This Week in Tech Episode 891 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT this week in tech. I know it's gonna be a long one because I've got one of the best panels ever. Paris Martin know Glen Fleischman and Dan Mor, of course, we're gonna talk about the upcoming apple event and what to expect. And then a very deep conversation about AI art. Is it legit and a doctor who used his truck to perform a vasectomy. It's not what you think. It's all coming up next on TWiT podcasts. You love

TWiT Intro (00:00:33):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:43):
This is TWiT this in tech episode, 891 recorded Sunday, September 4th, 2022. Use the Rivian that's nuts.

Leo Laporte (00:00:56):
This weekend. Tech is brought to you by podium. Join more than 100,000 businesses that already use podium to streamline their customer interactions. See how podium can grow your business. Watch a demo today at podium.com/TWiTt and buy, click up the productivity platform. That'll save you one day a week on work guaranteed. Use a code TWiT to get 15% off click ups, massive unlimited plan for a year. Meaning you can start reclaiming your time for under $5 a month. Sign up today@clickup.com. But hurry, this offer ends soon and buy Zappier Zappier makes it easy to connect all your apps, automate routine tasks and streamline your processes. Try Zappier for free today at zappier.com/TWiT and buy stamps.com. Get ahead of the holiday chaos this year, sign up@stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the page, enter the code TWiT, and you'll get a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale.

Leo Laporte (00:02:09):
It's time for TWiT this week in tech, the show we talk about the week's tech news and you know, sometimes we put shows together with great thought and we really, you know, kind of balance it. Sometimes we just throw the names in the air and they come down and sometimes that's better. This is one of those, maybe, I don't know, maybe Jason Howell had an idea, but I am thrilled by this panel. Let's say hi to Paris Martin know she was a reporter for the information. Always great to see her very crafty today. No sequin be sequined. No Bejo mannequins in the background.

Paris Martineau (00:02:42):
I'm gonna I'll I'll move it in frame at the break. Just wait. I'm gonna keep people on their toes. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
I bet you

Paris Martineau (00:02:48):
A shifting Tableau,

Leo Laporte (00:02:50):
The rest of the panel will recognize something right behind you. And let's find out when we ask, when we say hello to <laugh> yeah, Glen Fleischman. I think he's he? I think I recognize the chuckle from glen.fund longtime reporter for variety of Macintosh magazines, former jeopardy contestant type historian. Hello, Glen. Hello?

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:14):
Do I recognize a I see the transparent speaker I've forgotten the exact yeah. Name of it. Is that an original

Paris Martineau (00:03:22):
Was Caron card card sound sticks. Yes. I IED them up. It's 20 years. They are, and yet they sound fantastic and they look very cool. I've got them connected to a record player in a fun little mishmash of technology there.

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
Is there a person standing behind those Harmon garden sticks?

Paris Martineau (00:03:42):
There is, that is a lamp shaped like a man with a uniquely placed light switch that I will leave to your

Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
<Laugh>. Did you make that?

Paris Martineau (00:03:53):
I did not, but I bought it from a vintage dealer who excellent. I really enjoy. And

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
Every time you flip it on, you just go

Paris Martineau (00:04:00):
Every time it flips it on, you know, I'll often have people come over and they'll be like, so where's the light switch. And I'm like, guys, there's only one thing on me.

Leo Laporte (00:04:08):
<Laugh> there's only one place to look. Wow. That's his terrible <laugh> also with, it's great to have Dan Mor this is the, I think one of the first things you've done off your fraternity leave. Is that right?

Dan Moren (00:04:22):
You first, you are my first stop on the return for my paternity leave. There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:04:26):
Six colors. Co-Editor with Jason Snell. He has been off for a couple of months with a brand new baby. How old's the baby?

Dan Moren (00:04:34):
Baby's about six weeks

Leo Laporte (00:04:35):
Old. Oh, so it's not even a couple of months. Wow. How's it been?

Dan Moren (00:04:40):
It's been tiring. Can I need a better camera that doesn't show you the bags under my eyes. But other than that, it's been wonderful.

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
I love it. Well, I hope even if you're on paternity, leave you, right? Because we are waiting for volume four of the galactic cold war saga have here. You thankfully sent me the, the latest volume, which is book three, the Nova incident all three of them, by the way. Really good. You know, I'll be honest. I it's, this is terrible to say, but I wasn't expecting much.

Dan Moren (00:05:14):
Okay. That's good.

Paris Martineau (00:05:18):
You're starting off. Absolutely brutal.

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
Let me explain. <Laugh> not

Paris Martineau (00:05:22):
A, yeah, we're just at a really low bar. Not

Leo Laporte (00:05:25):
A, not, not, not in, in any way, a, a reflection on you, Dan. It's just that I know quite a few people in our business, you know, that's the old canard. I have a, everybody's got a novel in their desk drawer. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and the few people I know who have released those novels probably should not have, but now did you start as a writer? And then, you know, as a sci-fi writer and then become a tech writer,

Dan Moren (00:05:50):
It was always a passion of mine. And I, but you know, I got outta college and didn't really know what I was doing. And I worked it for a, a while and then I started writing professionally. And once I had done that, I think it really helped me hone a lot of stuff about my fiction. So I kind of went back to it after spending my first couple years in tech journalism, because it, it felt like, oh, you know, now I kind of understand, I work with deadlines and I've had to do this regularly and put in all these hours and you can't help, but get better. I think at those kinds of tasks, if you do them enough. So I think it, they kind of worked together nicely well,

Leo Laporte (00:06:22):
And that's what I look for in a good novel is somebody who makes deadlines. So <laugh>,

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:28):
Hey, it's harder than

Leo Laporte (00:06:28):
You think. No. Hey, just ask George a R Martin, right? Exactly.

Dan Moren (00:06:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. That guy's really suffering Patrick for not making deadline. Let me tell you Patrick

Leo Laporte (00:06:37):
Rothfus, you know there are quite a few in the in our

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:40):
Dan Dan was the person I thought most likely to become a breakout science fiction author, best seller. Yeah. And I think you're well, on the way to doing that, I'm reading the really good. Was it the, the beta edition of the Cal Dian gambit? I think I read pre-release and I was like, yes, this is,

Dan Moren (00:06:54):
That

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:54):
Was a long fine work. And then I read the release version. I'm like, man, this guy also revises, which is incredible. I mean, I like the, I like the, the, the draft and then the, the release version was fantastic, but

Leo Laporte (00:07:05):
There is there's right. A, a, a, a, somewhat of a leap from nonfiction writing to fiction writing. And not everybody can make that leap. Some have fallen in the CVAs in between. So I just wanted to say, it's really good. And everybody should, if you like, sci-fi this is it. The galactic cold war saga. And you tell me, you've told me that there may be a fourth one in the works.

Dan Moren (00:07:30):
Yeah. I, well, I'd like to, I've been working on this long overarching sort of plot line, and I am hoping I get a chance to sort of bring Matt to fruition, but each of the, I will say like, you know, a lot of people don't like to pick up a series unless it's done, but I tried to also structure it so that each of the books tells like a, a standalone story in its own regard as well. But like with a, in the background, right. There's like an overarching plot that's developing slowly. So I think you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of the individual volumes as it goes along, without worrying too much about like, oh no, will the series ever be

Leo Laporte (00:07:59):
Finished? You also have the best publisher ever angry robot. <Laugh> I just love that, man. That's true. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:08:05):
Hey, so long as you, you're not angry the series within 30 years, you'll have a leg up on R Martin.

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:12):
If they start shooting a season, one of your show, let's say you have five years to get the last book done. That's the

Dan Moren (00:08:19):
That's good. That's

Paris Martineau (00:08:20):
Comfortable, right. At least the next book done, you know, doesn't even have to be the last book can just be a edition.

Dan Moren (00:08:26):
Yeah. Stay far enough ahead of the game there.

Leo Laporte (00:08:29):
Or

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:29):
You could this

Leo Laporte (00:08:30):
Up, you could do like the wheel of time and just die before you're done. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:08:35):
Have you considered that? You

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:37):
Know, Leo has, that's

Leo Laporte (00:08:38):
A fun way to question for you. That's fun way to, that's one way to avoid deadlines. I

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:41):
Just had a kid come on. I'm already feeling you little bit more things. You need a little more of that important part of deadline, very spicy Leo today.

Leo Laporte (00:08:47):
<Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:49):
No, you could die. I don't know about these folks spicy.

Leo Laporte (00:08:53):
Get to know Brian Sanders, Brandon Sanderson ahead of time. And you'll be you'll. I will set.

Dan Moren (00:08:59):
I will tell you, I know I actually have met Brandon because we have the same agent.

Leo Laporte (00:09:03):
Ah, well, he, you know what

Dan Moren (00:09:05):
I know him,

Leo Laporte (00:09:06):
Robert Jordan was very lucky cuz he, he passed away before finishing this. How many 14 books series

Glenn Fleishman (00:09:13):
17.

Leo Laporte (00:09:14):
It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:09:14):
Ridiculous. 14 a lot. It's

Leo Laporte (00:09:15):
Insane. Huge number. Yeah. And of course he died before finishing it it's pretty clear. He, you know, he was gonna keep writing until he died. Thank God he had Brandon Sanderson to come along and, and finish it and finish it in, in, in high style of all of the TV productions of the Willow time TV shows the worst. 

Paris Martineau (00:09:36):
I don't know. There are some pretty bad TV

Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
Production, but I mean out of classic science fiction, I guess I should say. Yeah. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:09:42):
I don't have anything. I have no no loyalty to the book series. I hadn't read it. I kinda like will of time. See?

Leo Laporte (00:09:47):
Yeah. That's, that's pretty much how it works. If you've read it, you'll hate it. And if you've never read it, you'll like the TV show. And it is better now that I think of it than foundation, which was which truly awful.

Glenn Fleishman (00:09:58):
I had so much hope for it. And then by the end it's like, what are you doing? Horrible. Oh, come on. Horrible. I don't know. I don't know what they

Leo Laporte (00:10:05):
Were. How about Lord of the ring rings? We like, I,

Dan Moren (00:10:08):
The ring planned about Lord the rings, Glen is a big Lord of the rings fan.

Glenn Fleishman (00:10:10):
I, yeah, I'm sitting here with my 15 year old. Who's not read Lord of the rings. And I'm like, oh, well they're not telling a story about FAO. The creator of the SEMAR reels and his original name was, and I'm like, oh my God, I don't remember that. I know all this stuff. Why do I know all this stuff? It's the second

Dan Moren (00:10:25):
Useful information. All the useful information, every

Paris Martineau (00:10:28):
Useful thing youve forgotten. It's just taken up by

Glenn Fleishman (00:10:31):
Names of ELSs. It's not which been rod wise, but Colliner was the friend of the door. No, I'm a little, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:10:39):
A little confused. Have they have they, it's only been two, two episodes. Have they botched the series yet? Or is it pretty much faithful to what little we know?

Glenn Fleishman (00:10:49):
I, I think they're doing I think they're doing an incredibly good job of trying to bring in new people without a hundred percent offending people. Yeah. Like I was 30 years ago, the

Leo Laporte (00:11:01):
Cinderella, the Cinderella

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:05):
Relief

Leo Laporte (00:11:05):
CI did not, did not, did not specify a lot of this stuff for instance. And I saw somebody note this. Yeah. And I don't think this is a spoiler. But they're sailing the ship into the gray havens. Our our princess, I won't say names. Our princess has been awarded released into the gray havens. She's on the ship. They're standing there, the warriors long voyage, I think. But they're standing there the whole time in their armor. Then these ma come out and help undress them. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:37):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:11:38):
Are the, so here's my question. <Laugh> are the, are the main gonna, are they gonna sail the ship back for the next trip or are they going into the gray havens?

Dan Moren (00:11:48):
I think it's a one use ship. It seems like it's,

Leo Laporte (00:11:51):
It's not gonna survive the, it

Dan Moren (00:11:52):
Doesn't seem like it's turning around again. Yeah. Where are those

Paris Martineau (00:11:54):
Maidens going? They even gut extra

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:58):
Garb. There's some people who can go, but so there's, there's these different order of celestial being and the, but the El have servants and the,

Leo Laporte (00:12:06):
And then the weird thing is so the, the servants take the, we weapons and the armor from the elves and they throw 'em on the ground. They don't, they don't like fold them up, put them away. They just go here. I mean, it's like, what,

Paris Martineau (00:12:18):
What were you doing? Couldn't they have just done that. They

Dan Moren (00:12:20):
Just lay armor. They sell them for scrap later on. They can repurpose it and recycle, you know, but a little,

Paris Martineau (00:12:26):
Cause they've gotta get another boat to get back. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:12:28):
That's

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:29):
Right. The wings of desire, the armor things and wings of desire. Right. So there's all connects up to the Peter, oh, Peter Faulk universe.

Leo Laporte (00:12:34):
It all comes back to VIM vendors in the end

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:37):
VIM vendors.

Leo Laporte (00:12:38):
How about the house of the dragon? Are we are we happy with the house of the dragon?

Dan Moren (00:12:43):
I watched the first one and thought it was better than I expected. It was going to be, I was not super invested, but my wife was actually like, oh, I really like to watch. This's like all we'll sit down and watch it. And I don't know. I, I thought it was interesting. Having felt like the game of Thrones show ended on pretty sour note for me, I was more than pleasantly surprised by this and having a little more you know, I thought like having the positioning, the female characters was a little more agency and making a more involved story and like sort of focusing in a bit too. Right. Like rather than having like, there's a 6 million characters and they're all over this continent instead. It's like a smaller group and yeah, we'll see where it goes. Watch next view. I

Leo Laporte (00:13:19):
Feel like Glen, you're a little bruised still from season eight of the game of Thrones.

Glenn Fleishman (00:13:24):
I've never seen a single episode or a portion of, oh, that throne show. I just didn't, it didn't strike me as I'd read George R. Martin before he started raining that series. And I liked some of his, I liked his earlier funnier stuff better as I

Leo Laporte (00:13:38):
<Laugh>

Dan Moren (00:13:39):
Before he was curious.

Glenn Fleishman (00:13:41):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:42):
I'm, I'm starting the show with some light material because we're gonna get pretty heavy right off the bat. We talked about this on Wednesday with our wonderful Mike Masick from tech dirt who has really kind of burst a socket on this children's online safety bill that was just passed in California, were waiting for the governor to sign it into law. It seems like a good idea who wouldn't wanna protect children online. And of course, if you're not in California, you're probably thinking you can take the rod pile lower third down. I don't know why that's there, but there is no rod pile in this story whatsoever. <Laugh> oh my God. I mean,

Paris Martineau (00:14:26):
That's the New York times

Leo Laporte (00:14:27):
Lost, you lost control. He's lost control of the lower third

Glenn Fleishman (00:14:32):
Wheel that lower

Dan Moren (00:14:33):
To become ed.

Paris Martineau (00:14:35):
You say Leo, all of your smart assistant have taken over

Leo Laporte (00:14:38):
The show,

Glenn Fleishman (00:14:39):
Scrub the launch, scrub the launch.

Leo Laporte (00:14:41):
Ah, yeah, that was the Artemis story. That'll be coming later. None of you are in California, right? Dan, are you in CA I can't remember where you are. Dan. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. That's why, why your window is open. If you were in California, you would be down now it's about 109 degrees outside. 

Paris Martineau (00:14:58):
Oh yeah. And you guys don't believe in air conditioning, right?

Leo Laporte (00:15:01):
Yeah. That's that's the funny thing is people in California say, well, we have natural air conditioning until it gets hot. And then

Paris Martineau (00:15:08):
I say, we don't, I don't say much at anything change might change that for

Leo Laporte (00:15:13):
You. Yeah. so this is maybe not on your radar, but it sure is for us in California and Mike Masnick, who's also California, the New York times story about this, you would never, you know, think there was a problem. The, the California age appropriate design code act requires any web unlike kapa where it only FL affects websites that are aimed at children. This is a website, any website that might have somebody under 18 visited, which I think is any website, certainly ours, certainly Mike Masnick. So if you have the potential that somebody under 18 might visit your website, then you are required to, first of all, know the age of everybody who visits your website, problem. Number one that's pretty intrusive. We don't know the age of anybody who listens to our shows or visits our website. I don't wanna know their age, but in order to enforce this law, I need to, in fact, Mike's concern was, oh am I gonna have to do age verification?

Leo Laporte (00:16:20):
And if I do, how am I gonna do that? He says, it made me face ID. You may have to start, cuz you've got to know, youve got to know how old these people are. Then you have to look at every single feature of your site and do what they call a, a D P I a kind of like an environmental impact report on each feature of your site and how it might infect people under 18. And that has to be a, you have to do it because it has to be available. Should the attorney general of California ask you have 72 hours to produce that?

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:01):
Yeah. This surely feels like the kinds of rules that go into effect in countries that are trying to prohibit speech or use workarounds like, you know, India has imposed laws and, you know, Russia as opposed more, more draconian ones and even India ostensibly a democracy has imposed laws that, that restrict freedom in the name of safety or freedom from libel or other things. And they're meant to chill speech and this isn't per se designed that way, but it has all the hallmarks of one it's expensive to or impossible to implement. It's probably, I'm not a lawyer. It's probably unconstitutional based on what I'm reading does not seem to fit within the permissibility of, of you know, how this could possibly be enforced. So the, the bar, the burden is undo and it's chilling of speech. And so you're kind of like, well, how did it get this far? I think Mike pointed out in his articles like, well, nobody wants to, you know, you were saying, you know, oh no, I'm opposed to protecting children online. Yeah. Just clip that out. What I just said. Right? Yeah. Congratulations was opposed, you know, I'm not, I'm not, but no one's gonna vote. No politician is gonna say I'm voting against the protecting children from terrible things online bill. Exactly. You know, which is

Leo Laporte (00:18:09):
Why it passed in the Senate 30 to nothing.

Dan Moren (00:18:12):
Don't we don't, we do this every few decades. I mean, I'm remembering when I was a teenager, the communications decency act was a big sort of hot button issue at the time, which, you know, that was the, the heady days of 1996 or so. Right where the internet was not at all what it is today, but there was still the sort of the same idea, like, oh, we've gotta figure out a way to flag stuff that might be objectionable so that people aren't exposed to it. And ultimately I think it ended up being sort of impossible to deal with because how do you do that? Right. How do you do that on the internet? How do you control for that kind of information if you can't even control for it in, you know, other public sphere spaces? It seems, I agree with Glen, it seems like an unduly onerous task for people who are, you know, otherwise trying to be law abiding.

Leo Laporte (00:18:58):
Actually the CDA ended up having a positive impact. Ron widen said, you know what, we're gonna have to make an exemption here for social media and other sites. And the section two 30 was written. And thank goodness, go ahead. I'm sorry. Paris.

Paris Martineau (00:19:11):
I was saying, I think the thing that sticks out to me is, I mean, how are we expecting all of these different sites or service providers to be able to identify with certainty, whether or not the person accessing your website as a child? I mean, obviously we have currently kind of attracting tools. You can look at website analytics and see the demographics of your users, but a lot of social media sites and providers generally are kind of making their tools in a way that purposefully ignores anybody who could be under 18 because you don't wanna deal with that sort of data. And let's say even if you somehow devised a perfect way to send a flag up when any cell phone owned and operated by someone under 18 accessed your website, that still wouldn't cover situations where like most kids are probably using their parents' iPad or parents' phone for these sort of things. It just seems like a very technical question that is being answered by like kind of a very vague blank blanket order.

Glenn Fleishman (00:20:11):
I it's designed to impose enforcement, right. It's designed to be violated unintentionally and easily and thus allow government to intervene.

Leo Laporte (00:20:21):
Yeah. And Mike raises that issue. In fact, he was told, I think by the sponsors of the bill, well, don't worry that, you know, the California attorney general decides who's prosecuted and one would <laugh>, don't worry. And one would hope that the ag would say, well, you know, TWiT or teched or the information. Yeah. 18 year olds read it, but it's not, they're not a threat to 18 year olds. The ag would get to decide, but as Mike points out, well, what if, if I write an article that's critical of the California attorney general, which he does a lot, apparently then, then what happens? Is it,

Glenn Fleishman (00:20:55):
What if this law goes through effect in Texas and you write something critical of that? Exactly. In general.

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
Yeah.

Dan Moren (00:21:00):
Or, I mean, a lot of times cases like this too, I feel like on dually target, you know, people in community like such of the LGBTQ communities too, right. Where it's like, well, what is considered objectionable content, right? This is the kind of thing we're running into with the book bannings that are popping up all across the country is that, you know, you have governments and local, like, you know, city and municipality governments that are like, well, I don't want my kid exposed to this. So I'm gonna, you know, try to enforce the local school library to get rid of these books, cuz I just don't agree with them. So who gets to decide, you know, certainly what falls under objectionable content and how exactly that gets protected. The

Leo Laporte (00:21:37):
Other weird thing about this bill, it was primarily written by a British Barness director of one of the Bridget Jones movies who dropped her Hollywood career to protect children online. She says,

Glenn Fleishman (00:21:51):
Anytime I hear

Paris Martineau (00:21:52):
The words is not where I thought that sentence was going.

Leo Laporte (00:21:54):
<Laugh>

Dan Moren (00:21:55):
So what the weird

Glenn Fleishman (00:21:57):
Direction time I hear United Kingdom and protect children, I wanna run the other direction. I knows all there's so bad at everything they do there there's been so many scandals and conflicts, the whole the Jimmy SEL thing with the BBC. I mean like large and small, I think the United Kingdom has done a terrible job protecting children from predators online and off when government in politics in entertainment. And you're like, okay, yeah, we really wanna follow their lead cuz they know what's they know what's right. Is this like Cory doctor has written so effectively about the failures of the UK. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
You lived there for a long time. Is this a ignorance on the part of lawmakers? Like they, they meaning they wanna do the right thing and they, you know, they, they just don't understand the impact of what they're doing or is it some sort of malevolence? Certainly the Barness seems to have some sort of malevolence against the open internet. Do you think there is a trend? It feels like P politicians these days, it's not merely to protect the children. They want to take down big tech. They don't like it.

