This Week in Google 787 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff's here, paris is here. I'm back from vacation. We'll talk about Mark Zuckerberg's announcements at the MetaConnect keynote this morning and compare and contrast it to Sam Altman's a little bit weird AI manifesto. Then we'll find out why Cards Against Humanity is suing Elon Musk. All that and more coming up on Twig coming up on twig podcasts you love from people you trust.
This is twit. This is twig this week in google, episode 787, recorded wednesday sept, september 25th 2024. We here for you. It's time for Twig this week in Google, the show where we cover not just Google but the Internet. We cover, ladies and gentlemen, the web we weave. That is the book from Mr Jeff Jarvis. Professor Jeff Jarvis, he is the Townite Professor of Journalistic Innovation, emeritus Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. But do you have anything else to announce yet? No, not yet.
So we're going to keep giving you that old title. Good to see you, jeff. Missed you guys so much. Paris martineau is also here. She's back from croatia. She reports I am on youth issues at the information for the weekend, which is the best part of the information, I think we never shared our pictures of the three of us, did we?
I have them right here. If you want to see them, let me uh pull them up. So we so, on the way out of town, I stopped by uh, new york city, and we had a little meetup. Paris jeff and I at um, I at a place with a name that we can. Andre's restaurant in New York City. It's a great Greek restaurant. Actually, it's perfect for your.
0:02:12 - Paris Martineau
Leo, or a shirt with a lot of avocados on it that all the ladies loved.
0:02:17 - Leo Laporte
They did. And I said do you have avocados at this restaurant? And they said now we do. No, I posted it in the discord. I have it on the screen. Do you not see it, benito? I need to switch, you need to switch, you need to switch, I need to switch the power is in your hands, leo I did switch, you don't. What do you see now?
0:02:39 - Paris Martineau
I see that we leave.
0:02:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I need to switch to this. There we are. There's three of them. I don't know which one's best, but paris. We had to get paris to do the selfie because only she's young enough to know how to press the button and take a picture you gotta do the ai thing that picks the best one of each of you and see what it looks like oh, I could do that in the google in the google.
I like that one. That's's cute. Yeah, it was really fun to see the two of you have lunch. I'd never met Paris in person before.
0:03:10 - Paris Martineau
It's crazy that we had never met in person, given all the hours we've spent talking to each other.
0:03:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was really cool. And then you went off to Croatia. I know you've been back since then, but you had a good time. I had a good time. I had a lovely time.
0:03:28 - Paris Martineau
It was super fun and your parents became famous in peru while we were gone. They did inexplicably, um uh. My dad was caught in a tiktok video by a bunch of peruvian bystanders who believe that he was a celebrity, and he really decided to eat it up, and I love him for that they're not.
0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
They weren't fully wrong. I mean, after all, they, um your parents, were dressed in, uh, dinnerware they were ready for a you know wedding they had security in shades around them. Look at these guys in the shades. I mean I would have assumed he was famous too. Oh yeah, oh yeah, and that's your mom in the beautiful that's why mom is like come on, let's go.
0:04:09 - Jeff Jarvis
So the first. The first is she's smiling the first time.
0:04:11 - Paris Martineau
By the fifth time she's had it, she's tapping him on the shoulder by the time we get here. See, right there, right now.
0:04:17 - Leo Laporte
Now she's pissed this is how fame happens. This is how fame happens. Just that simple.
0:04:24 - Paris Martineau
Wow, I love how he is in comparison to every person, but he does look famous.
0:04:29 - Leo Laporte
He's wearing a tux. He's got guys in sunglasses and earpieces around him ushering him off. It's so funny I thought he was famous.
0:04:38 - Paris Martineau
He is famous to me, yeah.
0:04:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a really great. That's a nice event. Speaking of fame, my son, mr Salt Hank, is going to be on the Today Show tomorrow with Hoda and Jenna, or whatever, hoda right, that's her name, hoda 10 o'clock am on the Today Show.
0:05:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Is he?
0:05:00 - Leo Laporte
going to make anything with them. Yeah, he's cooking. I'm not sure what I told him.
0:05:08 - Paris Martineau
Make pickles because we have a new he and. I are in a pickle venture Plug the family business.
0:05:17 - Leo Laporte
It's called the Salt Lovers Club.
0:05:20 - Paris Martineau
This podcast thing is never going to take off, so I have to get in the pickle business. I saw organically some Salt Hank content come across my Twitter feed the other day.
0:05:27 - Leo Laporte
Someone just posted making Salt Hank meatball parms for my beautiful friends, there you go and I was like, wow, my son the sandwich king. His new cookbook comes out in about 10 days. It's called Salt Hank a five napkin situation. You can order it on Amazon or wherever you get your books. Uh, it is a beautiful cookbook, by the way, I have. It's funny because, jeff, I have a copy of the web we leave also available in bookstores everywhere, uh, but I don't have a copy of salt hank's cookbook your own son you're not blurbing.
0:06:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeez, I'm not blurbing my own son did anybody blurb?
0:06:04 - Leo Laporte
him, did they do blurbs in a cookbook? Oh yeah, big names blurbed him. Cool Gordon Ramsey, wow. Oh yeah, he's got friends in high places as they say.
0:06:17 - Jeff Jarvis
How many pictures are in it?
0:06:19 - Leo Laporte
It's all pictures. It really isn't a cookbook, it's a picture book.
That's expensive to produce. Oh, it's because I'm in schuster baby. They spent a lot of money. He's doing a book tour. Wow, they are. They have book tours. Went away when I was a young, yeah, but uh, they there's. They're doing it with him. So keep your eye peeled, mr hank.
All right, let's talk news. Google news google's getting sued in the eu. Or is it google suing? I think it's google suing microsoft in thegress fees, if you want to leave. Azure and google used to charge egress fees and then decided not to charge egress fees, and now they're really upset. So they got the eu to go after microsoft for charging, uh, egress fees. Egress for what? Well, if, for instance, I were to charge you, jeff, to no longer be on this podcast, that would be an egress fee and it wouldn't be right. But you know who does do that. A lot of people do that If you want to get your data out of the cloud, often it costs you money to get your data out of the cloud. So let's see, I thought we should do some Google news. But now back to Stanley tumblers.
0:07:53 - Paris Martineau
After that, you know, long foray to hard, serious news coverage.
0:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Do you have a pink Stanley tumbler Paris?
0:08:02 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm an Ouala girl myself.
0:08:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look at that, you're not with it. Apparently, stanley's pink tumbler was all the rage and now that barbie is celebrating its 65th anniversary, stanley every day. Oh, you missed it last week. Shoot see. This is why you can't go on vacation and it was important stuff like selling stanley quenchers to honor different barbies on the 16th. You like them I don't know.
0:08:34 - Paris Martineau
I just think quenchers is a very funny name for a product to quench your thirst.
0:08:39 - Leo Laporte
Here's, uh, the actual barbie, uh, with a, with a quencher all all her own wow, women can have it all look at that, you can, you can, oh look, and a cowboy, and a cowboy can have a.
0:08:55 - Paris Martineau
Have it all too okay, I think they're so silly they're too large.
0:08:59 - Leo Laporte
They're gigantic yeah, they are, and they look dopey because they have this little tiny hole at the bottom for putting in your uh, your cup holder. I think it's dope?
0:09:08 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I don't like that. Do you guys have stanleys?
0:09:11 - Leo Laporte
no, no, I have a off-brand something. I got a dicks oh, it's an awala it's the cool one.
0:09:19 - Paris Martineau
We both have the same thing. I like it because it's got a straw in it. It does, but it doesn't look like it has a straw.
0:09:27 - Leo Laporte
It looks like just a wide mouth frog, but if you unscrew it you'll see the hidden straw inside and it holds like 800 gallons of water.
0:09:37 - Paris Martineau
I have a tinier one for New York City bags, but it's quite good.
0:09:45 - Leo Laporte
Okay, here's our Barbie segment. We're moving fast. Essilor Luxottica. Did you watch the meta thing this morning? No, we streamed it.
0:09:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you?
0:09:58 - Leo Laporte
buying those glasses. I have the meta Ray-Bans. Oh, they didn't announce they're going to continue their partnership and they are going to add new features, including a translation, real-time translation.
0:10:17 - Paris Martineau
How many times have we been told that I know? That someone's going to add that I'll believe it when I see it.
0:10:23 - Leo Laporte
To Meta's credit, mark Zuckerberg was live on stage and did actually do a real translation with them, with a Mexican UFC fighter. He spoke in Spanish, mark spoke in English and they had a conversation. It was a weird conversation because you say your thing Hello, I'm very pleased to meet you, how's the knee? And then he has to stand there and wait while it goes Hola. And then he says his thing, and then you have to stand there awkwardly and wait. Not that much fun.
0:11:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I've done events with simultaneous translation. It's like that right. And then I've done events with not simultaneous translation. It's like that and then, I've done events with not simultaneous, where you have to wait in the event yeah, and it's, it's hard yeah, very hard to yeah to do that. What's what was mark wearing?
0:11:15 - Leo Laporte
that's what we all want to know now he was wearing a black t-shirt and black pants. Uh, despite the fact that mark looked like he'd been spending some time in the gymnasium, it was a loose-fitting black T-shirt.
0:11:30 - Paris Martineau
He wore a shirt that said Ot Zuck Ot Neil, which people assumed was a joke, referring to the phrase Ot Caesar Ot Neil, which means, I think, in Latin, either Caesar or nothing. So it would say either Zuck or nothing.
0:11:48 - Leo Laporte
You know what I was joking? That he should get a shirt that says Zuck Tua Ettuwe. Zuck.
0:11:58 - Paris Martineau
That's also good.
0:11:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, ettu Zuck Zuck has used Latin before. He likes Latin jokes Show showing off his, his hovet education. I guess, well, a quarter thereof yeah, but he took.
0:12:11 - Jeff Jarvis
He didn't have a whole year, did he? No? No, yeah, he did. Yeah, he had a sophomore year. Did he have the gold chain? Did he have the fancy hair?
0:12:17 - Leo Laporte
I gotta hear this stuff he had very, very curly um, a mop of hair. I give him a lot. Okay, I here's what I would. My takeaway from this event was we wanted to watch because I was curious what they were going to do with vr um, and he said you know, we got this thing. It's not ready by any means, but this is what we're working on. It's 100 grams, doesn't need a battery pack, has a little puck to drive it, but it doesn't need any additional stuff. It does augmented reality. It does a lot of stuff.
He showed people wearing it. He said there's only three in existence. He showed people wearing it, but he's. But it was like this is way down the road, but it was I. I was there to see that and to see what he's going to do with llama, their ai. But the thing that I came away with and you, you've, you, you've written about facebook, you, you, you've, you've been inside um. He didn't mention Facebook at all. Wow, this is MetaConnect. It's their developer conference, but everything Meta does is driven by the revenue from Facebook and Instagram. One brief mention of Instagram, because you'll be able to use AI on Instagram.
0:13:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No mentions at all about Facebook, and I think that's telling it's not on my IO how much is search as search mentioned in IO.
0:13:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's a good point. I feel like, though, this is Meta successfully pivoting away from their troubled core business and, I think, troubled because people are very privacy focused, but also because nobody under the age of 40 uses meta anymore. Right, it's not, it's. Facebook. I mean I think that part of the issue, yeah.
0:13:51 - Paris Martineau
Is that nobody really uses the core Facebook app, or at least young people are not using it, and my prediction is that Instagram will eventually go the same way, and you can see it based on the way that Instagram is starting to resemble the Facebook app. It's bloated with features. Every time I open it, I get a new pop-up telling me to do something with AI or try this feature or click over here. It is feeling more and more like the Facebook menus of yore more and more like the Facebook menus of yore, which is, I don't know, kind of sad, because the app used to be very much against visual clutter back in its heyday.
0:14:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is a shame. I liked Instagram. I think that they suffered severely from TikTok envy as well.
0:14:44 - Paris Martineau
Right, and became TikTok and a million other that they suffered severely from tiktok envy as well, right, and became tiktok as twitter and a million other things.
0:14:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah and and yeah, um, but. But I think what mark is basically implied? They talked about horizons and showed off horizons, their social operating system that you do in vr, and I think that he, he, despite what we might have thought, he is still all in on VR and virtual environments.
0:15:13 - Paris Martineau
Well, it's hard not to be when you've spent as many tens of hundreds of millions, of billions, as he has.
0:15:21 - Jeff Jarvis
But I think my argument is constantly that I think Meta AI is the sleeper here. I think Lama is good. The fact that it's open and free and open or open freely available. Call it that he's a spoiler and I think that's going to be important. They talked a lot about it, ai guy.
