This Week in Google 796 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. Paris Martineau is here from the information. Jeff Jarvis, our journalism professor we have lots to talk about. Meta, is pushing Apple and Google to do age verification. Paris just did a whole piece on age verification technology and the information. She explains what the latest AI technology can do. But is it a good thing? We have a little I guess a little bit of a debate over this. Elon Musk unleashes his army of sycophants on lowly federal workers. Doesn't seem like a good thing at all. And then do you own your tweets? X says no, it's our property. All of that and a whole lot more coming up next on this Week in Google.

This is TWiG: This Week in Google, Episode 796, recorded Wednesday, November 27th 2024: Holding Space for Defying Gravity. It's time for TWiG this week in Google, the show where we cover everything but Google. Actually, today we have some Google news, so it'll be about Google, but also about the internet and social media, about the media climate in general, about everything that's going on in the world around us, Because you know, when you have such a good panel, you got to talk about everything. Paris Martineau is not here, but there she's in Florida.

0:01:37 - Paris Marinteau
I am, I'm in the bad place, they say.

0:01:40 - Leo Laporte
No, it's the good place when you're there. She just clicked those ruby slippers and there's no place like home. I take it you're there for Thanksgiving.

0:01:51 - Paris Marinteau
Thanksgiving. What's that? Is Papa going?

0:01:53 - Leo Laporte
to do the turkey fry again.

0:01:56 - Paris Marinteau
He is. I am right now staring at a giant silver pot that the turkey is going to be deep fried in. He put it in the room in case I want to show it on the podcast.

0:02:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Show it off. Okay, hold on hold on come on while she's preparing.

0:02:12 - Leo Laporte
That's jeff jarvis, who is the professor of journalism now at stony brook graduate school of journalism at uh cun Now he's at.

0:02:25 - Jeff Jarvis
SUNY.

0:02:26 - Leo Laporte
He is also going to be teaching at Montclair State University.

0:02:30 - Jeff Jarvis
What does that say Attention? It says attention showed.

0:02:33 - Paris Marinteau
Showed.

0:02:34 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a attention showed what if you don't speak French? You get burned.

0:02:38 - Leo Laporte
Now I'm going to pass along a little tip, Paris, that your dad ought to know. I'll wait until she's back on headphones.

0:02:47 - Paris Marinteau
Which is, don't do it inside and also make sure you defrost the turkey so it doesn't explode.

0:02:51 - Leo Laporte
And the other key is not to overflow the oil onto the flame, where it will then explode. So what I was told yesterday by our MacBreak Weekly team is you put the turkey in the pot. You then add the oil, making sure that the oil plus turkey do not go over the rim, then remove the turkey, heat the oil yes, something like that.

0:03:13 - Paris Marinteau
I think my dad at this point he's probably been doing this for he's not at least 10 years, he's never more, he's never burned down. This we also do it just in the driveway um away from, all away from this video there is video in the past. Uh, if it's not raining tomorrow, I will be posting a video of him doing does he have a derrick? Very excited.

0:03:34 - Leo Laporte
A turkey, yeah to lower the turkey into the bath yes she's getting the derrick can't be that big of it. This, oh, he's a hand. He's a hand, it's a hand, derek.

0:03:46 - Paris Marinteau
It goes, the turkey goes on this, and then this sits in the pot and then he uses it to pull it out?

0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
Does he do it with his bare hands?

0:03:56 - Paris Marinteau
Sometimes I think that there's like a glove situation. I can't recall. I know that I have in the past before I took medication for anxiety, was very concerned about him burning himself.

0:04:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh now you're so calm right now. I'm fine, dude, do whatever you want, man, it's okay with me, it's not really my whatever whatevs um alleviate through chemistry. It's great thing so here's the really the fundamental question does it, what does it taste like?

0:04:24 - Paris Marinteau
fantastic. I mean so deep frying a turkey. You'd assume that it'd be like super crispy, and it's so. Here's really the fundamental question what does it taste like? Fantastic, I mean so deep frying a turkey. You'd assume that it'd be like super crispy, and it is crispy. It gets a nice golden brown. It's lovely, but then it's also moist on the inside.

0:04:36 - Leo Laporte
How long do you submerge it in the boiling?

0:04:38 - Paris Marinteau
oil, maybe like 45 minutes. Oh, it's pretty quick, that's another good reason to do it. Yeah, we also before we cook it, uh, we get kind of those bait like a buttery creole based, and then you inject the turkey all over butter gets under the skin and things like that, and then you rub it, of course the spices, then you put it in there and we wait until about 30 minutes before the feast is set to begin and then we're good to go. I'm also going to be making tomorrow. I'm making a coconut caramel tart.

0:05:15 - Leo Laporte
And I'm always the person who makes the stuffing.

0:05:18 - Paris Marinteau
I've got a stuffing recipe.

0:05:19 - Leo Laporte
What's your stuffing recipe?

0:05:21 - Paris Marinteau
It's a great question. Let me see if I can pull it up here.

0:05:24 - Leo Laporte
No, no, you don't have to give it in detail. Is it a cornbread stuffing? A regular?

0:05:27 - Paris Marinteau
it's a normal. It's a normal bread stuffing it is no orange juice, no italian sausage no, we don't stuff it in the turkey, because then it would be fried with it it's, I guess ostensibly dressing, but I think stuffing is the right way to do it.

Italian sausage is in that Onions, shallots, apples. It kind of goes in with what's it called Celery as well as a kind of chicken broth thing. It ends up fantastic. And then, of course, I usually do a mixture of Parmesan cheese, because Parmesan is perfect, and Fontina, because Fontina gets that pulliness as far as cheese goes, oh, this sounds really good.

0:06:10 - Leo Laporte
You put that on the top. It's really good.

0:06:12 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, put that on the top. I'll find the recipe, because it's just some I don't know random website, but all of my parents' friends in the area always ask me for it every year. I bet.

0:06:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Because it's great.

0:06:27 - Paris Marinteau
Oh, so is this a big festival with neighbors. Yeah, I think we have like 12 people total tomorrow. Fantastic. My parents are the sort of people that always invite whoever wants to come over for Thanksgiving to come.

0:06:37 - Leo Laporte
Sure Friendsgiving yeah.

0:06:39 - Paris Marinteau
Friendsgiving.

0:06:40 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, are you going to Chipotle for Thanksgiving or what's?

0:06:42 - Jeff Jarvis
the plan, but I suppose I should go because, as as nicole wallace said last night, she stands with chipotle in the fear of disappearing guacamole. Is there a fear? Of disappearing oh yeah, where guacamole? Where are avocados? Mexico?

0:06:58 - Leo Laporte
right, there'd be a 20 tariff on it guacamole is already so expensive exactly yeah, avocados are not cheap also.

0:07:06 - Paris Marinteau
I did find the recipe. It's from the cozy apron I posted in discord. It's great. I know the cozy apron.

0:07:13 - Leo Laporte
I uh, I love them okay um, did I?

0:07:18 - Jeff Jarvis
did I tell you the story about my pumpkin chiffon pie episode?

0:07:21 - Leo Laporte
no, but that sounds quite good too.

0:07:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that sounds so when I was trying to impress a young woman many, many, many years ago, my mother had a recipe for pumpkin chiffon pie and I asked her for the recipe.

0:07:30 - Leo Laporte
So that I could cook this is what dating was like back in the 19th century.

0:07:36 - Paris Marinteau
It was indeed, isn't this also how you burnt yourself, like making asparagus or something? No, that was for myself.

0:07:43 - Jeff Jarvis
That was indulgence. So she gave me the recipe and I never cooked. So I thought cooking is so weird, it's just so imprecise. I couldn't figure it out. One and one quarter c period canned pumpkin. So I said, okay, here's one can of pumpkin and here's a quarter can of pumpkin.

0:07:59 - Leo Laporte
And then I realized oh my god oh you thought the C was K, so I had to.

0:08:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Luckily the pumpkin was in a glob so I could then measure how much pumpkin to take out.

0:08:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because otherwise you'd have an overflowing pumpkin chiffon pie. But, maybe you were trying to send a message to the young woman.

0:08:20 - Paris Marinteau
Hey, I'm not doing the cooking in this relationship. Yeah, that's the message.

0:08:27 - Leo Laporte
Good message. So Google has, I have. I apparently am the only one who owns one of these canceled the Pixel tablet.

0:08:37 - Jeff Jarvis
It was never a great idea.

0:08:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, it was cool. This is the one that docked. I have the docking station over on the desk. It would dock on the desk and and see how it has the little pogo pins. It would charge and so it would be a standing device and then at some point you could take it and go somewhere with it. I've never done anything like that.

0:08:57 - Paris Marinteau
It never made any sense. I mean the name of it, calling it the Pixel tablet, is like if iPads were called iPhone tablet. I mean, I know that's not why it failed, but that just, I think, indicates the lack of thought that went into thinking of this as its own standalone product what they should.

0:09:10 - Leo Laporte
I think there's never been a successful Android tablet. I mean maybe, well no, the Nexus 7.

0:09:15 - Jeff Jarvis
the Nexus 7 was successful and we loved that and we loved that tablet. It was the best.

0:09:19 - Leo Laporte
They killed that too yeah, well, there won't be, although they had already done, apparently, according to Android Authority, considerable work on the Pixel tablet, citing fears the product wouldn't sell very well From experience. Yeah, now, this is from a source. This is not public yet.

Well, I wonder too whether this has an impact on the reports we talked about last week, which are just reports that, if the next Pixel, pixel book is a, is a uh, an android product maybe confused things with this do you think, by the way, that that we were talking about this on windows weekly earlier that google was maybe prescient, or got a tip that the department of justice was going to try to get them to sell chrome, and at that point they said, maybe we better have a plan B for Chromebooks?

0:10:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Chrome OS. That's what I kind of hinted at last week. Yeah, but Chrome OS is one matter and Chrome browser is another.

0:10:16 - Leo Laporte
Is it? If you sell Chrome, do you still get to do the Chrome OS? I don't know.

0:10:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Who knows the whole plan makes no sense to me.

0:10:23 - Leo Laporte
It's not gonna ever happen, so it doesn't really matter, but I thought the pixel tablet was okay, but I think google was probably smart that there is no market for the pixel tablet. 3 what made it just okay as someone who hasn't messed around with uh the biggest problem with android tablets is that android apps are there are really not well designed for tablet. Uh right screens.

0:10:52 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's really, it is a pixel, it's a phone because they're also not well designed for laptops, which is going to be an issue.

0:10:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, pixel book uh, I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's far worse than the ipad, really. I mean it's. You know, here's the google chrome browser in it. I mean it. You could sit there with your, with it in your lap, just like you would with an ipad, and do you. It's kind of you know what you know. What's wrong with it is the. You see, the aspect ratio is 16.9. That is, that's messed up. It's too. It's too thin and wide, it's computer-sized. Yeah, and I think compare it to the iPad.

0:11:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's an iPad Mini which is just a little bit Paris just asked what do you use the iPad for? Anything.

0:11:38 - Paris Marinteau
Nothing I was going to say. I've never heard someone tell me what they use. I guess my parents use iPads, but just as books like it's a decent reader.

0:11:47 - Leo Laporte
I mean the ipad mini, which this is, is a, is a reader size, so it's it's good for a reader or lying it's. Basically. This is my lying in bed looking at tiktok reddit, that kind of thing, youtube I used to.

0:12:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I used my nexus 7 in the old days to watch shows and movies on the plane yeah, yeah, this would be good for that too.

0:12:08 - Leo Laporte
Um then, the big, the big ipad is so big it's really a laptop. In fact, the way apple wants you to configure it with the keyboard it is a. Look at it it's a laptop, but it's a touch screen laptop. So apple is very schizophrenic on this thing, because it really is their touchscreen operating system. It's not a, not a Macintosh. How do I turn it on on you? There we go. I guess I turned it off and it has it.

0:12:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you ever use it? Do you use that? No, you know what I thought it was off, but then potentially not well, it was off for another reason.

0:12:46 - Leo Laporte
It was off because it steals my mouse. But that's a complicated I don't want to get into it, but I don't want to talk about it. But, uh, what this is really good for is photography. So that's, that's really what I. I mean, that's really the one thing. So when I get, uh, oh yeah, it's good for, like it's good thing.

0:13:04 - Paris Marinteau
So when I get uh, it's good for like, it's good for taking photos, or editing.

0:13:07 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, no, no. It's good for processing photos. So I connect my camera up, download the photos, uh, wirelessly, and then I have a bunch of uh different apps that I can use, like photo meter, which Apple just bought, uh, or dark room or um, or there's quite a few really good affinity photo, very good apps for editing photos on here, and this has a very good, very accurate screen. So it's a. It's actually a good choice for photo editing and, and the thing is, with photo editing, I have the pencil and I have my finger, so you can kind of do it in a more natural. You're not using a mouse, you're actually touching it, enlarging it, resizing it, sketching out colors and stuff like that, and I think that that actually is a natural workflow. At least, that was the story I told myself when I spent $2,000 on this.

0:13:57 - Paris Marinteau
Oh, my God.

0:13:59 - Leo Laporte
It's a laptop you could get a fancy computer for that.

0:14:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm thinking of the remarkable. Again, I'm debating.

0:14:07 - Paris Marinteau
So Mr Steve Gibson for that well, I think I'm thinking of the remarkable again debating. So uh, mr steve, we were talking about this before the show last week because jeff and I are both big paper people.

0:14:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, when it comes to I like the remarkable. Uh, steve said do not get the remarkable three, get the old one. Remarkable two uh, because it's lighter and it's not trying to do color, which is a mistake to do color. Yeah, I had the remarkable. Actually I gave it to Micah, but I think the remarkable is quite good. I like the remarkable quite a bit. I also have the Amazon Kindle scribe which is pretty big and you can read books on it, but you can also. It has a pen and you can annotate with that. I think the remarkable if you take handwritten notes. Steve uses it for his coding notebook. So a lot of times when you're writing a solving a computer problem, it's easier to visualize it if you sketch it out and it has kind of infinite graph paper right.

0:14:57 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's very nice paris and I use it wrong here paris for for marking up documents, for for reporting.

0:15:03 - Paris Marinteau
ah right, we talked about that, jeff Marking up documents or also, I like, do very in-depth written outlines when I'm working on a kind of a gnarly story and then I With your hand, with my hand Isn't outlining easier on a keyboard. Yes and no, but when I type something it leaves my brain in a way that writing it down doesn't.

And also, frankly, what I've realized the reason why I end up doing paper outlines is because I like. One of my biggest problems second, I guess, to when I'm writing is figuring out what the beginning of a story is. I can't do anything else to that. But then it's organizing all the different discrete parts. It can really gum up my workflow if I'm trying to think about how things should go.

So I will write all of the discrete parts on different pieces of paper and then lay them out on my kitchen table or on the floor, and then move them around until I figure out the correct order. It's so funny, I could do that with um something digital did you come up with that on your own?

0:16:00 - Leo Laporte
I did yeah well, it's funny you should say that, because that's exactly what Strunk and White suggest. I mean, that goes back to the 40s. Really, yeah, they suggest you cut out, you take your thing and you cut it out and you rearrange it, just like you're doing. It's brilliant.

