This Week in Google Episode 717 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:00:00):
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Wow. Wow. What a great show we have for you. S not here. So we've got Mike Elgan dialing in from Italy, Jeff Jarvis, all the way from New Jersey, and our special guest sitting in for Stacey Higginbotham, Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag and discoverer of so many amazing technologies. We will talk about ai, of course, the Build Conference and what Microsoft announced, but AI in general, including Bard and a whole lot more. And, and while we're doing the show, we're gonna listen in on Ron DeSantis Twitter space where he announces his candidacy. The result may surprise you. It's all coming up. Next, a twig podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:00:51):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:00:53):
This is Twit.

(00:01:00):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 717 recorded Wednesday, May 24th, 2023. A book shaped object this week in Google is brought to you by a G one by Athletic Greens. If you're looking for a simpler and cost effective supplement routine, ag one is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase of a subscription. Go to athletic greens.com/twig and buy ZipRecruiter whether you're starting a new business or growing one. If you wanna be successful, you need the most talented people on your team. That's where ZipRecruiter comes in. And right now, you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/twig and buy fast mail, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity, and make email yours with fast mail. Try it now free for 30 days@fastmail.com slash twi.

(00:02:06):
It's time for Twig this week in Google. And we have a couple of substitutions to announce at the beginning because we have, we have brought in the understudies. Mike Elgan is here filling in for Aunt Pruitt, taking a couple of much needed days off. Hello Mike. Hello, Leo. Thank you for having me. This is really exciting from Italy today. It's always from in the world. Victoria, Veneto, Italy. Yes. There Mike and the mirror in the Veneto. Are you getting ready for your Prosecco gastro tour? Yeah, that's, that starts Tuesday. The, the Venice Prosecco experience starts Tuesday, and that's gonna be in this general area, the Prosecco Hills and Venice, stuff like that. I was telling you my whole life when people asked, I said, oh, yeah, I'm Genove. Cause I thought my grandmother was from Genoa. So, you know, my Italian roots, I'm a gen.

(00:02:58):
And my, my sister the other day, I said, we were in Genoa. And, and I remember that's where the family villa was. She said, you're not Genevese <laugh>. She said, <laugh>. She said, my grandmother's stepfather was Genevese Jacobi. But she, she said Grandma was born. Actually not, no, no. We called her, was born in SCIO in the Veneto near, very near where you are. Yes. I'm all this time. I'm Venetian and I didn't know That's right. You're Venetian. Woo. You're, you're, you're, you're a child of the Venetian empire. Woohoo. Which is not bad. Yeah. Your grandmother has curtains just like behind. Mike, I love those. That's these might be your grandma's curtains, <laugh>. They could be my grandma's curtains. It could be <laugh>. That's Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead, singers, jump your cue. Craig Newmar, graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Hi, Jeff. His new book, the Real One Arrives. Yeah. Lisa said, oh, his book is here. That's the hard cover. That's not the Gales, that's the real deal. No, that's the real, with that real thing. Yep. Gutenberg parenthesis.com. No. Yes. Is that right? Yes,

Chris Messina (00:04:10):
I

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:04:10):
Think so. You still pre-ordering that? It's not officially out until June pre-ordered. Not until June 29th in the US The ink is still wet on that one. Stacey iGen Bathum also has a day off. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to get an internet legend and man about town on the show. Chris Messina is here. Hi Chris.

Chris Messina (00:04:29):
Hey in. Good to see

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:04:30):
You. We've known Chris forever. Chris one of his many claims to fame. He's a big, you were a big Twitter user. You actually left Twitter.

Chris Messina (00:04:40):
I was in the

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:04:41):
Flame of Blaze of Glory. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a couple of about a month ago. That's right before that. Best known because you introduced the hashtag which has really gotten a life of its own. But it was, you started using it, or you suggested using it, I guess, on Twitter mm-hmm. <Affirmative> as kind of a canned search.

Chris Messina (00:05:00):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, back in 2007, you know, Twitter was a simpler place. But yeah, we needed a place to share about what was going on. And most importantly, a way to filter things out that weren't relevant. And so the hashtag actually was meant to have both purposes. One was for adding labels, essentially metadata to posts so people could follow and track those topics. And then also my proposal, which was just a blog post. The idea was that you could mute things that you were not interested in. You know? Cause the, the problem actually that we were solving for, that I was trying to solve for was in March of that year, a bunch of us had gone down to South by Southwest. And those who were not at South by Southwest were really annoyed by all the tweets that were coming out about South by Southwest with our drunken antics and the rest. And so it was,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:05:45):
You needed away. I remember this was basically slew

Chris Messina (00:05:47):
Stuff.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:05:47):
Yeah. It was so annoying. Yeah. I do remember that <laugh> and the hashtag was, if it's you, we kind of encouraged, if you're gonna tweet about South by just hashtag SX S X S W so that then

Chris Messina (00:05:59):
We could ignore it. We

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:06:00):
Could ignore it. This wasn't, there was no functionality built into this, into Twitter to do this. Of course. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but Twitter at the time had something called Track. So Exactly. You could track track a hashtag.

Chris Messina (00:06:13):
That's right. So, and in fact, that was, that was one of the, the core drivers of the format, you know, cuz back then, you know, if you wanted to, you know, see what was going on with different topics then, and, and when you followed someone, that also meant that everything that they tweeted would get sent to your phone as a text message. You know, this is before there was push notifications. This is before the iPhone really. And so with hashtags you could string together a series of words and then track that series of words because it was, you know, to Twitter, it just looked like a big blob of characters. And so that, that was actually one of the first use cases. In October of that year my friend Nate Ritter was down in San Diego and was tweeting about the, the wildfires that were going on and, you know, was using Sand Space Diego Space fire colon as a prefixed to all of his tweets. But you couldn't track that, you know, you couldn't get updates on that specific topic. And I was like, Hey, Nate, this would be a great use case for using hashtags. And so he used hashtag San Diego fire and people could subscribe to that. And then they saw him doing it, and then they started to do it, even though I didn't know why he was doing it. <Laugh>. And that's basically one of the first kind of examples of citizen journalism using, using hashtags. Yay.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:07:19):
Here. A huge argument for preserving old tweets, because this is the tweet in August of 2007. How do you feel about using pound for groups as an hashtag Bar camp message? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Oh, those are

Chris Messina (00:07:35):
The days Bar camp.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:07:36):
Mm-Hmm. What's interesting is that a lot of the functionality of Twitter was in fact, you know, created like this by its users who said, you know, we need an at reply, we need a hashtag. Who gets Yeah. Who gets credit

Chris Messina (00:07:45):
For the at reply? Does anybody think that was R S G? If I recall correctly? I mean, even the retweet was user convention. Yeah. I mean, it used to be, if you recall, like, it was rt. Rt and then at Username and then the content, and it was just a copy paste job, you know? I mean, it was so simple.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:08:03):
Wow. Yeah. That was one of the secrets just for somebody who wants to build the next Twitter. One of the secrets of Twitter was it was kind of formless, which allowed its users was emergent to, it was an have emergent properties. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and that was what made it so incredible. Sad to say, if you follow the, you know, Christmas tweets as his last one is goodbye. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yep. so you left, in fact, you wrote an article about it. You find you finally, by the way, Elon Musk tweet from March of this year, <laugh>, I hate hashtags. Of course you do, Elon. Of course you do. Of course you do. It's all good things. Of course. <Laugh> hashtag goodbye says Christmas mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that's so why, what, what was the last, the final straw? I don't need to ask why. What was the final straw? <Laugh>?

Chris Messina (00:09:00):
You know, it's, it's such a strange thing and, and it, I feel like I'm, I'm living in this, like, or I had been living in this weird world of gaslighting on, on Twitter, essentially, where it was hard to know what was intentionally being done to degrade the service versus what was accidental versus what was just sort of circumstance. And, you know, my, my intention all along had been to give, you know, Elon his six months, you know, to, to sort of see where he was gonna take the platform. You know, I, I am a Tesla owner, and so, you know, I have appreciation for, you know, his products and for the things he's done. And in this case, you know, I've been <laugh>. The funny thing is, I was on Twitter since 2006, so that means that the longest relationship in my life, <laugh> beyond my marriage, beyond my current romantic partnership Wow.

(00:09:43):
Or anything like that was with Twitter. Wow. Okay. Like, which is, I know, a very terrible and sad thing to say, but even still to have, you know, come up on the platform as the 1186th user, and to see it grow as it did meant that I wanted to see, you know, maybe there's some things that can be done here that only an Elon Musk character could pull off. And, you know, after four or five months, especially with so much focus and emphasis on blue checks and verification and eroding a lot of the trust on the platform, it just, it just seemed to me you know, that the time had come for me to really look at and consider this relationship. And so what had happened was there was a, a person who is a sort of Twitter slash Elon Stan, who retweeted this 14 year old app researcher, NE's tweet, didn't provide what I considered to be adequate credit.

(00:10:35):
Essentially, this person sort of takes other people's content, just like Elon does with memes, and then sort of gets the credit and all the likes and all the adoration. And it was just like, you know, to do this to a 14 year old kid, you know, who, who is so positive in the world, he lives in Iran, like of all places. To take his work and then to share it as though it's your own. And to sort of leave it ambiguous in terms of where it came from was sort of a, like a strike too far for me. So I called this behavior out, of course on Twitter, and I was like, what the hell? This is ridiculous. This is stupid. And then got into this back and forth with that person in dms and you know, I was like, whatever. Like, I don't care.

(00:11:10):
I'm leaving my tweet up, you know? And within an hour or two, NEMA actually sent me a message and he is like, where did your blue check go? And I was like, what are you talking about? Oh my God. So I went to my account and it was gone. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me. This was like days before, like Blue Check could get him. Like, when they were all gonna go away for everybody. And I was just, you know, assuming and accepting like, I'm not gonna pay for Twitter blue, I'm gonna lose my check. It's fine. But to then lose my check like days beforehand, it just like smacked of such small, it was

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:11:39):
Retribution. It was,

Chris Messina (00:11:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm like, you know what? Like, I don't need to stay here. I don't need to be providing my content and the things that I do out in the world. Like, you know, we've had a relationship for a long time and now it's become abusive and I just need to leave. And so that's, that's what happened. That's how I, and how does it, how does it feel after you've set Shiva for a while? Hmm. you know, it's, it's it's hard. Like Twitter is in our culture. Like Twitter is, you know, a a a circuit or, or circulation system or circulatory system, I suppose for the, you know, the tech world. And so many conversations go on there that normally I would participate in. So I'm still, I don't, I wouldn't say that I'm like going through like, any kind of withdrawal or anything like that, you know, I have other platforms that I have other places where I can share, but it does feel like leaving, you know, the town or city where you've spent, again, I, I did literally spend years kind of growing up.

(00:12:33):
But I, you know, it's like it's becoming something new and different and I don't need to stick around for that transition process. Do you read it at all still? I do. I mean, I, again, I get lots of threads sent to me, you know, I'm, I'm mm-hmm. Deep in kinda like the AI world right now. And so there's a, like the, the AI community really is there. They haven't really found another place. And so I find myself going through, but I have decided that I will just not post publicly. I still use dms, you know, a lot of people mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, use that as a primary way to get in touch with me. And so that's what you do in, in ai. Chris? you know, mostly right now learning, I would say I've done a few angel investments here and there, but you know, I think it's like, like I've been on Product Hunt for a long time also since around 2014 and last December I happened to catch Chatt p t as it was being announced, and I posted it to Prita Hunt, and you are the zing of everything.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:13:29):
Zing. He is Product Hunt. We should mention, if you don't know about it, it's worth checking out is a place where founders go to announce their new products and then they're people like Chris mm-hmm. <Affirmative> amplify that. And it's a really great place to see what's hot because cuz of people like you totally. You like to contribute your, your, your content to people, other people <laugh>.

Chris Messina (00:13:53):
I, you know, I, I like being useful. I like being helpful. Yeah. And so, you know, for a long time, you know, like, so in my, in my career, my career is very strange cuz I've done many things. I'm sort of a generalist, a maximalist. How did

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:14:06):
You, what did you start? You started as a designer, right?

