This Week in Tech Episode 910 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
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Leo Laporte/Padre (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT this week, weekend Tech. Father Robert is here with all sorts of cool stuff from C es. Connie Guglielmo, C Net's Editor-in-chief is also back from Vegas. She's gotta a look at some of the more important things she saw at c s and then of course, Paris Martin Oe. From the information, there's a lot to talk about. Let's get started. Twit is next. Podcasts you
TWiT Intro (00:00:26):
Love from people you trust. This
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:00:30):
Is twit, is Twit.
(00:00:36):
This is twit this week in Tech. Episode nine 10 for Sunday, January 15th, 2023. It's a Merkel. This week at Tech is brought to you by decisions. Don't let complexity block your company's growth decisions. No code rules driven process automation software provides every tool you'll need to build custom workflows, empowering you to modernize legacy systems, ensure regulatory compliance, and renew the customer experience. Visit decisions.com/twit. Learn how automating anything can change everything. And buy noom. Stay focused on what's important to you with noom Weight's, psychology based approach. And check out Noom s first ever. Book the Noom Mindset. A deep dive into the psychology of behavior change. Available to buy now wherever books are sold. Sign up for your trial at noom.com/twit and buy ZipRecruiter your company has goals this year. Find the right people to help you achieve them with ZipRecruiter. Where four out of five employers get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it free at ziprecruiter.com/twin and buy Mint Mobile. If saving more and spending last is one of your top goals for 2023, switching to Mint Mobile is the easiest way to save this year. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to mint mobile.com/twi.
(00:02:16):
It's time for twt. This week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. We got a great panel for you, including a bunch of stuff from the Padre Shopping Network. Before I get to that, let's introduce the editor-in-chief of cnet. Connie Guo, it's great to see you again. Thank you for joining us, Connie.
Connie Guglielmo (00:02:35):
My pleasure. Happy
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:02:36):
To be here. Wonder. Wonderful. Have you, you were at c e s and you're still standing.
Connie Guglielmo (00:02:43):
I did not get sick this
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:02:44):
Year. Impressed. It was late this year. It started on Thursday, went through Sunday. But I will get your thoughts before that though. Let's say hi to Paris Martin. No. Who did not go to ces. She is of course, at the great information. We've been quoting you guys a lot lately. Hi, Paris.
Paris Martineau (00:03:02):
We've been doing a lot of great stuff here. Hi. Happy to be here. Just like the lot in Merkel. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:03:08):
You mean Merkel? Merkel. The drug for drugs. That one.
Paris Martineau (00:03:14):
<Laugh>. Yes. It's the
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:03:16):
One that one specifically the drug with the unaccountable <inaudible> over the m. That one. It's
Paris Martineau (00:03:22):
No vowels except for a y unless you
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:03:24):
Count that Yr. K l Father Robert brought this father. Robert Baller. The digital Jesuit is here. It's great to see you. You were in Vegas as well. I was. And it was odd because I always come back from CES with something normally a cold or a flu instead. Merkel. I, I had a miracle. I got a Merkel. And look at all this. Yep. Look at all this. Yeah, I kind of, okay. I have to say, this is only the, the big stuff. I left most of it back in Las Vegas, so I never, I don't know about you, Connie. I never come back with anything from ces except maybe a stress squeeze doll. I come back with everything. How did
Paris Martineau (00:04:03):
You What Leo? That's like the one point of going to CES is stuff you've got. I always come back with an Nikon bag. The yellow bag
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:04:12):
Icon bag. Yeah, the yellow Nikon bag. Yeah. I kind of came back. See I got on the table. There's three laptops. Pair of shoes, bunch of socks, a couple hundred dollars worth of SSDs and USBs. A pet vacuum. A really, really cool super encrypted drive. Some noise canceling headsets and power products. We're gonna have to figure out. We'll get one every 10 minutes. This is a sleeping bag. That's right. Minus it's, they call it, I think it's big glue. Big glue. Like, like big igloo. Big glue. It's, it's rated down. It uses that aero gel stuff that I've always wanted to play with <laugh>. It's super light. It's real light. It's rated for minus 40 degrees. Oh. For this size sleeping bag. That's amazing. It's a mummy bag. So when you take that trip down to, down to Antarctica, that's, I'm bringing my, what is it called? Big glue <laugh>. <Laugh>.
Paris Martineau (00:04:57):
I think in between each ad. Read Leo, you gotta just like zip yourself up. <Laugh> 25% more. I, by the end it's just gonna be your eyes.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:05:04):
I'll be sweating Bullets. <Laugh>. Well, we were, we were torn between doing that or taking this Merkel, which is designed for people who are about to drink heavily. Yep. Yep. And then having a shot every five minutes. It keeps your body supposedly keeps your body from absorbing that alcohol. So you can get as torn as you want to without having the hangover <laugh>. It's got electrolytes, <laugh>. It's what a body needs. She's she's in inside the, the Big Lou. If you go, who's in the big, if you go to the wide shot, who's in the big <laugh>? Oh, sorry. No,
Paris Martineau (00:05:36):
In the Big Lou.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:05:38):
That's gonna be really warm. Connie, is it b i g l o u? It's b i i g l O O. Big Lou. Big Lou. Big Lou <laugh>. All right. Put Big Lou under the table for a bit. You never, you never got the c e s swag. I mean, that really is part No, seriously, I I would get a lot of press releases. Yeah, no, those go straight. They would never give, the press releases are the opposite of swags. Yeah, yeah. You know, I was talking about this last week when Stacy was on, cause she was just back from ces. It used to be a CES that in the main lobby there, there'd be a FedEx booth that would ship everything back for you. I have a feeling you carried this on. I, well, yes, because so 90% of the, they didn't give it to me because I told them, please just ship it. Oh, so they shipped it to your Well, they, they shipped it to Rome. But these, I actually wanted to play with <laugh> while they was in the United States. So I'm
Paris Martineau (00:06:35):
Somewhere the Pope is receiving a, yeah,
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:06:38):
A VR headset. This <laugh>. I dunno. Yeah. So half the stuff I sent to the Vatican, the Pope just takes like, he's gotta send. No, come on. He's got some VR goggles right now. He's got some great gaming laptops. The Holy Father, has he ever played any VR games? Oh, he's really big in the cod <laugh> Call of Duty.
Paris Martineau (00:06:54):
He, he's just sniping all the nonbelievers.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:06:57):
Yeah. He only uses his knife. He just sneaks up on people. It's amazing. Oh, yeah. He's one of them. He's very skilled. It's one of them. Does a pope have an RTX 40, 90? Oh, I mean, no, he's got the next version. Of course. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So why shoes? Okay, this is bothering people because they're shoes on our tables. Shoes. But they're clean. They've never been worn. These, yeah, these have never been worn. These are the ksics. Now, last year they sent me a pair and I thought, this is gonna be a joke. I Why are you sending me shoes at a tech conference? But these are the, you can just step into them and, but they're not slip-ons. That's how most shoes work. No, no, but I mean, if you get That's what I said. I said, I've, I've seen slip-ons before. Except these are crazy comfortable.
(00:07:40):
It's, it's almost as they remold your sh your foot after you put your foot foot. Did they use Arrow gel? No. No, but I mean, and they're crazy comfortable. No, thank goodness. We have a space program so we could get shoes and big looses <laugh>, because otherwise, Ugh. What would we do? These are, these are, so you wear like Birkenstocks? No, I, I actually wear a pair of black Ksks. Oh, really? And my cats, my feral cats have had the entire year to tear them up the Vaticans, and they still look fine. The VTA cats. All right. Well, the only reason I brought this one up is so I could take this Oh, great. Table. Because it's this disturbing people. Vcas, I don't wanna bother you. It is pretty upset. Connie, you, you've seen it normally has a very big presence at c e s, a big studio, and you do a lot of live programming and stuff. Not this year though.
Connie Guglielmo (00:08:24):
No. This year was our first year back in person since the pandemic. And like everyone else, we were wanting to see what it was gonna be about and if there was gonna be the same energy and momentum that you've seen in years past. And so we decided to send a very small crew. And I would say that was the right call, <laugh>. It was you know, there were some announcements, and as always, there's crazy stuff that people write about, you know, smart toilets and cars with all kinds of new camouflage gear and what have you. But generally speaking, it was a year of people just sort of getting back to it. Yeah. Versus you know, I think one of these years that it's gonna go down in history as a moment that something amazing was
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:09:09):
Introduced. There was no historic moments at CS this year. No. There was some interesting news, but Connie hit it right on the, on the head, which was last year. Technically CES was back, but no, it was the Covid show. You had boots like LG that just had the, the outline of the booth on the floor. They didn't bring anybody. <Laugh>. Sony brought no TVs. They just did a car. Right. Right. So this year it felt like a c e s It wasn't like the full on ces where you were gonna get some amazing announcements, but there were enough vendors there, they had spread into the West Hall that it kind of gave you that feeling of, okay, yeah, this is a ces. This, this is like an off year ces, but it's still a c s versus last year, which was proof of concept that we can do this without having a hundred thousand infections. 115,000 people showed up, which was actually a lot. That normal year, some years ago would've been 180,000. Did it feel crowded, Connie, or was it kind of
Connie Guglielmo (00:10:02):
Sparse? No, I mean, I think it felt pretty light. And I, the fact that the two of us didn't get sick. Yep. I don't know. That's amazing. Both of us wearing masks and maybe spraying everyone with antibacterial spray. But it, it felt, it felt like people were curious to see what was going on. And I think, you know, there's pent up interests in people traveling. Again, I'm wanting to go to shows, but again, I don't, I don't think there was, you know, Schwartzenegger spoke.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:10:28):
What, what was Arnold there for?
Connie Guglielmo (00:10:32):
He was talking about, gosh, I can't even remember. Look, that's not even that matter.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:10:36):
The very memorable Arnold Schwartzenegger was talking about gerrymandering or something? No, he, he was looking at the next generation of a quad copter transportation devices, just so he could say, get to the chopper. Get to the chopper. <Laugh>. Sorry. That was a, a long way. That was a long reach. A long
Paris Martineau (00:10:55):
Walk. Yeah.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:10:57):
Long walk. I apologize. That's <laugh>.
Paris Martineau (00:10:59):
When was the last time you guys remember that CES really wowed you? Yeah. There's the question. Who had something that was worth being at? Yeah.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:11:07):
I mean, the Walkman was pretty awesome. The, so no, there's a new Walkman. There's a new Walkman. Sony has a new Walkman. People
Paris Martineau (00:11:14):
On TikTok. The Gen Z is really into Walkman.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:11:18):
Right. I don't get that. Don't you have a phone? But it's a Walkman. I mean, they're back in, they want experiences. So it's a nostalgia. No, it's, no, you, you can do everything on your phone. Butt it more fun to have dedicat dedicated devices. Sounds, sounds, it sounds like something. Some T twee 20 something in Brooklyn would want. That's true. I'm sorry. Paris. I don't know what you're talking about. <Laugh>. <laugh>. There was a TV that attaches, there were a number of wireless TVs. There was one, and I, I see a CNET story about it. It a wireless TV that attaches to the wall with suction cups. What could possibly go wrong? As we all know, <laugh>. Well, in fact turns out, if the battery dies, TV falls off. Well, if the wall <laugh> good, that's the TV falls off the wall. So I'm not sure I really want this.
(00:12:15):
LG had that TV that I, they brought out either last year or the, of the pandemic that rolls up and down. So they keep showing that every year. Yeah, it's a hundred thousand dollars. It is expensive. Yeah. They finally are shipping. Yeah, that's oof. Oh. How about that? Like the the light year car, buzz light year from it was from a French company. They made a all electric vehicle super aerodynamic. It can get 47 miles just off the charge on the solar panels, the integrated solar panels of the car. And then you have to park it for four days. Well, no, the, so every day 47 miles of range. And then that's good. You could plug it in for a full range and it only costs $300,000. <Laugh>. Think of, oh, wow. Bargain. Think of all the money you'll save. I buy two of them. <Laugh>. I, yeah, I have to think that. So Connie, you think it will, it's just this is the year after the pandemic and it will come back, or, I'm starting to think, I've been thinking this for some years, that big companies like Sony just say, we don't need this to show new products. We have our own way of doing that with our own line shows or whatever.
Connie Guglielmo (00:13:24):
Well, I mean, certainly you saw that happen during the pandemic. Apple can always have whatever event it wants, and it doesn't need to happen in person to get everyone to pay attention. But I would say, you know, your, your question about is CS back and what's the most interesting stuff? CS is about those crazy products that you were talking about. Million dollar flying car. That was another one. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But it's, that's not really what I go to the show to see. I go and see what some of the themes are that lots of people are blobbing onto. And a couple of years ago it was voice activated assistance. Right. You had Alexa in everything, like light switches and
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:14:01):
How did that work out?
Connie Guglielmo (00:14:03):
<Laugh>? People were laughing about it.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:14:05):
I, I'm
Connie Guglielmo (00:14:06):
Happy Voice activation and everything. Yeah. This year we saw lots of themes around sustainability. People talking about using solar and having things not just being made with green tech. That's kind of at the low end. It's but about building some intelligence into these devices so you can see how much energy they use so that you can make a call about whether you want to invest in that device or not. You know, wireless charging, you know, that's always something people want as an interest. But
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:14:35):
How much of that sustainability stuff do you think is just marketing, like, jumping on the bandwagon and how much of it is actually legitimate? My concern is a lot of this stuff at CES will never see the light of day.
Connie Guglielmo (00:14:47):
Well, that you're absolutely right. <Laugh>, a lot of the stuff we see sees will never see the light of day. I mean, in Berkeley, California, now the city has asked that all sorts of green technology be built into new construction. So, you know, it's gonna be solved. There is a piece, some of these questions Yeah. Some of these questions about sustainability and green and, and, you know, mitigating climate will be mandatory through legislation. And so there will be a market of interest there. I know people in California are interested in solar. I just put in a solar system while there are federal subsidies in place. And while our local utility, pg and e it's, it's grandfathering in, if you do it before April, a certain rate reimbursement that will go dramatically down starting in April. For those of you who wanna follow the public utility commission in California like I do, boy,
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:15:37):
I I'm, it's gonna really hurt that. I didn't know that. Yeah.
Connie Guglielmo (00:15:41):
They're gonna, it's gonna hurt solar adoption. But, you know, there's, there's interest in all those things. It's about what consumers wanna do. Right. It's where they wanna spend their money. Right. Right. And until that people, if you ask someone, do you wanna make the right choice? And would you spend more on something that is better for the environment? They'll say, yeah, but they don't put their dollars. Do
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:15:58):
They do? Yeah.
Connie Guglielmo (00:15:59):
Yeah. They don't, we haven't seen that yet. But that
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:16:02):
Could be challeng to some degree. Just like you are going there to put your finger to the wind. That's what manufacturers are doing as well. They're saying, well, what if we, what if we made this? What if we made Merkel <laugh>? Would you buy it? And they're, and they're getting some gauge of interest before they, many of these things before they even get made. What is this? This looks like you bought a magic wand. No, no. That was, wait a minute. Don't tell me. Is there something Yeah, no. Can you figure it out? Can you figure out what that is? There's a, there's a, this is a, looks like a wand. It's metal. It has a grommet at one end and a little plastic thing at the other. I pulled, don't say Ava Cadabra. I pulled Ara Cadabra. <Laugh>. Nope. Just killed Joe coming out. Hold on. Wait. Oh, it's a bottle of washer. Kind of almost. That's
Paris Martineau (00:16:47):
21St century technology.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:16:49):
This is a modern blow pipe for the, for the, the sanitation focused pig me. I mean, you're like, part of the way there. This has a plastic mouthpiece. So is it a straw? It's a straw. Thank you. It's a super high tech straw. I just put my mouth on it. You might wanna wash it. Well, that's what the pipe cleaner
Paris Martineau (00:17:07):
For. It's super high tech.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:17:09):
It's a straw. It's a metal straw. Okay. <laugh>. It takes them a sustainability booth. But that's sustainability. Right? That's what that's all about. That's about told no plastics. Mm-Hmm. in the water. And
Paris Martineau (00:17:21):
Except for the one on the mouthpiece.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:17:23):
Right? Right. No, that, that's actually silicon, you know. Oh, it's easier to clean different.
Paris Martineau (00:17:28):
That's in Merkel. That's
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:17:30):
<Laugh>. That's actually the proper way to, to shoot a Merkel pill. You gotta put it the end of that straw. Well, actually, that looks pretty good. <Laugh>. You need a monocle One can be a, whenever I'm in town, I use Merkel before I go out and drink. All right. Kill the cord, man. About sound. Fine. That's that is very, very exciting. I mean, we, CES has been over now a week. Yep. Paris and I are going, wow. We really, we merely missed it. You could have had next.
Paris Martineau (00:18:06):
Just saying That's very exciting in a dry voice is how I feel about all
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:18:11):
Of, yeah. That's it. That's
Paris Martineau (00:18:12):
It. Just absolutely no excitement, no levels.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:18:15):
Your father, Robert, has a bunch of crap in the Padre Shopping Network. <Laugh>, show us one thing that we're gonna go, oh, that's pretty good. I would, I would use that. Okay. Oh, well I gotta, I gotta do this. Okay. This is the, this is the iron, iron wolf key Iron, iron key. This is their vault. So the whole idea is it's an encrypted ssd, so it's crazy fast. 250 megabytes per second. Either way. Solid state. Solid solid state drive. It's external. It's a U USS bbc. It's got its own inter engine. Or it's Thunderball. Is it Thunderball? No, it's us bbc U s bbc. It's USS bbc. Okay. It's got its own encryption engine. So that's speeds the throughput. But it also has, and this is something that's I'm really geeky about. Do you remember bad U usb? Yeah. That was a very nasty infection that you could get right?
(00:18:58):
From going to trade shows. <Laugh>, no, from, from bad people who actually Yes. Candy drops. That would be a really good place. So, yeah. Bad u sb infected the firmware of a u SB device. Right. And unfortunately, because, and then it would be bad USB device. It'd be bad USB because ware, yeah. There's no way to find it. Right. Because the firmware is responsible for reporting on the health of the device. Right. So if someone can install something into the firmware, you could forever have a compromised device. They've included a, a piece of hardware. It's hardcoded that checks the signature of the firmware every time the device turn turns on. Nice. And it will not allow it to continue if it doesn't hit the check. So kinda like secure a boot on a Windows machine or the Chromebook. Right. Right. Wow, that's kind of cool.
(00:19:41):
So, I mean, it's how much, this is from Kingston? This is from Kingston. And well, they've got four 80, they've got 960 gigabyte versions. Is it much more expensive because of the special and it's got an LCD screen and everything? Yeah. So this actually, when you powered up, it's got the interface. So you can set a password to encrypt it. You can set guests. I think I saw this in like a James Bond movie. Yeah. It's, it's kinda like that something you would you would you would like though the password, you can set it so that the keyword randomizes so that someone can't get your password just from looking at where you're pressing. Oh yeah. Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, it's 1 7, 3, 4, 9, 2. Exactly. And it just changes every single time. That's a good idea. Yeah. And you can, because otherwise you could see the bigger prints.
(00:20:21):
Right. These thanks. But you can do per user. So you can, you can have the administrative user and then per users, and once they hit the, a certain number of attempts, it just locks a device. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, that, these kinds of things make a lot of sense. That is practical to me. Cuz I do travel a lot to places where Right. Our data is in demand. What happens when you get to the US border and the guy says, can you unlock your iron? Yes. You use, you use one of the client IDs that has just innocuous information. Ah, you have plausible deniability functions. There's stuff there. It's just nothing you want. That's really good. <Laugh>. That's smart. All right. Watch out customs. I'm coming. I'm a coming for you <laugh>. And if you get this now, we'll give you a free set of steak knives. <Laugh>.
(00:21:09):
Actually that's ties to a story that I was reading this week. A government watchdog agency was able to crack a federal agency's passwords in minutes as part of their I guess, you know, security pen testing. They hired the Department of Interior. They hired somebody, the office and the inspector general for the Department of Interior hired somebody to test their security. The agency manages the country's federal land, national parks. It has a budget of billions of dollars and uses passwords to protect most of its systems. What a surprise. That's what we do. Right. it has bucked nearly two decades of the government's own cybersecurity guidance, not using two factor or hardware keys or something like the iron key. So they inspector General spent 15 grand, hired some bad guys who broke in. Within minutes, they built a password cracking rig for $15,000.
(00:22:09):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they built their own hardware, a setup of a high performance computer with a computing power designed to take on complex mathematical tasks. Within 90 minutes, they were able to recover 14,000, 14,000 employee passwords. It's about 16% of all department accounts because the passwords were things like, remember this is the Department of Interior National Parks 2014 and <laugh> Polar Bear is 65. Shoot. Excuse me, I gotta go change that password. That's just a tiny bit better than monkey 1, 2, 3 four's. It's monkey 1, 2, 3. Yeah. The watchdog also recovered hundreds, recovered hundreds of accounts belonging to senior government employees and other accounts with elevated security privileges for accessing sensitive data and systems. 4,200 hash passwords. Oh, it took 'em a few weeks, but they were able to, they were able to get in. So that's interesting. This is an interesting way to do pen testing. They, they built their own, the Department of Interior built their own rig.