0:16:17 - Paris Marinteau
I mean yes because that I've realized will often be. The thing is, I will be writing a section and then be like, well, should it go before or after this section, Then I will hem and haw and sit there frustrated for 30 minutes because I can't complete a section until I know what begins and ends it. And it's much better if you just write a quick little outline of each one and then move them around.

0:16:37 - Leo Laporte
Did you in J school or later in life, or maybe in high school? Did you read the Ele of style by uh strunk and white? No, I didn't, I should jeff, you know this journalism school? Oh yeah, I didn't do journalism school um this is. This is a little skinny book that is a classic.

0:16:57 - Jeff Jarvis
There's other, maybe white is a major writer oh yeah, charlotte's web and all that and so the fact that he was part of a style piece and it's very.

0:17:11 - Leo Laporte
It's skinny and it's very simple and I've lived the strunken white lifestyle my whole life. There's another book that's less known by who was the guy who wrote I claudius. It was a kind of a kind of scratchy um. Robert graves has a book on writing. Let me see if I could find this that I really liked. Do you read books on writing at all?

0:17:32 - Paris Marinteau
yeah, I've read, uh, the art and craft of feature writing, which is by william blundell. Uh, it's based on the wall street journals guide.

0:17:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, and I like that does that include a necessary insertion of moral panic about technology? And hate for the internet probably yeah yeah, you're there, uh the blooms, uh, bloomsbury, jesus, though uh bloomberg used to have um the bloomberg way yeah, and it was very idiosyncratic and you had to follow these rules exactly uh, yeah, no, I'm not talking about.

0:18:07 - Leo Laporte
Stephen king has a very good book about writing that I like a lot. My chief takeaway from that is don't use adverbs ever, ever, nothing with ly, ever. And then annie lamott has a very good uh book about writing. I don't know why I don't write, but I read books I would really recommend.

0:18:27 - Paris Marinteau
Then have you read robert carrow's working no, I haven't I'm.

0:18:32 - Leo Laporte
I love robert carrow, of course, because it is all about his process and how he has decided to like write and work throughout his life.

0:18:40 - Paris Marinteau
It's very interesting and his interview style. Something that sticks with me from that is uh, when he was interviewing a bunch when he moved to lyndon b johnson's hometown in order to basically can you believe he did that he? Moved there with his wife, lived there for a couple of years because people aren't going to tell me anything.

His wife is his research assistant too right um, but he's like people aren't going to tell me anything unless I show them I mean business, so he moves there. But then he had this great bit of advice for when you're doing a tough interview. And he of course, takes all of his notes handwritten, which is crazy. But he's like, whenever I would be, someone would be telling me something I really wanted to hear. I would be compelled to try and interject, be like oh and ask questions, because instead I'd force myself to look down my notebook and write s-u-s-u-s-u-s-e, which stands for shut up, shut up, shut up.

That's so great and it's just be, quiet for as long as possible yeah because people will continue to volunteer information absolutely, if you just let the pauses get uncomfortable they will fill the silence.

0:19:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, for you. I would think that that's that's what you, because that's your, that's your craft. Yeah, um, I don't know why. Here's another one. This is the robert graves book, the reader over your shoulder, which I think is less known than the elements of style, but I thought was just as good. I mentioned stephen king's book and, uh, annie lamont's book, I think is called bird by bird. Let me see if I can find it. She's a wonderful writer.

0:20:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I have an illustrated fancy version of Strunk and White back there, oh that's fancy.

0:20:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, bird by Bird. I think you might like Bird by Bird because it's not just about writing, it's about living well, Very classic book and she's a marvelous writer. But these are all more prose than what you do. You're a journalist.

0:20:29 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, but prose is still good. Well, it's ironic because I can't write.

0:20:33 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I write well, but I can't do the. You know I've written books. The process of writing is so painful, it is difficult, I can't do it, it's just. I think I'm also hampered by my aphasia, my inability to see images in my mind, because I can't like see the castle and then write up all the details.

0:20:58 - Jeff Jarvis
What does that do in terms of can you? Can you visualize an outline of a structure or something?

0:21:02 - Leo Laporte
only abstract. Every nothing's visual. It it's all abstract. I can intellectualize. So yeah, I think nonfiction's not as much of a problem for me, but I don't think I could. I want to write fiction and I just can't. Yeah, same here. I just have you ever started a novel, jeff?

0:21:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, up there in my cabinet is my very embarrassing novel I wrote in 1981 about the Berlin Wall. Is there?

0:21:31 - Paris Marinteau
are there spies in it. Can you read? Us. Can you open it? Just read one page for us, the beginning of one page, All right.

0:21:38 - Leo Laporte
Yes, stephen King's book is called On Writing A Memoir of the Craft, and also very good. It's unfortunate because, as a genre fiction author, people don't think about him as a great writer. But actually he's brilliant, and so this is a very interesting book to read. I don't know why I read so many books about writing.

0:22:02 - Paris Marinteau
I mean, I think it's just fascinating to hear people talking about their craft.

0:22:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is, you're right.

0:22:08 - Paris Marinteau
And insight into a process like that.

0:22:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:22:10 - Paris Marinteau
Oh my gosh, jeff is pulling out four boxes.

0:22:14 - Leo Laporte
What the what you have, the manuscript. I was imagining it was going to be bound. He has the full manuscript, the typewritten pages.

0:22:22 - Paris Marinteau
Do we think it's going to be typewritten or handwritten?

0:22:25 - Leo Laporte
Typewritten right. Is it typewritten?

0:22:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeff, no, I wrote this in my Osborne 1.

0:22:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, it's a what is an Osborne 1?. It's a very early computer and I guess those would be printouts. Did you burst and decollate those printouts?

0:22:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I bought. No, I bought a um you had a laser printer. Oh no no, that's what it was, it was. I bought an impact printer.

0:22:52 - Leo Laporte
The printer cost more than the um, it was like a typewriter. Those impact printers were basically typewriters.

0:22:58 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, computer controlled typewriters what a world look at that oh my goodness, jeff, come on now. I bet you, you know what you should.

0:23:10 - Leo Laporte
You should really think about reread, readdress this, because maybe it's good this got rejected in 1990.

0:23:16 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, but so the world wasn't ready for it google wasn't.

0:23:19 - Jeff Jarvis
it was also wrong because I said the wall wasn't going to come down.

0:23:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, Well, now it could be on alternative history. It's the man in the high castle, God. I even did umlauts.

0:23:30 - Paris Marinteau
Wow, umlauts.

0:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Not easy to do on an impact printer. Let me tell you.

0:23:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Carson read his story one last time, then picked up the hotel phone and dialed his office in Chicago I love it. Sheen, on the other end of the line, answered his call beeping its hello, and Carson stuck the phone into a rubber brassiere Okay, so it's a little dated by his portable computer. Then he hit one button to send his story across half of Europe, a whole ocean and half of America in three minutes worth of high-pitched digital gurgling. By the time I have not read this in literally 40 years Is this?

0:24:07 - Leo Laporte
the opening paragraph. No no, this is page nine. Oh no, give us the first paragraph, give us the first line.

0:24:14 - Paris Marinteau
The first line is whether you're going to finish read the book or not?

0:24:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Bulletin urgent West Berlin UPI. A car bomb exploded at the Berlin Wall today, exactly 25 years after East Germany built it and divided the city into two, so it was a mock news story.

0:24:32 - Paris Marinteau
What's the next sentence? Frankly, I like page nine.

0:24:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, nine was good. I thought that was good. I'll skip the next paragraph On a Chicago newspaper.

0:24:39 - Jeff Jarvis
an editor named Frank read the green computer screen. That itself dates it See you know what this is?

0:24:44 - Leo Laporte
because you love technology.

0:24:45 - Paris Marinteau
This is great, honestly green computer screen that itself dates it, see you. So you know what this is, because you love technology great honestly, I like that.

0:24:50 - Leo Laporte
This is a beautiful blast from the past. Wait a few more years and it will be be retro. It'd be so people will love it.

0:24:53 - Jeff Jarvis
That carried the news and shouted carson wow so carson is a reporter chapter two, berlin, august 14. The dike cracked, but still nothing can flow through, save sound. Carson read his paragraph, grinned at it, then erased it from his small gray computer screen and started typing again.

0:25:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, Carson, it's you.

0:25:17 - Jeff Jarvis
He wasn't writing a novel, only a news story. Okay, that's enough. I like it, Jeff. I have not opened that up literally since 1990.

0:25:25 - Leo Laporte
I think you should readdress this Paris and I encourage you.

0:25:27 - Paris Marinteau
I do think you should publish it the only people who read it were my parents.

0:25:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know if I should say that because it had a sex scene in it and they made fun of me for it. How old were you? Well, it was in. I was in my late 20s.

0:25:45 - Leo Laporte
You were Paris's age. Now, here's the thing. Here's what I would do. Don't publish it, forget publishers.

0:25:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh God, no, it's embarrassing.

0:25:52 - Leo Laporte
We're going to turn it into a podcast.

0:25:55 - Paris Marinteau
Jeff, we're going to do a. You're going to need a third podcast. That's what you need.

0:25:59 - Leo Laporte
That's awful. Are there male and female voices in this? Is there a Carson?

0:26:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yes, oh, yes, and is there a woman in this? Yes, yes because he falls in love with an East German woman and they can't get together because the wall keeps them apart.

0:26:14 - Leo Laporte
Let's hear your East German accent. Paris.

0:26:17 - Paris Marinteau
I'm going to direct this At one point I could do a German accent, but I can't anymore.

0:26:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what it's sounding like. You're Irish. Irish yeah, you have to be a little more staccato. I have to be a little more staccato yeah, but I think we could work on it, maybe listen to some stuff time when I could do a German accent, but that was high school.

0:26:40 - Paris Marinteau
I've lost it.

0:26:41 - Leo Laporte
You're gonna have to do a sexy German. What's her name?

0:26:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know what her name is like. I'm trying to find and carson, is you obviously, jeff. God damn the thing is 568 pages.

0:26:51 - Paris Marinteau
Well, that's well it'll be a multi-series podcast I honestly think.

0:26:59 - Leo Laporte
Are there cliffhangers, like moments where you go? What's going to happen next? I don't remember I don't remember you gotta digitize this draft oh god, no, no, oh god, look, I'm looking for scripts that we can add somewhere, somewhere, I have five and a half inch discs paris. Would you like to be part of a radio drama?

0:27:18 - Paris Marinteau
I would love to be part of that, yeah her name was petra oh you're, I've

0:27:22 - Leo Laporte
cast you as Petra, petra, petra, petra, martino. And is there, I could be the narrator. You're going to need a narrator because it sounds like it's not all dialogue. Yeah, or I could be the cantankerous newspaper editor. Cousin, get in here.

0:27:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe it was. That's perfect. Maybe it was Uta Croft. Get in here. Maybe it was Uta Croft. I can't remember who it was.

0:27:48 - Leo Laporte
I like it. Start casting it. John Ashley, what do you want to play?

0:27:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I need a role. I think, he's got to be an East German guard, can you be?

0:28:03 - John Ashley
I'm not going to attempt to do it. No, I don't get paid enough for that, leo.

0:28:10 - Leo Laporte
There'll be money for you, because this is going to be huge.

0:28:14 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the next Wicked.

0:28:16 - John Ashley
No amount of money will try to get me to do a German accent. Thank you very much.

0:28:22 - Leo Laporte
I love the let's see. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a quick break, and then I will get to the next story.

0:28:30 - Jeff Jarvis
After that diversion, you know what?

0:28:33 - Leo Laporte
that's what this show is known for. I think we got big money here. Yeah, and I've been looking for. I want to do radio theater on podcasts. Unfortunately, I went late to the game. I had been thinking about this for 20 years and then, of course, many people have done it, like the moths. But I would very much like to take your novel and dramatize it.

0:28:53 - Paris Marinteau
I think that would be great.

0:28:55 - Leo Laporte
It's no worse than Megalopolis. It's bad.

0:28:57 - Paris Marinteau
Have you Did. You see it, Leo.

0:28:59 - Leo Laporte
Not yet. I'm waiting till it comes out in streams.

0:29:02 - Paris Marinteau
It's out on streaming it's out. Is it out in streams? So far, it's not. It's out is it?

0:29:05 - John Ashley
out and streaming it's, I it's is it out right now, really I thought so because I saw people posting well, they promote it. Or if you want to watch it for free, you can watch a really poorly uh ai and yes, it's out on streaming yeah, okay, good it's 20 bucks, but it's out on stream you know what francis deserves my money leo, I want to save you 20 dollars, though you should go look up.

0:29:30 - Paris Marinteau
We really argue you know I would argue it's worth it's worth.

0:29:33 - John Ashley
Or you can go to youtube, go to movie recaps and look up the uh ai uh summarized version of megapolis. No, no, no, no no, it's already it's already basically the ai summarize version.

0:29:45 - Paris Marinteau
It is so, and since I was in it in the original incarnation.

0:29:49 - Leo Laporte
I think I need to buy this and see if I was adam driver. Or maybe I was gin carlo esposito, or maybe I was natalie emmanuel, I don't know. 2.1 stars hold on.

0:30:01 - Paris Marinteau
I just posted a link in the discord, that is, someone compiled some of the craziest things that happen in megalopolis because it's now on streaming. If you want to watch a couple of them or you could, you could keep. Yeah, keep your mind pure wow, there's a chariot race there's so much in this movie, I can't decide between this and wicked. I don't know there are multiple dick jokes.

0:30:24 - Leo Laporte
It's like a whole thing yes, francis is quite a is quite a piece of work. All right, I can't wait to watch this tonight. It is available and I will be watching it. How's your nickvember going, by the way? It's going great this is a long month, isn't it? Almost at the end?

0:30:40 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, it's quite a lot of nick it's uh are you going to subject your family to anything?

0:30:46 - Paris Marinteau
I am, they're excited.

0:30:47 - Leo Laporte
What are you watching tonight?

0:30:51 - Paris Marinteau
It's a great question, maybe Con Air or Moon.

0:30:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's good, the folks would like that one. That's a parent, pleaser.

0:31:01 - Paris Marinteau
All right, let's take a break. We were saying that before, but we've got to do it because we have a lot of ads this episode we do.

0:31:08 - Leo Laporte
We have a lot of ads today, two at least our show today brought to you by. Actually, this one should be a public service announcement. I'm not going to take your money, Bitwarden, because everybody needs to use a password manager and bit warden is the only password manager I use and recommend why? Well, few reasons. It's really well done. I mean, it's very it's. I like the UI, I like the interface, I like how it works, I like its uh ease of use. But, but most of all, I like the fact that it's open source GPL license. That's good for a number of reasons. In my opinion, any cryptography program, any program you use that has encryption in it, should be open source. That's the only way you can know that there's no backdoors and that it's implemented properly using appropriate technology for encryption. And even if you can't verify that, the fact that it's open source means others have. In fact, Bitwarden is regularly audited by by third parties, and Bitwarden does something a lot of companies refuse to do. They do the audits, but sometimes other companies go, but I'm not going to publish your results because they don't want you to know what the audit turns up. Bitwarden always publishes the full results, so you and sometimes, yeah, there's an issue, the hey, you know this isn't done properly or whatever. Bitwarden fixes it right away. So you know this is battle-hardened.

