize. It's a great story because he theorized the existence of the Higgs boson in 1964. He said it helps bind the universe together by giving particles their mass. But, of course, in 1964, you're not going to. Hey, there it is, there's the Higgs boson. We didn't know.

02:15:38
I remember very well when the Large Hadron Collider in CERN in 2012 began experiments and there was some concern, by the way, at the time that they would somehow create antimatter and blow up the world. But they didn't and they discovered that Higgs. Peter Higgs was right. There was, in fact, a Higgs boson. Amazing that, you know, 40 years after his original discovery. 48 years after his original discovery, experimental physics would prove him right. Pretty impressive. The Higgs boson still bears his name. He got a Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the time the standard model of physics which underpins the scientific understanding of the universe rests on the existence of a special kind of particle, the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space. Okay, Even when the universe seems empty, the Higgs boson is there.

02:16:49 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And we are more connected. As a result of Higgs, cern, which was founded largely to pursue this research, also created the World Wide Web. That's right, and it was largely to share scientific data around this very research. That was the kind of immediate need, isn't that great, yeah. But now we have the whole, now we can share, you know. Cute dog videos.

02:17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, of course, tim Berners-lee is still around and uh and being very active in the development of of the world wide web, so that's cool but also how wonderful that higgs lived to see his you know his theory borne out yeah, yeah, apparently very unassuming quiet guy, kind of a steve martin of physics very didn't wear our arrow through his head, but kind of an unassuming quiet guy who who got the recognition he deserved, which is always always nice.

02:17:45
And as long as we're talking science, I don't know, you know, a lot of times I read these stories. Nothing ever comes of them. This is kind of interesting from science daily. Uh, an improved charging protocol that might help lithium-ion batteries last much longer. Sounds like you're familiar with this, larry.

02:18:05 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well, it's funny Having a car with a lithium-ion battery. What I want to know is where do I buy this charger? I literally have a brand new. I actually opted. So they have two different technologies on the Tesla the LFP, which stands for somebody tell me what it stands something phosphate which doesn't degrade as fast, but it's also a smaller battery, so it doesn't give you that much range. Or you can opt for the lithium ion, which gives you a longer range but faster degradation, and it sounds like this is a cure to the degradation and, if I'm reading this right, in theory you should be able to buy a charger. I suspect this is years away from commercial exploitation, but one should be able to extend the lifetime of any battery if this research is correct and somebody builds a product that actually bears it out.

02:18:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Batteries like ours are charged usually with a constant current. When you plug in to your charger there's a constant flow of electrons. A new study by HZB and Humboldt University in Berlin says that's not the best way to charge them. They say you should pulse the electricity. Pulsed current clear differences between the two. In constant current the solid electrolyte interface of the anode was significantly thicker, which is one way the capacity gets impaired. But pulse charging led to a thinner SEI interface. Fewer structural changes in the electrode materials. Speeds up charging but, more importantly, makes the battery last a lot longer. Doubled the life cycle, double the life cycle.

02:19:43 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I just Googled pulse battery charger. I guess there are. There are products that claim to do that, so I'm going to. Might be soon, yeah.

02:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Denise, do you drive an electric vehicle? Are you still a gas bound?

02:19:55 - Denise Howell (Guest)
I am gas bound, but my next vehicle will at least be a hybrid. I'm pretty sure Everybody. Go ahead. I have an e-bike, so I'm curious about extending its battery life.

02:20:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody who drives an electric, actually car or bicycle, and my experience goes, wow, where have you been all my life? It's really they're fun, don't you love your e-bike.

02:20:20 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Oh, I love my e-bike.

02:20:21 - Larry Magid (Guest)
where do you live, denise? Uh, I live in newport beach okay, because I live in palo alto where, unless I go into the hills, it's flat, so I haven't bought an e-bike because I don't need an e-bike with the right around flatland, but it is great when you are in hills it's terrific harry mccracken rides his e-bike all the way from down where you are, all the way up across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, has a cup of coffee and rides back on his e-bike Because you know you still pedal, you still get exercise.