0:15:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they talked a lot about Lama. He didn't use it was interesting. He didn't use the phrase, which I kind of faulted him for of open this being the open source. Ai, uh, I don't.
0:15:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think he said open source at all well, that also has cooties now, because people are fearing that's how bad guys will use it.
0:16:00 - Leo Laporte
So you want to call it something else, it's open availability, or whatever they call it. He did claim I don't know if there's a way of justifying this, but he claimed it was the most used AI today.
0:16:10 - Jeff Jarvis
It's free Cause it's free, so is.
0:16:12 - Leo Laporte
Gemini yeah, but it's odd. But but I mean I have llama on a on computers and stuff because you can download it and you can use the models, uh free locally. I mean I don't know if it's true, he said it, I wonder where that's coming from.
0:16:26 - Paris Martineau
I wonder if that's weasel words somehow related there was a weasel word you know, uh, he said is embedded in instagram search, so is it technically doing an ai powered search when I type in uh, leo laporte's instagram handle, maybe?
0:16:43 - Leo Laporte
maybe he does claim there'll be a lot more AI. In Instagram, Stephen is asking in our Twitch stream what's Lama? We shouldn't assume everybody knows what Lama is. Lama is Meta's large language model, their AI comparable to what Apple Intelligence is, or Google's Gemini or what else Anthropic OpenAI's ChatGPT. Lama's the meta version of that. And very similar. It's an LLM, it's very similar. Get it LLM, l-l-m-a. Anyway, the most interesting thing to me was that how honestly I felt like Mark was very authentic.
0:17:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, I think he's, he's well, he's also. You know, I'm done with politics. It's a real apologizing. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm me now. Yeah, and to hell with all of you. I'm rich, I'm doing what I want to do and that's that. So he's really.
0:17:40 - Leo Laporte
He gives no f's and while apple is, you know, highly polished, pre-produced product releases uh, this was very much down to earth. He's talking to developers. As a developer, I kind of liked it. It was refreshing.
0:17:54 - Jeff Jarvis
This is vaguely old.
0:17:56 - Leo Laporte
You have not liked him for a long time. No, I think he's rehabilitated. I thought this was his rehabilitation.
0:18:01 - Paris Martineau
He spent a lot of money rehabbing his public persona, and it's through things like these outfits he's wearing the photos and videos you've seen of him doing dorky stuff, like being on that sunfoil or grilling meats. This has all been part of a carefully orchestrated attempt to rehab his image, and folks the New York Times, including Mike Isaac, have reported, I believe, quite a bit on this and it seems to be working. People like you are suddenly pro-Zuck again.
0:18:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Enamored of him. Oh, I'm not enamored of him? Did you take a walk?
0:18:34 - Leo Laporte
on the beach with Zuck. No, I just I feel like, well, does it? Does he deserve a second chance? I think so Paris? Yeah, I mean, I don't look, paris is silent.
0:18:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris is, she's getting a feeling Paris disagrees yeah.
0:18:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean I don't know like a second chance for what?
0:19:01 - Leo Laporte
Because, well, for so long we've kind of made fun of him changed about him?
0:19:07 - Paris Martineau
he's still a billionaire tech ceo in charge of a product that is highly controversial, beholden to shareholders in ways that are that often, um put it, its interests, uh, perhaps not always in alignment with those of its users.
0:19:27 - Jeff Jarvis
But he's 100 times better than Elon Musk. Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, that's the thing.
0:19:34 - Paris Martineau
Comparing him to the worst guys.
0:19:37 - Jeff Jarvis
The worst guys are the guys on top. He ain't the worst guy by a long shot. Now, that's the point. People were trying to paint him as the worst guy. No, no, no, no, no. There's far worse than Zuck.
0:19:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, I mean, Zuck was also involved in some pretty terrible stuff like Myanmar and things like that.
0:19:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and so in fact, somebody in our, by the way, that's Benito Gonzalez, our technical producer, and actually full producer and technical what do you call it? Technical director, switch pusher, he's the guy who's switching the show. Uh, as somebody did say in one of the streams during the meta connect thing is yeah, as long as you forget the uh genocide, uh, in myanmar. Do you think facebook has moved past that?
0:20:16 - Paris Martineau
I think they've tried they're really trying to move past it they just canceled rt, right they?
0:20:22 - Leo Laporte
They pushed RT off of Meta off Facebook.
0:20:26 - Jeff Jarvis
But again, I think it's a very important moment when he said I'm done with politics. I'm not doing politics, I'm done apologizing. He's been saying that the last few weeks and he's basically just saying take me as I am, this is what we do, this is what I care about. I have the resources to do what I want, and I think that he's probably wishing he'd done that long ago he also.
0:20:45 - Leo Laporte
At the end he stated the company values and he, uh, oh, that's kind of new. Yeah, I, I, I really feel like I want to give him credit. Maybe, maybe it is all a pr plan and all of that stuff. Certainly there's been things that facebook's done that are appalling. Uh, the thing he's doing in hawaii ain't so great buying up the ancestral lands secretly and to build his giant I don't know what hidey hole, uh, but I think he is trying hard to be. You know, he they. Once again, let me see if I could find the statement of values, because I thought they were pretty good. Yeah, I'd like, I'd like to see that. Yeah, and the fact that he even talked about, uh, values what's is this?
0:21:29 - Jeff Jarvis
move fast. We build and learn faster than anyone else.
0:21:32 - Leo Laporte
No, no, that's the thing he. He kind of dumped that whole, move fast and okay and break things that's still what culture admitted. It's still up, so I guess he's got yeah, but well, maybe he needs to fix that.
0:21:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Update the website.
0:21:46 - Leo Laporte
Let me see if there's a lot of coverage of this, mostly of his shirt. That's the problem with doing something like that right. You get a lot of attention for your shirt and not what you're saying.
0:21:56 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's probably what he wanted also, is it?
0:21:59 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I think he, you know, maybe I'm misreading him, but I genuinely felt like one of the things he wanted to emphasize is look, we're making a product that's better and he said it better than Apple's Vision Pro at a tenth of the cost. We're bringing VR to people. We believe connection is important to people. I think he's always believed that We've decided to offer this even less expensive, expensive quest 3s, which is the same price as the original quest 2 299.99. Um, they're adding features to the ray-ban glasses and he really he said uh, you know, I wish I could get the exact quote at the end I I'd love to hear that yeah, I'll tell you what.
Let me, I can find scrub through the video. Yeah, I could find the event. We we unfortunately decided not to, as we usually do when we cover these kinds of things not to stream their video, but just to stream micah and me talking about their video, asking people to watch it in hindsight.
0:23:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, because they've been trying to take you guys down for covering these sort of things Apple has, yeah, which is ridiculous. Yeah, it's a PR event for Christ's sakes Like what.
0:23:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's also fair use. I mean, we're doing news commentary on a newsworthy story.
Now, to be fair, Facebook's not said anything, I just. But we've had such trouble with Twitch and YouTube. I don't want to get banned forever, and that's the threat both Twitch and YouTube offer, so I don't want to do that. Let me see if I can find here. It is Mark's vision. Go ahead to the no, no, no. This is after Mark left A lot of people pretending to be. I do like this. Let me see if I can. He's talking about some of the things you can do. This is the Orion glasses that they're building top of mixed reality Generation.
0:24:09 - Mark Zuckerberg
You can have what looks like normal-looking glasses. You're looking at the culmination of decades.
0:24:13 - Leo Laporte
Is this a cut down? Oh, it is. That's the problem. This is a five-minute. Oh. I don't want a cut down. Screw the mission no no, that's the fault.
0:24:22 - Benito Gonzalez
That's the fault.
0:24:25 - Leo Laporte
Is Screw the mission?
0:24:26 - Speaker 5
No, no that's the full. That's the full, is it? Let me play it again then I guess it is.
0:24:34 - Leo Laporte
It wouldn't be having a countdown at the beginning of a cut down. God, we cut away a lot earlier, didn't we? He did exactly an hour. So let me go into Hours.
0:24:48 - Mark Zuckerberg
There he is by the way, don't you think he did exactly? An hour so let me go into hours. There he is, by the way. Don't you think he's cute speaking?
0:24:53 - Leo Laporte
of ai and glasses. Um, oh, there was open source ai. It was on the wall. I missed that.
0:24:58 - Mark Zuckerberg
No working on the future and like I'm sitting on your couch next to you as a hologram and we're just the manufacturer they're calling these holograms, by the way great, another misused sci-fi term.
0:25:16 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, so we are going to use I assume we just have a list of sci-fi terms kicking around and they throw a dart at one every year and they're like which one are we going to do today?
0:25:25 - Mark Zuckerberg
that we need to, but we're also going to work with a handful of partners externally to make sure that we I don't know if I can find his values I'll look for the future and like I don't remember that part of technology. There is competition of ideas for what the future should look like and at meta, this is trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible. This is it.
0:26:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Open accessible natural human connection.
0:26:07 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well then, collectively, us at Meta and all of you here today have the ability to shape both the industry and the world in even more positive and bigger ways in the next generation of computers.
0:26:20 - Leo Laporte
Except that his damn shirt says Zuck or nothing. I would buy it, except for that you know, zuck, maybe consider your choices and saying hold on for all of you who are building with us.
0:26:33 - Mark Zuckerberg
Thank you for being on this journey with kind of a jack dorsey.
0:26:36 - Leo Laporte
I hope you enjoy the rest of it is kind of a up yours, but you know, I was pretty much impressed, uh, by vision, weren't you? I mean, it seemed, of course. Now this is going to, we're going to take a break, and this is going to take us to Sam Altman's piece about AI, and there's two me's on this and I bet there is on you too, one where I want to believe and say, yeah, you're right, this is great. This is a new world we're entering where we could be connected and we could be positive and yeah, that's just a PR ploy to make yourself a billionaire or more money, you know.
0:27:11 - Jeff Jarvis
But the difference is that the Alban and we'll talk about this when you get to Alban but I think he's a, he's a doomer and he's presenting this I'm going to be in charge of the whole world. Zuck is saying I'm not gonna be in charge of the whole world this is what we're gonna do and use it, don't use it.
0:27:32 - Leo Laporte
This is where we are, I think that's a huge difference, I think. I think so you're kind of more in my camp that this is a reformed news up well we'll talk about that. Scares me some and yeah, we were. Let's talk about this sam altman piece, which I think we probably could read in in its entirety, because it's not very long.
0:27:44 - Jeff Jarvis
There's also a great TechCrunch analysis of it, of what's believable and what's hype. Okay, really well done.
0:27:50 - Leo Laporte
That's a good way to go through it. We'll get to that in just a second. You're watching this Week in Google Jeff Jarvis, paris Martineau, brought to you today by Bitwarden. Hey, there they are. I like that. Do that again. That was good. Whoa. What was the? What was the? Wasn't there a meme where there was a hamster who was scared?
0:28:14 - Paris Martineau
Like a meerkat or something. Yeah.
0:28:16 - Leo Laporte
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0:31:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So what's the? Sarah Perez takes it, takes it into slices and she says he catapults past founder mode into God mode which is really true.
0:31:26 - Leo Laporte
With his latest post. First of all, why did Sam Altman write this and post it?
0:31:31 - Jeff Jarvis
He's raising $8 billion on $150 billion valuation. He's raising hundreds of billions of dollars for his worldwide world. Yeah. That's why he's doing it so um.
0:31:49 - Paris Martineau
We're in a generation now also, where the top CEOs of these tech companies are all posters. They've all got poster brain, and this is Sam Altman's post.
0:32:03 - Leo Laporte
Did Mark Andreessen start this, jeff? I mean, he certainly was one of the people who wrote these. They're practically manifestos. But I have to say, as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, yeah, I don't disagree. Testos. But I have to say, as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, yeah, I don't disagree. Sam writes in the next couple of decades, we'll be able to do things that would seem like magic to our grandparents. I saw one snarky comment that, oh yeah, I just taken that from. Uh, um, was it isaac asimov's a statement that any, uh, any, uh, sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic?
0:32:34 - Paris Martineau
okay, but it's true. Grandmother probably didn't know what the internet was before she died a couple years ago. I don't think the internet would be magic to her the thing.