Chris Messina (00:14:09):
That's right. I did. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I came, I came to Silicon Valley in 2004, and I worked on the launch of Firefox. And that was my, my first kind of foray into the tech world was through open source, you know, and as a designer in the open source world, back in 2004, there was like two or three of us, you know. And so I just kinda like got going there and, you know, worked on browsers, browser technology. I mean, even the hashtag was sort of a intended to be kind of an open format or standard that anybody could use to build social platforms and social software. And so along the way, I, there was some predecessors to Prnt that would allow you to post the products that you used. One of them was called I use this, and then I use this eventually went away and Prnt came out.

(00:14:51):
And it was a way for me to help founders, makers, builders, you know, get the word out, you know. And so because I had worked with engineers and open source people, and they're not always the best at selling themselves or marketing themselves, I could help to translate the things they were doing to a broader audience. And so product was one of the channels that I found was really useful to have interesting conversations about what people were building. I should mention that it's astonishing to see the degree to which generative AI tools Oh my God, have taken over Product Hunt. It's unbelievable. What would you It really is, it's 70% now. I, that is the number that I use, 70 to 80% every day. Wow. There's like some, and I think this is one of the things that's for, for people who are not too close to it or just reading the headlines, I, I think what they're missing is the degree to which developers and, you know, founders want, like, have to embrace this new platform.

(00:15:42):
And this, this shift. And two, the degree that they are, you know, they are building things and they are sort of taking a crack at how to use this stuff. And I think for me, as someone who's always worked in tech and, you know, thinks about communication and language and interfaces and product and design and platforms, this new shift is, you know, as, as big as probably like, you know, the web and web 2.0, you know, was if not bigger, simply because it changes the nature of how people interact with computers and what they expect computers should be able to do for them. So we are just at the very early innings in the very start and, and watching it on product on Unfold, you know, since I launched chat G P T in December and it became the number one product of the year.

(00:16:23):
I mean, I've just never seen a product like that I've launched have that kind of dominate response. Yeah. Yeah. You and, and chat. G B T is is obviously very interesting. It's obviously making a huge impact, but it's, the tools built using APIs to services like, like chat. G P T is the real, the, that's the real thing. People say, oh, chat, G P T makes errors, it hallucinates all this kinda stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's not the point mm-hmm. At all. Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's like the data set can be your data set, it can be any data set, it, you know, this is the thing that people don't understand. It's not a search engine. That's right. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an approach to information. It, as Jerome, Jerome Lanier said, it's a way for humans to collaborate on a massive scale. And so it's really the, the, the data set, the errors, all that stuff is really beside the point. It's all these little tools of the kind you find on Product Hunt that is so fascinating and so surprising every day. It's like, wow, I didn't think of that, that you could do something like that. You know? It's, it's pretty amazing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what's, what's

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:22):
The abortion, both of your views of real things versus bandwagon hopping?

Chris Messina (00:17:30):
Hmm. it's

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:32):
Hard to tell I know, but I'm just curious.

Chris Messina (00:17:34):
It, it is because spec, you'd have to first define what it means to be a real thing. And we are in the stage right now of experimentation, obviously chat. G B T is a real thing I would say, given what Microsoft talked about, you know, their build conference this week, co-pilots is a new category, just like social media, you know, became a category. And so you can launch all sorts of co-pilots that are differentiated based on the, the dataset that they, they work on based on kind of user empathy and understanding like what people's needs are and how sophisticated those users might be. You know, for example, I use a number of text editing tools, and they've all added some sort of AI in a generation. But then even within those components, you could have a, a, a co-pilot or AI generation within like, their code generation tools.

(00:18:20):
In other words, like if you can paste, let's say, you know, markdown over some code, let's say that you put into a document because you're writing developer docs, well, within the code editor itself, you could have an AI tool that helps to debug or improve the clarity of your code. So at all these different levels, you just imagine that there's, you know, a thousand tiny interns kind of running around and all these different text boxes. And I mean, <laugh>, that's, that's kind of like where we're at, so to say, like, what's real and what's not. And I think it's still a little bit early for that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:18:49):
Yeah. The, one of the things that was kind of interesting, we, we covered the build keynotes earlier this morning and yesterday morning. And the most interesting part of the keynotes was actually at the very end of today's keynote when Stevie Batis came on. He's a technical fellow at Microsoft. He used to do hardware now to software. And he more than anybody at Microsoft positioned AI's role in software going forward. He said there's three, three stages we're gonna see. There's where, where is ai, it's beside what you're doing. It's inside what you're doing, and then it's outside what you're doing. And let me explain what each of those means. Beside is kind of where we are now as AI, as a helper. AI as a sidebar, you know, being chat maintain minimally disruptive. Most of the stuff you do continues as it used to, but you can use AI as a, as a little assistant.

(00:19:44):
He says, the next stage, and I think this is gonna be interesting, and this is clearly what Meyer, Microsoft wants to be. Maybe, maybe they're better positioned to do this than anybody else, especially in what they did not mention, but inferred would be Windows 12, where AI is everywhere. It's the main scaffolding. It's the, instead he, he showed the very famous, or somebody showed the, maybe it was Raji cha, very famous, Doug Engelbart de ma mother of all demos with the mouse and the, the first mouse and the pointer. And he said, we are now moving to the next stage where it's not mouse and pointer, and the input loop isn't waiting for a keystroke or a mouse stroke. It's ai which, so, which means that the UI is gonna change, but AI is gonna be everywhere. And then the final stage, wait,

Chris Messina (00:20:33):
Wait, wait, wait. Hold on there for one second. I still draw that picture a little more for

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:20:38):
Me. Well, Matt, you know, one of the things we do right now with any computer, your silly Chromebook, <laugh>, Hey, hey, hey, my Linux os in front of me. Mac Os in front of no, actually you have iPad, probably Mike Elgan I won't infer I'm rocking a Mac. Yeah, rocking a Mac, yeah. Is you have you, you have applications which you launch to create a document. And the, and for years we've had this applications kind of centric view of computing. Long time though, people have been talking about, Chris, remember this, of course, document centric computing. We've tried to do this many times. But the idea is that's more how you work as a human. You know, humans don't say, do I need word or, or excel, or maybe we do now, but in the old days, you, you, you wouldn't, you would say, what do I want to build? Do I need a hammer or screwdriver? You'd say, what do I need to build? And you'd focus on what you're building and then use various tools as appropriate. Ai will, will facilitate this because it is the master tool. You'll you'll talk to ai not to, it'll figure

Chris Messina (00:21:46):
Out what tool to use.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:21:47):
Yeah. And that's

Chris Messina (00:21:48):
What, that's what Grammarly showed a few weeks ago. I mean, feel like the, an interface for this would be like Fortnite, you know, where essentially yes, you can build kind of whatever you want, right? And right. Like that's, that's actually the problem is that you'll have infinite choice. And the question then is, how does the AI coach you into, like, working from what is, you know, an enormous space of possibility down to a set of clear either, you know, buttons or interactions or, you know, almost like Madlib style. Okay. Like, who is this for? What are you trying to achieve? Like, I feel like I think Google was the one that really writes good complaint letters, I guess, for getting refunds and things like that. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Yes. I mean, they've seen enough email, you know what I mean? It was good. They probably, it

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:22:27):
Looks good. Yes. They demoed that at Google AI and were <inaudible> and they said, if you really wanna show, write an angry one here, <laugh>. Where,

Chris Messina (00:22:34):
Where do I send the complaint letter

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:22:35):
To Google? Yeah. Right.

Chris Messina (00:22:37):
Was that email? Well, Don, there's no one there to be, that's, I'm sorry,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:22:39):
I gonna number three. Well, Fortnite is a good example, Chris, or the master hand in Zelda, the tears of the kingdom. One of the reasons Zelda is so hot right now is cuz you have arbitrary build capabilities and that's transformed the game. It's fascinating to watch people. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So this is, so I think Microsoft's, what Microsoft's saying is we're a, they almost said this explicitly. We're a platform company. They use, they, they actually put Bill Gates' famous quote up on the screen saying, you know so, you know, something's a platform when the people use it, make more money than the platform maker, that the platform facilitates people to create new things. And, and they're gonna even benefit more. And I think that's what Microsoft sees itself as is the AI platform builder. And they, for, you know, for all of the attention that open AI gets, let's not forget, Microsoft owns nearly half of them, and all of it is running on Azure.

(00:23:35):
So in, in effect, Microsoft is financing the AI revolution. So that's in, that's the second stage beside then inside. But the one I think is really most interesting is outside. And Microsoft talked a lot about disparate data sources, orchestration across multiple apps, pulling in acting as an agent. And Chris also will remember this, Mike will as well. This, you know, the, the very famous John Scully video with the knowledge navigator and the little ai with the bow tie. The whole idea of it acting as your agent and pulling things in your Jarvis, if you will, Jeff pulling in things and from everywhere, from the, from the, from all of the world and becoming your kind of intermediary to the real world. And this is what I see. This is Microsoft saying, this is what we think the future's gonna be, and this is where we wanna be. Now, whether it will be or not is another matter, but

Chris Messina (00:24:31):
Another, yeah, another perspective on the, on the external use of ai occurred to me, and it's, I'm sure it's not original thought at all, but it, it, it sort of, kind of blew me away when I was really thinking about it, which is that no matter where augmented reality goes, and I, I'm, I'm certain that augmented reality is gonna be much bigger than virtual reality, even if it isn't, it's gonna be huge. Augmented reality is, so we're all gonna be talking about it after the apple ww d c next week. And some of us have been talking about it for a decade, but there's no augmented real. The aug, the future of augmented reality is going to be heavily dependent on AI to the point where the ai, the AI part is the indispensable part. The visuals, the holograms, all that stuff is theoretically dispensable.

(00:25:19):
What I mean by that is AI is going to see and interpret the world for us. It's gonna take in all that data, figure out what's going on, and then use that information to then give us advice, nudge us here and there, answer our questions to all that kind of stuff, with an awareness about what's going on in the world. So the, so the, the AI to interpret the world, and then AI to figure out how to help us with the world, the, the, our surroundings is the going to be the most for sure gonna be the most important part of augmented reality. And, and you, you

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:25:52):
Almost have to have it in order to interact with the world. Exactly. There'll be so much input. Exactly. You'll need a something

Chris Messina (00:25:58):
To filter it. The, the, the, the, the smoke and mirrors part, the, the, the visuals, the holograms, the, the, the, the 3d, you know, the magic leap stuff. Well, that stuff's gonna take forever. And the applications for that kind of thing are going to take forever. I'm ready. And I think everybody's ready for an AI augmented reality right now with just, just voice. Right. and, and so I, I think we're like on the brink of, I think this year we're gonna see a lot of things like that where we're talking to a voice. The voice is talking to us, and AI is interpreting the world and figuring things out for us. All right. Since, and I've augment a reality,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:26:33):
I have at least two, if not three bullish AI bullish people on, I want to tell you my dirty little secret. I don't buy any of this. I am not <laugh>. I, I am, I am not I bearish on ai. And here's why. You know, I think about self-driving cars. I think about speech to text interfaces, handwriting, recognition. It seems to have been always the case that the first 90% can be done and be very impressive. But the last 10% is such a failure that cars run into kids. And and Siri has no idea what you just asked it, and your handwriting turns into farm. And I, I think we've seen this over and over again, and I worry that we are once again falling for what is a hype cycle. Because the first 90% is so damn impressive. Well,

Chris Messina (00:27:29):
It's not just the last 10%. The last, the last 10% of the last 10% is almost impossible.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:27:35):
Yes. It's zinos paradox. You're never gonna get there. Right, right, right. So, Chris, I'll let you defend this cuz Chris, obviously you are a believer. I mean, history might be on my side. Why is this gonna be different?