02:20:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a car alternative. It's a great way of getting around.

02:20:53 - Larry Magid (Guest)
My son bought one because he didn't want to buy a second car for him and his partner.

02:20:56 - Denise Howell (Guest)
They have an e-bike and a car Right and I find I actually get more exercise as a cyclist on my e-bike because, like you said, there are hills that I just couldn't navigate without its help, and with its help I can still get exercise on those hills.

02:21:11 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, you know, I couldn't imagine going back to a gasoline car. I mean, hybrids are great. We have a Prius, we love our Prius. It's a great car and, frankly, we don't buy much gas for it. But I just love the fact that I can fill up at night. Every night I fill up my car and the next day I've got a full tank of electricity to you know, of course, not everybody lives in their own house. If you live in an apartment, it can be much more challenging.

02:21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I got to point out, you live in an area where gas prices are actually close to $8 a gallon.

02:21:49 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Now, right, they've really gone up. I saw a Redwood City gas station.

02:21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was $7.50 a gallon. Let me see if you feel better about my. Eat peep. Buy electric bill.

02:21:54 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, it's a very nice feeling to drive by that $8 a gallon. On the other hand, if you're using superchargers or if you're charging and paying for it on the road, you actually are paying, sometimes as much as gasoline, depending upon no we got?

02:22:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we got 60 solar panels. We got two tesla power walls. We charge you almost always charge at home you're driving on sunshine, driving on sunshine.

02:22:15 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Hear me out on that out crazy idea what if we, what if we took a car but made it like more of a shared vehicle with capacity for you know, I don't know 50, 60 people? I mean, uh, electric, oh and. And we, instead of having to charge it, you had continuous power through an overhead line wow, I could beat you on that.

02:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if you dug, dug holes, board holes, if it were into the ground and took that 60-person car and drove it through the ground so there was no congestion? Now, what are you talking? Now, what do you say?

02:22:51 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Wow, okay, but to get more efficient, why don't you take those rubber wheels and make them steel? Oh god, since it's a dedicated pathway, put steel rails.

02:23:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so steel wheels on steel rails or what if you board a long tunnel underneath the city of las vegas and you took teslas and you drove them slowly?

02:23:14 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
oh, and you could have a flamethrower too you know, the, the flamethrower is the pièce de résistance of the whole can you guys see that word processor over my shoulder?

02:23:26 - Larry Magid (Guest)
that doesn't require batteries. It works as unlimited uh charging incredible that is amazing.

02:23:32 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So is it biologically powered? Is that?

02:23:35 - Larry Magid (Guest)
that's right. It's actually in fact. I burn up calories every time I use it. It's finger power.

02:23:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So it's like it's almost a hybrid between a Peloton and Microsoft Word.

02:23:44 - Larry Magid (Guest)
There was a Dennis Domenes. I don't know if anybody here remembers Dennis Domenes, but there was an episode like when I was a kid and Dennis went over to his neighbor, mr Wilson's house and Mr Wilson had a carpet sweeper and Dennis couldn't believe that he could operate this carpet sweeper without plugging it into the wall. And what an amazing invention that was. He just pushed it right. Just push it, it cleaned your carpet.

02:24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, I know these are all flights of fancy, but maybe someday we'll have something we can wear on our wrists with a little cathode ray tube that can tell you where you are at all times. It's just a dream, but it's my dream. Thank you, denise howell, her new podcast. I'm so thrilled that you finally got a feed for it here. I'm so thrilled myself. Say culture. There's two of them. There's R&D with D&D, dave and Denise, and is technology helping or hurting us? Is the latest episode. You also did one about NFTs and then uneven distribution, which, of course, is a play on the classic William Gibson comment the future's already here, it's just not very evenly distributed. Denise talks about the future. Move fast and break things All in all out. Please hold the fallout. Oh, you did one about fallout.