Paris Martineau (00:22:58):
I mean, something that I think about a lot is as part of my job, all of our jobs, we end up watching these big tech hearings that we had every couple of months over the last couple of years. And as I remember the first couple that I watched, I was like, oh, this is gonna be interesting. You know, an actual, like political discussion about what's going on was not that it is mostly just politicians giving a, a one minute stump speech totally unhinged or unrelated to the thing they're actually discussing. And I think that's what we're seeing here in some ways is it is partially ignorance, but partially a lot of like modern day politicians have realized that the way to get attention from your base or the sort of people that you want to bring into your base is by making big, bold statements like bringing down tech, you know, making all the children safe regardless of whether or not that actually has any teeth in it. And it will, the end result of that is sometimes you get policies like this that can have disastrous unintended consequences.

Leo Laporte (00:24:00):
There's a, there's both a care and a stick. There's the, the threat, the fear that a sound bite will be used against you. Oh, he's against protecting children online. But there's also the carrot that it makes a great sound bite that might get you some votes if you say. Yeah. She's she's really, she voted to protect the kids online. So <laugh> it's the problem is soundbites. It's just posturing. I think you're,

Dan Moren (00:24:26):
I think a lot of the, there is ignorance at the base of it too, because I think it also presupposes this fallacy that there is somehow a switch in flip that will protect, you know, make it per the system perfectly functional in a way that protects children. Right? Like we entertain this idea that like, oh, well, technology can solve this issue for us. Right. And that we just, you know, technology is very black and white one in zero and it's like, well, you know, it can obviously tell you whether or not you're able to consume this information, but that's, you know, I think as point out, it's very difficult to know who is consuming these information. I think also about things like libraries that have, you know, computers available for people to access the internet who don't might otherwise not have, you know, ways to do that. How do you tell who's using that? Right? Like how do you tell who's on the other end of that? So I think it, people think tech is very clear cut when they don't know anything about it, but the, you know, anybody who spends time with it realizes like, no, this is extremely nuanced. And there's a lot of gray area.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:25):
Well, the Springs me back to the whole, well, there's two things. One is the overarching issue is that I think we probably all agree. I won't speak for other people, but I think it's likely that we know that the big social media companies and other companies in most cases are failing to protect children online. They're doing things that are actively bad for children. They don't seem to have any compunction about it. And no one has an idea of precisely how to stop it, except through public disclosure, whistle blowing threats by legislators, but nothing. There's no compulsion. And particularly in countries with expansive free speech laws and commercial speech laws people feel impotent to solve that problem. So we know there are problems with Instagram used to promote eating disorders and, and they've made great strides in that. But you know, there, there's just all of this all of this negative content aimed at children algorithm fed often that has some kind of beneficial effect, but it also reminds me damn what you were just saying of when they kept talking about, I think it was the Clinton administration later, keep trying to bring this up.

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:23):
Like, well, what if we had a special key that only law enforcement could access only in very particular cases, otherwise the encryption would be perfect and protected. You know, when they were talking about end, end encryptions, like, well, there's no way to build an algorithm like that. And every encryption expert in the world agrees, but nobody on the political side wants to accept that they don't want accept the technological problem, that you can have a system with a key that only legitimate parties can use. Same thing here is how do you prevent harm to children, which is active and underway without also chilling speech? I was terrified for my children that grew up in this environment. And fortunately, I think we managed to avoid, you know, any significant problems, but I'm sure we all have stories or know, people have stories of children being you know, harassed online or singled out or groomed or so forth. It's just a, a massive problem made worse by many of these companies.

Dan Moren (00:27:13):
Also, people don't wanna hear that the, the hard solutions to this problem are all often ones that require like societal change and work, rather than just technology, which can solve it at the, you know, snap of your fingers. Right? Like people are like, oh, there's a shortcut. We just make the technology do that. Right. and yeah, nobody wants to think about the fact it's like, no, that's, that's a bandaid and it's not a particularly good one. It's a bandaid on a gushing, you know, the amputated arm or something. It's not gonna fix your problem.

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
I also wonder if Barness Kidron, if, if she used to work in Hollywood, if Hollywood were told, oh no, no, you have to make sure that every movie you make is appropriate for somebody under 18 or every novelist had to make sure every novel was appropriate for somebody under 18. I think they would bridle at those kinds of restrictions as they should. We, we don't wanna design the world for people under 18.

Glenn Fleishman (00:28:07):
Don't forget to gore

Dan Moren (00:28:09):
<Laugh>. Yeah. And yeah. Well, and I mean, what is appropriate mean in that case even, right. Like, you know, first of all, kids at different ages have different levels of maturity and different levels of appropriateness, a 13 year old and a 17 year old are gonna have very different levels of what they think is appropriate. I mean, I definitely went to, you know, rated R movies as a 17 year old and probably with my parents, you know, went to rated R movies younger if it was like a serious topic or something like that. But yeah. How do you, how do you deem what is appropriate?

Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
The rate? You know, the ratings actually is a good system because all the ratings were designed to do is to inform you or parents ahead of time. Here's the content not to censor the content. So I'm not sure the rating, I think the ratings, I think, kind of worked I don't know. Would you wanna rate every website on the internet <laugh> and say this website rated R I don't know if that's appropriate either. Yeah. Yeah. Who

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:03):
Would, who would do it? I mean, the motion picture, right. Association of America had a reason to do it. I mean, a lot of organizations, a lot of trade groups grew up specifically to address a preventing regulation from going into effect by voluntarily adhering to standards. That's right. And enforcing them the code and yeah, yeah. Right. And so who wants a law? But, but in this case, I think, you know, how do you protect children? Even from there's some very COE things like, how do you protect predators? There's, you know, I, I have this discussion a lot. It's not that there are so many predators in the world. I wanna believe that the number of people who are pedophiles and active predators against other people is a relatively small percentage of humanity. A very small percentage. I wanna

Leo Laporte (00:29:46):
Believe that too. I'm not sure that that's the case, but I

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:48):
Wanna believe, I don't know either, but let's, let's pretend it's the case briefly, but say that the internet is an amplification force. So it doesn't matter if it's one in a hundred thousand people or one in a million is out after children. If they can access 10 million children and winnow it down and find one near them or that they can reach out to, it's a, it's a, a yield issue. And so online services need to impose their own protections that reduce that yield potential. And that's where I think things are failing is I don't think they have a motivation to do it. There's no financial benefit. There's no regulatory framework and they haven't yet suffered significantly from it. So when there's backlash, like there was a lot of backlash against Facebook for all the revelations from oh, I forgot the, the group in England.

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:32):
Yes, thank right. So they had backlash, it seemed like it affected their market price. There was the threat of a lot of regulation that were open hearings. Right. But I don't think we've seen the same concerted effort that's gone into the sort of diffuse choices that have led to children being endangered. Occasionally something will leap up and Facebook will say, oh, okay, we're gonna disable all contents on or comments on videos uploaded by people under 18. Or didn't they just say, they're going to make all uploaded videos private by default on YouTube side

Leo Laporte (00:31:03):
For yeah. If you're under 17. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:04):
Right. So these bandaids, but they do it only in response to the most outrageous stuff. So it's possible this law being passed, maybe it gets signed, it's held up instantly in the courts. Obviously you can imagine every giant tech company files for an injunction and it takes years to resolve conceivably. I also, by then

Leo Laporte (00:31:22):
Mm-Hmm can imagine every, every state legislature, well, at least Texas, Florida and others saying, oh, good idea in passing a similar bill which makes it harder,

Paris Martineau (00:31:32):
Harder, but with their own slant like specifications for what is good or bad for children. Right. You know, obviously given what we've seen in Texas that would probably include a lot of anti LGBTQ right. Sort of points as well as, you know, maybe content around women's rights to, you know, choose is also considered bad for children. I think it it's really tricky when you are handing over like content controls and censorship opportunities to these different state legislatures in such a vague way.

Leo Laporte (00:32:11):
This brings up something. And you, you added this link to the rundown Glen. I, wasn't gonna talk about it, but I think it's appropriate to talk about it, which is the, the battle between cloud flare and Kiwi farms, which is a horrendous horrific website. I don't even wanna mention the name of, because it's really been used to docks people, to target people, to SWAT people by the way, both political persuasions, it's just a, a nasty, nasty site. Cloudflare was protecting it with their DDoS services. And, or as early, as recently, as a couple of days ago, Matthew Prince said, we are not gonna stop protecting him. That's what we do. We don't judge. We just protect these, you know, websites and everybody has a right to speak. They, he changed his mind, I think, under incredible pressure. But he says also because we see so many dangerous threats on Kiwi farms.

Paris Martineau (00:33:07):
I mean, I believe right before CloudFlare ended up making the decision to end its relationship with the website. They, there had been posts on the forum about people being like, oh, we heard in this podcast that this TWiTtch streamer was maybe going to go to, I believe it was a poutine place. Oh, in Belfast. And they looked up yeah. Put a list of every Putin place. Lord in VE somebody had said, oh, I've planted bombs at three of them. And other ones, like I have men with guns waiting outside of one of them. It escalated dramatically.

Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
This is a Canadian Tritch streamer, Clara. So any who actually fled to Ireland to be safe from Kiwi farms threats. And they just followed her right there.

Paris Martineau (00:33:56):
I mean, cuz she, I believe had been swatted multiple times. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> she had been docks. Her whole family had been docks. It escalated beyond, I mean it had escalated and then escalated again and then escalated again. I also think it's interesting that, I mean, the way that CloudFlare came to this decision with regards to saying no, no, no, no. We're not going to sever this business relationship again and again, public statements. And then two days later deciding to do it after increased pressure is kind of the exact same way that this broke down. I believe with eight Chan Ann's sta Stormer that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:34:33):
Whenever they kicked, they resisted that last

Paris Martineau (00:34:36):
Couple of years. Yeah. Then a couple of days later

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
They gave in, get it. I have, I sympathy for the the, and this is the reason I bring this up is this is kind of another facet of the same argument, which is how do you do this? Do you allow all speech and, and you know, let God sort it out. Do you prohibit, do you attempt to lock it down to protect everybody? Or is there some middle ground? And I don't know if any of those solutions work,

Dan Moren (00:35:07):
This, this is one of those places where I, I feel like I've got like a, like a pet peeve about people who pride censorship at a lot of these things because you know, people are like, oh, free speech everywhere. And you can have all the speech you want and doesn't matter, you know? And it's like, well, but these are businesses. This is not the, so like what we're talking about with this part,

Leo Laporte (00:35:25):
It's not illegal for CloudFlare to block them or UN not block

Dan Moren (00:35:28):
Them. Yeah. They can decide who they wanna do business with. Yeah. People used to, when I worked back in Mac world, you know, people would complain on our forums all the time. The censorship, when like threads got shut down or whatever, it's like, whatever, we're a, we're a business we get to choose only.

Paris Martineau (00:35:40):
This is citizenship. The government does it. This is my exact response with everybody complaining about losing their TWiTtter accounts. So I'm like, you're not being censored. That's

Dan Moren (00:35:48):
A business. That's not, that's not what this is. Right. This that's capitalism people. That is what you signed before. That is the free market. You

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:56):
Never see this with like, you know, we, we never see this with like CloudFlare standing up for this LGBTQ site that expresses extreme inclusiveness to an extent that bigots all over the world are so angry. They're demanding CloudFlare drop it. Even though the site is engaged in peaceful posting of articles about drag Queens reading at libraries and people getting married around the world and the increase in inclusive nontoxic environments. You're like, you don't see cloud fair flare out there because it's always violence. It's always the right wing. It's always, you know, fascism or flirting or way over the line. Although antisemitism, Kiwi

Paris Martineau (00:36:34):
Farms was used to SWAT Marjorie Taylor green.

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:37):
Yeah. I feel like equal opportunity

Paris Martineau (00:36:39):
Employers. I mean swotting anybody bad idea. Nailed it. I'll even, this is my one chance I'll come for Marjorie Taylor green. Yeah. Shouldn't be swatted. No one should be. No,

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:48):
It's fascinating cuz it's all these people, you know, this is where you get back into the whole most terrorism seems to arise out of domestic terrorism. As in domestic in the house you find most of the people get involved in these kinds of efforts have trouble already. That's well known. They already, they already commit or are victims of domestic partner or familial violence. And so you keep seeing these things wri large. So it's like, they're they find the weakest target, which right now is trans people remain a vulnerable target worldwide. And they attack them because they feel like they will get the most support from even people who otherwise would be negative. But then, you know, it's always about violence. So they go after Marjorie Taylor green for who knows what reason totally unacceptable that they would do this, but are family at risk, whatever you think about or obviously but they don't have any discrimination. So you think, I always go back to that. Like they came for, you know, they, they come for one group first, but they're always gonna come for another, another, another. And you're always gonna be in one of those groups.

Dan Moren (00:37:44):
It's a means, that's the issue more than anything, right? It's not, it's how they're going about it. Right. I mean, I, I think about this too, when I see stuff in the politics realm where people are like, oh, if this happens, they'll be violence in the street. And again, to Glen's point, you never hear the people who are about inclusiveness diversity being like, ah, there'll be violence in the street if there's not inclusion in diversity. No, that's not how it works. So yeah. It's about the means of how you're going about. I have a, I have a friend who has actually been targeting by these kinds of people and it is truly horrific the kind of things that, that they have done, you know, in order to try and basically just shut these people up and harass them into silence, like, or for often for very little provocation at all, other than they just feel like doing it. So yeah. I, I don't know. I'm glad that CloudFlare flare make this decision. It's a shame. It took them so long and it's, you know, not gonna solve the problem, but it's a step in the right direction. The

Glenn Fleishman (00:38:35):
Thing I've seen said, which I think is, is worth repeating is that freedom of speech, freedom of expression is, can be suppressed by people who are also engaging in freedom of expression. So when CloudFlare says we are about, you know, Maxist free speech, we don't wanna suppress anybody because then governments come to us and tell us to take human rights groups off the internet, which to me seems like a spacious argument to begin with. There's a bright, light difference. You can make that decision. Yeah. Like if a group's advocating violence and dosing people and in involved in the coordination of harassment and abuse, that's quite different than a group saying this government's committing, you know, human rights violations. But the fact is these groups that are commit harassment are decreasing the amount of freedom of speech of other people. And I think there has to be a balance when you're dealing with extremists, you can say like people, some people are never going to like trans people.

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:26):
They're never like the concept that Jewish people exist or whatever. And I, I mean, I wanna say I can live with that. I can't, I hope try to live with that, but it's like, I I accept that people may have bigoted ideas or terrible ideas that affect me and my family and my community, my country, whatever. I can accept that, but facilitating them to coordinate activities that are intended to suppress speech and harm lives. That is a very bright line. And I just, it suppresses my ability expresses everyone around me's ability to, to be able to have their own version of free speech

Dan Moren (00:40:01):
To Glen's point. I, when I was in college, one of the jobs I had was during in subsequent years after I was a freshman, I was in an orientation group where we taught incoming students about using all the tech systems at our school. Right. We said, here's how you use your email, whatever. And we went over free speech, hate speech and harassment. And this was in like 1999 in 2000. And we could, if I could teach hundreds of incoming freshmen, the difference, then, you know, we could figure this out.

Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
It's it seems so difficult though, to know exactly where the line is drawn is that maybe is violence where the line is drawn.

Paris Martineau (00:40:43):
Coordination violence is certainly one of the lines. Yeah. I think that it also, shouldn't be a terrible thing. If you have a group of people where they are actively coordinating to harass others, and you want to actively coordinate a group of people to say, Hey, business, that's making money from this group, protecting them. We think that's a bad business relationship. You should be allowed to do that. I think that's not a big deal. And if CloudFlare is deeply annoyed and frustrated by it, so be it, you are the one keeping this business relationship going.

Glenn Fleishman (00:41:19):
The CEO was calling that bullying the fact that people who are under the gun being attacked docs, forced from their homes, people committing self harm that, that people standing up for them against Kiwi farms against Cloudflare's relationship was bullying. And that is bullying.

Leo Laporte (00:41:35):
I <laugh>. Yeah. Should lives of TikTok be banned. This is a big controversy on TWiTtter. Yes. Yes. Right now 1.3 million followers it is not actively inciting violence, although it paints L B GT Q teachers of being pedophiles and groomers. 

Paris Martineau (00:41:57):
I mean, I do think it's worth noting that libs of toss content and specific hyper focus on children's hospitals that also treat trans children resulted in seemingly resulted in bomb threats, being called

Dan Moren (00:42:15):
To children's hospitals incur with that, that that's Boston children's hospital right down the, the street for me, basically where I am. And yeah, that's, that's a big deal. That is a major hospital that does a lot of important work, including the kinds of things they're getting harassed for and to, you know, call in a bomb threat on a hospital. I'm you know,

Leo Laporte (00:42:34):
But is, is TikTok clear integration? Libs of TikTok says we a hundred percent condemn any acts or threats of violence. They are not saying go bomb the hospitals, but

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:45):
No, but it's plausible that, you know, will nobody rid me of the troublesome priests is still an incitement to violence. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
Yeah, yeah. There you go. I mean, that's actually great. That's I have a reference there on that one. Fleshman sorry.

Paris Martineau (00:42:56):
Yeah. I haven't taken a close look at their tweets as like the only tweet I happened to see last night was I believe the I'm forgetting the woman's name behind the account, but she had tweeted, oh, I'm prepared for TWiTtter to suspend or block my account. And once they do, I'm gonna Sue TWiTtter and everybody there because they're censoring me and taking away my freedom to speech. And I'm like, that's not how any of this works, sweetie. Like you losing your TWiTtter account is not a first amendment violation. No,

Leo Laporte (00:43:28):
No it's and TWiTtter has not, no TWiTtter has not banned them at this. As of no,

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:31):
They suspended the, they

Paris Martineau (00:43:33):
Got one slap on the wrist for one tweet, which like everybody else in the world, who's gotten one tweet flagged you delete it and you move on.

Leo Laporte (00:43:40):
Right?

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:41):
Like Jordan Peterson,

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
It's a such a, yeah. It's a difficult thing to to know how to, how to do it. It is not de platforming somebody to kick him off of TWiTtter. I'm sorry. It's.

Paris Martineau (00:43:53):
Yeah. A brief aside, since you mentioned Jordan Peterson, though, I think one of the funniest things is if you look back overall, the different times that he's been suspended or something, and been like that said, I'm done with TWiTtter. This platform is terrible. And I refuse to acknowledge this next time. They try to suspend one of my tweets. I'm never gonna delete it. Come back. He says that. And then like every time 22 hours later, he's back, that man is addicted. You

Dan Moren (00:44:16):
Cannot stop.

Glenn Fleishman (00:44:17):
I gotta say the point of joy I have right now is watching Alex Jones being raped over the coals over and over and over again. And all of his garbage exposed and also the success and lack of success of so-called de platforming, right? So Alex Jones lost his access to a number of platforms. And yet he apparently continues to make tens of millions or, or more dollars a year from selling snake oil to people. But it's been, it's been great to see that grimy underbelly, like fully the rock picked up and exposed to understand exactly the ecosystem and what the value is to people spreading misinformation and hatred. This

Leo Laporte (00:44:51):
Stuff is so hard though. I mean, I can't really blame TWiTtter for trying to thread this needle. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, I may disagree with what they've done in some cases and not in others. But it's a hard thing. It is a very hard thing to do. And it's hard to know what the, what the line is right or wrong.

Dan Moren (00:45:10):
They also put, they put themselves in that position though, right? I mean, they, they opened that can of worms by creating the product that they did. And if you, you know, to a certain degree, they're responsible for policing it in, in a responsible manner. Right. so on the other one hand, yeah, there is some trickiness to this, but it's, it's a problem that could be at least if not solved, addressed by prioritizing it. And it always feels like they kind of want to throw up their hands and be like, oh, well, you know, there's nothing we can do. Right. You know, we don't, we don't make the rules. You like,

Glenn Fleishman (00:45:41):
It's the internet,

Dan Moren (00:45:43):
The rules,

Glenn Fleishman (00:45:43):
The main character of the day problem at, at TWiTtter, which has, I think gone up and down at times is, you know, nobody wants to be the main character of the day. That's your job in life. If you, if you're participating in social media, don't do I know some people who have become the main character of the day, it's not very enjoyable to them ever. Occasionally it's positive, very

Leo Laporte (00:45:59):
On other side, on any side. Right.

Glenn Fleishman (00:46:01):
Any part of it, right. Yeah. And so TWiTtter has built a machine that creates main characters of the day, sometimes multiple ones. And the issue is a right wing accounts typically, but sources accounts that want to encourage harassment up to the point of violence and, and real harm, they have figured out how to leverage the TWiTtter main figure of the day algorithmic feed so that they can cause harm by fluttering butterfly wings. Right? So they can say something that isn't directly doesn't meet any kind of first amendment test, even of imminent harm. And doesn't meet TWiTtter's direct tests about incitement to violence or commitment of hatred of speech, but they, or hatred speech. But they they surface up these accounts like libs, oft TikTok surface up people who are absolutely innocuous and make them the, the 30, what is it? The five minute hate figure. What's it from 1984. And everybody in the world who is of that ilk gets that amplified out to them through the mechanism of TWiTtter and then other subsidiary mechanisms. And that person becomes a subject of this for no, there's no reason it should happen. It's a failure of the network that, that happens.

Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
I wanna take a break. When we come back, he used AI to win a fine arts competition. Was it cheating? This is gonna be a fun conversation. A great panel. You guys, I love this. This is gonna be a long one. I could tell, cuz I don't ever wanna stop. When we have people like Dan Moore here from six colors dot com Glen Fleischman, Glen F do glen.fun. I'm sorry, Glen F I can't, I don't, my F keeps broken. So I, I can only go to Glen dot UN. Could you

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:42):
<Laugh> I'll register that to me

Leo Laporte (00:47:45):
When you place

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:45):
On Glen, I'll join the United nation. So I'm there.

Leo Laporte (00:47:49):
I, you know, it's just, it's fallen off and somebody who lost her slash and question Mark Key, but survived Paris Martin know reporter for the,

Paris Martineau (00:47:58):
You know, I learned to ask fewer questions and I think that's all right.