0:32:45 - Leo Laporte
What we're doing right now would seem magic. Oh yeah, yeah to people 100 years ago. You are in new york city, jeff's in new jersey, I'm in california, and we're sitting together talking about something and broadcasting not one of us can actually explain what, how this all works and we don't know how it works, and I have no interest in figuring it out ignorance is magic
so I think sam's absolutely right we are going, we already are, and in the next few decades we'll be able to continue to do things that would seem like magic. This phenomenon is not new, he says, but it will be newly accelerated. This is the thing. That is certainly what people like Sam Altman, the CEO and founder of OpenAI, have been pushing. With AI, people have become dramatically more capable. People have become dramatically more capable. People have become dramatically more capable over time. We can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible. We're more capable and this, to me, was the paragraph I really thought was interesting not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society, being way smarter and way more capable than any one of us, and this speaks to what you were saying, benito. We don't need to know how a television set works or a car or a jet airplane works. We benefit because of the infrastructure society provides us. Same with a steam engine, yes, but yes, same with a Steam.
0:34:12 - Paris Martineau
Engine isn't smarter than a person. It is better at a specific task.
0:34:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Same here.
0:34:22 - Leo Laporte
I do Well okay. So, that might be the thing that has changed over the last hundred years. I think some of the things we're seeing, it's not inappropriate to call them. You know, the infrastructure of society is smarter and more capable, he says. In an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence.
0:34:45 - Jeff Jarvis
That's David Weinberger's argument, that the room is smarter than anyone in it, the internet. I think that's true. I think that's true, but I think that's been true of society for a long time. Print led us there. But don't let it get me started on Gutenberg Language led us there, yes, of course.
0:35:03 - Speaker 5
The tribe is better at hunting the elk than one guy.
0:35:07 - Paris Martineau
Yes, this has been the process of human. Part of what we're about to get to in. This is the folly, I think, of this mindset is centering the technology rather than centering the creators of the technology and the users of the technology. The next paragraph says it won't wait, wait, wait, stop stop stop, I haven't finished this paragraph.
0:35:29 - Leo Laporte
Our grandparents and the generations that came before them I'll let you do the next one. Our, our parent grandparents and the generations that came before them I'll let you do the next one. Our parents, grandparents and the generations that came before them built and achieved great things, so they're saying exactly what you guys are saying. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. Ai. Now this is where we start to make this transition. Ai will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn't have figured out on our own. This is the first statement in the whole thing that you might say whoa, hold on, really.
Yeah, and you have folded proteins and new molecules and, yeah, the story of progress will continue, he says, and our children will be able to do things we can't Right. Ever, thus Okay, ever thus Go ahead.
0:36:19 - Paris Martineau
It won't happen all at once, but we'll soon be able to work with AI.
That helps us accomplish much more than we could without AI, all right. And then we get into what I would consider a crazy town. Eventually we can each have a personal AI team full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personal instruction in any subject, in any language, at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better health care, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more. There's a lot of hand-waving going on there and I also just don't think that those are going to be as realistic and as easy as this paragraph implies. And that's kind of the core complaint a lot of uh, I guess ai complainers. How about this sort of guy?
0:37:07 - Jeff Jarvis
well, it was a personal ai team and also you know I've been talking I think you also, though.
0:37:13 - Leo Laporte
If you want to reach the future, you have to have a vision for the future that isn't yet here. Is that not a reasonable? Thing to aim at.
0:37:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Not necessarily. Sorry, I'm going to do it again because it comes from my brain, but Gutenberg had. No, he was a man of the scriber's age. He was not a man of the print age. Oftentimes, when you create these new technologies, you don't know how they will be used.
You don't have a vision for them, you create a possibility that others see. It took a century and a half after Gutenberg before anyone thought to invent the modern novel or the essay or the newspaper Newton said, if I have seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
0:37:51 - Leo Laporte
Everybody does that. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have the correct vision, but you do need to be inspired to be doing something. Gutenberg may not be the best example. Maybe Edison would be a better example, or Tesla, or I can go through lots of things, where Edison thought that newspapers were going to be delivered on audio rolls right? Yes, that's fine, he doesn't have to be right.
0:38:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Thought the typewriter was ridiculous. Edison wasn't right about a lot of it, but he created tremendous opportunity. That's right, that's what. I'm saying he doesn't have to be right, he didn't have the vision he had the technology, and then what happens is inevitably the technology. The technologists become boring and fade into the background, and that's when it gets interesting. That's when people create things that the creators didn't imagine.
0:38:36 - Paris Martineau
I agree, and I think that part of what we're bumping up against here with trying to parse documents and statements like this from someone like Sam Altman is he is raising billions of dollars based on this sort of hype and he is getting that money versus other people who have ideas and thoughts about the future, and I think that that requires us to take a critical lens to his ideas, his approach to it. He is not just some guy with a dream. He's not just some guy with a dream. He is a guy who documents like this are getting him all of the money in the world for this sort of research and work and all of the power to do whatever he wants with it. So I do think that inherently means he should be open to criticism of the highest order.
0:39:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And we need to. It's our job to mark the hype. That's what I liked about the TechCrunch thing is that it figured out the hype where it was. If you go to that paragraph Paris, I think you know. Being able virtual tutors, personalized instruction yeah, in any subject, maybe not In any language. Yeah, we know that. At whatever pace they need, yeah, right, so it's a mixed bag, but you get that phrase like uh, full of virtual, an ai team full of virtual experts in different areas, as means well, so part of the reason this discussion I brought this up is because I want to contract, compare and contrast to the vision mark zuckerberg uh proposed, uh earlier.
0:40:14 - Leo Laporte
Mark Zuckerberg proposed earlier.
0:40:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, maybe Sam is a little self-aggrandizing compared to what Mark yeah, yeah.
0:40:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, keep going, keep going, it goes more Okay. With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity. This is where this is where it starts. It starts getting a little test reality we have. We can have shared prosperity to, to a chicken in every pot, kids to a degree that seems unimaginable today. In the future, everyone's lives could be better than anyone's life is now. Now, if you think about it, jeff and paris, we live as kings do these days. We've got got running water, hot and cold, we don't have to go outside to go to the bathroom, we can watch TV. I mean, in some ways we do live not all of us, and I think it's a mistake to say all of us yeah, that's the issue.
0:41:07 - Jeff Jarvis
He's arguing for shared prosperity, with no basis for that argument.
0:41:12 - Leo Laporte
Prosperity alone doesn't necessarily make people happy.
0:41:20 - Benito Gonzalez
There are plenty of miserable rich people, oh, but it would mean the lives of people around the world. Hey wait, so he's asking for 150 billion dollars so that we can all have money.
0:41:26 - Leo Laporte
That doesn't make any sense well, you have to spend the money just no, no, wait a minute, it's trickle down technology no, no, no you have to spend the money. Yeah, he's even a minute, it's trickle down technology no, no, no, you have to spend the money yeah. He's even said maybe it's going to cost a trillion dollars to create a true yeah, but once you give me the trillion dollars, you guys will be fine, that's right exactly exactly.
Well, mightn't you be. Here's one narrow way to look at human history. After that he writes after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision, at extraordinarily tiny scale, into computer chips, run energy through it and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence. He's describing, of course, the computer chip revolution.
0:42:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you AT&T Bell Labs.
0:42:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. I don't disagree with him on that.
0:42:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I mean, yeah, I disagree, I think it's consequential, but I think it's consequential along others in history Paris.
0:42:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think it's a disrespect to Mr Gutenberg out there.
0:42:40 - Leo Laporte
And all those who've written about him. Yes, thank you very all right. Okay, well, we don't have to grade each invention all right it's possible, we'll have super intelligent. This is, by the way, this is the headline that everybody reported on. It's possible. We will have a super intelligence within a few thousand days.
0:42:51 - Paris Martineau
That's essentially it, let's all do the look again.
0:42:57 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like sooner. What it sounds like sooner, but it's really the next 10 years, is what he's saying.
0:43:03 - Jeff Jarvis
No, what the F does super intelligence even mean? That's the hype of hype, the BS of BS. I watched an entire half day AI hype conference this week of academics presenting their papers and one guy said that he I don't know who he was quoting. He was quoting somebody else he'd just seen from a university who said one of the mistakes is we call it intelligence. We should have called it fancy math. And then if you thought, well, fancy math, did that, fancy math, did that. It wouldn't be so bad when we call it intelligence, when the anthropomorphize it to that extent. And then we say it's super intelligence, it's greater than us. And then we say we're going to get there in a thousand days and I'm going to bring it to you if you're giving us money. That is all bs. I'm confident we'll get there I'm not.
0:43:46 - Leo Laporte
Do you think that what human brain does is in some way significantly different than, uh, what a computer can do?
0:43:53 - Paris Martineau
yes, because we don't even know what a human brain does.
0:43:57 - Jeff Jarvis
That's good we.
0:43:58 - Leo Laporte
It is so unfathomably complex to us that we cannot figure out what it is just a deterministic machine that is hard for us to understand, but it's just a machine.
0:44:11 - Paris Martineau
I don't think there's a lot of evidence that it's anything beyond the machine will be able to somehow recreate that without having any understanding about how the machine works in the first place well, he says deep learning has been the surprise right that that's actually worked, and um not with accuracy, not with with with arithmetic.
0:44:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I had a discussion with Jason on AI Inside today, where he brought up a new Google thing about quantum computing, and they've done something to make it more accurate. But quantum computing, as you've explained to me, leo, is inherently close enough inexact. It's not a logic gate that says 1 plus 1 equals 2. Large language models and generative AI are similar. They are random, by choice. They are never exact, and so the interesting thing to me is that's what makes them more like the human brain, because we expected computers to be exact, and now computers are getting more like us in the sense that they are less exacting computers are getting more like us in the sense that they are less exacting.
0:45:17 - Leo Laporte
I I think we need somebody like sam altman to posit this vision. It's fine for people to shoot at him now uh as as um as you are and uh as uh sarah perez does in her tech crunch piece but I think it's good that somebody is there saying If you didn't have all this test trail BS behind them.
0:45:40 - Paris Martineau
Then why are all of the top executives at OpenAI leaving?
0:45:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, another one today.
0:45:48 - Paris Martineau
Mira Murady, the CTO of OpenAI, resigned today and no one really knows why. It was a complete shock to employees. Well, that's the problem. Is we?
0:45:55 - Leo Laporte
don't know right, she was the interim CEO when Sam was deposed.
You know he says at the end, if you were a lamplighter, you know, fast forwarded into today's world, you would see prosperity all around you. Maybe not if you went down lamplighter. You know, fast forwarded into today's world, you would see prosperity all around you. Maybe not in the if you went down a skid row, but you would see something pretty amazing. I think that's true. If you took your great grandparents and brought them in the 21st century, they would. They would be kind of boggled by what they saw People flying through the air.
0:46:34 - Jeff Jarvis
But let's look at the, at the amount of change that happened around 1900. Um, either side of that is is is unbelievable right transportation that couldn't have existed before.
0:46:46 - Leo Laporte
Broadcasting to the whole world, film recording things, you know, I, I even I'm researching my next book do you not think that the technological advances of the last 200 years are far outpaced the ones, uh, of the let me pick a different thousand years.
0:47:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me go back to the previous turn of the century, and I think those were more momentous. Let me just give you one example the word photograph. I didn't realize that that that, um, stenographers were called phonographers. Why? Because they were the only mechanism of recording spoken words. Think about that for a second. There was no other mechanism for recording spoken words than writing them down. Why is the phonograph named the phonograph? It's because it replaced what the humans did, because it was that new right. Isn't that cool.
But if you think about that, that you could not record anything, you could draw it. Here comes the camera and here comes the phonograph, and suddenly there's an entirely different view of reality, that you can record it and have a different sense of verity in front of you. That's huge. You could never go faster than your horse could go. Now you can go really fast. Now you can run machines. Now you can do things. You could never print more than 4,000 newspapers in a day, because that's all you could pull off the press. Now you could do hundreds of thousands and millions, and on and on and on. And so I think that the changes were more fundamental than Leo.
0:48:18 - Paris Martineau
I do think that that's an interesting point. It is completely reality altering to go from a world where you couldn't capture someone's voice, you wouldn't be able to communicate with someone over long distances. Be able to communicate with someone over long distances, broadcast, is not something you're even able to conceive of to those all being relatively commonplace among the middle class. I think that that is the sort of fundamental leap we're also, you know, seeing in a way over the last couple of decades hundred years we've been in, certainly, but it is somewhat less drastic because it is improvements upon already existing technologies for us, yes, and they're marked improvements, impressive improvements, but yeah.
0:49:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you're right, paris, and he's trying to tie it to this idea that this is going to bring prosperity to all, which I think is also just deeply laughable, coming from a man who has raised a truly eye-watering amount of venture capital and lives in prosperity.
0:49:32 - Paris Martineau
The idea that for the average person in America much less the average low-income or impoverished person in America that Sam Altman raising billions of dollars is going to meaningfully improve their life in any way is laughable.