(00:23:11):
Actually it was two of them with eight GPUs each mult running multiple open source containers. They can bring up to eight GPUs online, assign them tasks. Benchmarks of 240 giga hashes per second. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> 240 billion hashes per second. It's basically a dictionary attack per second. Right. Well, and the reason this comes up, of course, obviously this is a good, I'm glad they'd pen tested this, but the reason this comes up is cuz of the last pass breach. Right. A lot of lot of people are now starting to worry about their password manager and how well secured it is, and whether they're using good passwords. You can't trust the hash anymore because what this team did was they actually did fieldwork before they did the attempt where they reverse engineered some common hashes. They did a basically a rainbow table. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So they then they can just take that and they compare it against the hashes until they find the matches and they know, okay, this is partly probably part of that string.
(00:24:13):
This is probably part of that string. Now it should be said that the ones that were easiest to crack, of course, were the ones that were like, you know, monkey 1, 2, 3. But the ones that were more sophisticated, they were still able to crack a couple of days and weeks later. Which again means for $15,000, you can now build yourself a rig that can get you into pretty much every hash file that you need to get into the first Steve Gibson was telling me this, the first thing crackers add to their password hash dictionaries is the top 1000 passwords. Yep. Yep. And it turned out 5% of all the passwords of the Department of the Interior included some variation of the word password. <Laugh> naturally. No, no. <Laugh>. Leo, I think we're about to have something warm here, but I Falcon Heavy.
(00:25:01):
The Space Force mission is about to there it goes. Wow. That was good timing. Thank you Father Robert. This is this, what are they doing? This is a a secret mission for the Space Force geosynchronous orbit satellite to watch over us. So to make sure we're gonna something it's is that Yeah. Steve Ferrells in there closely. A Jeff Bezos is just tied to the top. But this is the first, this is the second launch of the Falcon Heavy. We, we haven't seen too many of these second. Right. You know, why don't we, this one will bring Artemis to the, the moon. No, no. This is a different one. Space, space ship, I think is delivering a Tesla to the moon. <Laugh>. Thank you. Thank you. What is Elon up to these days? He is, I haven't heard from him lately. Is he doing anything?
(00:25:44):
Well, no. He's flying from San Francisco running Oakland businesses. <Laugh> that was another big story this week. It's unclear whether this was done on purpose or by accident, but according to Aaron Wu running for the information Twitter intentionally suspended third party apps, the api, including TWiT bot mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Thursday night, I started seeing messages all over, especially on our Mastodon account. Twit social, saying, what the heck? My third party app is just not logging in. The information Aaron Wu got internal messages that lead one to believe that this was intentional on Twitter's part. My bot stopped working. Oh, you had a bot? I, I built a bot, used the api. You're right. I used the api. I I and some of it did just did screen scraping and it just started freaking out. It, it can no longer do. Its its job. So I had to turn it off. Interestingly,
Paris Martineau (00:26:47):
Hey, but all the bots have been defeated, so, you
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:26:49):
Know, it's no more bots ultimately turn off the api.
Paris Martineau (00:26:52):
Really smart.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:26:54):
Hmm. Twitter riffs said it was still working, but the, the, but many of the other ones including a TWiT bot, which is very popular Twitter. Terrific. they said that was working, but then I've seen the information says that it's not Phoenix for Twitter. Echo phone TWiT,
Paris Martineau (00:27:11):
Delete birdie is down as well.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:27:13):
Oh, it's good. I deleted all my TWiTs already.
Paris Martineau (00:27:16):
I know it's quite bad.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:27:18):
Well, there's a positive side to the story. And, and that's that it seems that Twitter did it on purpose rather than this accidentally happening cuz something they changed. Here's what the information learned. They saw a internal Slack message from a senior software engineer on Thursday night saying, third party app inspe suspensions are intentional. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> yesterday the information tried to contact that engineer. He refused comments. The internal messages I'm reading from Wu's story seen by the information also show that Twitter employees have been discussing when the decision would be announced publicly. Well, not yet. <Laugh> No one. It's one of those big mysteries a Twitter employee working. I mean,
Paris Martineau (00:28:01):
I think part of it is who would be announcing these things. Twitter has a skeleton staff and almost nobody from comms.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:28:08):
They have
Paris Martineau (00:28:08):
No comms. I mean, no one from comms is left.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:28:10):
No pr, no comms, HR is a skeleton. Apparently the API engineering team is mostly gone as well. Yep. Yep. So they were in the first round. Yeah. Who would announce this? <Laugh>, I don't know. A Twitter employee working on project product. Partnerships asked on Friday morning when employees could expect a list of approved talking points. You're all in comms now for questions for partners related to third party clients revoked access. Do you wanna talk about how the information gets this information Paris Or is that a
Paris Martineau (00:28:37):
State secret? I mean, I guess it's somewhat a state secret, but it's the same as all I think journalism happens. We have reporters who their job is to build up kind of networks of great sources. People either inside the company or people are familiar with these decisions and they're in constant contact. And so I remember kind of seeing in certain groups with colleagues over the weekend of news breaking internally that this was happening and they turned that into a story. I think especially Aaron Wu, the reporter who did this, has been producing really fantastic work for us on the Twitter beat. And I think that it's kind of, I mean, a lot of, so many journalists have, because it is such a, I mean, the story is ever changing and there are employees constantly on the ins and outs with Twitter leadership that are willing to talk to the press about what's going
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:29:31):
On. That's basically what's happening. They're, yeah. And so you're seeing these Slack messages because they sent you screenshots or, or the, like,
Paris Martineau (00:29:37):
Something like that.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:29:38):
Yeah. Paul Hadad, who write is, works for tap bots and writes TWiT bot tooted on Mastodon almost 24 hours later. Still no official unofficial info from inside Twitter. I'm gonna continue as a vis as if this was all done on purpose. And Paul, now there's evidence it was mm-hmm. <Affirmative> what now? So tap Botts has a master on client, which is in beta right now called Ivory. I don't use it, but a lot of people who use it say it's very good. He says, well, we're gonna go into hyper mode with just the absolute minimum, three to four things that have to be done, finished up, and then off to Apple. Probably gonna, in other words, to get a app approval. So it can be in the app store. Probably gonna be a bunch of things I'm not super happy with, but I'll guess we'll fix it in post.
(00:30:20):
Hopefully everyone knows what we're capable of with and can live with some hopefully not long-lived rush rough edges and missing features. You know, a TWiT bot's amazing. Yeah. Ivory will be amazing. But what's, what's the long game here? So, I mean, is this just because Musk wants to sell a third party app, he wants to reduce the amount of expenses for accessing for the api. I mean, what's, what's the cause here? The third party support for Twitter has been something that really drove the adoption of Twitter. So are we just now saying, well, we're done. We've got all the audience we want. And thank you very much. Well, remember this is not the first time Twitter did this. Yeah. They did it some years ago. And actually I think Jack Dorsey has later said that was a huge mistake to cut off the third party api. I suspect it's just as simple as we want you to use our webpage in our app. Okay. And if you the new Twitter, I, we haven't talked about Twitter in some time, so I apologize for people thought this was an Elon Musk free zone. But, but <laugh> occasionally we kind of have to, we have to mention this.
Paris Martineau (00:31:22):
You smell that? That's the musk
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:31:24):
<Laugh>. Oh no. It's such an aroma. You've been sprayed. Well, who, and I don't use Twitter anymore, so I'll defer to the You're
Paris Martineau (00:31:33):
A, you're a toot man
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:31:34):
Now. I'm a tutor. We have our own masine and since we have for years, yeah, it's quite nice. And I thought, well, you know, I don't, I can easily leave Twitter without any consequence. Although I have more than half a million followers, some of whom were actually humans. And was
Paris Martineau (00:31:49):
The breaking point when Musk started calling himself the chief
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:31:52):
Twitter. That was a big one. Wasn't happy. That's the name I've used on my socials since 2007. Somebody must have told Elon because he stopped pretty quickly, but that didn't mean that that he wasn't, he isn't still being called out by mainstream media. So he changed, it looks like at the top of the Twitter now used to be you could go chronological. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or latest no. Or home. Did they change that? Which was Oh yeah. There's no more there. That little twinkly button is gone. Oh no. You now have very TikTok like for you and following.
Paris Martineau (00:32:29):
And I mean, I don't know about if either of you guys who are using Twitter have the same issue, but for me, I spend too much time on Twitter. But my, for you kind of feed is almost all people that I do not follow. It's all like that we are seeing just likes from people I follow. So instead of popular TWiTs from accounts that I'm following, it is mostly you know, TWiTs liked by people I follow or recommended TWiTs from different categories. So in order basically to see anybody's TWiTs that I follow, I have to just do chronological, which is not what I want most of the time.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:33:07):
Yeah.
Connie Guglielmo (00:33:08):
So let's talk about what's going on at Twitter, cuz that's how you started this discussion. Elon Musk we've seen in the past two weeks has been the person on the planet who's lost more wealth in a short amount of time than anyone else. 200 billion Tesla's shares are tanking. CNET wrote a story back in December, how lots of, not lots, but there was a trend among Twi Tesla owners who were just not gonna renew their leases or backing away cuz they just didn't like what he was doing. And I think what you're saying is that he's, you know, it's easy Monday, Monday, Monday morning quarterback, how to run a social media site when you're standing on the outside. But there's a totally different story when you're inside trying to make policy and do things and work. And so what we're seeing is the, the supposed genius of this man is not, you know, that genius when it comes to a social media site. And either he's getting bored with it and, you know or there's a communication breakdown where people are not quite sure what they need to do. I mean, he's supposedly looking for somebody else to run it. Right. That's what we keep waiting to hear. Who's now gonna step in and run it because the internet voted him out. So it's kind of seems
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:34:21):
Like he's ignoring, by the way, it seems like he's kind of ignoring the results of that poll.
Paris Martineau (00:34:25):
I think it, it's notable that even after that he was like, yeah, if I find someone new to be CEO on Twitter, they'll be ceo. But I'm gonna run all the tech and
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:34:33):
Platform. Yeah. I'm gonna still run it.
Paris Martineau (00:34:34):
I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, ceo.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:34:36):
So scooter X in our char says, tell me if this is still the case. Scooter exit. Some of these third party clients aren't working again. I see your TWiT. I, again, I I don't have a dog in this hunt anymore and I'm very happy that I don't. But I think there's still a lot of people who care deeply about what happens to Twitter, right?
Connie Guglielmo (00:34:57):
Absolutely. Yeah. And that's why you're getting leaks from the company. I mean, I'm a longtime Apple reporter who in the early days when I was working at this place called Mac Week, we'd have all these great stories and people were like, why is all this stuff leaking? And it, it wasn't leaking because people were malicious. It's cuz they loved the company. Yeah. And they wanted to see it get better and do better. And so you're seeing some people talking about what's happening inside Twitter, not because they wanna tear it down, it's because they can't believe it. And I want someone to come and help save it or rescue or create enough outside momentum to get some of the crazy stuff stopped.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:35:34):
You know, I stepped away entirely from Twitter in December leading up to CES for, for like six weeks. And it was wonderful. It was so, I I I focused on Macedon on the I love you and in our Macedon. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a fun community. When I came back, I didn't really miss having access to a larger audience. I did miss some of the members of the community that I had built up on Twitter. Now, if they were to come over to Macedon, there would be no reason for me to go back to Twitter. That's the only reason why I still care about that company, because there are some people who I can only connect with over Twitter. That's it. I feel like there's a lesson that needs to be learned here that we have, many of us have, but some of us have not yet learned, which is that at least when it comes to social, this kind of centralized single owner company is ultimately not good for you.
(00:36:28):
Whether it's Facebook, look what they're doing to Instagram. I is anybody happy with the new Instagram? Elon Musk at Twitter? I ju I feel like these companies, because their model is not to create a nice conversation. Correct? Correct. Their whole business model is to create fewer or so that it's sticky. So it's engaging and as a result, you get I think things that are bad for our polity, I think they're bad for society. I don't think they're good for us. Whereas these decentralized, and I think it's more than just decentralized social networks, honestly, I think it's also open source that this is maybe the watershed moment. Maybe I'm being a pie eye optimist. I also believe it was gonna be the year of the links desktop in 1924. But I, I think that this may be the watershed moment where we start to realize that computing should not be owned by any company.
(00:37:28):
I would hope so. That blogs should proliferate. Everybody should have their own blog. That social networks should be diverse and federated. That, that it doesn't make sense for one company to dominate. It's bad for us, except, and we did a big meeting in the Vatican on this it we called. It did, yeah. It's common, common good in the digital aid. Exa, if anybody should support open source, it's the Vatican. And, and actually they asked me about that. They said, what is so sticky about Facebook or Twitter or any of the other social media services? You know, we had mass communications before. Can you say Satan? Well, no, no. The keyword was, that's what came to mind. I'm sorry. <Laugh>. The keyword was outrage. Yeah. It's, it is. That's how social media, that's how they make you sells on outrage. Yeah. Because outrage spreads so fast, an outrage motivates more than anything else.
(00:38:21):
Because if I can get righteously indignant about somebody else, about what someone else did or what someone else said that spreads, that spreads. Now, if I write this wonderful story about how there's a woman in Philadelphia who is taking care of homeless children, that will get like maybe a day of coverage. But if I write about how there's a woman in, in Pennsylvania who has abused homeless children, oh my God. She will be the most famous person ever. News, local news has never been about good news. Newspapers never been about good news. News. But it's reach, if you want people to read your paper Yeah. Or watch your TV show, you get 'em, it doesn't have to always be anger, but you get 'em, eh, you get 'em revved up somehow. But the, the loop, the feedback cycle on social media, the fact that you can get that anger cycle so insane quickly.
(00:39:10):
Yeah. I mean, it's those little mini hits of dopamine. So I guess that's my question. Why are we trying to save Twitter? It's community. It's honestly, it's the community because that's where your friends are. Yeah. Now there's, but that's their, that's to me, that's their heroin dealer's hook. Yes. That's what they're saying. Well, you don't want to lose your friends. And honestly, all would take us for us to move. It would take us. But some people, a a lot of people are invested in the years, decades for decades for some, nobody wants to read your gold TWiTs. Nobody does. But if I've got an account with a hundred thousand followers and I really put time into developing a hundred thousand followers, yeah. I'm not gonna just abandon it. Well, I'm sure for a brand, Connie, that makes a big, that's a big part of it. I mean, I, I would love to see CNET say no more Twitter. It's ridiculous. But you can't do that. We don't even do that. Twitter doesn't even do that. You tried to do that. I did it. Yeah. But I can't get the company to do it.
Connie Guglielmo (00:40:11):
So at, as somebody who's been in the tech industry for a long time, things come and go. Right. And right now, should we save Twitter? I don't know. I mean Yeah. Am am I used to it? Do I know how it works? Have have brands built communities, but it's also, there's a lot of negativity around there. And we saw a lot of, you know, bad things happen to brands when anybody could get verified. That's true. Right. As a brand and started putting out misinformation.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:40:36):
There's a few brands who wish they weren't on Twitter. Yeah.
Connie Guglielmo (00:40:38):
Yeah, that's right. So I think what we're looking at, I, I agree with everything that's been said about the toxicity that brings, that social media has brought to the world, and all of us spending way too much time looking down and being in these echo chambers that are being hijacked by disinformation and propaganda and outraged cycle drivers. So then the question becomes, what, what is the next thing that might inspire and engage people? For a while, everyone thought it was gonna be TikTok, just these short little moments that made you laugh. But then there's the Chinese government behind them and who's collecting the data and for what purpose? I'm not saying TikTok is not gonna be successful or continue to, to have a lot of traffic, but what's the idea behind it? Right. And what's the next level of social engagement that we wanna have or that we wanna walk away from? So that's the discussions that I think are gonna start, especially if more governments, Europe will be ahead of us in the US start looking at these big tech giants and saying, no, we don't want you to have all that power. We want you to want, want to reign you in in some areas. We're just at the beginning of that.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:41:45):
Connie, can I invite you to our next conference in the Vatican? Yeah. No, it's,
Connie Guglielmo (00:41:49):
I would absolutely, as a good Catholic, I would love to come. Okay.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:41:53):
<Laugh>, I've even gotten an apartment for you. I get, I'll offer you the same apartment that I've been offering Leo for the last five years. <Laugh>.
Connie Guglielmo (00:41:59):
I, I am, I'm happy to come. But, but look, technology, I say this all the time. Technology is a means to an end. It's not an end. And at the beginning, the promise of places like Twitter and Facebook was to connect people in a more easy way. Where you got out of touch with, you know, your high school classmates or your college ca classmates, and now you can get back in touch with 'em. Or you wanna create communities, you know, who wants to go to a movie night or have about luck. That was the promise. It's been co-opted by people for nefarious purposes. So, so it's, the technology inherently isn't bad. It's how it's being cooped and used by people.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:42:39):
And, and, and part of that is that we've kind of let it happen. We just let it Yeah. You know, whatever happens, happens. I love the idea of sitting back like you're doing at, in the church and saying, well, let's think, let's be more conscious about what we do next and think about its impact. I hate to see, and I do think there's a certain amount of moral panic for instance around TikTok. I hate to see people say, well, it's big tech, so it's bad. Right? But at the same time, I think little tech is better <laugh>, you know, I really do. I think personal tech is better. Small scale is better. And maybe it's time to wean ourselves off of this adrenaline dopamine hit that we get from going to places like Twitter. And, and, and Yeah. You know, you got a mass it on.
(00:43:27):
It's not quite so exciting. There's no buzz. It's just conversations. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's pictures of the vcat. It's kind of pleasant in a way that the Twitter isn't. And maybe we just need to get used to, you know, kinda, it's like a, a sugar addict. It's first, it's very hard not to eat stuff la with sugar. But I don't know. One of the issues, like is a better way is a one channel. So one channel was a strategy that has been developed by enterprise communications companies that allowed companies to have quote unquote one channel to, to touch bases with their customers. And that meant it combined the feeds from social media, from their own internal communication systems, emails, et cetera, et cetera. Internally. That's what they saw. Right. So they, they wanted the customer to be able to move from one type, anywhere of communication to another.
(00:44:16):
And you continue the conversation. Is that still that's still going. That's still going. That's good. I like that idea. But social media is specifically, Twitter was a huge part of that one channel strategy. So if you lose that, that's billions of dollars that has been invested that they lose. So they're heavily invested. Of course Twitter wants to silo it. Right. Twitter doesn't want you have one check. No. They want your channel want you to Twitter for Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's take a little break. Lots more to talk about. And a lot of crappy gadgets still <laugh>, including a pet vacuum. <Laugh>. It's for Burke. This is good stuff. He needs a haircut. <Laugh>. I love it. Father Robert Ballas here. The digital Jesuit is here. Jesuit pilgrimage. This is your new your new app. Yeah. So we've been, we were working on this for a while.
(00:44:59):
It just, it came out of an evening of, Hey, we're bored. What do you want to do? And someone said, Hey, why wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait. You and the Pope and some cardinals sitting around. Yeah. Kind of, of, they, they wanted a digital project. And I said, how about something super simple? At, at, at, at one point someone wanted, this is a Pokemon Go. Cause this is, this is actually the church trying to figure out how do we stay relevant in a digital age. Correct. Yeah. So we just, I said, let's make an app Pokemon. Come on. Go. Wouldn't be bad. What would you search for? I'm not gonna be throwing Saint Balls at Saints. I mean, come on. I'm not gonna catch them all. But, but it, it just gotta catch 'em all. We just took people through the different sites of the pilgrimage.
(00:45:38):
Wait, your name is on this. It is, it is. This is your app. I know that actually iPad and iPhone. Ipad. iPhone. It's on app. Android is your Android too. Yeah, of course there is. So what do you do? So you, we, we have it, it geolocates. So if someone, you have an app, you buried the lead. Yeah, I know, I know. But I, I do lots of things. But, but let's say you're actually visiting the the pilgrimage sites. The Apple automatically know that you're there and it will bring up information about the site where you should go. It will give you the, the meditations that St. Ignatius himself did. It will show you 360 view. Oh. As you're there. As you're there. Right. That's when did Saint Ignatius live? Oh back in the <laugh> 15 hundreds. Okay. So, well that's not that long ago.
(00:46:22):
I mean, Jesus was a couple of thousand. Yeah, exactly. So yeah. So and si the society of Jesus is Yes. Right. Yeah. Founded by Saint Ignatius. Correct. That's, so that was our founder. And actually, if you look through the app and you follow the pilgrimage sites that he was at, you kind of get an idea of why we ended up the way we are. Plus you're gonna get some great Italian food. <Laugh>. I should, you know, you think you have restaurants in this. I think it's an open-ended development. <Laugh>. And we've been thinking about what else we wanted to add. Now that the core functionality works, it's not all in Italy. Some of it's may I suggest a cook with the Pope Cook pope segment? You know, like a little run to camera. Okay. Yeah. You can tell us where we go. What does a holy father like to eat?
(00:47:05):
He's okay, well he's Argentinian, right? An Argentinian food is beef. Beef. He likes meat, beef. He likes, he likes a good meat. What is the cheese dish where they bake the cheese <laugh>. It's so good. Yes. He we don't have that. It's too rich. Oh yeah. It's too rich. It's too rich. Yeah. But he's, he, honestly, and there's a chance that he might be in the house when you're there. He is one of the, the nicest, most unassuming people you've ever met. You've told me some stories. Mostly I'm sure not for public consumption, but Yeah. That really are like, wow, that's kind of cool. I'm still trying to get him on our Dunson Dungeons and Dragon crew. You guys go down in the cab.