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Bitwarden works with your stack to centralize security management across the entire enterprise and on employee devices as well, which gives you better control over sensitive information. It is such a great tool for business. And, of course, Bitwarden users can seamlessly connect tools for IT management and compliance and security automatically to improve and standardize deployment of enterprise credential management throughout your organization. You deserve a cost-effective solution that can dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online. You need Bitwarden. It's only a few minutes to set up.

Bitwarden supports import from all the major password management solutions, so it's very quick and, as I said, because it's open source, you can be sure it does exactly what it says it does. And I should mention this tomorrow, thanksgiving in the United States, if you're going to dinner with family and friends, ask them. Just say, hey, what do you do for password management? And if they tell you, oh, I got it all in the post-it note on my screen, or what do you mean? All Well, I only use the same password everywhere. Oh, don't freak out, just gently tell them about Bitwarden. And one of the nice things is for individuals, Bitwarden is free forever. You can also get a free trial of the teams or enterprise plan. All you have to do is go to bitwarden.com/twit. Tell them about it. You'll be doing your family and friends a favor. bitwarden.com/twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week and Google. You support us when you go to that address. bitwarden.com/twit.

0:36:58 - Paris Marinteau
I do think one of the funniest possible things you can do at Thanksgiving is saddle up next to your family and say hey, what are you doing?

0:37:01 - Leo Laporte
about passwords. Here's an even better one. Here's a. Here's an even better one. Go in the uh, go wherever the computer is in the library and look at the post-it notes, write down the password and then sidle up to him and say, is this your password? And see what they do.

0:37:18 - Paris Marinteau
Actually, there was some list of the most popular paths were oh yeah released a week or two ago and yeah two of them that had reached the top in the US were internet and computer, and that just makes me giggle but but you know that the like probably 80% of the general populace does that yeah oh, of course, the dumbest possible password yeah, I have a a friend, randall schwartz.

0:37:46 - Leo Laporte
He used to host our floss show. He's a well-known uh computer coder, also kind of a hacker in his own right. We used to go. He used to go on every geek cruise with us.

We'd go on these cruises and do geek stuff and, uh, on one of the cruises he was doing that he was writing down because he was watching wi-fi traffic this is in the days before the traffic was encrypted and he would write down the person's password, write it on a piece of paper and go up to him, say is this your password? I told him randall, stop. The point is well taken, but that's not the way to do it. What? Was the reaction usually well what he did to me my hair was on fire.

I said how do you what the what he said wi-fi, unencrypted. I said oh yeah, nowadays, by the way, almost always when you log into something, it's everybody's encrypted. Now, so that would no longer work and two-factor I had.

0:38:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I had one account that I hadn't done two factor on yet and coming back from Germany, I'm waiting in line to get on the plane and I get a text from this institution saying your password has changed. If you didn't do it, call. And it's an account that mattered. Hurriedly calling getting the account locked, good, and must've been a hotel, must've been yeah, two factor, wow. And so I two-factored it. I just finally did my onboarding for Stony Brook University At one point. I wanted to, you know, leave us your comments.

0:39:15 - Leo Laporte
I wanted to say you're not effing Fort Knox, but they are.

0:39:18 - Leo Laporte
But they are, but they are I'm telling you but they had three different two-factor apps.

0:39:21 - Jeff Jarvis
They had three different two-factor apps. Can't you just agree on one?

0:39:25 - Paris Marinteau
Well, yeah, Are you using Duo or something? I found the Duo so annoying at NYU.

0:39:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Duo's good.

0:39:35 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, they sometimes have Okta and Duo and you know variety. I'm just annoyed by the ones that have to call me on the phone to let me in. I'm like just put it on an authenticator app.

0:39:41 - Leo Laporte
I used to have to do that with iHeart because they would require password changes, I think every three months. It was a lot, and I never logged into iHeart. I didn't work inside, I didn't use the email. So when I had to log in for my training on how not to do Plugola, every time my password was no longer good. So I had to call and say, hey, my password is not good anymore.

0:40:07 - Jeff Jarvis
You got scolded for not changing it, didn't you change it?

0:40:11 - Paris Marinteau
No, I don't work for you. Don't you know who I am? I'm the tech guy.

0:40:17 - Leo Laporte
I know that's the irony of it. They had no idea.

0:40:20 - Paris Marinteau
That is very funny actually, Are you Leo?

0:40:22 - Leo Laporte
Lappert? Who are you? No idea. So Meta has come up with a clever ploy and I'm curious what you think about it. We're talking about age verification and there's a drumbeat going boy in.

0:40:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Washington DC. Wait till we get to Australia on this story.

0:40:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and all over the world, where they say it's up to, these social networks have to. You know, these social networks have to verify the age, make sure they're not serving kids, which I understand the motivation, but it's also, as you know, very difficult to do age verification and preserve privacy. If you do, or if you're doing it, you have to do it for everybody, every user. And that means what? Am I going to give you a picture of my driver's license? Hell, no. So Meta, who you know, instagram, whatsapp and, of course, facebook. They don't want to do this, so they are lobbying hard in Congress to say oh no, it's not our job, it's the app store's job. Make Apple and Google do it so we don't have to. Oh nice, try. Apparently the, according to the washington post, they're, they're making headway in this jesus, in this lobbying the new surgeon general.

0:41:37 - Jeff Jarvis
The new surgeon general thinks that we all should ban, like australia, children under 16 from. Yeah well, I mean it's quite interesting.

0:41:44 - Paris Marinteau
Actually, I wrote a story this week we have the ways that we're doing it I put it underneath that uh story we were just talking about in the rundown. So, right now, the way that meta and tiktok so right meta recently rolled out these instagram teen accounts and the under which, by the way, that's a that's a good idea.

They're advertising it like crazy but the underlying like question, with all of these pushes for, you know, regulating kids and social media, something like kosa, teen accounts, like how the heck do you determine if someone's a kid or not? Uh, because anybody can just put in that they're 75 on. My kids did the internet, yeah, and how they're increasingly doing it is through facial age estimation. Yes, that sounds dystopian but is surprisingly. I don't know.

I had been looking into this quite a bit because I had heard a question that I had been asking in my field of work is like there are all these attempts to figure out how kids are, how old are kids, and one of them is the traditional form of age verification or identity verification that involves an ID and that's not super viable for most people because, one, kids don't have IDs. Two, no one wants to upload their ID for every website they go to on the internet, be it porn or social media. But turns out, the middle ground of this is this thing called age estimation and in specific cases, like for instagram and uh, tick tock, they're turning to facial age estimation is there increasingly yes, but they're increasingly using one provider this uh which I profiled in my story this week.

this british company called yoti um and there are, according to Yoti's own research, it seems to be quite accurate. There's been little independent research onto this, except for the National Institute of Standards and Technology did a study basically judging the efficacy of a bunch of these providers, albeit the results are kind of skewed because they used government data in order to estimate. So it was like visa photos of four-year-olds and in most cases Yodi was the most accurate for, say, kids aged 13 to 16. It could identify their age within a year or two by taking a photo.

0:44:01 - Leo Laporte
Does Yodi say how old they are, or just say kid or not kid?

0:44:04 - Paris Marinteau
They say kid or not kid, and so that's the thing is, yodi might be a year or two by taking does yodi say how old they are, or just say kid or not kid? They say kid or not kid, and so that's the thing is, the yodi might be a year or two off. But really what they're doing is, say, instagram wants to check whether or not uh people are uh 17 or under, um, and if they are 17 or under, they're going in a teen account.

If they're 18 or over, they're going in an adult account and the only yodi recommends kids on the border like you're 18 and so that's the problem is the kids that are in that kind of negligible zone. So what yodi and these other companies recommend to platforms is you actually make for facial age id. You make the cutoff age higher. It's like that sign you see at the grocery store. It's like if you look under 35, we're going to ID you. Yodi will say if someone looks under 25, we're not going to let them pass with facial age estimation. They might have to upload an ID or get a second person to vouch for them or something. So right now in the platform for Instagram, for Facebook dating, for TikTok, if you want to use certain features, or in Facebook dating dating's case, I guess, have your age verified, you have to take a video selfie and Instagram says Meta said that it caught something like 96% of teens trying to change their accounts in previous tests.

0:45:24 - Leo Laporte
So you talk about Louisiana, which has been requiring this for a while now.

0:45:27 - Paris Marinteau
But Louisiana how does?

0:45:28 - Leo Laporte
Louisiana, do it.

0:45:30 - Paris Marinteau
So the interesting thing about this field is there's kind of like three different buckets. If we're talking about how you're going to figure out what age someone is, the easiest bucket is called, like, age declaration or age gating. That's a thing pops up. It says give me your birthday. The medium bucket is facial age estimation. What we just talked about. The hardest bucket is what Louisiana is doing called identity verification or age verification. That means you have to prove someone's a very specific age. In Louisiana's case it's people over the age of 18, 18 and up can visit porn sites. So what porn sites have to do is they connect to this third-party app the state has, uh, kind of given the go-ahead for, called la wallet, that essentially you upload your id.

0:46:13 - Leo Laporte
Give my id to la wallet.

0:46:15 - Paris Marinteau
Yes, you upload your id you upload your id into it and, sensibly, what they're supposed to do is they'll give you, like a, a token that if you want to verify with Pornhub you'd enter in the token. Pornhub doesn't get any information about you but it does check that token against la wallet and la wallet says yes above 18 or no below eight, but la wall, obviously la wallet has your driver's license and ostensibly data about what sites you're.

0:46:45 - Leo Laporte
You know is la wall run by the state of louisiana? Is it owned by?

0:46:48 - Paris Marinteau
no, it's run by a third party company it's a private company it's a private company and basically the louisiana uh provision for this law says that any third party company will do la wall. It's just kind of the one that has emerged. So that's, I think, the big problem.

0:47:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, back in the day sites thought that everyone online was from Virginia because we came through AOL. How is geographic targeting now, if you're in Louisiana, can?

0:47:20 - Leo Laporte
That's another point. It's better, but it's not perfect. It's IP address-based.

0:47:24 - Paris Marinteau
It's better. So what I understand is it's ip address based and people are able to get around it with like vpns and whatnot, um, but it also ends up being a problem because ostensibly like the louisiana rules are supposed to just apply to citizens of louisiana but if someone's like driving through they can't look at, warn or things like that it'll catch. You know anybody who just has someone's?

near an ip address that's uh designated as being in louisiana. Even if they're over the border, they might not be able to access foreign sites there's a lot of obviously a lot of issues with uh, age identification, age verification.

0:48:01 - Leo Laporte
I education. I tell me why my position on this is wrong. My attitude is it's. It's not about chronological age. Some 13 year olds should be on Tick Tock doing their thing because they're making a million bucks. Some 18 year olds shouldn't be, and the people who know that best are the parents, are the custodial adults. Shouldn't this really be in the hands of the parents, shouldn't the parent? I hate it that state governments and soon the federal government are going to weigh in on this with imperfect technologies for identification when the parent knows how old the kid is. What, in my opinion, should happen is apple and google and other companies, and certainly all apps, should have parental controls and the parent should have to set it. Yes, this kid is a. It's appropriate. Yes, it's not. How do you?

0:48:57 - Jeff Jarvis
know that they're. They're a kid, I agree with you, but the problem is how do you know that they're subject to parental control unless you know that they're young, or who's not young?

0:49:07 - Paris Marinteau
and I also think I think that's a very valid point, leo, and I think that's a common sense argument here. But I think the issue and how we've gotten to the place we are right now is up until a couple years ago, it was basically the wild west out there. These social media websites, as well as every other website, wanted to know if you were 13 or younger, because then they'd have to do with COPPA stuff and they wouldn't want you in the platform. Otherwise, you've got an adult account. I think it was only like 2019 or 2020 that TikTok even introduced kids' accounts. Instagram didn't just introduced Instagram teen accounts. Up until recently, the parental controls were non-existent to very, very small um that's what it's got to be a very big problem, and so people are pushing.

In the absence of past controls, they're pushing for the harshest possible punishments for this company.

0:49:57 - Leo Laporte
That's the mistake, because they're mad yeah, uh, make, and so I think maybe it's going to end up somewhere in the middle make the platforms, empower parents and to answer your question, jeff, if you're, if you're an adult, you don't. You, you don't use parental controls. Parental controls are only for parents to turn on for their kids, and if the parents don't listen to their kids, then there's no controls and it's up to the parents.

It's device based. Yes, yeah, so every iphone has parental controls. Every android phone has parental controls. Uh, every app should have parental controls. That that the parent could say okay, first of all, the parent should say whether instagram is on that 13 year old's phone or not. That actually exists now. If the if instagram's on there, the parent should have a setting an instagram that says no, yes okay hold on hold over a second.

0:50:50 - Jeff Jarvis
What if it's just I'm getting to this stuff through the web?

0:50:53 - Leo Laporte
how does the parent know what, to none of this apply. I mean, yeah, you're right. I mean the web is an issue. That's why it has to be probably has to be at the level of the phone be probably has to be at the level of the phone.

0:51:09 - Paris Marinteau
Um, look, I mean, yeah, the issue is in practice. It's very difficult, parent, what parents seem to be reacting to is. It's very difficult for even parents with the means and time to police their kids activity.

0:51:18 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't matter, that's their job. That is their job. It's not the government they're looking for.

0:51:23 - Paris Marinteau
They're looking for more ways to do so and I think, in absence of having common sense parental controls, a lot of parents are pushing for extreme measures to be taken right, and we're just starting to see the results of that, where companies, in response to all of this are, are rolling out their own like responses, like just yesterday.

0:51:46 - Leo Laporte
TikTok Do you think OT is a good enough solution.

0:51:49 - Paris Marinteau
It seems so far to be quite good.

0:51:52 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I was really surprised, but Would you trust your kids with it?

0:51:56 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, I think that in most cases it seems to get it right. I mean, they have even a demo on their website where you can like upload, where you can try to check out with like a knife and a couple bottles of alcohol and drugs, and then it takes a photo of your face to determine whether or not you're over 21. And within one second it was like, yeah, you're over 21. And I was like, oh well, I mean, I guess that's true. But I didn't want to be that fast.

But it seems to be very good at determining whether people are kids or not. Albeit, there are, like you mentioned, some disparities across racial lines, as well as across gender lines. It does seem to be less than like 1% In many cases. It's like two or three tenths of a percent difference in terms of accuracy. But, of course, if these solutions are deployed at scale, that's going to be a problem and that will result in, you know, more barriers to entry for younger looking black or brown adults or women or Asian people are often seen as younger.

I mean, the issue is less in fairer skinned people and it's more in people with the darkest skin tones, although there's some slighter disparities with uh people from asian regions.

0:53:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Um if I may add a media angle into this, um, what's happening in australia, uh and I have a video cued up below is that this is coming from murdoch. And and why does murdoch care about this? Because he hates the internet.

0:53:26 - Paris Marinteau
Are you sure? Because the Wall Street Journal has spent like $20 million lobbying against COSA.