0:49:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but his hubris is so extreme. It's not only about that, but he says, if I may continue, but it's a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems. I can see him pounding the desk. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale. That's a big thing too. Give you a lot of money to make it bigger and there are those who disagree with him, from the Stochastic Parrots paper, for example and that that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.
And then he goes on with more. Ai models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants to carry out specific tasks on behalf of, like coordinating medical care on your behalf. So you throw in those kinds of anecdotal things and say, okay, yeah, look at, look at the amazing, look around you and you see it. But it's but, but the the ego of this to think that he could deliver this. And, by the way, he's not a technologist, he's an investor he's a money raiser.
0:50:50 - Leo Laporte
yeah, somebody's got to do that job, understood? Uh, I don't think there's any harm in letting Sam Altman say these things and try to raise the money. And if there are billionaires out there, because he's not going to get the money from you and me, he's going to get the money from people who already have a lot of money.
0:51:06 - Jeff Jarvis
He's going to use it to go to Washington DC. He's going to get policy changed. And behind all this and you even said, test reality on your own, Leo, God bless you. I want to kiss you for a drink You've taken it on now. Is that what's behind that is eugenics.
0:51:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's not a good thing, obviously.
0:51:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No, and that's what, that's what must, maybe obvious and Sam is more subtle about.
0:51:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it may be better to focus on taking money out of politics then, so that these people don't have a disproportionate influence, amen, on our society. Uh, but I think it's fine, for you know, the railroads got built by capitalists. Uh, most of them went bankrupt, but we at least got the, got the rails laid um, I mean, how many people died for those railroads? Well, that's the nature. People are going to die anyway. It's the nature of life. People die, right.
0:52:02 - Benito Gonzalez
Should you not build the railroads A disproportionate amount of Chinese people died by the way.
0:52:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was going to say largely immigrants died and I don't know. I just think we should try and be better.
0:52:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad we built the railroads, yeah, but we could have built them better.
0:52:21 - Speaker 5
That's the question we could have built them without killing a lot of people.
0:52:24 - Benito Gonzalez
Was that the only way?
0:52:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now. A defining characteristic of the intelligence age will be massive prosperity. That is starting to sound like Krupp in 1933. Right, that's what's disturbing.
0:52:48 - Leo Laporte
To basically armed Germany Right, so I, yeah, ok. Armed germany, right, so I, I, yeah, okay. So I mean, there there are. There are things that we would not like to have happen, but at the same time, I think that we have to have a excitement and vision for what technology can bring us and not say, uh, we already been down this road it's not as great as who and how.
0:53:11 - Benito Gonzalez
Isn't that the job mostly of fiction?
0:53:13 - Leo Laporte
that's the job of fiction yeah, well, in fact, that's what's happened. Is that all these guys are doing is spouting fiction that inspired them. But honestly, we probably wouldn't have gone to the moon without fiction. I mean, and what have we gained going to the moon?
0:53:27 - Benito Gonzalez
There's a lot of people who said we shouldn't have gone to the moon. It's not people like Sam Altman. It's not people like Sam Altman. It's not people like Sam Altman who has those visions, it's people like Gene Roddenberry.
0:53:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but Gene Roddenberry had a TV show. He did not create, a company he did not create.
0:53:41 - Benito Gonzalez
AI. He inspired the creation Sure.
0:53:44 - Leo Laporte
that's how it has ever again, as it always has been Art inspires, and then people bring it to life. That's what art does. I'm not against that. But Gene Roddenberry is not an industrialist, those guys I mean. Isaac Asimov wrote a lot of great books, but he had inspired a lot of people, including, apparently, sam Allman. But that doesn't mean that Sam Allman doesn't have a role. We're not going to let the book authors invent the future.
0:54:16 - Jeff Jarvis
But go back to your original question. At this point, would I prefer Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? I'll take Mark Zuckerberg and I'll take Jan LeCun over OpenAI.
0:54:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm starting to get soured on Jan LeCun. I'll be honest, I think he's one of those guys who is making his name by saying nay?
0:54:38 - Jeff Jarvis
What say nay? He's the one who's putting AI in more hands than anyone else by making it open. That's true.
0:54:43 - Leo Laporte
He's the scientist behind. Lama yeah, yeah, okay, which one would you take?
0:54:50 - Jeff Jarvis
He certainly knows more about AI than I do.
0:54:52 - Leo Laporte
I'm not saying that, harris?
0:54:54 - Jeff Jarvis
you have no choice. You are stuck. You must decide. There's a future to be built, there's money behind it. No choice. You can't prevaricate. Is it Musk or is it Altman?
0:55:05 - Leo Laporte
Musk or Altman. No, no, no.
0:55:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Musk, I'm sorry. I'm sorry Zuck, zuck or Altman.
0:55:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that was a 40s, zuck, zuck or altman. Yeah, musk is at the end. I mean, I would say journalistically, I would say zuck because he seems to be more of a known quantity, has kind of a group of advisors around him. His thinking behind key decisions seems to be known. Altman is more of an enigma.
0:55:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you think Musk has learned any lessons? I mean, why do I say Musk again? Do you think Zuck has learned any lessons through all the troubles, or do you think he has?
0:55:44 - Leo Laporte
better PR people. By the way, it was Arthur C Clarke.
0:55:47 - Paris Martineau
I think a big part of that is probably better PR people, but I think he's learned a lot of lessons. How could you not being raked over the coals in front of Congress having a? I think something that has been coming to mind as we've been talking about this is Zuck used to be the sort of idealist that we're talking about with Altman, where he's making huge declarations positioning his company as the future of everything, um casting himself as a great man leading the world and it's its next generation of technological innovation.
That led to him getting too close to the sun. His wax wings burnt and he ended up being raked over the coals in congress for god knows how many years. And now he's like like I'm done, I'm out, I'm stepping back the company. Facebook, meta, instagram, all this is still doing the same sort of thing, but his approach to it is a lot more mindful. He is taking a backseat as a public figure, in a way that CEOs of yore typically do, because that is how you do not attract the ire of regulators. I think that leadership in all of its forms is a performance, and we're seeing two different sides of it right now, and I guess that Zucks is more of cultivated, I suppose.
0:57:17 - Leo Laporte
But in most cases their performances. That's a very good insight.
0:57:21 - Jeff Jarvis
That's really good, and I think about it too. So Nick Clegg is now a major power at Meta.
0:57:28 - Paris Martineau
Has been, but increasingly so.
0:57:31 - Jeff Jarvis
He's president of global affairs. He's trained Zuck in how to be politic and deal with politics and meanwhile the last CEO COO left. I wonder whether that's a change. Yeah, sandberg, thank you Whether that's a change that was significant in all of this and the new Zuck that she was.
0:57:54 - Paris Martineau
All business clagg is is more about policy and politics and how to play that I think I mean I believe, like cecilia kang and I'm sure frankl wrote an interesting article about this a couple years ago that, uh, it ended up I mean, this is part of what happened around the time zuck's uh fire burned out. Um, it was he and cheryl sandberg were being raked over the coals by regulators. Their names were becoming closer to a household names in terms of attracting the ire of the american and global public. They were being brought in front of regulators around the globe and, at a certain point, what had become what had for a while been a very close working relationship became a rivalry and Sandberg lost, and so she ended up being the one pushed out and kind of took the fall for it in a way. She left and someone else has risen in her stead, and that's just how the game is played and it's not the revenue person who rose, it's a politician, former deputy prime minister.
0:59:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, by the way. Yeah, which makes sense, it's uh deaf, it's politics, it's performance yeah, yeah, leg was in the news this week for criticizing the current prime minister, rishi sun, for wasting a lot of time.
0:59:18 - Jeff Jarvis
He's not the current prime minister. Oh, I'm sorry, former prime minister Rishi Sunak.
0:59:21 - Leo Laporte
I know it's so hard to keep up. It is.
0:59:25 - Jeff Jarvis
All these lettuce heads go by.
0:59:28 - Leo Laporte
Sunak had a summit focusing on AI safety and Nick said I think we wasted a huge amount of time going down blind alleys assuming that this technology was going to eliminate humanity. We're all going to be zapped by a robot with glowing red eyes.
0:59:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Where did clint say that.
0:59:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's, that's wonderful, he said in a podcast uh released on thursday um, this was the november bletchley Park Summit that Sunak had, focusing on AI risks to national security. I don't have a problem with investigating that I think that's fine.
1:00:04 - Jeff Jarvis
No, this is again where the test grail has got us is, they have redefined safety as this side of doom, as opposed to current environmental harm, current labor harm, current energy harm, current hubris of this sort, and so they've ruined the sense of safety. So the politicians and the policymakers who are able to come along and say, oh, we're going to, we're talking about safety, oh yeah, let's get the doomers here.
1:00:34 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break, and then I want the AI to have a conversation about Jeff's new book, the web we weave from basic books. Is it in the bookstores now? No, it'll be October 8th. October 8th, just a couple of weeks away. Our show today, brought to you by and I mean quite literally brought to you by our good friends at CacheFly.
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We did, and that was a lifesaver. CacheFly we did, and that was a lifesaver. CacheFly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you to shield your site content in the cloud. We've been doing that since before they offered this to the public and it's amazing 100% cash hit ratio. I love that. With CacheFly's elite managed packages, you'll always get the VIP treatment we always do. Your dedicated account manager is with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24-7 support when you need it. We love CacheFly. We know you will, too. Learn how you can get your first month free at CacheFly.com slash twit rcdn. I know you know this because I've said it for years at the beginning of every show. Bandwidth for this week in google is provided by CacheFly at c-a-c-h-e-f-l-ycom slash twit. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, CacheFly, for making everything we do possible. So, uh, notebook lm, which we, when, when they came out, we actually had one of the designers on.
Thanks to you, Stephen Johnson. It's Google's notebook that ingests content and then delivers summaries. You had it do a podcast.
1:03:46 - Jeff Jarvis
So, stephen Johnson, so they came up with a new feature, which is that you can create an audio dialogue in the AI about it. Stephen Johnson put his entire book into it. So I did the same thing, Final proofs oh interesting. So this is all AI generated. It's all AI generated.
1:04:05 - Paris Martineau
It thinks that Jeff's book is called Final Proofs.
1:04:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Because that was the name of the file I put into it.
1:04:11 - AI
Oh, All the craziness we deal with today. I like it, and he argues that the internet itself isn't the villain.
1:04:18 - Benito Gonzalez
Can you turn it up a little bit Lou? It's more like a mirror, like reflecting.
1:04:23 - Leo Laporte
I have it as loud as I can go, I think let's see. I can't get any louder. You get the idea, though it really sounds like us.
1:04:40 - Speaker 5
That's crazy it replaces us, and, and, and it's about how long is it there what
1:04:44 - Leo Laporte
does it say uh, let's see nine minutes and he points yeah, nine minutes 52 seconds.
1:04:48 - AI
The internet for, like you know, spreading misinformation or eroding trust. It's giggling. It's a good summary, is it accurate?
1:04:58 - Jeff Jarvis
All in all, yes, it's interestingly structured. It's not obvious, it's not like, well, then he says and then he says and then he says no, it synthesized the content in an interesting way. Now I put it in once. I think it was very good, it was very impressive. I put it in again. It wasn't so good. I thought there was a bunch of articles, ah.
1:05:19 - Leo Laporte
So now you did it with Paris's collection works.
1:05:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I did two. I did one where I took seven articles that were in the rundown last week on AI and put it in. Then I decided to do the Paris version, where I took her oomph about her new beat. So there was one, I think four stories, oh, and I had to make PDFs of each story easy. Just put it in, wow, and then put it in. So here's the Paris show.
1:05:44 - AI
That's a phrase that makes you think of robot teachers and kids writing essays with a blank. That's funny, right? There was a lot of fear when tools like chat gpt came out like everyone was worried about the future of learning, but what's happening in schools today is way more complicated than that. We've got a bunch of research, do you?
1:06:02 - Paris Martineau
recognize the article this is based on yes, yeah, I mean it's just very funny that it's got like a cold it's so natural yes, yeah, these articles you name it that paint an interesting picture.
1:06:15 - AI
So let's dive deep into AI and education. Initially, yeah, there was a lot of fear, and rightfully so. I remember those articles from the Atlantic and Inside Higher Ed Teachers this is not good this puts us out of business. Jeff, yeah.
1:06:28 - Leo Laporte
This is better than anything we could do.
1:06:30 - Paris Martineau
Why are we out here at 7 pm at night doing this guys?
1:06:33 - Leo Laporte
No kidding, bye, they're giggling they're laughing.
1:06:37 - AI
They're saying AI was like a pig, they're saying, like you know, worrying about the death of critical thinking and all that.