Paris Martineau (00:47:41):
What a, what class do you think the Pope would
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:47:44):
No chaos gonna be? Evil Cleric's. A cle. Absolutely. And he's
Paris Martineau (00:47:50):
The Pope just decides Barbarian
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:47:52):
<Laugh>. He likes to tank. You can't blame him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who doesn't? Right now see our, our D 20 sessions are in an actual catacomb. Yeah. So if you told me this so sick, you told me once that you guys were down there and there's some priests, but there's some Are there cardinals? Bishops? Yeah. High ranking members of the church there. Just, we just, you know, plain a little d and d. Who is the dungeon master? I was at the gm. Okay. Yeah. And his holy father comes wandering by, we were a little loud. You were loud. And he heard you, he heard us and he came down to see what the ruckus was. Just wanted know what was going on. Like, is, are they rising from the dead? What's going on? Well, cuz when you make noise down there, you don't know where it's coming up.
(00:48:36):
Those tunnels go everywhere. Yeah. So he, he didn't like send a Swiss guard down? No, no. That would've ended differently. Loudly with bullets. He put, he put his, he put his pontifical slippers on, which are beautiful by the way. Yes. And came down himself. He wears Uggs. No, stop it. Papa hugs. Papa hugs. <Laugh>. And what did he say? Pugs? I, they just wanted to know what was going on. He's just smiling. I said, okay. Alright, well, goodnight. Keep it down boys <laugh>. It was actually right before that one of the players had hit a D 20 and did an impossible move. And so everyone was just, was like, ah. Right now he's a soccer fan. So he's he's used to this kind of UPS Argentina. He's a, he's Argentina. Yeah. He's very happy with right now. He's very happy. Yeah. Did he watch the World Cup? Oh, he did. Yeah, of course. Yeah. <laugh>, everyone in Italy watched it, even though Italy wasn't playing in the world game. Yeah. But I forgot he was Argentinian. So he's really, he's a, he's a messy man. He Oh yeah. And you know, even the non Argentinian fans were happy. Like, look messy deserved. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is his thing. This is the way to end his career. Yeah. Yeah. But if he comes back next year, he's fair game. <Laugh>.
(00:49:51):
All right, we're gonna take a little break. More stories of <laugh> the Vatican catacombs coming up. Also great to have Connie Gomo here, editor-in-chief, have seen it like the big shot, the ma the person in charge. The, the I. So nice to have you. We really appreciate you're taking some time to be with us and of course, my pleasure. From beautiful Brooklyn, New York where she has purple. What is it? Magenta plants behind her. I like
Paris Martineau (00:50:17):
That. Listen, you know, I got a, I got a little fun light back
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:50:20):
There. It's not a plant. It looks like your plant is,
Paris Martineau (00:50:23):
I mean, there is a plant, there is also kind of a like a neon light back
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:50:28):
There that I see shining up. It's melding with the plant. And then it looks like you have a shrine in your fireplace. I don't want to, I don't wanna say anything. I
Paris Martineau (00:50:35):
Do. It's a, it's a little lamp that is in the shape of a man with a strategically placed light switch.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:50:41):
Oh, <laugh>. So right now he is very on.
Paris Martineau (00:50:46):
He is so on
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:50:47):
Right now. <Laugh>. Okay, got it. <Laugh> Paris. Martino from the information. Ah, I love it. We're having more in just a bit. Our show today brought to you <laugh>. Is it on his nose? On show? I like this. His nose. Sit where? No, that is not his nose. Just,
Paris Martineau (00:51:03):
Just think, think how hard about it, you know.
Leo Laporte/Padre (00:51:05):
No, don't think too hard about it. No, don't. No, no, no. Reject. Reject the thought. <Laugh>. This episode of Twit brought to you by new sponsor. Welcoming Decisions. Decisions is super cool. I spent some time with the decisions team. And I really like this stuff. Decisions gives it and business experts, the tools they need to automate anything in your company, all within one no code platform. Every business, every, every boss, every C level executive says, if I could just get this information audited automated. If they could just have, can't I just have like a dashboard with this informa? How do we get our business rules encapsulated in such a way that we can, we can incorporate this into our, and this is how you do it. Decisions it could fix any business process and prepare you to withstand economic uncertainty. Resilience to the recession requires a deliberate management of resources and the flexibility to adapt at a moment's notice.
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I didn't realize they were this big. 2 million elevators all over the world. And of course a lot of those elevators are using different automation systems. They don't talk to one another, right? Otis needed a way to check every one of those 2 million elevators every single day. They call it a daily pulse check so that they will know ahead of time before an elevator's having problems. You don't wanna find out after somebody's stuck in it or after the elevator fails. You wanna know ahead of time so you can fix it and have a great uptime. So that's what they did. They used decisions to create automation software that handles all the integrations with the disparate systems. So they get their daily pulse check, 2 million units every single day thanks to decisions. That is a really good example of how this kind of software can transform your business process.
(00:55:33):
And you'll be glad if you ride in a notice elevator. You'll be glad to know <laugh>. They're keeping an eye on things, right? As the recession approaches the durability of a businesses foundational directly impact its performance and its ability to survive. How strong is your foundation? Are you ready? Even if, even if everything goes great, there's always something. There's always something. Decisions. Automation platform provides a solution to any business challenge. Automating anything. Changing everything to improve your company's speed to market, improve your financial growth, your operational success decisions helps industry leaders alleviate bottlenecks and automate pain points in their business. So you can do what's best to change the world and build your business to learn more about decisions. No code automation platform. This is the one by the way. This is amazing. Scope your free proof of concept. Just go to decisions.com/twit. D E C I S I O N S decisions just like the word.com/twit.
(00:56:36):
We thank 'em so much for their support. I welcome 'em. I had a boy, I had a great conversation with US team and they blew me away. They showed me example after example. You'll find out the website too. Decisions.Com/Twi. I think you'll be very impressed. We thank 'em so much for supporting our show and thank you for supporting our show by going to that address so they know, oh yeah, they saw it on twit decisions.com/twi. That's very important to us. Thank you decisions. All right, what else you got Father Robert <laugh>. Oh, you know what, how I'm trying to do a commercial and he is setting up a vacuum cleaner. <Laugh>. Okay. Okay. I do have to show this off because this was, this was one of these things where, okay, the only reason why I went up to their suite was because they had one of the the performers from nwa.
(00:57:21):
He was up there and a rap star. Yeah, rap star. And they had some really good food. And I, I was looking for some, some evening entertainment. <Laugh>. And then they did this. This is the, their P two. They, if you have pets, you know, the one downside of a pet is what? Fur. Fur everywhere. Lots and lots of fur. So they, they they released this P one early last year. It was a surprise hit. They sold like 50,000 units sold up the entire row's just for pets. It's just for pets. Not the pet itself. Not the pet itself. Pet owners, I should say pet. The pet owners. Yeah. Now there's a bunch of attachments that connect to this thing that have a groomer, a clipper a brush. Oh. And all the hair goes straight. Oh, I didn't get this for Lisa.
(00:57:59):
Oh no. I wanted it for Burke. Oh, Burke needs it. He's kind of shiny. Yeah, he's got a lot of hair. But the killer thing is when you turn this thing on, once we get Burke hair everywhere, it's nearly silent <laugh>. It's, it's, yeah, it's nearly silent. So you don't scare away the pets. Nice. I mean, come on. It's practical tech. Yeah. It's not Earthshattering, but who's this from? What's the name of the company? Ni Casaa. N e a k a s a Casaa, N A K A S A. Nika says Su casaa ni casaa. Essu casaa. It's, and I think right now they're still doing their c e s special thing. So if you go on Amazon, it's like 1 29. And anyone who's ever bought a a dice on a Dyson knows that's a, that's a good deal. That's a really good deal.
(00:58:38):
You can't get a Dyson bag for 1 29. Right? Right. But I've already played with one of these with the VCAs and they're feral, but they don't run through it. They're not scared of it. They're not scared of it. I I thought they would be outta their minds. Go figure Now. It's on Amazon. It's on am ne ne. Just put P2 P two vacuum. P two p p v a c u u m. It's, it's remove the ni casaa. Don't do ni casaa. It's N E A K A S A N E A. Niaa Casaa. Nia Casaa. Nia Casaa. Oh, I don't see, it's nowhere did it go? I know it's there somewhere. You know what, this is problematic cuz I think what's happening is all the other other vacuum cleaners have bought, got their copy placement and you don't see them.
(00:59:25):
Oh, there it is. Yeah. The issue is that an unlock? K A s A oh n e a n e a National Education Administration. No, I was, I really hoped Burke was gonna be here because I kind of wanted to do a clipping. There's something wrong with my Amazon. No, it's Woodward. N e a k a s a. Okay. I'm so bad at this. K a s A. Well, if they had a normal name, I could find it. Are they Japanese? Where they're located in Los Angeles. Why? Why is it not showing up? I think Amazon is doing something here. I think Amazon doesn't want you to find it. Amazon does not want me to find this. It's all Mike appeared. How come it's coming up on yours and not online? <Laugh>,
Paris Martineau (01:00:08):
You'd be too powerful if you had this, if you had
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:00:10):
The ability to stop. They don't want me to have the ability. The chat room aunt found it. Anne has two dogs. He needs it. <Laugh>. I don't know what's wrong with, I kind of wanted to get one of these for, this tells me something. This tells me that Amazon is modifying the results for me. Cause I'm logged in. I saw it in real time. It actually changed the term that you put in. I, that's a weird, weird, weird thing. I <laugh> 129 bucks. The dog and the cat do not come with a vessel, by the way. So let me ask Connie and Paris this, would this be a good anniversary gift for my wife?
Paris Martineau (01:00:43):
<Laugh>? Absolutely
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:00:45):
Not. I'm not gonna ask
Paris Martineau (01:00:46):
The only, only if you want her to leave you
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:00:48):
<Laugh>. Okay. I don't want that. Okay, nevermind. Oh my honey, look what? I got you. A vacuum. Wow. That sounds bad. That doesn't sound good. Even if it's, I'm a, I'm celibate and I know. No, that's danger. Now <laugh>, that's even the priest knows that. They'd be like, you shouldn't do that. Oh, for your, for your anniversary. I got you a new stove. It's the same kind of vibe. I was actually thinking mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because I want to get an induction stove top, but I, wait, wait, she should. Are you electric right now or gas? Gas. You're gas and you wanna get induction. Wow.
Paris Martineau (01:01:20):
What
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:01:20):
Do you have? Paris?
Paris Martineau (01:01:22):
I rent. So I have You have what? They give you poisoned a bit. Every time I make any food Today. I tried to cook some French toast in my apartment. Smelled awful for a while afterwards. <Laugh>, I'm probably losing brain cells.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:01:37):
It's worse than the winter. Cuz you can't open the windows, right? Is freezing. Is is induction better? I I thought induction in was one secondary to gas. Oh, they see the
Paris Martineau (01:01:45):
Gas. Have you not? Okay, this is because you guys are not on Twitter. You haven't seen the great gas debates
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:01:51):
On lately. I bet Ted Cruz has something to say about gas
Paris Martineau (01:01:55):
<Laugh>. Oh, I'm sure Ted I'm sure Matt Gates has like seven TWiTs on gas right now. So
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:01:59):
What happened there was
Paris Martineau (01:02:00):
Actually DeSantis does
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:02:02):
Ron DeSantis is gonna pass the law in in Florida banning the banning of gas <laugh>. Can you ban a ban?
(01:02:11):
Okay. Well, yeah. There was this study. So this came, this came out of the I can't, was it the who was, was it, was it epa? Yeah. It was a study that is kind of weak that a certain percentage of childhood asthma, like 16% is caused by gas stoves. By natural gas. And the president actually had to put out a statement. No, we are not banning cast stoves. Nevertheless, there are the op the loyal opposition has been jumping on this saying, you see, next they're gonna come for the stoves. So l lemme get this straight. All the science pointing at masks and vaccinations being useful is not gonna make a dent in his head, but Yeah. But a study about how gas causes asthma. Yeah. All right, cool. I'm done. But I, but honestly, I don't want to, I would like to get rid of natural gas in my house for other reasons. And I want an induction stove top, but I keep, Amazon won't let me find those either. So I don't know. I don't know what's going on with my Amazon. I don't know. Hey, scooter X, did you check to see if your third party TWiTs we're going through, or no? I'm just curious. All right. Scooter X, who is normally quite talkative, seems to have abandoned us. He's gone because he's cooking on his gas stove right now. <Laugh> gas stove.
Connie Guglielmo (01:03:33):
He's passed out in his home right
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:03:35):
Now. Scooter X, he's got asthma and has mu carbon monoxide poisoning in his home cuz of gas. Now Connie, I, I don't want to put you on the spot, but since you're here, we should probably ask you about chat. G P t cnet. Ooh. Use chat G P T to write. No, you don't want to, you don't wanna talk about this?
Connie Guglielmo (01:03:56):
No, no. I'm totally happy to talk about We didn't use chat G B T
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:03:59):
Though. Oh, use something else. Yeah, you 7 75 articles. Now this is the report and that's why you're here. No, that's not why you're here. But now that you're here, <laugh>, I'm gonna definitely ask you about it. Was AI of some sort, was used to write articles about it was about personal finance. Now I have to say, I think CNET handled it properly saying in fact you know, they had a human review everything and all of that. Oh, here's your post. Look at that. Let's look at, look at your post. And this is how it came out, I think. Yes. AI assist. Okay. That's so, so tell me what's going on.
Connie Guglielmo (01:04:41):
Yeah, so we have been using one, one team at cnet. The personal money team has been testing the use of an AI to write what we call basic explainers. Like what is a credit card? What is compound interest since the middle of November. And the stories had a byline and if you clicked on it, it, it was seen at money staff and if you clicked on it, it said it was created in part with an automated technology, an ai It says
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:05:15):
It right here. Yeah. Reviewed fact checked and edited by our staff. So by humans.
Connie Guglielmo (01:05:20):
So we changed the, it was a hubber before. Ah, and then somebody, you know, found that we had been doing this. It wasn't, it wasn't a secret, but we didn't pre-announce that we were doing this. We didn't put out a press release. But
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:05:34):
That's a good way to test it, right? See, you know,
Connie Guglielmo (01:05:37):
Well that's, it depends on your point of view, <laugh>.
(01:05:41):
But we, we did not pre-announce it. I mean, we told the staff internally that we were looking at an AI engine and obviously the crew in this, on the money team knew what was going on and everything was checked and reviewed by an editor. Because the experiment that we're doing, which is ongoing, it's not done, is, you know, there's all this hype around this technology. How can it help you? And our model was, can it help for some kinds of stories where we don't have staff to write and does it actually save time for these editors? How long does it take to edit pieces? So we're gonna be looking at all of that. Like, I think almost every media company is looking at different ways to get an assist from tech. And I will say, as a long time tech journalist, I worked at Bloomberg many, you know, a decade ago. There had been AI technology helping us assist stories. It's just at various levels. Chap Chat, G B T is on this other extreme, which people have been talking about, like writing Shakespeare for you instead of Shakespeare. And that, that's not what I'm talking about here at all. But you know, there've been stories that are auto written on the stock market. Prices go out, prices go down, consumer index goes up, consumer index goes down. Those, those things have been going on for a very long time. This is
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:07:06):
Actually, sports stories too have been written by computers for years. I mean, this has been going on for years, but that's cuz they're very, they're very mechanical, you know you can look at a box score and write that story. A cubic computer can write that story. Same thing with financial stories for the most part.
Connie Guglielmo (01:07:22):
So I, we don't know the answer yet to whether it's it's worthwhile, but we're trying to find a use case. And in this case, the use case was these basic explainers that, you know, we have a staff of really smart, talented reporters. And if I said them, could you write a basic explainer or could you write an in-depth feature and go and interview people? I know where they wanna spend their time. Right? But you have to have some of that other, those basic explainers are, are valuable. It's just a matter of resources. So that's what the test was and that's what I wrote in that blog post. And anyone can read for themselves. Was this
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:07:58):
Your idea?
Connie Guglielmo (01:08:00):
It was not my idea. <Laugh>. I am like most journalists, I am slow to adopt new technology. Yeah. I always like to pick the tires and, and test things and understand the implications. But we are at about the beginning of a process with some of this AI tech, like I said, to auto insert numbers and stories, right? We, we report on mortgage rates as part of that money team. You know, those numbers are auto uncertain, just like stock prices are inserted. So it's part of a process of looking at that technology that I think warrants the same kind of scrutiny that CNET would give to any other technology. And I linked to some examples of stories there where we, you know, we looked at duplex when it first came out and we're like, is this Google du duplex a good idea or not? I I went and looked at the Magic Leap headset headset when it was announced. Is it BS or is it brilliant? Like this is what we do and I hope other people are doing as well. Cuz you can be afraid of the future and what tech might bring or you can be part of helping to find how to usher it in. So
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:09:06):
I found a use case. What's that? I actually wrote about it for Amy Webb's future Today Institute. Using chat G P T three, I was able to create a honey bot. So a the code or? No, no yeah, so we used the bot and populated it. It's, it's with content from chat, well, content specifically relating to network topology. Oh, interesting. So if someone was trying to hack the network rather than denying them like a traditional I p s would just blocking them at the source so they can't get into the network, it would actually simulate an intrusion. So someone thinks they're in the network and it's an entirely a fiction created by chat GPP three <laugh>. And it was, and it's plausible. It's plausible. It and, and this instance I was using wasn't specifically tuned for that, but still gave an incredible simulation of yeah, this is what an intrusion would look like. So imagine that your network defense is just making up stuff on the fly. So that's someone attacking your network. Oh, I think there's lots of Oh yeah. It's a cool and appropriate yes. For Do you wanna talk about what, how, how you did it, Connie? Or is that a state secret?
Connie Guglielmo (01:10:14):
Oh, we're not talking about it beyond what I wrote in
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:10:16):
That, except that it was not, it was not chat G p t.
Connie Guglielmo (01:10:20):
No, it was
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:10:20):
Okay. But there's a lot, I mean, there's a lot of tools like chat. G P T is by no means unique. No. Paris as a reporter. <Laugh>, what's your attitude towards this? I mean, you, you were, this affect might affect your living.
Paris Martineau (01:10:35):
Not really. I'm not particularly worried that it would affect my living because I think the sort of journalism, I mean, I think it's just what Connie said. Most reporters probably don't wanna spend their time doing the sort of necessary but maybe slightly more rote work and part of journalism. And instead they'd rather spend their time working on larger features or bigger reporting projects. And I think that these sort of tools can be a great like way to augment your workflow where instead of, you know, I had worked at publications where you'd have to not churn out a bunch of content, but for lack of a better word, churn out a a bunch of content. Yeah. Because that's part of the job, right? And if you had a way to do that very quickly and then you could spend most of your hours working on the sort of stories that matter most to you, I think that's
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:11:25):
Good. I have to wonder, is there, are there any reporters who aren't at least enlisting a little help from chat d p t on some of these boring rote bits? I, I completely understand that. And as, and, and, and Connie, you did the right thing. You've got a human reviewing it. The only issue with chat d p t is it's, it's a sometimes it's confidently wrong. Right? It's, it's, it's says it with such assurance that you go, it must be right and it isn't. And so you've checked that, obviously.
Connie Guglielmo (01:12:00):
Again, I don't, I I don't use Chad G b t, so I can't speak.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:12:04):
Oh, you gotta try it. It's very yeah, there is
Connie Guglielmo (01:12:06):
Clear. Well, I watched, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, I watched Ryan Reynolds use it in his ad his Wasn't
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:12:12):
That wild and I mobile. Yeah,
Connie Guglielmo (01:12:14):
It was. But I think the key to anytime there's a new technology used and in, certainly in this case where there are completely valid and re legitimate concerns about, you know, is it gonna take people's jobs away? Because I'm sure every tech takes people's jobs away, but is to label the content. And we didn't label it as clearly. You had to hover and click to find out. So that changed this week where we said, well just, let's just say it and let, let's not back away. But our other publications that are using the technology today being as forthright and labeling and being transparent about who created what content, that's something that has to happen as a discussion in the industry as a whole. So I'm not saying that, you know, like I said, that the, the jury's still out and how, and what the use cases might be. But I think making sure that we're labeling this stuff and we're also not afraid to test it and try it is part of the path forward.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:13:13):
You know, one of the reasons why this story has hit so hard is we did not expect the advancements in G P T to come as quickly as they did. If you look at text that has been written by G P T two, you can tell that it was Auto General. Oh yeah. Because tech, it will find a couple of facts, a couple of the nuggets that it wants to put in and then it just keeps repeating them in different ways. So it's a pretty easy way to figure out that this is an auto-generated piece of content chat. G P t three doesn't do that. It is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than G P T two and we did not expect that they'd be able to get to that level this quickly. And now the question is, well, when they release the next version that is using more than 175 billion different parameters to do its predictive texting, what are we gonna get?