0:53:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Really, there are exceptions in this.

0:53:36 - Paris Marinteau
I don't know, but this was recently. If you look up, there was the Wall Street Journal. I was shocked by this. The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article inside Big Tech's bid to sink the online kid safety bill, and in it there was a disclosure that I didn't notice at first.

0:53:59 - VO
I didn't notice that either. Tech billionaire, Elon Musk, has just weighed in on the government's proposed teen social media ban, calling it the back doorway to control internet access for all australians.

0:54:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Hello, I'm paul barry, welcome to media watch, and this is a great show australians, hello I'm paul barry, welcome to media watch, and this is a great show oh, it's great, my q I could read that video.

0:54:25 - Leo Laporte
It was two million oh I, because I I clicked the link and it did not.

0:54:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry to the. What's the? Uh, I think it was five minutes in news.

0:54:29 - Paris Marinteau
Corp has spent about two million dollars lobbying uh against kosa in the past say why.

0:54:35 - Jeff Jarvis
It say why.

0:54:36 - Paris Marinteau
It doesn't say why, but it does say non-tech companies are also objecting for reasons including concerns about determining the age of users.

0:54:44 - Jeff Jarvis
There you go. It's inconvenient, but in Australia I'll find it for you, Liam, sorry.

0:54:50 - Leo Laporte
That's all right.

0:54:51 - Jeff Jarvis
So in.

0:54:51 - Leo Laporte
Australia. They've recently introduced a bill ABC.

0:54:54 - Paris Marinteau
anyway, they recently introduced a bill banning kids from social media of 16 and under. I believe In.

0:54:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Australia. Well, it's more than that. It's about to be implemented. Pass and what? This video, this show is really great and they have this great compilation of all the editorials in the Murdoch papers and all the stories in the Murdoch papers, and it's just in sync of pushing for this, because he pushes against the internet platforms, because he hates them. Media company which was boasting this month.

0:55:29 - VO
This is a major win for News Corp's Let them Be Kids campaign.

0:55:33 - VO
That News Corp campaign, launched six months ago on the front pages of its Sunday tabloids, had one main aim to pressure the government into barring access to social media for anyone under 16, arguing that the age limit is desperately needed because teenagers are facing the greatest crisis of a generation.

0:55:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my God, Of a generation. What about last generation? Or the next generation, I ask you? We don't have a memory for that of a generation. What? Since rock and roll, there's never been a greater threat to teenagers. All right, um, I don't know. I just feel like this shouldn't be a a law, a regulation. I agree, I think the parents should be doing it. And if parents don't do it, well, just feel like this shouldn't be a law, a regulation. I agree, I think the parents should be doing it, and if parents don't do it, well, it's on them. I mean, we don't make parents do a lot of things.

0:56:25 - Jeff Jarvis
But Paris's point is right we should make it easier for parents.

0:56:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, give them the tools.

0:56:29 - Paris Marinteau
I agree, give them the tools I do think we're already starting to see like very impressive results and I mean it's crazy that it's taken these companies multiple years into very costly like um litigation as well as legislation, to start making changes, like yesterday tiktok announced that it will no longer allow beauty filters to be, used on like kids under a certain age, and I mean listen probably top of my mind, but they should have done that from day one, and it's surprising that it has taken this much money and time for these companies to actually take common sense actions

0:57:07 - Leo Laporte
yeah, well, um, I oppose this as a hypothetical. Actually, on sunday, if perfect face recognition age id were cape, you were capable of it, would that be? Would then these age id rules be okay? And people still bristled.

0:57:26 - Paris Marinteau
They still didn't like the idea of having to do this I mean, but maybe it's as unobtrusive as you could get right yodi claims and it's published a lot of white papers and the underlying data to support this that when it comes to identifying whether 13 to 17 year olds are under the age of 21, it's 99.7 or something like that percent accurate but but the data coming from where again I mean coming?

from yodi it's not they did an independent test with um. Some company I'm forgetting that also said it was in the 99 range. The numbers are quite a bit lower when it was tested by the us government, albeit yodi and the other companies say that's because, instead of using selfies, which is what the data is trained on, the us government used us government data, which is like border crossing photos and mug shots, but which are not super accurate, but still it was one of the most um accurate ones. I don't know.

0:58:22 - Leo Laporte
I think it's an interesting way to try and address this yeah, but I think the articles in the information weekend the big read a complex new age of face tech by one Paris.

0:58:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Martineau. Thank you, Paris, for the work On the job.

0:58:40 - Leo Laporte
Yes, very good. Let's take a little break. When we come back, lots more, including ScooterX's Google changelog. Fire it up, scooterx. But first a word from our sponsor. You're watching this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. This segment of this week in google, brought to you by our fine sponsor, USCloud.

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Visit uscloud.com, book a call today. Find out how much your team can save faster, better and less expensive. Microsoft support for less from USCloud uscloud.com. We thank USCloud so much for supporting this week in google. You support us when you call them and, uh, if they ask, say hey, yeah, I heard it on. This week in google was on the twit network. Yeah, I heard it. It's pretty good. Uh, all right back to the show. Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis, Elon Musk we, we said the name, we might as well talk about him unleashes an online army on federal workers. This is, this is a sign of what is to come this?

is the nightmare.

1:04:03 - Jeff Jarvis
He is doxing federal workers just like line level, not even like he's just by name cnn tried to get people to come on the air to talk about this experts and none of them would do it of course not because elon will sick his army on them.

1:04:26 - Leo Laporte
Um, this is not how you want to improve government efficiency. This is a reign of terror, this is stalin-esque, this is not good this is totalitarian fear I don't. I'm not going to mention the names, but he zeroed in on one uh director of climate diversification at the us international development finance corp and brigaded her basically um 32 million views. An avalanche of memes and ridicule from his followers against the employee I this has got free speech man elon, this has got to stop.

1:05:08 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not gonna stop. It's not gonna stop. No point to he's done it before probably not even first amendment. It's probably not even first amendment because he's not a government employee, he's not official in government.

1:05:19 - Leo Laporte
He went after Yol Roth, remember after Yol left Twitter and Yol really said it was a nightmare, it was a nightmare.

He called him a pedophile. His targets this week include Nancy Pelosi's relative and a senior climate advisor at the department of housing and urban development. But that post, according to wall street journal, also include the names of tubes. By the way, the journal's publishing the names, which kind of makes me mad. I'm not gonna do that. The post included the names of two obscure federal officials with climate related jobs, including one who is no longer at the Energy Department. The tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees, said the president of the American Federation of Government Employees. It's intended to make them fearful, that they will become afraid to speak up and yes, they already are. They won't go on CNN.

1:06:14 - Jeff Jarvis
This is about experts on this topic won't go on yeah if you're an academic studying this kind of stuff. So into totalitarianism are you going to go on?

1:06:27 - Leo Laporte
very unfortunate this is totalitarianism. This is you're going to yell that on cnn, let alone off well, go ahead, elon, take me on. You see, the problem is we're not widely distributed, so to speak.

1:06:41 - Paris Marinteau
Uh only one of us has been on cnn in the last couple of weeks, oh yeah aren't you afraid me?

1:06:50 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, scott james is a clown.

1:06:56 - Leo Laporte
I'd be more afraid of Elon. Elon, you know this is talk about punching down. Here's the richest man in the world. He owns Twitter and he's using Twitter as a platform to dox and attack and brigade with his you know army of little sycophants, hard working people in the federal government. But let's say these guys areworking people in the federal government. But let's say these guys are terrible people in the federal government? He still shouldn't do it.

1:07:22 - Paris Marinteau
No, it's not okay, being a bad employee does not mean you should be harassed by pillory, pillorying people and it's not about being a bad employee. It's about a that this will be his like seventh job being the leader of some company or entity yeah, can he hold a job?

1:07:46 - Leo Laporte
what's going on?

1:07:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I know I've said it before, but I just finished. I'm going to write a post I hope next week when I'm in california of ara hannah, iran for journalists yeah and we've got a look at the um uh she lessons to be learned it for those who don't know.

1:08:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure many of you do this.

1:08:05 - Jeff Jarvis
She wrote the book on totalitarianism explaining how hitler's germany happened and and soviet and stalin yeah, um, and, and part of the part of the lesson of this is and this is a big one for journalists is that it's about the creation of a fictional world, that the real world that we live in is messy and difficult, and so part of what you do to become an authoritarian and totalitarian is you create a fictional world in which the facts don't matter. And so we in journalism think, oh well, we'll solve this with facts and disinformation will be solved with information. Nope, and we don't have the right tools to figure this out. How do you deal with Elon by naming the people he goes after in a huge publication?

1:08:56 - Paris Marinteau
No, I mean, and I do think it's very interesting that one of the first things Elon did when he took over Twitter was he published his Twitter files, had Barry Weiss and Matt Tabby go through about all the different ways that Twitter had worked with the federal government, by which it meant like responded to some Biden admin emails about taking accounts down that were harassing or impersonating them, and now a major social media platform is going to be a de facto arm of the state.

I do think that that's something we're considering, yeah, doing far worse than yeah, he is yeah, and it's very strange now that we have a platform run largely by one man that is trying to be the right hand of the president. I don't think we've ever had that in terms of a social media.

1:09:45 - Leo Laporte
I think it's worse than that, and it's also a platform that.

1:09:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm being neutral. He's not the right hand of the president or elect. He is his own man.

1:09:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, we did have newspapers, I I think if you go back to pilitzer and hearst, uh, we had media that was similarly powerful, or, um, father cochlan coughlin on the radio, I think people forgot how dominant father cochlan was in the in the 30s and uh who is this?

1:10:17 - Leo Laporte
yeah see, uh, you know rachel maddow did a really good piece on father coglin. Uh, it's probably on youtube. You can go back and uh, look at it. Uh, I should warn you if you're an Elon Musk fan. He says she lies, so, but it's historically everything she said a podcast she did a great podcast she did a podcast about it.

Yeah, yeah, but he was a demagogue kind of you know the demagogue uh, he was a priest on radio who was railing against communism, anti-semite he was everywhere also anti-semitic right and he would attack he. Yeah, there's also a pbs uh documentary called uh, him, or actually is it a documentary or an article? Today let's see, yeah, the Father Coughlin story Exploring Hate, a public media initiative. He was the guy and you know it's funny because he was listened to by almost everybody. He had huge power, uh, and wielded it comp.

1:11:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean so irresponsibly he was the precursor to mccarthy yeah, well, he, he was pro-nazi.

1:11:32 - Leo Laporte
I mean, he was. This was not a good, a good person. The only thing that stopped him was the church ordered him off the airwaves in 1942. He died in 1979. He was alive in our lifetime but fortunately he was silenced. But he was one of the first to use the new medium of radio, and very effectively.

1:11:55 - Jeff Jarvis
So I came across a great little tidbit this week when I was doing some research for my Linotype book and oh, I don't know, sorry, when I was reading Hannah Aron, she kept on quoting the same book. Well, it turns out it was a guy who used to set up Hitler's loudspeaker systems. Oh yeah, his rallies, yeah. And then he got into the inside of the I. Oh yeah, his rallies, yeah. Then he got into the inside of the.

1:12:20 - Leo Laporte
I'll put air quotes administration and he was the developer of the people's radio. Yeah, her thesis was the av squad was what enabled hitler. Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah, I really liked that actually at being a former member of the AV squad. Anyway, I don't you know, is Musk another father Coughlin, I guess.

1:12:41 - Paris Marinteau
So in some ways, although Coughlin had really more sway over the American public than anybody has had ever since so I mean I know that Twitter is imperatively to other bigger social media platforms a small drop in the it's 100, 300 million people.

1:12:59 - Leo Laporte
It's not.

1:13:00 - Paris Marinteau
But I do think that it's notable that even this week Elon admitted for the first time something people had known in practice for a bit, that he's purposefully throttling any posts that contain links on Twitter. And said it because he doesn't want anybody leaving the website. But I do think that goes back to the point you were saying before about limiting information and making it more difficult for people to figure out what is real or not.

1:13:26 - Leo Laporte
He finally admitted it, paul Graham, who I respect and like the founder of Y Combinator, and he says he has 2 million followers. He blasted Twitter's biggest flaw the deprivatization of tweets with links in them. He complained about that on Sunday Musk's workaround hey, no problem, just write a description in the main post and put a link in the reply. This stops lazy linking. That's what he's against is lazy linking.

1:13:54 - Paris Marinteau
It's just a ridiculous request for a modern social media platform that you can't post a link in your post or else it won't get any pickup you have to reply to it.

1:14:05 - Jeff Jarvis
It's happening with instagram and facebook too I mean yes, that's.

1:14:08 - Leo Laporte
I think this is oh yeah, they don't want. Oh yeah, with threads.

1:14:12 - Paris Marinteau
They don't want links. So I do think this is part of the reason why blue sky is taking off is I can post a link to something or a story or something and people will see it and be able to discuss it, and that's lovely.

1:14:25 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think it makes sense that the Elon's blocking links just because he doesn't want you to click a link and stop reading X.

1:14:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, it's, because that's news. What you're linking to is generally news, and that's the way to degrade news. Exactly the same thing that's happening on all the better properties.

1:14:41 - Paris Marinteau
They're doing it as a way to degrade news it's the same sort of line of thought as to why he made that stupid choice where previously, when you'd post a link, it would populate as a card that would say the headline of whatever website you're talking about and a description. But he got rid of that for some reason, and so all these different news websites changed the way that images displayed on websites like Twitter to include a headline and a description, but then he changed it back to be some tiny little part of it, and it's just why are you trying this? To deprioritize the news experience?

1:15:18 - Leo Laporte
All right, one more X story and then we'll move on. This is kind of an interesting story. So you remember the Onion bought InfoWars for about half what InfoWars was offering. Wait, you say InfoWars was going to buy InfoWars was offering yeah, wait, you say InfoWars was going to buy InfoWars yeah. So Alex Jones is being forced to sell InfoWars in a settlement to the Sandy Hook families who won a multi-billion dollar award, and he's got to sell off all his assets. But, interestingly, a consortium of people formed by the products he was selling, I guess, offered a considerable amount of money which had basically put it back in his hands. The Onion offered half that, but the parents said no, no, sell it to the Onion, we like that much better. Well, on Monday X weighed in. Remember, we talked about the fact that they were going to have something to say about this. Elon Musk's lawyers objected to the sale of the InfoWars X accounts. That would have gone along with the sale. Right, All the X accounts for InfoWars. Elon Musk said no, we own those. X owns all the accounts.

1:16:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Including ours.

1:16:42 - Leo Laporte
Including yours, including mine, including paris's. Uh, you do not own your followers, you do not own your account. You do not own anything at all. And actually, as 404 media points out, um, this is jason keebler writing uh, that's probably true for all social platforms. They consider your posts their property. That's probably true for all social platforms. They consider your posts their property. That's how they could sell it to ai right, but does?

1:17:04 - Jeff Jarvis
but does that, does that presume that you can't you have no power over it to give it to somebody else?