1:06:42 - AI
Yeah, it's interesting, though right this fear. It always comes up with new tech and education or the Internet, Even letting kids have cell phones in class.
1:06:57 - Leo Laporte
Every time there's anxiety and, to be fair, the worries about jobs and critical thinking. She sounds nice. I'd like to get to know her. He's pretty friendly sounding too. Yeah, so did Stephen explain how they're doing this? Are they? Those are real human voices that they've ingested.
1:07:10 - Paris Martineau
I don't know how they do the technology.
1:07:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, must have been ours. I don't know how they do the technology.
1:07:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, must have been ours. The thing about Notebook LM is that it's fairly rag-based in the sense that it doesn't go off in making up stuff all over, but it obviously uses context and brings context into that discussion. It's pretty damned amazing.
1:07:31 - Leo Laporte
This is Stephen's post actually not Stephen's from Biao Wang Notebook. Lm now lets you listen to conversations about your sources, so you provide it with what is the limit? You said the word rag retrieval, augmented generation. It's when you take documents and feed them to an LLM and then ask it to summarize. What is the limit of the number of documents?
1:07:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's 50 now. It's quite a lot we could take. It'd be, it'd be. I didn't want to. I have a life, so I didn't do this. But it would be interesting to take, let's say, last week's show and take all the articles we in fact talked about, make a pdf of each and put it in and see what podcast it created I don't think it would have a fun diatribe about wiki feet though. No, it wouldn't.
1:08:14 - Paris Martineau
That's the sort of human content you can only get on this week.
1:08:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Here with us.
1:08:21 - Benito Gonzalez
I actually think Leo nailed it when he said I want to meet these people because you're never going to be able to like, and that's that's the crux of it, is that like people listen to this show because they like you three you know, because they think we exist.
1:08:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but these are likable if you go back to the one about mine, you're never gonna be able to actually meet them or talk to them. Yeah, they can't believe that that's their friend. I I can't ever meet nicole wallace, but I watch her every day.
1:08:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you have a big crush on her face you could be honest. Yeah, that's, that's um journalistic crush. Yeah, wow, I uh Realistic crashed me. Yeah, wow, I mean honestly, this to me is exactly what we're talking about.
1:09:03 - Paris Martineau
We're in a revolution here. Well, I mean, I could see some utility.
1:09:06 - Jeff Jarvis
First, AI came for the podcasters and we didn't know I could see taking a bunch of articles that I want to get some sense of and throwing it in there and kind of making as I take my evening walk.
1:09:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think maybe what Benito is saying and I think this is true there's. So this isn't the most efficient way of ingesting content. No, what you listen to shows like ours for is companionship. There's real people talking and having a conversation and it's like your friends on a walk with you and, I think, even know as good as the ai is you're never gonna.
1:09:41 - Jeff Jarvis
You're never gonna feel like well, these are my friends, I'm yeah, but if you listen to the npr morning news report, if you listen pretty robotic. Yeah, yeah, they are.
1:09:50 - Paris Martineau
And so they're robotic because they are filling a very specific format. They have to hit a certain number of seconds, I know why that's a slot in to the radio he was that robot.
1:10:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you were that robot I'm not the years, yeah, um, this is daniel barbaro and the third, and you're listening to the Daily. I feel like I'm Audie Cornish. Yeah, see you, listen, don't you? You know Audie, I don't know.
1:10:21 - Jeff Jarvis
It's technologically impressive yeah.
1:10:25 - Leo Laporte
It is. Put that lamp lighter down and say, hey, guy, you know.
1:10:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Give you something to listen to as you're walking around lamping the lights.
1:10:32 - Paris Martineau
I will say, though, again I mean, yes, this is impressive, but I feel like this falls under the parlor trick category.
1:10:41 - Leo Laporte
Does it devalue what we do? A little bit though.
1:10:44 - Paris Martineau
It doesn't. I don't think because one we have the expertise to know whether or not the things we're talking about are accurate. I'm sure if I went through and listened to that podcast, there would probably be some inaccuracies in there. But also we are journalists and storytellers and have been doing this for a while and we approach what we are doing in a way that we're making something for an audience and we know what humans like and don't like and know how to frame that. The way that that AI and education podcast opened up doesn't really make any sense. It doesn't fully have a hook or any of the normal things you'd put in the beginning of a podcast to get someone interested in the idea or even set up what you're about to talk about. I think that there's still a lot left out there that human podcasters do over whatever that is.
1:11:42 - Benito Gonzalez
I think it's perspective right. It's like people like all of these stories are filtered through the three of yours perspective and that's what people listen to this show for you know Well, steven, but I think I think the purpose of this is different.
1:11:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, and I get to there there, there is a story in here about how you can have a social network with nothing but bots, but we'll get to that later.
1:12:03 - Leo Laporte
What steven says, and as by the way out of sync points out in uh. On our discord there are already many ai influencers that have huge followings, and in Japan you have these eduro that are, everybody knows, made up fantasy characters that have huge followings. So I'm not convinced that there's anything we do as humans that are is so very special.
1:12:28 - Jeff Jarvis
What Steven says here is he emphasizes the informational value and he says but it's a terrible way to.
1:12:33 - Leo Laporte
I mean, wouldn't it be more efficient to read Paris's articles, Not necessarily If you have five minutes.
1:12:40 - Jeff Jarvis
There's four articles in there, and if I have five minutes, which is the length, I can get a sense of them. And what he says here is that it's translating information from one format to another Right Expanded, expanded. That's what's interesting about notebook lm in this case. Um, and so it's about. It's about information more, but literally. There is a new social network. There's nothing but bots, which I think is kind of ridiculous well, who's using it?
1:13:02 - Paris Martineau
bots um, it's supposed to be for, I guess lonely if you want. Like yeah, people like you say what sort of reply guys you want. If you want trolls or you know, people who are obsessed with you or people will be conversational and then people will reply.
1:13:22 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what replaces us. Yeah, I want a young woman who's going to make fun of old men in this structure. That'll make me happy. In this structure, that'll make me happy.
1:13:33 - Leo Laporte
So one of the things Mark talked about at the meta event is that they're getting celebrities to do voices Judy Dench, awkwafina, keegan-michael Key, john Cena they're going to be doing those voices, so maybe now it doesn't even matter if it's not a real person, if, if, if, it's a celebrity voice.
1:13:54 - Jeff Jarvis
The voice doesn't make the person well, yeah, wait, amazon tried this.
1:14:01 - Paris Martineau
No one is using their voice assistant, that we will not name well, look for this week in facebook, instagram and whatsapp. Uh, I don't know for john cena to be talking to me on instagram. I just want to see what my friends are doing. Right, please don't make me tap, but if you didn't, have friends. See, you're in the, uh, absolutely enviable position of having friends those of us who have no friends right exactly might need to talk to john cena want john cena to be our friend.
1:14:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Or your dad. Leo is the closest I've got.
1:14:35 - Leo Laporte
I'll take your dad, he looks pretty famous.
1:14:38 - Jeff Jarvis
It's true, he is Just don't talk politics, yeah.
1:14:46 - Leo Laporte
Just fascinating it really is. I guess what I'm saying really is I am wide open to whatever AI brings us and I can't wait to see what it is. And that's really been my whole life has been about. Hey, technology is amazing. I can't wait to see what happens next.
1:15:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, and I just feel that way about AI and make it and do things, but not to predict now that it's going to change. Well, I do believe Prosper prosperity for all.
1:15:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, and that may be bs, and it may be to raise money and so forth. I think he believes it. It's definitely part of the test, real myth. But um, you have to have a vision. Whether you're right or not, is it irrelevant? But you have to have something you're aiming at. You can't just say, well, let's make it, see what happens. Gutenberg't say, let's just make a printing press, I don't know what they're going to do with it. He must have had an idea he wanted to get the monks out of the scriptorians?
1:15:42 - Jeff Jarvis
We don't know, but no, not necessarily. You could argue that he was trying to improve the work of them. No, no, no. The one guess is that he wanted to make a Bible. Another guess is that there was a bishop in town who wanted a new Psalter.
1:16:05 - Leo Laporte
And this was a way to impose that Psalter on multiple churches. I mean, think about the people who built the cathedrals over many generations, hundreds of years. They would never get to see it, but they had the vision of something that they were all working towards and perhaps they thought this would help them get into heaven or whatever, um, and they created an amazing edifice that we get to enjoy today. Is that so very different than what ai then sam altman saying I want to build a cathedral of ai well, that's his god complex right.
1:16:38 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not different in that case? Well, it's not.
1:16:41 - Paris Martineau
That's the thing, and I would say sam alton's more akin to like the medici, like boss in this case he's not.
1:16:49 - Leo Laporte
Somebody had to pay for the actual labor I mean michelangelo wasn't going to do it for free yeah, does pope julius deserve no credit for the sistine ceiling yeah, but he doesn't have to burn the planet down to paint that.
1:17:06 - Benito Gonzalez
You know, like simon altman wants that's like the energy.
1:17:09 - Leo Laporte
I think you could make the case the catholic church did a few awful things. I don't, I don't and I'm not and, by the way, I'm not saying that's a good thing at all, but but uh, you gotta what's your argument here leo.
My argument is I embraced the future and I'm very excited about it and I hope I live to see it. I have no idea what it's going to be like. It could be terrible. I hope that we will do it with those values that Mark espoused. I hope we'll do it with compassion for others and care for others, and I'm certainly trying to live my life that way and I hope others would do that. But I'm very excited about what we're going to see.
1:18:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't, aren't you? I'm rarely excited about anything, but that's a personality. You're just jaded.
1:18:03 - Leo Laporte
God, she's nihilistic, yeah are you a nihilist she? Tries to say I'm an optimistic nihilist it's the world's going to hell, but it's going to be a fun ride. Is that what you're saying?
1:18:11 - Paris Martineau
it's going to help, but I'm going to try my best to enjoy it.
1:18:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm kind of saying the same thing. It's better than despairing, which I sometimes fall into. That's a terrible pit.
1:18:22 - Paris Martineau
And despairing is overrated. It's only so much despair you can do.
1:18:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I love this notion of progress. It's not always progress right, it's also regression. It's as you try to progress, then there are those who want to hold you back and will fight to hold you back and will get violent to do so. We see that happening today, and the progress isn't about technology. The progress is also about race and equity and other things in society, and that's the fight we will always have, I think that technology can unquestionably be used in ways we can also screw it up.
1:18:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it is I would say absolutely a part of our job. Part part of my job, I see, is as a cheerleader for technology, but it's also part of our job to lobby for doing it in a uh, in a good way well.
Yeah, so I think that we can do both. We can do both. I, I feel very fortunate to have been on the sidelines to watch the last 50 years of technology. It's been amazing. It's been incredible and I and I I hope AI lives up to its promise. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I also hope that we don't burn the world down doing it. That's really a cause for concern. We talked earlier about the fact that Microsoft is re-energizing the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the largest nuclear disaster in the United States history for AI. It's a massive nuclear plant and they're going to put it back online in the next few years because they need so much juice to create AI. Is that a bad thing? Our grid, frankly can't handle it.
Sorry.
1:20:10 - Benito Gonzalez
The grid, our electrical grid, actually can't really handle it, but it can't handle our evs either, and we want to move everybody to evs because yeah, but only one of those is generating a bunch of money right now.
1:20:21 - Leo Laporte
It's not bvs, it's ai but that money is about to become a trillion. I don't think it's based on his.
1:20:28 - Paris Martineau
No, it's definitely not based in reality, but things often aren't when it's generating venture capital.
1:20:34 - Leo Laporte
Right, but it's not. You know, I don't have any problem with that, because where does? Again, where does venture capital come from? Most, I mean, I guess some of it comes from, like, the retirement funds of your local firefighters. But and that's you know but that's on, that's on them, for you know investing that way.
1:20:51 - Jeff Jarvis
This this is late-stage capitalism argument. But one thing I just wrote part of a chapter about the Lennotype and it was a moment when there's a bad character. There's a neat villain in my story and he's the publisher of the New York Tribune and he's the one who realized that media was going to be controlled by capital, because no longer do you just buy a wooden press and some type and you can say what you want to. Now you had to have capital to buy the high-speed presses.
1:21:21 - Leo Laporte
AJ Liebling said, the power of the press belongs to the cat who owns the presses Well and buys ink by the barrel is what he said.
1:21:28 - Jeff Jarvis
And now the irony is they buy it by the thimble because nobody buys print anymore. The irony is they buy it by the thimble because nobody buys print anymore. But capital was what took over media and public discourse in the late 19th century and now capital, in one sense, is taking it over all the more. Look at open AI. But if these tools are made open in a way that many of us can have access to them, then there may be a different definition of equity. That's where, again, I'll contrast, more than anything else, meta versus open AI, because of meta's view and openness.