(01:13:59):
I mean, it's, it's already at the point that I have had, had inquiries from some of our universities on how can we detect auto-generated content from students. And I've told them, well right now, until we come up with something more sophisticated, what you need to do is you have to get a baseline sample of the writing from the students at the very beginning of the course. Oh, that's smart. Cuz that's the only way you're gonna be able to tell, you're not gonna find the errors in G P T three. Yeah. Jeff Jarvis is talked about a, a teacher who's gonna use chat G P T in her English classes. And I think that's probably the case, is that it's foolish to hide your head in the sand. Yep. And I agree with you, it feels like we are at an inflection point that there's some sort of cam explosion going on with ai, not just, not just text, but with the illustration as well.
(01:14:46):
And mm-hmm. <Affirmative> AI voices have gotten better and better and better and I think very, very interesting. So I, yeah, I don't, I'm not one of the people who was critical of CNET at all. Cuz I think you did, you did it the kind of, if you're gonna do it, they'll do it the right way. And I think there is a good use ca use case for it and that people like Paris will always have work because No, somebody, I wish I could find this source. I think it was on our trip mass on somebody said chat. G P t is the, is is just basically the ultimate mansplaining <laugh>. It's, it's just this confident kind of Yeah. Patronizing voice saying, well, well actually, actually <laugh>, just in case you didn't know, and then it's confidently wrong. Stephen Wolfrem of Wolf from Alpha, who is I think arguably one of the geniuses of our time, wrote a very interesting piece about how chat G p T might use Wolf from Alpha to correct the stuff that gets wrong.
(01:15:38):
He talks about some of the, the confidently wrong conclusions chat. G P T comes up with like this, how far is it from Tokyo to Chicago and chat? G p t gets it wrong. It says well the distance is 76,000 miles. A very long distance would take a significant amount of time to travel one place. The other the flight to to Tokyo from Chicago is about 16 hours. Well, it sounds pretty convincing, but it's wrong. Cuz if you ask Wolf from Alpha instead of 7,600 miles, it's 6,313 miles. And and he says, by the way, you can teach chat G p t by adding that information. And then chat. G P T says, well, thank you for correcting me. You're correct. The distance from Chicago is 613,000, 6,313 miles. And then you can ask it again and it will then get it right.
(01:16:32):
Okay. Okay. It learns, which is very interesting. So his premise is, there are things that because of the way Wolf from Alpha Works, Wolf from Alpha knows that three to the power of 73, which is not 14 billion, but in fact a different number, much larger that it could be working with chat G p t to fix it. But people should be very careful about chat G P T, especially when it comes to factual matters. Leah's mansplaining. I, okay, I just came up a pitch for a show, a new Twitch show with two hosts, and both of them are chat G p t three <laugh> with Text to speech enabled. I love it. I mean, I'm telling you right now, you could have a hit. Just make it a 15 minute hit a day. It just auto generates <laugh>. I'll, I'll code it for you. Does that res resonate Connie in Paris? Is is chat g p t basically a mansplainer.
Paris Martineau (01:17:25):
I mean, I think that it's just, I think that these tools are useful for their very specific use case. It is taking a large amount of information, aggregating it, and spitting that out. I think that in some cases it'll be right. In some cases it'll be wrong. The fact is it's taking in a large amount of information and what you're getting is it's you know, version of what it thinks is important and what it thinks is correct. So it's never going to reflect the world. It's never explaining anything in particular. It is just kind of synthesizing. It reminds me a lot of, I'm, I'm, I'm a big redditor. That's been my, we're talking about social media lately. The social media network. I've, I guess I've been turning towards moral lately as Twitter has died is Reddit. I agree. And you have all these little bots in there where it's like, oh, we're going to try and take the article that was posted and give you the TLD r via bot. And most of the time it's wrong. Sometimes it's right though <laugh>, and I think that's like a little fun experiment, is seeing what does the computer think that this actually means.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:18:30):
There's the other issue, which is the people who created the original content that these AI are using, right? Whether they're artists or writers. Our friend Alex Kantrowitz, who is a regular on this show and writes the big technology ck said a writer used AI to plagiarize me. Now what? And I was taken in, by the way, by this writer, maybe you saw it, it's a a, a CK called The Rationalist, which looks like it's written by a human, is not it plagiarized one of his posts on the Creator economy. I saw this post, it was on the front page of Hacker News, a post that said the 1% in creator in the creator economy are taking all the money. There's no middle class. It turns out Alex had written this some days before. The rationalist, he says, is an odd publication. It has no mission, no named authors outside of Petra. It's been live for a week yet, two days after it went live, it was lifting passages directly from big technology. And he has, you know, the smoking gun for that, the flashy headline, the Creator Economy, the Top 1%. And everyone else helped propel his story to the Hacker News front page. It was his story.
Paris Martineau (01:19:43):
This was the first thing that kind of came to my mind when you were asking earlier about what I thought about potentially whether this is going to put journalists out of a job or something, is I feel like oftentimes in the news industry, we end up having these plagiarism scandals that, I mean, in some cases, obviously it's people taking huge sections of someone else's work, but oftentimes it's been like someone lifts a couple sentences or a paragraph. And I think if you had publications running unchecked on AI generated content like this without an editorial oversight, that would happen all the time. This exact example, because aggregating other people's information is going to result in plagiarism. It's kind of like what we're seeing with AI art right now.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:20:28):
I was totally fooled by this. I booked Mark the story. I talked about it on some of the shows, <laugh> at no point does it say it's AI written. But it is. But I mean, was it listened? I or was it transforming? Yeah. Yeah. It starts with a story. As I scroll through my social media feed, I am inundated with the carefully curated lives. It's quite well written by the way. It, it's, it's a little bit scary. And if it's a ck newsletter could conceivably make a lot of money. Although some of the commoners did note this this sounds like an artificial intelligence. We're getting better, aren't we at detecting this stuff? I'm, I'm impressed because I didn't detect it, but I think some people are smart enough to, to
Connie Guglielmo (01:21:17):
Pick it up. So to me, this goes back to even the discussion about social media and what technology has caused in our culture, which is distrust of the, the people and news sources that are out there. And if we could just all take a moment, hacker News to vet who they're amplifying and do some due diligence and, and check. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Wait, they don't say that it's an ai, but okay. Have a white list of sites that you will pull from. And if someone wants to join your white list, then have them apply to, to join your white list. Right? This was an argument that came out years ago with Google News about, oh, you know, we're feeding the disinformation cycle and I, I wrote a column proposing this. Well, then don't label what you're putting out there as news. Right. Don't put it in a Google newsfeed.
(01:22:04):
Have a white list and invite people to join. Be very clear about what it takes to join that light list and be transparent about it so that at least people can trust <laugh> that is not being written by an AI or it's been plagiarized by someone else. Because I think, you know, we all have examples, Paris and I of our work showing up under someone else's byline very clearly. And what is the recourse? Well, if you work for a media organization, their legal department can send a take down notice. Right? But not everyone can do that. That's a process. It, it could hurt you and your business. And so we all have to get smarter about what we're reading and who we trust and how we consume this stuff. And yeah, I agree. Agree. That's not something that happens today, but that's something I think that, that should be taught in schools.
(01:22:50):
You know, starting from second or third grade or whatever makes sense. I'm not a teacher, but we need to be more conscious because there is a ripple effect, whether it's plagiarized by an AI or another human being. Alex Kantrowitz was screwed, right? Yeah. By somebody. Yeah, absolutely. And that at the end of the day, that's the message that his work was co-opted. Right? So what is his recourse? And, and he's the victim. So does he have to somehow defend himself? Why is he allowed to be victimized? How can we prevent the victimization, if you will?
Paris Martineau (01:23:24):
Yeah, I think this is, I mean, we're starting to see, obviously this question be asked and in some ways answered in the art world, given the kind of proliferation of AI tools there. I believe just yesterday there was a class action filed against stability ai. Oh, really? The journey and deviant art for DM c a violations, right. Of publicity violations, unlawful competition and, and breach of terms of service by kind of this large group of artists. Because obviously the work that is being generated by these companies or makers of AI tools is built off the back of artists who have their work on the internet.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:24:04):
It's funny, I would've thought that deviant art was the sewer instead of one of the one of the defendants. Because most of the stuff on deviant art, at least until recently was written, was done by humans. And I would've thought, oh, those humans were upset about their art being, cuz it's, you know, that's exactly what, stability, stable diffusions. Yeah. scrapes and all the other things. But I guess there's so much AI art appearing on deviant art now that they are
Paris Martineau (01:24:31):
Apparently so I didn't realize this, but apparently Dian Dart has this product dream up a product that the lawsuit claims unlawfully infringes in the rights of its own art community, I guess by generating AI art.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:24:44):
Interesting. So I mean, this is the, this is kind of the other side of this AI stuff, is the machine learning comes from publicly available content, whether text or art or, you know, sound. That's how you train these giant models. That's gonna be big. So like, let's take GBT three. How do you get around it? So the, it has 175 billion possible parameters that it can draw from Yeah. When it's, when it's generating its content. So there's, I could foresee them making some sort of regulations on what kind of data you can feed to a narrow ai. It can't just be, here's the internet, take it. Because you're gonna get so much inform misinformation, you're gonna get so much copyrighted material. You're gonna have to start seeing responsible companies saying, we've generated our own data set based on things that we've sampled and we know that it can generate content that is not copyrighted. We don't have that yet, but that's where we're gonna be going. If these start to catch on, if you actually start to see these being used in a professional environment, that's just gonna be part of the legal due diligence. If you don't have a, a parameter set that is free from claim, it's not usable in a commercial setting. Yeah. I cons, I'm concerned because voice is the next frontier on this. Yes. And it's completely possible to steal my voice 100% <laugh>. Especially because there's
Paris Martineau (01:26:09):
Near what you're saying, there's some samples of your voice,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:26:12):
<Laugh>. A few, maybe a few. And my image too. Now, I would love to use this myself to create a virtual Leo that I could then go home and let it take over the shows and maybe then in a few years, that is what will happen. Would you trust Ant with virtual Leo? Yeah, I would. <Laugh> what we'd have to do is hire,
Paris Martineau (01:26:30):
See, that could be Padre's version of the show is that's two co-hosts. It's both Leo,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:26:36):
Leo, you'd be dressed in cleans powered by chat here.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:26:39):
G t this is a company called 11 Labs. This is from their blog. This voice doesn't exist. Generative voice, AI taking people's existing voices. Google's been doing this, a lot of others are doing it and applying it to a synthesized voice so that you can, in apples now using AI voices in narration of some of its Apple books. They're quite good. Here's a, here's an example of, so this, the model lets you set things like the Voices core identity, which is gender, age, accent pitch, speaking style. And then you can generate a new voice out of this that never existed before. These are good. Let me play you right. Let me play you one here. I wanna hear this. I have to turn on my
AI Voice (01:27:27):
Sound. Celebrating his 11 first birthday with,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:27:30):
Oh, this is, this is a passage from the Hobbit when
AI Voice (01:27:33):
Mr. Bbo Baggins of Bag end announced that he would shortly be celebrating his 11 first birthday with a party of special magnificence. There was much torque and excitement in Hobbiton. Billbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for 60 years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:27:53):
That's pretty damn my good. Oh my God, that's, I was trying to hear some artifacts. It doesn't sound nothing. Machinery. Yeah. The, the pace was on and even the pause, the pauses pause, it sounded like, and this is what's really scary about Chad, that's a candy t too. It sounds like it understands what it's saying. Right? It obviously it can't, it doesn't. Here's a conversational voice.
AI conversational voice (01:28:12):
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you are trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.
AI voice (01:28:26):
Even the inflections.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:28:28):
I
Paris Martineau (01:28:28):
Know. Wow. This is
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:28:29):
Good. She's a ballet girl. Dad is really Okay. No, I am actually scared about that way more than I am about chat GT three. Yeah. Yeah. That's too realistic. Yeah. well imagine pairing that with chat g pt. Oh my goodness. So this is 11 labs.io and they say, starting next month, this is gonna be released to the public. Oh my God. As part of their voice lab. I, there are certain classes of jobs, jobs that somebody like me might do, like video game or book narration, that pr probably are gonna be going away. News readers, you know, most news readers on radio stations are human right now. I don't think they deserve to be. I think they could easily be a machine that, that's not Texas speech. I know Texas Speech and I don't like Texas. That's actual performance.
(01:29:22):
It's perform, it sounds more like performance doesn't, and now those are samples they generated. So let's see what happens when they, when they put 'em out. I have to say it was very impressed too with Apple's narrators. But they sounded, you could tell, right? You know, it's, it's like the Google, the Google Voice and the Siri voice, they're okay. But I know what they sound like and I know they sound artificial. There was nothing in those two samples that sounded artificial. Yeah. That's kind of scares me. Let me see if I can find a sample of actually I have it on my phone. I've played this before. There's this is a book about lumberjacks, <laugh> projects. <Laugh>
Paris Martineau (01:30:02):
What what app are you using for your audiobook,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:30:05):
Leo? I use Audible, but there are many better probably choices like Libro FM and, and others.
Paris Martineau (01:30:11):
I have this terrible, I every audio book I listen to, the narration is
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:30:15):
Terrible. Oh, you, that's why Audible is good. Worse than text to speak. Yeah. You gotta really,
Paris Martineau (01:30:19):
I've tried Audible.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:30:20):
Yeah. Well, it depends on the book. Cause everybody's different. I think. I think the problem really is that some narrators are awful. I have listened to thousands of hours on Audible. I, I just, I'm a, let me see if this fools you or not fools you, but is it gonna be the lumberjack song? I'm a lumberjack No, no. This is a, so this is quote narrated by Apple Books. This is a book, a book called The Lumberjacks that probably no human would want to read. Okay. Because it's just the history of lumberjacks. But hit me <laugh>, let me play this. You tell me. I think you can tell the difference.
Lumberjack AI voice (01:30:55):
Loggers and British Columbia of the three interwoven ages of Eastern Canadian logging the first belonged to the bearded square Timberman, who huge great bulks of white and red pine, and drove them in huge rafts down the rivers to Quebec City from where they were shipped.
Paris Martineau (01:31:12):
Just imagine you doing the dishes sailing to
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:31:15):
This. I think it's fine. It's fine. But No, I can, you can, there's a little bit of artifacting at the ends. I sentence. I think that's maybe though the bit rate and stuff. Maybe, maybe. I I think that the samples on these are not as good. Maybe as so I, I don't, I but it's not as good. I think as the 11 labs. What the 11 labs does is it speeds up and slows down, which is a very human Yeah. There was to do, there was a very natural is more, it's the same speed. Even though there are pauses, they have a lot of romance Yeah. Novels written this way. Let me just,
Robotic AI Voice (01:31:46):
It was right. Of course, lately she'd been distracted every time she looked out
Paris Martineau (01:31:51):
The window. Oh, that one's very robotic.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:31:53):
Yeah. That's Vancouver's heart. That's one step. Us know, you would immediately know. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (01:31:58):
It was a small day. Day. I mean, I will say that's better than some of the human
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:32:03):
Audience. I've listen bad narrators. You're awful. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (01:32:05):
It feels like every book that I choose, just the worst audio narrator in the world has been assigned to it. It's like they haven't even read the
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:32:13):
Sentence. I wish Audible were sponsored today because I could pick some very good audio books. There's some that really are well narrated. I'm listening to Ian Banks's first book in his culture series considered Flbo and the Narrator's wonderful Anna. He's really doing a nice job of bringing it to life. They're good books, but you gotta find him. Couple of who who did love him. There's, there's, I know, I don't know the, the one who did, who did the, the Martian. Oh, he's so good. He's, he's exceptional. I've heard him in so many books. So it's an, an interesting thing happened there, I think, which I talked to Andy Weir about this. He gave the rights for the audio book two Audible. So they recorded it. And the guy who originally did The Martian, they, they, I guess they lost him.
(01:33:03):
Right? So the new version is Will Wheaton. Will Wheaton who is not as good. He's not as good. I, I heard Will Wheaton, I like, will I do ready Player one? And he was okay in that. He's okay, but he's not the, what was the guy's name? He's, he's done so many sci-fi in the sci-fi genre. Yeah. I have to ask Daniel when he's on Daniel Suarez who wrote one of your favorite books, Freeman and Freedom. Yeah. His new book is coming out and he uses the same. That's one of the things if, if you, if you get good, you're gonna have the same narrator again and again and people start to, here's this Jeff Gerner, who I think sounds really Oh, Gerner's. Fantastic. Really good. This is from Demonn, probably violating copyrights Penguin audio presents. Oh, this is, this is the very beginning Suarez. So there's a little funny little thing going on. But
Paris Martineau (01:33:50):
My pitch, my startup pitch is that there should be a company that makes like custom audiobooks. Perhaps they work with the author. Put a little bit of effort in that, you know, in addition to just having a decent narrator. I guess this is my issue cause I read a lot of non-fiction books. Yeah. But just turn quotes around slightly so that you introduce who is saying the thing before you launch into a quote as
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:34:14):
My Paris Martin. It
Paris Martineau (01:34:15):
Feels like my, yeah, yeah. As Paris Martin said. And then quote, because sometimes I'll just be listening to a book in the driest, flattest voice. And then I'm like, oh, these past two sentences were a quote. Little did I know.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:34:28):
Yeah, actually I agree. There's a, there's a section of The Martian where he's hacking the rover. And in the text when you're reading the book, it, it's fine cuz it has like the code. But then he's reading out the code in real time. <Laugh> it's like slash
Paris Martineau (01:34:43):
Slash slash. Yeah,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:34:44):
You probably could have slipped there. Hex 5 66 slash on the other hand, <laugh> on the other hand there Andy's latest, which is project Hail Mary. That's excellent. Really is well adapted audio because there's an, can I say this without spoiling it? There's an alien. I could say that. Yeah. Yeah. And the Alien speaks in a musical. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> tone. And whereas reading it on the pa, I don't even know what it looks like on the page cause I only listened to it, but reading it on the page, it's not gonna be that way in the They produced it. Well yes it is. And it's a musical voice. And you go and the Alien has his own musical voice. I read it first and then I, and then I listened to the audio book. I'm like, oh yeah, it comes along. Duh. That's how I should have been hearing it.
(01:35:24):
So it just depends, I guess. Hey, I gotta take a break. We're way behind on our fine sponsors. We will get a we will get a lovely, you told me that wasn't an audible ad right there. Yeah. God, if I could only charge 'em for that <laugh>. They are a sponsor. We do love them. It we'll get another pick from CES from Father Robert in just a second. But first a word. Now this is a sponsor I live in fact because on New Year's Day I made a resolution. You ever hear of that? I had been overindulging a little bit and I said, you know what? I'm getting back with Noom. I've been using Noom for more than a year. You've probably seen the ads on TV and so forth. It's a psychology. It's not a diet. Don't put me on a diet cuz I will then respond negatively.
(01:36:07):
Right. I will then go get a package of Oreos and say, screw you diet. I'm eating these Oreos. Not with Noom. Noom is a psychology based approach that really is more about educating you about food and your relationship with food. So you can break the cycle and change your habits for good. I started doing Noom about a year ago. Lisa at being a wonderful wife, said, I'll do it too to support you. I don't have much weight to lose, but I'll do it. She is like the queen of noom now. She, she not only lost the weight, she got down below the, the weight she's always wanted to be at. She got down to the, the weight she's always wanted to be at, but never could reach and is maintaining it beautifully. It's amazing. And her health is great. And you know, I, over the holidays, I maybe ate a one or two.
(01:36:53):
You probably did this too. Too many Christmas cookies. Yeah, yeah. That box of seas Candy was calling to me. And but you know what? January 1st, Noom again. I went back and I love it. In fact, I actually reset my lessons to kind of start over. I have, I had, you know, I got like the master's degree, got to the end of Noom and they have a great maintenance program. But I thought I really want to kind of reengage myself. Losing weight starts with your brain, but it's not a, I hate to even say losing weight. It's about learning how to change your relationship with food. So it supports you. It's, you have a healthy weight. Make the science behind your eating choices why you've got cravings. I learned for instance, that I am a fog eater. I eat in a, in a blind fog.
(01:37:37):
You could ask me five minutes later, what did you just eat? How did it taste? And I go, what, what are you talking about? I have no idea. Noom helped me learn that the program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices. Why you're doing that. 4.6 million people to date have lost weight through noom weight. But everybody's journey is different. So your daily lessons are personalized to you and your goals. They are using specific principles of psychology, like cognitive behavioral therapy. Maybe you've heard of C B T really, really works. It's all about progress, not perfection. There are no bad foods. You don't have to give up carbs, you don't restrict yourself. Cuz restriction as we've all learned, just leads to cravings. Right? If you have cravings or food, fomo, noom weight can help you lose weight while enjoying your favorite foods. And you could choose your level of support from five minute daily check-ins to personal coaching.
(01:38:31):
They've got groups and it's grounded in science. Now, let me give you the facts. 95% of customers say Noom weight is a good long-term solution. It absolutely was for me. I lost 20 pounds, kept it off. I'm ready for the next 20. Lisa lost 15 pounds has kept it off. She can't lose anymore. I won't let her. But she, she's really loving it. We have listeners, I've, I've mentioned before, one of our chatters was on the cruise with us in in Alaska last summer. I I sent him a note. I said, where are you? I thought you were gonna be on the cruise. He said, I'm standing right next to you. I did not recognize him. Lost 60 pounds and has kept it off. He looks great, thanks to Noom. Brianna. Woo, a hundred pounds. Whoa. Have you seen her lately?