Leo Laporte (00:48:01):
And go to fewer websites. <Laugh> I should, yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:48:04):
All my websites are insecure now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:07):
Right? No, no. Slash slash our show today brought to you by podium. If you own a small business, it's, you know, congratulations, you're still, you're still running. It's been tough, tough few years from supply chain issues, increased demand. Business owners have to manage the businesses that are thriving right now are the ones who are forward thinking. And that's why I love podium PO I you know, there are a number of businesses in our area that use podium. And when I love it, I'll leave the, my dentist. And they as I'm leaving, I get a text message saying, you don't forget your appointment is coming up in six weeks or whatever. And or maybe would you like to leave a review on Yelp or you know, that kind of thing. Podium helps your small business stay ahead of the curve with modern messaging tools that make it easy for your customers to connect with your business.

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One car dealer sold a truck. It just four text messages that jeweler sold a ringing, coordinated curbside pickup, did it all through texts and the customers love it. A dentist had had a bunch of outstanding payments. He'd been sending a mail, you know, trying to, he sent out payment requests through text, got 70% of the outstanding collections in just two weeks because it works. I don't remember, but the open rate I think on text is well over 90%. It's the, it's the number one way to reach people because it's effective with podiums all in, in one inbox, your employees will love it, too. It all goes into the inbox and you could do more than just chat. You can get, get online reviews by sending an easy to use link. You can collect payments, send marketing campaigns. I get, and I'm ashamed to say it really works.

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I get our local ice cream parlor every few weeks. I'll get something saying, Hey, we haven't seen you in a while. How about 30% off a pint? And it works. Gosh, darn it. Every single time, all by a quick text, your employees can stay in touch with customers in one unified inbox. See how podium can grow your business. Watch a demo today. You'd just go to podium.com/TWiT P O D I U m.com/TWiT. If you're, if you wanna know more, you can learn the facts are there. And I think you probably, if you think about it already know, this is how your customers wanna do business. Why don't you do it that way too? Podium.Com/TWiT podium. Let's grow the ultimate text messaging platform. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. He <laugh>, I loved this story, but it's actually kind of a, a deeper question.

Leo Laporte (00:51:26):
He won a fine arts competition, but wasn't cheating. This is a Colorado state fair digital digital category. The, the digitally manipulated photography category Jason Allen won beating 20 other artists, blue ribbon, $300 prize with an artwork he created through mid journey, which is one of the new generative art tools that are just taking off. Somebody said it's a CBRI explosion of AI art. And I think that may be maybe accurate. The portrait beautiful portrait looked like Renaissance art. Although if I, when I look at it, I can tell that that's, that's, that's AI generated. I mean, that's not, that's clear to me, but maybe the judges didn't have as much experience with this stuff. Is it fair to, I mean, he says, well, I wrote the prompt <laugh> and then he imported it in Photoshop and fixed it up a little bit. So

Paris Martineau (00:52:29):
What category is it in? Was it in like painting?

Leo Laporte (00:52:32):
No, no, no.

Paris Martineau (00:52:34):
Normally they have a

Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
Digitally manipulated photography.

Paris Martineau (00:52:38):
Okay. Then that's fair argue. I mean, that is exactly what it is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:42):
I mean, I was

Paris Martineau (00:52:43):
Say, I think if you're talking about high art or experimental art using an AI to make a weird painting, that kind of looks like a computer made it, that is art in and of itself.

Dan Moren (00:52:58):
If the judges don't know and they still look at it as just a work itself and are like, yeah, that's great. We love that. If they didn't know it was AI, I don't know. It's hard to, I, I find it hard to ding them on that. Even as someone who, you know, writes creatively and feel like if an AI wrote a book and that book won a competition, I would

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Be

Dan Moren (00:53:16):
A little miffed, but I also don't know that that would just probably make me a hypocrite that

Paris Martineau (00:53:20):
Like, you gotta hand it to it. Like if someone being AI made a better book, like, well, yeah, nice for that.

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:27):
I I, I have a degree in art doesn't make me better informed on this, but I studied a lot of art history as part of that degree. And one of the courses looked to the concept of knoe, which is how art is evaluated for its quality, right? So both by like, you know, price, but also how do you evaluate pieces of art and say this is better or worse, or this is a master work and so forth. And I think that this actually gets into that, you know, very obstru little thing like knoe ship is that there are, you know, this whole thing about kit, right? Kit was a concept develop developed by Clint Greenberg. Like, I don't know, I think 80 years ago to describe art that was predigested you looked at it and it required no interpretation.

Glenn Fleishman (00:54:12):
He was talking about Soviet art and other art that was super pedagogical and designed to just be the kind of, you know, puum to the masses you looked at it's like, this is the message, right? And that the opposite of kit is something that requires, you know, this interpretation, you look at it and there's a perception and it was, you know, Jackson, Pollock, and all the people doing abstract impressionism data isn't before it surrealism and then a pop art and later movements, they all rely on this impression that art is something beyond just looking at a thing and saying, that's a picture of a cake, right. So I'm sorry to get so deep into artistry stuff here, but it applies because you're like, on what basis do the judges evaluate, this are the components that they evaluated as being winning work ones where they were mistaken, things that they should have actually been looking at more carefully, or is it justified? Does this work actually because of the sources in which it derives and how the algorithm is recombined it, does it make it justifiably something that you can compare and use that kind of stewardship today? This is actually equivalent to other work of this Cal caliber

Leo Laporte (00:55:16):
Or is it just prettier?

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:18):
Is it

Paris Martineau (00:55:19):
Pret? I will say we do need to see what the other art works, competing work. Cause maybe they all really suck. We're not considering that true. Two, if we're, if we're looking at this from an art history perspective, I think AI generated art would be a very futurist like piece. Like this is kind of what the early futurist movement like around impressionism was talking about, which is that, you know, art is not precious. Art can be fast. Art is like movement and technology. And if in this case, art is typing in a couple words in a screen that's art baby.

Leo Laporte (00:55:56):
I actually go beyond that. I think that the skill involved in typing the prompt, cuz it isn't usually just a few words it's usually elaborate and you often refine it is a form of computer programming. And I think maybe the future of computer programming as we interact with machines with AI you know, computer programming up to this point, you very specific, the computer's gonna gonna do exactly what you said no more, no less, but this is now the new, the new way of communicating with the computer. It's more of a conversation. I think that that's actually the new form of programming and think we're gonna see in a lot of areas

Dan Moren (00:56:38):
To me, I think the clearest syndication that it, you know, is a valid form of art is that every new medium or style is always greeted with that question. But is it art? Right? You know, look at the

Leo Laporte (00:56:51):
Impressionist. They were, they were refiled, right? They had to have their own art show just to get show people their work.

Dan Moren (00:56:57):
If people are asking that question, I think the answer is usually yes. And so, yeah. I mean, it's not what you expect.

Paris Martineau (00:57:04):
That's not our, whatever was just

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:06):
<Laugh> everything else

Leo Laporte (00:57:07):
<Laugh> here. Here

Dan Moren (00:57:08):
Is I never wanted to

Leo Laporte (00:57:08):
The prompt, the prompt for it is a still of Donald Trump and Alex Jones in jail. Photograph natural light, sharp, detailed face magazine, press photos, Steve MCR. Oh my God. David Lizar cannon Nikon focus. These prompts. I mean, pick one. You like, can

Paris Martineau (00:57:21):
We can we put a Leo themed prompt in here? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):
Is that I did search for my name. This is the new, this is the new Google search. I'm sorry to say. Was

Paris Martineau (00:57:30):
That your first

Leo Laporte (00:57:30):
Search? Yeah, one of my first. So this is it's

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:33):
Like Leonard Cohen in the upper left corner there.

Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
Yeah. Well this is a search engine. This is a search engine. That search is stable. Diffusion stable diffusion is responsible for a lot of this Cambrian explosion over the last two weeks. It's an open source generator that's been made available to anybody. You can install it. If you have enough horsepower, big enough GPU and run it yourself. There's there are a lot of nuances to this story. A lot of facets, this story, one of the problems with stable diffusion, according to some is it uses a lot of images. We'll talk about this later that are not in the public domain as it's training material. And yet, because people can play with it. It's we've seen a lot of progress in the stuff we can generate. How about I'll just do Adam driver. How about that? Cause they're more of him

Paris Martineau (00:58:20):
A a clear one to one for you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:24):
Than. Yeah. Me and Adam driver. So these, these are all images that include that. Now one thing stable diff fusion does is it will show

Paris Martineau (00:58:32):
There's some Nazi eye iconography. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:34):
I was gonna say there's some, this one,

Leo Laporte (00:58:37):
This one is a portrait of John Oliver standing next to Adam driver's stoic, full body, military uniform. That's weird fantasy intricate.

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:44):
John Oliver did an excellent segment by the way. Recently on he did wearing a cabbage. He

Leo Laporte (00:58:48):
Did. And he married a cab was incredibly

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:50):
In fact

Leo Laporte (00:58:50):
It was beautiful. Yeah. In fact, if I serve on Oliver, I'll find a lot more of his a and it looks like he really just

Dan Moren (00:58:57):
Added driver. Yeah. All

Leo Laporte (00:58:59):
That's

Paris Martineau (00:59:00):
I never thought about that, but

Leo Laporte (00:59:02):
Yes, John and Adam have a history I guess, but they do. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of John a

Glenn Fleishman (00:59:07):
That's right. They have that

Paris Martineau (00:59:09):
About, oh, there's a lot of him, John Oliver covered in blood in a way that I would not have expected.

Glenn Fleishman (00:59:14):
Well, that came from he did a lot of searches, I think in prepara. Well, he was searching on people doing searches of him or, or a work about him. Yeah. And then found the one in which he buried a, a

Leo Laporte (00:59:25):
Cabbage highly recommend that watching that segment from the last Sunday. So this routine,

Paris Martineau (00:59:29):
Oh God, that one over the right is terrifying. This

Leo Laporte (00:59:32):
One <laugh> yes.

Paris Martineau (00:59:33):
That is my actual nightmare.

Leo Laporte (00:59:35):
This is a facial portrait of John Oliver looking at the camera, laughing like a maniac colorful background lighting, like in the Blair witch pro project. His

Paris Martineau (00:59:43):
Teeth look like corn.

Leo Laporte (00:59:46):
They don't mention corn teeth joke. And John Oliver had a baby. Yeah. Yeah. I find's

Glenn Fleishman (00:59:52):
A classic. Oh, sorry. There's a classic sci-fi story. I wanna say it's by cm, corn booth, but I may be wrong in which a machine falls through from the future until like 1940s or fifties and a guy finds it and he discovers, it produces art. He gives it limited inputs and it produces beautiful work. And what he doesn't realize is he he's written in a language, his understand. And so he sends off, it looks like Swedish. So he sends off an instruction manual that came with it to get it translated as he is using it. He starts to make these contracts. He's getting gallery shows. It's all being produced by the machine and what he finds out. He gets the translation back and it's a form. The persons like this looks a little like Swedish, but he is been pressing the delete button all the time. So as the last image comes out is basically empty and it draws a circle. And I was like, was a perfect, it's a perfect story from 80 years ago or 70 years ago about this idea like automated art from the future, but then you hit the wrong button and you're, you're done. It's all over.

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
One senior research scientist at Google actually is sounding in alarm Negar, Roza as says, can't believe stable diffusion is out there for public use and that's considered, okay.

Glenn Fleishman (01:01:02):
Wait, why

Leo Laporte (01:01:03):
Google's been very careful. It has open AI to limit access to some of these engines. And apparently some scientists think let you've released the Cracken <laugh> if you, if you've released AI I, I think what's, I think what re is required for the development of a lot of these things is kind of this tight loop of interaction. And I think stable diffusion that's exactly what's happened. It's getting better and better and it's more and more intriguing. I just typed in bunny and I'm getting a lot of weird

Paris Martineau (01:01:42):
Things. I was gonna say, that's a not safe for work search.

Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Feel like. Yeah, well apparently portrait of Taylor swift as Lola bunny in space jam. Wow.

Paris Martineau (01:01:52):
<Laugh> again, another sentence that I would not

Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
Expected to that extra there's there's a lot more, oh yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:01:58):
There's a third arm.

Leo Laporte (01:01:59):
There's a third arm. Yeah. You need a

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:01):
Third arm.

Leo Laporte (01:02:02):
I,

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:03):
I mean, this is, we're talking about day one earlier, you know, I've always, I've, I've ridiculed Bezos using that because you know, they're not a startup anymore. They wanna pretend to be one and they're a multimillion dollar company. It's

Paris Martineau (01:02:12):
Two or day three at

Leo Laporte (01:02:13):
Am. Joe Biden wearing 20 years.

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:15):
We are day one for a lot of AI stuff. It's amazing how much utility we can get out of AI. And it's still not very good by many measures. Like, you know, if you can it's I mean, I think voice recognition has gotten pretty good, but it still has a long way to go. This is in the early days of being practical and it produces remarkable stuff that the bid journey stuff is, can be in incre the scifi or sorry hor horror author. Dan, what he called Chuck Wede.

Dan Moren (01:02:42):
Oh, he does weird, weird

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:43):
Multi genre. He's really interesting guy. Great. Yeah. <Laugh> and very funny guy and I think interesting user of technology and he is constantly publishing sort of writing, probably his mid journey queries onto Instagram. You're like, it's so beautiful. Sometimes it's hard for me to believe this could be any kind of amalgamation that it's not directly from a source.

Leo Laporte (01:03:06):
Here's some not,

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:07):
Not that image though.

Leo Laporte (01:03:08):
This is from the mid journey community showcase. So these are, and this is another thing you, you it's my mom always said, if all good bakers leave many cakes on the window sill, that, that, you know, if you're gonna, you throw out the bad ones, but if you're gonna show it in a community, so showcase it's a success. And I would say these are stunning. These images of

Paris Martineau (01:03:29):
The first, like 15, you scrolled through all looked like PlayStation five, like title characters

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:34):
Basically.

Leo Laporte (01:03:35):
<Laugh> yeah, well I, maybe those prompts, but I mean, look at this, this looks like breathtaking Baro beauty, blonde, beauty, full head oval, Baroque frame, not bar. It's not bar that's, but you know, what's more,

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:48):
Something's,

Leo Laporte (01:03:48):
It's something here's a Crescent moon covered in vines and roses, art, new VO. 

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:53):
I mean, if it can't get, if it ain't bar don't fix it <laugh>

Dan Moren (01:03:57):
I knew you were gonna go there again.

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:58):
I just had to

Leo Laporte (01:04:00):
<Laugh> 

Glenn Fleishman (01:04:01):
I think, yeah, I mean, you, if you, if you follow communities of cartoons and illustrators they're more freaked out than authors are. Maybe we were past being freaked out by it. I don't know about automation.

Dan Moren (01:04:10):
Yeah. I don't know. There's always something very tempting in this for me too, as somebody who has very little like visual arts skills whatsoever and has done some work with like, you know, stock photos, making some book covers for stuff. I'd self-published I mean, the idea that you could generate art, that would be not just a stock photo that you've sort of manipulated or worked with. Like, I don't know, it's it is an attractive option because I there's no way in a million years that I would get the skills and develop them and have time to like, sort of spend all the time at require to get to this point. Does it mean it's taking jobs away from like people I could be paying to do that? I don't know. That's an interesting question.

Glenn Fleishman (01:04:47):
Question is I think where it get complicated.

Paris Martineau (01:04:50):
I was just saying, I think where it gets complicated is I've seen a lot of major media publications as of late come under fire for using like lead images and stories that are generated by mid journey or Dolly or something like that. When it's like, this is the sort of illustration that typically these publications are paying a couple dozen different freelance artists, any given week or month to create. I think the Atlantics Charlie Wark had recently gotten some hot water cause he had, he has a small budget for his newsletter. So he is already just using stock images, rather

Leo Laporte (01:05:25):
That's this image I'm showing

Paris Martineau (01:05:27):
Illustrations, but he had used the most horrifying photo of Alex Jones in a newsstand generated, I think by mid journey. And it was <laugh>. I mean, people were quite upset about it.

Leo Laporte (01:05:39):
Were they upset because of the image or upset because it took the took bread outta the mouth of some illustrators somewhere.

Paris Martineau (01:05:45):
I mean, I think that people seeing it without context saw it and they were like, oh, the Atlantic a publication that has a lot of money and typically is going to be paying and working with illustrators is using an artificial intelligence powered system to create their lead artist. Like if the Atlantic is doing it, what is stopping any other publication? I mean, I think this is a little bit of a different case cuz he had a follow up newsletter. We explained, I just run my small newsletter and of a very limited budget. But I do think that it begs some question when you're talking about larger publications,

Dan Moren (01:06:21):
Does it devalue? Does it devalue the work too, right? Cause if, you know, if you a freelance illustrator and you're like, well here's my rate. And they're like, well, we could just go to an AI and plug in a few words and get the, by the way, same thing for

Leo Laporte (01:06:33):
This, this is generated by mid journey and the caption says it by mid journey, Alex Jones inside an American office under fluorescent lights and it's but also I should point out mid journey retains the right to these images. If they're turning to NFT, it may get a cut <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:06:51):
Yeah. NFT, the most popular thing. I, as a musician, I know told me the most horrifying thing horrifying phrase I've ever heard about creativity a few years ago. She said I'm competing against all music ever published now. And I think that might be what terrifies artists and rightly so as a writer, I'm slightly terrified. Because I don't, it's funny. I don't, it's not like it's easier to do art, but it's harder to get a Corpus to produce, say a news article or analysis of a contemporary thing or even a description of something. Because you have to have a deep Corpus, but with art, the Corpus is all art ever created. And so every time a, a rabbit appears in anything that could be fodder for an AI to use. So it's, it's really the sheer amount, right? It's the training set. So I don't think someone's gonna write an article about I don't think an AI could write a feasibly credible article now or in the next few years about an person entering an AI generated piece of art <laugh> in to a contest of winning.

Dan Moren (01:07:52):
I don't know. I've seen some, they've had those. There were those ones. I can't remember what the library was, but what was the, there was a thing recently where it would generate a story. If you, in the same sort of way you could like tell, write a story in this way. I know because bar Powell, we Friedman did it like, oh, write a description of this podcast and, and it was, you know, surprisingly good again. And I think the biggest

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:12):
Full length you write a feature that, oh

Dan Moren (01:08:14):
Yeah, I don't know. Not now maybe, but I wouldn't discount it for the future. And I think the biggest challenge with this is, is this argument this's gonna, the only this argument ultimately moot because it's like, well, the, the genie's outta the bottle. Like once it's out there, you can't stop it it's done. So

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:31):
Yeah, it comes down to right, like the source material, the training set to me becomes the issue. We were talking about that on this very podcast with Christina Warren and who, who couldn't talk about it. Cause she works for Microsoft and the co-pilot product some weeks ago, because that's the same thing as like who, if, if there are public, you know, this art isn't even public, right? Some of it is art that's copyright, but it was

Leo Laporte (01:08:56):
So Andy bio did a very interesting study. He this is waxy.org. He stable diff unlike Dolly too open AI does not release the training set. So we can't see where that came from because stable diffusion is open source. You know, where it came from, where the training set came from, he says, we indexed the 12 million images in a sample. By the way, there are many, many more images. They, you know, they didn't want to go through 2.3 billion images. So they took a subset 12 million images and they indexed them. By domain half, the images were sourced from only a hundred domains domains. And the largest number of images came from Pinterest 8.5% of the total dataset scraped from Pinterest. So completely disregarding you know, copywriter ownership fine art America, second biggest domain, which sells art prints and posters 244,000 from Shopify then wicks and Squarespace red bubble. So it's scraped images all over the net. Number one artist of the top 25 artists, the data set only three are still living Phil K Aaron Hansen and Steve Henderson, the most frequent artist. Who would you guess Thomas Kincaid? Of course then the, the, the planes of light trademark.

Dan Moren (01:10:24):
Well, and it depends to a certain degree. Like how does this, I, I, you know, again, I don't know enough about the technology, this one to know how that works in terms of ingesting that material. I mean, one argues that if you are an artist you have gone and looked at a lot of art and you have that artist

Leo Laporte (01:10:38):
You've done the same

Glenn Fleishman (01:10:39):
Thing. Yeah. Good

Dan Moren (01:10:40):
Point. Right? Like, so, but you know, are you, as long as you're not storing those, if you're just sort of exposing the AI to that and it's deriving its own conclusions, I don't know. That seems legit to me, but maybe I'm not taking everything into consideration here. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:10:55):
It's the same thing we're trying with copilot. Same thing with JavaScript. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:10:58):
This is why we should legally ban every artist who has a photographic memory from looking at any artist

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:04):
<Laugh> right. Right. You know, this is a story Harrison Bergeron, right? The Kurt VK story about someone who is you know, the society in which everyone, everyone has to be equal, but they define equal by disabling people who are too good instead of raising up everybody to the same level. And so Harrison Bergon is the most beautiful, capable, intelligent agile person. And so he has to walk around wearing like 300 pounds of weights and disfiguring masks and so forth. And that, that is, it does get you to those fields where you're like, well, the AI should be blind. It must be blinded because you can see too much beauty

Paris Martineau (01:11:37):
For some reason when you described that, I thought, you know, someone would make a good point and you just club him in the knee. You know, <laugh> disable him immediately. <Laugh> like just chop off an arm. You were too smart in that meeting. Sorry. Gotta take down a peg.

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
Andy did an interesting thing. He gave a prompt, same prompt to Dolly two and stable diffusion on the left realistic 3d rendering of Mickey mouse working on a vintage computer, doing his taxes. <Laugh> and you can see that the one on the left of Dolly two image doesn't know who Mickey mouse is. It's just a mouse. That's

Dan Moren (01:12:09):
The original Mickey mouse is like,

Leo Laporte (01:12:11):
Yeah. Maybe that's what it used

Dan Moren (01:12:12):
To live. White tank top. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:14):
Yeah. Wife beat fit.

Dan Moren (01:12:16):
That's what he had on before, you know, when he goes off for the day, you know, when he goes through relax, that's what he,

Leo Laporte (01:12:21):
Mickey mouse after hours. But yeah, but in stable

Dan Moren (01:12:25):
Out there, it

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
Knows who Mickey mouse is, cuz it's trained on Mickey mouse. And so that,

Dan Moren (01:12:31):
That alone is gonna get them into trouble. Right. Because they're in Disney, I'm saying, Hey yeah, you gotta pay up for that. That's our, that's our property.

Leo Laporte (01:12:37):
Yeah. It's it's so that does raise an issue. Then there's also the issue of AI generated pornography and a number of publications have started to point out there may be more of this appearing stable diffusion team bid a predict, built a predictor for adult material, assign every image and S <laugh>. This must have been a fun project. And N S FW probability score ranging from zero to one. So about 2.9% of the English language images were unsafe, but it's so, so there's DEC definitely a hardcore content.