1:22:02 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. I want to do the Google changelog. I need an AI to help me run the show. Do you really want to do?
1:22:07 - Jeff Jarvis
it. Do you really want to do it or do you just feel like you should do it? I never feel like you should do it.
1:22:21 - Leo Laporte
I never want to do it, but I always feel like I should. Here's a little game. Maybe next week we feed the changelog into notebook lm so that it does just the changelog scooter x. Would you do that for us? Let's, we can do scooter x's changelog as a some disembodied ai voice, or maybe as dame, judy, dench and john Then we can all go outside and do something else. Awkwafina, who sounds just like Scarlett Johansson, I learned could do it and it'd be great and Scarlett couldn't complain.
1:22:42 - Benito Gonzalez
How about that? I wonder if we would get taken down for that, I wonder.
1:22:45 - Leo Laporte
No, of course not Using someone else's voice. No, I'm saying they're using someone's voice thing, but they paid them to, by the way it is said, millions of dollars each to do their voice.
1:22:58 - Benito Gonzalez
let's open ai I don't make the rules on youtube, man. This is meta yeah, well, let's not, let's not get taken down
1:23:04 - Jeff Jarvis
for oh, such a good idea.
1:23:07 - Leo Laporte
No, we will not get taken down for that, I promise you. What would be the excuse?
1:23:14 - Jeff Jarvis
hey, hey, I don't know, it's unique content.
1:23:16 - Benito Gonzalez
It has no content tag to it. I'm down, I'm down.
1:23:21 - Leo Laporte
Scooter X you got your job. You have an assignment.
1:23:25 - Paris Martineau
Benito is just doing a labor protest. He doesn't want the podcast to be replaced.
1:23:31 - Benito Gonzalez
I just have to press play on the thing. So that's true.
1:23:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to make fun of Benito because he couldn't get it done last week, and I was going to say that Benito was scared for his job and was doing labor stoppage.
1:23:43 - Leo Laporte
What could you get done last?
1:23:44 - Jeff Jarvis
week.
1:23:44 - Paris Martineau
What happened? It was just how to play the file. Oh, we couldn't play the fake podcast last week.
1:23:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's what I do. That's my job. Don't take my job. There you go. Let's take a little tiny break. You're watching this Week in Google with Mr Jeff Jarvis, Ms Paris Martineau and your genial host, AI Leo. And now it's time for the Google Change Law, the Google Change Log.
1:24:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, Before you start and I just have to issue a complaint here, not about you. There was yesterday a Chromebook showcase event and we didn't cover it. No one has. There's nothing about it. There's a story about coming up.
1:24:34 - Paris Martineau
If a Chromebook showcase event happens and no one covers it, does it really happen? It doesn't exist.
1:24:40 - Jeff Jarvis
So I wanted that to be in the changelog. And there's no changes to report and I'm very upset. There's nothing to say? I guess not, there's nothing. If you search for it, you'll see a story saying the day before here's what we're expecting from it.
1:25:02 - Leo Laporte
It and then nothing. Silence, hands-on new hardware launched at the 2024 nyc chromebook showcase. Look at the date this is from may 28th. I tried, yeah, here's the chrome os events page. Let's see what they have to say. Uh boy, this is the most boring or I've never seen a less interesting page future proof your security posture.
Wait a minute, now, let's get resilience starts with it oh, meet chrome os at fstech, meet chrome os at nex the power of the modern endpoint who needs an ai. We've got paris. All right, get ready for this, because I'm excited. Google tv you, by the way, they they have sold them out. No, really the google store, but if you go to best buy and others, there's a place you could. Because I'm excited.
1:25:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Google TV by the way they have sold them out.
1:25:57 - Leo Laporte
No, really In the Google store, but if you go to Best Buy and others, there's a place you could still get them. Google TV is adding more free channels, including, ladies and gentlemen, bob Ross all day, all night.
1:26:10 - Paris Martineau
Dog Whisper with Cesar Millan. He's still doing it. The Dove Channel.
1:26:14 - Leo Laporte
Daz and Ringside. Daz and Women's Football, the Dove Channel, the Hill TV, oh no, comedy Dynamics and more. There are 157 free channels now on your.
1:26:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Google TV, and they're worth every penny you're going to pay for them Free.
1:26:36 - Leo Laporte
They started with 80 channels when they launched in 2023, but that's that's impressive. That's very impressive. Uh, you may have noticed this. Just try it right now. Pause this show. If you're watching on youtube, did you get an ad? Yeah, google has started putting ads in your pause screen. Uh, they're not video ads, they're just little pop-ups like this one. The show is paused, but your hunger isn't duncan's six dollar meal deal, and that, I think, is supposed to prompt you what was the um way back in early days.
1:27:13 - Jeff Jarvis
what was the program that? That that your screensaver would take over and put news in it?
1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, Something like that 400 million.
1:27:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, it was the thing. You were in the bathroom, but some advertiser was paying for showing you this. You paused the video for a reason You're gone and Dunkin' Donuts is paying for your eyeballs that are elsewhere.
1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
Hold on, just hold, that thought I'll be right back Now. Google has added passkey syncing to Chrome. We talked about this yesterday on Security. Now, so if you use Chrome, you can save passkeys, whatever operating system you're using Windows, mac, linux, yes, linux, chrome OS, android devices, ios coming soon. Instead of a QR code, you're going to get a PIN and now you can move those passkeys to any device you use with Google Chrome. So that's probably good news for passkey adoption.
Cloudflare has decided. This isn't really a changelog item, but we'll put it in here anyway. Cloudflare has decided to add tools that let your site block AI bots for free. So, if you are not yet aware of this, it is very hard to keep those AI crawlers off your site. They often do not honor robotstxt or you may not have the right line of code in your robotstxt. Now, thanks to Cloudflare, customers will have access to a dashboard showing which AI crawlers are visiting their websites and scraping data, including those that are attempting to camouflage their appearance. By the way, this is getting more and more prevalent. Today, linkedin announced they're going to let people AI bots scrape LinkedIn for content. Lionsgate did a deal for all their movies and TV shows, for OpenAI scraped their content. It's lucrative.
1:29:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Lionsgate is also. I think they're setting up a structure where they can. Openai is going to create. No, it wasn't OpenAI, it's a different one. What's the other Anthropocene? No, it's another one, it's one that makes videos Runway.
1:29:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, runway. Thank you, runway. It's going to help create models for them based on the work that's there. You know they're't get coverage on this. We've got to. You know we've got to get Keanu Reeves to jump through the window.
1:29:39 - Jeff Jarvis
We need that establishing shot for the restaurant, exactly. Let's just do it Exactly.
1:29:43 - Leo Laporte
I imagine there'll be a lot of that. You know Lisa was asking me and this is a question for you guys If somebody in an ad, for instance, she said that ad was clearly ai generated, should there be a little thing that says this ad ai generated?
1:29:59 - Paris Martineau
I said, no, I don't think so, I think so you think so why not, jeff?
1:30:03 - Jeff Jarvis
you're the what's what does it mean to generate it? If you used it to, um, you know, redo a photo? Is that as I generated? If, you?
1:30:11 - Leo Laporte
yeah, that's kind of my fact check it. Is that generated? Yeah, where is that line?
1:30:13 - Jeff Jarvis
of calling it, and how does that help you?
1:30:14 - Leo Laporte
I mean you're looking at something I think in in a news you used it.
1:30:15 - Jeff Jarvis
That's kind of my fact check it. Is that generated?
1:30:16 - Leo Laporte
yeah, where is that line of calling and how does that help you? I mean, you're looking at something, I think, in a news story. For sure, if channel 7 runs a clip of kamala harris and it's ai generated, they damn well better say this is not real. But that's, that's news.
1:30:32 - Paris Martineau
It's kind of like the. There's some sort of ruler regulation and I feel like a European or Scandinavian country where if advertisements use Photoshop, they have to disclose it, and I feel like something similar, like if it.
1:30:53 - Leo Laporte
Jeff remembers this a proposition, prop 65, which said that every business that had carcinogenic chemicals anywhere in the business would have to have a Prop 65 warning. And so you can't go anywhere in California without a sign that says Prop 65 warning. There may be hazardous, cancer-causing chemicals in this environment. Your baby is going to die if you come in here and you see it so many places that you no longer pay attention to it, and that's what would happen if you put an ai announcement on things. It was just like well, of course ai is everywhere. Oh look, I just found a 50 bill in my pocket is ai in there?
1:31:31 - Paris Martineau
is it real? This problem is oh I think that was mine actually. You might need to send that back.
1:31:36 - Leo Laporte
Okay, if it was yours. What president is on the front?
1:31:41 - Paris Martineau
The guy with the mustache yeah, got some for glasses, is that?
1:31:46 - Leo Laporte
Ulysses S Grant.
1:31:49 - Paris Martineau
Probably.
1:31:49 - Leo Laporte
Nobody knows Some guy with a beard.
1:31:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it say Maybe, Maybe Out there.
1:32:05 - Leo Laporte
some, uh, does it say? Maybe out there some? Uh, you know, dollar bill head is shaking their fist at the screen, don't you know? That's ulysses s jackson, the president of the senate in 1853 it's grant, it's grant it is grant, not our best.
Did you know that, benito, or you looked it up? No, it's definitely. Look at it. Although you know had to pass that test when he came in the united states, you have to be able to tell you what, every, what, every character is on every us bill right, I was born an american are you a citizen?
1:32:30 - Paris Martineau
yeah, yeah oh gosh, I gotta, I gotta call.
1:32:32 - Leo Laporte
I got a call to make. Wait a minute.
1:32:34 - Paris Martineau
That's Benito's now.
1:32:37 - Leo Laporte
Just kidding. We love you, benito. We like to tease, we do. Indeed, google Photos is getting a redesigned video editor, speaking of AI, ai-powered presets that add video effects with a single click. So you better watch out, you better not cry. I'll tell you here which. Is this real? Is this guy really, uh, doing a skateboard trick?
1:33:06 - Paris Martineau
I don't know, no one knows, I can't even trust skateboard videos, no more yeah, now, that's.
1:33:13 - Benito Gonzalez
That's sad, that we can't trust skating videos. That's yeah, what good is that?
1:33:17 - Paris Martineau
What do we have left?
1:33:18 - Leo Laporte
Google says these updates are starting to roll out today. So get ready.
Oops, I got to be careful. I don't want to close this window. I want to close this window, thank you, oh, I did it again. This is, by the way, the most complicated setup, and I am just not capable. I am not capable. Google's Gemini, gemini, gemini, gemini AI will soon appear in your corporate workspace. Are you excited about this Workspace users? Gemini AI for free. You used to have to pay 30 bucks for this. We'll be part of your. Oh, really, I believe so.
1:33:59 - Paris Martineau
I don't want it.
1:34:02 - Leo Laporte
Get it away from me. I will no longer need to purchase a separate Gemini add-on.
1:34:05 - Paris Martineau
Oh.
1:34:05 - Leo Laporte
Do you think this is?
1:34:06 - Paris Martineau
just so they can boost their numbers of Gemini users.
1:34:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course it is. Yeah, you cynic, you're such a cynic.
1:34:15 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm an optimistic she's never know.
1:34:17 - Leo Laporte
your father was a movie star, I tell you. Google Earth AI eliminates clouds.
1:34:26 - Jeff Jarvis
So they've updated. I put this in here. They updated Street View and associated services with various AI. Look how pretty that is Right, that's an enhanced street view view so this is a uh image of cloud removal ai.
1:34:43 - Paris Martineau
Why can't we?
1:34:43 - Jeff Jarvis
have clouds. No, if it's for coming looking down you don't want clouds shadows mr hayes I retract my see. Look at this this is san francisco okay, from 1938 to 2022.
1:34:56 - Leo Laporte
But without the clouds you can kind of see what is it shrinking? Is the city shrinking?
1:35:03 - Paris Martineau
I'm terrified I think it's two different photos. There's two different angles. It's not a good comparison, that's bad.
1:35:11 - Leo Laporte
Google, that's bad. Get an ai to fix that. Uh, anyway, that's cool. And and they're also bringing Street View to Bosnia-Herzegovina, namibia, liechtenstein and Paraguay.
1:35:23 - Jeff Jarvis
They have a new smaller camera that makes places more accessible.
1:35:27 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of cool, so they could take it out on the dock and stuff like that.
1:35:30 - Paris Martineau
This will be really great for the geoguessing community.