(01:39:15):
Hundred pounds. I don't even know if she had to lose a hundred pounds. She loves noom. They publish more than 30 peer reviewed scientific articles to inform users and practitioners and scientists and the public about their methods and effectiveness peer reviewed. So it's, you know, it's not, it's not marketing materials. It's actual important stuff. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom Waits, psychology based approach. Sign up for your trial today, Noom. Oh om noom.com/twit. I am a living symbol. I believe in it, man. This thing is so great. It's so great. N oh om.com/twit. Sign up for your trial today. Check out their book too. They got their first book coming out. You can pre-order it. Oh no. It's available now. Yay. Available to buy now. Wherever books are sold. Good. I'm gonna get my copy. The Noom mindset, A deep dive into the psychology of behavior change.
(01:40:11):
It really works. Love them. Thank you. Noom Noom and oh om.com/twitch. All right. I wouldn't losing a hundred pounds. You can do it. I really, I really need to. It's hard because you have to eat in a refactory where they serve you day old eggs. Oh, those eggs are awesome on the Vatican eggs. They're the Oh, the pasta. I've seen your pictures. They're bad. We just actually, we just fired our entire kitchen staff. What? Really? But we, we got them. You don't fire in, in Italy. We got them new jobs, Uhhuh. And we've replaced them. Yeah, that's what they're saying at the Twitter folks who got fired in Europe saying, you can't fire us. Can't. No, no. This is Europe. Job protection is really, really strong. They
Paris Martineau (01:40:53):
Haven't paid them severance either though. Yeah,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:40:55):
I know. Mm. But the, the difference is the European courts will absolutely, they'll find, slam us for that. Yeah. they believe in in I have to think. He's just looking for the escape hatch at this point. Basically. Yeah. I mean, he has dumped in a, aside from the purchase price and not including all the value that Tesla has lost, he's dumped in about 8 billion just to keep Twitter afloat over and above his 44 billion all over and above. And he's got interest coming up of more than a billion. One, 1.4 billion is what the interest payment will be at the end of the year. He has, he's gotta feel a little trapped right now. He's very trapped. I noticed he's not TWiTing as much. He's not, but I mean, if you look at it, so 92% of his revenue came from ads. He was 200 million in the whole and Twitter's best year.
(01:41:38):
It has not been their best year. He's lost about th conservatively 35 to 45% of his highest advertisers. Which means that even with all the job cuts, if you include the debt that has been added onto Twitter, it's at minimum of $2 billion in the hole a year. And that doesn't, there's no way to make that money. There's no way to make, there's zero way to make that money. It's completely unsustainable. I'm sure he is looking for an escape hatch. He might be thinking about launching himself on a falcon Heavy to the moon. I dunno. <Laugh> his, his TWiT an hour ago. I think he's listening to the show. Instagram makes people depressed and Twitter makes people angry. Which is better. <Laugh>
Paris Martineau (01:42:15):
El Elon Musk. Come on twit.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:42:18):
I know, exactly. Come on guy. Explain your side of it. Tell us what your, what your plan is. Yeah. Elon meet the real chief Twit. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. I, yeah. No, I don't think he wants to meet me. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Now that's, that's the, that See that big laptop Leo? Yeah. Grab that one. So these are Chromebooks that Acer gave me. I Chromebooks. These are not Windows machines. Those are not windows machines. But the, the, this is a big
Paris Martineau (01:42:44):
God. You can make a sandwich out of those. This is a backbeat. It's got like one on either side.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:42:49):
A 16 inch. Oh, it's a beautiful screen. It's
Paris Martineau (01:42:52):
Got both Mario. Does it have Luigi?
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:42:54):
It's, well, this is a gaming, it's a gaming film book. <Laugh>. This is designed for gaming. Oh, this have Luigi? Yeah, it sounds good. It looks good. It's got that all day. Battery life, you know, 14 hours on a single chart. Is it a i p s screen? It looks, that's an IPSS screen. This one's got an I five in it. And look, look how it has the W A S M lit up. Of course. You gotta get your wiess ass. D i, yeah, yeah. Now and it's of course, it's an Rrgb keyboard. So in the night, you know exactly what you need to put punch. It's not a touchscreen, but it, I gotta punch Luigi <laugh>. No, who's that? I wanna punch that other guy. I hate him. Oh, a Bowser Wario. Oh, Bower. Mario's No mu no. No hero either. Yeah. This is nice.
(01:43:33):
That's a Chromebook. How much it the 600? That's not bad. That's not bad. And it's, it's actually, that's a Creaming Chromebook. It's very, very nice machine. I was surprised because when I think of Chromebook, I think a cheap build, 120 Hertz screen. One 16 gigabytes hundred memory. It's got a nine five in it. It's got a 2 56 gigabyte nvm. E S sd. It's an IPSS screen. That'ss running 25 60 by 1600. You can now run Linux on Chromebooks. Yeah. This could be a great Linux box. This might be my new desktop. That's pretty nice. It's, it's dedicated graphics, but it's Intel. It's Iris, it's dedicated, it's new Iris Graphics. Yeah. But they really sell this as sort of a cloud-based gaming book. So you've got the Nvidia service or the Amazon service. Sorry? Stadia. <Laugh>. Oh, oh, sari Stadia. Wait, wait. You had a Stadia, right?
(01:44:18):
Yeah. Did you, did they give you the parting gift? The, you the Bluetooth upgrade to my studio controller here. So now can be used anywhere. Yes. Thank you. That was a good thing to do. And that worm game they gave us, they give you Nice. The worms. There's a, there's a, it's not the worms, it's Oh, worms <laugh>. They, they had a, a worm game they were using to test Stadia. That was the final drop. No, next week. It's so sad it's over. But just look at that screen. I seriously, I remember when I thought that high refresh rate screens were a gimmick. No. 120 yards makes a difference. My gosh. It makes difference. Pretty good. Yeah. It looks so nice. Would you, would you game on this Paris?
Paris Martineau (01:44:55):
No, I'm not really a computer gamer. I spend so much time looking at my computer for work. Are you a switch? I want to look at, I am a switch person. I I've been thinking about getting the steam deck as of late. I'm really excited. The new Okay. I know, I know. Trying to switch. Let me decide what I should get next.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:45:12):
Don't get, I had the steam deck. We bought it, actually Micah bought it, and I played with it for a while. And it's big. It's heavy, but it's still a seven inch screen. Yeah. If you're gonna play those games, play 'em on a desktop. It's this nice thing about the Switch is it's games designed for that platform, and they're great. What's, what are you for right now?
Paris Martineau (01:45:28):
I mean, I'm, I'm really excited for the new firearm one that's coming out. I think either next week, within the next week or so on Switch on Fire Emblem Engage. It's gonna be on Switch. Yes. I believe it's an Nintendo exclusive. You know, this is gonna be my next couple quarters of gaming. New Zelda's coming out in May. Oh,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:45:45):
Okay.
Paris Martineau (01:45:46):
An exciting
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:45:46):
Time. You were a Animal Crossing fan, were you not? I
Paris Martineau (01:45:49):
Mean, I was certainly, I think when Animal Crossing came out, that's what,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:45:53):
For the first year of the pandemic. Yeah. That kept me alive. It was pretty fun. <Laugh>, at least I had a little village I could go to with, with Animals.
Paris Martineau (01:46:00):
<Laugh>, I got really into Disco Elysium a couple months ago. I know. I'm like two, two years late to that game. But No,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:46:07):
No, you're never late that game. Connie is everyone should smiling Benignly at us. Like, you nerds.
Connie Guglielmo (01:46:15):
You nerds. I live in a family surrounded by games. Oh, okay. I mean, there was that whole, that whole period of time when Un Uncharted was going on in the background. And then last of us, which I had to leave the room for <laugh>. I personally, the game that I discovered during the pandemic was a deck of cards. Oh, that's nice. And now, whenever we
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:46:36):
So wait, like, like on a, on a switch, a deck of cards on a switch. No, Xbox
Paris Martineau (01:46:41):
A Solitaire the game.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:46:44):
It's this thing Nintendo used to do about a hundred years ago. <Laugh>, they made cardboard playing cards. People don't realize that. I mentioned that fact once. And people are like, no, that's, that's not true. Like, no, seriously, they used to make cards. Pokemon was a card game. So, so Connie, are your, are your kids excited about the TV show? The Last Of Us, which comes out next week?
Connie Guglielmo (01:47:06):
So it'd be my son. I, I think he's a little busy in school right now. Uhuh. I am curious. The reviews have been mixed on it. I, you know, there are things that have scared me in the past. And I have to say, just watching from afar, that game. Yeah.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:47:20):
It's scary. You played
Connie Guglielmo (01:47:21):
Yeah. Scared me. So, yeah. Scary. Yeah. Not on my good, not on my list.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:47:24):
It's a really good game. Yeah. No, Leo. I discovered a game during the pandemic, and you wanna read the number of hours that that's been played. So he is showing me his Steam login. Six hours. Oh, no, no. Oh, 4004661.6 bucks. Oxygen not included. It's, it's addictive. And what is the, what is the premise of this? It's basically just like a colonization simulator. You're not doing factorial anymore? I do factorial, but you know what, you had avac a Vatican factorial server. Yes. Well, but see that, that's, again, that requires active participation. Yeah. Oxygen not included is more like an ant farm where you could set a bunch of stuff up and then just let it run and see if it's gonna survive. Oh, I like this. Yeah. It's So, those fourth whatever, million hours, they weren't, you weren't sitting in front of the screen the whole time. Correct? It was correct. It would run overnight and I'd wake up in the morning. Oh. Oh, this is cool. It's kind of like factor. Yeah. It looks like fallout meets factor. It's fun. It's, it's really fun. It's single player only. So there's no, there's no multi challenge. Ooh. Can I play it on the switch? Yes, you can. Ooh, it's Lennox.
Connie Guglielmo (01:48:31):
You can, you can buy the used deck of cards from the casino. Las Vegas. <Laugh> at a dollar store for a dollar.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:48:38):
What game? What game? What card game do you play, Connie?
Connie Guglielmo (01:48:42):
You know, sometimes we play war. Sometimes when we play war.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:48:46):
Come on.
Connie Guglielmo (01:48:47):
All kinds of four.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:48:48):
No. Wait, Connie, do you have four players? Can you sp can you play spades? You need four players. I
Connie Guglielmo (01:48:53):
Don't, yeah. No. I, it's usually my husband and myself traveling. And now we've made it a point, going back to your app there about restaurants, finding cafes, where we go and sit down some coffee play.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:49:05):
That's what Lisa and I do. We always bring a deck of cards. We play cribbage. You ever play cribbage? There is an antiquated game. <Laugh>. Now on my, my table game isn't so portable cuz I play Majong and that. Oh, I saw you played Majong with your 50 50 pounds of tiles. Yeah. To do properly. <Laugh>. That was the cutest picture of you. And your dad was sitting there and your mom and you were playing. My mom Majong. My mom cheats. Cheats at right now. Mom, I know you're cheating. Don't cheat. I know you're cheating. She wins way too much to not be cheating. Connie's, is she like,
Connie Guglielmo (01:49:38):
At least good
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:49:38):
At cheating? Does she have like a good bluff? Oh, she's, she. Excellent. So Majong, you're sitting, I, I've just seen people play beside, behind like ivory tiles. Correct. With Chinese characters and pictures of dragons and stuff on 'em. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then there's a pool in the middle. This kinda looks like Scrabble. It kinda looks like Scrabble. And it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a card game. So the whole idea is to get four what, five sets of th Of three. You're trying to organize them. And then a two, a set of two, right? Yeah. Because you have, right. And then so you throw tiles in and other people can take tiles. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. How can you cheat? You look at what's under the, that's what I'm trying to figure out. <Laugh>. I mean, if it was easy, you
Paris Martineau (01:50:19):
Just gonna pick your mom up and give her a big kinda shaky hug and see if some tiles.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:50:23):
Tiles in there. Yeah. And the funny, the worst thing about it is she, she's such a good winner that it's hard to be mad at her. She's just, oh, it looks like I won again. Oh. Oh, I'm sure you'll get it next time. I'm like, oh, Connie, have you ever played cribbage?
Connie Guglielmo (01:50:41):
I have not played cribbage. We are backgammon family
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:50:43):
Now. Backgammon is nice. And then when you play cards, you play rummy, gin.
Connie Guglielmo (01:50:49):
We, we play, we played all sorts of things. I mean, had
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:50:53):
A cribbage board. I'm telling you the re I started playing cribbage in college. Cuz you could play it when you were really high <laugh>. It, it, you don't, it. There's no, so, wait, did you use the pegs or were there something else that you put in those? Yeah, sure. You could do it. Well, we used to take bong hits on the turns. Actually, now that you mention it the idea is you gain points. You have hands. You could play from two to six players and you play the cards out and then you count your hands and you could do it pretty high. And and then it's whoever wins this little pegging race. And it's really fun. That's not all courage boards look like the number two. You cannot play. [inaudible] Will not. It will not. Yeah. No, you couldn't. No. And that's what I'm looking for in a game, to be honest. Okay. Not anymore, but No. Well, I mean, Leo may, maybe this will work. I tried. I need Merkel Miracle Merkel. Yeah. It's a Merkel. Huh? Merkel. It's a Merkel. It, it might also stop marijuana. I have might
Paris Martineau (01:51:48):
Stop your heart too.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:51:49):
Stop your heart. But you're not drunk. Exactly. On the, on the bright. Since you're dead, you don't have the hangover. So I wanted to show you, speaking of chat, G P T and ai, I've been using a new search engine, which I'm starting to think might be my new uhoh permanent search engine. Replace Google. You pay for it. Five bucks a month. Okay. So there's no ads. Okay. Okay. It's called Neva. It's from former Google Executives. But look at this, see this paragraph at the beginning instead of the Google Wow. Knowledge box that's stolen from Wikipedia, it uses a AI to generate a summary of a number of, and it gives you footnotes so you know where they came from. And, and this is actually a very good use of I like that. Gimme something to gimme something. Let's see. How does Pope get choosed get chosen? Right? We all know the white smoke and all of that stuff. Let's see what it does here. Con Yeah. That, that, no, but it didn't generate a AI thing. Religions too. Maybe it's too yeah. How do I quit smoking <laugh>?
(01:52:52):
I don't know why I thought of white smoke and smoking, but I did. I actually heard that Merkel is actually pretty Merkel will do that. Yeah. Let's see. How do I quit drinking? And now it's, oh, you know what? Maybe it's okay. Nevermind. It's, it's, nevermind. It's disgusting. Let's see. Does Merkel? Merkel does. Well, lemme <laugh> Merkel work. Oh, you know what? It's auto completing it. Oh, here comes, here comes Merkel is a free, oh my goodness. It's set to break down up to 70% of alcohol after 60 minutes. Ah, it's a probiotic supplement. Wow. And it's getting this from a variety of sources, including the sun.
Paris Martineau (01:53:30):
Oh, that's a great source there. You know, never anything
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:53:32):
Wrong there. But it, they actually do a pretty good job of saying, when you're talking about covid information, which is, let's see does the Covid vaccine work, let's see. This is a tough one for search engines, right? No. Let's, let's see what it says here. I just, I think it's very, it's, it's, you know, notice it's a little slow. It's not as fast as Google. That's a hard thing to do. It's giving precedence to cdc. That's not bad. So, and then when it does see these verified things, it's a behind next to search results that are considered verified. You know, that reliable. It puts a little verified link. So I think that's kind of interesting. Oh, well, I well, that means that Elon Musk's gonna buy this and they're gonna be able to buy verified for $8 a month. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
(01:54:14):
That's good stuff. Check. Yeah. So you know, you know what search engine was able to gimme an answer to how does a Pope get chosen? No. Bing, bing. God. They have pictures and everything. Am I the knowledge of Cardinals? I would be the only TWiTperson that uses Bing. You are definitely, it is my standard. Why? I just, I like spinning up my data. How? How? Honestly, it gives me better results. I'll have to try it. Are you sure? I I have been using <laugh>. I have been using it for eight years. It's skepticism here. Father. Let's see what Neva says about Bing. Bing is a search engine developed by Microsoft, by the way. It gets his result from Google. <Laugh>. <laugh>. And he's designed to provide trusted search results fast. Like Microsoft rewards points. That's one of my problems with the track topics.
(01:54:59):
And trending stories take control of user privacy. That's not a bad, they could say it, but we're better. But no, they don't. No. You know, I, I just like, and also I like splitting up my data among some of the big players. Yeah. Yeah. Well that's why I want to use Neva. That's exactly right. Exactly. Although, although Google, Google can't figure me out because I, I fuzz all my data. It's got geo-located data in multiple languages from different parts of the world at the same time. Yeah. What else you got? Oh, here, you need this. Do I eat it or? It's a depository drinking. Oh.
Paris Martineau (01:55:33):
I think you should just put it right in there. No questions.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:55:35):
Yeah. Yikes. So open it up. Open it up. It's, these are little ear buds. It's quiet on, quiet on, on the top of it. I know that, that you've, you've played with a few of these before. These are just used. The bows used for sleeping. I used the bows or I tried the bows and I still have them, but I never really use 'em. But they were bows in years. They basically take their existing quiet comfort. Probably the 30 fives. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> turn off the ability to play music. And all I could do is play tracks from your boza. Exactly. Then that's a problem because most of the the sleeping buds, what they do is they give you white noise. Yeah. Or oceans. Or oceans or jungles. And the they, they've actually shown that any sort of noise does disrupt the sleep. You may be able to fall asleep, but you're not falling into as deep.
(01:56:19):
You know what I like about these Earth? Lots smaller than the bows super small. And they, and it looks like they fit into your ear well enough. See, I can't sleep with yes. Cause I sleep on my side. I can't sleep with these in These are, are better than flush. So you can side sleep in these and you're not gonna feel them pressing into your ear. Oh. They use foam. So it gives you a nice seal. But instead of white noise, it's an actual cancellation. So it's, it's got little mics on the outside and it's canceling the noise trademarks here, because I think there's a toilet manufacturer that wants to use better than flush <laugh> for their slogan. So that's one of the urine detectives. That's their thing. Yeah. Did you try any of those? . I mean, not on the show floor. <Laugh>, no peeing on the show floor. They actually had a demo.
Paris Martineau (01:57:02):
That's why it's always a good strategy. Just carry around a bottle of piss around
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:57:06):
Cigarettes, <laugh>. And so you're ready. Try everything out. Say, try this as you do. Am I pregnant? <Laugh>. And very important. And they go, father, I think you should expect something delightful in six months. You know, when I was still working at Twit I would get blood work at the Quest Diagnostics here. Yes. Probably once every three months or so. Yeah. And every single time I went, there was always someone who wanted to buy my urine. What out? Always out front see me going, Hey man, they see a priest. No, no, no. Not just like this. They just wanna buy anyone's urine. I'm like, well, I know what you're trying to do, but can you pee in this bottle from me? I'll give you a hundred bucks. What do you go behind the sit stand behind a bush? No. That's why, for I, now I just go out there with a bottle in my hand. <Laugh>. I'm just like, it's cold, man. Can you warm that up, man? All right. I gotta take a break. This is too much. Our show today brought to you by, we'll have more with our fabulous panel. Connie Gomos, editor-in-chief of cnet. She is slumming with us, but we're very glad to have her. Thank you for spending some time with us. Paris, Martin Noe, who is the great reporter of the information, man, Wayne Mah had some great Apple stories last couple of weeks. Do you guys,
Paris Martineau (01:58:15):
Wayne is insane
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:58:17):
Breaking news.
Paris Martineau (01:58:19):
Truly one of the best reporters
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:58:20):
I've ever, ever before. Like watching. I'm happily pay for the information. I think I did back when Ms. Lesn started it. And I have never stopped because your, your stuff is so good and I love your stuff. Paris.
Paris Martineau (01:58:32):
Yeah. We have a huge staff now.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:58:33):
It's gotten big, hasn't it?
Paris Martineau (01:58:34):
Yeah. We got so many people over the course of pandemic. When I started in like mid 2020, we had maybe two other people in New York. Now we've have such a large New York based staff. We've had to open an office. Like, wow. Previously we were in a WeWork space. We outgrew that office. We had to renovate the floor below. Oh, I am so happy. And now our you know, pushing the limits of that. You
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:58:57):
Got a mirror Friday. It is such great Google stuff. You've really got great people. Yeah. you know, when, when Jessica lessen started this, this was a big jump. Big leap. Like, can you make it with a, you know, kind of starting from scratch, $400 a year subscription news service. And I bet you most people thought, well, 50 50. And certainly there were a lot of people who failed around that, including Rupert Murdoch. But she's done such a great job and now it, it's going to gangbusters.
Paris Martineau (01:59:32):
Yeah. I mean, and now of course everyone in news is pivoting to the subscription model because Yep. Advertising isn't forever. Yep.
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:59:40):
Are there no ads on the information? I don't even notice.
Paris Martineau (01:59:43):
No. No ads. We don't have ads. I mean, I think that there are sometimes maybe like a message from a sponsor in a newsletter, but other than that,
Leo Laporte/Padre (01:59:51):
It's really No ads. Good. This is, yeah. Wow. I'm so happy for you. That's fantastic. Very nice. Let's talk a little bit about getting a job. What do you say this is, this is an interesting time, isn't it? Our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire this time of year is tough for any business. You've got new goals for the new year, but you've gotta find the right people to accomplish them. And weirdly it's hard to find people. There is definitely a shortage of, of skilled jobs. Finding qualified candidates or adjusting to candidates work preferences can be, you know, challenging. It's a challenge we all face. I could tell you what we use when it's time to hire. We use ZipRecruiter. And I have to say, when you are hiring, often that's the worst time to hire in a way.