1:17:13 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's it. I mean, when the president, the president, the POTUS account on Twitter, at POTUS, doesn't belong to Barack Obama. It belongs to whoever the president of the United States is, or does it? No, it turns out, it doesn't belong to anybody but X.

1:17:33 - Paris Marinteau
I mean, I think this is probably what they're trying to do. Is X had a bit of a side hustle for a bit I don't know if it's still going on where they're now trying to hawk hot usernames to people Like, if there's dormant accounts that have maybe like a four or five letter username or a one letter username, after a certain point they'll be taken offline and then some people who work at x will go around and try to hawk it to interested buyers for six figures which, by the way, folks, is why you don't want to kill your account, make it go dormant, do whatever you want I'm still there, but that's a different discussion.

1:18:08 - Jeff Jarvis
But don't kill it, because it'll get taken over. Yeah, can I do one more? Leo on on this topic yeah, all right this will be the last one.

Yeah, but the financial piece of this is just interesting, I was interviewed by the Observer, the Guardian Observer, and he asked me about the takeover of Twitter and I said you know, I was one of those who said it was stupid and dumb, but it turned out to be a damn fine investment for Elon Musk because he got to the center of power and meanwhile Tesla stock has shot up at far more value. Well, the other thing that happened just now is that Elon is going to give his backers who aren't the center of power they gave him the money, the $44 billion to buy buy it. Now he's giving them stock in xai and uh, which is currently valued in the billions.

Right it's, right, it's called. It's a windfall for them yeah, well there you go.

1:19:07 - Leo Laporte
See it was smart to invest in, uh, in uh, elon's acquisition of twitter. Yeah, good move, yeah, wow I um all right.

1:19:18 - Paris Marinteau
Well, I guess, while we're, on the subject, similar but different. I found it really interesting this week because last week we talked about how Blue Sky has, according to some metrics, now a highly daily active user number in threads active user number than threads and I guess threads was paying attention and meta was paying attention because over the last week they've now rolled out two copycat or announced that they're going to copycat two features from blue sky one, the ability to have custom feeds or opt into a default chronological feed on threads, and two starter packs, uh, where you can put together a list of people to automatically have somebody follow. I think it's just very interesting that it feels like meta has, over the last decade or two, taken most of its most popular features from other apps like stories and Instagram.

1:20:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's a skill. It's a skill, it's a talent, it's it's a feature, it's um. By the way, paris, what was the method you said last week for how we could? It was broken at the time, but it came back up how you can find out what's clear sky.

1:20:29 - Leo Laporte
Yes, tell me about that. What is that?

1:20:31 - Paris Marinteau
so clearskyapp. If you pull it up this is something just built by a third-party guy that has been down for quite some time it ostensibly shows you on top the top people who've been blocked or are blocking someone on Blue Sky. But if you put in your account name there so I'll put in Parisnyc, it will show me. Well, it one shows you who I'm blocking and who I've been blocked by. But there's also a thing on there on the side that says lists and you can click on the lists and it will show you what lists include starter packs nice, only block three people you're a nice person a nice person but watch, she's blocked by there's also blocking, yeah she is on quite a few lists, including it.

1:21:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, wow more. That's a long list of lists I've been gaining fault.

1:21:26 - Paris Marinteau
I mean I, since last week have gained 7 000 followers can I enter my?

1:21:32 - Leo Laporte
am I allowed to do mine?

1:21:34 - Paris Marinteau
yeah, but you need to figure out. If you have a blue sky dot social handle, then you need to enter the whole thing, whatever it is no, he has a. He has a then just enter in what your username is. Yeah, it's leolaportme, I guess, right but the thing is, anybody can look this up, so right, it's public.

1:21:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's me, yeah, that's my uh little image at the top you're only blocking martin screlly, which I think is very funny, leo very well, I don't even know. I mean, like that is silly, let's see if I'm blocked by anybody. I don't post very much.

1:22:03 - Paris Marinteau
I mean you have to there. So if you saw on the first few people blocking is a thing, a big thing, on blue sky. If you saw when clearskyapp came up, it shows you the top blockers on the website and it's become a bit of a race for people To see who can have more. Because it shows you the top five blockers. The number one right now is this person named Palomar, who has blocked 408,000 people.

1:22:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, I saw him on your list as it went by at Paris.

1:22:30 - Paris Marinteau
I mean yes, because he's blocked most of Blue Sky.

1:22:32 - Leo Laporte
Brianna Wu is at the top. Most blocked is brianna woo yeah, yeah brianna's uh opinion iconoclastic, iconoclastic.

1:22:44 - Paris Marinteau
But it also show you in the last 24 hours and you can see, because libs of tick tock just joined. They've been the number one blocked in the last 24 hours ah so this is, this is using the API.

1:22:56 - Leo Laporte
I guess this is all legit, right? This isn't secret information.

1:23:00 - Paris Marinteau
And it's a very technically difficult thing to pull off, especially in lists, because right now I believe I'm probably going to describe this wrong because I'm not sapping this but the only way to determine if a user is on a list is you literally just have to check every list and then do the equivalent of control F to see if their name is on it. So since Blue Sky now has like 20 million plus people, they took them like a week or two to pull up, to get all this information back together, because there are so many lists and people.

1:23:29 - Leo Laporte
I want graphs. I want to know if you're blocked by more than you're blocking, or like that. Let's see how many lists. I'm on 100 lists, which is I'm pretty happy about that. I might have to post more on Blue Sky. You are also on 100 lists, Jeff. I'm on 100 lists.

1:23:46 - Paris Marinteau
I mean, I think it might just tap out at 100.

1:23:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it does.

1:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, 100 is the highest.

1:23:51 - Jeff Jarvis
The frustrating thing is, I wish I could click on that list and go to the list to see who else is on it, which is why I want to do it Instead. It just takes you to the person.

1:23:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're on Blockenheimer.

1:24:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Some lists are there to block everyone on that list.

1:24:06 - Paris Marinteau
You know there are block lists on Blue Sky as well, lists of people to block, and then you can just auto-block all of them. They also have accounts that are specific labelers, which I haven't really gotten into, but it'll be things like you could subscribe to a labeler and that'll auto label certain things, like news accounts from this bent or that bent or people that are tech versus non-tech. It's very interesting so.

1:24:32 - Jeff Jarvis
So let me just say one more. So if I go, if if you, leo, go back up and click on one of the lists, any list doesn't matter okay, I'll, I moved it to me so how do we get to the starter kit?

1:24:42 - Leo Laporte
I am on bonnie's starter pack, but I guess I can only go to bonnie bonnie.

1:24:46 - Jeff Jarvis
So how do you then find out where the starter pack is to go to that?

1:24:49 - Paris Marinteau
basically what you need to do is you need to click. No, you need to click their username on there, yeah, and then look at the list, yeah if you click their at, it'll pull up their profile and then it shows starter packs on your profile oh, and this is interesting, she is requested to obscure records from unauthenticated users.

1:25:11 - Leo Laporte
Now I can authenticate, because I just haven't.

1:25:13 - Paris Marinteau
I wasn't logged in on this page, so so, essentially, there's a setting that you can have on in blue sky that says I don't want my posts shown yeah, outside of blue sky, and so now I'm logged in so then I can see starter pack list starter, starter.

1:25:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there it is. There's bonnie's starter pack and then also she has a list that you're maybe on as well, like yeah and isn't it nice leo was there next to the onion I'm next to the onion and right above stephen colbert colbert ryan reynolds, you are in good company this is a good list. I'm going to follow this list. These are good people, george.

1:25:50 - Paris Marinteau
I'm also looking at a list from someone named why maraner and you are. There's an editor for something called my, this touch, then you and then chuds of tiktok yeah, I'm one of the chuds.

1:26:04 - Leo Laporte
I think what's a chud, what's a chud, never mind why. Maraner consoles starter pack uh, I'm not sure I want to be in that group. I don't know. It depends what a chud is cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers I mean I'd say it's like, it's like a loser. I'd say uh yeah, so his list is of losers no, I mean no, that's not the list name.

1:26:32 - Paris Marinteau
That was just an account called chuds of tiktok oh, I see he's following, I see chuds of tick tock is in the list yeah, you're in this right. I'm right above chud you're right above chuds of tick tock interesting.

1:26:45 - Leo Laporte
Chuds of tick tock is an independent journalist covering conspiracy politics, history, extremism, corruption and more. An account, according to newsweek, often critical of conservatives, bj novak. I like that. Uh, this. This is a good bunch of people too. I like this one. Ryan reynolds appears on all of these lists you want to follow that one.

1:27:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I like this one.

1:27:07 - Leo Laporte
I'm following all of them. This is one of the nice things about blue sky when you do that, you get, you know, a lot of good things. I have a a post I'm going to put up. I have to get in a car and drive over to a restaurant because they for some reason it's next door to a drive-through and for some reason, at the at the end of the drive-through it says exit only and then an x, and I thought that might make a really good that's really good, that's a good, that's a good post don't tell anybody that's gonna be my next post.

I have to make a trip over.

1:27:41 - Jeff Jarvis
You heard it here first, guys do you have to go through the drive-thru and order something?

1:27:47 - Leo Laporte
no, I can. I can go to just to the exit and take a picture of it. I wish I had when I was there. I wasn't. It came to me later I should make that a post. But see, and again, I'm gonna give you a little nudge. If I go to microblog and I make that post there, it not only posts on my blog, on the microblog blog, but also on threads blue sky and mastodon. So I'm telling you, I love microblog, you should do that, jeff, it's posse I'm planning to do it.

It's posse right. Yep Post wants syndicate everywhere. I don't know what the second S is. All right Time for a break.

1:28:26 - Paris Marinteau
And then we're going to do what I like so much to do, which is Scooter X's changelog, and then Drive, drive, kicking and screaming yeah we need to get a little icon of scooter x in the change log video uh, his icon is just like an octopus, a red octopus we just have an octopus in there all right your access hydra is.

1:28:49 - Leo Laporte
Is he hydra? What is his, uh? Why is that? What is his, uh? What is that? It's an. It's an octopus with a skull, hydra it's, it's explain yourself. Oh, it's a marvel thing you just wouldn't understand.

Yes, okay, it's okay, leo it's okay, I saw a marvel movie once. Actually it was a good one. It was, uh, black panther. I loved that. That was a great movie, but I haven't seen any others since then. Uh, our show today brought to you by and again scooter exchange log coming up and you each pick your story because I there's so many stories in here, so many of them, like hank green plugging your book, jeff, yeah, I want to brag about that.

1:29:41 - Jeff Jarvis
We haven't even shown our our social realm pictures yet. That's something to stay on.

1:29:46 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, oh see photos of me and jeff irl dressed all fancy in in black tie.

1:29:52 - Leo Laporte
Wow, well oh we got, the tie is black, but well, that's nice that counts.

1:29:57 - Leo Laporte
That looks nice, that counts. You're listening to and watching this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau.

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All right, you want to see pictures of Jeff and Paris all dressed up? They got papped, but they're on Getty Images. Oh, that's a cute shot, you two sharing about cats.

Maybe I don't know something tell us, uh, where this was. What was the event?

1:34:36 - Paris Marinteau
it was at the glass house, a building I know nothing about other than that it's called the glass house and it's really inconvenient yeah, it was very far away from any subway or things like that, but we were there for the committee to protect journalists.

Uh, press freedom awards oh, that's great oliver was the mc jessica lesson of the information, was the event chair and uh three or four different journalists uh got awards um for various great things they've done, um impressive works of journalism or impeccable careers here's an image that's not from getty so we can show it.

1:35:16 - Leo Laporte
I probably shouldn't have shown those other ones. Uh, there you are on the step, and what is it? Stepping forward, step and repeat step and repeat and there and this is kind of cool.

1:35:26 - Paris Marinteau
This is the whole information team yeah you can see Jeff's shadow down there at the bottom, because he took this photo. That's, that's his head.

1:35:33 - Leo Laporte
We were looking for someone to take the photo. I was like, oh wait, jeff's photo.

1:35:35 - Paris Marinteau
Yes, that's that's his head. We were looking for someone to take the photo. I was like, oh wait, jeff's here oh, that's funny.

1:35:40 - Leo Laporte
They had a step and repeat, but no photographer.

1:35:42 - Paris Marinteau
Well, well, I mean that photographer's roaming, but he was busy taking.

1:35:45 - Leo Laporte
And and there's your founder. By the way, jessica, we don't give some credit to jessica lesson, who founded the information yes, took a big chance really on a, on a no advertising, uh fee, only news. Uh site it was, and it was expensive, four hundred dollars a month, a year, and three years a year, not a month, and I joined immediately because I you know.

I know jessica and sam and I think they're great people. They've both been on our shows and I knew that jessica would do a good job. I didn't know how good a job. This has been a huge success and, of course, they hired a very talented reporter for the weekend named Paris Martin. No, I love that. What a great. That's a great photo.

1:36:27 - Paris Marinteau
Good job, jeff, lovely time.

1:36:29 - Leo Laporte
Next time Get your silhouette out. I tried to. I was doing that. No, it was very difficult.

1:36:35 - Paris Marinteau
No one could really get. They had really intense lights on. It was clearly meant for a professional camera. It wasn't great but they throughout john oliver's little set.

1:36:48 - Leo Laporte
Throughout the night he kept making fun of google which really made me laugh, because they were trying to what? This wasn't a google event. No, no, no, no.

1:36:53 - Paris Marinteau
They were trying to raise money and google had a table which was right near the front and so, John Oliver, he was trying to kind of get the crowd to donate money and agree, he was like trying to get someone to donate $50,000. He's like anybody from Google. Google, are you going to do that? What about $25,000? $5,000? One, and kept all night ribbing the Google employees and then at the end had to read off and now for the google sponsored cocktail hour.

Oh boy I love it, but I thought it was very funny, that's awesome yeah, he's a funny, funny guy.

1:37:23 - Leo Laporte
I used to listen to his podcast. No, I've watched wasik tonight, but he's been doing that for 10 years. Before that he did something called the bugle wait with andy zaltzman yeah, it was hysterical podcast.

1:37:36 - Paris Marinteau
Well, if you're an andy zaltzman fan. It was hysterical podcast. Well, if you're an andy zaltzman fan, leo, may I recommend a show that I've already recommended to you before, called task master, but this most recent season, which was zaltzman on that zaltzman is on it and he is unchained. I cannot recommend it enough.

1:37:52 - Leo Laporte
He's, uh, in perfect form oh, I will definitely watch it and go back and listen to the old Bugle episodes. I'm sure they're still somewhere, because he and Oliver together. Yeah, he still does it, but it was him and Bugle.

1:38:04 - Paris Marinteau
He spends the entire time of Taskmaster, which is five days of shooting, then 10 episodes in studio in a full cricket whites, and then in studio he has other wacky costumes. He's like dressed as a roman soldier, a wizard, a whole thing what is his real job?

1:38:24 - Leo Laporte
is he a reporter? What does he? What does he do? I think he's a comedian oh, maybe he's a comedian podcast, yeah, something like that ladies and gentlemen, your patience was now going to be rewarded, because it's time. We know you've been waiting, you know you've been hanging on For the Google Change Log You're calling in the kids.