1:35:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah right, community of people that, yeah, yeah, they do some great work you can now get hands-free help on your headphones by just saying hey, goog, if you have their they're changing the nomenclature of the uh wake-ups because they're going to be adding gemini to Buds. So if you want Gemini, what do you say? Hey, gemini, I'm not.
1:36:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you get Gemini.
1:36:03 - Paris Martineau
Gemini cricket is what you say.
1:36:07 - Leo Laporte
I think I got Gemini on here. I actually think Gemini is pretty good, but I think they're all pretty good. None of them great. But earlier today we were doing Windows Weekly and I posited that it must be. At least half of Qualcomm's income came from licensing. And then I thought, well, I know how to find that out. I'll ask Gemini. So I said how much of Qualcomm's income last year came from licensing and it knew the answer.
1:36:42 - AI
Qualcomm's 2023 fiscal year licensing accounted for approximately 16% of its total revenue 16%, so I was wrong, that's not what it told me last time.
1:36:52 - Speaker 5
Well, you think, if you trust Gemini but you don't know if you're sure, do you?
1:36:55 - Leo Laporte
like that voice. No, it's kind of nasal. I wonder if I can change it. Anyway, that's the Google Change Lock. Next week there it is Scooter's doing it. Google Gemini is coming to Pixel Buds, but I guess you'll have to send the settings. Choose if you want. Hey Google, you know the old voice assistant or the new one. Thank you for clarifying that. Next week, Scooter X is going to do the entire change log as a podcast. Oh no, it happened again, it's telling me the story of the history of voice assistants.
1:37:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought your sound went out.
1:37:39 - Leo Laporte
IBM shoebox, introduced in 1962 at the Seattle World's Fair. Let's totally do this no.
1:37:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, google, stop Well be nice Leo?
1:37:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, thank you and stop, we're stopping. Yeah well, be nice leo. Oh, jeez, thank you and stop, or stop it? Yeah, uh, jeff and paris, please. I, you know, every week I I end this show with bitter regret. I'm gonna tell you a little insider scoop here. I am a sad, sad podcaster, because I end the show I say that's it, see you next time Five hours later or whatever, and I look at the rundown, I say we didn't even cover a fraction of these fine stories that Google and Paris have put in. So help me out here. What are the big stories that I've missed?
1:38:34 - Jeff Jarvis
He just said that Google and Paris put them in the rundown. Yeah, Jeff, you've been relegated.
1:38:39 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I just spent the whole time fact-checking. Gemini, it was correct 16% of Qualcomm's Pretty good, I thought it was half.
1:38:47 - Leo Laporte
And in fact, when I asked earlier today, it said 20% to 30%, but I did ask this time specifically for 2023. So there you go Amazon's making employees come back to work five days a week. No more remote work at amazon.
1:39:03 - Paris Martineau
sorry kids, they're not happy amazon honestly, I think this is just a strategy to reduce headcount yes, get the week links to say bye, bye.
1:39:14 - Leo Laporte
But then they get this problem because you get quiet, quitting right, you got people go. Okay, well, I'm gonna look for work. Well, meanwhile I guess I'll show up. But I'm.
1:39:21 - Jeff Jarvis
There was a great tiktok of a guy saying I'm going to work at amazon, badges in and leaves me out the door.
1:39:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not gonna go well, is it? No, it's not. How the fact did you see this that way? Back in time, raymond Chandler, who is best known, of course, for his character Philip Marlowe in 1953, sent a 1953 before I was even born, before Jeff was even even even that sent a letter to a friend with a jargon filled passage parodying science fiction writers writing uh he's. He said. For instance, I checked out with k19 on aldebaran 3 and stepped out to the cromalite hatch on my 22 model serious hardtop. I cocked the time-jector and secondary and waded through the bright blue mandagrass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. But but get ready for this. A little later, the sudden brightness swung me around and the fourth moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn't enough proper name google, at that google's responding.
Stop it um did, did somehow raymond chandler uh see into the future in 1983 and see that google.
1:40:55 - Jeff Jarvis
He had a dream proving pretzels to benito's point it's always the fiction writers who are ahead.
1:41:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yep um it. The thought is probably that he did not, that he just made up the word, but still maybe that's where google came from google told me.
1:41:21 - Paris Martineau
Google said stop saying it hey, google.
1:41:26 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's, that's my contribution to the pile. What do you got? I'll give you one. I love.
1:41:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, you like a good one, one of two.
1:41:41 - Paris Martineau
Last week, a project known as Word Freak, short for frequency, shut down. It's a project analyzing human language usage and it shut down because generative AI has polluted the data. The creator says. Basically, word frequency is a program that tracks the ever-changing ways that people use different languages and it analyzes a bunch of different sources, including Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, you know, know, social media, um, and it would be used to analyze changing language habits as, like slang and popular culture change, um. The projects creator, robin spear, wrote the project will no longer be updated. Generative ai has polluted the data. She wrote. I don't think anyone has reliable information about post 2021 language usage by humans.
1:42:43 - Leo Laporte
Now, all of a sudden, everybody was using the word delve and they said this can't be right, I used the word delve.
1:42:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I used the word delve and I had to insist.
1:42:50 - Paris Martineau
It was me and of course people said that's what today I would say now the web at large is full of slop generated by large language models written by no one to communicate nothing, including the slop and the data skews, the word frequencies.
1:43:05 - Benito Gonzalez
Isn't that data in the large language models though? Yeah, Like the word usage frequency and things like that. Well, that's the thing.
1:43:13 - Leo Laporte
It ups the average of the average words. Right, More average words are used because it chooses the average words. I can see why they might be. It might be they're overreacting, but I can see why they might be.
1:43:27 - Paris Martineau
I could see why it might just be time to end the project.
1:43:30 - Leo Laporte
They would know better than good stand. Yeah, oh, good one. All right, jeff. All right T line. We're're gonna turn this into a competition and have people vote on which story was the best john mulaney, uh, was hired to unbelievable dress.
1:43:49 - Jeff Jarvis
A dream force, yes, and the san francisco standard was there to report on it. You want to read the first gags?
1:43:55 - Leo Laporte
So this is, and I should mention that almost every comedian maybe not of of John Mulaney's stature, but almost every comedian does corporate gigs Right, and when they do corporate gigs they like to put in little jests and jibes at the CEO and, you know, kind of personalize it to the company. Apparently, john Mulaney thought this was all beneath him. I personalize it to the company. Apparently, john Mulaney thought this was all beneath him. I don't know how much Dreamforce paid for him to speak. This is, by the way, salesforce's big conference. Dreamforce is a huge conference. Huge.
San Francisco literally cleaned itself up last year for Dreamforce. So John starts by saying let me get this straight. You're hosting a future of AI event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably. The Standard says Kevin Wynn writing. Everybody inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned. Any notion that the award winning comic would play the corporate gig safe and clean were thrown out the window Thursday. Thursday when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, a headliner no less, started roasting his host, salesforce, and the audience sitting right in front of him. You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought this is the future.
1:45:09 - Jeff Jarvis
That's pretty good it's pretty funny.
1:45:13 - Leo Laporte
If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that humans should die, then I think we should die, so many of you feel imminently replaceable. He also said can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?
I like that. You know what? That's good comedy. That's good writing's good writing it is. It is, uh. I'm wondering, however, he asked one one attendee, your vp of customer success? Congratulations on the position that not exist five years ago. Um, I think he's probably just doing his, his, his gig, yeah, it's fine. Um, no evidence that uh dreamforce didn't give him his money. I have to say I've done. I've done the same thing. I've bitten the hand that feeds me.
I was invited to go to palm beach, florida, to speak to hbo affiliates some years ago. They thought they were getting a tech guy who was going to do a gadget-filled keynote showing people what the future was. They specifically said don't mention anything about piracy, please. So what did I do? I talked about piracy. Did you get paid? Yeah, they gave me the check, but they practically spit on it before they came to me. I felt really bad, but I couldn't. I couldn't stand up in front of them.
This was back when there was kind of a battle between uh, hbo and nbc and others and the internet. They were, they were really upset about uh, you know, pirates stealing stuff and they were getting pretty nasty about it. And I said you know, chill out, man You're. You're criminalizing your customers. Good for you, god's work, man. Didn't go well, but I did get to stay at the uh, what is that? Beautiful Palm Beach hotel. It was pink, it was beautiful. I did get to stay there for a couple of nights. Yeah, it was nice Mar-a-Lago, something like that. I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, I understand how Mulaney feels. You feel compromised when you take money from a big corporate to do a comedy and so you're going to end up maybe trying to show your independence by roasting them a little bit. I bet they didn't mind that. I bet they laughed, yeah.
1:47:41 - Paris Martineau
Can we talk about Marques Brownlee's wallpaper app?
1:47:44 - Leo Laporte
12 bucks a month.
1:47:47 - Paris Martineau
12 bucks a month for wallpaper. Marques responded it's just ridiculous to me that somebody who has all of this goodwill was created this huge persona. He could have launched a million things and made millions of dollars from them. Instead, he chooses the dumbest possible idea, which is a subscription phone wallpaper app.
1:48:12 - Leo Laporte
Marquez, upon receiving some criticism Constructive though it was. Constructive criticism said quote. I hear you.
1:48:22 - Paris Martineau
Very succession.
1:48:24 - Leo Laporte
I hear you. What was the slogan? We hear, we hear for you.
1:48:30 - Paris Martineau
We hear for you. We hear for you.
1:48:34 - Leo Laporte
Because he wanted to be we hear you. We hear for you, because he wanted to be we hear you. But then his aide says there's actually been some concern about us listening in on our cable customers, so we probably shouldn't say we hear you, we hear for you. Anyway, I feel bad for Marquez. Marquez is a good guy. He's very talented, very smart, high integrity. Um, I don't know why he doesn't need how do you think this happened?
1:49:01 - Jeff Jarvis
no, he doesn't need this. I think somebody talked him into it it's.
1:49:04 - Paris Martineau
Why would he do that?
1:49:06 - Leo Laporte
well, you know why would I do many of the dumb things I've done? Why?
1:49:10 - Jeff Jarvis
would he wear the shirts? He wears, you know, you know. I mean, how would you?
1:49:13 - Leo Laporte
own a leak hat. Don't you like this shirt? Yeah, it's very nice. This comes from the screensavers days. This is an old bit of wardrobe.
1:49:21 - Paris Martineau
Are those the screens that got saved?
1:49:22 - Leo Laporte
They were the screens that got saved, although they would make me button the top button. I'll never forget. On the screensavers, we hired a Hollywood producer, big Shot, a wonderful guy. He had been a booker for the Carson show, so that really gave him the credentials to, and lost that job, and all he could do was work on screens.
Technology show on a fading cable network, but I do remember him coming in. He said you know, this show needs one thing. I said what's that? Because I used to be, by the way. I used to be the managing editor of the show, but he became the manager. I used to be the managing editor of the show, but he became the managing. I said well, what does it need, paul? He said more cleavage.
1:50:03 - Paris Martineau
I was about to say that's a classic Hollywood guy thing to say.
1:50:08 - Leo Laporte
It was totally. It was like no, it doesn't, what it needs is more Linux.
1:50:17 - Jeff Jarvis
WNBC.
1:50:19 - Leo Laporte
What else you got? What else? Cards against humanity is suing elon musk spacex. Now, by the way, if you've never played cards against humanity, if you want true hilarity, get your friends and family together. Have you ever played this paris? Yeah, it's great, and the whole idea. It's a very simple game. You get handed out uh uh cards that are just a phrase. You know like uh, the seven dwarfs in your bed and then the. The one person gets a fill in the blank phrase and you pick from your hand the blank apples to apples, but it's darker and dirtier.
It's dirty. Anyway, they're wonderful people, apparently. Back in 2017, when, when the president was talking about building a border wall, they decided to thwart him by raising money thwart him by raising money 150 000 people in fact donated 15 to this crowd-sourced campaign to purchase a vacant land in cameron county, texas, land that would have been used to build the wall. They bought it in 2017. It's kind of a stunt, but they owned it free and clear, uh, for at least six months. Spacex, according to the lawsuit, has, quote treated the property as its own cards against humanity, suing spacex accusing it of trespassing, clearing the land of vegetation, laying down gravel, bringing in generators and using it to park vehicles and store construction materials. Spacex did not respond to the Washington Post on this story. It is, you know, right next to SpaceX's Starbase industrial complex, and perhaps it was just an innocent error that they thought this was part of the land.
1:52:16 - Paris Martineau
Well when Cards Against Humanity confronted them over it. Innocent error that they thought this was part of the oh yeah sure. Well, when cards against humanity confronted them over it, I believe spacex said like here's an offer for your land. It's a low ball. You have like 24 or 48 hours to respond. So it's. I mean they were aware of it at some point, it seems that made space.