Chris Messina (00:27:50):
You know, like the way I'm looking at this is really about resetting assumptions about what computing is. So, you know, I often try to think about generationally you know, kids coming up now who are in school, who are learning to work with chat. G P T will have a completely different set of assumptions about what the interaction paradigm should be when they pick up a device. Right. You know, already there's some kind of skepticism. You know, we grew up obviously, and these things are still magical. Like, you know, those of us who who, you know, choose to stay on Twitter still think that Twitter is amazing. Whereas a younger generation is like, this is like, it's just text. Like, this is so boring. Where's the video? Where's the interaction? Where's the game? Like stuff. So I do think that, you know, for a certain generation, a certain cohort, certain set of people, you know, the AI is not gonna be that relevant to that.

(00:28:33):
I mean, you know, there's, there's a story I think today about how car manufacturers are trying to like, take out a AM radio, you know, from the cars, right? And there's some contingent of folks who are like, no, like, you know, over my dead, you know, body or whatever. In, in a similar way. I think there will just be so many folks who, who resist what AI can do for you, and yet another cohort of people for whom these types of conversational interactions will become the defacto way that they actually compute. So that to me is the shift. And that's the difference. And so we have now 30 years, you know, if not longer maybe 40 or 50 years since the mother hall demos that define the computing paradigm based on changing human expression to meet what a computer could understand. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

(00:29:17):
Yes. So moving our, our finger around to point to things through a metaphor, which was the mouse, or having, you know, a set of keys, rows of keys that you have to like, put your fingers on in a certain order to generate commands so the computer knows what to do. Now we are finally in, you know, I, I built a conversational AI company in 2016 that was just too early with the assumption that we have built the APIs, we have built the platforms. What was missing was the interface that would allow kind of just in time coupling of those services through a conversational or language based one time. And that's, to me, the shift that is happening. And it will change everything because again, people will start building from those new set of assumptions. They won't be building with an assumption that, you know, you have to go through an app store to deliver a little chicklet on people's phones and all the, the mechanics around like ads and all that other stuff.

(00:30:12):
Now it's gonna be intent-based, which, you know, Android has been working on for some time, but you still have to have the metaphor of the app. And I think it just dissolves a lot of those boundaries. And the way that we've organized so much of the digital world that, that I think is what's gonna fundamentally change. And Chris, that that's the 10,000 foot view. And I, I, to me, the, the 100,000 foot view is that we've been using computers since we've been using electrical powered computers since the first half of the 20th century. And in the entire evolution of computing, the way that it changes and evolves is that the computers become more powerful and they work much, much harder to speak the language of humans, right? And the language of humans ultimately is just storytelling of verbal conversations that we, that we have with other people.

(00:30:57):
So it's in, it was inevitable since, you know, the 1930s that someday we would have computers that we just talked to and they would talk back to us and they would make sense and they would understand things and help us do things and do things for us and that sort of thing. It's always been the direction of, of computers. They've always evolved. So the voice, is it the voice interface? Is that, I mean, right now we're, it's typing that odd, it's not language, it's not, it's a command language. It's a language. It's language. So it could be, it's all the things that humans do. We we're visual animals. We're we're, we're, we have language that we, you know, this is, this is what we are. It's, it's, it's, we are bending it to become something that's, that's part of ultimately what we're, what we're sort of talking about and point to is easily it's sense making and it's communication.

(00:31:43):
And you're absolutely right. Like all the ways in which humans understand the world through our sense sensory input, right? First has to be, you know, felt and experienced. And then the second part is then how do you translate those experiences verbally into phone names that I can then shoot at your, your ears, and that you can also see, you know, my movements and things like that to try to understand the medic you know, things that are swirling around in my brain. And so that, that, that is how we create a kind of union while we were still boundaried. So I'm still me and you are still you. And yet as I described these things with words, as I shape that reality in your mind, we then come to an understanding. And up until now, we've had to use a lossy type of communication style with computers to approximate what we mean because of the huge number amount of sort of sequential compute that's needed to get to an, something similar to what humans are talking about.

(00:32:35):
Like, you can give a computer a, an image or a photograph and you know, it's a bunch of you know, text. If you ever try to like open up a jpeg in a text editor, like it's, it's gibberish. It's it's nonsense. It's not concepts. But now thanks to machine learning, largely we've trained the system to have a better sense for patterns and phenomena and to label those phenomenon with human concepts and ideas that now allow the computer to respond to us in a way that is much closer to the way that we understand and, and interpret and experience the world. And that changes how often and how frequently people will want to use computers because it becomes a lot more accessible and a lot more delightful than the current method, which all of us, and it changes quite good at, can use computers Exactly. Precise. It changes hoop can use

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:19):
Computer. That's right. It also changes who can use language. It, this has been my argument about, about this is that it, it open broadens literacy both in text mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and in visuals, images and in programming Yep. People who can now communicate. Chris, let me ask you, since, since you went 10,000 feet and Mike went a hundred thousand feet, I'll go down to hell. Great. I'm trying, I keep on trying to look for anyone who has a credible scenario in which they argue that this could destroy mankind. I don't believe it, but I Have you seen what's I I've never seen the script for that except, oh my God, we're all powerful. We have big schwans <laugh>, and we can do what we want with the world. I've never seen something that takes me through the steps by which that happens. Have you,

Chris Messina (00:34:03):
You know, I, I'm obviously, there's, there's plenty of sci-fi and you know, movies that attempt to, you know, tell the story of these things. But I feel like

(00:34:12):
It's a little bit lazy to just make this assumption that, you know, once you add plug-ins into chat, u p t, suddenly both the system is somehow sentient and also sees humans as Yeah. A blocker to, you know, enablement. Like one. I think although these systems can become extremely powerful, I mean, you know, and you can have all sorts of different conditions that, you know, emerge from that. It feels like the, the real risk is almost like if not a cultural like decline, that that is caused by a set of questions about what is it that humans should be doing with themselves? How should we be doing work if suddenly, you know, we have a lot of, you know, we already have enough income inequality in the country that suddenly now you have a bunch of sort of executive folks who are hiring ais to do a bunch of, you know, roles throughout an organization.

(00:34:55):
And that leaves a lot of people without a lot to do and without sort of, you know, like, like capitalism starts to break down quite a bit when so much of the work that currently is done by, by people to give them purpose and meaning and a way to contribute to their community suddenly goes away and can be automated and made to be extremely cheap. You know, like we, like in this country, we, we've struggled with slavery and this is a new form of slavery that is not morally reprehensible in the same way it's different. And so that is something

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:22):
Who's, what's the machine is the slave.

Chris Messina (00:35:24):
Yes. Like essentially if you're using chat c b T, let's say that you're, you're in college, like, there's no reason necessarily for you to write an essay if your goal is to get a credential and then to go into the world and then to show someone this, this credential to get a job that has now been automated through like automation technology. So instead, like the, the shift, and, and this is not exactly answering your question, but I'm suggesting that the, the thing that, that I, that I'm most concerned about is that we're not doing a good enough job teaching the skills that will be necessary in this future world. Yeah. Where there is an assumption that, again, people are using these tools day in and day out, and it's in their pocket. Right? The tools of, of empathy, of curiosity, of you know, <laugh> listening, proactive listening, nonviolent communication, like all those things are actually quite necessary in this, in this new world. But they're not the things that are taught in school for the last a hundred years or so. We've been teaching people how to, you know, wrote memorization Yep. Facts, all that stuff. And to Mike's point, we've been building computers that do all that stuff for us so that we don't have to, we need to spread

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:26):
Hard people with humanities involved now.

Chris Messina (00:36:28):
Yes. Yes. So, so we're sort of coming back full circle into the humanities and philosophy just

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:32):
As they die.

Chris Messina (00:36:34):
Right, exactly. So, so I think that's like, if anything, maybe it is that we be, you know, bore ourselves without changing what education is about to encourage, you know, deep curiosity and then the ability to ask better questions. These reasoning tools that we're building now will, I think make a lot of people very like lazy and they'll miss the point of what education could and should be about in terms of personal development, personal growth, personal inquiry, et cetera.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:01):
In, in my journalism school, I started a program with my colleague Carrie Brown and engagement journalism. And the argument is that it doesn't start with our stories. It doesn't start with the journalist perspective. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it starts by listening. Yes. And we're oddly bad at that in our field. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and other fields like education and retail and government and, and listening is a skill that we haven't had. And part of the problem too, that part of my argument about the internet and why there's moral panics around it is because people who have always been there and have always been speaking, who were never heard in mass media, now have the opportunity to be heard and resent not being heard. And those who held the stage before resent their voices. And so speaking and listening take on a whole different definition. I like that. I like where you're headed with that, that we're, where chat becomes a, a, a, a what is it? Is it a, is it a curator, a middleman, a gatekeeper, a a facilitator or what in between?

Chris Messina (00:38:00):
Yeah. Maybe a facilitator, maybe a context, you know, like to, to be, you know, either an interpreter or just again, to sort of ask the questions. Like, because so many people have such a, you know, diverse set of experiences, and we're living in a world you know, and we're seeing this with social media now, right? Like Twitter obviously was one melting pot of a lot of different ideas and cultures and so on. Now we're, you know, disaggregating again to different edge networks and platforms now, it's very hard, you know, having left Twitter for me to have a sense of the zeitgeist of what's going on. Yeah. And so there are little pockets of reality and truth or truthiness that are popping up and I'm encountering them, and they're very confusing. Like it's very bewildering maybe. And so anyways, like a, a type of AI or a conversational agent that can be there to help me understand what's gone on before, what, what is the context of this place that I find myself in? What are some of the appropriate norms and ways to speak, you know, could really smooth over our movement through these digital environments. That's an

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:38:58):
Interesting, that's what

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:58):
Interesting about Blue Sky.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:38:59):
Yeah. Well, blue skies get humans. They're

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:01):
Getting ready for, they're getting ready for agents and interesting. The argument is hell are they, he's gonna bring in those agents next.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:39:06):
I think in, you know, that's interesting that to Twitter, a read only Twitter that is created by AI <laugh>. But I, but I have to say, I'm still skeptical because the content AI produces is so anodyne so phony at this point. And I don't think it's gonna, well, it's us. Yeah. I don't think it's gonna get any better. I don't, I I think there's a little bit of a science fiction leap that you're making that it will somehow, you know, achieve this flu fluency that I don't necessarily,

Chris Messina (00:39:34):
I think, I think if you think of it more from a collaboration, like Yeah. Yes. Like those, those who use it for collaboration I think will actually sprint much further than, than those who don't. I also think that poets

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:45):
Develop novelists who are doing just that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:39:48):
Are they making better poetry and better fiction because of it?

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:52):
Yes. They're being inspired Be the other way. Look at Leo. I do. I doubt. Listen, if you wanna know what, how to lead, I think a tree

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:39:57):
Is much more inspiring than any AI would ever be, but okay, man,

Chris Messina (00:40:02):
If you hooked up a tree to ai, that would be a book I would wanna read. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:06):
The one right behind Christo <laugh>.

Chris Messina (00:40:08):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:09):
Wanna, to me, what's interesting is if you have this thing that has 3 trillion connections in language, it's telling you everything that all the cliches we've had, it challenges you then to go beyond them. That's

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:40:21):
What you still have to think beyond the cliche. And all you're getting is exactly cliche the

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:25):
Machine machine won't. So you got a great cliche generator with collaboration. What's

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:40:29):
The value of a cliche generator that's not useful.

Chris Messina (00:40:32):
<Laugh>. So have you read any high schoolers essays? Yes,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:40:35):
They're Exactly, exactly.

Chris Messina (00:40:37):
They're horrible. Yes. Machines really should be doing those. But, but I, I think, I think the, the, the, the analogy that, that I like so far, and we'll see if, if if, if any new emerging facts jars this away from me. But basically, I think it's very similar to photography and what it did to painting be before photography. Painting was something we used to record visual scenery or visual things. People sat for portraits. And it was a, a kind of a propaganda. It was a lot like stable Diffusion is now where it's kind of an idealized version of the aristocrat standing there, like in, in, in a kind of a phony environment. We used it for capturing far away scenes and landscapes of places where with far away from any place you'd ever go, and you would look at it and go like, wow, that's what it's like there.