02:25:09 - Denise Howell (Guest)
That's Dave Siffrey, by the way. Oh, I love Dave. Oh, dave is my most recent guest, most recent show.

02:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fair.

02:25:19 - Denise Howell (Guest)
What did you guys talk about besides Fallout? We talked about AI and various AI tools that Dave has been working on, including one called Questy, which is pretty interesting.

02:25:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't heard of him since Technorati, so he's still very active out there. That's great.

02:25:34 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Very active out there.

02:25:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love hearing that People say that about me all the time. They go. What have you been doing since tech TV 20 years ago? Nothing, nothing important. Denise, thank you, it's always a pleasure. Any hair products you might recommend I should buy for my wife, just let me know, okay.

02:25:51 - Denise Howell (Guest)
Yeah, I know I've already downloaded all of my knowledge to you, so anything else comes up, I'll let you know.

02:26:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank. So anything else comes up I'll let you know. Thank you, denise. Uh, mr larry maggot uh, longtime cbs radio commentator. You still hear him from time to time. Their president and ceo of connect safely connect safelyorg. If you hear a clacking coming from the office he's typing boys and girls well, if I can promote my own podcast, I have a new one.

02:26:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It's called are we doing tech right? It's connect safelyorg slash podcast, if you want to bring it up. And uh, we have interviewed everybody from, uh, you know, vid surf and leonard kleinrock the creators of the internet to say what would they do now? Uh, we recently did one with, uh, our friend jeff um, I'm blanking his last name Jarvis.

02:26:39 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Jeff.

02:26:39 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Jarvis.

02:26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that guy, oh that Jeff.

02:26:41 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Had a Dodge Tecto Moral Panics, nice Youth Mental Health in the Age of Cancel Culture. That's another very recent one. So you can get these wherever you get your podcasts and, of course, at connectsafelyorg slash podcast. Nice, yeah, congratulations. This looks great. Yeah, yeah, congratulations, this looks great.

02:27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, it's doing what it's doing very well. We're really enjoying doing it, um cool. Thank you, larry, great to see you. You know, I find, uh, the podcast scratched many of the radio itches, if, as it were, yeah, I get to use this mic and I paid all this money for this big microphone.

02:27:16 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's right, you get to use it, yeah to use it, but I don't get to use my ISDN line anymore. You're the only one listening. Who knows what that is.

02:27:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, in fact did we turn ours off? You still have one. We had one until we ended the radio show. It got turned off, but we still have the Comrex boxes in case they ever need it.

02:27:35 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Oh, I have to tell you my box is at the Computer History Museum. I donated it. Cbs didn't want it back. Oh, that's awesome, so it's on display.

02:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the days of broadcasting, Larry Magid would use this box to communicate with the world. That's right.

02:27:52 - Denise Howell (Guest)
And it's because it was symmetrical right, symmetrical up and down. It was reliable. It was a digital.

02:27:58 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It was a digital it was direct line and it actually worked every time back when the internet didn't work so well. But you're right denise.

02:28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It had two 64k channels so it had enough bandwidth to send high quality audio down. But we also would get high quality audio back and for calling radio and stuff like that. It wasn't, it was a necessity. But did you have a?

02:28:16 - Larry Magid (Guest)
hybrid, yeah, telephone, yeah, I have one of those. I still have one of those.

02:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I could eventually uh, premiere uh, which owned the radio show, got tired of paying for an isdn line and they got more expensive because the phone companies really did not want to keep those switches. So they replaced it with a comrex which used the public internet oh my god, right where the public goes and it worked just as well and it was free but the main thing we're doing, this show on, zoom on on this is the public internet, folks, and it works.

02:28:46
It works amazingly yeah, it's kind of when it doesn't work. It doesn't, but most like 90 of the time it works great, oh, more than that yeah, by the way, leo, as part of the copper copper line, switch off.