1:52:34 - Leo Laporte
You don't want to make cards against humanity mad. They said we're probably going to lose because you don't have as much money as SpaceX. But you know what? I think they should have another crowdfunding effort and raise some money, cause I think this is they're doing God's work here. So in SpaceX, for trampling over their pristine vacant lot. I think that's my favorite story of the week.
1:52:59 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a good story. Elon Musk denies romantic relationship with Giorgia Maloney after Italian prime minister calls him precious genius.
1:53:10 - Leo Laporte
I do not. I did not have sex with that woman, except that Elon. Never mind, I don't want to go down this road. No, no, no, no, no, no but, donald's touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers instead. You won't believe what happened next. What happened?
1:53:30 - Jeff Jarvis
next jeff jarvis. They're still putting pickles in the burgers. There didn't involve jobs going down.
1:53:35 - Leo Laporte
Technology doesn't always do that I have to say I have been in the mcdonald's that had these kiosks and there were literally like three people working behind the counter. I mean, I don't know, is that really the case? That didn't replace. Well, you're in california. No, this was in rhode island, oh really, oh okay. Yeah, I was visiting my mom and I thought I gotta I got to have something to eat before I leave. And I went in there in the middle of nowhere and it was jammed and they had those big you know, they have those giant screens French fries. You push a button, but there was hardly anybody behind the counter. Where are people going to get their their French fry skills If you don't, if you can't?
1:54:20 - Jeff Jarvis
So can you explain to me the Mullenweg versus a WordPress WP engine fight, or do you don't care to?
1:54:29 - Leo Laporte
I love Matt. I really do. He's, of late, been I don't know. Sometimes something happens to people when they become rich and famous. I don't know. I don't think he's wrong on this. Uh, matt originally created wordpress as an open source project. Founded a company that runs wordpresscom. The company's called automatic, with two t's um you know by the.
1:54:55 - Jeff Jarvis
It took me years before I got the joke.
1:54:58 - Leo Laporte
Matt, get it Matt.
1:55:01 - Jeff Jarvis
On a Matt-ic and we had Matt on a couple of years ago, great conversation.
1:55:06 - Leo Laporte
And he's a big supporter of open source. Yep, and I don't think he's really wrong. Wordpresscom is the commercial arm. You can always download WordPress and run it on your own server. There is another company called WP Engine which also provides a service similar to WordPresscom, kind of hosted WordPress. He says the company has been profiteering without giving much back, disabling key features and so forth.
He actually started getting a little bit more aggressive, calling it a cancer. He said that WP Engine you know WordPress, automatic contributed 39 hours, 3,00 hours a week, man hours a week, woman hours, coding hours a week to WordPress, wp Engine 40 hours a week. He also said that may not be exactly right, but he said he also called GoDaddy a parasitic company and an existential threat to WordPress's future. So he criticized a number of people. It's become a little bit of a loose cannon. Anyway, wp Engine sued him or sent him a cease and desist, to which he responded with a lawsuit. So this is going to be kind of a little bit of a battle. He said the problem is they call themselves WP Engine and it's confusing people that this is WordPress. But he did the same thing WordPresscom, right.
Mullenweg said WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising and entire promise to customers is that they're giving you WordPress, but they're not, and they're profiting off the confusion. A lot of companies, though, offer one-button install of WordPress and hosted WordPress and things like that I'm not sure including GoDaddy. Anyway, it seems like it's a little inside baseball, right? Thanks, yeah, I love matt. I'm not gonna say anything bad about him, but sometimes, you know, I understand I. We were pissed off at twitter because we thought you know we were twitter.
Twitter existed. I tried to buy it.
1:57:33 - Paris Martineau
They didn't take my offer ah, what a world that would have been you as CEO of Twitter. Twitter would have been much better.
1:57:41 - Leo Laporte
Just take a look at twitsocial or Massadon instance, and what a nice, clean, happy-go-lucky place that is.
1:57:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Would have made a penny, but it'd be great.
1:57:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
1:57:52 - Benito Gonzalez
Never made a penny anyway. That's true too. Never actually made a penny anyway, that's true, too.
1:57:57 - Leo Laporte
Never actually made a penny anyway. Right, they're just losing money like crazy, aren't they? Anything else that we should do before we wrap things up? You're watching this Week in Google Paris Martineau. She is at theinformationcom. You should subscribe.
1:58:12 - Jeff Jarvis
One other funny one. I find it funny Introducing HP Print AI, industry's first intelligent print experiences, as if you could adjust, turn on the printer and work, adjust to that.
1:58:28 - Leo Laporte
There's no money in that, Jeff.
1:58:33 - Paris Martineau
And they just make it so that I don't have to delete the printer and re-add it to my laptop every other time. Is that the?
1:58:38 - Leo Laporte
AI. That's all I want maybe they can wait a minute. There's no, we don't know yet. Maybe they can maybe this ai will solve all your printer woes.
1:58:45 - Paris Martineau
Maybe this is the ai is going to say does not compute, does not say you have to pay for a toner subscription yeah, more like we actually.
1:58:56 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's funny. I, uh, we have a very nice hp color laser printer. That's very good. That's what we use at home.
1:59:03 - Paris Martineau
Um, I'm not against, it has a brother, I have a canon, as we've previously discussed well, I have that brother.
1:59:09 - Leo Laporte
You have a memory on you.
1:59:11 - Paris Martineau
I have the brother that everyone has that was just a show title that I thought was cute, so I did remember it oh really, we had a show. It was jeff's brother paris's canon, or something like that yeah, um, we are watching this week in google.
1:59:27 - Leo Laporte
Jeff jarvis is also here, former emeritus professor uh of journalistic innovation at the craig newmar graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york. We'll take a little break and when we come back let's do some pics. What do you say? Time for our pics of the week? I don't know what paris's thing is. All I can see is it says the 90s executive. Yes man, what is that?
1:59:59 - Paris Martineau
So when I was a kid growing up, my dad had this like little guy on his desk that we'd always kind of make fun of when he could turn on a button. It was called the yes man. Someone got it for him as a gift, as a gag gift. Yes man, someone got him it for him as a gift, as a gag gift. And basically the thing was I think it was voice activated where you were supposed to have it in your desk as an executive and you'd say some sort of idea and then it would in response be like that's a great idea, or how do you do it, or when you're right, you're right, and just all sorts of brown nosing things. I don't know how, but this got woven into the psyche of my family. The actual yes man disappeared many a decade ago, but me and my family to this day will always be like how do you do it? Or when you was like you know I could find this on eBay. I found not one, but two. I sent one to my parents.
2:01:00 - Leo Laporte
I sent one to my home.
2:01:02 - Paris Martineau
And now it's here. Let me turn it on. I can see if I can get it Hello. I couldn't agree with you more completely. Very loud.
2:01:12 - Leo Laporte
I couldn't agree with you more completely Bad.
2:01:15 - Paris Martineau
Mm-hmm, yeah, it's loud. It's going to do it again, probably shortly.
2:01:21 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's random. You don't get to say what it is. I don't know.
2:01:27 - Paris Martineau
It will keep going and it's really delightful, so that's my pick of the week. Is this guy that I got?
2:01:32 - Leo Laporte
Get it on eBay because it's no longer, according to Rao Creations, which actually created this thing, no longer available anywhere. Well, paris has something to say about that. That idea is a real beauty Paris. Thank you, what more can I say? When you're right, you're right.
2:01:54 - Jeff Jarvis
That's me.
2:01:55 - Paris Martineau
What does Gizmo?
2:01:56 - Jeff Jarvis
think of it.
2:01:58 - Paris Martineau
No response.
2:01:59 - Leo Laporte
There's something a little weird about this, though, because your father had this on his desk your whole childhood.
2:02:06 - Paris Martineau
It was my whole childhood, but it made enough of an impression. It was definitely there for a bit. It's kind of a funny thing to have on your desk.
2:02:14 - Jeff Jarvis
when it's not yelling at you, you can turn it off is your father based on on the beginning of the show and the video, is your father someone who could be classified as a character sounds like he's definitely a character.
2:02:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I would classify my parents as characters, to say the least yeah, you can get this for 44.99 jeez oh, that's very expensive. Yeah, I think I got this 20 bucks oh, here's also the whipping boy not pc to use that also from john rao in 1991.
2:02:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm.
2:02:54 - Paris Martineau
It doesn't work, as is for parts.
2:02:57 - Leo Laporte
For parts For whipping boy parts. Ebay is an amazing place.
2:03:02 - Paris Martineau
It really is. It really is. So you know think of something strange from your past and order it on eBay is my pick of the week.
2:03:11 - Leo Laporte
I like it. Yeah, for me. What would it be? It would be a rock, maybe with a face painted on it. How about that? Did you have a pet rock back in the day? I did not have a pet rock he didn't have many friends.
2:03:24 - Jeff Jarvis
He said even the rocks didn't like him.
2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
Even they just roll away you seem like a very intelligent fella. What's your?
2:03:37 - Jeff Jarvis
following paris is hard. I'm boring now, so let's pick this really quick. Uh, more americans, especially young adults, are regularly getting news on tiktok I saw this from you, yeah young adults in the us now really get their news. Tiktok. How we can ban this is beside me. It's. It's useful, the election it's being used by the candidates. I just don't get it.
2:03:59 - Paris Martineau
We'll see. Once a year I go and do a career day at a local high school and when I asked everybody how they got their news, everybody said I mean, the one thing most people said was TikTok. When I asked them are you guys concerned about the TikTok ban? They were all like no, I'll just use reels or something else. They just didn't care at all, which I thought was interesting a nihilistic generation to your heart yep.
2:04:22 - Leo Laporte
According to pew, the, the share of tiktok users who regularly get their news on the platform has doubled in the last four years.
2:04:30 - Jeff Jarvis
That's amazing it really is um, you know.
2:04:33 - Leo Laporte
My daughter, though, says yeah, I use tiktok for search. I said you can't use it for sure. She said, good, cry me. I said, well, how tall is the empire? Is the empire state building? And she found it. You just search tiktok, you could find anything well?
2:04:46 - Jeff Jarvis
did you have to listen to a 30 second video telling you that, or?
2:04:49 - Leo Laporte
probably yeah but you know that's life.
2:04:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I hate that too well, youtube is far worse. How do I get this hp printer to work? I'm going to take 20 minutes to turn about the smash to subscribe.
2:05:02 - Paris Martineau
Tap that bell.
2:05:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, Jeff and Paris, it has been a great reunion.
2:05:09 - Mark Zuckerberg
I had a wonderful lunch with you, guys two weeks ago and I'm glad to get back.
2:05:13 - Leo Laporte
This is the show I look forward to all week because you're so silly, and I hope we can do this all again next week. What do you say?
2:05:22 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'll consider it.
2:05:23 - Leo Laporte
All right. Wednesdays we're here right after Windows Weekly, roughly 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live. We stream everywhere. Yes, even X. You know us live. We stream everywhere. Yes, even X. You know, I tried. I tried While I was gone. I told the team. I said I don't want to be on X anymore and they said no, you have to be. Yeah, do either of you mind if we're on X?
2:05:49 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm on X.
2:05:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I post on X. I post AI inside on X.
2:05:54 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I guess I was wrong. Anyway, I post AI inside on X. Okay, I guess I was wrong. Anyway, we are on YouTube, we are on Twitch, we are on X, we are on Facebook, we are on LinkedIn, we are on Kik and we are on Discord if you are a member of the club. Oh, if you're not a member of the club, my goodness gracious, I would sure appreciate it if you would join. It's only $7 a month. It really helps us on our bottom line. We need that revenue to keep Benito employed, frankly, so help us out. Twittv slash club twit $7 a month.
We do give you some benefits. Add free versions of all the shows, access to the discord, which is a great hang. You also get special events and so forth. That going on. In fact, friday we're going to do 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern in the club, chris marquardt's photo review. The assignment was hypnotic. Uh, he has some great photos that the people have submitted to our flickr group. We'll do that as photo review, which we did for years on the radio show. Uh, we'll do it as a special on a friday and we will stream that, but after the fact, you have to be a member of the club to see it. So if you're not a member, please join. We'd love to have you.
Twittv slash club twit. After the fact, you can get this show on the website twittv slash twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. You could subscribe to the audio or the video and get it automatically as soon as it's available, and that way you can listen at your leisure. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you, paris, thank you Jeff. Have a great Cacio e Pepe tonight.
2:07:28 - Paris Martineau
One last surprise look for the road.
2:07:30 - Leo Laporte
Ready One, two, three. We'll see you next time on this week in. Google.