(00:41:23):
That's amazing. And so we used the painting as a way to capture what was really there. As soon as we had photography that could really capture what was really there, well, suddenly painting just exploded into a thousand styles of, of surrealism and all these different things that we really love. It, it really it freed humans to be super creative and to do things that humans can do that cameras can't. So we no longer need to write the cliches that AI will do it, and we can do something more original. Well, I, I, I think, oh, so for example, we on the Rundown is a, is Admissive by Sunar Pacha. You know, my feelings about Sunar Pacha, who, who's writing in the Financial Times, and, and his entire thing feels like it was written by ai. I don't think it was, but I, but it's, like you say, it's Ady.

(00:42:08):
He's, he's a boring writer. He are, he's, he doesn't make any, he doesn't make any mistakes. He doesn't, he's careful about everything. He's, everything's couched in these sort of platitudes and so on. That's how AI writes by default, then you can tell it to be sassy or whatever. And it's not very good at those sort of things. It's not very good at summary for the most part. But again, this stuff has been with us since January. I mean, you know, give it, give it two years, three years. I, I really think that like the seeing the younger generation come up with this as a core, you know, tool and I, and I think the photography example is, is pretty good because by and large, especially given all the, all the, the cameras in people's pockets now, and the sheer volume of terrible, terrible photos that have been produced as a result of putting cameras in everybody's pockets doesn't mean that those who have real talent or vision can't then use that tool for something more transcendent.

(00:43:04):
And I've seen, you know, so far, for example musicians who maybe normally don't write vocals or lyrics, you know, to their songs, be able to use something like Chachi p t to just get something, to get a rift, to get a line, to get, like something that sort of inspires or gets them going. And ultimately, if this is the best solution to the blank slate problem or the blank page problem, and that means that, I mean, you know, I, I spent a walkabout year kind of traveling the world thinking that I was gonna like write a book about my experiences, and I got nowhere because of this blank page problem. Yeah. So if I have chat G p t or something like it, that not only harasses me into like sitting down and like spending, you know, an hour writing and then also is like, okay, tell me about this, or tell me about that.

(00:43:45):
I feel like as a creative tool to extract things out of a person, then that's a way to, again, to understand these tools and to put them into the current context. I mean, it's, you know, you think about it from a different perspective. This is something that we actually try to work on on Google Plus, which, you know, oh, Mike, I know you were there for that. You know, was the question like, what is the prompt? And currently, whether it's Twitter or whether it's Blue Sky or any of these other platforms, they ask you something, you know, the prompt, like what's going on, what's on your mind? Like, what's happening? There's been loads of tests, but all within a very sort of fine mix. You can imagine that a chat, G P T or some other G P T tool could actually propose topics that you might be interested in based on what's, you know, both your interest personally and then what's been going on in your network. Right? So for lots of people who currently find it hard to participate in social media or are mostly lurkers, this could be a facilitation to get their voice, their perspective into the mix, and then they can be coached on how to express themselves in a way that gives them greater confidence. Just like having spellcheck or grammar check, this is almost like concept check. And that could actually be a great enabler for hearing from more people.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:44:49):
I need to take a little break. If you want to rush over to Twitter and the Twitter space, or Rhon DeSantis is about to announce his for president says an hour ago

Chris Messina (00:44:59):
Ago. He said it was in two hours

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:45:00):
Later. Yeah. No, it's at three o'clock. It's right now three o'clock Pacific. No, 27,000 people are in there right now. I don't see Mr. Desantis in there yet, nor do I see Elon Musk, nor who the man I thought was gonna be the host David Sachs. So I don't know what's happening, but no, it's, it's now but Florida Man is missing <laugh>, Florida man is gone. I do want to talk a little bit about our sponsor, AG one from Athletic Greens. You gotta, right. Hey, these are the travel packs, which I really, really like. I love the idea of everything you need in one little pouch. You add to water. Yes, you can use cool water, it tastes fantastic, and you get everything you need. You don't need a lot of supplements, you don't need anything else.

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And they, it actually tastes fantastic if you're looking for a simpler, cost effective supplement routine Ag one by Athletic Greens. If you go right now to athletic greens.com/twig, you'll get a free one year supply of Vitamin D, little droppers. You can put in as much as you need each day. And five of these travel packs free with your first purchase of a subscription, athletic greens.com/twig. We thank 'em so much for their support of the show, and thank you for supporting us by going to that address, Atlantic greens.com/twig. Are you, are you listening to the it says I can't fetch it. Can't fetch it. It's working. Yeah. I notice you're able

Chris Messina (00:47:29):
Fetch

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:47:29):
Space. The number of listeners is going down. Oof. So maybe there's something going on. Maybe, maybe Twitter can't handle

Chris Messina (00:47:36):
It. It's been

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:47:36):
Crashed. Handle it. Yeah. I I noticed over there, one, one of your one of your jobs I know you consult Christmas, I noticed one of your one of your clients is Neva.

Chris Messina (00:47:49):
Yes. So sad

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:47:50):
About Neva. I've been, I've been flogging Neva for, you know, months. He has been.

Chris Messina (00:47:56):
Oh, he has been. I

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:47:57):
Love it. I love the AI generated synopsis, the future. At the beginning it's, it was, I was paying five bucks a month because I didn't want ads. It was now they're, they're selling out and they're and they're closing down and they're refunding my money. Do you have any insight into what happened?

Chris Messina (00:48:15):
You know, it's, it's I started out kind of you know, advising Streetar certainly there was, there was a lot of alignment in terms of what Neva was working on.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:48:23):
He was at Google, head of advertising at Google, so,

Chris Messina (00:48:26):
Yes. Yeah. Yes. So we have, we have that, that background together. But, you know, I, I think there were a number of things that happened. You know, they, they did a bunch of different and interesting experiments. There was a whole effort that they had focused on around Web three and NFTs and kind of, you know, just trying lots of stuff to see, you know, what the next wave of the web might be like. And, you know, I don't, I don't have any specifically insider information about this particular thing, but I think the thing that he said, which is the thing that I would, I mean, we saw this with Google Plus as well, is hard, is like changing behavior. Yeah. You know, even if you have a better product just the muscle memory and the distribution that Google has is really, really difficult to break through.

(00:49:06):
Yeah. And so, you know, like, it's interesting, you know, one of the reasons why I reached out before was of course talking about, you know, Twitter and Activity Pub and those things. And we face a similar question, you know, as to whether or if some of these other networks that are coming up now where it's a, like Google doesn't even have, I mean, Google has some network effects, but for the search experience, it's largely a private personal experience. And yet the muscle memory is so ingrained, you know, you almost have to like, you know, do some psychedelics or something to just like, you know, break free from like, the way you think about it. But I think that was, that was the thing that Neva really you know, struggled to, to overcome. It's

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:49:39):
The purity of the default. It's

Chris Messina (00:49:40):
The default.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:49:41):
Yeah. You know I kind of was souring on Google just because the, the above the fold stuff was less and less. Oh yeah. Search results, <laugh>, I just, I just kind of said, mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I need something that's gonna gimme search results. Neva gave me very, I think, pretty good search results. And then when they turned on the ai, I was, I kept showing all these, these poor guys are so bored with it. I kept showing it to 'em. June 2nd. Chris, do you ever

Chris Messina (00:50:04):
Use a shut AI search engine called Find P H I n D? Find p I have not. Ph i nd.com. Check it out. It's,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:50:12):
I'm looking for Neva replacement. I'll have to check AI search engine for developers, ah,

Chris Messina (00:50:16):
And for developers develop. But I dunno why. It's for developers, it works for all purpose. Searches have tried a perplexity Google-like result, and also an AI chap g t like result, ah, side by side. And it's, it's, it's pretty good. Quite good. Yeah. Nice. I think Perplexity is sort of in the, in the similar realm. I think it's perplexity.ai. It's, it's interesting how like, there's a new, it feels like a standard in, in interface design that was largely inspired by chat chip pt, where it's sort of like chat box, but then they give you sort of like starter conversations to get going. Yeah. But yeah, I, I don't know. The Neva thing is, is super interesting. Obviously, you know, they'd raised a bunch of money to go after this problem. But I think the, the LM stuff changed everything and it woke up the sleeping giants and now it's like, game on. And so it's Microsoft versus Google. And as an upstart, you know, had had like chat chupe t and, and Open AI really not come on the scene as they did. I think Neva, you know, could have had their runway and continued, you know, chasing that dragon. But now that, that the big guys are, are awake and actually like launching their stuff, like Google had all this stuff, you know, behind closed doors that makes it much harder you know, without a billions of dollars of investment, you know, to do the same.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:51:29):
Yep. Yeah, this is pretty good, actually. I'm just trying to get it, I'm trying to get it to write some code for me. <Laugh>. Let's see if I can do it.

Chris Messina (00:51:41):
See if you can spin up a, a Twitter spaces club

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:51:43):
Competitor. <Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. I, I need the dial tone of the internet. Can you can you get to work on that real quick? True <laugh>, huh? Okay. Sort of good. And what was the other one? Perspective, huh?

Chris Messina (00:51:57):
Perplexity. I'm

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:51:58):
Sorry. Perplexity. Yeah. But a lot of these, unfortunately, it's so hard to make a search engines index. A lot of them are just using bings or Google's yep. Index. And this looks good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'll have to, well, that, that's another

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:12):
Question. Do, do not just indexes, but trading sets become a commodity.

Chris Messina (00:52:22):
I mean, obviously like, one, one of the ways that I think about ai is a lot of people have talked about data as kind of a new oil. And I just, one, I think that that metaphor is a little bit, you know Yeah. Gross and tired. Yeah. I tend to think about it more like varietals and, you know, grace, I'm in California, so I would think that <laugh>, but like, you know, I think, I think that w with data, it's a little bit like terroir. It's, it's, you know, it's the specific kind of, you know, region where different aspects of the data has different levels of complexity, different levels of expressivity, different metadata that's attached to it, you know, and so, you know, those varietals are kind of, you know, the, the weather, the atmosphere, the ground you know, the grape growing area, as well as the people who are then cultivating those things.

(00:53:02):
And they have a certain taste or preference. And so when it comes to building whether it's a search engine or a reasoning tool built around a large language model it isn't so much that I think the training data becomes a commodity, but there are different expressions of it in different use cases. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you might have a, you know, general purpose, like large government body data set, and it might have a bunch of extraneous stuff that just isn't really that relevant or that useful. And so tweaking those models, deciding what goes in, what stays in, what goes out, how to, you know, cross reference like identity, ironically, which is something I spent a lot of my career working on, becomes an even bigger problem. Because now you wanna be able to know from one dataset to another, what are the same like, you know, reflectivity, like, is this object in this data set the same thing as in that data set? And what are the other relationships between those things? So that's also the way in which these things are not necessarily commodity per se, but they can be blended, if you will to create new types of data sets, whether they're synthetic or or not.

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:01):
Do you, what do you think of, of, of the argument in the stochastic parrots paper that ever larger learning sets are, are, are meaningless and counterproductive and hard to manage and really not the point?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:54:17):
Hold on a second. Let me just interrupt. I I was in the wrong group. Elon has launched his group for the his

Chris Messina (00:54:25):
Presidential campaign,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:54:26):
His presidential campaign. I can't get it to run <laugh>, but he's got 375,000 in there. So I think I was I was in a side, and this is one of the problems, of course, I was in a, a side group here in one Yeah.

Chris Messina (00:54:39):
From a verified user, right?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:54:40):
Yeah, exactly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. This is it. Where do you even find it? Yeah, it's just, it's in the trends. I see it on the top. Yeah. Elon Musk is the host. I'm a listener, apparently. So is Yaha Ali, Alexis Ohanian, Michael Belos, Alex Wagner, Laura Ingraham, Caitlin Jenner, it's a who's who of Tony Lauren <laugh>, Matt Gates Rudy Giuliani. And there's ran DeSantis. He's just listening. For right now. He probably

Chris Messina (00:55:07):
Can't figure out how to guess

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:55:08):
His, how do I talk on here? I guess Elon, what,

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:10):
What Rudy Giuliani ran for president. Honest to God. His Twitter account was private.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:55:15):
Can I, let me just turn on the, turn on the sound here. Can you hear, I'm just curious. I think it's Elon talking at this point. Can I b re-broadcast this? I don't know. You know what? I wonder if I should report this space as being offensive <laugh> to my liberal ears <laugh>.