02:28:58 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Isdn lines are going away.

02:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I figured, yeah, when do they give a timeline?

02:29:04 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
uh, you know whenever, whenever regulators allow at&t at all to.

02:29:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still using copper lines, but it's, uh, using a separate kind of switch and and usually I knew towards the end to get the guy who knew what that was, there was like one guy in the whole office you know who had a little closest and then you go. Can you give me the isdn guy who's that?

02:29:30 - Larry Magid (Guest)
and cbs paid three thousand dollars for that box that I gave you the computer?

02:29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah, oh, mine was seven. My zephyr was seven thousand dollars. Yeah, it was very fancy. I think we still have the zephyr, right. Did we send it back000? My Zephyr was $7,000. Yeah, it was very fancy. I think we still have the Zephyr, right. Did we send it back? We have two Zephyrs, and how many Comrexes? Two, but I didn't know. I could give them to a museum. Did you get a tax break?

02:29:51 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Well see, I didn't own it, CBS Ah. Ownership of ownership of these devices is unclear. I don't think. I don't think premier wants it back under the, under the tax law, trump tax law. I'm not entitled to breaks anyway, unless I buy item I. So that's a whole other shit about it. I did my mom's taxes.

02:30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yesterday, I don't, I don't do mine, it's too complicated. We have business but mom's. Relatively simple, but complicated enough. I couldn't use EZ. Of course I'm using TurboTax, Right and every five seconds. You know you could for a couple hundred bucks more you could have some help. I don't want any help.

02:30:42 - Denise Howell (Guest)
You know it would only cost you $93 more if you just got by the end. It's just just, it's incessant upsell and it cost. You see the irs.

02:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The irs is beta testing their own tool for simple taxes not in california yet, I'm hoping by next year. Or rhode island, where I was filing for my mom. I'm hoping by next year I won't have to pay turbo tax.

02:30:53 - Larry Magid (Guest)
It kills me 200 bucks wow, yeah, I bought the, the uh downloadable version you know, the tax code changes every year.

02:31:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Larry that 1975 they updated.

02:31:06 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Oh, they do okay, yeah no, it's always updated.

02:31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, you can do a box, I'm just doing it online no, you can.

02:31:11 - Larry Magid (Guest)
You download it and then they update it, they get you, though, don't they?

02:31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they charge you for e-file, they charge you for the update they you get, they're getting there, they're getting their two cents you know they get plenty of money, yeah non-stop upsell owen thomas go ahead.

02:31:27 - Denise Howell (Guest)
We had to end on tax day no, no, no, we're not.

02:31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No taxes. If you haven't done them, you have till tomorrow yeah I I put it off the last minute from my mom. The only reason I keep using TurboTax is, you know, because she's older. She has to with required withdrawal from her IRA, so she has an IRA and TurboTax just logs in and gets the data, downloads it.

02:31:51 - Larry Magid (Guest)
That's so magical when it does that. I have an investment account and it just sort of magically puts the information in there.

02:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It saves me a lot. I mean mean, there's foreign tax credits, there's all sorts of weird stuff and I don't have to do with it, so I guess it's worth 200 bucks. Owen thomas, he should know more about this because he works at the san francisco business times. He is the guy. Uh, he, uh. You can find his writing at bizjournalscom. Slash San Francisco, or just look for all over the city little blue kiosks with the right. Are they blue?

02:32:26 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I don't think we have any street distribution anymore. They used to have little blue boxes yeah, no, it's, it is a largely subscription, but they still print it, subscription circulation, they do still print it and they do, they do still print it. Um, and we're actually we're having to change our uh print format because it's hard to find printers actually, I bet I bet.

02:32:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, always a pleasure. Owen, my dear friend, it's great to see you. Um, I don't get down to san francisco much anymore, but I hope the next time I'm at the Golden Gate Theater.

02:33:01 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Hey and make an appointment with John at Joe's Barbershop before I will love the haircut, john.