1:38:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Calling in grandma. It's time Get the whole family in For our favorite part of the show Google Change Log. Come on, john, there you go.

1:39:01 - Leo Laporte
Actually I put this one in and don't think I. I kind of regret it. Uh, google labs has a new uh ai generative ai tool called gen chess labsgooglelabsgoogle slash gen g-e-n chess. I'll choose my google account and now I can make a classic chess set inspired by cheese good so it does. It does the pieces in the uh. Well, now see, they're all cheddar.

That's not good let's do this one ice cream? I thought I saw that one once and I thought that was quite good. Uh, because there's all different flavors. The cheese, apparently there's only one kind of cheese, velveta. But there you go. You got mint chocolate chip, you got pep, I don't know what strawberry that's, that's, that's just about yeah and chocolate.

Maybe that's pistachio, yeah, and you can even edit it. You can go in here and say hmm, that should look different. I can regenerate it. I don't know what you do with it. I don't know why you do it try generate, try bow house oh, bow house, that's interesting here's they had ice cream versus hot chocolate, which would be oh, now that's a chess set I'd like to play with yummy, yummy, yummy.

Now we can play chess ice cream versus hot chocolate. Oops, I pushed the button too fast. Let's move my strawberry flavored pawn two squares forward. Oh, he's playing the peronies defense. I don't know, I don't know what he's up to. Let's. He likes moving his knight an awful lot the squares. Yeah, I know it's terrible. It's a terrible chess set. Uh, I would never. I would never want to use this chess set, but I do like it. Ice cream's going to beat hot chocolate. We're going to make them melt Until they melt, right exactly yeah. Can you do it in the style Picasso?

You know what? It seems like it's better than it is.

1:41:15 - Paris Marinteau
That's AI's whole deal.

1:41:16 - Leo Laporte
I just want to say that, uh, how do I get back?

1:41:18 - Paris Marinteau
it's the two-year anniversary of chat gpt this week and I think that's a great wow in the last week. Yeah picasso huh all right okay, I did do a make a creative chess set inspired by cryptids and it came up with some. I mean, they're not all cryptids, but some of them are good uh, please try a different prompt.

1:41:43 - Jeff Jarvis
He doesn't like the name. What was yours? Uh, bow house, because?

1:41:46 - Leo Laporte
because I put it in the chat bow house had a famous chess set. Ah, okay, but let's see if this is the bow house chess set. Well, it's very angular no, it's not no, let's look at the

1:41:57 - Jeff Jarvis
official bow house chess set do a make a creative chess set inspired by christmas is this in notion turned out quite well, just search for bow house chess set send me a notion link oh, here it is.

1:42:09 - Leo Laporte
No, it's that's. Oh, look at this. Oh, this is beautiful, it's etsy.

1:42:13 - Jeff Jarvis
So the point is that this shows the the yeah, that shows what the part does the X oh, you see yes, the bishop moves as an X.

1:42:23 - Leo Laporte
That's the only one. Oh, the knight does okay, shows as well. Yeah, you know what those Bauhaus errs were really smart, yeah, but that's not the only Google changelog, oh, no that was, that was enough.

1:42:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Leoo, that was plenty I think it was.

1:42:38 - Leo Laporte
I think it was more than enough. Uh, google's. Oh wait a minute, he just sent me the same one. Let me find another one. Oh they, by the way, we've got some holiday. Just briefly, as an intermezzo, some holiday badges from Joe Esposito.

1:43:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, thank you, Joe.

1:43:04 - Leo Laporte
May your turkey be free of moral panic, says Jeff Jarvis. I say I'm putting extra.

1:43:10 - Paris Marinteau
Alfhog in my stuffing.

1:43:13 - Leo Laporte
That one's really good. And Paris says baste your ham with plenty of nihilism. Good work, beautiful. Thank you, joe esposito. You're the best, you're the sticker man you're the man and now for the google sponsored cocktail hour. Uh, no, I'm. I'm going back in time to try to find scooter x's. He did, scooter. Put him in so long ago yeah, I mean it.

1:43:42 - Paris Marinteau
When we originally talked about it was a minute a minute ago oh, there's a google black friday sale are you excited about?

1:43:51 - Leo Laporte
does anybody do black friday anymore? That's friday and nobody. I don't hear anybody talking about it. Amazon.

1:43:57 - Paris Marinteau
I mean, everybody does Black Friday like the whole week basically.

1:44:03 - Leo Laporte
Google's Black Friday sale features record low prices on pixel Nest and more. And, you know, if you want to buy one of those old pixel tablets, we'd be glad to sell it to you for nothing all right, so it's pretty, it's a $200, 20% off. It's a good discount.

1:44:19 - Jeff Jarvis
There's the tablet, so $150 off the Pro XL.

1:44:22 - Leo Laporte
I spent $400 on that Pixel tablet. You can get it now for $279 everywhere Amazon, best Buy and even at Google. Don't, by the way. The Pixel Watch $280. That seems a little high, mm-hmm, yeah, uh, the pixel watch 280 bucks, that seems a little high. Yeah, uh, anyway, you'll find them all on the verge or at the google store. Oh, my god, scooter x has done a massive dump of uh changelog stories. Here's the full list of gemini extensions and what they can do.

Gemini extensions give access to first and third party apps. So Google flights, google home, google hotels, google Maps, google workspace oh, you don't want to use Google. How about open stacks utilities, youtube, youtube music, whatsapp, phone messages and Spotify coming soon? So you go to the Gemini app, you tap your profile photo, you select extensions and you can toggle those on. So the list is actually built into the app. So there you go.

Google is going to enhance now playing on the pixel and tweaks the home screen icon. We don't have to go into more depth. I think that speaks for itself. Google TV gets major R roku channel update with new features and more free channels. Again speaks for itself. Now I am an nvidia shield user, so I'm going to pay attention to this one. There is a new nvidia shield tv available update available but it might cause google Home issues, but that's okay because I don't really care. So security enhancements for 4K DRM content playback. Support for parental controls in the French language, which is where parental controls should always be how my parents used to speak in French when they didn't want me to understand what they were talking about, so maybe that's for them. Uh, it is uh only being unable to Children shouldn't speak French.

It seems wrong, it seems an adult language Daddy, daddy donne-moi un château de ma patente. What else Google Photos gets? Navigation redesign on the web with collections Google iOS app now injects. This is actually not a feature. This is a bad thing. Google's ios app now injects links on third-party websites that go back to search. That's a no-no, not, not, not cool, google, not cool. You don't want, uh, to inject anything on other people's websites.

Google calls them page annotations. The feature, as Google explains it, extracts interesting entities from the web page and highlights them in line. Effectively, it creates links on a website that you've opened through Google's browser. The website owner did not put there the links when clicked to perform a search on Google. It's just artificial intelligence at work. You're going to love it. Good reason not to use Chrome, if you were even thinking about it. The Google Developer Program is now well, could be now as much as 299 a year. They're offering a premium tier there. It is a free program, but if you want more, you can pay for it, and there's a whole explanation of what's the difference between standard and premium. That I can't. I'd really be bothered to tell you. Uh, google Maps now lets you report police instead of just speed traps.

1:48:00 - Jeff Jarvis
The popo On Waze. It says police.

1:48:03 - Leo Laporte
There's the popo right. Mostly it'll be speed traps, but Scooter X says, as someone who has an allergy, as someone who has a stair allergy oh, it's Scooter X. This is good. Google Maps now does a better job of highlighting stairs. Actually, that is useful.

1:48:22 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, for people who are wheelchair users.

1:48:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know. If you're getting walking directions, it will let you know that. Oh, this one has some stairs. I think that's a really good idea. I do like that. Why is Brave opening? Make brave faster. No, I don't want to make brave anything. I guess I must have made on windows weekly. Earlier I made brave my default browser. By accident, google calendar rolls out full google task integration on android. Oh, what time is it Gemini?

app for Android. What? No? I already said that one Gemini Gemini app for Android and iOS users is now rolling out to Google Workspace users. Congratulations, Jeff. Gemini is with you, and that is Scooter X.

1:49:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Google Change Law send your complaints to scooter x and your complaints.

1:49:28 - Leo Laporte
Scooter x uh. Here's one more little thing from joe esposito a little, uh. You know we like you, we want to talk about it. We love you. If you join club twit, make it a lot more fun. Be part of the tech enthusiast community, the best tech enthusiast community around. Apparently, I am Indiana Jones, I'm a gymnast and I'm Michael Jackson. Are you tired of tech coverage that focuses on outrage and clickbait? Do you want to help grow a network of hosts and shows that prioritize spreading light instead of just generating heat? Then join us. That's my new slogan, by the way.

1:50:07 - Paris Marinteau
All the light, none of the heat you're doing a great pose there as a gymnast I think this.

1:50:15 - Leo Laporte
I don't know where he found these pictures of me, because it really looks like I'm straining and I'm kind of a little heavy, a little hefty in there and that's perfect amazing.

1:50:24 - Jeff Jarvis
You can hold yourself up like that, not easy what you don't see in this still picture is my arms are shaking like mad.

1:50:33 - Paris Marinteau
I mean, that's why that's the beauty of photography yes, you miss.

1:50:37 - Leo Laporte
You miss the vibrational stuff. Well, that's uh. Thank you, go, scooter x, for a fabulous change login. Thank you, uh, mr, uh, uh, joe Esposito for a lovely bunch of pictures, images and stickers and posters. Yeah, all right, I said I would let you guys pick some stories and I will do that in just a moment. You're listening to this week in Google, is that right? Is that the name of the show? Wait a minute. You're listening to this Week in Google, is that right? Is that the name of the show? Wait a minute, let me check. Oh yeah, this Week in Google. No one knows why we named it, that we talked about Google today.

We did quite a bit. We did, we just did a whole changelog right. Better than this Week in Musk, by the way, elon, I'm sorry. Eric Schmidt from the New York Post, this just in. Ex-google CEO Eric Schmidt warns perfect AI girlfriends could worsen loneliness for young men, thought you'd like to know.

1:51:40 - Jeff Jarvis
You crypto incel boys better watch out of losing your heart to AI. And Kevin Roos.

1:51:48 - Paris Marinteau
I think AI can have him.

1:51:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I am a little puzzled why Eric Schmidt decided to weigh in on this. He has a bunch. Maybe he's lonely.

1:52:02 - Jeff Jarvis
No, he tends not to be.

1:52:05 - Leo Laporte
Yes, maybe that's it. He doesn't need a perfect.

1:52:09 - Paris Marinteau
He said this during his podcast with Scott Galloway I wasn't going to say that name.

1:52:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh God, no.

1:52:17 - Paris Marinteau
I'm sorry, slowly I turned Step by step.

1:52:22 - Leo Laporte
That's a reference that no one in this audience knows? Did you see that he claims that he makes $10 million a year on the Professor G show?

1:52:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, just poke a hot stick up my rear end.

1:52:37 - Leo Laporte
Joe, do not make a sticker out of that.

1:52:40 - Jeff Jarvis
No oh.

1:52:42 - Leo Laporte
God.

1:52:42 - John Ashley
Please do it, joe, please do it, please do it, please do it Please do it Make a flash game yeah.

1:52:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh God, oh Joey, please do it, please do it, please do it, please do it, please do it, please do it, please do it, please do it, please do it. Make a flash game. Yeah, oh God, oh Lord.

1:52:52 - Paris Marinteau
All right.

1:52:52 - Leo Laporte
I got a story for you. Okay, it is time for Paris Martineau's Story of the Week.

1:52:59 - Paris Marinteau
Are you guys holding space for a little song called Defying Gravity?

1:53:03 - Leo Laporte
Gravity. So this is what this is from Wicked. This is a video that went viral this week. Is this from Wicked, the song so?

1:53:08 - Paris Marinteau
these are the two people yes, it's from Wicked, which recently came out in a movie, and the two actresses who play the main characters have been having the most baffling press tour, which I think can be best explained by this short clip from one of their most recent videos, where a simple question frankly a weird question from the interviewer gets an even weirder response from ariana grande, who plays the pink person, and glinda yeah glinda and elfaba the uh the witch.

1:53:44 - Leo Laporte
What? Who's the actress playing her? Uh, I feel bad for them because they that's right yeah, they have to go around dressed in pink and green for all of these interviews frankly, I think they're choosing that.

1:53:58 - Paris Marinteau
They also said in a different interview I watched that they got like six tattoos each representing their characters before no, was ever shown.

1:54:06 - Leo Laporte
No, no, did no one tell them tattoos are permanent.

1:54:10 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, and someone. She was like yeah, we were showing them to the director and he was like wow, it's bold of you to get these before you see what the final cut of the movie looks like. And they're like we just the role changes so much. Wait, but you can see, I would describe it as the most theater kid energy anyone has ever produced. Is what Cynthia and Ariana are producing here.

1:54:29 - Leo Laporte
So let's watch. Let's just watch this clip.

1:54:31 - VO
I've seen this week people are taking the lyrics of Defying Gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that. I didn't know that that was happening. I've seen it. Yeah, that's really powerful.

1:54:48 - Paris Marinteau
That's why I want it. And then Ariana holds her middle finger Just fingers on her middle finger.

1:54:57 - VO
I don't know how widespread, but I am in the media, so that's my it's pretty cool.

1:55:03 - Leo Laporte
I've seen it's just a truly baffling 30, I think I think honestly that uh, cynthia does not have, uh does not know what to say at ariana grande, by grabbing her middle finger, which has, by the way, a three inch long nail on fingernail on it. Uh says it all.

1:55:24 - Paris Marinteau
And it's just a video that I could watch again and again, because it is two of two just baffling. Three baffling responses from human beings. One what does I hear? People are really holding space for the lyrics of Defying.

1:55:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Gravity mean oh, in their hearts and in their souls, and in their minds and in their lives, in their hearts, in their lives.

1:55:46 - Paris Marinteau
I mean, it's just baffling, yes, and then that's what I wanted is a wild response for it, as if she wrote the song or the musical.

1:55:56 - Leo Laporte
So let me just we can't play Defying Gravity, but I can give you a dramatic reading of it if you'd like, and maybe you can hold space for it. Yeah, so it starts with Glinda speaking. Hold space for it. Yeah, so it starts with glinda speaking. Elphaba, why couldn't you have stayed calm for once instead of flying off the handle? I hope you're happy. I hope you're happy now. I hope you're happy how you've hurt your cause forever. I think you hope. You think you're clever. I hope you're happy, I hope. Now elphaba says I hope you're happy. I hope you're happy, I hope. Now Elphaba says I hope you're happy too. I hope you're proud. How you would grovel in submission to feel your own ambition. So then together they sing. So though I can't imagine how I hope you're happy now. Then Glinda says Elfie, listen to me. Just say you're sorry, you could still be with the wizard.

Oh was she with the wizard what you've worked and waited for you can have all you ever wanted, I know, but I don't want it. No, I can't want it anymore. Something has changed within me. Something is not the same. I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game. Too late for second guessing, too late to go back to sleep. It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap and finally we get to the reason for the whole song. It's time to try defying gravity. I think so. Does she fly?