Dan Moren (01:13:18):
I know we've wrapped around back to that first story. Here's the solution to all that age verification, everything on the internet is produced by AI. It's tagged as to how unsafe it is and then you pull the content. There you go. Nice. There you go. Perfect. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:13:32):
The future, the internet doesn't have any idea about Mickey mouse and I think that's beautiful.

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:37):
<Laugh> I think, I think the future is a fax machine, which feeds into a shredder. That's my future. Oh, that's that's great. So it's AI, AI consuming content generated by AI. We don't need to be involved.

Leo Laporte (01:13:49):
Yeah. We just take a, take a break, go to the beach, relax. Right?

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:52):
Let them do their work.

Leo Laporte (01:13:54):
Good, good, good research from Andy bio and I'm not sure what it concludes. I, I, you know, there's a lot of copyright violation that's and there's certainly a lot of cribbing from existing art. I still think though, that this is it's interesting, cuz we've seen, it's been such a stop and start thing. AI there's, you know, been several AI winners already. We've seen how difficult it is to get cars, to drive safely, to get voice assistance, to answer intelligently. And yet I think in this one area, AI has made huge Amma, a huge amount of progress very quickly. Or is that just my imagination?

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:34):
We, we fill in details visually better. Right? We see things that aren't aren't there. And you know, if, if 10 words in a row are misspelled, we're gonna notice that. Or if the sentence doesn't make sense has to make logical sense. But we look at like the Mickey mouse, one on the right there it's, you know, Mickey's hand is two fingers and it's distorted and the keyboard doesn't have all the keys and that's okay. We don't notice that as much. You're like he's

Paris Martineau (01:14:56):
Doing his taxes. I get it. He's

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:57):
Doing his taxes. Yeah. It's a you're

Paris Martineau (01:14:59):
Mickey on the left. The Mickey on the left is using a external clickety cl keyboard on what looks like a typewriter there's

Leo Laporte (01:15:09):
Make

Paris Martineau (01:15:09):
Any sense.

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:10):
Yeah. It's great. Well, but

Paris Martineau (01:15:11):
Yet we're like the mouse is ripped and doing his taxes.

Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
It's like, and that's actually hard Paris, your keyboard cuz it looks like it's missing the question mark.

Paris Martineau (01:15:18):
That's true. You know,

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:20):
Just, I

Paris Martineau (01:15:21):
Like to serious mouse

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:22):
<Laugh> I'd like to know if the rear end next to you is AI generator that appeared during the break. That's my

Leo Laporte (01:15:27):
Question. Could be <laugh> could be, I don't

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:31):
Know. Suddenly I realized, I noticed all right. Yeah. Oh, that's the sequin. I understand. That's that piece of art.

Paris Martineau (01:15:36):
This is the sequin mannequin butt. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, I understand. Now I can't figure out which way to turn. Yes. I, you know, brought it.

Leo Laporte (01:15:43):
No that's straight outta a stable diffusion. <Laugh>

Dan Moren (01:15:47):
The 2% of

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:49):
That prompt in now

Dan Moren (01:15:50):
On that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:52):
Made

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:52):
That 3d 3d printing plus AI plus 3d printing you'll type in sequin mannequin butt. And then it'll come outta your device and you'll have, you know, there

Paris Martineau (01:16:00):
You go. And you'll be like mannequin butt only as one butt cheek. But I get it.

Dan Moren (01:16:05):
Do you remember with, there was this fear over nanotechnology of like gray go, everything we turn in gray go. Now I'm worried that we're gonna be a, was in 3d printed stuff generated by AI this little Casty <inaudible> everywhere that an AI has created

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:22):
Now

Paris Martineau (01:16:22):
Around it's like a mouse with six arms, but

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:25):
You know, like, like a lot of like robotics and AI stuff. And I don't know if this is, I sometimes feel like I'm way off base. And sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it as a trend is augmentation. Right? We have more people despite the pandemic, more people are now employed in America than there were before the pandemic we've recovered from that employment continues ever upward, even as American productivity, just to take, you know, us as an easy to find example, productivity continues on an unprecedented pace continuously for all American workers, blah, blah, blah. Right. We have so much robotics. Now we have AI engaged in a lot of aspects of daily life. You know? I think Dan, I think you use this Paris. You may as well, AI based transcription for interviews and things like that. At least as a first pass. If not the verbatim one, I love, I

Paris Martineau (01:17:06):
Use this love Trent.

Leo Laporte (01:17:08):
You love

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:09):
Yeah, I'm using Trent

Paris Martineau (01:17:11):
Trent, Trent. He's a great fellow that just listens to all of my interviews and kind of mashes some buttons

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:16):
Really helpful

Leo Laporte (01:17:17):
Trent, with an eye. Yes.

Paris Martineau (01:17:19):
Trent Trent with an eye. It's a really good transcript.

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:22):
It's not a, I need Trent.

Leo Laporte (01:17:23):
I thought you loved Trent. I didn't know. Listen,

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:26):
Trent AI O Otter is integrated with OT, another one integrated with zoom and it made a huge difference in my reporting. It would, it would sometimes take hours out of the work I was doing to have a searchable thing. So it was, this was substantial augmentation, my, you know, word rate or my hourly rate for articles, I wrote essentially went up by playing, paying a, a relatively low yearly fee to have this AI assistant. So augmentation, my question is, and I think a lot of artists are thinking about this now. People like web cartoonists and folks who do commercial art, the field had sh has shrunk. And it's a very complicated one already. So the question is, does this become an augmentation where they can use this as a tool, as a visualization tool? Is it something that helps them get to where they're going faster for commercial work or you know, as a writer, do I wind up there's another science picture story, which, you know, some writers like us or something they're typing away and you have to control the AI for moving too fast ahead of you, but it's a partnership and it allows someone to produce more work that's more accurate and more quickly, maybe less creative or you're providing the creative component.

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:32):
So there is a future in which augmentation reduces less of the scut work and produces a, a better impact. But again, you know, we have so much, so much so many professions and fields have been roboticized or have had even tiny robots or other kinds of automation added in the last, you know, 50 years and yet employment. Right. We're not employing 50%, fewer people we're at all time, high employment, America history.

Leo Laporte (01:18:56):
Yeah. In <laugh> there's too many jobs for too few people. So

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:00):
More robot hamburger flippers. Right. I

Leo Laporte (01:19:04):
Think you're, I think you nailed it though. I mean, honestly the best self-driving cars are not driving entirely on their own. They're not level four or five it's level two where a human it's human augmentation, and that's why it's a mistake to call it autopilot. But but that, those kinds of, you know, self-driving vehicles are great. They're not, self-driving the they're assist they're computer assist. And I think that works well. Do by the way, Trent is, do you, have you tried Otter, which is better Paris, you like to, I

Paris Martineau (01:19:35):
Have been a Trent fan for many years. I find that Otter for me. I don't know. I know a lot of people who swear by Otter. I found that it doesn't often transcribe with the same level of accuracy. And most importantly, for me, I think that Trent that's T I N T not my friend Trent <laugh> Trent's editor, editing service is really perfect for the sort of things that I use transcription for. Yeah. But once you load up your transcription, you kind of have a timecoded like live transcription of it, that scrolls with the audio. And you can, whenever let's say, if there's a word that it got wrong, you go into edit and it pauses. And then once you're done editing it, restarts at the word right after. So I think it's like really good for the sort of workflow that I do, but, you know, I know a lot of people Otter,

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:31):
I should point out there's another reason I discovered Otter was for live captioning. And I should point out this is an incredible area in which it was almost impossible to get. And now is widely available is you needed live people typing to do real time transcription of conversations. Now there are a billion conversations a day that can be transcribed or, or sorry, could have live caption, Google Skype,

Leo Laporte (01:20:52):
Built it in Google, an amazing job with Android 12 and 13

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:55):
And Skype is incredible apples adding it and iOS yeah, apples. So, and that, that is a, I mean, so 99.9, nine, 9% of all phone conversations, video conferences and, and whatever do not have live captions. And now you have the potential. And I suspect it is a more than 10% number where people enable that. And that is, oh my God, the amount of cognitive energy that saves and the improvement in conversations. So not like I wanna be a, a, like AI only has positive impacts, but I'm like my wife has hearing issues. She can't drive at night. Like I see always, I look at AI and improvements in all these kinds of automations and robotics as tools for people, you know, directly near me where it's gonna improve captions, already improve her life. And augmentation that would allow like night vision or other tools it'll have to be full, automated driving could allow her to drive at night again safely.

Leo Laporte (01:21:49):
Yeah. Dolly two has announced a new feature called out painting, which is kind of another way of taking a human generated product and then applying. So I'll show you the time lapse God for mirrors, the girl with the Pearl earring Dolly two is painting the room, the girls in. And it's, I mean, it's not obviously probably not the real room, but it's pretty credible. Oh, it's weird. <Laugh> so weird. Did

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:21):
You see the example of someone? She was she's a fashion designer and technologist, and she created a video by combining out painting and like two or three other tools to, to create seamless images. And it just shows her like walking down the street and her outfit is changing into AI, generated alternatives as she walks and it's

Paris Martineau (01:22:40):
Together. I see that video. It's

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:42):
Phenomenal. I remember. Yeah. And it, she cobbled together a bunch of stuff.

Dan Moren (01:22:45):
That Verre thing though. I mean, it really makes the girl with the pro earring look like a bit of a slob that like

Leo Laporte (01:22:50):
<Laugh>, that's not very tidy. What is going on there? Yeah. Was

Paris Martineau (01:22:54):
Like, do you need that many lemons on your shelf? Like fridge?

Leo Laporte (01:22:59):
I dunno. Yeah. <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:23:03):
With a clutter problem.

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
Maybe, maybe, maybe AI has a problem. Maybe AI is a hoarder. Oh my God. I mean,

Glenn Fleishman (01:23:09):
Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Weird. How many lemons do you need? AI,

Dan Moren (01:23:13):
TEAC cups up on that top shelf there. What is, what is happening? <Laugh> perspective issues too. With where those see you're right. Many shelves are angle.

Leo Laporte (01:23:20):
So now, so now I'm realizing,

Paris Martineau (01:23:21):
It's like, man, if you, you got so many Amazon packages there in the bottom, right. You gotta really take the recycling out.

Leo Laporte (01:23:27):
<Laugh> now I'm realizing that you were right. Glen Fleischman, that we are filling in the details that make it feel better than it really is. If you look closely

Dan Moren (01:23:37):
It's for me by way of empty Esher.

Leo Laporte (01:23:39):
Yeah. It's kind of awful. It's

Glenn Fleishman (01:23:40):
Kind of cool though.

Leo Laporte (01:23:41):
Yeah. It's kind of cool. Kind awful. That's that's the, that's basically

Paris Martineau (01:23:44):
The that's kinda ice

Leo Laporte (01:23:46):
Spy and what's this thing hanging here. What is this? Is that I we're just,

Dan Moren (01:23:49):
That's a light pole, right? It's a light.

Paris Martineau (01:23:51):
That's a boom mic.

Leo Laporte (01:23:52):
It looks like a mouse hanging by its tail. I

Dan Moren (01:23:55):
Don't premier edited out. It was a goof. And that's why premier <laugh>,

Paris Martineau (01:23:59):
It's actually under the goof section of IMDB, you know, that's right. You see it in the frame. What

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
If AI is

Dan Moren (01:24:05):
Like ver painted this? Would we say, oh, what a beautiful painting. This is art. I dunno. That is fascinating.

Leo Laporte (01:24:11):
You, oh my God. I

Paris Martineau (01:24:12):
Dunno. I feel like it was long enough ago. Like this is kind of impressive, cuz it just like, man, you survived. You didn't get enough. You didn't die of illness in the time 16 to paint this, this

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:23):
Took 16 years to paint. I hope you got a good price for yeah. Yeah. It's 

Leo Laporte (01:24:28):
It's it's oh

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:29):
Man. That's

Leo Laporte (01:24:29):
Great. Do you think AI might be slightly psychotic? Like 

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:33):
It's not conscious. So who knows?

Dan Moren (01:24:36):
Hesitate to give a clinical diagnosis? Cause

Paris Martineau (01:24:38):
Yeah, I don't know. We're not armchair. We don't wanna armchair of psychologist. AI here. Fair.

Dan Moren (01:24:43):
Fair enough. All Georgia now. And see if she'll

Leo Laporte (01:24:45):
Here's an interesting application. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:48):
AI therapy. That's gonna be a growth industry.

Leo Laporte (01:24:50):
AI. I think

Dan Moren (01:24:51):
We started with that Glen. That was where

Paris Martineau (01:24:53):
Eliza came from. Yeah, that was literally Eliza we're full circle.

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:57):
Oh my no, no. But therapists for the AI not therapists for all

Leo Laporte (01:25:01):
The AI needs.

Paris Martineau (01:25:02):
Yeah. The AI is gonna be scrolling through TikTok and it's gonna tell the AI what ADHD and have gotta get stimulants right now.

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:10):
Georgia Dow therapist to AI. That's good. Your

Leo Laporte (01:25:13):
Here is I think a very good use of AI storybooks.ai. They want to take all of the Gutenberg project, public domain text and illustrate it with AI. It's

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:26):
A fascinating

Leo Laporte (01:25:27):
Idea. Is that an interesting idea?

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:29):
It's problematic in an entirely different way. Although what's weird is the original drawings of many of these works have exist. Like many of these works were illustrated and they're not in copyright either. So, but it's, it's an interesting exploration.

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
Is that what Sherlock Holmes looks like?

Dan Moren (01:25:45):
No, I don't like it. I don't

Leo Laporte (01:25:46):
Like it. I don't like it. One.

Paris Martineau (01:25:47):
What is going on with his job? Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:49):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:25:50):
You've become AI critics. You guys let's see. Well

Paris Martineau (01:25:54):
Send you,

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:54):
They are gonna be therapy after if

Paris Martineau (01:25:55):
They're producing art. They better be okay with

Leo Laporte (01:25:57):
Getting rid of the so OK. Dicks do Androids dream of electric sheep. That would be a natural for AI, right?

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:04):
There's that? I like, I

Paris Martineau (01:26:05):
Like this book. A very thick man.

Leo Laporte (01:26:07):
Pajama Rick Dick,

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:08):
His

Leo Laporte (01:26:08):
Book gala bed.

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:10):
What is it called? Galactic pot assured healer or something. It's one of his strangest works much better

Leo Laporte (01:26:16):
Though. Philip K Dick. I

Paris Martineau (01:26:17):
Do think we have to try and analyze why AI is obsessed with making ripped arms. You know, like all of the they're every arm is Jack

Leo Laporte (01:26:27):
Because it's been trained on, on Jeff Bezos images. That's why that's

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:31):
True. Then the next one very long time

Dan Moren (01:26:33):
Too much some and it must, it must pump ironing

Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
Little too much. <Laugh> oh, that makes

Paris Martineau (01:26:39):
You wanna know a fun fact. I've never been able to get in copy. Reference, not have heard from sources. Since Jeff Bezos got on his fitness kick, you know, obviously to kind of go to space, he started taking, he never would use the am the elevators at Amazon's HQ when he was CEO. That's true. He would always take the stairs up and down. And that meant of course, due to the power, like politics, like internal politics dynamics of working amongst like next to a CEO. Who's trying to get jacked all of his underlings, but also be like, oh, I gotta take the stairs. Jeff is up there. I can't be seen in the elevator. And I think that's just very funny. Sometimes you

Leo Laporte (01:27:13):
Worked at Amazon, then you Glen, you know that. Do you know the story?

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:16):
Yeah, I I think I don't know if you did it at the time we, I worked, I worked Amazon when we were on the second and fourth floor of

Leo Laporte (01:27:23):
The video. Oh, so you don't know Columbia,

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:25):
But yeah, I think he walked to the, I think he walked to the fourth floor. I think his office is on the second floor wall street. He had a rack of identical shirts behind him though. That's how I

Leo Laporte (01:27:32):
Remember wall street journal article this weekend, yachts and watches. The real CEO flex is wash board abs amazing. And there's there's the ex's oh, no. Elon Musk. There's the counter example. Elon Musk getting, getting hosed down by Manuel.

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:53):
I've never felt better about Elon Musk and seeing that it makes me feel very sympathetic.

Paris Martineau (01:27:56):
Listen, we all wanna believe in our hearts that we would be the Jeff Bezos physique if we were billionaires. But really a lot of us would be the Elon Musk

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):
Physique had the money. Here's here's from selling sunset, the Jeff, Jason. Opheim the the buff realtor, chef

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:13):
Bezos.

Leo Laporte (01:28:13):
Here's Jeff Bezos pulling a Putin

Paris Martineau (01:28:15):
On a horse. Yes.

Dan Moren (01:28:16):
Say it was very bad. You were Putin looking. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:21):
Here is the video game. Oh

Paris Martineau (01:28:22):
No, that is too tight. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:28:26):
Stressing. Hey,

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:28):
Hide that out. You can see

Paris Martineau (01:28:29):
NS. That's too tight.

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:31):
It's the Batman costume of Mr. The, I think

Dan Moren (01:28:34):
The best part of that says photo courtesy of stress. El was like, give us your, your Batman picture

Paris Martineau (01:28:42):
Ball street journal reached out and was like, Hey, can we get a photo? We're doing this one about walk for ads,

Leo Laporte (01:28:47):
Right? Where he shows snips.

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:49):
Yeah. And you see your pack

Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
Or Mr. Zelnik who favors TWiTce daily workouts and says he exercises up to 12 times a week is not dad. Bodying it. And neither friends like Mr. Emmanuel, chief executive media company, endeavored the journal says, oh my God, on a recent visit to Mr. Emmanuel's office in Beverly Hills, Mr. Zelnik said the executive took phone calls and wrote emails while walking at a treadmill desk. Mr. Emmanuel, who did not walk during his actual meeting with Zelnik did not comment.

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:18):
Oh, treadmill desk. Nothing. You need to have like a row machine desk. <Laugh>

Paris Martineau (01:29:23):
Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:24):
All

Leo Laporte (01:29:24):
Right. All right. I, I have to say

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:26):
A, a closer desk

Leo Laporte (01:29:28):
On the Elon to a scale. I'm a little closer to the Elon side of that scale, but that's the new thing. If you got the money washboard, abs

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:38):
It's always cheap. You can harder 'em on Amazon slacking right on. That's true. Yeah. It, it costs a lot of money to look as good as people who have to do manual labor <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:29:47):
Are I think probably Paris. You're glad you didn't get assigned to this story. <Laugh> yeah. As an Amazon story, you didn't really wanna write,

Paris Martineau (01:29:57):
Not, not really. Don't need to spend any more time. Looking at the physiques of tech executives. I think it's a little weird

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:05):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:30:07):
Hey, let's take a little break fun panel today. Paris Martino from the information Glen Fleischman from well, Glen f.glen.fun. I'm sorry. He's Glen F on TWiTtter. You're

Paris Martineau (01:30:19):
Gonna get it by the fourth ad break. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:30:21):
You know, if I could just get this F key work in here, I

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:25):
Bought the F <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:30:27):
Why did, why the F key like did I, was I pounding hard on Leo?

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:33):
You hard on ligatures there. What? You got 10 more F keys right at the top. Oh, F

Leo Laporte (01:30:41):
Just

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:42):
Apply. Yeah. Sign an F key to the F key.

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
What happened here? My computer just

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:46):
Macro time

Leo Laporte (01:30:47):
Just died. Also that is of course, Dan, more in the author of the galactic cold war saga. If we're all really nice to him, maybe he will write another one soon.

Glenn Fleishman (01:31:01):
The the CBRI explosion was not one of your books as I call. That was no, no, no, not yet. But Caledonian GA that

Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
Was Elian. Gambit is not the CBRI explosion. Yeah. Our show today brought to you by click up. Imagine in your five day work week, having one of those days off, right. One extra day, a week, what would you do with the time I'd be watching more reality TV, maybe you'd cook healthy meals. Maybe you'd work out more. Get that buff CEO bot, or maybe like Dan you'd write volume four of the galactic cold war an extra day a week. Well, you can with click up the productivity platform. That's so good. It'll save you a day. A week on work, guaranteed click up began with the premise that productivity was broken. There were too many tools to keep track of too many things, and you siloed into completely separate ecosystems. There had to be a better way, a more productive way to, to get through the daily hustle, click up.

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Does it one tool to house, all the tools you use, all your tasks, projects, all your docs and goals and spreadsheets and more. And it's it. It's a great idea for any size team. Even if it's a team of one, if it's just you or for a a thousand plus people packed with features and customization options. No other productivity tool has out of the box. You'll be productive immediately, but you can also customize it to work the way you work best. Whether you're in project management or engineering or sales or marketing or HR, everybody gets an easy to use solution that creates a more efficient work environment. It's click up, join more than 800,800,000 highly productive teams using click up today. Our offer code TWiT will get you 15% off. Click ups, massive unlimited plan for a year. That means you could start reclaiming your time for under $5 a month. Sign up today, click up.com. Use the code T w I but don't delay this offer. Doesn't last forever. It's limited time. Thank you. Click up for supporting TWiT, click up.com. And again, the offer code is TWiTt. Thank you. Click up a well, Wednesday is a big day. Apple is I, I think there should be a new word for the apple events. It's it's a product launch, but it's also an infomercial. Is, could we call it a launch, a commercial? I don't know <laugh>

Dan Moren (01:33:38):
Is any product launch? Not in infomercial, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:33:40):
No. Well, actually all of these are aren't they, in fact I've kind of thinking, should we really be giving these, the coverage that we do, but people wanna know, people wanna see it could call them I candy. Yes.

Dan Moren (01:33:52):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:33:53):
I

Paris Martineau (01:33:53):
Get it. I think we should call them. Should be any email,

Leo Laporte (01:33:58):
Maybe, you know, that's a reporter talking. Can you just send me the talking points please?

Paris Martineau (01:34:04):
I will say one of the happiest moments in my life is when I changed in the tech reporter world from having to sit at like two, three different computers, paying attention during all the apple releases to not caring about it. I'm just witnessing it as a consumer. Did

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
You ever have to do that day and sit at the computer and transcribe the oh

Dan Moren (01:34:23):
Yeah. Yep. I live blogged a bunch of events, financial calls, which are always the best cause everybody

Paris Martineau (01:34:29):
Loves. Oh yeah. Now I'm here on quarterly earnings.

Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
This

Dan Moren (01:34:33):
Yep. Done that a lot. This is Tim

Paris Martineau (01:34:34):
From one fire to another

Dan Moren (01:34:36):
Tim.

Leo Laporte (01:34:37):
This is Tim. This is Tim. Good morning. Good morning. Will you be going Dan? To the apple campus? 

Dan Moren (01:34:45):
This morning? No, with a, with a six week old, I will not be going to the,

Leo Laporte (01:34:49):
And Jason will, it doesn't

Paris Martineau (01:34:50):
Seem like the apple execs will be going either, right? Yep. Last time they were just there be a video. Right?

Dan Moren (01:34:56):
I was there. I was there in June. Which was an interesting experience and I know Jason will be there and Leo, your P and mine. My Sergeant, I believe will be there as well. Yeah. Yep. So that's very exciting leaving

Leo Laporte (01:35:08):
Me in the lurch, all alone, sitting here, snaring during the infomercial, but that's all right. That's that's the job I chose. This it's interesting. Cause the invite said Steve jobs theater. So the event you went to in June was outside with a big screen screen and

Dan Moren (01:35:26):
Yeah. Well, yeah, you could sit outside or it was partially in the, the, the, we, the cafe

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):
Cafe called

Dan Moren (01:35:31):
Ring, right? Yeah. The cafe max and the ring. Yeah. So we were in just indoors for that, but it was like open air. But yeah, the C jobs, theater definitely suggests a more traditional presentation than what we saw in June.

Leo Laporte (01:35:44):
So, and yet

Paris Martineau (01:35:44):
Calling it, the rings makes it sound like Tim cook is gonna fight someone.

Leo Laporte (01:35:48):
<Laugh> like the octagon Tim cook versus Jeff payso cook.

Dan Moren (01:35:55):
You got some washboard abs

Leo Laporte (01:35:56):
I bet. So, so now we've never seen, Tim's worked a lot, but I have a feeling he probably does have a six pack under there. Every

Dan Moren (01:36:05):
Story about

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:05):
Tim. Well, this reminds me

Dan Moren (01:36:07):
Working out.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:07):
This does remind me by the time I got a call from reporter asking about Jeff Bezos's private parts and I'm glad that story never ran.

Leo Laporte (01:36:13):
Oh, I remember that was it national. Thank

Paris Martineau (01:36:16):
You, Mr. Packer.

Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Pecker, Jesus aptly named the head of the national Enquirer.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:22):
I did do that interview. And then I was like, maybe I don't need to be talking about Jeff Bezos's private place, not from personal,

Leo Laporte (01:36:28):
You know what Jeff called their bluff. He said, go ahead. I

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:31):
Will say,

Paris Martineau (01:36:32):
Listen, that was the, one of the best PR moves I have seen in a, a long time, like is taking what should have been a moment of weakness and somehow spinning it into no, I'm gonna drop all the receipts. And then also make a couple of like puns <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:48):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:36:50):
This was of course going back to when the national choir came claimed, and I think they got it from his girlfriend's brother, which was really that's right. She

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:58):
Was it messages proven? Huh? I dunno. There's I wasn't sure if it was, was it proven? I think it was pretty strongly the correlation,

Paris Martineau (01:37:07):
I believe there was litigation. I'm not sure as to how that shook out though.

Leo Laporte (01:37:13):
Very yicky very squirmy. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:16):
The whole thing,

Leo Laporte (01:37:16):
But that's called what do they call that in PR where you take the lead on a story? You, you get ahead of the story. He got ahead. He got way ahead of the story. Way ahead of that story. He got so far ahead of the story that it was like, well, we can't publish these now. They'll just <laugh> he's just

Paris Martineau (01:37:32):
Ruined it. Instead of like leaning into a crash, he caused like a different crash. Yeah. But it somehow ended up. Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:37:38):
Good for him. He's I guess doing all right, anyway, back to apple. <Laugh> sorry.

Paris Martineau (01:37:42):
Doing all right. This is just Bezo story. He's

Leo Laporte (01:37:45):
Still right? Yeah. Not he's whatever happened to him. Is he happy back

Dan Moren (01:37:49):
Together? What a, what a rough time he's had. He's

Paris Martineau (01:37:51):
Just going to space whenever he feels like where in a cowboy hat

Leo Laporte (01:37:55):
Take

Paris Martineau (01:37:56):
Drive in some helicopters, you know what? I'm

Leo Laporte (01:37:57):
Okay. Billionaires in space. That's a, that's a story from a few months ago, capitalist pigs in space. I think you meant more like <laugh> something in the chap says, I

Paris Martineau (01:38:08):
Dunno, you just said the same thing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:09):
Doing all right. That Jeff Bezo story. I think you're right. That could be the name. Apple's pro product products will steal the show at the iPhone 14 launch events as mark Gman. One of the things I'm a little interested in the rumor that the new apple watch pro kind of bigger heftier sport model will cost as much as $900.

Dan Moren (01:38:36):
It's still not the most expensive apple watch ever made by a wrong show.

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
Yes, <laugh> right. Yes. I mean this slowly short

Dan Moren (01:38:44):
Of them. Yeah. They've come down over the years. So 900 bucks is a price point. I feel like is a pretty, pretty reasonable ask plus. I mean, you know, apple always tried to position those watches as a fashion accessory. If you know anybody who's like really into watches, you spend way more than $900 really,

Leo Laporte (01:39:01):
But that was Johnny's folly. The, the apple watch solid person. I wouldn't disagree with that. I feel like with Johnny gone, it's a little tone deaf to say we're gonna make a $900 apple watch tell,

Dan Moren (01:39:16):
Well, the question is, what, what is this? What is the story Apple's gonna tell about why is this watch better than the watches we already have? What makes this a pro watch? Is it just that it's bigger? Is there something else going on here? You know, I think what

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Could they do to make it worth that much?

Dan Moren (01:39:30):
I, that's a great question. I think they'll

Paris Martineau (01:39:32):
Tell you exactly the time that you they'll

Dan Moren (01:39:34):
Tell you how much time do you have left. It's a theme.

Leo Laporte (01:39:39):
Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:39:39):
It's just a

Dan Moren (01:39:39):
Countdown glove counting down. Why is this watch going backwards? This scene dominance

Leo Laporte (01:39:46):
Goin does, does remind us that, you know, you can get a solar powered Garin watch for, and that's $1,300. So it's not unheard of in these high end sport watches to spend the significant amount of money.

Dan Moren (01:39:58):
I think mark made the point as well. That it's just some of this is Apple's way of saying we don't wanna seed that portion of the market. We are, you know, we are premium product brands, so therefore if we can be charging people more and they will pay it, then we should be doing that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:13):
Yeah. Apple holds 36% of the smart watch market. I would've thought it'd be a bigger percentage. That's according to counterpoint research.

Paris Martineau (01:40:22):
Yeah. That's actually surprising.

Leo Laporte (01:40:23):
Yeah. Garmin is the market cheerleader for watches over a hundred bucks. So Garin is, I think you're right. Got a target on its back. Yeah. 

Paris Martineau (01:40:35):
My thought is, I, I mean, obviously this is incredibly speculative, but I feel like there's always been people talking about how apple could at one point buy Peloton. And I think that would be the thing that would really jumpstart their watch business. If they kind of sold it as a tie in to some sort of exercise based platform in a way that kind of broadened all the aspects of their fitness ecosystem, as well as apple music. It could, I think really kind of bring about an interesting flywheel effect. Probably they won't do it because pelotons a big flaming trash fire, but well,

Leo Laporte (01:41:10):
It makes it cheaper. My dream. Right.

Dan Moren (01:41:11):
That's true. Fitness, fitness plus is already doing a lot of that for them. I mean, they already have watch integration with that and it is plays, I believe life fit music and all that stuff too. Yeah. So I, I don't, I don't know what Peloton would get them other than just scooping up on

Paris Martineau (01:41:27):
Account. Yeah.

Dan Moren (01:41:28):
Yeah. And I don't

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:29):
Buy all the Peloton

Dan Moren (01:41:30):
Bikes.

Leo Laporte (01:41:31):
Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:31):
Yeah. Apple good is buy all the pelotons used. They're so cheap. Now just buy a bunch of pelotons.

Leo Laporte (01:41:35):
A Peloton has announced that they's gonna start selling their bikes in Amazon, and they're gonna stop doing the white glove install service. Right. I, I think pelotons angling to get bought by Amazon, to be honest with you. 

Paris Martineau (01:41:48):
Okay. My thought though is once they start selling these bikes on Amazon, they're going to have a nightmare on their hands because the delivery of Peloton bikes is very complicated. Yes. The bikes are very fragile. I know this because I have one

Leo Laporte (01:42:04):
I did too. And they heavy

Paris Martineau (01:42:05):
Know when it was delivered.

Leo Laporte (01:42:06):
Yeah. It

Paris Martineau (01:42:07):
Broke immediately. <Laugh> and it was just that one wire was slightly pulled the wrong way. Oh. And it literally took like multiple different technicians coming out. They had to replace, oh my gosh. Piece of the bike fully from the ground up. Then another person moved it once when they were replacing one other part of it. And they had to do it all over again. I mean, if you have an average Amazon delivery person, somehow now trucking in your pellets on bike, it's going to blow apart. It's gonna turn to dust.

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:36):
How many hundreds of pounds does it wait also, am I exaggerating? It's it's heavy.

Leo Laporte (01:42:40):
It's not hundred, but it might be a hundred. I mean, that's, it might be a hundred that fly wheel has to have a lot of weight. That's that's what you're moving when you pedal. So it has to be heavy.

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:49):
That's a hard box to get into a lot of places without some

Leo Laporte (01:42:53):
I agree. You couldn't get it up. Nobody

Dan Moren (01:42:55):
Really makes light exercise equipment. I wanna say this to somebody, help people move weights. That's a lot just

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
Designed to be

Dan Moren (01:43:01):
Heavy. That is all they do.

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
You know? Wait a minute. Yeah. That's a hot category. Light exercise equipment. I like it. If this were shark tank, I'd give you some money.

Glenn Fleishman (01:43:14):
There's some's some exercise stuff you can fill with water later and then gets, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:43:18):
That's water no. No, that's, that's silly. That's how you, Hey,

Glenn Fleishman (01:43:23):
So waters, waters, wait, what's wrong. What's wrong with water? What

Leo Laporte (01:43:26):
Are you? What are you Rocky? I dunno. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:43:29):
I've heard that every person who's drank water has died, so I'm gonna stay away.

Leo Laporte (01:43:32):
<Laugh>

Dan Moren (01:43:34):
Dioxide strikes again. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
My God. I

Paris Martineau (01:43:39):
Listen. There's a, there's a common thread that no one's talking about and it's

Leo Laporte (01:43:43):
Water. It's a very good point. Water, new wifi data shows that I know that Peloton, right? The data stream to add home fitness bikes was down 23% in the first half of 2022.

Glenn Fleishman (01:43:57):
That's interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:43:58):
We're

Paris Martineau (01:43:59):
All leaving the house

Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
Again. We're going back to the gym maybe. Huh? Fitness bikes. The single biggest contraction followed by blue Ray players, iPods, iPods, and similar devices.

Paris Martineau (01:44:11):
I don't think that, oh, the iPod

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:14):
Ipods, blue iPods,

Leo Laporte (01:44:16):
Just media players was the whole category declined 14% P this is the data streaming via wifi. This comes from blue,

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:24):
Blue RA players stream wifi. They don't have enough. That doesn't make any sense. Some of them

Leo Laporte (01:44:31):
Streaming, some of them are streaming by media. Let's just say media players. Yeah, media.

Paris Martineau (01:44:35):
We're picking the sentence part Leo. Sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:44:38):
I right. We're

Paris Martineau (01:44:39):
Coming for you.

Leo Laporte (01:44:40):
I go, Rutgers wrote blue raises and then PCs were down 7% year over year. This is cuz plume, which makes those little pods that Comcast uses a number of companies also use for their mesh wifi. And of course you can buy 'em directly smart TVs, data consumption increase by 34% smart speakers. And I think I'm mostly responsible for this up 26. I was

Paris Martineau (01:45:09):
Gonna say you have 18 in every home, in every room in your house.

Leo Laporte (01:45:12):
And they're all sending every conversation. Of course. So up 27%,

Paris Martineau (01:45:17):
Every cough, every shower you take

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:20):
Cloud

Paris Martineau (01:45:21):
Is

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:21):
Like, I'm on, I'm concerned about this, this plume group here, this data.

Paris Martineau (01:45:24):
Yeah. I was gonna say, plume is just selling data left to right. But this is

Leo Laporte (01:45:28):
Not well it's, it's anonymized. You're

Paris Martineau (01:45:30):
In the house of every person that owns an iPod still. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:34):
It's a anonymized. Yeah. All the iPods. I mean the, a non

Paris Martineau (01:45:37):
Representative sample, honestly, if they're all iPods with Blueray players,

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:41):
I think it's, I think it's media things and they broke it down to Blueray players, iPods and similar devices. But I think media players, I think it's,

Leo Laporte (01:45:47):
Shouldn't lead with Blueray it's streamers. I think it's apple TVs

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:50):
And all that stuff. Rokus apple is

Leo Laporte (01:45:53):
Roki.

Paris Martineau (01:45:53):
I hope this, I will say this is a unpopular for, but I want my TVs to be dumb. I still have,

Leo Laporte (01:45:58):
That's not

Paris Martineau (01:45:59):
Popular, like five. I, I bought my TV five years ago and I'm like, I don't want you to connect to the internet. No, I'll plug my Roku in and out as a C fit and nothing more. We

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:09):
Got smart. We got a smart TV. We cause we on a bigger TV during pandemic, we were like, oh, let's get a bigger TV. We're watching it more. Need something to watch. And so we did and I got a, a vio and well, the great part is not only that it's, it's smart and I have to deal with its stuff is at some point in the last few months, it developed this new firmware update that I can't figure out to control where when the video source gets turned off, like the apple TV, if the H D M I, what is it? Call HT I C C thing doesn't work. And your TV gets turned off also. Then the TV just starts advertising itself. It starts putting up movies and stuff. You can buy through the smart TV part. And I'm like, I did not buy you. Yeah. So you could advertise to me in your downtime. That is not the reason

Paris Martineau (01:46:51):
This is, this is the kind ation of everything. It's just like, oh, you have a blank screen. Let me throw some ads up there. Nothing you can do to stop it. Try <laugh>. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:00):
Yeah. I paid full there's no special over there. That's right. I paid full price for that puppy, but it's pretty cheap. My, we know the video of monitor companies, TV companies are, I think a few years ago it turned out. Most of them weren't making any money. I think Samsung only the ones that made their own displays, their own panels were so they have to make money somehow. They're skimming it off the top.

Leo Laporte (01:47:19):
Yeah. I'm writing down the kind ation of everything. I will use that somewhere. That's good. I like you just

Paris Martineau (01:47:26):
Whenever a hat <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:47:28):
Paris, when you disconnect, you it'll be an ad replacing you on the screen.

Paris Martineau (01:47:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll just be, you know, like a little emoji, but it'll just say like buy apple products.

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
One of the things apparently and this is contrary to Johnny Ives, long instructions Gar Garman says the iPhone 14 pro models will have bigger batteries will move.

Paris Martineau (01:47:51):
Okay. Wait, why is that? What Johnny ive was against? He

Leo Laporte (01:47:54):
Like thin lighter. Bigger though. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:47:57):
Okay. I know, but a worse performing phone. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
Yes. And this is why I'm glad search battery for

Dan Moren (01:48:03):
Inance. That was the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:48:04):
Is

Glenn Fleishman (01:48:05):
The

Paris Martineau (01:48:05):
Being able to use your phone for more than eight hours a day. I agree. It's really in elegant. I

Leo Laporte (01:48:10):
Agree. No, no, no. This is sound. This is gonna end up being controversial. I predict the new iPhone cutouts will be a laze Gena pill, but, and this is the thing I think is gonna be controversial. Apple's gonna darken the screen between the laze and the pill. Yeah. I saw this and that's where it will do simulated lights for if your camera's on or your microphone's on so that it will look like a big Osage, except it won't be the cutouts aren't but the screen is gonna just extend that. And then what happens to this wedge

Paris Martineau (01:48:42):
Above

Leo Laporte (01:48:43):
Of, yeah, no. What happens is border up here? Just thrown away. Just useless. You can't put anything up there.

Paris Martineau (01:48:50):
Up there is just gonna be where it, it keeps saying like 5g plus plus plus

Leo Laporte (01:48:55):
No, no

Paris Martineau (01:48:56):
Best service ever all the way have

Leo Laporte (01:48:58):
Like one it's gonna be here. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Moren (01:49:00):
We've changed the bar system. It's no longer five bars. It's 25 small bars.

Paris Martineau (01:49:05):
It's it's 25 small bars and like seven star symbols.

Glenn Fleishman (01:49:08):
It's a bar crawl. Now you're gonna go to 25 bars.

Paris Martineau (01:49:12):
Okay. And you're still not gonna be able to make a video call if you're not connected to wifi.

Leo Laporte (01:49:16):
Okay. let's see, what else? Oh, the air pod too. Now AirPods are a product. I am not, I have to really covering

Paris Martineau (01:49:25):
I'm rocking some air pods. Are

Leo Laporte (01:49:27):
You, are you, you like AirPods? Oh yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:49:29):
I love my air pods just because I enjoy being in as close to silence as possible. They're

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
The number one choice around with of contributors on CNN. I believe I

Paris Martineau (01:49:41):
A very hot market. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
I see them all the time and you can't miss it cuz it's a big white thing in your ear

Paris Martineau (01:49:48):
And all of them have like the same buzz cut. Right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:51):
So it's kinda well that too. Yeah. they will, the AirPod two will have you'll appreciate this. Well the pros have no cancellation. The AirPod two's gonna, I've got pros. Yeah. These are gonna sound better because the rumor is, and I hope this is true cuz Apple's been usually kind of laggard in Bluetooth. 

Paris Martineau (01:50:10):
Oh the sound quality is awful. It's terrible. I'm using these just for audio in, but I have my mic for

Leo Laporte (01:50:17):
Yeah. Don't music. Don't use

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:18):
Them for a mic. Absolutely. The sound quality in your ear is pretty silent.

Paris Martineau (01:50:21):
I use them a podcast and that's about it listening.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:25):
This is that thing I, I get, I used to get so much email about Bluetooth stuff at Mac world. And a few years ago when I was doing an editing stint at wire cutter, we wrote kind of a fact about people always like, why is Bluetooth audio so bad? So they're well, and I actually contacted the Bluetooth SIG and they were kinda like, well it is bad because, and I was like, wait,

Paris Martineau (01:50:45):
Why are

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:45):
You drink? There's a very, there's a very particular scenario that Bluetooth weirdly wasn't prepared for, which was streaming high quality audio in both directions and like certain circumstances. So like over, I think over Bluetooth Le Bluetooth, four Le if you, the low power version, low energy you can get, you can be using the wrong profile. So if you have the right device and the right profiles it'll sound great, then you will walk to a different device or even a different model of the same device, like an older MacBook. And you sound like you're coming in on an old radio, you know, show from the 1950s or something. We

Paris Martineau (01:51:21):
It's strange also Bluetooth. I don't know if you guys have noticed this when walking around in large cities, but here in New York, Bluetooth has always really craps out when you're walking across like an avenue or something. What, even if your phone is in your pocket, really it, I will say like one out of five times will cut in and out. And I, I had a colleague who looked into this and wrote an article that I'm now forgetting the details of of course, but I think it's because there are so many different signals that makes sense crossing off the same path that it ends up having. You're

Glenn Fleishman (01:51:48):
Crossing you with, like in a crosswalk and you're a bunch of people with you crossing or just,

Paris Martineau (01:51:53):
Or even if you're by yourself, like just because there is a lot happening in this space.

Glenn Fleishman (01:51:58):
Well, but Bluetooth uses let's. Thank he. Lamar actress, he Lamar for Bluetooth frequency hopping, spread, spread spectrum. Yes. It still uses frequency hopping. So it should actually be more resilient for, but than anything else because it swaps among like 80 something frequencies on a pattern basis. But that's I

Paris Martineau (01:52:18):
Think in

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:18):
Explain

Paris Martineau (01:52:19):
A lot location, it gets a bit confused.

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:21):
It's reflection. Yeah. A lot of reflection going on.

Leo Laporte (01:52:23):
I think there's a great golf between the spec and the results on all of this stuff. And apple will have a new, the new H what is it? The H chip, the H three, I guess H it will be in these new AirPods and it is hoped by some that it will in fact, upgrade the Bluetooth Le spec to use LC three, which is a much higher quality Kodak.

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:46):
Definitely a better, I bet the studio, the beats studio buds, and they are absolutely rock solid for audio playback. And the audio input is terrible. I mean, it's, I don't think it's the mic quality. I think it's simply the standard. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:52:59):
Yeah. I mean, that's,

Paris Martineau (01:53:01):
I'll say the one thing about these AirPods pro, which I guess is like a recent software update that I absolutely love and wish would come to other devices that I have, like I have over the ear, Bose headphones is with apples. Find my app. Yeah. I lose everything always. So literally before we were recording this, I was like, where did I put my AirPods? And you can just open it up and it will tell you, like, you're not close. So then you walk over to the other side of your house and you're like, you're closer. And then it's like, it's five feet to your right. And one foot down and you can find them like that. And I never

Leo Laporte (01:53:30):
More than 10 feet from a pair of AirPods. <Laugh>

Paris Martineau (01:53:32):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, every person ingests about 3.14.

Leo Laporte (01:53:37):
Yeah. You've got 'em in your tummy. You're right next to 'em. I have a air tags on my keys, but it does. The problem is you have to be near them or it says, I can't, I don't know where they are and

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:47):
Should be able to

Leo Laporte (01:53:48):
It. No, no, it won't. It

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:50):
Won't other devices. Oh, oh, you want the very short range? The ultra, I wanna find my

Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
Keys. It's very

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:57):
Play the sound on. 'em Why don't

Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
Just play can't unless they, unless there I've it says something

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:03):
Something's terribly wrong, then it could, I

Leo Laporte (01:54:05):
Lost my keys this morning. And it said we can't, you have to get closer to your keys for us to play a sound on them.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:12):
Oh, that's right. It's Bluetooth range for keys. That's right. But it should be able to find them when you're

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
Has no idea. It says it's in the house.