Chris Messina (00:55:32):
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:55:33):
I, I imagine they'll have that turned off anyway. Well, I guess we can't hear it, so well, there's

Chris Messina (00:55:38):
No staff there to shut it down anyways,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:55:40):
So. Oh, that's true. That's true. And he's still not paying the rent, which may Really's kind of an amazing Linda

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:49):
Yesterday. His building is not earthquake safe, so maybe he'll use that as,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:55:52):
Oh, there you go.

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:54):
This is a dumb question. Yeah. How do you get the spaces

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:55:58):
Do you know how to, this is this thing called Twitter mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. You'll find it@twitter.com.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:03):
Yeah, I'm there.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:56:03):
Yeah. And then over on the on the right hand side. Well, let me, let me refresh cuz it's probably doesn't I see Tech Crunch. Oh, it's not there anymore. It's not there. Yeah, they've

Chris Messina (00:56:13):
Been moving stuff. Mobile

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:56:15):
Took it out on mobile. It, it was there, it was right here in the trending. Maybe if I explore,

Chris Messina (00:56:23):
Wow. My, my space bar just went away. Yeah. Twitter crashing hard right now. It's crashing hard. That's what's happening. Yeah, that's, yeah. Oh, there we go. Listen. Live in spaces. It should be up here. Preparing to Launch is the name of that one now. 473,000 people in there including all these famous and semi-famous. That would be so good if like, you know, the one moment where, where Elon tries to like showcase his new purchase is the moment when Twitter actually finally crashes. Like all the predictions about shit in the Yeah, yeah. Right. It's like somewhere Presidential campaign. Who saying, I knew this had happen, right? Oh, oh, I heard, I heard Elon.

Elon Musk (00:56:59):
Alright, well, it's certainly an, an incredible honor to have Governor DeSantis make this stark announcement.

Chris Messina (00:57:08):
What the hell? What the hell is that? <Laugh>, please wait. I guess we're going Mars guys. That's it. We're on his his Roadster off somewhere in the that's right. Geez, Louise. All right. I don't know what that is, but I'm closing it. <Laugh> you mentioned AM Radio Fort has reversed its course and says we. Okay. Well, all right. We'll leave the AM radio on in your 50 defensive cost in your cart, them nothing. In fact, it's a software update. If you Yes. Kind of amazing. For any owners of Ford EVs without AM broadcast capability, we'll offer a software update to restore it said C E O, Jim Farley. So apparently they're building them with AM radios. They just disable 'em in software I want. Is that, huh? Sorry. Like my mine is, my mind is gonna like several different places because there's a lot of things that have been changing in the audio world.

(00:58:05):
Obviously we saw that with Twitter spaces. But like, when it comes to <laugh>, when it comes to audio and cars, obviously that's a really relevant ad channel. And so whether you're streaming Spotify or other platforms like that, that's all coming over, I presume, you know, digital frequencies perhaps. So if it's a software update, does that mean that the hardware is just being turned on and turned off? Yeah. For am Or is am content being streamed Oh, over like, I don't think Digital Connection. I don't think so. Because one of the reasons I think they're bringing AM back is because there's been movement in Congress AM is a critical emergency channel for Well, that's what I would expect. Yes. And so that's why, so yous a hardware, radio software update. Yeah. Yeah. You need a hardware radio because there are plenty of places in the US you can't get your That's right.

(00:58:55):
Cell signal. That's right. And so if it is a, with like starlink and other types of maybe satellite coverage, maybe act like I'm not, I'm not disagreeing. I have the same question. Elon does not, as you know, in your Tesla, Elon does not put a on radio mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in your Tesla does not <laugh>. So if, if, if everyone needs to go to Mars, I will not be notified. You know, if that's right, the message goes out over am it'll be on Twitter spaces. Yeah. So I'm, look, I'm looking at the debacle that is this announcement and

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:59:20):
Twitter crashing Desant, this keeps being demoted to a listener rather than, oh my God.

Chris Messina (00:59:26):
It's symbolic. It's symbolic.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:59:27):
Oh my God. There are half a million people. The number continues to rise. Are people trying to listen? They should have used Clubhouse. Here's Brian Brian s ST's tweet is this space is not available. Hmm. Yeah, I think it's in fact, I can't get it to can't take it to do anything. It's kind of just kind of dark now. <Laugh>, <laugh> another, there we go. Refreshing blunder for Elon Musk. Let me join

Chris Messina (00:59:54):
For primetime.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (00:59:55):
Lauren, Laura Ingraham, and see what's going on. One more time. We'll give it a, give it a shot here.

Chris Messina (01:00:02):
I bet he's throwing all of his ad inventory at everyone who's trying to get on the space right now.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:00:07):
<Laugh>. He's gotta pay those bills, man. Huh. Well, there you go. So I'm sure we'll find out more about this on the evening news where,

Chris Messina (01:00:19):
Well, if you go to the Explorer tab, at least for me, again, I don't know what's personalized and what's not, but Musk is a trending topic with 986,000 tweets, and DeSantis has 170,000 tweets. So talk about being a ratio. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:00:30):
He's not even <laugh>. That's how Elon likes it, and that's how we're gonna keep it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. <laugh> is Joe Biden tweeting. Oh, well, let's see what the president has to say. <Laugh> <laugh>. Jack Dorsey. Actually, oh, he just came back. Oh, who? That is silence again. <Laugh>. Are you listening? Looks like we're ready to go here. Oh, that was silence again. Oh, Lord. Jack Dorsey apparently has is now endorsing, let see, let me find that story. Dorsey, who? R FK Jr. At least he's, no, he's retweeting. No. Yeah. Posted two videos in the past week featuring R F K Jr. Oh man. Who was across course a big a covid and anti-vax conspiracy nut and more. Yeah. so there, what is it about people? They they get red pilled. Oh, I hear, I hear Ilan. That was me. You say there's too many people's

Elon Musk (01:01:34):
Unfortunately never seen this poem.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:01:39):
Oh, this is not good. No. Are you, Chris, do you, do you mourn this a little bit? The loss of Twitter and, and where Twitter is gone, and I'm mourning it like it's said.

Chris Messina (01:01:51):
I went through definitely a period of grief, you know just, you know, because again, this, this, this place and space, it, it is like a neighborhood that's sort of, we need it, you know, that goes downhill. Yeah. And it was a place that you could go to. And, you know, our neighbor, you have like a down moment. There was always something interesting. And there, I mean, there still is interesting things going on, but it's sort of like, you know, they've, they've taken out the plumbing and, you know, just like porta potties around. And you're kinda like, is anyone need to clean this up? <Laugh>? It's just, so, it's, yeah. In that sense, it's sad. And you know, like, I don't think there's much conversation about grieving of, of, of the loss of Twitter. And yet in terms of the purpose that it served, it, it, it, it doesn't serve that function anymore. There's gonna be a generation that grows up without Twitter as we knew it. You know,

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:32):
There is that discussion around community, around black Twitter. There's a story of the rundown today that, that climate scientists are, are kind of leaving on mass as a group. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think that we see it around communities rather than Twitter as a whole. Absolutists still dunno what to do.

Chris Messina (01:02:48):
I mean, so, so this is, this is, again, the, the thing that I was interested in, in the conversation you guys had previously about activity pub and about these migrations. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I do think that the dissolution of a social platform like this, like, I think it's interesting having been on the inside of Google Plus as it was being built and having designed parts of it. Bless you, sir. Bless you. Yeah. Well, and, and also struggling mightily, you know, in, in a lot of the kind of idea, some of the ideas were, were good, some of the ideas were completely orthogonal to what, or how humans tend to want to interact with each other. And so, you know, if you come at it from a more, I don't know, observational perspective, then maybe you can build better software. Anyways, this question of like, where these communities go and how they move mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and whether or not we should build into the fabric of the social web, that ability to, you know, leave if a place becomes toxic or no longer serves its function.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:03:35):
Is anyone afraid that a year from now that Twitter will be the right wing

Chris Messina (01:03:39):
Twitter

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:03:39):
And Buskey will be the left wing Twitter? And is that a good thing? I think good now, Mike. Yeah. I, here is the Biden tweet a little, throw a little subtweet, I think <laugh>

Chris Messina (01:03:54):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:03:55):
This link works

Chris Messina (01:03:56):
Now. It's on.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:03:56):
Yeah, now it's on.

Chris Messina (01:03:59):
Yeah. But to give money. Okay. Donations.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:00):
Yeah. To give money. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, he's not having a he's not having a, a spaces chat.

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:09):
Neither is Elon right

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:10):
Now. Apparently. <laugh>. Are you, are you monitoring it?

Jeff Jarvis (01:04:13):
I was trying to, but now

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:14):
It's, no, there's nothing, huh. Interest. Most of,

Chris Messina (01:04:17):
Most of my running. Yeah. Most of what I'm seeing are people saying that it's not working.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:21):
The surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murti says, social media may harm children and a profound risk of harm to adolescent mental health, urges families to set limits. And governments oh, to

Chris Messina (01:04:37):
Set looks like, sorry, David Sack. If you go to David Sack's tweets, he just posted a, a, a space with Rhon DeSantis, so,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:44):
Oh, they created a new one. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:04:47):
Maybe, maybe because, because Elon has too many followers, so Elon can't stop his

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:50):
Face. Oh, that might be,

Chris Messina (01:04:53):
That

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:04:53):
Could be. That might be. So let's see here. Yeah. yeah, Tulsi Gabbard in there. David Sax is hosting this one, and there's Ron and a bunch of other people. I, oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:05):
It's, it's that noise again.

Chris Messina (01:05:13):
<Laugh>, who shows this music?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:05:17):
Guess take a one. Wild, wild guess.

Chris Messina (01:05:21):
Is this what DeSantis plays at his

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:05:23):
<Laugh>, his gatherings? It's unbelievable. So the Biden administration's surge in general, let's point that out. Called on tech companies to enforce minimum age limits and to create default settings for children with high safety and privacy standards. And urge the government to create age appropriate health and safety standards for technology platforms. You know, fine. I, what are you gonna, so,

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:49):
Leo below, I have a thread on 79 where I went back, I so happens, I was, I was researching this just the, the part of the book I'm writing now where I went back to 51 years ago and the surgeon general report on television violence, five volume monstrous thing 40 years ago on video games. Yeah. This, and, you know, every, every single decades technology ones here's, and they're all the same. They all end up the same. And then the interesting thing was professor Corn Revere, who's a really good First Amendment scholar, had a really good post about the a video game. One went to the Supreme Court, and, and you see the First Amendment lesson, it happened again and again, and again and again. And it has to be retaught. And so in the Supreme Court ruling on brown California versus whatever entertainment company it was there's a quote that gets reused now constantly about the First Amendment that, but, but in one of the footnotes Scalia was arguing with, with, I think Alito somebody, and he described a, a ridiculous law that should never happen.

(01:07:07):
And what he described was Utah's law that just, just went into effect. And so we go around on this moral panic Mandela over and over and over again. And that's not to say that there isn't plenty worth studying, and there isn't plenty to be concerned about, and there isn't plenty to support parents with, and that's all true. But the, the Surgeon General's report says nothing about guns in schools. Right. About young women. Seems

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:07:29):
Like a more

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:30):
Danger about climate change, about the economy Yeah. About all of these things. Oh, no, no, no. It's all phones.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:07:38):
Yeah. well, the,

Chris Messina (01:07:41):
The weird thing, and, and I think this was acknowledged, there's a, there's a certain degree of I, I guess it's refreshing honesty or surpri it is more honest. The, the certain general's statements than, than I would've expected. But he basically points out that the problem is that we haven't studied it enough. Oh,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:07:59):
My, we don't know. We studied it. Oh my God, the arms are, God, it, there have

Chris Messina (01:08:02):
Been, yeah, there have been studies and, and they point out that there's a, you know, there's probably more harm than benefits, but the benefits are there. It actually, the existence of social media and the lives of young people is actually a, a huge benefit in a number of ways that include, you know, a sense of a place to express creativity, a place to, to find connection with people, to, to, to, for, for people to help, you know, find people to help them through their adolescent problems. And so on, on the downside, there's, there's bullying problems. There's like self-esteem issues

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:33):
As in lunchrooms

Chris Messina (01:08:35):
<Laugh> e Exactly. So,

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:37):
But Mike, very important,

Chris Messina (01:08:38):
Listen to me that

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:39):
You bring up a really important point, Claire Caine Miller at the Times to great credit in the Times for the great credit, how Destroy today talking about how important the social media is to L G B T Q teens, especially now when they're being assaulted in some states all around, they're not being allowed to live as themselves. And, and so the existence and which, which Murthy Mur Murthy Mur acknowledged in his report, he had a thick paragraph, but the benefits, just as you just did, Mike and he acknowledged the importance to l lgbtq q young people without that they'd be even more lost.