1:57:21 - Paris Marinteau
she's on a broom and it like on the stage production. She's lifted up off the stage into the air and it's kind of lovely big you know moment. But people apparently I think she was interviewed by the new york times. This went, this video went super viral because it was baffling um and it is the showstopper in act one. Right, yeah, which is the end of the first movie. Um, basically because it's two movies, wait a minute um, the movie ends at act one.

1:57:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it's a two-parter, yeah, but act one is like just the setup.

1:57:53 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, um, so she fly, they fly off in their brooms and that's it I mean, I don't know, I didn't see it, but I assume it ends with defying gravity.

1:58:01 - Leo Laporte
Now I gotta tell you on broadway, and and I saw the broadway, you probably did too it was christian chanoweth and uh dina manziel, better known as phenomenal yeah, what did john dervolter call her? And those two, I mean, I'm sure they brought that to life. I don't know how uh cynthia rebo and uh ariana grande did who did this interview with them it was the. Yeah, it was an out out.

1:58:28 - Jeff Jarvis
It was out I think it was the new york times.

1:58:30 - Paris Marinteau
No, no, it was out as she, uh, as she says in the clip, she's in queer media, which you can tell based on her hair that she is in queer media. Um, but madison will encourage her. At the new york times did an interview with the interviewer asking how all this happened? What? Does that mean.

1:58:49 - Leo Laporte
Holding space she interviewed.

1:58:51 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, what does that mean?

1:58:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:58:54 - Paris Marinteau
And she said I had just seen that day Toni Morrison from GLAAD, who's a friend?

1:58:58 - VO
Defying gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that.

1:59:03 - Leo Laporte
And then, of course, cynthia Erivo. Just all choked up.

1:59:08 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, and I guess the context for this is apparently this interview had taken place just after the election, so she saw people posting the lyrics of you know defying gravity to say, like you know, we're, I guess, all in this together does anybody wonder what uh kamala's doing after the election?

1:59:30 - VO
This is actually old, but it's for but a dry brine is easier and do it brine for 24, but 48 hours is best if you have the time. You guys getting a fresh turkey. Yes.

1:59:43 - Leo Laporte
Okay, fine, that's fine. Now we know.

1:59:46 - Paris Marinteau
Acceptable Dry brine. Dry brine I'm doing the wet brine, but that's all right.

1:59:50 - Leo Laporte
Let us give some credit to Mr Jeff Jarvis. It's on that. Because he is getting name checked by the Vlogbrothers.

1:59:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Hank Green, yeah, and at the end he did a bibliography. Let's go back here Right when he changes clothes there.

2:00:06 - VO
yeah, Are infinite lies. As you're doing the work to try and get everything right, a grifter on reels has run a couple of laps around you, so they have that advantage, but they also have a disadvantage, which is that the things that they are saying aren't true, and as we get better at not letting this media cast spells on our brains, as we always, eventually do the folks with the better information do tend to win out. Yay, eventually. The question is how long. The space between the Reformation and the Enlightenment was not quick.

2:00:36 - Paris Marinteau
He should.

2:00:36 - VO
Hey, this seems like the Jeff it seems important to me that our path here be a lot shorter than that, so let's focus on that.

2:00:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm so honored about what's going to happen, John.

2:00:45 - VO
I'll see you on Tuesday. A bibliography for the end of this video. This video is heavily inspired by and informed by Jeff Jarvis' Gutenberg parenthesis. Very interesting and I would suggest it to anyone. I also pulled a lot of long-fied dogs, yay. I was so happy, I was so honored Wow and you're the first one I was so happy, I was so honored, wow, and you're the first one, riffer. Lee was informed. As he's going through the whole, watching the whole video. Yeah, I said that. I think it's probably the piece.

2:01:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, the things he was saying and that's why I played a little bit of that were really from your book. And, by the way, the Green Brothers are amazing, the best, they are novelists. So very successful novelists, very successful, uh, youtubers. 3.82 million subscribers that's a good plug they and they do.

2:01:36 - Jeff Jarvis
They spread education and truth and yeah, you know what?

2:01:39 - Leo Laporte
I have huge respect for them. They're the best. Uh, you know often I say bad things about YouTube influencers and something, but these guys are the real deal. They're the antidote.

2:01:49 - Paris Marinteau
And Hank Green is a very competent Dungeons Dragons player. He's been on my favorite show, Dimension 20.

2:01:55 - Leo Laporte
Really, oh yeah, we should get them on our show, should we not? Oh, that would be wonderful. What do you think, john Ashley? Is that doable, or is that too big a stretch for us? Anything is possible. Just say that the author of the Gutenberg Parentheses would like to return the favor and have them on his really big show. There you go.

2:02:19 - Paris Marinteau
Honestly, I think that's a good pitch. Jeff, you should ask him if he wants to come on.

2:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you could also say you know, jeff jarvis is a well known speaker at the commonwealth club. He's he's in fact speaking, uh coming up next wednesday, uh, at the commonwealth club 5 30 pm in san francisco talking about the web. We weave his new book. The title of the talk how we reclaim the internet. You can be there in person. I would recommend it. But if you can't be there in person, you can get online tickets as well at just google commonwealth club and jeff jarvis and you will find it.

2:02:56 - Jeff Jarvis
And please, I don't want an empty room. It's so embarrassing please.

2:03:01 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know what it's on them, not you. If they don't promote it, it's just like selling books.

2:03:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Now it's all on us. Yeah, that book.

2:03:08 - Leo Laporte
I've found it in two barnes and nobles and I sent any single copies somebody sent me a picture of hank's book at the local um bookstore here in petaluma and somebody probably Hank had turned it facing out, so I was very pleased you can thank Burke for that. Burke did that. Oh, that's right. I was looking the wrong place. It was in the slack.

2:03:37 - John Ashley
Burke saw it not hey, one of our few employees who actually goes to the bookstore.

2:03:44 - Paris Marinteau
And there it is, right next to it's because he needs things to cut apart my mom called me my 90.

2:03:52 - Leo Laporte
She'll be 92 in a couple of months. My 92 year old mom called me. She said I said have you read, because hank calls out his grandma and her ravioli. Have you read the book yet? She said oh no. So she called me last night. She said it's really good he's a writer. I said yeah, mom, it's a new york times bestseller. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but he isn't speaking at the commonwealth club, so there and I'm sorry I miss. I misspoke, it was kevin.

Kevin. Well, whoever One of our employees, Whoever it is, gets a bonus. A bonus, a free copy of. Hexbook, our Christmas party, or what do you call it, holiday get-together Gathering next week.

2:04:41 - Paris Marinteau
Are we not allowed to say party anymore?

2:04:44 - Leo Laporte
You can't say Christmas anymore.

2:04:46 - Paris Marinteau
Well, you could say holiday party.

2:04:49 - Leo Laporte
You would say holiday gathering. Our holiday gathering is going to be at a local tiki bar this year, so that'll be fun, that's fun. Yeah, jeff, did you have a? I probably stole your story, but do you have a story this week that you'd like to talk about?

2:05:08 - Jeff Jarvis
No, what I thought I would do instead is given I'm going to plug again, given that we're recording this the night before Thanksgiving.

2:05:17 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

2:05:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Given that in my book, let's do a little reading, shall we? No, no, no. I have a thank you note to the internet, so I thought I would like to hear the three of you say something. Oh, what we're thankful for, thankful for the internet.

2:05:31 - Leo Laporte
Right, do you want me to start? I'll start. Let me start because I know what the answer is. Because, as somebody who worked in broadcast radio and television for almost 50, more than 50 years, when AM radio went belly up, when tech TV went belly up, I realized that I didn't need a big old transmitter and an FCC license to do the stuff that we love to do to talk about technology, to help people understand technology, to empower people with technology. And back in 2004 and 2005, I realized all I need is the internet.

So for 20 years the internet has been feeding me and my family. So I'm very grateful to the fact that I can distribute what we do. We can distribute over the internet and we don't need a gatekeeper to help us do that. And I think, really, when I look at somebody like my son, saul Hank, and so many people on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, the reels the internet has given people a voice that when I was starting out, you had to beg and plead to somebody who owned a radio station or TV station or newspaper to get your voice heard, and that's just changed a hundred percent and I think that is a very positive. You know we talk a lot about the negatives, but that is a very positive thing that's happened in our world and I'm very I'm as a beneficiary, I'm very grateful and I'm very happy that that exists for so many people like my son.

2:07:16 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, I think my thankful thing for the internet, the thing I'm thankful for, is something similar. I guess it's the power of social networks. The power of social networks I think I owe my last two jobs that I've gotten to Twitter. Tweeting out that I was looking for a job is how I got the last handful of job offers I ended up getting, and that wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a platform of people who care about technology and tech news that had chosen to follow me on these sites. And I've been thinking with this a lot with Blue Sky over the last couple of weeks, which I'm thankful for the ability to rediscover my love of posting again.

I feel like I went there were quite a few years where I was going hard on posting on Twitter. I loved it, but then I got a bit burnt out of it. It was the whole pandemic. You know everything that's happened in the last four or five years.

2:08:08 - Leo Laporte
And I pandemic you know everything that's happened in the last four or five years.

2:08:10 - Jeff Jarvis
And just remember, jay graber owns all your posts, okay, I'm just saying well, no, she doesn't she doesn't that's the good thing who owns the posts on blue sky?

2:08:17 - Leo Laporte
I do is it a public benefit corporation? I mean what well?

2:08:21 - Paris Marinteau
no, it's, it is a public benefit corporation.

2:08:23 - Leo Laporte
But hold on, I'll find uh there's a there's actually a terms of service that says you own your posts I will actually hold on.

2:08:30 - Paris Marinteau
Let me put this in the discord chat so that you guys can open it. A blue sky employee wrote about the benefits of an open network recently, because it's all on this thing called at protocol and they're only to scroll down to the drawings of the house first and show that. So normally what happens with a website is you might have like Instagram's house or Twitter's house I have a room in that house. Blue Sky is different because it is basically what you are doing. We are building on the app protocol. Our own house it's Paris Barton-Nose House and right now I'm posting in the blue sky room of that house to where my posts are going out to all the other blue sky users, but I could post it to other platforms and things like that.

They haven't fully made it integrated where you can integrate it with, like Mastodon stuff, but it's essentially. I can take all of my posts and my handle and take it anywhere, because my handle right now is my website. I'm technically posting onto my website and if you look at the bottom of this post, there are blue sky comments because it's integrated. This is part of this employee's website, but it's also integrated into Blue Sky, so I don't know, I just I've really enjoyed. Blue Sky has made me rediscover my love of posting, but I also think that it's makes me happier to be growing a following on a website like this where I kind of own part of the platform that I'm posting on.

2:10:08 - Leo Laporte
Very nice, I agree. I'm not sure I agree with the blue sky part of it, because they haven't really federated yet, but let's presume that their intentions are good and they're going to do that there was a post by the uh, the woman who authored the uh activity pub protocol, christine uh lemmer, webby lemmer, is that right? Right, yeah, let me read part of this.

2:10:33 - Paris Marinteau
It says blue sky is just one app built onto an open network which is called the app protocol. If blue sky open Twitter, then you can imagine an open reddit or an open Instagram too. In fact, this is becoming a reality now with apps like white wind for blogging, front page, a web form, smoke signal and events app and blue cast, an audio app. With instagram x and reddit, you're creating an account on their app. It's like you have a room in their house and you have to follow all of their rules. If the app shuts down, you lose your room there. This seems to happen every few years. You connect with all your friends. Then that app crumbles.

2:11:03 - Leo Laporte
You have to start all over let me though as a counter I don't want to harsh your Thanksgiving mellow, but Christine Lemmer-Weber says it's cosplaying decentralization, and until they do it and, by the way, this is why Cory Doctorow has not yet moved to blue sky I agree, the potential is there, as does she, but, uh, it is currently very centralized, and so I personally kind of prefer, uh, what I would suggest is getting a web site that is on the fediverse, like microblog, and then cross posting to blue sky, but maybe someday blue sky will offer federation and then, uh, we can all sell.

I think the more popular it gets, the less time they have to work on the federation maybe, or the more incentive they have not to federate, which is the concern I think a lot of people have I mean, I don't think that's the case.

2:12:06 - Paris Marinteau
I don't think mike masnick would have signed up to be on the board if they weren't planning to do that.

2:12:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, she says Blue Sky and App Proto are not meaningfully decentralized and not federated either. This is not to say that Blue Sky is not achieving something useful. While Blue Sky is not building what is presently a decentralized Twitter, it's building an excellent replacement for Twitter, and Blue Sky's main deliverable goal is something else instead a twitter replacement with the possibility of a credible exit. Um, you know, I think you could say a lot for what blue sky has done it, and it certainly is the case that you can, I think, suck the your, your skeets out Sky right and put them somewhere else. Or can you?

2:12:55 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, you can.

2:12:56 - Leo Laporte
Okay.

2:12:56 - Paris Marinteau
You can do that. So that's key, but you can also, I guess, host your own personal days.

2:13:01 - Leo Laporte
Well, I do that at microblog and so when I post on microblog it goes to Blue Sky, but it's not dependent on Blue Sky for the hosting, and that to me is an important distinction. It also goes to Mastodon and Threads. That to me is an important distinction, but that's why I'm so high on microblog and I kind of agree with Christine Lemmer-Weber that maybe we should be a little skeptical of Blue Sky until they actually do the work.

2:13:31 - Jeff Jarvis
And she was an author of activity pub. She wrote activity pub, so it sounds like she's willing to embrace blue sky absolutely got to embrace, yeah federation? Yeah, she's not necessarily. Is she saying that they ought to federate with activity pub? Or because that's the whole thing, is they have their own there? When they do open up, it's going to be their own form of federation. Is that acceptable or not?

2:13:56 - Leo Laporte
uh, it's a. This is a technical uh argument that that is a little deeper than anything. I can summarize uh, on the show. I would read her article. Um, she is currently a little skeptical of at proto. She says blue sky is built by good people who care and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you're looking for a twitter replacement, you could find it in blue sky. Today, however, I stand by my assertions that blue sky is not meaningful, meaningfully decentralized.

True, thus far, yes and it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that blue sky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both those terms, which I find unacceptable. However, credible, exit is a reasonable term to describe what blue sky is aiming for. It is blue sky's term and I think blue sky should embrace that term fully in all contexts and work that they.

2:14:53 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a very reasonable post.

2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, a credible exit is is the. She says, the best thing blue sky can do so that you can move and I think cory has said that as well if you can't move your stuff from a site to another site as you can with Mastodon, then it doesn't really count.

2:15:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, mastodon's limited right you can't move your content, you can move your network.

2:15:23 - Leo Laporte
And you move your followers and followers. That's what I'm saying. The followers, yeah.

2:15:26 - Jeff Jarvis
But you can't move your content from one instance to another.

2:15:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that's, I think, a technical limitation. Limitation, it's hard, which is not criticism.

2:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis
It's hard to design something that could do that.

2:15:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, and that's again why I recommend, instead of letting anything host your stuff, you should have your own website that hosts your stuff, which you then syndicate to Mastodon and anywhere else you want to syndicate.