Paris Martineau (01:54:20):
It'll show you like near or fall.

Leo Laporte (01:54:21):
They're in the house. They're in the house. You can't, it doesn't. But I know they're in the house. That's not the problem. It's where in the house

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:30):
We should, where the house is. You shouldn't have built your house as a Fairday cage. That blocks all single my

Leo Laporte (01:54:35):
House, a single story. So it's spread out. That's so funny. I think honestly, so what I have to do, and what I did this morning is wander all around the house until it says, oh, I see 'em now. And then it'll play a sound.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:49):
I

Paris Martineau (01:54:49):
See Leo, you know what you need to do with you and your 87 phones, the ones that are iPhones, you should hide one in each room. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:54:58):
That's and

Paris Martineau (01:54:58):
Then connect it in the cloud. You're never, you have one iPhone within every room to find your key.

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:07):
Well, there's always an iPhone within 10 feet. I wrote a book about air tags and find my, of course, cause I've written a book about everything now. And is

Leo Laporte (01:55:14):
It a take control

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:15):
Book or it's a take, take control of air tags and find my, or

Leo Laporte (01:55:18):
Find my, I might have to buy this

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:20):
And it's but it's fun. I mean, how do you write a book? 120 page book about it. It turns out to be easy because there's so much complexity. But recently my wife, who is we, we call, we use, we call my wife the early rejector in the house. And I use that with affection. She doesn't wanna adopt new technology before it's matured enough. And you know, I'm the person who is testing everything out. And so the other day she said she got lost in a parking garage. I've been lost in as well, because there's multiple floors. You can't get to from each other. So she'd parked in one of them, gone up an elevator and then taken the elevator down to a different part. That's non-contiguous and she's like, all right, can I get an air tag for the car? And she has a car she drives more often than I do. But then when my older son and I drive that car, we're like, there's an air tag moving with you. He's like what? Oh, it's so,

Leo Laporte (01:56:05):
Oh, I hate

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:05):
That. Lynn's tracking us.

Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
Yeah. Yeah. You know what? This book 130 pages. It should be longer, should be longer, make it longer.

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:15):
There's a lot of privacy stuff. And alright,

Leo Laporte (01:56:18):
I

Paris Martineau (01:56:19):
Honestly, you told me something I wish air tags could do, which I don't know why they have an Institute. This feature is, if you let's say like I was on a trip the other week and I had my air tag in my keys and like, carry on that. I left at the hotel while I was out and about like in a storage thing. And I was like, oh, I'd love it. Shouldn't I be able to turn in a setting that if my bag is moved, my air tag is moved from this location. It gives me an alert. You can't do that for some reason. And you should be able to do that.

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:46):
Oh, that, but it's an anti stocking

Paris Martineau (01:56:47):
To come in. I

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:48):
Know it's anti stocking problem. It's a two edge. I know it's funny. Somebody was just asked me the other day. They're like, I, exactly that I left my luggage in my hotel room. Why can't I market it? So when it moves, like, because the small percentage of people rooting it for all the rest of us are going to use that as a tool to track people. But, but there should be a consent thing. There should be a way to say I'm going to do this, but it's also going to every time it does it, it's gonna put out an alert immediately to everybody around you, as opposed to moving with you thing. I mean, there should be ways to make it more it should be able to announce itself more that it's doing it while still keeping you your device or your stuff safe.

Paris Martineau (01:57:25):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:57:27):
Apple will not be announcing an AR VR headset on Wednesday. We're pretty sure of that. Although there was, there were rumors. They would do a VR headset this year. Mark, mond's now saying next year, but they did file a trademark for this is filed by immersive health solutions, LLC in Wilmington, Delaware, which it turns out is an apple shell corporation for a trademark for reality, one. So reality. And, and, and, and maybe they're gonna call AR apple reality, right? Reality, one and reality pro of

Paris Martineau (01:58:07):
The, the trademarks and Facebook meta, I guess, are just really going as broad as possible with these names.

Leo Laporte (01:58:12):
Yeah.

Dan Moren (01:58:13):
Hard. What are you gonna call? I mean, Google glass, apple reality. I don't know. I it's hard to brand.

Paris Martineau (01:58:18):
I mean, just how do you trademark the word reality? That's my question. Like,

Leo Laporte (01:58:22):
Apparently you do in over,

Paris Martineau (01:58:24):
Apparently you can

Dan Moren (01:58:25):
World. We're just living in it

Leo Laporte (01:58:27):
In several countries over the past few weeks, including the us, they also trademarked apple, let's see reality processor. So that would be the onboard <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:41):
It's called our brains. The reality processor

Leo Laporte (01:58:44):
Will handle me

Dan Moren (01:58:45):
No apple brain it's yet to be trademark.

Leo Laporte (01:58:47):
So what's your thoughts? I mean, are you waiting with bated breath for a apple VR AR headset or

Dan Moren (01:58:53):
I, I wanna be convinced that I want it. That's the thing for me. I mean, I I've, I've used a little bit of VR stuff in the past. Apple's been talking a good AR game for a long time, but I've always thought that the, the demos they've done in their product demonstrations before are, they don't really represent. What's so great about it. Like, cause they'll be up on the stage with the phone or the iPad and they'll be pointing at, at a table and like this, this amazing, the reality's been all, but like fundamentally a phone and a tablet are not a good way to experience this because it's like peeping through a people like look into the immersive world, but you have to hold this thing of glass in front of you in order to peek through. Whereas, you know, obviously a headset seems like a much better proposition for that. So they've laid a lot of groundwork for it, which is encouraging, but it's a hard sell. I mean, I think Google learned this honestly.

Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
Yeah. Decade

Dan Moren (01:59:40):
Ago. Yeah. So, you know,

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:42):
Glasses are the ideal format and I don't think we're ready for glasses because you want something that's inobtrusive doesn't look like Google glass. I, I know somebody on TWiTtter was pointing out was like, it was only a few years ago that people were literally beating people in the street for wearing Google glasses. I'm like, yeah, it was kind of crazy. People got so mad about the feeling of invasiveness by them. Yeah. And the way that people have had early go, Google glasses were using them without kind of exercising.

Dan Moren (02:00:07):
We changed enough as a society in the intervening time. I mean, everybody's got a camera on their phone or four different cameras on their phone. I mean, be used to that. We're

Paris Martineau (02:00:14):
I mean, no one's beatings for wearing those Facebook Ray bands. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:20):
Good

Dan Moren (02:00:21):
Point. Snap, Chad, it's

Paris Martineau (02:00:22):
The same thing or the Snapchat glasses.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:24):
I think once they're intrusive enough, if they're just a layer that you is barely visible.

Leo Laporte (02:00:28):
Yeah. What if you were wearing them right now, Glen, on your, your existing spectacles. If you

Paris Martineau (02:00:32):
Just, just joining us with sunglasses on for entire don't

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:38):
Speak English, you know, I don't speak English. This is being translated, live and heads up on my

Leo Laporte (02:00:42):
Could be a heads up display on those glasses. It would be, do you think, I guess they'd have to have a bigger battery. They'd have to have

Dan Moren (02:00:48):
That's the goal. Clearly

Paris Martineau (02:00:49):
I say, I mean, the thing is over the past, like AF over the past month, I've had my just randomly thinking while I was doing I, man, it would be really nice to have a heads up display that somehow did work with either eye movements or maybe a voice component where you're like washing the dishes. And you're like, oh man, I wanted to like, I can't remember the name of that one thing I'm thinking of. And I don't wanna have to dry my hands to look it up.

Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
That great is between his legs, Paris between

Paris Martineau (02:01:15):
His, I know, I know. I always forget that. But the thing is that's,

Leo Laporte (02:01:20):
I mean, I think, think the were

Paris Martineau (02:01:21):
While <laugh> no listen, sometimes you gotta look it up. It's a

Leo Laporte (02:01:24):
Call back. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:01:27):
The thing is, I think that we're a long ways away from making that work like technological. I

Leo Laporte (02:01:33):
Don't feel like anybody wants this, that this is the tech industry saying, oh, we need the next iPhone. What is it gonna be? And that's the best thing

Paris Martineau (02:01:40):
That's I feel about some of the VR stuff right now. Yeah. I think that AR could have very interesting real world applications. That would be very useful. But I think that full VR right now is just too uncanny valley and it doesn't seem like there are that many use cases for it. Yeah.

Dan Moren (02:01:55):
And in the AR side of things, I think at the, you know, you gotta remember, it's not like someone's gonna come out and, you know, hand you that pair of spectacles that looks totally unobtrusive. Right. That's not the first gen product. No one's gonna be and we perfected it already. Right? Yeah. That's gonna, if, if it is, if there's something there, it's gonna take a whole bunch of iteration to get to that point. And I think that's the ultimate goal, but it's gonna be messy and ugly for a while from, you know, not everything is the original smartphone.

Leo Laporte (02:02:22):
You, that might be enough to kill it. Right. I mean, look what it could be. Yeah. You looked so dorky on a segue that it was, it, it was over. It was like, yeah, that's not going. 

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:30):
Anyway, I mean, here's the, the thing that I think is a good example of how it would work though, is, you know, an iPhone as awkward as it is to hold an iPhone up for augmented reality, it can work incredibly well. And for things like translation, right? That's the perfect use case, right? You hold it up and Google translate and other apps will do that live translation thing on signage or subtitles or, or whatever then use. And that's, that's, that's great. I mean, we're not always traveling or, or offering live again, live captioning. If you had AI, you know, if you had Siri live, caption, Skype, whatever system, Google, but

Leo Laporte (02:03:04):
Nobody wants to hold, hold up a phone all the time. Right. It's

Dan Moren (02:03:07):
But it, but it works. He personalizes you from like, okay, I'm staring Glen, I'm talking to you, but I'm looking at my phone. Well, but it's, it's

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:13):
A, it's a worthwhile use case, but the form factor's wrong in most cases.

Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
Right, right. Agreed. Let's take a break more to come. Our fabulous panel. Our show today brought to you by Zapier. But I use Zapier all the time. In fact, it's how we produce the shows. Zapier is automation done, right? If you're trying to grow a business, you know, your time is precious. What if you could streamline the boring stuff, the routine operations that eat up your time, things like lead management, employee onboarding, customer support. That's what Saper does. That's what's awesome about SAP year. It makes it easy to connect all the apps you use to automate routine tasks to streamline your processes. So you got more time to do the stuff you're good at customer client needs that kind of thing. It's the power of automation made possible for everyone. For instance, when I, when I am going through my news feeds my RSS feeds.

Leo Laporte (02:04:13):
I have a Zapier script. If I click a link or a star of newsfeed, it automatically zaps it. It puts it up on my TWiT social feed. I have a newsfeed there. It puts it onto Pinboard and, and it even adds it to a spreadsheet called Leo's links that can easily be moved into a rundown spreadsheets. It all does that. I don't even have to think about it. I set this zap up years ago and we've been using it ever since as a big part of our production. And it saves me so much time. I don't even have to. It's kind of if I thought about it, I figured it's probably saving me hours every week, hundreds of hours every year, that's kind of mind boggling. And it was so easy to set up. I use Zapier for all kinds of automation. And if you're in business, what a great way to get started with business automation.

Leo Laporte (02:05:02):
This is, this is not low code. This is no code zero coding. There are 4,000 apps that Zappier connects with the most popular businesses, business apps out there, Google sheets. I mentioned that we use that QuickBooks, Facebook, you have Google ads. Any RSS feed, you can automate almost any workflow imaginable with easy to use templates, thousands of them, right on the site. You don't even have to write your own a lot of the times. And once you get good at it, disguise the limit. The average user saves over $10,000 in recovered time every year. I guess that's, that's accurate if it's a hundred, if it's 200 hours a week a month for me, that's th that's a thousand hours a year or more. Yeah. Yeah. I get paid more than 10 bucks an hour. No wonder over 1.8 million people and businesses use Zapier to streamline their work and find more time for what matters most.

Leo Laporte (02:06:01):
I've been a Zapier subscriber for, I think as long as they've been around for years and years, see for yourself, why teams at airable and Dropbox and HubSpot and Zendesk, thousands of other companies, including TWiTt use Zapier every day to automate their businesses. Try Zappier free today. Z a P I E R Zapier <laugh>. I love the name. They call the program. Zaps zapier.com/TWiT. Thank you, Zapier for supporting the show. And I mean, literally streamlining my workflow. Let, let them streamline yours. Try it free zapier.com/TWiT. Don't forget the slash TWiT. That's very important. So they know you sign here. I, we were talking before the show about Adam Newman, the guy who started WeWork and then you know, kind of drove it to the ground, but walked away with a lot of money. He got bought out by SoftBank.

Leo Laporte (02:07:01):
Now he's buying definition of failing up, failing up is right. He's yeah. Now buying now getting more money apartments and yeah, Anders Andreen Horowitz just gave him $350 million, but that's not the news story. The news story is my friend, Kevin Rose getting 50 million for his moon, birds NFTs, a 50 million funding round for the proof collective. Now I have to point out Kevin actually already made 50 million selling these moon birds as NFTs. They made so much money that he had to make a YouTube video saying we're gonna do something really good with this <laugh> with this money.

Paris Martineau (02:07:45):
<Laugh> that's always a sign.

Leo Laporte (02:07:48):
Yeah. yeah. So I guess, you know, the rich get richer and you know, I love Kevin, so I'm glad he's, he's, he's getting the money. The proof collective will get $50 million, not only from a 16 Z, but also from Alexa Hanian V VC firm 7, 7, 6 what's with the numbers on these things. I a 10 million funding round in April and great. <Laugh>

Paris Martineau (02:08:22):
I guess here's my pitch. I think, you know, everybody, instead of investing all this money in NFTs should give me their $50 million and I in return,

Leo Laporte (02:08:31):
What will we get will will we get a Quin man advice? Everybody

Paris Martineau (02:08:35):
I will. Okay. Let's say, you know, instead of your NFTs, you can get a very bespoke collectible once in a lifetime opportunity to own a piece of a mannequin, but that there's only one of in the world. Perfect. And it's encoded in this blockchain called reality, which LBT has been copyright by apple. So we might have to work around that good point,

Leo Laporte (02:08:56):
But

Paris Martineau (02:08:56):
There's only one of them. So, you know, it's gonna be a real collector's object.

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:01):
I just wanna, I'd like to buy one art,

Leo Laporte (02:09:03):
Go ahead. One

Paris Martineau (02:09:05):
Art,

Leo Laporte (02:09:05):
Go ahead, Glen, what do you wanna buy?

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:07):
I would like to buy one art, please.

Leo Laporte (02:09:09):
Please give me art future,

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:11):
Future drama reference for those guys.

Leo Laporte (02:09:13):
Yes. How about you? What do you think, Dan? I

Dan Moren (02:09:15):
Think 50 million buys a lot of copies of my book. So we'll

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:19):
Just want do that. That's good. Best, very good. I think we could.

Paris Martineau (02:09:22):
How about the four of us split 50 mail? We call it even. Yeah, there we go. I think that's good. I think, you know, I agree. Yeah. Proof

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:29):
Nfts are the biggest hammer that's ever been developed in technology with no nails. There are no nails.

Leo Laporte (02:09:36):
<Laugh> I think almost blockchain is that I know everybody says, oh, the technology is really interesting, but it's just, it's just a distributed database. That's, that's really what it is. It's not blockchain

Paris Martineau (02:09:47):
Leo. So many people are screaming at their phones to throw them across the wall. You gotta stop this.

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:51):
I can see a purpose for block. I can see a purpose for a blockchain, and I think we will have them. I think we will have a I think we'll have a purely digital tech or, sorry. I think we'll have a version of Fiat currency of government back currency. You know, China's already working on the digital renminbi and we're gonna have a version of it in America and there'll be a version of the EU. And so the Euro and so forth that uses blockchain, blockchain technology. And it may be an incredibly bad idea, but I think it will happen. And I think it will be why

Leo Laporte (02:10:20):
Does blockchain make it better? What makes that better?

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:23):
There is a utility of having an IRR of an auditable, irreversible permanent cryptographically verifiable record of things. But the number of cases in which that's useful compared to a database are very small

Leo Laporte (02:10:41):
<Laugh> and there's a high price. I mean, let's face it. There's a significant price in terms of transaction costs, transaction privacy time. Oh yeah. And, and energy usage. Yeah. To doing it this way. So you better damn well have a good reason for it other than

Paris Martineau (02:10:58):
Blackchain, but those monkeys are real cool looking. I think that's a great

Leo Laporte (02:11:01):
Proof is also creating a Mer moon bird's Dow, which will oversee licensing of the moon bird's name by granting trademark rights in deploying capital projects that quote further the moon bird's mission. I'm glad they have a mission that Dow will control a soon to be formed. Dow treasury, quick question. Are we sending these birds to the moon, to the bird's come?

Paris Martineau (02:11:25):
Are they already there

Leo Laporte (02:11:27):
Stupid involved? I'm not clear on that. I don't know what their mission is.

Paris Martineau (02:11:30):
The moon like an aspirational goal, like the birds to the moon spiritually. They,

Leo Laporte (02:11:36):
I love that. They're owls the birds to the moon. They're owls. That's all just owls monkey do

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:42):
Invest.

Leo Laporte (02:11:43):
They're owls. They're owls monkeys were taken. So they're owls. Aw.

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:47):
The only Dow I invested is Georgia Dow that's

Leo Laporte (02:11:50):
Yeah. I like Georgia DAS stands for a decentralized

Paris Martineau (02:11:53):
Dow I invest in is and Dow, you know, great character actress.

Leo Laporte (02:11:57):
The Dow stands for decentralized autonomous organiz or no. What is it now? I've forgotten. Wait a minute. Decentralized autonomous organization. Yeah. It's

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:07):
It's also kind of a cool idea. It's a lot of these things are cool ideas and then the people are implementing them, make me want to run away into the hill.

Leo Laporte (02:12:14):
They're cool ideas for forever taking your money out of your wallet and putting it in mine. Proof is also

Paris Martineau (02:12:21):
At least for a little bit until it gets, you know, hacked and then putting some that's true.

Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
But yeah, that's a good point.

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:26):
It's all implementation though. I mean we've again.

Paris Martineau (02:12:30):
Oh, I was gonna say something completely irrelevant. Please continue.

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:34):
We've all talked about web three is going great. You know, one my wonderful site, wonderful site a few months. Yeah. And it's this it's, you know, it's the Kazu playing at the ongoing funeral that people refuse to accept is a funeral for cryptocurrency in Dows and, and NFTs. But I, I think, I think the there's a fundamental problem. That's not that the technology is bad. Is that everyone involved in it immediately went into the sort of Gring and churn and hype mode. So it's, there's no the entire, you can't take anything that's going on right now. I think, and build something meaningful because there is so much bad that's

Leo Laporte (02:13:11):
Happening. Here's an example. Bill Murray auctioned off an NFT, oh my God. Representing the right to drink a beer with him during which a painter will paint a picture of the scene that the buyer can keep the auction. It benefits charity, chive charities of veterans, and first responder focused. Non-Profit the NFT sold for 119.2 E that's $185,000 give or take hours after the auction, a hacker gained access to Murray's crypto wallet and snagged the E for themselves. Oh my God. They also attempted to steal 800 NFTs from the remaining collection by bill Murray. Although a wallet security team was able to safeguard those NFTs in time.

Dan Moren (02:13:52):
What I love about this is like, everybody compares these things to gold rushes. But what I love about is this is the Grif rush, right? And it's just like everybody constantly stealing from each other. It's kind of hilarious from the outside anyway,

Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
From the outside. And that's the key stay on the outside baby. Stay on the what's.

Paris Martineau (02:14:06):
Speaking of wish, the one person who's doing quite well is, I don't know if you guys saw the story that crypto.com accidentally sent a woman 10 million.

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
No, I guess

Paris Martineau (02:14:16):
Not in Fiat, but instead of 100 and they didn't notice for months and she bought a mansion cuz it just, you know, if I was to accidentally get $10 million and not have anybody follow up for months, I would you know,

Dan Moren (02:14:30):
I paint pink error in your favor. As the old card says,

Leo Laporte (02:14:33):
They sent a woman asked for a hundred dollars Australian refund. They sent her 10.5 million instead because instead of entering the amount of the refund, somebody working@crypto.com accidentally entered an account number into the refund amount section, which, you know, turned out that account number was effectively 10.5 million Australian dollars. Now I have to say, she's kind of a little bit at fault here. She didn't say, Hey, you gave me 10 million. I only wanted a hundred. She put the money into a joint account with her sister bought her sister a five bedroom house.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:08):
That's sweet.

Leo Laporte (02:15:09):
<Laugh> yeah. For a

Dan Moren (02:15:11):
Generous, no, no notice. Well now

Paris Martineau (02:15:12):
It's litigation and crypto do com to prove that she did something wrong, which is she kind difficult to do? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:15:19):
Yeah. Actually it's an interesting point. I mean,

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:21):
This happened recently though in the, in the mainstream financial market was last year. I

Paris Martineau (02:15:25):
Was about to say with Citi group

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:27):
The Redlon thing. Yeah. Somebody didn't check some compliance box and they sent, what was it? 400 million. Oh, so

Paris Martineau (02:15:34):
Went city group accidentally paid 900 million in debt. 900 million to Revlon creditors like they're lenders. Yeah. It was supposed to be just like, oh, a small thing. They accidentally paid the whole debt and they were like, oops, see, can we have that money back? And they were like, no,

Leo Laporte (02:15:52):
No, you owed it to us.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:54):
Yeah. We got like 400, 500 million back. And the remaining companies that didn't wanna return it went to court. And the judge said, well based on the doctrine of finders keepers and no, backies, <laugh> really, I don't know really that's

Leo Laporte (02:16:06):
A legal doctrine.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:08):
Okay. It was a legal doctrine. That effect. It was the, I mean the judge analyzed the terms of the transfer. Didn't matter that it was an error because the creditors had every reason to believe it was a legitimate, right. 