02:33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at Joe's Barbershop I went to kind of a hipper place. They all have like their Instagram handle over their chair and they gave me a fade and I think at my age it's not the right, it's not the best. I now it's grown out and it's now a problem, so I don't know what to do. You died gray yeah, I die at gray cause I want to have the. I actually worked with somebody at tech TV I'm not going to say his name who died his temples gray, so that people would trust him more.

02:33:46 - Larry Magid (Guest)
I grew up in.

02:33:48 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Kevin Rose.

02:33:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No. I'm not going to say any names. It wasn't Kevin. I'm not going to say who. Thank you, Owen. Thank you, Denise.

02:34:01 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Thank you, larry, great to see you. Thanks to all, all of you, always a pleasure being in this show always fun.

02:34:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love doing this show and I thank you for being here. I thank our audience for letting me do this. I thank especially our Club Twit members for paying me to do this. We do this. We can take every Sunday, 2 to 5 pm Pacific Time, that's 5 to 8 Eastern Time, that's 2200, I'm sorry, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it on YouTube, youtubecom, slash twit, or, if you want to be more convenient, you can go to there's a YouTube channel. After the fact, you can watch the video, or you can get it from the website twittv. Best thing to do to go and subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. I guess we should have kind of a little party, because in three days it will be the 19th anniversary of the very first twit. Episode one was April 7th. Right, it was at April. Let me look it up. I have to do this every time. I think it was april 17th 2005.

02:35:03 - Larry Magid (Guest)
Yes, wow, patrick so cool kevin rose and robert heron well, you're almost the same age as connect safely. That's great you're older than that geez, uh, we were, yeah, technically the end of 2014, of 2000, yeah, yeah, something like that 2004.

02:35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, 2004. My first podcast was 2004 was the Tech Guy in, I think, october or September 2004. But Twit really didn't exist until we started doing Twit. The first one was called the Revenge of the Screensavers, and then I got a cease and desist from Comcast and I asked the audience for suggestions. Somebody said, how about this week in geek? And I thought that's good, but I don't like geek. Maybe this week in tech. And I liked the acronym TWIT and yes, it's intentional. I still get emailed to this day. You know TWIT, that's a pregnant goldfish. You know it's where it's an insult in the UK. I know, I know it was a joke. It was a little. We were being self-deprecating.

02:36:02 - Denise Howell (Guest)
And then someone made you a magnificent logo and it was set in.

02:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dorothy Yamamoto made me a wonderful, beautiful logo which is, to this day, lives on that little guy with the eye that you got the little legs.

02:36:15 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And some other guy claimed to be the chief twit of another company.

02:36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I complained about it and I am convinced he won't take credit for it, but he won't deny it either that Jason Calacanis, who is intimate friends with Elon, went to him and said Elon, you can't be chief twit. There already is a chief twit, because he only did it for a few weeks and then he changed it.

02:36:37 - Larry Magid (Guest)
And you're not going to change the name of your company to X. Right, I think I might. I'm actually considering it right now.

02:36:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you for joining us this week in X See, X is a terrible name for anything.

02:36:49 - Denise Howell (Guest)
It's not a good one.

02:36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The logo could cross its antennas. Yeah, elon briefly called himself the chief twit, but I think I have a feeling somebody got to him because he didn't do very good. I hope so, because I was getting mad, and you well I'm. I won't go into the history, but we have twitter and I have a history. Yeah, you and I have a history too.

02:37:13
Yeah, well, I want to hear about that sometime. Not that kind of history. Oh okay, Thank you all for being here. Really appreciate it. It's been wonderful 19 years. We start our 20th year next Sunday with an open house, April 21st. If you haven't yet gone to the survey ticketstwittv, I would love to see a full house for that show Because I guess that will be the official birthday. But actually Wednesday is the 19th birthday of this Week in Tech and you know what? For 19 years I've been saying it. I'm going to say it again Thanks for being here, We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.