Chris Messina (01:09:13):
I mean, like, doesn't it seem like the other piece of this is to su suggest that social media either also harms adults and parents, or that they are actually one of the number, like, leading causes of some of this harm and abuse because, you know, adults and parents tend to set the norms and the behaviors for their kids. And to assume that kids should some somehow develop, you know, some sort of moral clarity or a laity in the absence of those examples, seems to ignore like some of the fundamental distortions from social media. In fact, I think they do do exactly that. You see, you see a fluidity of movement of younger people from one social network to another for per, for the, for various reasons. True. I mean, you saw people rushing to Snapchat because you know, years ago because, because they could have a group of, you know, interact with like, you know, 12 people instead of a thousand.

(01:10:01):
See, now, now Discord is is is that for a lot of teens? Exactly. Exactly. So it's, it seems like on the whole, one of the interesting things about younger people as a demographic is that they're quicker and sort of better at finding spaces on social, social media, and in some ways it's more dismissible to them. Yeah. Right, right. Like, it's more like, and again, sort of reflecting back on, on how we grew up with this. And so, you know, like, my accounts on social media are so valuable to me, they're so personal, and I wanna hold on to them like forever. I think what I see in, you know, this is true in, in a lot of other communities, is kind of a, a willingness to abandon or let go of, or just kind of use disposable identities, you know, constantly. And especially earlier on, like, I think one of the things that's interesting about this report, and this is a, a, a constant conversation that I just do not know how to square with, you know, American conventions, values and laws, which is causing social media platforms to be better at identifying young people underage and then restricting their access and use without some sort of identity regime that requires everyone, you know, every kid basically to have an an ID that is attached to them somehow in a way that is completely against so many of the principles of, of privacy and, and security.

(01:11:15):
So we want exactly, you know, the cake to eat, you know, and to eat it too. But it's not really realistic, I think, to put the onus of parenting and controlling access to these platforms exclusively on the platforms themselves.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:26):
Chris, there's a, there's a great quote. I, I just read this paper today by Kirsten from Pedagog Historic, I Oh wow. Read all the fun things, <laugh>,

Chris Messina (01:11:37):
Multiple Wednesday,

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:38):
Latin's

Chris Messina (01:11:39):
House.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:40):
No. Is

Chris Messina (01:11:41):
That a real library behind you?

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:43):
One line quote on a social level, media pens basically attempt to reestablish a generational status quo that the youthful pioneers seem to undermine. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you're right on target. That it is about age, it is about generations. It's about parents either saying they're protecting their young people or as so much in moral panics, it's about hooliganism and vandalism and delinquency mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so it's either condemning our young people or protecting them cuz you don't trust them in that way either. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and the young people know what the hell they're doing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and they're figuring it out. And you're right. The there are us elders or not.

Chris Messina (01:12:19):
I mean, I, I feel like the, the, the ways to, well, I don't know. Like I, I do have a role as a parent now, and, you know, I do think a lot about how to equip kids to be in these media environments and to understand like, what, what, what is, if not real, just what is important about what people say and don't say. And, you know, we've got a a 13 year old here at home who runs a Discord server, and I've had to teach them about being responsible as, as a server admin because they determine who is in the server and who's not. Well, I would

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:50):
Love to hear those moderation lessons.

Chris Messina (01:12:53):
Well, it's, I'm learning as I go, but you know, thankfully I've run my own Discord server so I can have that conversation. Think about all the parents out there who have not run their own discord servers, let alone even know what a discord server is. <Laugh>. Yeah. Right. So, and yet those folk, you know, those are the folks who are trying to tell their kids how to behave and how to do things. And there's a whole, like subgenre or subterranean world of social interactions that are happening in these spaces that are affecting kids and their mental health and their sense of security and safety in their communities and their environments that are completely opaque to parents. And so parents are like, oh, let's, you know, get the surgeon general to like, say this is a problem and to crack down and to restrict access.

(01:13:30):
But that doesn't solve for the underlying right. Interactions and behaviors that are gonna happen anyway, as you said, like in the lunchroom, you know, that is, that is a visible space. And yet school interactions happen outside of school now, you know, whether it's on text messaging or whether it's in these chats. And so the vernacular in the language that needs, I mean, we talked about this earlier with like, you know, chat G P T being sort of a, a, a context provider mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for parents, you know, where it's like, what is it that your child understands about social media and technology, and then what do you understand about social media and technology and where are the gaps? And can you facilitate a conversation so that both can at least come into those conversations with a, a broader lens for what belonging like in this moment means to that generation? Yes.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:14:11):
Would that be useful, or that sounds like what you, you were answering Jeff's question about what are the hazards of AI <laugh> if AI's prescribing parental

Chris Messina (01:14:20):
It depends on, you know, the relationship that you wanna have with your kids.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:14:23):
<Laugh>, the machine said I should be talking about sex. So sit down and shut up <laugh>.

Chris Messina (01:14:30):
That you don't want the government enforcing it. I

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:14:32):
Agree. You don't want the government

Chris Messina (01:14:33):
Involved Exactly. By the time you get around to doing something about it, the they're all gone and off somewhere else, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's like, I just don't, you know, there's so much di dynamism mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in, in trends in social interaction among teenagers that it's like you, you, you don't have a prayer of like, it's, it's a game of whack-a-mole. You don't have a prayer of climbing down on TikTok, because by, by the time you do the, they'll be off TikTok and on on the newest thing that doesn't even exist yet. So,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:15:02):
Well, as we predicted five creators in Montana have sued now over the state law, and TikTok has now entered the phrases

Chris Messina (01:15:10):
Itself.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:15:10):
Right. It is also suing. Yeah. I thought it might not just let the creators do the, the heavy lifting, but they filed a federal lawsuit against Montana.

Chris Messina (01:15:20):
It's clearly a

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:15:21):
First, it's a first amendment. I mean, who

Chris Messina (01:15:23):
Knows what the spring court, but it, but it's wild that's happening in Montana of all places. Yeah. Yeah. It's also lazy, right. First of all, Montana is, is is doing something. They're, they're basically doing a, a, you know, international relations, right, right. As a state. But, but the other thing is that they're just basically, it's it, they're saying, okay, apple and Google, you guys we're, we're gonna crack down on you if you don't enforce this stuff. And it's, it's, it's pretty ridiculous, you know? So it's like if you were on one side of a state line, you, you, you can download an app. If you're on the other side of the state line five feet away, you can't, this is not gonna work. Apple has, this is ridiculous.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:01):
Apple has said prior to the law being introduced, or actually when it was introduced, but not passed, that they did not have a technical means to prevent people in Montana from downloading TikTok. I find that hard to believe. I think you could f you could create the great firewall of Montana if you, if you really wanted to. I don't, I

Chris Messina (01:16:20):
Don't think that's how the internet works, but I know, I'm glad that you've hallucinated that idea. Oh,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:25):
Can't you just say well, lemme look at that IP address. Oh yeah. You're in Montana. No,

Chris Messina (01:16:29):
You couldn't. I mean, they did this for PornHub too, you know. Yeah. And they do it now for Utah porn. Motivated. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:34):
Yeah. Right. If PornHub can block itself, itself,

Chris Messina (01:16:37):
Business is

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:38):
Great. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Chris Messina (01:16:39):
I mean, it's great news for VPN providers.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:42):
Exactly. Sure. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:16:44):
Ella might still have a business. Are

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:45):
You excited about Instagram's new text-based app for conversation? This is from the

Chris Messina (01:16:51):
Fact that it, it, it at least seems to have Federation built in and it wants to interoperate.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:57):
Our app will be Activity

Chris Messina (01:16:58):
Pub

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:16:59):
Soon. Our app will be compatible with certain other apps. Like Mastodon don't, I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like there'll be Activity Pub,

Chris Messina (01:17:06):
Well, some, a race Blue Sky and

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:09):
And Instagram. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> who's gonna get there first?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:17:11):
Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:17:12):
Well, I mean, I've been having a lot of conversations with people who are actually building bridges between Oh, good Beauty Pub and Blue Sky, or At, at Protocol. And I think that that's like, it's, it's so funny cuz I started working on this stuff in, you know, 2006, 2007, and finally some of these ideas are coming to fruition, you know? And so it's interesting to see that Blue Sky picked up a bunch of these ideas and yet kind of reinvented the wheel once again. So now it's like, oh, great, now we have like five standards and now we have to choose among them, but actually they're close enough that maybe we can get to some alignment and maybe this Instagram thing could actually push it forward. I mean, we'll see,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:17:45):
You don't have a favorite between at Proto and and Activity Pub.

Chris Messina (01:17:50):
I think they're actually complimentary. As I've dug in a little bit more, I understand that what Blue Sky is trying to solve for is actually different than Activity Pub. And so, you know, considering, like I, I helped to create the Activity Streams format that then turned into Activity Pub, right? The original goal was about syndicating a greater richness of activities beyond just what r s s encoded, which was blog posts. And so now that Activity Pub is quite mature and now there's software behind it. The alignment between what Blue Sky is trying to do from an identity portability perspective is compatible with the way of expressing the activities that Activity Pub uses. So essentially you get some aspects of identity and the, the tree structure, and I don't know, there's a bunch of like weird mutation stuff that I don't quite understand in, in the app protocol, but it's not completely incompatible.

(01:18:35):
In fact, the app protocol uses things like an actor and a verb you know, to encode its content. So it's already there. And the, the work is being done currently to, to see if those things can actually, well, the Bridges Flipboard is really interesting because basically from within Flipboard, you can, you can, you can reply to, you can like, you can repost content from either pixel Fed or Blue Sky, and it's like, wow. If you can do that on a, on a site like, like, like Flipboard, then wow. It's Media is doing it. And if, if a lot of publishers, you know, Jeff, to your, your, your earlier point about media folks, you know, leaving and, you know, trying to find someplace other than than Twitter. In fact, if there is federation in an underlying protocol that can link all these things together, it almost doesn't matter in the short term where they end up as long as they kind of move together. That's the dream.

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:22):
Well, this is, so Dave Weiner, Dave Leo, or if you saw Dave Weiner put up a set up an RSS feed for your blue sky, fortunately you have nothing to feed into it.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:19:31):
He set up an RSS heat for my Blue Sky.

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:33):
Yes, yes. Yours and mine and a few others.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:19:36):
Well, I better post,

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:38):
Come

Chris Messina (01:19:38):
Back to Yes Rs, everything's RSS speed <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:19:43):
Does Blue Sky support RSS natively? I know Macedon does.