Leo Laporte (02:16:19):
They were

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:20):
Owed transaction. Yeah. They were owed the money. It was spent to them. So some, I think half the creditors did not agree to return it. And it's a very funny, long putting.

Dan Moren (02:16:28):
It's always hilarious when you see just how fragile the underpinnings of our society actually is. Right. Just one wrong checkbox. And the whole thing comes crashing down.

Paris Martineau (02:16:36):
Like this was two random dudes. I believe like overseas, whose job was to put some numbers in a box and like one of them put the wrong numbers and the other one didn't catch it. That's it almost a million.

Leo Laporte (02:16:48):
If you missed out on the original moon birds there's a early 20, 23 moon bird mythic.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:55):
Oh, thank God.

Leo Laporte (02:16:56):
A profile picture collection of 20,000 NFTs with quote, an eye toward giving back to the original moon, birds and odd these collectors.

Dan Moren (02:17:07):
I still don't know what any of those words is. What is,

Paris Martineau (02:17:10):
You know? Yeah. Okay. What is the hearth of an odd God? Okay. I'm just gonna read this sentence. Scroll up a little bit. Oh please. For a second. Cause there was

Leo Laporte (02:17:16):
A really good one there. Okay. Here.

Paris Martineau (02:17:19):
The hearth of the odd God, when an egg enters the hearth, it will hatch 24 hours later. What does that mean's you can hatch or two, the question. Can you can, how do you get a mythic with an oddity?

Leo Laporte (02:17:29):
You can hatch it.

Paris Martineau (02:17:30):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:17:31):
You can hatch it. Only 25 oddities will be burned each day.

Glenn Fleishman (02:17:35):
Oh, sure.

Paris Martineau (02:17:36):
What? Sure. What someone started saying words to me. I'd assume I was having a stroke. So

Leo Laporte (02:17:41):
You know what breaks my heart.

Glenn Fleishman (02:17:42):
It was

Leo Laporte (02:17:42):
Like the artist, grandparents, the artist who paints, paints these yeah. Same thing with the yoga labs board apes, they get paid like a flat fee.

Paris Martineau (02:17:54):
It's like, yeah, they don't get any of this money from the actual trades. Yeah.

Dan Moren (02:17:59):
But they also Don like exposure. So it feels like you walk away with, at least, at least you got paid in probably real money.

Leo Laporte (02:18:05):
Yeah. Maybe a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. You have all,

Glenn Fleishman (02:18:07):
This is how I feel like my grandparents felt when I tried to explain the internet to them, you know, they're just like, there's no context for it. It doesn't make any sense. There's no, it's all abstract. But it's like, I mean the, the part is of the internet turned out to be useful. I, no, that, that might be a mistake. Maybe I was wrong on that part where NFTs are definitely not, but maybe, maybe the jury still out.

Leo Laporte (02:18:28):
I'm sure if I got Kevin on, he would have a explanation for why this is good and valuable and true and sure. And, and all that.

Paris Martineau (02:18:40):
It's unlicensed, securities trading, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:18:43):
It's, that's a afraid what the S SEC's gonna decide, but without

Paris Martineau (02:18:46):
Any of those, the rules are regulations you're telling me is. And I guess if you're really into that and making money, it's

Leo Laporte (02:18:53):
Good for making money. That's good

Paris Martineau (02:18:54):
For you. Good for making. I don't think that it's an, a net good to the world.

Dan Moren (02:18:58):
<Laugh> it's the multibillion dollar version of the two kids I saw today on the bike P near my house selling Pokemon cards. Oh, nice. At their table. I think that's like basically future

Leo Laporte (02:19:08):
That's like future,

Dan Moren (02:19:09):
Future NFT, crypto traders.

Leo Laporte (02:19:10):
Crypto.

Paris Martineau (02:19:10):
Yeah. You're just gotta walk up to those. Cause they be like, so have you heard about the blockchain? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:19:15):
Yeah. Be much

Dan Moren (02:19:16):
Better. Get out now. Get out. Now it's too.

Paris Martineau (02:19:18):
They'll call their parents immediately. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:20):
I, somebody in the chat room saying, well, bring Kevin on. Nope. <Laugh> not gonna do it. We're I've already told staff and producers, and I'm sorry if you're all into this stuff, nobody who's gonna come on. Any of our shows who's gonna flog in FTS, flog, current cryptocurrency. I I'm washing my hands of it cuz you know what? I don't wanna be responsible if you go out and bet your rent money on an Ft, thinking you're gonna make all this money and it just lines the pocket of somebody who's already got a

Paris Martineau (02:19:50):
Lot. Leah, what about an algorithm? Stable coin. It's got the word stable in it. Doesn't that?

Leo Laporte (02:19:54):
It's stable. Gotta be good. Unless it collapsed.

Paris Martineau (02:19:56):
I mean, there's nothing that's ever gone wrong with those before,

Leo Laporte (02:19:58):
Right? Yeah. Oh Lord. I like Kevin a lot. I can't say I endorse what he's doing with this and he, and you know what they're gonna say? Well, that's just cuz you're old and you don't understand it. You're a you're you know, you're like Larry, David, you're a boomer.

Paris Martineau (02:20:12):
You can't even find your keys.

Leo Laporte (02:20:14):
Okay. Boomer. Yeah. <Laugh> I can't even find my keys. So what do I know? Blue

Glenn Fleishman (02:20:18):
Bloop. I'm hitting the bloop bloop and the button. Doesn't go. Doesn't play a sound. What's going on with that garage

Leo Laporte (02:20:23):
Door is opened and closed about six, seven times. So that's working great.

Paris Martineau (02:20:28):
I'm logged outta Facebook suddenly.

Leo Laporte (02:20:31):
<Laugh> <laugh> I'm laughing cuz it hurts. Cuz actually I am that old, but I do a radio show where people are actually much older than me call in and exactly those questions and I have to go, Hey <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:20:51):
Oh, I have a great account to follow Jess west, who is at Jess that's YN. Who's a librarian in and a futurist and a great technology thinker. But she's a librarian in Vermont. And one of the greatest people to who I think writes and thinks about the future of what information online is, but also is just like a librarian. And she has this regular thing where she seniors come in and people of any age, but often seniors come in and she helps 'em with technology and she tweets it out and with absolute love. Right. And it's fascinating to see, I love this insight. This is why I love writing the Mac 9 1, 1 column at Mac world also is I love same thing.

Leo Laporte (02:21:28):
Insight. You're doing the same thing. You're

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:30):
Yeah, I God's

Leo Laporte (02:21:31):
Work.

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:31):
Yeah. What is hurting people? What is the friction? What doesn't make sense to them and if I can solve that, I feel great. But I also, I wanna understand how people conceptualize technology. And so she's seeing, you know, people who have not encountered or, or are using it are functionally almost illiterate in technology, but they have to use it every day and they come to her a librarian for help.

Leo Laporte (02:21:52):
She, I

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:52):
Love it used to live in Seattle.

Leo Laporte (02:21:53):
She calls her fantastic. She calls herself the rural tech geek. Yeah. Which is easier than saying the rural juror. Jess J E S S a

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:03):
I technically owned Metafilter that's right. She also was a, for many years was one of the main people below Matt Howie. 

Leo Laporte (02:22:09):
Oh I love Matt and I love Metafilter Matt. All

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:12):
Right. Well Matt's great. Yeah. She was a moderator or whatever they call. I don't think they call him moderators, whatever the name was there.

Leo Laporte (02:22:16):
That was, I still subscribe to Metafilter it's still active. It's

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:20):
A very lovely site. Yes, they did a great job building a community.

Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
Boy. We've now mentioned waxy links and Metafilter <laugh> we?

Dan Moren (02:22:28):
We is it, that

Leo Laporte (02:22:28):
Was great. We are old.

Dan Moren (02:22:30):
I've been writing about this in my live journal. So everything's

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:32):
<Laugh> suck.com. I

Leo Laporte (02:22:34):
Dunno. What's <laugh> oh, I missed love

Paris Martineau (02:22:37):
The design of dig. It's never gonna change, right?

Leo Laporte (02:22:39):
Yeah. That's right. That's right. Speaking to Kevin Rose. Yeah. We kind of got Digg in there as well. Oh, that's right. Yeah. It's all comes around.

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:46):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:22:46):
Funny. And then meanwhile, the, these youngsters, these zipper snappers have announced USB four version 2.0,

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:53):
Oh, I got things to say about that.

Dan Moren (02:22:54):
I knew knew Glen

Paris Martineau (02:22:57):
Us be to rule them all. So for too many types, we just gotta pick one.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:02):
I gotta back channel to somebody who's involved. These discussions who is very unhappy because of people making fun of this name. But simultaneously also told me that this is an internal product spec version release number. And at some level the people, the USB implementers forum, the USB I F that manages the spec. They have these two parts. One is kind of a public casing part. And one is a developer. And like manufacturer facing part, this press release came from the developer manufacturing part. It's like, Hey, it's awesome. We've got version 2.0 of 4.0 of sex. Point three of seven out. Everyone's like, yay. Right. And the consumers are like, oh God, they're giving us new numbers. Is the, is it gonna be a trapezoidal connection again? Or a Dorin?

Leo Laporte (02:23:44):
Like what,

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:45):
What am I gonna do? I

Paris Martineau (02:23:47):
Need to get new chords.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:48):
<Laugh> so he's like, he's like, look, when this actually shipped, it's gonna be called us before. And what it's gonna say is 80 gigabits per second, and it'll be labeled and you'll know if your devices are and it'll all be it's

Leo Laporte (02:23:59):
Oh, that's such a lie. You are. It's all gonna be straightforward. No, that's such a lie. That's not true. That's so untrue. They always say this, oh, don't worry. You get that type C cable. There'll be a, an, a sidle on it. Oh my God. That will tell you what it can do. And then on the port of your computer, there be a little sidle that will say what it can do. And then you match the two. Nobody puts any of those symbols on anything. I know you don't know what it does or

Paris Martineau (02:24:25):
The product will, when you buy it will say every word that has ever been made. That's associated with technology. It'll be like cord monitor, power speed, 80 bits, 200 facts,

Dan Moren (02:24:36):
Extra high ultra speed facts.

Leo Laporte (02:24:38):
They gotta do what version

Paris Martineau (02:24:40):
4.2

Dan Moren (02:24:40):
Match your Siles. Then you sum demos. So you get

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:44):
Use sidle. There is a good, that's a good $64 word there.

Leo Laporte (02:24:47):
I think that's what they are. They seem to be burning with fire.

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:51):
As I said, I've written a book on every topic and I have a book called take control of untangling connections. And it isn't part about

Leo Laporte (02:24:57):
I'm understanding

Paris Martineau (02:24:58):
It's either about chords or about your love. You're

Leo Laporte (02:25:00):
Putting or

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:02):
Both. It's well you to get this narrative that runs through it. It's very complicated. She was USB. He was Thunderball. He

Leo Laporte (02:25:09):
Never thought never. And then,

Paris Martineau (02:25:12):
Then you got SI bla on his forehead. And some of

Leo Laporte (02:25:15):
You take the

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:16):
No child of mine will ever marry a trapezoidal type B connector.

Leo Laporte (02:25:20):
<Laugh> but this is the book book you have to read. If you wanna get all the answers on how to connect USB Thunderbolt, ethernet, display, port HTM, I and audio old

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:29):
Lord. Well it's, it was a incredible journey writing this book, but, but I think the ni the nice part until the announcement of USB four version 2.0 was that it seemed like we have, if you have relatively recent devices and they have a USBC port on it, generally you plug in a Thunderbolt four slash USB four cable. That's kind of a new universal cable and everything works lost

Leo Laporte (02:25:50):
Me.

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:52):
Alright, let me go back. There's a

Paris Martineau (02:25:53):
Slash

Leo Laporte (02:25:53):
In there and the slash on Paris's

Paris Martineau (02:25:55):
Keyboard, doesn't work to say, people keep telling you about Thunderbolt and I'm like, this is too much. Listen. I just want one <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:04):
Thunder slash Glen.

Leo Laporte (02:26:05):
You're digging a deeper hole. I don't think it's getting better. Whatever it is. We'll have 80 gigabits per second of bandwidth, which is, we don't need that. You know, about a hundred gigabits more than you'll ever need, but okay, good, frankly, fine. 

Paris Martineau (02:26:20):
Whatever it is, it's going in the shoebox in the bottom of my drawer with all the other

Leo Laporte (02:26:24):
Cables, you can, your old cables, but they won't be as fast.

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:28):
I did discover the reason you want 40 gigabit per second. And this is, it took cuz most things don't need it. You don't have a raid drive,

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
A hard drive. Can't do it. Yeah, let alone it.

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:37):
Yeah. Ssds, the most, the fastest modern SSDs can actually perform at rates where you're starting to hit above a limit of 20 gigabits per second, which was kind of the earlier high point for USB and Thunderbolt. Two in some forms of Thunderbolt three. So all the current specs are like, okay, we do 40. If you're all up to date, everything is 40. And then the fastest SSD you can buy, can perform at it's highest internal bus rate. And that's kind of the, that's the bottom line. So they're doing 80 because there's a new generation of SSDs that will be out at some point. And you'll wanna be able to use those full

Leo Laporte (02:27:09):
Speed

Glenn Fleishman (02:27:09):
For video and

Leo Laporte (02:27:10):
Whatever people will use docks. I mean, I think this is the real reason. Yeah. With multiple connections, sharing that 80 gig, 80 gigabits, that 80 gig

Paris Martineau (02:27:18):
Bit, I've got a stupidly expensive docks sitting under my monitor and it pained me to buy it. But ma'am, it's lovely. Yeah. Got

Glenn Fleishman (02:27:24):
All my 700 ports on it or a, I reviewed, I

Paris Martineau (02:27:28):
Mean, because it's like a Mac one. It's not as many as I

Leo Laporte (02:27:31):
It's obsolete, by

Paris Martineau (02:27:32):
The way, don't

Leo Laporte (02:27:32):
Have anything. Does it do Thunderbolt four, 3.2.

Paris Martineau (02:27:35):
It does do all the thunderbolts. I don't know. I hate it. I was like, I want one that has like six

Leo Laporte (02:27:43):
Usbs. I have the cow digit. I bet she has the cow digit, the

Glenn Fleishman (02:27:46):
Cow

Paris Martineau (02:27:46):
Digit bolts and cow digit is and the ethernet. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:27:49):
Import it's like the cow digit one is like $300. Yeah. But it has, I think literally 18 ports coming out of it. Yeah. So you plug in the cow digit, it's a great unit. It's kind of expensive, but it's like, it has every kind of USB Thunderbolt display port HTMI multiples. It's like, if you just wanna buy a thing and it answers the need, you throw that thing a tiny one, they have one it's like the

Leo Laporte (02:28:13):
It was, you couldn't get it for a long time. I waited.

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:16):
Yeah. It was out of

Leo Laporte (02:28:17):
To get

Paris Martineau (02:28:17):
The thing is I've took a long time looking in this. And I was like, I want one that it has at least a cord that like plugs it into my computer. That is at least more than three inches. This is it. Because I put my computer up on a monitor. Yeah. That is, I do have that

Leo Laporte (02:28:29):
Ts three plus plus plus

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:32):
Plus plus plus plus two

Leo Laporte (02:28:33):
Pluses plus size. Good. Small.

Paris Martineau (02:28:34):
It looks like it could be like a small look at these port explosive device.

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:38):
It kind of seems obscene. There's like, if you have that what's the thing. If you have the fear of holes not trick.

Paris Martineau (02:28:44):
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like musical really? Or there's

Leo Laporte (02:28:47):
Fear of holes.

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:48):
Yeah. People

Dan Moren (02:28:50):
The like on the

Paris Martineau (02:28:52):
People are scaring people left and right. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:28:53):
You can't live in Switzerland. If you have this fear. It's very, very hard. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:28:56):
Yeah.

Dan Moren (02:28:57):
I like that. I like that. Paul, those ports, cuz it looks like the the old onion article about we're gonna put five blades on the right there. It's like put

Glenn Fleishman (02:29:06):
Another port on. It is

Paris Martineau (02:29:07):
You're

Glenn Fleishman (02:29:07):
Doing all port, but it's really, where's my

Dan Moren (02:29:09):
SCU

Glenn Fleishman (02:29:10):
Port. It's a really good unit. It's really good. It's got like draws like 140 watch it's this is kind of, this is the ultimate thing. This is the like the killer doc. If you really, if

Dan Moren (02:29:21):
I need that many ports, I've taken a wrong turn somewhere. I've done something wrong in light.

Paris Martineau (02:29:24):
I need that many ports and I've taken a lot of wrong

Leo Laporte (02:29:27):
Turns. Here's the thing. I mean I waited, I finally got it a couple of months ago. I waited six months to get it cuz they couldn't keep, couldn't get the parts or whatever. And now thanks to USB. What is it? <Laugh> USB four version 2.0 it's up

Dan Moren (02:29:41):
Buy new one. Gotta buy a new one.

Glenn Fleishman (02:29:43):
Just throw it in the garbage. Throw it in the recycling. Electro recycling

Leo Laporte (02:29:46):
Bit. Thanks a bunch USB. They should do what the wifi Alliance does. They should just have names instead of all these just call it USB for greased lightning.

Paris Martineau (02:29:55):
They should name it. Like they name hurricanes. Yeah. They should be like, this is the season of female names. Yeah. Is the season of male names. People be like, screw you Mike <laugh> I want Nina. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:08):
This? You mean the wifi Alliance? The one that introduced the numbering system and then decided to introduce wifi six E

Leo Laporte (02:30:13):
Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:13):
That wifi,

Leo Laporte (02:30:14):
That wifi Alliance.

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:16):
This

Paris Martineau (02:30:16):
Feels like it's the same people who are naming cell phone like signals

Dan Moren (02:30:20):
It's actually yeah. It's one group. It's actually one group of people just need everything.

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:24):
The name I'm driving with my, they

Paris Martineau (02:30:26):
Just have a big bag full of numbers and letters. Yeah.

Dan Moren (02:30:29):
They pull it out. I'm like, what

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:30):
Is this? I'm driving with my 15 year old yesterday. And they're like, I'm not getting good 5g service. What a incredible complaint. And I said, oh, does it say 5g? Or does it say five U G? Or does it say five UW? And they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah. That's right. Well, let me explain

Leo Laporte (02:30:45):
At T has 5g, which wasn't 5g. It was LTE posing 5g.

Dan Moren (02:30:51):
Did your kid open the door to the car and just roll slowly out as you

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:56):
Seatbelt? Yeah. Is it used they're

Leo Laporte (02:30:59):
Seatbelt? Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:31:00):
My favorite thing is like, now that all the networks have upgraded, like if your cell phone service even goes to like 4g LTE, it's like you're living in the stone age. It's like, I cannot download a tweet.

Leo Laporte (02:31:10):
It's already, it's

Paris Martineau (02:31:11):
Like, somehow we lived like this.

Leo Laporte (02:31:12):
Yeah. How did we survive? Actually, interestingly, I think this is a, this we'll do one more story and then we'll take a break. But I think this is really I'm making, I'm happy. Comcast and charter says FCA, but they face a grim new reality, actual competition. And where's it coming from? T-Mobile and Verizons, residential internet service using their phone. Oh man network.

Dan Moren (02:31:36):
Verizon fi Verizon files. That's what I've got right now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:31:40):
I have not even files internet speech. Yeah, but that's you got something, you got a landline. Good thing. I got this for my daughter. She I'm already a Verizon customer. So it's 25 bucks a month. It's just a little Verizon 5g receiver that turns it into wifi. And it's four residential service, 138 gigs megabits down it's like 20 or 30 megabits up. It's very good service for 25 bucks a month. And this has stalled, Comcast and charters. Zero growth last quarter.

Dan Moren (02:32:10):
I love that. This is the thing because it's the inverse of like 10 years ago with, at and T had those micro cells, right. Wifi to give you phone signal. And now it's like, haha. She was on the other foot. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:32:22):
Yeah, my my dad and stepmom live in a relatively small town in Washington that has okay. Cable service. And my dad calls me up. He's reasonably, technically savvy in his eighties. He's for his eighties. He's very technically savvy. And he said, I think the service is going in and out and we're talking about stuff and he's like, it just keeps going down and up. And I'm like, have you called the cable company? They get like a hundred megabit per second's like, yeah, I don't know. I'm like, and he said, then he emails me. He said, I've heard about this new T-Mobile service. Should I get it? I'm like, you know, I've heard good things about it orders. It it's $50 including tax a month, plugs it in. And like I say, they're in a relatively small, you know, not super remote. It's like two hours from Seattle with a ferry ride and he's getting a hundred megabits per second. Exactly. It's been up like 99.9% of the time they canceled their 80 something dollar a month cable service, cuz they don't like it. And now they got a thing that works

Leo Laporte (02:33:11):
T-Mobile and now has more than a million subscribers. Wow. Okay. Half of whom they added in the last quarter, this is by Brian Roberts, a Comcast that this is killing us. All right. Verizon has 384,000 home internet subscribers, two thirds of which from the last quarter it's it's gone from zero to 60. Very, very quickly. Now I should caution. It will not work everywhere. You have to be close to 5g tower that it can't be congestion. If you're lucky enough to have that service nearby as my daughter is it works great. It's flawless. I checked. And the other thing is because I'm the Verizon customer. I can check her bandwidth at any time. So I've been checking it day and night just to see. And it's fine. It never goes, it never goes down. What are you

Glenn Fleishman (02:33:51):
Doing? What are you on

Dan Moren (02:33:53):
Day at night? You're like day at night. Check it.

Leo Laporte (02:33:57):
And

Dan Moren (02:33:58):
Blue rap player usage is really down. Where's your iPod? Three iPods.

Glenn Fleishman (02:34:04):
No, we, we have one gigabit internet service to our house and it's because our local telephone company was failing. And so they, they rolled out, did a big bet, the company thing and they rolled out fiber. Good for that all over the place. So that's the flip side is I pay 80 something dollars a month for gigabit, internet and Comcast still has terrible, more expensive service in my neighborhood. And so I think they're being killed on that lower end and the higher end.