(02:00:43):
Because, you know, somebody, somebody leaves and then suddenly you're down a person. And at the same time as you're trying to, you know, hire somebody, you gotta get that work done. And it's just nuts. Ziprecruiter is the place to go to get your hiring done. And I could say that with absolute confidence cuz it's what we use and it's worked so well for us right now. You could try it free ziprecruiter.com/twit. About six months ago Ashley decided our, our wonderful continuity person decided to, to go somewhere else. She got, I think she got a job closer to home. She didn't want to commute. She gave us notice, but we said, how are we gonna replace Ashley? We, we, we placed a ad on ZipRecruiter. And one of the things that happens is ZipRecruiter, the first thing that happens, you're posting everywhere to more than a hundred job sites to social networks everywhere.
(02:01:35):
But then something amazing kind of happens. And all incidentally, you know, don't fear posting all over the place. Cause the wider, you cast a net more likely that perfect employee will see your posting. And, but then you say, oh, well I don't want a hundred people calling me or mailing putting, you know, email. And it all goes to the ZipRecruiter interface. All of it, including the resumes which they reformat. So they're easy to scan. You can have automated screening questions to eliminate people who are just not right for the job. But then the magic happens at ZipRecruiter cuz they have this technology. What they do is they match the requirements of your job to those resumes. And they find candidates who fit your needs and then tell you about 'em. At which point you get to decide, am I gonna invite them? And I have to say, it's been our experience.
(02:02:16):
When you send out a personal invite, Hey, you look like you'd be right for this job. Would you be interested? Those people respond. They come to the interviews, they're, they, it's a whole different experience cuz they're so happy to be, you know, welcomed in. And I, it's, we found, and this is often the case, Lisa posted it at breakfast by lunch. We had three or four great candidates. In fact, the only challenge for us was figuring out which of the four I think they interviewed. We interviewed three or four people what we were gonna hire. We, we hired Viva. She's fantastic. Thank you. Zip Recruiter. By the way, when you post ZipRecruiter offers attention grabbing labels that will let the applicants know that you are flexible. Things like training provided, those kinds of things really help. Ziprecruiter also has a user-friendly dashboard. Like I said, filter, review, rate your candidates in one place fast.
(02:03:09):
Ziprecruiter, let them find the best people for all your roles. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day for us, usually within an hour or two. See for yourself, go to our special address so you can try it for free. Ziprecruiter.Com/ ziprecruiter.com/t W I t ZipRecruiter, ZipRecruiter, smartest way to hire ZipRecruiter. Thank you. Ziprecruiter. I, I don't know why I'm making up a jingle for them. <Laugh>. I wonder if I could use ZipRecruiter to get more priests. I bet you could. Mm. I remember going on Christmas Eve to a mass many years ago, 20 years ago. There's a little church you probably know in San Francisco where they still do the mass in Latin. Oh yeah. It's a French church. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I thought, oh, it'd be fun to hear the mass in the, in the high Latin in the old, the old tongue.
(02:04:03):
And the whole sermon was, we need more priests. <Laugh>, anybody want, anybody wanna be a priest? We need more priests. And they thought that's probably not the message you want to put up. That that's kind of true. It's kind of true. I mean, when I, when I entered the society in 1994, we had, have you been a priest that, well you weren't a priest yet, but, but that's when you started. That's when I started. Holy cow. We had wait, wait a minute. You were 12 <laugh>. No, no, no. I I was an undisclosed age. I was already older. I had just, I had graduated from college. <Laugh>, you were, you and I, we people dunno this maybe about you, but you were an IT professional Yes. Before you became a priest. That was your that was my, so that's why you're so good at all this stuff. This is your right. I brought it in with me. I brought it in with me. But we had almost 30,000 Jesuits at that time around the world. Yeah. How many? And now we have about 14,000. Oh, that is a crisis. Yeah. That's not good. Have you talked to Father Guido Succi <laugh>? Maybe he could help. No, I mean, I'm just, I'm gonna form a priest chat room. There you go. And
Paris Martineau (02:05:01):
We'll just, here's my pitch. You get chat G p t in there. You get a couple of these monitors on you go there, go get, we go some metaverse type things. You don't need legs to be a priest. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I got a thought hook up. AI there. Are
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:05:13):
You really, are you really, like, are you really locked in in that whole thing? If they can only be a celibate man? Mm. That's a li to me,
Paris Martineau (02:05:23):
<Laugh>,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:05:23):
That's a deal breaker. You know, I, five years ago I could answer that question without fear of repercussion. Now let's not talk an issue. Okay. No, I I will say this. I will say this because there has have been some very good discussions about the requirement for celibacy personally. And this is gonna get me fired. I no, don't say it. I think the idea of women as priests, I love faster. Some could come more quickly. I Lisa's Episcopalian and they absolutely a lot of female saying ministers and they're great. They're great. Yeah. But I mean that, it all happens with the sermon over time. How conservative are you about all of this stuff?
Connie Guglielmo (02:06:04):
You said, oh, you know female priests is a great idea. Why would you cut off half the population of the world Right. To serve.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:06:12):
Yeah. That would help. It would help a lot. Yeah. It would help. And it, it's not just numbers for me. It's, you know, there is something that is very experiential about being man or being woman. And why would you cut out half of that? That's right. That's the, it's the same reason you want diversity in the boardroom. You want diversity in the design room. You want, you want a variety of experiences, not just male and female. You want a variety of experiences in all technology because you're going to be selling products to all kinds of people. Why would you just want a bunch of, you know, white tech bros Yeah. Designing this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. What, why, why the male thing do you, is that, obviously it's historic, but when did that start and why? I mean, it goes back to it depends on who you ask.
(02:06:57):
Yeah. a lot of it was based in patriarchy of the systems in which Catholicism was spreading. Right. And so, naturally that's, but I mean, you, if you go back far enough, you find communities in biblical times that were being led by women. Sure. So the very earliest Christian communities, I'm sure I I don't want to kick off that debate. It, it's, it's something that I think well reasoned and well-intentioned people should speak about. If you come in thinking, I'm gonna defend my position because I'm a male priest and therefore I always want male priests, it's not gonna be beneficial to anybody. Right. but, you know, that's fine. It might come to the point where our hand gets forced. It's sort of like, okay, well you only want to have male priests. Fine, here's five around the world. What are you gonna do? Right. Well, and I know these are discussions that go on within the church. There's a lot <laugh>, you've, there's a lot of politics, believe it or not. Yeah. in all of this <laugh> really in religion. I know, right? It's who knew. Go figure. I didn't think so. Yeah. but let's talk about the other religion. Apple n nfl. Oh, okay.
Connie Guglielmo (02:08:03):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:08:03):
I thought you were gonna say NFTs. Nfts. No. There's a little too much faith in that one. Yeah, I know. I'm not even, we
Connie Guglielmo (02:08:10):
Will touch
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:08:10):
Nfts. That's a failed religion. Yeah. Is it, can we write NFTs off? Is it done? The people who still are trying to unload NFTs, all the people who own them wanna keep it going. Yeah. People I wouldn't buy, I don't think people are buying them anymore. Well there is still trade, but it's, it's a dying trade. Yeah. basically the people who are gonna make money on NFTs have gotten their money. The people who are holding onto NFTs are hoping that it will bump a little bit so that they don't quite lose as much money. There's really no one getting into NFTs right now. Right. Connie, you've been in this game a a little while. One, it's one of the things that fascinates me. And one of the things I think as an old timer, much older than you obviously, but as an old timer I bring to the table, which is I've seen a lot of technologies come and go that at the time people said, this is the next big thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like NFTs, you've, you've probably have had the same, you must have had the same experience over the
Connie Guglielmo (02:09:08):
Years. You know, one of them. I absolutely, one of the most interesting examples though, I, you know, I'm not ready to write up NFTs a hundred percent because I think the use case in the future might be different. But I think about Corning. Cuz I went and visited Corning in upstate New York several years ago. On the fifth anniversary of the iPhone, Corning creates grilled glass that was the, is the front of the, the iPhone. Steve Jobs went and threw their archives and found it and asked them to do a formulation. And Gorilla glass, if you don't know, was originally designed as the toughest, strongest glass possible. And they were gonna use it in windshields. But it was so tough and so strong that it actually was a hazard. Because if you bumped into the windshield, you could not get out of your car. You could not escape. It didn't break. Wow. And so the use case for it, for this tough, amazingly strong glass was wrong. But the glass was Right. You, you actually want tempered glass or glass at pimples. Right. So that if you have to evacuate your car in an emergency, you are not trapped <laugh> in a box of impenetrable glass. And so it took someone finding an application for it, whatever, 30, 40 years
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:10:16):
Later. It's my understanding that they were about to shut the factory down. They were going out of the business
Connie Guglielmo (02:10:24):
Who Corning.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:10:25):
Yeah. Not out of business Corning, but out of the Gorilla Glass business. They couldn't find a market for it. Oh
Connie Guglielmo (02:10:30):
Yeah. I don't think they, they really manufactured it in bulk at all. Yeah. They, their, their glass is used in a lot of things, Corning and including L C D displays, which, you know, there's a big market for that. But anyway, my my point is that sometimes people design products that are ahead of their time because the use case isn't there. Right. And the guy who invented Glu very weak glue, a 3M that ended up being the right glue for
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:10:55):
It was a ladder. It was gonna be for the steps on the step ladder so you wouldn't slip off <laugh>. But it wasn't, it didn't work. So good. <Laugh>.
Connie Guglielmo (02:11:04):
So, so what I'm saying is the use case for NFTs. Yes. That's a good point. Today as a vehicle to make people a lot of money. Yeah. And basically create a pyramid scheme. I think we're all done with, and I think it's over, but I don't know what the future application of that tech could possibly be. And that's the interesting thing about technology is that somebody in the future can find in a new adaptive use for it. And so that's, it is a joke today, but I think it's kind of interesting. And we'll see how it comes back. Yeah. Maybe not in our lifetimes, Leo, but maybe. Yeah.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:11:37):
Steve Jobs told the story of going to Corning New York to meet with the c e O of Corning. Because at the time they were gonna put the the iPhone screen was gonna be plastic, but it scratched terribly. The problem was, yeah, you could replace it with glass, but glass shatters, I think we've learned that glass shatters. But at the time people were very worried about that. So he went to, went to Corning and he and he weeks, the CEO Wendell Weeks had told jobs about Gorilla Glass, but he said, but I'm not set up to mass producer. We don't have the factories. JB said, don't be afraid, <laugh>, you can do this. And, and basically I think paid them to open up a factory and make Gorilla Glass by ordering tons of it for the longest time. They didn't admit it was Gorilla Glass, by the way.
(02:12:29):
That's right. Apple didn't say it was Gorilla Glass. Didn't they call it Sapphire? Yeah. They had all sorts of names for it. But that was Gorilla Glass and then Gorilla Glass two, and then Gorilla Glass three. And we've gotten better and better and better. There was a CES that Corning came to just so they could tell people, no, we are the glass. That's right. That, that was their big marketing because Apple didn't want anybody know. Oh, no. We, it's all we do it all ourselves. Yeah. That's the story. But yeah, that was a great designed in California. <Laugh> great. Yeah. Yeah. Designed in Corning, New York. Yeah. In fact, we had, Corning was a sponsor for some time. They made they make fiber optic cables. We had some of their fiber optic cables. Yeah. We had the bun twit. Yeah. They were great. That was really cool. Yeah.
Connie Guglielmo (02:13:11):
Well, that, you know, funny story CorningWare, remember. Yeah, you can Bacon your ovens started out as missile cones. <Laugh> the prop of missiles. <Laugh>. It was indestructible. And it could, it was very, very heat resistant. And so then it ended up being turned into that
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:13:27):
Was, I had no idea. I love that. Isn't that hysterical now? On missiles, they just put iPhones on the They're perfect. They're perfect for that. <Affirmative>. Yeah. All right. I was gonna talk about the NFL playoffs. Who cares? Football's going on this weekend. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (02:13:44):
Sorry. We really derailed that later.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:13:46):
Yeah. Probably talk after glass. The football fan in the studio is a little upset right now. One guy here, one guy HDR 4K for the first time especially the hdr, that's new. I think we had 4k in oth vet 4K in other sports. It is 10 80 p up up converted. Yeah. See that's a thing. Whenever they say they're broadcasting in 4k, they're not because they don't have the cameras. And more importantly, they don't have the truck. It's a special truck that you have to have. And it's very different workflow. Well, I mean, once it gets to your distributor, they're going to sample it down because they don't want to use up all their bandwidth for multiple 4K streams. Well, that's why Fox is doing it, because they have that app. Yeah. And they do stream it in high quality app.
(02:14:28):
And apparently they've made deals with a lot of cable companies because guess what? There are a lot of people with 4K HDR TVs that are a little miffed that they're watching these games at seven 20 p 30 frames a second. 42 cameras at the championship games that are going on this weekend. In fact, right now, don't go watch 'em. Stop. 42 cameras with aerial cameras, sky cams, line to game cameras, double carts on both sidelines. You seen those? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Have you seen those? They actually have like trucks with scissor lifts on them. Have you? You've seen that. A right. And they're going back and forth in the sideline. I love the U S F L. They've got drone shots now. Yes. And the drones. It's weird. On the U S F L, which is coming in the spring. I think I watched them last
Paris Martineau (02:15:12):
Year. You put a camera in the ball. That's
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:15:15):
My pitch. Oh, why don't they, someone doesn't watch sports. They have 'em in the pile. They right in there. Put it in the ball. You're right. Watching. You could watch the ball gun in
Paris Martineau (02:15:23):
Helmets, <laugh> in people's
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:15:25):
Helmets. They have mics in the helmets. Yeah. Let's see it. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (02:15:28):
Camera
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:15:29):
In the helmet. See, this was weird. In the S F L, the drone would fly into the huddle. They literally, you could see this, there would be a drone in the huddle, and then they'd break and the drone would ski, ski back and then be right behind the quarterback and follow the play. I don't know if I want a drone flying next to my players. I, they're light. I think they have helmet cams in the U S F L as well. I think they're doing that because that's how you kind of jump on the bandwagon. I was a little disappointed that Apple did not score the Sunday ticket. And then I think some of this was because Apple wanted to do some interesting things. And the N NFL said no. Youtube TV will have N F NFL Sunday ticket starting in the fall the next n F NFL season.
(02:16:12):
But there is a rumor now that Apple is trying to get Premier League. So Apple did get major league soccer, the US small time soccer for 10 years. And it's a good, but now there's a rumor that Apple is gonna bid for the English Premier League, which arguably is the no interest either in this either. Huh? Is that where Richmond AFC plays? Oh, is that rich? Is that that's that's Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso. That's a fake team. Right? You almost got me there. Actually, Reham is the team that's owned by Ryan Reynolds. That's right. That's right. Well, it's Ryan Reynolds and the guy from Phil Rob Mcny. Yeah. The Daily Mail Bastion of truths in journalism. Okay. Maybe not says Apple's gearing up to bid on a package of English. English Premier League football, soccer, streaming rights, which is about to come up for renewal. I think it's very interesting. I want these tech companies actually to show what technology can do in the coverage of these games. Apple failed miserably with Friday night baseball. It was. They did. Yeah. God awful. But the deal will cost Apple. Did
Paris Martineau (02:17:24):
They do to mess up Friday night Baseball?
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:17:26):
Make it more boring. They made it more boring. <Laugh>,
Paris Martineau (02:17:30):
They just adding to like three hours.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:17:32):
Yeah. They made it longer. I've gotten used to the coverage that I get over in Europe, which, what's that like of baseball? There's none. No. Oh no. But like of F1 and of soccer where there's no commentator, you get the crowd sounds. They just show the I love that. I love that You don't have crofty. No, it's lights out in Munza. <Laugh>. No, that's the best part of f1. I mean, I, I I like that on the replays, but for the race proper, it's, it's so quiet. Yeah. We're just watching the Costco round and round. The deal will cost Apple a quarter of a billion dollars a year according to the Daily Mail. But that's for us only any English bid for domestic UK rights would be billions a year. This is the number one spin. Billions and billions. Billions a year. Billion. Billions. Oh, that didn't gain any interest. Let's see what else I can do. Have you heard about Corning Glass
Connie Guglielmo (02:18:25):
<Laugh>? Can I just tell you, if you are in upstate New York, you should go visit Corning because it is fascinating. Their claim to fame is that they made the machine that produced Thomas Edison's light bulbs and the guy who created that machine to mass produce light bulbs created such a perfect machine that it is still the same machine that is used today. They haven't altered the design. Wow. That's how fascinating glasses
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:18:52):
Actually on the other coast. There's another Edison related story. There is one Edison Bolt that has been burning for more than a century. That's the one in the firehouse. The firehouse in my hometown of Fremont. Is it still burning? It's still there. You can still visit it. We used to, when I, this is 30 years ago when I was working K N B R, we would do a, a weekly check to see if he's still there. Was still on. It's still there. Okay. I mean, unless the firehouse bird's
Paris Martineau (02:19:16):
Down still working. And my Phillips Hugh is burning on us for like three years. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:19:21):
Have you noticed that I I've got regular l e d bulbs and then I've got smart l e d bulbs in the, in Rome. And all of the smart ones have burnt out like within three years.
Paris Martineau (02:19:30):
See, that's the thing is it hasn't like totally burnt out. You know, the Phillips Hugh, the color ones, they have a range of colors. About half the range is gone. Oh, right. Where it's just not really what you want to, where it's only kind of the awful light that makes you feel like you're in a cafeteria, which I think is the worst way <laugh> these bolts to
Connie Guglielmo (02:19:47):
Burn out. Wait, so this is a good tangent for a conversation about sustainability, which changes.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:19:52):
Oh, yes.
Connie Guglielmo (02:19:52):
Yes. Lots of products in the olden times were designed to last a long time. But in recent times, those products are designed to live very short life of, of course intended to be disposable. So there is a movement in the tech industry. And some of the people at CS this year we're talking about is to create products that are replace with replaceable parts so that you can actually replace the parts or that are refu refurbish, so that you can actually buy one without feeling guilty that you're buying an old gen whatever. And this bit for nostalgia, somebody was talking about, you know, old tech being interested. Right. Digital cameras are coming back into the forum. You know, the, the kids have liked you know Insta Instagram camera, not Instagram. What are they called? You know, you push the button. The
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:20:43):
Insta Polar Polaroids. The Instas. You
Connie Guglielmo (02:20:45):
Polaroids. Yes. Thank you. So what's old is, is not necessarily mean that it's bad, but it's your lip bulb problem is that if those lip bulb manufacturers created a light bulb the last 30 years, they would be outta business. Yeah. After they saturated. I
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:21:01):
Always thought there's a little bit of, I mean, they always said that, oh, they, yeah, they could make gasoline outta water. That would, and they always say that. And I always wonder if that's, if that's you can make combustibles out of air. There is a thing called solar jet that just uses heat and pressure to when are we getting a Mr. Fusion? Well, the problem is you, the amount of energy that you have to put in is more than the energy that you get out. Ah, that's right. Yeah. Not more that the, the fusion. Right. So that's, that's the thing that people missed about that fusion story. Yes. It's nice to have a lot of energy that you're generating, but it's what that energy generation will allow you to do. You can then do efficient and inexpensive generation of fuel from atmospheric air. Yeah. You can then move to a hydrogen based fuel system. You take water from the ocean. Right. Cause it's really lead to a easy to electrolyte. That's right. So yeah. There's, there's a number, I'm sorry to say, I've gone to centennial bulb.org, which is No, the website it looks like was designed when you see a website, 1910,
Paris Martineau (02:21:58):
When a website's like this, you know, it's gonna be some good stuff. It's,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:22:02):
This is a time capsule. I have to say though, there is a broken link here. The, I don't know if they're using flash or if the light bulb has actually gone at No, no. You know what it is? It's, it's one of those little Logitech quick ball cams that you used to use on Tech tv. Yeah, that's pretty old. That's probably what it's using. But you can email 'em at centennial bulb hotmail.com. Just, just ask, Hey, can you send me a picture of the ball? I'm gonna sign the guest book just to say I was here. <Laugh>. Wow. The only thing missing from this website is in a mailbox with a animated opening and closings. Or, or, or how about at the bottom under construction, A guy with a jackhammer jackhammer. It's this is the top 5% of the web. I'm guessing.
(02:22:44):
Hey, you know, we all used to make sites like this 20 years ago. Oh yeah. Look at that animated gif. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the lights here. Look at that. The, the lights are lightening up down here. But no, that's state of the art. That's it's lit, guys. That is state of the art. The camera is dead. <Laugh>. Oh my God. I think that site just gave me a virus. Not my computer. I think me, it gave me That's sick a virus. Cs couldn't do it. But the light bulb YouTube is, by the way, I was mentioning YouTube tv. In fact, I pay 20 bucks extra a month for 4K content that doesn't exist on YouTube tv. Wait, why, why, why, why? It started back in the Olympics. Those are over for a long time. You can, you can <laugh>. I know I'm just an idiot. Occasionally, but like this, they have a 4k.