Chris Messina (01:19:46):
Do you have to? I doubt it. Yeah. mostly because I don't think it's super relevant to their audience. Right. you know, I mean, I, I don't think it'd be that hard to build and now that Oh, the clients are open source. Yeah, exactly. So he must, but he's scraping it. Probably not. It's sort of ironic. Yeah. To like, take something that's like rich, like an activity object and then reduce it down to like rss.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:20:06):
It's like a way, it's sort of

Chris Messina (01:20:07):
Like you have like aji or really great graphics and you're like, let's smash this into a jpeg because I'm

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:13):
Sure that Dave has answers,

Chris Messina (01:20:14):
But I know, I know. It is.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:20:16):
The last time I talked to Dave, I said, why don't you make me sign up with Twitter on all of your web stuff? And he got mad at me and I haven't spoken to him since. So I, I'm glad he's guy Mike. I know my loose Sky feed,

Chris Messina (01:20:30):
By the way, did you guys see that? It looks like Snowflake has actually gone through with the Neva acquisition.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:20:35):
Ah, good. I mean, I guess good. Oh yeah. Good for Neva. Yeah. Oh yeah. Snowflake is an AI company. They were interested not in Nevas search capabilities, but in their ai. Yes. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Was Neva using, do you know chat G B T or were they doing something separate? I think they came out before chat. G B T

Chris Messina (01:20:51):
I mean, they might have been using G P T though. Yeah. They might have been using the open AI APIs. Right, right. For what they were doing. Right. But yeah

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:20:57):
I thought that was actually a good use for search. But even at Microsoft's event, which there's going on right now at Build mm-hmm. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> talking about search every time on the, on the very tiny print at the bottom, it says results AI generated, not factual accuracy, not guaranteed. And I think that that's a problem in the long run or maybe just the short run. That's why the search

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:21):
May be the wrong place for it.

Chris Messina (01:21:22):
Yeah. I mean it's, it's weird that we've lived so long without disclaimers at the bottom of search results to say these results might be sponsors. Good

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:21:29):
Point. So good point. You okay. You're right. Yeah, <laugh>. But at least the link is to something that exists. We know that Chad, which could

Chris Messina (01:21:36):
Also be completely fabricated. Right? No, that's true. You know, it's sort of like when you click to something on LinkedIn, it's like, oh, you're leaving the LinkedIn walled garden now. And you're like, yeah,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:21:44):
Watch out. Watch. Does

Chris Messina (01:21:44):
That mean watch out? There are snakes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:21:47):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, do we wanna start a pool on how many people get fired at Twitter after this space is tobacco.

Chris Messina (01:21:54):
Is there anybody left? Anybody

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:21:55):
Fire?

Chris Messina (01:21:55):
Exactly. Where's Linda is Linda weighing in? Linda

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:21:58):
Was in the space. So poor Linda. Oh, she was? Yeah. So I don't know.

Chris Messina (01:22:02):
He

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:02):
Has more black owned businesses than any state in the nation. That's what he just said.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:22:05):
Who does Rons?

Chris Messina (01:22:07):
Ron DeSantis.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:22:07):
Ron DeSantis. He's talking about I have more black owned <laugh>.

Chris Messina (01:22:11):
That's scary. That's like saying binders full of Woodman. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:14):
Cuz it's merit, not identity politics. Well, you could, you can just pop in

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:22:17):
Any second. Wow. <laugh>. It's something interesting.

Chris Messina (01:22:20):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:22:21):
I know the way that they got this going was by basically booting everybody out. They're down. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Messina (01:22:26):
40,000 starting the server.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:22:27):
Yeah. They, they restarted the server. Elon's. Well, we that too, Elon said, we've never had, there's never been 500,000 people in a room at the same time. Which is wrong, of course. And yeah, that's wrong. And then it crashed. Right? <laugh> be careful what you wish for. That's all I can say, Google has reached a 39.9 million privacy settlement with Washington State. This is not the only state suing Google over the fact that their switch that turns off location didn't turn off location. And they were still collecting location information. Google has promised,

Chris Messina (01:23:05):
You know, so like this, this sort of is such a strange, like it juxtaposes so well with what we were just talking about with age gating and, you know, TikTok downloads in Montana. It's sort of like you, you, lots of people would prefer that these companies not collect this data, but then to do the thing that they actually need to do, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in terms of, you know, provisioning access. You can't have the information that's necessary to actually enforce certain rules or, or laws. So I dunno, it just feels like in the Google case now, guaranteed it's been many years since I've worked there, but like, you sort of end up collecting this information by virtue of, you know, having an IP address to deliver a webpage to someone who has come to your server. And it has to go back there. And the nexus point has to be someplace on the physical earth. Like how do you get around that? I I just, well, this

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:49):
Is the interesting thing about the Facebook fine, this huge fine,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:23:52):
1.3 billion

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:54):
Where the issue wasn't Facebook and privacy at all. The issue is America, it's Europe, not trusting data in America.

Chris Messina (01:24:01):
Europe said, same with

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:02):
America and TikTok and data.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:24:05):
The EU told me it stopped

Chris Messina (01:24:07):
An American company and American employees control data that's housed in a European server. How's that different? Right? If they don't, if they don't impress

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:24:14):
Americans, well, this is the same TikTok issue, this

Chris Messina (01:24:15):
Difference does it make where this data is Right?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:24:16):
Tiktok said, well, thing Oracle's gonna store the data. But that wasn't sufficient because Montana and whoever else said, but yeah, but the Chinese government can still access it. Right? so this is what the EU actually Ireland's. Data Protection Commission is complaining about data being transferred, the data collected by Facebook being transferred off of European servers into the US about, obviously about European citizens.

Chris Messina (01:24:44):
It's so, like, I don't understand how that works. When, when it comes to like edge cashing and like network optimization. I mean, if I'm a European citizen accessing, you know, my Gmail account from Oregon, does that mean that I'm, I I only can access my, my Gmail if it's stored in somewhere in, in the eu, in which case I'm dealing with like the latency of constantly going back to that. Like, it just seems like it, it runs against the way in which the internet was, you know, designed and the way in the performance works. Right? If I email somebody in the eu, isn't the entire conversation stored in both places, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only one person can see the conversation at a time because, you know, they're in different places. Bizarre. The emails shall never meet in the middle. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:25:24):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I guess the problem is we have a global internet and it doesn't respect national boundaries, but nations, nations want it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:33):
Imagine that.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:25:35):
And I don't know who wins on that one. Do you have a, you are on t2, which is, was created by former Twitter folks, t2, social it's very much like Twitter. You're on Blue Sky, Chris. Yeah. You're on Mastodon. Do you have a dog in this hunter or are you just, you just watching?

Chris Messina (01:25:57):
I, I mean in the sense that the dream of, of the original distributed social web, you know, is still alive and I, I now is more than we've had an opportunity, I think, in most of internet history to perhaps, you know, right. The wrong of the centralized social platforms. Yes. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, as far as it goes. One, I want to be seeing how these platforms are showing up and competing and how they're innovating and changing things. But then also, if I'm gonna be providing guidance or input to any of the folks who are working on the underlying protocols for interoperability, we do have to sort of think about, I guess yeah. What, you know, what different verbs, you know, do in different contexts and what certain behaviors are allowed in some context or another, and what happens when it comes to interoperability between them. So we do have an advantage as Twitter has kind of

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:26:46):
Led the way, I mean, we have, we know what a, a, a working social network looks like, and so all of,

Chris Messina (01:26:51):
Well, we know what it looks like from a centralized Twitter from centralized. Yes. Yeah. They, they look like it. And you're po like, you know, and Google Plus was, you know, very similar. You have a text box and you type something or you add some attachments and then it goes into a feed. And that's kind of the whole model. But in this new world, you know, you should be able to follow people that are on different networks, right. On different platforms that are run by different people. And are you sad that there are different policies? Are you

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:27:12):
Sad that plus didn't, didn't

Chris Messina (01:27:14):
Take off? No, I like, I, I think it's useful just to state for the record that Google Plus was successful for Google. It was not successful for users of the network, per se, <laugh>. But, you know, having, you know, being the person that designed the Google profile, you know, there were 43 different representations across Google when I got there, where you could have a different profile photo and a different name mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And, you know, there are some benefits to charting your identity in that way. But when it comes to interacting with one company, you know, it's not like you wanna have like 15 different Apple accounts or, you know, 15 different YouTube. I mean, maybe you do for business purposes, but like, as far as it goes, when you change your name because you got married, you want it to be propagated across all the places that's necessary with one company.

(01:27:55):
And so what Google Plus did was it provided identity as a backbone for all subsequent Google Services to be built around those assumptions, which then gave you different capabilities and things like Google Docs and Drive. So you could share something to someone and know that the right person had it. And from a business use case, you could then have people who work for a company and therefore have access to different, you know, services or data or information. And if they leave that company, that information can be revoked without them having to give up their full Google account. So anyways, in that sense, plus was a su success for Google's business goals. It just wasn't a consumer hit. Now Google Photos, I will say is largely a success. It drives a lot of the machine learning that Google does. And in fact the product manager who's still working on that is the same product manager that was working on that with Google Plus. So it's, it's kinda amazing to see, you know, that some folks have really stayed with these products all the way through, you know, even like 10 years later.

(01:28:51):
I also think that Google plus improved social networking generally, because so many companies, especially Facebook, tried to copy some of the best features. Sure. And so, even, even I think this week you know, Twitter said, oh, we're gonna have you're gonna have videos on Twitter that are, what, two hours long? Two hours like that? Well mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that, I mean, we're, that Google Plus had that in 2000, Google Plus did have a lot of like, really good ideas, like Yeah, absolutely. I think the, the, the timing was a little awkward and the emphasis on desktop browsers was probably its Achilles heel. You know, during, I remember during that year, that was when Zuckerberg had his famous kind of like hoodie lockdown, and everyone basically had to like stop using Facebook on their, their desktop laptops and switch over to mobile. And they realized how bad the experience was, which then allowed Facebook to build what essentially became their, you know, mobile advertising juggernaut, which then of course Apple then, you know, cut, cut off their legs, you know, with the app tracking transparency stuff.

(01:29:46):
But nonetheless, you know, I think if Google had really ironically, you know, leaned into Android, they might have actually done much better by building into the os. Actually, this is something that I don't think you guys have talked about, but, and, and I'm curious to see what happens when W W D C happens this year, but Apple has been slowly building a social network into the operating system for the last two or three years. And there is no antitrust concerns because it's so, there's no app, there's no kind of concept of, you know, this is the thing that you could pull out from the platform. And yet that is how Apple is slowly eroding Facebook's I think position in, in the market. You know, for example, if you go to Safari, there is a for you section or shared with you that comes from all the different people that have shared links to you via iMessage.

(01:30:32):
An iMessage, there's a shared with you thing that shows you all the photos from different people in the Photos app. There's stuff from your contacts. So very, very slowly, you know, boil the frog type method. Apple is introducing social sharing functions as part of the operating system that is completely, it seems to me being missed by the mainstream press and by analysts, because there is no kind of app that you can point to and say, aha, that's the Apple social network. Yeah, you're exactly right. And if you look at notes, and if you look at Freeform Yes. You, you basically, you share documents that you interact with with people. And then th tho those, those connections are persistent. So you go back to like, I do it all the time with family members and, and colleagues and stuff like that, where you just go back to the play space in, within those apps where you were interacting and interact again for a different purpose.

(01:31:17):
And it's just sort of, you're sort of just sort of connected with all these Yeah. Products. It's very strange. And, and like the, the contacts and the address book app in Mac Os and on the iPhone are the ways in which you manage those connections. But it, there's not like an explicit like add this person as a friend, you add them to your address book, and that is the action that you, you take to then connect with them. Hmm. And that was the vision of Google before and after Google plus. And, and, and, but, but to circle back to your point about mobile and missing mobile, I mean, one of the, one of the ways in which Google Plus was what light years ahead of everybody else was live streaming, right? Mm-Hmm. That we, they call it live streaming back then. But basically you do, you could do a hangout and just basically be live streaming and it would automatically be live on YouTube and then be stored on YouTube permanently.

(01:32:05):
And, but it was desktop. And so if you look at how, how live streaming turned out to be a huge phenomenon. It was all on mobile. That's right. Mostly a, a, a mobile phenomenon. So if they had just been aggressive, like you said, about getting that live streaming capability and the group chat live streaming capability and rushed that to mobile, they would've just owned the future that, that, that became the, the big, the big deal. And they just missed it cuz they were only on the desktop. Yeah. Yeah. It was such a blind spot, you know, and looking back, you can like clearly see it, especially, you know, everything that's happened with, with Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, you know, all the parts were there, Google had all of it, but they, they were just so wedded to again, and, you know, I mean, if your business, you know, is this huge, you know, money volcano, you know, thanks to search, you're just, you don't have the right incentives really to cut bait, you know, from the past. I,

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:54):
I argued years ago, AOL was Facebook before Facebook.