Leo Laporte (02:34:27):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Competition's a good thing here. This is yeah. Cause all the, the cable monopoly

Paris Martineau (02:34:32):
20 bucks a month for 400 up down. And it's fantastic. What,

Leo Laporte (02:34:36):
How is that

Paris Martineau (02:34:38):
Somehow with Verizon? I, I, over my phone bill, it like bundled with my home. The home is only $20. Every apartment I moved to in New York, I make a Verizon man come up, scale the wall and drill a hole into my wall to put the fiber thing in. And then I run extension cord throughout my entire home. Don't show or show him ethernet.

Leo Laporte (02:34:59):
Don't show him the lamp though. Cuz he may never won.

Paris Martineau (02:35:02):
Won't you know, last time I think he might have seen one because they accidentally left a fancy router, just like sitting on my fire escape. So

Leo Laporte (02:35:10):
I took it as they ran. That's great. They ran listen all let's take a break and I have for the final stories, this is going on way too long, but I'm having way too much fun. Paris Martin, Nolan, Fleishman. So great to have you Dan Mor we gotta do this again soon. You guys are fantastic. Our show today brought to you by stamps.com. Somebody called the radio show today said, I wanna sell online. How should I do the mailing? What kind of printer do I need? Whatever I said, no, no, no, no. It's very simple. You check with the vendor, see what they tell you to use. If it's stamps.com, you're golden. You don't need a special printer. You don't need anything. Stamps.Com is the biggest Bo for the small business owner or getting ready for the holiday season. It's coming up. If you, I hope you still don't.

Leo Laporte (02:35:58):
And I, God, I remember this a couple of years ago, going to the post office, standing behind somebody who had an arm full of packages, she was mailing. She was waiting in line to mail them. That's crazy. Stamps.Com can do it all without a trip to the post office. You never have to leave your desk. It's a 24 7 post office. You can access anywhere, no lines, no traffic, no hassle. We've been using 'em since I don't know when I, they we've doing their ADSD since 2012. I think we've been using 'em for longer than that. Haven't you tried them yet. You've heard me talk about it. What are you waiting for? And by the way, it's getting better stamps.com. Now is your one stop shop for all your shipping and mailing needs. For more than 20 years, it's been indispensable for more than a million businesses because they can print real us.

Leo Laporte (02:36:46):
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Leo Laporte (02:37:36):
In fact, if you're using the post office, a uniformed employee of the federal government will come and pick up that mail and take it <laugh> to the post office, your mail carrier. If you need a package pickup, you could schedule it right through the dashboard. Same with ups rates are constantly changing, but with stamps.com switch and save feature, you can easily compare carriers and rates. So, you know, you're getting the best deal. You're saving money and it's fantastic for an online store. It works seamlessly with all the major shopping carts and marketplaces they'll actually fill in all the forms automatically. You don't have to do any typing print right on the envelope. If you're sending an envelope, print a package label, they'll even suggest, Hey, this might be better. Media mail, save some money this way. Look, get ahead of the holiday chaos. This year, get started with stamps.com.

Leo Laporte (02:38:22):
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Leo Laporte (02:40:57):
I have some very good news. Paul thera will not be joining the apple live event stream on Wednesday. <Laugh> it scared the hell at us? So many people. You, you understand why that would be humorous? I don't know if you've ever followed Paul during an apple event and his tweets. He is not the biggest fan. But I thought, well, that'd be a good antidote to the apple event, but no, it will be me and Andy and NACO this Wednesday. <Laugh> it would've been fun though. I wish we, I wish we could have gotten Paul to do it. He said, I don't need the I don't need the Appium. But 10:00 AM Pacific. Yep. 1:00 PM Eastern time, 1700 UTC, Wednesday, the seventh for the big apple infomercial and Andy and I will, will give you context story of the week. And actually the headline scared the hell outta me. When I saw the picture, Dr. Uses his Rivian R one T to perform vasectomy during power outage!

Glenn Fleishman (02:41:56):
Was a one in a million chance doctor one in a million chance.

Leo Laporte (02:41:59):
<Laugh> I, I probably like you might have misunderstood this story, especially cuz it looks like that Rivian is crashing into the doctor's office. But no, in fact, a doctor based in Austin, Texas, Dr. Christopher Yang was set to perform a vasectomy in his clinic when the power went out, as it, as it is, want to do in Austin, Texas, his patient said, doc, <laugh> I can't rescheduled. Can we just go ahead and do this? The doc now you could probably, I just

Paris Martineau (02:42:33):
Wanna be inside the, the mind of a patient. Who's like, listen, I know the power's out, but I gotta

Leo Laporte (02:42:38):
Go, man.

Paris Martineau (02:42:40):
Oh, I gotta, I gotta get this. And I can't

Dan Moren (02:42:42):
Dunno. What is the, what is the rational now? What is driving this person? Why do they need it's really battery

Paris Martineau (02:42:47):
Power.

Dan Moren (02:42:48):
Yeah. I need the backstory. It's

Glenn Fleishman (02:42:50):
Got 314. Miles of range was plenty close enough to

Leo Laporte (02:42:55):
So you give me a ride. You say like a lot of electric vehicles has, has one 20 volt AC power outlets. Four of 'em. Oh my gosh. On the Rivian. Now, you know the Ford lightning, you can actually plug your house into, if there's a power outage and run your house off of it. This is not that this is just regular one 20 volt AC outlets. The doc, I guess. I don't know. What did he have to plug in lights?

Glenn Fleishman (02:43:16):
I would think it was says his electro cautery C cautery unit, which I would think would be more like a two 20. I mean, that's my opinion as somebody who uses electricity, but I

Paris Martineau (02:43:25):
Mean, are you under, during this

Leo Laporte (02:43:27):
Proceed? Well, is there I can, I can fill you in cuz I've had a vasectomy and no, not you're the weird picture though. You're you're you're wide awake. But you're, you're an estheticized, it's

Glenn Fleishman (02:43:39):
A local, I

Leo Laporte (02:43:39):
Hope it's a local. So

Paris Martineau (02:43:40):
What sort of a car powered your vasectomy? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:43:45):
Fortunately, I I'll never know the power didn't go out and we didn't have triggered for locals way back then. This is actually probably the 28th anniversary of it. Cause I got it right after my son was born.

Glenn Fleishman (02:43:56):
He started Farrick Newgen happy

Paris Martineau (02:43:58):
Birthday,

Leo Laporte (02:43:59):
Birthday ectomy Farrick Newgen Newgen they, they plugged it in electro cautery was normal. The procedure went great. Says Dr. Yang. I mean, I mentioned this story to our own house doctor, our physician in the IRC, Dr. Mom she said that's nuts if you're getting a procedure and the power goes out, stop. <Laugh> do not plug into your truck and continue

Glenn Fleishman (02:44:26):
Just wings. Don't on

Paris Martineau (02:44:27):
Bus. Probably heard about this and then sat straight up and his bed and was like, we gotta get a Tesla out there performing. Yeah,

Dan Moren (02:44:34):
Because there's, there's one thing that Elon Musk did not get. It's a vasectomy. I thinks,

Paris Martineau (02:44:38):
Oh, that's true. He's probably very, he's probably thinks this is

Glenn Fleishman (02:44:41):
A good advertis. No, what's the opposite of that. He did something. That's the opposite of that.

Leo Laporte (02:44:44):
I think he had 10 children

Paris Martineau (02:44:45):
IVF. He, he did IVF with his executive to give her TWiTns. Oh, oh, oh, wait a minute. Can you do that with Tesla?

Leo Laporte (02:44:54):
They didn't wait a minute. I didn't know this. I remember this, that the, the woman who runs yeah, the neuro brain implant. Yeah. For him is pregnant with his TWiTns. But I didn't understand

Paris Martineau (02:45:03):
He was through IVF.

Leo Laporte (02:45:04):
Yes. They didn't do it in the traditional method.

Paris Martineau (02:45:07):
As far as we know through legal documentation. Yes. Because she was able, they were both able to argue that it was a non-romantic encounter. So it didn't run a foul of HR rules.

Leo Laporte (02:45:18):
I really, I did not say. And I hope I did not say this, that, that Rian vasectomy was nuts. Did I? No, I hope I did not say that. That would

Glenn Fleishman (02:45:28):
Be, I need a trombone. I do trombone very quickly

Dan Moren (02:45:31):
Because the thing would the tiniest, no matter how it goes, you're ending up as a news story, right?

Leo Laporte (02:45:36):
<Laugh> yeah. Yeah. One way matter

Dan Moren (02:45:37):
How it came out one way or another one

Glenn Fleishman (02:45:39):
Hand Sue's doctor over, I was gonna say,

Paris Martineau (02:45:41):
Let's check back in with this guy in like a year or two to see if it, you know, actually was successful. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:45:46):
Just

Glenn Fleishman (02:45:47):
Way they're gonna do brisses next. That's gonna be, oh

Leo Laporte (02:45:49):
Lord. That's gonna be inside EVs says the R one T continues to prove its versatility and

Glenn Fleishman (02:45:56):
I, oh God, come on.

Leo Laporte (02:45:58):
I would, I would agree. The other

Glenn Fleishman (02:46:00):
Power plant story.

Leo Laporte (02:46:02):
The other story I would like to mention, I don't know, maybe this isn't the most exciting story. When I brought this up earlier with another panel, they didn't like it, but I like it. The New York times says, oh yeah, we can now talk to naked mole rats. And it turns out the naked mole rat has a fairly elaborate vocabulary. When the two rats meet in a dark tunnel, they exchange a standard salutation. They make a soft chirp and then repeating soft chirps as Allison Barker, a neuroscientist at the max plank Institute for brain research in Germany, they have a little conversation. Would you like to hear it? Here you go. From the courtesy of the New York times. Am I, is my volume turned down? Let me turn it up here. Oh, it's up to you bonito. We're we're never gonna know what the naked Mora said.

Glenn Fleishman (02:46:53):
It's Dr. Barker is Nove determinism right there. I think she's studying,

Leo Laporte (02:46:58):
Talking. There it is. That's that's the two rats talking. The greeting call, which I thought was going to be is this basic turns out to be incredibly complicated. So Dr. Barker machine learning formed my research, they're feeding animal sounds to machine learning systems to help them understand what the animals are doing and saying. And in fact, they've been able to see that there are multiple patterns. For instance, not only does each mole rat have its own vocal signature, they don't have any clothes, but they have each their own vocal signature. Each colony has its own distinct dialect, which is passed down culturally over generations. And this is the most interesting during times of social instability, such as in the weeks after a colonies queen is violently deposed. The di <laugh>. Wow. It's an, it's an elaborate. Someone is

Paris Martineau (02:47:56):
Going full circle, back active

Leo Laporte (02:47:58):
Game of Thrones. Wow. The cohesive dialects fell apart. Then when the new queen begins, her reign, a new dialect appears to take hold. I think that's fascinating. All

Glenn Fleishman (02:48:10):
This blockchain

Leo Laporte (02:48:11):
<Laugh> let's throw some blockchain at it. Throw some

Glenn Fleishman (02:48:15):
Box. Yeah, I

Leo Laporte (02:48:16):
Kim's

Paris Martineau (02:48:16):
Rats go to the moon.

Leo Laporte (02:48:18):
That's

Glenn Fleishman (02:48:18):
The question I've been I love this area. There was an article recently also about the systems that for dog and cat communication Mary Robin at Cowell the science fiction writer on her Instagram. She's been posting updates of talking with her cat Elsie with one of those button based systems. And it's really, I haven't seen anybody else use it as, or, or documented as publicly or elaborately. And it is extraordinary to see what Elsie will say. And Elsie will just walk across this thing. That's full of buttons and not touch one, but like literally just walking, like casually across it and then go to the right one and hit the thing. Wow. Or several to express your thoughts. And you're like, there is intent. This is not trained. It's more sophisticated than that. How much is it? Real communication? It seems like it's fairly substantial actually. But you know, we always lay things on top of it.

Leo Laporte (02:49:11):
This is a little cleaner, cuz you're not training the rats. You're just observing that.

Glenn Fleishman (02:49:14):
Right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:49:15):
Yeah. And, and it's clear that there are a variety of vocalizations. There is a university of Washington up your way has as software called deep squeak, which <laugh> well

Dan Moren (02:49:26):
Played university of Washington,

Leo Laporte (02:49:28):
<Laugh> it can automatically detect, analyze and categorize the ultrasonic vocalizations of rodents. Huh? It can also distinguish between the complex song like calls the animals make when they're feeling good and the long flat ones they make. When they're not, you could tell if a rat's depressed deep squeak.

Dan Moren (02:49:48):
How does description couldn't anybody <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:49:50):
Yeah. Well you really look down in the mouth. Mr. Mr. Rat deep squeak has been repurposed for other species, including lemurs and whales. That's a very deep squeak. Other teams have developed their own systems for automatically detecting when clicking chickens or squealing pigs are in distress.

Dan Moren (02:50:11):
Often it turns out when people are about to kill them. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (02:50:14):
I

Paris Martineau (02:50:15):
To say, how are they making

Leo Laporte (02:50:16):
Chicken? Well, I wonder if we, if we could start to understand the animals, we may not be so likely to kill them.

Glenn Fleishman (02:50:20):
Well, they, they they might have a lot of things to say that we're not very interested.

Leo Laporte (02:50:26):
Well, they may be so annoying that we want to kill them. Is that what you're thinking?

Glenn Fleishman (02:50:29):
You, you learn a dialect. You're like, oh my God, they won't shut up about that new tree. The growth. Although I like to talk to crows, think crows have a lot of interesting things to say, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:50:39):
Here's a recording of fruit bats engaged in perch aggression, just in case you're interested.

Dan Moren (02:50:46):
<Laugh>

Paris Martineau (02:50:48):
Aren't are they wearing hats?

Glenn Fleishman (02:50:51):
They would collar probably

Dan Moren (02:50:53):
Also likeactually it looks like one of those classic 1912, you know, black and white movies. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:50:59):
Yeah. I was about say, this looks like no Ferra is gonna pop out stage.

Leo Laporte (02:51:03):
Right. Right. So apparently

Glenn Fleishman (02:51:05):
I said, why are you stealing the middle seat? Those are rest of mind.

Leo Laporte (02:51:08):
No, that's exactly

Paris Martineau (02:51:11):
Like perform a vasectomy. No, the power is

Leo Laporte (02:51:12):
Out apparently fruit bats fight for a good position in the colony. And that's what they were they were, they figured out they were doing, it looked like it. And the fact that's what they were, they were doing project set, the sation translation initiative. Oh, C E T I bringing together machine learning, experts, experts machine BI, somebody, we need a machine to understand me a learning experts, machine biologists, roboticists, linguists, and cryptographers to detect what whales are saying to one another. I think this is a very, you wanna hear some whales? Sure. Why not? Yeah. I think this is a very it's clicking. This is a really, to me, a very interesting application of machine learning. Figure out what this is, what they're saying to each other.

Paris Martineau (02:52:05):
I love science because there's just like people sitting around being like, what are whales saying? And they get to figure it out. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:52:12):
And then in theory, talk to the animals.

Glenn Fleishman (02:52:16):
That's that's the slight, that's where there's a thin line between science and drug use. <Laugh> right.

Leo Laporte (02:52:22):
Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:52:22):
Yeah. There's like, man, what do you think about whales are talking about man?

Leo Laporte (02:52:28):
The according to the New York times, the prospect of ongoing two-way dialogue with other species remains unknown, but true conversations will require a number of prerequisites, including matching intelligence types, compatible sensory systems and crucially as shared desire to chat.

Dan Moren (02:52:47):
<Laugh> <laugh> maybe the whales don't wanna talk to us and I cannot blame them for that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:52:51):
There has to be motivation on both sides to want to communicate in your tos as Natalie Wil an expert on cognitive evolution, again at the max plank Institute. But this time for evolutionary anthropology, max plank got around and also there's EC there's. <Laugh> not like Elon Musk. That's a different, that's a different,

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:14):
He was busy in a different fashion, a

Leo Laporte (02:53:16):
Different

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:16):
Fashion. There were

Paris Martineau (02:53:17):
Two genres, max plank and Elon Musk

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:20):
Inside all of us there. Two yeah. Two

Leo Laporte (02:53:22):
Wolves, two wolves,

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:23):
Max blacks plank

Leo Laporte (02:53:25):
And Elon Musk. It is, they are archetypes for us all Mr. Glenn Fleischman auto didact, jeopardy contestant creator of amazing letter press. What is this here? What is this?

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:41):
Your show long fancier,

Leo Laporte (02:53:42):
A flaw. He's a long fan. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:45):
Some Seattle star, a newspaper that's been out of business for 70 years flying and a mystery. I have

Leo Laporte (02:53:51):
That's from web world war II, MacArthur faces all out assault.

Glenn Fleishman (02:53:56):
And the confusing part is this flung is a two page tabloid style flying, but on the same purchase, I was able to obtain a full page, broad sheet flying for that style of musical. We

Paris Martineau (02:54:12):
Just wanna go to acquire Flos

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:15):
<Laugh> the well eBay, but then sometimes things happen like a guy from Sweden says, Hey, I've got a couple hundred pieces of peanuts. Flo, you want it? They

Paris Martineau (02:54:22):
Just open up their coat and they're like, you want some floss?

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:26):
That's

Dan Moren (02:54:27):
Question. Call

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:27):
Those people

Dan Moren (02:54:29):
Flying pluggers or

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:33):
Wes long time. No, see

Leo Laporte (02:54:34):
You better explain for those who are not completely up on antiquated newspaper technology. What a flung is

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:40):
Just gotta always show you the flung not followed by my Reine Leo. It's a actually

Paris Martineau (02:54:46):
Light switch on my lamp.

Leo Laporte (02:54:48):
It's

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:48):
Oh, that's, it's a good name for it. It's a flung was a, a mold used a metal type days from when they, when printing was all.

Leo Laporte (02:54:56):
So they pour lead into that mold.

Glenn Fleishman (02:54:58):
Exactly. They'd make the flung under high pressure from like a blade out page of disparate elements, like pieces of type and illustrations. Then they'd put that in a press to create a single sheet that they could then cast into a hemispherical or half a circular metal plate that could go on a high speed rotary press and spin really fast and print, you know, vast numbers of newspapers every hour. So in every newspaper in the country, they had dozens of people like making, like laying out pages, making flungs making these plates putting on presses. It was this incredibly wild amount of lead <laugh> pouring. And just like, it's a crazy industrial operation that every newspaper had to do until about the seventies or eighties. And then it was utterly thrown out in favor of like a simpler photographic process that everyone uses. Now.

Leo Laporte (02:55:43):
It's sad though. But thank goodness. You're keeping the flying alive

Glenn Fleishman (02:55:47):
Little aspects of it in history.

Leo Laporte (02:55:49):
Documenting it. Yeah. Glen always a pleasure. Glen F thank you. Or no, I'm sorry. Glen do fund two ends.

Paris Martineau (02:55:55):
God, you had, this is your last opportunity.

Leo Laporte (02:55:58):
I know I screwed it up every single time. Glen hundred

Glenn Fleishman (02:56:01):
Percent easy to find me glen.fun

Leo Laporte (02:56:03):
Glen do to the name. And there's a lot of good stuff there. So great to see you. Thank you for being thanks. Saw me great to be Dan Mor, Bayer agenda LF extraction and the newest, the Nova incident, all part of the galactic cold war saga. Great reading. I could, I could vouch for it really good. Surprisingly good. Really? <laugh>

Dan Moren (02:56:27):
Once again, thank you, chucks. That I'm shock a man. Like you could string a sentence together really, really, and look at you. I see nothing behind those eyes.

Leo Laporte (02:56:38):
Remarkable. I, I appreciate it. Six colors.com of course. Anything, what, what are you gonna be doing on Tuesday? Are you gonna be doing a live thing or

Dan Moren (02:56:49):
Jason will be there at the actual event. So I think he'll be doing some of the heavy lifting, but we'll have some stuff afterwards on the site. And I think we'll, we may actually, we started doing some like video, like wrap up afterwards to sort of quick hit things to sort of discuss. So we might have one of those going up. Then there'll be plenty more coverage to come on six scholars.

Leo Laporte (02:57:08):
Excellent. Excellent. And of course the wonderful Paris Martin know the crafty Paris Martin know more ways than one in the information.com. There's your signal number? She's at Paris Martine on the TWiTtter. What are you working right now? Anything exciting?

Paris Martineau (02:57:25):
I cover Amazon write about different parts of the business. If you work for Amazon or you used to come chat with me on signal, talk off the record, be really fun, kind of like this chat. Nice, but also about your

Leo Laporte (02:57:36):
Work. Nice.

Glenn Fleishman (02:57:37):
You cover Amazon's all the unionization stuff, I assume.

Paris Martineau (02:57:41):
Yeah. I mean that as well as I'm really interested in kind of the movements in healthcare right now, as well as I mean, I think everything going with project Santos, it's a massive company and I feel like every time I look in a different part of it, I find something more interesting. So

Leo Laporte (02:57:59):
Always a pleasure. Thanks to all of you, always a pleasure. This was so much fun. I hate to stop. I really do. We do TWiT every Sunday about 2:00 PM civic, 5:00 PM, Eastern 2100 UTC. So you can watch us do it live@live.Twit.tv or chat with us live while you're watching@irc.Twit.tv club members get to chat in our club discord. If you're not a club member, seven bucks a month, let me do a little pitch for this seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows you get access to the discord, which is always full of fascinating stuff. We do events all the time. In fact, we have a fireside check coming up September 22nd, featuring club TWiT members Stacey Higginbotham's book club, the untitled Linux show hands on Mac with Micah Sergeant hands on windows with Paul thera. There's just a ton of good stuff in there.

Leo Laporte (02:58:47):
And all those shows also appear on the TWiT plus feed. So I invite you to join us in the club TWiT, just go to TWiTt.tv/club TWiTt for for information seven bucks a month. I think it's a good deal and it helps us out helps us smooth out the rough edges in the ad world. After the fact of course, though, we offer OnDemand versions ad supported of all of our shows@TWiTt.tv. You can also go to YouTube. Each ch show has its own YouTube channel, youtube.com/this week in tech. There's also of course the best way to get it subs the chance to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That's free despite the name. I know it confuses people, but it's free. Just follow us or subscribe to us and you'll get it the minute it's available. So you have it in time for your Monday morning commute. I hope you don't commute tomorrow. Cuz it's labor day. Have a great labor day weekend go out and barbecue for don't forget no more white pants or white shoes after tomorrow. <Laugh> this is it. Last chance. Get those shoes on and we'll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can