(02:23:29):
The Super Bowl's gonna be in 4k. I'll be able to see it on my YouTube tv and 4k sort of Leo, how many streaming subscriptions? All of think you have active right now. How many? All them. All of them? Yeah. All of them. Yeah. Because if you could write it off as a business expense, you'd probably have 'em all too. Yeah. And Leo is actually the only person on the planet who isn't sharing passwords. He actually owns all his accounts. Yeah. Mm. I don't share anybody's passwords. I might be sharing my passwords with my children who are just leeches, but that's another story for another day. <Laugh>, you <laugh>? No. I think so. I don't know why, you know why I think that my kids have my Netflix password? Because every once in a while it'll say, well, you're only halfway through that reality show about naked people on island.
(02:24:18):
Yeah. Would you like to watch some more? And I'm going, I don't think, which one? I don't think I'm watching that one. Anyway, YouTube is testing a hub of free cable style channels. I think this has been a secret goal of Google all along. Yes. already this what I need more content with ads. But they already have everybody under 30. Right. That's where they watch TV nowadays. They're talking to media companies to feature their TV shows and films in a hub of, you guessed it. Ad supported channels. It, this is the hot new thing in the industry. Fast free ad supported tv. Roku's. Got it. There's two B that's a Fox entity. Pluto, which is owned by Paramount free tv, which is, Amazon's answered all this. It's so funny because we started watching Netflix because there were no ads, right. You could watch the office, no ads. And the
Paris Martineau (02:25:24):
Industry, now you can't watch the office. Now you can, you can't watch without ads.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:25:27):
<Laugh>, the industry has been doing everything they can to bring them back, to bring them back. The the kicker for me was when Hulu started offering its subscription with the ads. Yeah. And cuz that that was the precursor for all the others. That was the test. Is this, is this a low enough pain point that people will buy into it? And unfortunately people did. They kept buying Hulu and so therefore everyone does it now. But I'm wondering what is enough? Like for me, I've got Amazon Prime because Amazon Prime in Europe is ridiculously cheap. It costs me $30 a month. Oh, sorry. $30 a year to be Amazon Prime. Because you're a Prime member anyway. You get the two day delivery. Well, no, that's, that's, so the subscription in Europe is 30 euro just for the tv? No, for everything. For Amazon. Prime's cheap. Right. But it's, it's like what, 130 bucks years? Yeah. Well, actually no, I think, aren't we up? We're above that now, right? I
Paris Martineau (02:26:18):
Think they just, I think it's one 40.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:26:21):
They just jacked it up. Holy cow. So I've got that.
Paris Martineau (02:26:23):
I mean, the thing is they're trying to increase membership in places like Italy. Yeah. In Europe. Really? The only other place in Europe where Amazon is a big, like prime subscriber base is Germany.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:26:34):
Oh, that's interesting. So yeah, we should mention Paris covers Amazon so she knows about this stuff. It's true.
Paris Martineau (02:26:41):
1 49 check,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:26:43):
Which by the way, in, in Italy, because of the, the way that the rights work, I get all of Paramount. So all the, all the Star Trek stuff, that's part of my basic subscription. Damn. That's great. I'm moving to Italy. I you get pasta, you get Prosecco. We have, and you get Star Wars. I've got a 10 gig line in a vpn. So I mean, I'm just, oof. It's a saying. Oh geez. <Laugh>. Just log into the Vatican. Just log in. What this guy in the Vatican's watching all these reality shows about naked people on an island, what's going on now? The trick to watching with the V VPN is you want to use one of the services that let, lets you download the entire episode so you're not streaming it over the vpn. N Oh, is that the secret? That's the secret. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. <Laugh>. Zach,
Paris Martineau (02:27:25):
What's this? That makes a lot of sense cause I've been having a lot of it's VPN season upcoming for me. Oh, okay. Because it, this new season of Love Island is about to start.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:27:34):
Is that the one with naked people on an island?
Paris Martineau (02:27:37):
I mean,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:27:38):
I thought that was naked and afraid. No, there're bikini's
Paris Martineau (02:27:41):
Afraid. There's a, there's
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:27:42):
A lot of bikini clad. Yeah. So this is like The Bachelor. That's the one I was talking about. Are you using my next one?
Paris Martineau (02:27:47):
This's like Big Brother. I mean, only on weekends. Leo, you know, <laugh> only on weekends.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:27:54):
So the whole idea is it's a bunch of good looking young people in in swimwear.
Paris Martineau (02:27:59):
In swimwear. But the thing that's interesting about it, I would
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:28:02):
Not do well on this show, is
Paris Martineau (02:28:03):
It is it goes on for basically like 50 days straight and they
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:28:08):
Can't have sex. Sex people are straight.
Paris Martineau (02:28:10):
Well, I mean they could, that's a different one That's called Too Hot to Handle's. That goes,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:28:14):
That's in the Page channel. That's different. There's
Paris Martineau (02:28:16):
A lot of, they are in essentially like a big brother house, like where there are cameras on every like inch of it. Yeah. And these people are filmed 24 hours a day. And you get like tomorrow we'll get the episode of what happened on Love Island like right now. And so every single day it's a new episode. It is fast between some days there's
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:28:37):
29, 9 episodes. Holy cow. Because
Paris Martineau (02:28:39):
You get all the content for in the uk like 55 days straight. And I think it's kind of interesting daily. It's not
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:28:45):
That edited. You know, I, yeah. I don't judge the content that other people watch cuz I watch some pretty trashy content. So if you enjoy it and it, you know, runs, I thought there might be season, you know, coming in that, but No, no, no. This is okay.
Paris Martineau (02:28:59):
I get it. I understand. Not High Brown any way, but it's kind of in, I think it's kind of interesting to see even from an editorial perspective, how you put together just live what is happening on a small, like in a small villa for 50 days.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:29:15):
Interesting. It is taking over television, isn't it? It's the last Saturday. It's because, well cause it's cheap of commercials. It's not just cause it's cheap. It works. People watch it. True. Well I, I got one the border security shows that they have on Amazon where they're basically just showing you customs at
Paris Martineau (02:29:31):
An Amazon. That's a dystopian sentence. It's a, the terrible show shows on Amazon. It's
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:29:36):
Terrible content. But I will have it on the background when I'm like working on something because it's, it's, it's a big shot of Shain Freud. What? Wait
Paris Martineau (02:29:44):
A minute. It sounds like the German
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:29:46):
Show. No, no, I'm dead serious. There's like five different versions of that. And they do like nine different countries. There's border security vibe, season security in Canada. Phony tourists here to work. Yeah. Belligerent visitors, smuggling, contraband toys packed with heroin. It is absolute bottom feeder content, but it's addictive. This is like cops, but like
Paris Martineau (02:30:07):
With human bones are found inside luggage
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:30:10):
<Laugh>. So, I mean, I watch this so can I really criticize someone who wants to watch an island filled with attractive young people? Border security, America's frontline. Wow. Is there nothing that they won't turn into a reality show? We haven't done it for the Vatican yet, although I tried to pitch it that college of Cardinals. That's right. <Laugh>. Next time you got a vote. There have been a number of movies, shoes of the fishermen. There have been TV shows all dramatizing what goes on. I was actually just gonna call it Love Island <laugh>. But they they true Weren big on that true Cardinal Philippe. Why do you wanna vote for Cardinal Ucci? I love him. Remember? It's gonna be great. That quote from John the 23rd. I can't equate you. What's the they they asked him how many people work in the Vatican and he said about half <laugh>
(02:31:01):
And said it's not an exaggeration. Oh, forget tech news. Wait a minute. What's the Sonology bag over here? No <laugh>. No, no. That was just one of the, you're teasing me cuz you know I have a sen I love my sonology. I they were supposed to send me a na and it didn't arrive. Instead I got the the velvet bag. I got the SSDs that go into this, into the, the new Sonology. They sent you the Well that's cool. Yeah. These are the things that really cost you money. You buy a tology, you buy a bunch of hard drives and they say, oh, one more thing. Right. <laugh>. So they sent me the drives. Now the cool thing is the new versions, they have a 10 gigabit ethernet connection. Oh, nice. So you and that's what you have in Italy? No, but they just, when I went by the booth, they just gave me what is essentially an i fixit kit. Oh, well that's good. I love that. What else you got? Well, gimme something. This is practical. This is practical. This is something you could use. Yeah, I know you like, it's a fanny pack your man purse. It's a fanny pack. You
Paris Martineau (02:31:49):
Just say, it does seem like a fanny pack.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:31:51):
It is a fanny pack. But I was looking for something that held all the tech, and I don't like a fanny pack. So then this is immersed, they call it a sling. This is a bolster and yeah, a sling. It works. Actually, you know, I'm kind of a fan of bags. I know, right? That's why I brought it in. So this goes over my, it's like a messenger bag. You can go over the shoulder or you can there's a, a, another strap. You can go around your waist. So you just choose how you want to wear it. It looks like a man's ear to be honest with. Yeah, it's, it's really designed to be like diagonal. Well, <laugh>
Paris Martineau (02:32:22):
Maybe. Wow. Yeah. You're really rocking that.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:32:25):
Yeah. Hey, I'm a tech bro. Can you tell <laugh>, you know, if you want, you can take that with you. You can use that in, bro. No, I don't way
Paris Martineau (02:32:35):
You don't have to carry your 28 phones, Leo. Oh, have them all in
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:32:39):
There. Yeah. This wouldn't hold all my phones. It might,
Paris Martineau (02:32:43):
You could get another
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:32:44):
One. Actually, no. That's why you need this. This is the, the mag. The one thing I thought was really cool, you did this video piece for us last week, and I asked the tech guys and this of all the things, all the real cool gear, including the Miracle. Miracle. This is the one I was interested in. So this, this is a mag safe. It's a mag safe thing. It, so, okay, let me take my phone out so I can sh So you can, it just flipped. It hangs onto the phone. Is Mag safe strong enough to put my wallet in there? I mean, Nick, should I trust that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. You can actually, you hold it by the, the, the holder. It's got a little pop socket kind of, it does come off, but it's supposed to,
Paris Martineau (02:33:20):
So it just holds your cards.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:33:21):
Well, no. Yeah. Holds your cards. But what I like about this, this, I use this at c s This is an N F T device. So it has my business card on it. Yes. Really rather nft. Right? So rather than giving someone my business card, NF C, not nf T Oh, sorry. Nft. Let's make that very cool. Whoa. How would you like to buy this? No. So you,
Paris Martineau (02:33:41):
You can put it on the blockchain.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:33:42):
You put, you put your business card on, on, on it or no. Right? Right. So you put a link to it, you put the link to it, and so you tap it to the back of someone's phone and they have their contact information, which is so much better than business cards.
Paris Martineau (02:33:55):
That's fun.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:33:56):
Yeah. Who wants all that things? You must have done this. I just got back and started sorting all my business cards and, and half of them I couldn't remember which representative belonged to which company. Yeah. Yeah. Does it have to be purple? No, I just chose that because I, I like purple <laugh>. Well, look, it matches the color right behind me. It's good. Oh, all right. I wanna take a little break cuz it's getting late and Connie has places to be and things to do, and a teenage son to monitor. But our show today, I do wanna mention is brought to you by, we were talking about Ryan Reynolds. Oh. In his chat. G p T ad. Ooh. Which was hysterical. Mint Mobile. Big fan of Mint Mobile you use, you said you use it. I do. Not in Italy. No. I, but, but I need a new studio home.
(02:34:42):
When you get home, come into the States. Yeah. Mint Mobile is brilliant. It is a phone company with no stores, no physical presence, but they take all the money, they save that. And they're cheesy ad campaign. They save a lot of money there. That's, and they put that money into your pocket. If you're saving more and spending less is one of your top goals for this year. That's a very good resolution. Why are you still paying insane amounts of money for your phone bill? Just think what your cell phone bill is a hundred bucks a month under 20 bucks a month. Mine, you know, sneakily slowly has been inching up every month. It's getting close to 200 bucks a month. But Mint Mobile, nope. $15 a month. All in, that's nationwide unlimited talk and text plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.
(02:35:33):
It's not a secret T-Mobile. So if you get good T-Mobile service where you are, this is absolutely a no-brainer. Premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. And that's it. There's no secret fees, no added things. Oh, you gotta pay for this. No, that's it. Because they're online only. They eliminate the traditional cost of retail and they could pass those savings onto you. You could bring your own phone. MIT Mobile now supports eim. So if you've got an EIM enabled phone, you don't even have to get 'em to send you a SIM card, but if you need one, they will send you one for free. They don't charge you. They also cell phones at amazing prices. I got an iPhone, S SE and Mint Mobile complete 30 bucks a month. New phone and Mint mobile service. Four gigabytes of data for 15 bucks a month. Need more.
(02:36:17):
How about 20 bucks for 10 gigabytes? Nobody needs one 10 gigabytes a month. Okay. 15 gigabytes. That's $25 a month. What are you paying? They even have an unlimited plan, mint mobile. And they have that modern family plan that lets you mix and match data plan so everybody gets what's right for them. All you need is two lines, and you don't even have to be in the same family. Just be good friends. Just be good friends with Mint Mobile. Choose the amount of monthly data that's right for you and stop paying for data you never use. This is absolutely a no-brainer. Mint Mobile Premium wireless service starts at 15 bucks a month. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to mint mobile.com/twit mint mobile.com/twi. Again, cut your wireless, build 15 bucks a month and they'll ship it to you for free.
(02:37:10):
We, I am such a huge fan of Mint Mobile. It's like, why do you pay anymore? I feel like I have to have all the different carriers. So I of course can tell people what's wrong with them all. I've never had to say anything's wrong with Mint Mobile. It's just great. Mint mobile.com/twin and do, if you can, they've been showing it on the football games and stuff. Ryan's chat, G p t written ad. It's actually really good. He's entertaining. I think he's so fun. He's so what he did that was smart is he started an ad agency. He did. He did. And that was, that's like brilliant. No, all these movie stars are buying tequila companies. He bought aviation gin. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But then he said, you know, I should start an ad agency. And he's actually, I think he's done better on that, his movie career.
(02:37:56):
I mean, he's really good at it. And he owns Mint Mobile. Mint mobile.com/twi. At first, by the way, I did some research. I thought, oh, it's, you know, here, we'll give you 5% of the company, do our ads or some, no, he owns more than 50%. He is literally a controlling owner. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a Mint mobile, which is hysterical. What I like about, when I made my first subscription to Mint Mobile, they sent me two extra sim cards and I just keep those with me. So every time I come back into the United States, when I hit the US I just pop the sim in, I activate the card and I'm good to go. And then they send me another card. So I only pay for the months that I'm actually in the United States. It's, it's a great service. We had a great week this week on twit. Did you see all of it? I bet you missed a few things, but fortunately we have a lovely little movie we've prepared for your entertainment. We're gonna sit
Ant Pruitt (02:38:46):
Down and enjoy some quality time with the wonderful Miss Daisy Higginbotham as we have our book club.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:38:54):
Which Leo
Ant Pruitt (02:38:55):
Slept through Indie
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:38:56):
Wes. I was supposed to be there. Kill Mary. I know we don't have alcohol, but we all have opinions. Yes. So, so true. Let, should we start off Amp? Did you hate this book? No, I <laugh>. Wow. Previously on Twitter. Is that the first one you didn't hate all about Android, Motorola. That's, hes announced 30 years of the Lenovo think pad. And now Motorola is releasing the think phone. So they, they're, you know, doing this like collaborative thing to give you serious think pad vibes.
Mikah Sargent (02:39:30):
IOS. Today it's time to talk about some of the most productive, most creative, most useful apps for your iPhone and your
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:39:40):
Ipad. Da Vinci resolved security. Now Rob TWiTed to me, he said, alright Steve, you asked and I delivered, I wrote a PowerShell script to parse the XML file. That is your last pass vault. I, so I replied pulling crap. Rob, you're a PowerShell wizard. To which Rob replied, not sure I can claim the title of Wizard though. I had chat. G p t do most of the heavy lifting. <Laugh> <laugh> Heavy Chat. G P T is a PowerShell wizard. It is tech just like you, like it, it's kind of amazing. The PowerShell did all that. Couple of re remaining stories at the bo they sank to the bottom. Of course. Let's get 'em all in real quick. Yep. Goldman Sachs wa wa lost a billion dollars on the Apple card. Yep. Yep. How incompetent do you have to be to lose money on the Apple card? So that's opportunity cost. Essentially they have to set aside enough money to cover any bad loans that are, are being put onto the Apple card. It's so hard to get an Apple card. Right. You gotta have perfect credit. It's
Paris Martineau (02:40:54):
Hard to get even a credit limit at above, you know? Yeah. I saw some people getting a credit limit of a couple hundred dollars.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:41:00):
You can't buy anything in an Apples store for 200 bucks. But that's, that's the problem because most of those credit cards work on Mar razor thin margins, but huge volumes. And Apples card does not have that. They couldn't give them the volume thing, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> interesting. Yeah, it's kind of sad. I it's, it's part of a larger story. I love my Apple card. Me too. I use it. I buy groceries with it. I don't think I can get one in Italy. Right. They don't, they don't offer them outta the watch. But I do on my watch, I just tap to pay everywhere and it's all goes in the Apple card. It's like I'm not really paying anything and then it comes outta my It's true. Yeah. And I didn't even know. Wait, is that how Credit Credit works? Yes, it's free. Oh, okay. Sweet.
Paris Martineau (02:41:35):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:41:36):
It's free. Have this sandwich. It's free. What do you mean? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, just tap your, your watch on here and, and we'll give it to you. Chat. G p t. How do credit cards work? <Laugh>. So let's type that in please. Ooh,
Paris Martineau (02:41:47):
So it just says it's free
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:41:49):
<Laugh> Loser. A pairing loser. How many people got it? Just because it's a status symbol. I got it. Cuz it's very heavy. The
Paris Martineau (02:41:56):
Card is very heavy.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:41:57):
It's very heavy. It's heavy. It's nice. But I mean like, are you gonna use that over the card that gives you miles?
Paris Martineau (02:42:03):
I use it. I have a card that gives me miles and my Apple card. I use the Apple card whenever I, umm paying with my phone or Yeah. Watch. Okay. Which is a lot. Okay. And then I use my Miles card for everything else.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:42:17):
The Apple card gives you 3% on Apple purchases. That to me, ah, is thousands of dollars a year. <Laugh>. Yeah. Yes, that's true. True. Or, or that could be hundreds of thousands of miles, which you can't use except for blackout dates. Oh, you can, you need to carrier. Do you fly here on miles? Delta? yes. And on which? On Delta. Delta? Yeah. When I was flying before I amassed something like 4 million miles. So I'm still working those off. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh yeah. I have 150,000 United Miles I can't use to go anywhere I want. So it's like, thank you for nothing. The problem with Goldman Sachs is they they've been really trying to become a consumer Yes. Bank. Yes. And that is an expensive proposition. And Apple, the Apple card's not the only one that they're trying this with. They've actually lost 4 billion since 2020. Apple accounts for 1 billion. Yeah. So they're trying to do this whole Yeah. Niche market where you get, get higher income customers. They have a buy now pay later thing called Green Sky. By the way, didn't Apple announce B N P L? And did they ever put out Buy Now pay later? I think they've heard about it.
Paris Martineau (02:43:22):
They do have it for Apple products. They do. Cause I've used it whenever I purchased, I don't know, like a, a MacBook recently. Oh, okay. Where it's just installments kind of baked into your Apple card, like zero apr. It was pretty easy.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:43:36):
So is that, is that internal or did they go through Goldman Sachs? I think that's Goldman as well. I think, I don't know. Maybe that's where Goldman's taking the hit. Could be. Yeah,
Paris Martineau (02:43:45):
Probably.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:43:46):
There was an app, there was an app called Retro Podd. Really? <laugh>, which looked just like an iPod until Apple realized it looked just like an iPod and they killed it. Hold on. Yep. Wait, why this replicates functionality? It looks just like an iPod, which they don't even sell anymore. The app had been downloaded half a million times because of viral videos. And that sounds, it's just fun. It's a fun little app approved and released in October. Get that. Neither Apple nor retro Podd has said why the app is removed. But it did come right after it got a spike. We can start, maybe
Paris Martineau (02:44:23):
Apple will
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:44:24):
Buy it. Maybe Apple buy. I I think Apple is going to do an anniversary re-release of the iPod. So they don't want anything getting in the way of those sales. Actually, that's the other iPod story. Somebody has hacked the iPod, nano <laugh>, like who cares to do what? Do anything you want. It's actually, I would recommend, does it play Doom? You could play Doom. In fact, that was how it started. He wanted to put Linux and Doom. But what is actually is a great article. I recommended a Q3 k.org because it's how you would go about cracking a device like this. It was very locked down firmware. Right. And that actually is impressive. It's, yeah, it's an impressive hack. But also it's a fascinating hack. This has a secure boot boot rom, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. It's got, they got sign and all of that stuff.