2:15:49 - Jeff Jarvis
When I started using Medium, want to syndicate it. When I started using Medium, dave Weiner reminded me that I should preserve my own blog, and so I always cross-post everything to my blog, absolutely as he usually does.

2:16:01 - Leo Laporte
You need a place you control you own on the web, and it's fine to syndicate that content everywhere you put it on Medium and everywhere else's fine, or blue sky or twitter but you, you have to have a place that is yours. I used to run it off of a server, uh, which I have here, but it's just technically. It's something I probably don't want to do on my network, uh, at home. So I'm gonna. I do it with microblog and it works quite well.

2:16:26 - Paris Marinteau
It's very affordable five bucks a month I had been struggling to understand that what seems like a very smart blog post, but I found someone who wrote a uh more explain like a five uh explainer. His name is nick barnes, on medium yeah this is wrong.

Yell at him and he says what does federation look like with at proto? Uh, blue sky is focusing on data ownership, with their implementation of federation using their own protocol, known as AT Proto. It allows any user to spin up and run their own server so they can host their own data, rather than their data being hosted on Blue Sky's server. But that's just about where federation starts and finishes in Blue Sky. The service said today, rather than other than hosting your own data on your own server, you shouldn't notice any other differences, but it's not mastodon. To start with, mastodon uses a different underlying protocol and its implementation of federation is very different. It focuses on users being able to set up their own servers, which have their own timelines, and each server can implement its own rules and moderation techniques, which is what a lot of people found frustrating with mastodon is the onboarding process, because it's difficult to figure out all these settings.

2:17:33 - Leo Laporte
You can go to a number of different places to live on Mastodon. In fact, I encourage you to go to twitsocial, which is Twit's Mastodon instance, but you notice, I don't even start there. I start at microblog and post to Twit's social on Mastodon.

2:17:54 - Paris Marinteau
And they go on like if a server is not known to you, you may not see the post. There's just a bunch of different settings. When it comes to Mastodon, yeah, Mastodon is problematic that way, because it's fully federated.

It's difficult and Blue Sky, where it zigs and zags from this is. Blue Sky has taken an approach to focus on global conversation, so when you federate and host your own data on your own server, you shouldn't see any difference in the core service. Instead, bluesky pulls posts from all the servers and focuses on like one global view, and your experience is based on the accounts and feeds you follow, not the server you're on.

2:18:22 - Leo Laporte
It's a fairly technical distinction, yeah, and I apologize because I think for a lot of people it's a difference without a distinction.

2:18:34 - Paris Marinteau
No, but I do think it matters for people who really believe in federation and I do think it's interesting to be able to kind of understand that but then also, I guess, understand in some ways you might say, that difference is part of why Blue Sky is taking off and Mastodon has stayed at its comfortable level of kind of core users who are familiar with that technology and that's kind of why I I think blue sky is going to end up staying centralized, because that's the functionality people leaving twitter want.

2:19:02 - Leo Laporte
They want a centralized site.

2:19:05 - Paris Marinteau
Uh, that's why they didn't migrate to mastodon it's good to have a centralized platform for global conversation with the option to federate and take your data if take your toys and go home if you want to yeah, I mean I on blue sky.

2:19:22 - Leo Laporte
I use leolaportme because that is. It's not a blue sky handle, it's my handle, which I control um you know we used to have kevin marks on a lot.

I should get him on uh soon, maybe when you're, maybe next week when you're gone. Uh jeff uh to talk about this. He's, of course, a big promoter of indie web and indie webcam and their that's their real focus is you gotta have your own, publish on your own site. First own your own content and then, if you want to syndicate elsewhere, go ahead. And that's the only true way to say I control my content.

2:20:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, I don't want to extend the show for two hours with this question, but I'll ask it. If Section 230 gets repealed, what's your view of maintaining?

2:20:15 - Leo Laporte
twitsocial. Well, it's going to be challenging for us because we have twitsocial, which is Mastodon twit community, which is a forums. We have multiple chats because we're on eight different platforms. There's actually chats on eight different streams. If I am suddenly responsible for anything anybody puts on any of those places, it's a. It puts me in a lot of jeopardy.

Um, I don't, I don't want to be hasty, but the prudent thing would be to take all those down. Yeah, the prudent thing would be to say, all right, well, we're only going to post our content, content we will be willing to take responsibility for and not allow our viewers, our listeners, to post content on our platforms because, absent 230, we're liable for what they post. Maybe we wouldn't go to jail for it or be fined for it, but we would probably go to court, and there are people out there who would would probably go to court, and there are people out there who would happily go after us, if they could, in court just to harass us. So it would make me very nervous. I might not be hasty with it.

Lisa, though, who runs the company and is probably more prudent than I, would probably advise that we not take the risk. I know our lawyers would. That's the risk with the loss of 230. Now, I don't think 230 is gonna go away, but if it's modified then it becomes even more critical. Then I have to get Denise Howell and Kathy Gellis in and ask them what does this mean for small independent publishers who have user generated content on their sites? What does that mean? What it means for YouTube is well, they have to allocate some of their massive profits to court costs.

I don't have massive profits to allocate to court costs, we would not be able to defend it. It would literally put us out of business. So I think probably the prudent thing would be to take all user-generated content down. Blue Sky had to quadruple their moderation team. Yeah, and this section 230 is still there. They're still protected by it. What if they weren't? And you know, I imagine Elon Musk, who can't afford to defend himself in court, would probably be happy to see section 230 go away, because he can. He can afford it. Yeah, it's the same.

2:22:36 - Jeff Jarvis
He wants the um uh tax breaks for electric cars go away, because he believes that his brain doesn't need him position yeah.

2:22:45 - Leo Laporte
So this is regulatory capture and this is a big risk, which is you're not putting the big guys. The incumbents get strengthened by this because no one can challenge them. Nobody can come along and say, hey, we're going to be the little guy and we're going to take on the big guy. The big guy is dominant because they have the, the war chest to defend themselves. The little guys go away and that's when you get. Then you really have a problem with big tech, because there's nothing but big tech everywhere. Yep, hey, what a great conversation. What are you grateful for, jeff jarvis?

2:23:20 - Jeff Jarvis
um, I'm grateful that the web taught me how wrong I was about all of media and my life in it was about all of media and my life in it. Oh, that's good. It taught me that, properly conceived, it's a conversation.

2:23:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what I learned too and I agree 100%. I often say it's no longer an audience, because when you're on TV or radio, it's an audience. Right, you talk, they shut up and listen. Right, it's a conversation, it's a community.

2:23:52 - Jeff Jarvis
It's also another Dave Weiner moment. At the first BloggerCon, I had a panel on politics and blogs and I said something to Dave about my panel and Dave said no, it's not your panel. You know what? There is no panel, the room is the panel.

2:24:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree.

2:24:10 - Jeff Jarvis
And I've always liked that and that's the agree, and I've always liked that.

2:24:11 - Leo Laporte
That's the way I look at events and that's why I look at media and everything else, but it really came from blogging and the internet you can imagine it's hard for somebody who has been able to control the microphone, and and for an entire lifetime more than 50 years but it's been such a blessing. It's so much better to have a conversation. It really is. We really appreciate the chance to have that conversation with all of you, uh, and we're very grateful for the chance to do what we do. I mean, are we privileged or what?

2:24:42 - Jeff Jarvis
um. You should see how grateful we'll be if you join the club, though.

2:24:46 - Leo Laporte
Be that much more grateful uh, jeff jarvis, it's great to have you on. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Jeff is a professor at both Montclair State University and the State University of New York, stony Brook Two wonderful institutions. If you're a student at either of them, look for Jeff's classes. He is, of course, emeritus Professor of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journal innovation at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york. Thank you, jeff. Have a great, don't have too much caviar, tomorrow, leo.

2:25:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I can't you'll be thirsty.

2:25:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna live at the caviar bar. Uh, paris martineau is getting ready to fry the turkey at a at home in florida. She's a reporter for the information. You can catch her work in the weekend. A great piece on age verification. Fantastic piece on that, thank you.

2:25:36 - Paris Marinteau
Thank you.

2:25:37 - Leo Laporte
Yep and have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I know your family's waiting for you, and we extended the show a little longer than we planned.

2:25:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you want to have them just come in for a minute and stand with the camera so we can see the star? Do they want to do that? Just minute and stand?

2:25:49 - Paris Marinteau
with the camera so we can see the star. Do they want?

2:25:51 - Jeff Jarvis
to do that Haunting?

2:25:51 - Paris Marinteau
I don't know where they are Otherwise. I would how many? Times, did he?

2:25:56 - Leo Laporte
showed you the video of his moment in Brazil.

2:25:59 - Paris Marinteau
Twice so far, since I've been home and each time I'm like, oh yeah, I've seen it, and he's like no, no, no, you gotta watch the whole thing.

2:26:05 - Leo Laporte
We showed it on our show.

2:26:07 - Paris Marinteau
I did. I did tell him that, yes, I was like.

2:26:10 - Leo Laporte
I've shown it to all my co-workers hey, if it had been me, I would show it to my kids over and over again as well oh yeah I completely understand as you should paris. Have a wonderful week. Jeff, have a wonderful week. Have a great talk in san francisco. Thank you, I'm sorry, I'll be here not there, uh, but I'll.

I'll watch after we get off the air and everybody should go buy tickets to the Commonwealth Club December 4th. Jeff Jarvis, talking about the web we weave how we can save the internet, because it's worth saving. We do this week in Google every Wednesday around about 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream live on eight different platforms youtube, twitch, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, xcom, uh, kick, and if you're in the club discord, you can watch us live, but you don't have to, because we also make a podcast out of the thing and post it on the internet at twittv, slash, TWiG, uh. If you go there, you'll also see a link to our YouTube channel Great place to share clips.

Maybe share our Thanksgiving, grateful gratitudes that we said, or whatever you think is worth sharing on the show. That way, you spread the word about this Week in Google, so we thank you for that. Easiest thing for you, though, of course subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you'll automatically get a copy of the show the minute we've edited it up. Thanks so much to John Ashley filling in for Benito this week. Thank you, john Benito's on vacation for a few weeks, so John Ashley's going to do the hard work. I drew the short straw.

Hey hey, do you want tiki bar or not, john Ashley.

2:27:54 - Paris Marinteau
Yeah, you got an angle.

2:27:55 - John Ashley
Okay, I am. I have angled for it because I are you excited about Kapu? Well, it's also on my birthday.

2:28:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, well then we will celebrate a little bit for you, JA.

2:28:05 - Jeff Jarvis
That's awesome. Extra little umbrellas for you.

2:28:12 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, john, we appreciate the work you do and all of our team. We have a great team in continuity. Besides Lisa and Debbie, there's Ashley and Sebastian. We've got great editors with Kevin and John and Benito and, of course, anthony Nielsen, without whom nothing would be possible. Did I say Viva? No, you said Ashley. Oh, you said Viva. I said Ashley. Yeah, she doesn't work for us anymore. It's Viva. Yes, I was thinking John, ashley, and that was in my head. Too much Ashley on the brain. No, we love Ashley, but she's not here anymore. Viva took her place and does a great job. Viva took her place and does a great job.

2:28:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, have I left anybody out? Lisa, I get everybody, lisa. You left lisa out no, ceo.

2:28:56 - Leo Laporte
And uh, and proud owner of the twit podcast network, voice of the gallery. Oh, I know I left out our marketing guy, ty uh. And don't forget burke and burke, who runs the studio operation. Oh, and our engineer who's off-site in massachusetts, patrick delahanty. I did say thank you, anthony nielsen, our creative director. We got a nice team, we got a good people. Did you say micah? Oh, micah who who's joining? Us well I'm not gonna say all the other hosts there's a lot of people and.

2:29:32 - John Ashley
Leo was telling me I'm trying and Leo wants to go to the Kapu. I think more than I do.

2:29:36 - Leo Laporte
I want to go to Kapu. I'm ready for the tiki bar.

2:29:38 - Paris Marinteau
What sort of drink are you going to get there? I'm going to go for dinner tonight?

2:29:42 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know, I'm reading what you're having for your coffee tomorrow he gets a choice at the seafood station of poached jumbo shrimp cocktail point-raised miyagi oysters mini lobster, vol-au-vent, dungeness crab, louis, lettuce cups, strummy spiced smoked salmon. And that's just, ladies and gentlemen. The seafood station, the caviar station, has house-made blinis, toasted brioche, hard-boiled eggs, red onions, young celery, not old celery, you got to do it, young celery.

2:30:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you don't want tough stringy celery they have journeyman charcuterie pickles how? Are you guys reading the menu? I didn't say where we're going.

2:30:28 - VO
Yes, you did the menu, I didn't say where we're going.

2:30:32 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I said the hotel not the restaurant.

2:30:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, oh, you said the hotel and you got a reporter here, you got two journalists and you've been doing.

2:30:39 - Leo Laporte
Did you post it in discord?

2:30:41 - Jeff Jarvis
we're slow roasted berries, organic turkey brown butter, black truffle gravy I don't like truffles. I love truffles. I'm not a truffle guy. Paris, you don't have to, apparently, you're not stuck with truffles.

2:30:58 - Leo Laporte
There's plenty of other things you can eat.

2:31:00 - Paris Marinteau
Speaking of food. I'm going to get dinner Go get dinner.

2:31:04 - Jeff Jarvis
What's for dinner tonight? Paris, when are you going?

2:31:05 - Paris Marinteau
Mexican food.

2:31:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh.

2:31:07 - Leo Laporte
God Restaurant.

2:31:13 - Paris Marinteau
Are you food? Oh god, oh, a restaurant are you going out restaurant? Yeah, so queso, get the queso. I'm hoping so. The local place that had the best queso ever got demolished to make room for a public's, so we're going to another mexican restaurant that's supposed to be quite good is there a family rule about double dipping the queso?

2:31:25 - Leo Laporte
oh, it's okay. No, it's family.

2:31:26 - Paris Marinteau
You could double dip family frankly with friends, I think it's fine I think we're being too precious about double I agree if your immune system can't handle the whatever is being introduced from a double dip chip, then you deserve to die and, by the way, will make queso kills all bacteria.

2:31:44 - Leo Laporte
You don't have to worry about it yeah, uh, incidentally, sad to say, our 50-year-old steakhouse in Petaluma, the Cattleman's, is being replaced, torn down end of the year, by a Chick-fil-A. So Publix isn't the worst that could happen. Devastating, devastating.

2:32:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that place you took us to for the New Year's party still in business? Where did I take you? Was it that awful, oh?

2:32:11 - Leo Laporte
no, it's that terrible place. It was that awful place with the mashed peas. Yeah, yeah, there's. They've been in business. The washoe house has been business for 100 years.

2:32:19 - Jeff Jarvis
They're an old roadhouse going out the stage coach would go there.

2:32:22 - Leo Laporte
They have. They are so old. They have confederate dollars stuck to the ceiling.

2:32:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It is ancient and it's never going away never, it's all right, go to go to dinner. Well, you gotta have. You said have we not ended the show.

2:32:37 - John Ashley
The show has not ended officially, leo thanks for joining us everybody.

2:32:43 - Leo Laporte
Have a great holiday if you celebrate. We'll see you next time on this week in Google. Bye-bye.