(02:45:11):
They really locked it down. And so he's, this is a really wonderful article. I thought on reverse engineering the boot rom. He's actually looking at the code, not cuz it's open source, but I guess cuz he ooh. He compiled it on, disassembled it. I don't know where he got this symbol table. I guess he doesn't have it. And he was able, he's really great. It says things like, well, as you can see here, <laugh> <laugh>, there's a, there's a bug in the usb. You see this right here? I'll trust you. You see where it says U sb device request G eight EP zero DMA wall. Oh, obviously, obviously I, I could see that across the room. Leo. They're not sanitizing their inputs. Inputs there. There, there it is. The bug's right there. Can you see it? That's right. If BM request type and per sand do X three equals zero bug. Oh. The user controlled index populated from the lower bite of the index field of the setup packet is used as an index into the G State USB handlers without any boundary checks.
Paris Martineau (02:46:13):
You dunno about the human narration on that article. <Laugh>,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:46:17):
You know, chat G P T will never be able to make that <laugh>. You know, don't count on it because now that it's written up chat G p t will absorb it eventually. And you could probably ask it how to hack something. Now, Connie, at ces, did you happen to, to pass by the hall of Failures?
Paris Martineau (02:46:34):
No. That
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:46:35):
Was fun. No, there's an actual hall of failures. So they made like a bunch of cubicles, little cubicles with pe demonstrations of technologies that have failed over the years. So they had things like the zoom and that hurt me cause I loved the zoo. Yeah, I loved it. But, well, the Zoom HD was actually good. Yes. Yes. Not the Brown Zoo. No. <laugh>. That was like the, the shoes. The Cho No, it's chocolate. It was chocolate. Chocolate. Not, not the crap zone. Good news. You can swear on your YouTube videos. Dammit. Did you know they were demonetizing videos with swearing? Not only just new videos, they were going back in time and looking for swearing the profanity police only in English. Well, they didn't know French. Yeah. [inaudible] <laugh>.
(02:47:20):
You have the brains of a, they have a calf <laugh>, a fr you know, general direction <laugh>. And you can get that away with that. Right? YouTube says, oops some videos were flagged, others weren't. We were demonetizing. You only learned after you were demonetized. So YouTube hasn't said what it plans to change. It's not clear if the revised policy Oh no. Will turn it around. So just stop cursing. This could really, really stop a cussing affect some of the videos that I've made for Pope Francis <laugh>. I gotta go back through that. And the rule, just so you know, the rule limits,
Paris Martineau (02:47:57):
You gotta just go back and just censor all of his curse words. You
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:48:00):
Know?
Paris Martineau (02:48:00):
Oh my, at least in the first 15 seconds,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:48:02):
Shut the front door. Exactly. <laugh> the
Paris Martineau (02:48:05):
Rule,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:48:06):
The rule limits, it removes ads on videos where someone swears within the first 15 seconds. So you could swear in after that. Or has focal usage. Or maybe I'm mispronouncing it. And this is like f b I rules for listening to a Call of Rude Words throughout and is guaranteed to completely demonetize a clip if swearing occurs in the first seven seconds or dominates the content. Okay. I I, I would love to know why they're doing this. Now, do people swear on the hot ones? Like when they eat the hot sauce, they go Mother, mother, but they bleep them out. Mother Fuer actually. So it's only the swears that make it through, right? If you sell censor Yeah, you bleep it. Yeah. So I want, I'm gonna,
Paris Martineau (02:48:45):
This makes, this is clearly why my YouTube channel yeah. Didn't off. Cause I was like, Hey guys, welcome to Fuck. And YouTube was like, absolutely not <laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:48:57):
Today we're gonna use the word get in created.
Paris Martineau (02:49:00):
It matters. Maybe if you hit the cap, like, hit that bell. Guys. <laugh>. Not today. I,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:49:06):
I may be wrong, but I feel like almost all the YouTube videos are full of swearing. Yes. So I don't Yes, I'm puzzled by that study says you
Connie Guglielmo (02:49:15):
Just have to do a Latin preamble for the first you
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:49:17):
Kings time there I can I I'll mm-hmm. I can create a custom Latin voice. Do they use the swear words from The Good Place and the Vatican? Like, you know, do they say, you know, it like the Good Place had all those great swear words that weren't swear words? I have never even been seriously tempted to swear in Rome, which is, it would be bad weird because I swear all the time here. But over there it just,
Paris Martineau (02:49:38):
You just like pass into the airspace and you're like, zen, it's
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:49:42):
Cleaned out. I'm just cleaned out. So it's like a swear. The F word becomes fork. The S word becomes shirt bch becomes bench <laugh>. Your hiny becomes your ash, your pecker becomes deck and on and on and on. Okay. Well now I have Ms Swear <laugh>. Yeah. You might try that in the bad place. You can curse me. Well, I mean remember Battlestar Galactica used frack back in the, back in the seventies and they got away with
Paris Martineau (02:50:13):
It. I love Fren
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:50:13):
Cho. Yeah, no, in fact, that was great. Yeah. And then the Firefly used fake Chinese words. Yeah. Like goam and Yeah, I loved that. I thought that's really a way of getting the, you know, the anger out. But not study says. No. And I think, you know, it's funny because this is maybe not how my people, the left wingers would like me to interpret it. The Russian trolls did not in fact impact the 26 16 election. And I thought that on the surface of it, even back then was a little absurd. Yeah, sure. They were there, but some people didn't read a TWiT and then say, ah, I'm gonna vote for Donald Trump. So this study, which was conducted it's published in nature, long list of researchers looking at whether or not Russian trolls on social media had any impact on the 2016 election. No, they did not. Finally, they say we found no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign, which no one denies existed and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. I, you know, that just makes
Paris Martineau (02:51:19):
Sense. I mean, it reminds me of like, with the whole news cycle around Cambridge Analytica, where everybody at first was like, oh, this has completely changed the face of reality. But then you look into it a bit more and it's like, actually people looking at TWiTs, the TWiTs aren't the most impactful part of their day-to-day lives. Right. It is not fully changing someone's thoughts and feelings about someone. Well,
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:51:42):
Well, I mean, it's all been about self reinforcement of what you already believe. And that's, that's actually what the, the trolls and the influence Pedalers have done. They know they're not gonna change anyone's mind. There's very few fence sitters who are gonna be changing their vote based on a YouTube video or a TWiT. However, what they can do is they can make any sort of useful discussion, toxic which, which that heads off a, a, a further discussion about important issues. So in that instance, it has made an effect. It, it just didn't change the outcome of the vote. It has changed the outcome of future votes because no one wants to talk about anything without becoming five levels of horrible.
Paris Martineau (02:52:24):
Yeah. I mean, I think that it really is amping up the polarization on both sides. And I'm sure that one aspect of that is your people are perhaps going to end up being more actionable on certain items. Yes. You know? Yeah. Someone who might not have donated to like far Right. Campaign. Correct. If you see enough content, they're going to maybe send that five or $10.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:52:47):
But that's so subtle. It's probably not measurable. Right. Maybe that's why not It's not easily measurable. Yeah. Yeah. Because no one can be opening up their books to show exactly how much they've received and donations after the last hate speech campaign.
Connie Guglielmo (02:53:02):
It can also though sway what are the topics of conversation and push them in subtle ways, one direction or another. So
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:53:09):
The, so the so-called Overton window gets shifted. Yeah. Yeah.
Connie Guglielmo (02:53:12):
Yes.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:53:15):
Well that concludes this thrilling and gripping ion. We ran outta news, we ran outta time. Oh, almost three hours. Oh my goodness. Okay. I'm so sorry. I apologize to All In Sunday. Have you noticed that I tend to be on the longest Twits. You haven't even gotten half this crap. You brought
Paris Martineau (02:53:29):
<Laugh>. Wait. Yeah. Can we see another dude? Dad, please?
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:53:31):
Do Dad,
Paris Martineau (02:53:32):
What's the silliest one?
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:53:34):
Took Oh no, hold on. The silliest ones I did not bring because they're not safe to be on the air at Twit. The urine puck? No, no. But they, you
Paris Martineau (02:53:44):
Didn't just bring a, a bottle of pee. You could have sold that to someone outside the studio for a hundred bucks.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:53:49):
I real, no, there there was. Okay. There was one from a company called Handy. Don't tell me that. Yeah, exactly. I don't wanna know <laugh>. Alright, I'll just leave that by Leo <laugh>.
Paris Martineau (02:54:02):
Hi. Goodnight.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:54:03):
It's comfortable though, right? It's nice. It's it's, it's sheer. What is this material? This is aero gel. What does it do? What is it? So it's, it's 99% air, so it's super light, but it's also one of the best insulators that NASA's been able to come up with it. It feels very toasty. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very light and it's comfy. It's a kind of a, it will retain almost all of your body heat. In fact, I use this when it was down at, what, 30 degrees and it was too hot. I had to open it up. Yeah. Nice. Will this be available in your art local rei? Oh gosh, yes. Eventually, but right now it's Big Lou. Actually that and the bolster are Kickstarters right now. <Laugh>. It smells like Mars. Wait, what? So this is a Kickstarter, big Lou.
(02:54:46):
This is a Kickstarter. Oh, Nate. It's kind of fun. You know, I, I like having those companies back at ces. I spent so much time down in the e the Eureka Plaza or Eureka Zone. Yeah. Down in the, the, the bottom floor of Venetian. That's where you find like the old go failed product zone. Do they have that? Yes. That's so cool. Leo, next time you come with me I will. One day. Just one day. The Eureka. I've been to the Eureka zone. Yeah. I feel like, I feel like I just jumped out of an airplane. I'm having trouble getting the parachute back in the box. <Laugh>. So lemme just push this out out of the, oh, now it's in front of Connie <laugh>. Oh no. What am I gonna do? Connie, what are you doing these days at cnet? Anything exciting coming up?
Connie Guglielmo (02:55:26):
Well, I told you we're looking at all that sustainability tech. I was actually really excited to see some of the, the themes and the conversations that people were having. And one of the funnest products that I saw was basically a bread box that can a, keep your food that is not in the refrigerator fresh for two months. Caltech was the company out of Japan. And, you know, no, most people think of a bread box as a bread box, but it was a, a way to minimize food waste. So was
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:55:51):
It like UVC or how did it do that? It just,
Connie Guglielmo (02:55:54):
It has a, it has a, a photo catalysis, a chemical procedure that's used in the decamp decontamination of water to keep bread and produce fresh. How interesting. Longer it
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:56:07):
Has a That's cool. Yeah, cuz I don't, like I do, I will if I have to freeze or put refrigerate bread, but it always takes some of the good flavor out of it. But on the other hand, it'll go mok at least in our house within a few days. So it's better than nothing. But if there were a box about the size of a, I don't know, bread box that I could like put stuff into that wouldn't refrigerate it, but would keep it. That sounds great. You also had a very nice piece by Ty Pendlebury on the most ridiculous and weird tech gadgets, like the Hush Me voice mask. No, I don't understand that one. <Laugh>, they tried, they tried selling me on it. I'm like, no. There seemed to be a lot of products to cover your mouse. Oh no. The Dyson Air Purify last.
(02:56:48):
There was so many of those that are basically a year and a half too late. This was, this was never a product. The Charman Roll robot. But it got a lot of coverage because, and I've always said this, if you want coverage is ces b the very first thing people see is they walk into the pep com. That'll do it. Or showstoppers. All the press will stop, cover your item and then go home because they just want to get the hell out of there. The smart tubes. Fresh. I love fresh love the, I love the TV that falls off a window when it runs outta power. That sounds like a great idea. Such a terrible idea. Really smart. This look at this. We're gonna get one of those as soon as the power dies, this suction craps fail and your TV falls off the window.
(02:57:26):
Who thinks this is a good idea? I know the first thing you're gonna do is make sure it's always plugged in. Right. So it doesn't fall off the windows. Anyway, all this great stuff at cnet. Another toothbrush, man. Wow. How about a taser holster? Hold my taser. Thank, thank God. You know, like an, I'm wondering where should I put my tooth? Sure. Like an animal you're holding in your hand or you're just having your pocket. Yeah. Here's the Pee Pee Pet dryer. Yeah, I saw that one. No <laugh>. Well it goes with your I was about to say my cat would destroy <laugh>.
(02:57:59):
We remember this. This was the vibrating. Is that fork? Is the fork. The Happy fork. Okay. Another one. Look in the front door. Got coverage eight years ago. It needs to stop. This is, this is 25 years of of bad stuff. Hush me. That's what this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Belty Belty Smart Pan Holding device. Wow. Yeah, I remember that one. It just, wow. It adjusts your granular changes in your pocket. That was, that was good. That was yeah. Anyway, there's also serious coverage at C Net. And I agree with you. Sustainability. It's about time the tech industry started thinking about that, Connie, because I feel horrible. We throw this stuff out. It's terrible, terrible. Yeah, this right on the front page, C net zero. Everything you need to know about sustainability. So this is, this is gonna be a permanent section now on the
Connie Guglielmo (02:58:46):
Yes. It is a permanent section. We've been sending reporters to cop 26. Cop 27. Like I said, you know, there's gonna be government regulation that steps in, but then people are gonna wanna make choices about what they're buying and especially if they're not spending a lot of money on things and they wanna be more deliberate. Good. And what they're choosing. Bravo. They need information.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:59:07):
Bravo. Actually, this, this is another one of our big initiatives. We call it Care for the Common Home, but it's ba it's basically sustainability. So that's another reason why I might call you to do a conference over here
Connie Guglielmo (02:59:18):
On my, my phone is Open <laugh>, standing by
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:59:22):
Connie Gomo, editor-in-chief of CNET at Tech Leads, L E D E S on the Twitter. It's so nice to see you. So nice to have you on. Thank you for taking this Sunday afternoon or evening to be with us. We appreciate it. My pleasure. Cnet.Com kids, the information dot coms where you'll find Paris Martin? No. yeah. What's your, what's your favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn?
Paris Martineau (02:59:48):
Oh, that's hard.
Leo Laporte/Padre (02:59:51):
Do you have a hangout?
Paris Martineau (02:59:52):
Probably my f I go to, I mean, in Brooklyn, I go to this place called the Good Batch. Often they do really great, like little sweet pastries. It feels like
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:01):
This is what you should do in Brooklyn.
Paris Martineau (03:00:04):
It is, yeah. Don't have coffee. I am strangely in a neighborhood where I am surrounded by like six different vegan bakery coffee shops. So I've gotta go to the one that uses animal parts at the very loose
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:16):
<Laugh>. I
Paris Martineau (03:00:17):
Don't know, just, you know, to make my myself feel a little worse about my contributions to the world.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:24):
Yeah. Hey, the good thing about animals, they're sustainable
Paris Martineau (03:00:27):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:28):
I mean,
Paris Martineau (03:00:29):
Not really. I
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:30):
Mean, ok, that is technically true. It's technically true,
Paris Martineau (03:00:33):
But no,
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:34):
They do sustain. They're not good for themselves. They're not good for not good. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (03:00:37):
Not good for the planet. Our use of them Not good
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:39):
Para smart. No. On see Twitter?
Paris Martineau (03:00:43):
Yeah. Yeah. Find me there.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:00:44):
If I were named Paris, I would be living in Paris right now.
Paris Martineau (03:00:48):
The thing is, you'd quickly learn that even if you speak excellent French, French people do not, will never understand the concept that your name is Paris <laugh>. Yeah. I think that's cute. Yes. And no matter how great your French is, they'll immediately be like, switch to English. No, I asked you what your name is, not where we are.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:01:05):
Oh my
Paris Martineau (03:01:06):
God. I was there for like a year. I had to go by my middle name Gabrielle,
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:01:10):
Which is a beautiful name.
Paris Martineau (03:01:13):
It is, but I mean, not
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:01:14):
My first name. When you're in France, do you call yourself Paari
Paris Martineau (03:01:19):
<Laugh>? I tried, but that didn't work on, I
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:01:21):
Was confused. They just didn't
Paris Martineau (03:01:22):
Blank stares. They were just confused. Like,
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:01:24):
My name is
Paris Martineau (03:01:25):
Cleveland. The French are vicious. Yeah. They said they're likes, you clearly don't understand.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:01:29):
Confused America. They go right in. Ah, yeah. This is not my dog. <Laugh> Mr. Have to respect Father Reverend Ro, whatever it is. The right Father. Padre <laugh>. Defender of the Face. Defender of the face. Yes. Yes. Ge his his new app is on the app store right now. Yes. Android gate, Google Play Store as well. Jeez. Jesuit pilgrimage app. Dot app. Yeah. And if you poke around, you can find the places where I recorded the audio for the meditations and they did not take me out. I was supposed to be a placeholder, but I'm still in there. Did you do it with Commitment? Did you care? Of course. I care. So that's fine. If I'm gonna produce it, I'm gonna Yeah, I'm gonna do it properly. It's okay. It's good. Yeah. Yeah. Good. And coming soon to that app we're gonna show off Coffee Places in Rome. Is that you? I would be awesome. Good places to eat good places. Yeah. Gonna The Jesuits
Paris Martineau (03:02:21):
Ice cream places. Ice cream places.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:02:23):
Oh, gelato. No, I know. All the good gelato places, places. When you come, we're gonna hang. Oh, okay. Okay. There are three places you have to go to. One is called Old Bridge. It's right next to the Vatican Museums. The other one is called Cilla, which is near Casa Alfo. And the third one is called Tiro Gelato. That's like the artisanal gelato that's close to, to the of July forum. Yeah. I wanna act
Paris Martineau (03:02:47):
Theater. I'm there to
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:02:48):
Him there. Let's all go. We'll do twit from Rome next time. Yeah. Look, I've been telling people seriously, we have a place, we have the band, we have an apartment on the campus. Come on over. Yeah. I have to, I have to figure out a way we can spend it a couple extra days there. That's, but that would be really fun now that you don't have that weekend commitment. I know that whole radio thing. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations on that, by the way. Good. That's many, many years. Wow. 19 years doing radio. I finally said, if you're not gonna pay me, I'm not gonna do this <laugh>. And so I'm doing it with Micah on Sundays. And it was so much, it's been so much fun. We've done a couple of shows. It's it and it's gonna get better because you're getting Yeah, you're fine. Your stride. Why shouldn't we be doing it for us instead of for the, it's the first time in my whole life since I was 16 that I haven't had a job. You know what? Working for Sunday, I can be your call screener. You need a call screener. I can do that from Rome. Could you? Yeah,
Paris Martineau (03:03:39):
I will. I'll do some crank calls for you. Leo <laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:03:42):
Would you please?
Paris Martineau (03:03:43):
That'd
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:03:43):
Be awesome.
Paris Martineau (03:03:44):
I would love to moonlight with a person with a soundboard. Just kind of make some toilet flushing noises. Like a That'd be great noise if you could do
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:03:52):
That. Yeah. Could have like a black dot over your face and have a voice. Ginger drawer roers or whatever. That's great. And then we could say, yeah, that's great. She's she's she or he is calling from inside the house or whatever. It'd be great. Yeah, we could do something fun with you. I think that'd be good. You're more than welcome to I think to do that. We'd love to. You could use my keone set. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (03:04:12):
Oh, wonderful. I'll just be like, Leo, are your bones running
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:04:15):
<Laugh>?
Paris Martineau (03:04:16):
Like what, what does that mean? What are your
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:04:19):
Bones running? What? My bones, during, during the pandemic there was a wall, a retaining wall in one of the caves that was starting to crumble and I got permission to fix it. So they got me the supplies so I could wall it back up. I wait a
Paris Martineau (03:04:30):
Retaining wall. Wait a minute. In the caves
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:04:32):
With the bones. Look. Edgar Allen Poe The Tellier Hard. Yes. A trawl. The
Paris Martineau (03:04:36):
Cas of a Trel. The cask of a Monte.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:04:37):
Which is exactly what I thought of. So I got a plastic skeleton and I put Ves on it. Oh. And I walled it up. So a hundred years from now, some Jesuit's gonna be going through that n they now crumbling wall and they're gonna find a skeleton <laugh> and they're gonna say, what is it they were eating that they had bones were like a plastic.
Paris Martineau (03:04:57):
Yes. Did you put zoom in its pocket? <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:05:00):
Oh. See, see
Paris Martineau (03:05:02):
You gotta open it back up.
Leo Laporte/Padre (03:05:04):
Or a Sony Walkman. This something just really strange. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, thank you all for being here. We love having you on. And thanks to all of our viewers and listeners, our Club TWIT members. We really appreciate your watching the show. We do twit Sunday afternoons, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 utc. You can watch us do it live, live. Do TWIT tv chat with us in the IRC or our club Twit Discord. If you're not a member, seven bucks a month gets you a free versions of all of our shows. Access to the Discord, access to the Twit plus feed. It's so much fun. Where's the where's the, where's the logo Aunt? Yeah. Pruitt is our is our clubhouse community organizer. Next week inside Twit, Lisa and I will give you the Inside Story Club members only win DAOs Fireside Chat February 9th.
(03:05:55):
And yes, I mentioned that interview we're gonna do with the author of Demonn and Freedom tm. His new book critical Mass, comes out early February. Daniel Suarez will do a special club only interview on February 10th. Seven bucks a month supports us, supports the work we do. Twit.Tv/Club twit. We thank you so much. We also appreciate if you take our survey you only have a couple weeks left to do that. It helps us sell ads so we know a little more about you. We don't wanna spy on you. So this is completely voluntary and it's not personal. We don't keep track of your email or anything like that. But it helps us in aggregates say, well, we have this many men, this many women, college educated, all that stuff. What kind of app laps that laptops they use. What kind of operating system? TWIT TV slash survey 23. It also helps us understand you better so we can develop more programming. That's right up your, that's it for this episode. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can