Chris Messina (01:32:58):
Mm-Hmm. Sure.

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:59):
Right. AOL was Twitter before Twitter. It could have been all those things, but I couldn't see it.

Chris Messina (01:33:03):
Yep, yep. Yes. Where do you stand on the quote

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:33:07):
Tweet plot <laugh> controversy. Any thoughts? Do we need a quote tweet unmasked on?

Chris Messina (01:33:15):
Yes. Okay.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:33:16):
There you go. We do. That was simple. That was easy. That was fast.

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:19):
And they're headed

Chris Messina (01:33:20):
That way. I would chime in and say that we don't need it, but it would be nice. I like it. You, you can, it's easy to sort of construct your own and as the creator of the hashtag you, you, you know, that these like, sort of like these sort of workarounds can be very powerful. Like you just paste in the link to the original thing if you want to. Yeah. But I like quote tweets, it's easy, it's fun. I, you know, it's like the people who follow me, follow me for my theoretically for, for my opinions, my take on things mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it's easy to take a tweet and then share my take on it. It, it feels good. It's also a, it's also a, an ingrained behavior that a lot of people have. So I I think it would be nice, I don't think it'll ever happen. I think the mass, the, the, the, the diverse communities. No, I

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:01):
Think Oregon has been has been open to it when he attended the black Twitter summit you know, he's been talking about that, that, and, and he also, and, and Art in the black Twitter summit we held, he saw the value of search, open search to a community to be able to find each other. So he's very open to those, to those things. And I think we, there's some really interesting proposals on the Master Don Gi in terms of, of putting some limitations on it. Is it voluntary that you retweeted those kinds of questions are interesting to, to reconsider. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:34:31):
We need, yeah. I, I think, I think like there's a question of enforcement and behavior and how to, you know, conduct a space where you're emphasizing pro-social engagement and there's of course, negative things that are gonna happen. I just don't think that like the medium, I mean, yes, there are aspects of the medium itself that can be used to inhibit bad behavior, but if you're cutting out a, a huge set of content that people are com, you know, familiar with and comfortable, you know, using, and they can use that to actually build up other people's voices and provide Right, right. Distribution and attention. And you're like, well, let's just get rid of all of it because 20% of it is, you know, nefarious seems to ignore, like, again, where the the control should, should be put. You know, if, if someone is, is, is gonna be, you know, negative or mean, and these things absolutely happen.

(01:35:19):
That to me seems like that should be at the level of the individual and the person should be blocked or they should, should be C centered or something else. Yes, exactly. And this is another area where I wish people would copy Google Plus again because mm-hmm. But so Google Plus had an awesome phase. It's like three years where it was just amazing and then it sort of turned to crap like years. It was around for that long few years <laugh>, but, but in the, oh, yeah, there was one awesome thing that turned to crap in the last few years, which was that a single click would block report and remove That's right. Comment. That's right. Yes. That was just, yeah, so powerful. Just boom. And you just nuke somebody and their, their comment has gone forever, gone forever. They're reported and, and they're, and they're blocked. If every social network had that, yes, there would be no, there would be no trolling, there would be no hate speech. I mean, it would be amazing.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:36:02):
Hmm. Oh, you're advocating, I mean,

Chris Messina (01:36:04):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:36:04):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:36:06):
Okay. Yes. Actually, so on this, on this point, like I don't know if you guys have seen or tried out like what Blue Sky now offers with their moderation lists. And I don't know exactly how they're going to work. You know, it's very interesting that everything on Blue Sky is public, including who you block and, and those interactions. But as a decentralized platform you know, for better or worse, you do need to embrace some aspects of transparency in order for the system to, to function in a decentralized way. And so now you have the ability to subscribe to block lists. And, you know, I think the easiest way to understand these block lists on Blue Sky is just to think about an ad blocker. If you have an ad blocker that allows you to subscribe to block lists, then you can have multiple different sources and different perspectives on the things that you want to remove or get rid of on the internet. Whether those are cookie banners or ads themselves or, you know, there's, there's even some ad block list that allow you to allow some ads in that you might consider to be, you know, positive or that you wanna support, you know, the, the producers of different websites or whatever. In a similar way, this is going to bring that type of capability to the internet, and then to crowdsource collaboration on those types of lists.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:37:09):
This is interesting. So have people created Mute Li This is Blue Sky. I have people created Yes. Mute lists that I, I would have to know what it was, I guess, and that I could join them. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:37:18):
Let me see if I can find one. And your subscription to it is public.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:37:22):
Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. I haven't muted any accounts. Nor have I blocked any accounts. Oh, wait a minute. I did block one account. I don't know why, but Yes. Well, <laugh> but I haven't had much occasion to, to block you know, blue Sky. It, it, my only complain about Blue Skies is kind of silly right now because I think people Giddy <laugh> having left Twitter, they're just giddy and they're so happy that they can Yeah. I to post pictures of a Alf that they just go crazy. But yeah. Se settling down a little bit. Settling a little.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:55):
I just saw a discussion on, on on Blue Sky of Race and Health threads. I don't understand the health thread thing. It's actually right.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:38:04):
Yeah. I believe, let take, lemme take a little break. I wanna talk more about this, but I, I need to take a break. Christmas is here and what a great opportunity to have one of the legendary creators of all that is good and wonderful in the universe with us, including the hashtag and a lot of, so, I, I didn't realize you'd worked on Activity Stream. I guess I knew that way back when, back in the day. It was way back then. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:38:27):
Yeah, yeah. I kind of took a hiatus, but yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:38:29):
Supporter of open web standards, we liked that. Also, Mike Elgan, my friend from Points southeast North and west Astra nomad.net. Yep. Great to have you. He's in the Veneto right now. Great

Chris Messina (01:38:43):
To be here. That's right. See your, your ancestral homeland.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:38:46):
My homeland, my people. I would, oh man. I would live in Rome if I could. I would just move there. I would just go. That'd be it. Goodbye. Can't, but I would. Italy.

Chris Messina (01:38:57):
Italy is, Italy is my perfectly delightful. Yeah. I mean, veto is, is my favorite. I'd like to Italian place. Yeah. I don't

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:04):
Think I visited. I've been to Venice, of course, but it's the rest

Chris Messina (01:39:07):
Of it, it's unbelievable. It's as green is Ireland. Yeah. And it's just rolling hills of vineyards that just have it on earth. Did they

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:13):
Have flooding problems last week, or no, Amelia Romania

Chris Messina (01:39:17):
Did. No, they, and they, but they have water everywhere. Everything's so green. There's like these big canals, like, of rushing water, but it's well controlled. They, they, they've, they've had problems in the past. Right. But but in modern times, they've really controlled the water flow here.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:32):
Lovely. And of course, Jeff Jarvis, who is in New Jersey. That's all I'm gonna say. <Laugh> also my answer. It's gonna

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:40):
Be Toronto today. And not in the show by,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:41):
Oh, I'm sorry. What happened?

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:43):
I just, too much going on.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:45):
Okay. Well, I'm glad you're here. I bet you're glad you're here today. Stuck

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:48):
With me. Everybody else leaves you. But I'm always here, Leo. Bad Penny. Try. Can't get

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:52):
Rid of me. I try. I try.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:54):
I know you do.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:39:55):
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(01:40:51):
We do, we use it. That's how we hired most recently, hired Viva. We needed somebody in our continuity department. Lisa gets up in the morning, she said, I'm gonna post she posts. Ziprecruiter immediately goes to a hundred plus job boards. So you're casting a very wide net. You can add tags that really help, you know, grab applicant's attention. Things, things like remote for if you're, you know, allow remote working or training provided or urgent, or whether whatever you want to help your job stand out, then. But as I said, then ZipRecruiter adds to the value by going out and looking at all the resumes. They have more than a million current resumes on hand. And seeing if they can find people who meet your qualifications. If they do, they tell you about them. You can look at those people and then ask 'em to apply.

(01:41:37):
And there's something magic happens when you ask somebody to apply. They're very, they're thrilled, they're honored, they're touched. They, they, they respond. They come to the interviews. It's hard to hire these days, but ZipRecruiter the best way to do it. The easiest way to do it. And I'll tell you, Lisa got up in the morning, we posted the job for Viva. Within an hour, she started to get great candidates. She, in fact, that was the hard thing. We had so many great candidates, we had to choose one. That's beautiful. That's a nice position to be in. Let's ZipRecruiter fill all your roles with the right candidates. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter, get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself, we've got a great address for you. That'll get you a chance to try it for free. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twig. That's ziprecruiter.com/t W I g. Ziprecruiter, the smartest way to hire. We use it. We love it. You should use it too. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twig. already

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:38):
Dug into the Santas for a minute. He was saying Disney he is in such bad shape with their stock. They couldn't afford to build that building anyway. Oh, please. And then he wants to talk about education. And he bringing, they're bringing in Chris Rufo, major known intellectual to talk about that. I turned back

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:42:53):
To already the tech crunch reporting technical issues. Play Grand DeSantis, his presidential announcement on Twitter. You heard it happen here live the product, the product which allows live streamed group voice chats cut quickly, cut out quickly after going live at 3:00 PM The audio glitched in and out at times only played reverb noises along with some distorted speech. As of three 15, there were 580,000 listeners on the Twitter space update by three 30, an alternative space with the live. Ron DeSantis was up and running, although it only attracted a fraction of the initial user base. How many do you have in there right now, Jeff? It was down. You can't tell. It's about 147 last time. I, hundred 47,000 last time I checked. He announced, of course, as he intended to that he's running for president. I also saw Rupert Murdoch's response to this in the daily mirror. Oh, Ron Disaster. They called it <laugh>. I was quick. Didn't Rupert's not a fan. I think I don't know who he's a fan of, but not of, not of Ron, I guess. And, and somebody on Blue Sky Skeeted, right? Is it skeet? It's ake skeet.

Chris Messina (01:44:06):
Sket, yes. I think the CEO called it a post, but sure. You can call

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:44:09):
It ake. I wanted to call it sake. I wanted to call it alee. That would've been so much better lamps. Anyway. yes. Somebody bleeded. This has to get Tucker Carlson really scared because

Chris Messina (01:44:20):
Tucker

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:44:21):
Would routinely have

Chris Messina (01:44:22):
Betting on the platform,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:44:23):
Multimillions watching his show. They, if they can't handle half a million people, that's problematic. Well, here,

Chris Messina (01:44:29):
Here's the, here's some context. So before Elon Musk fired everybody in November, 2022, Elon Musk himself did a, a space with 2.7 million people. In December, he did another one with 2.2 million. Oh. In May of, in May of this month actually the former Prime Minister of Pakistan did a space with well, I guess only 65 K. But there have been bigger spaces than this far bigger Interesting. Back

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:00):
In the

Chris Messina (01:45:00):
Day crash when

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:01):
People still worked there.

Chris Messina (01:45:03):
Yes. Employees are good. He said six months to really, you know, firm up that, that infrastructure.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:09):
That's a bad, that's, that's the wrong direction. That's Wow. Okay. Okay. What were, how many,

Chris Messina (01:45:17):
How many young people can choose social support?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:19):
Like 25? That's a good question. <Laugh>. It's running a no idea. It's running on a forked ma. On, it's probably pretty good. It is. That's, we'll see. It might be more stable depending on how well they forked the code.

Chris Messina (01:45:30):
Probably don't have the money though, to pay for it. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:32):
The Washington Post DeSantis presidential campaign kickoff on Twitter plagued by technical issues.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:38):
This is not, not a good look for either DeSantis or a

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:42):
Lead story. New York Times DeSantis announcement derailed by Twitter malfunction <laugh>

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:50):
Not a good look. Oh,

Chris Messina (01:45:51):
No.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:45:52):
The Twitter, this is the post, the Twitter space where you set to announce came to a halt after roughly 20 glitch plagued minutes filled with long stretches of silence and messages, like, details not available. The funniest thing was, and we heard a little bit of it, Elon muttering to himself, <laugh>, it's not working. I don't, God, Elon, I would not want to be around. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:12):
SHA Freta. Thy name is switched.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:46:14):
I know. I'm sorry. We shouldn't, we shouldn't, I'm sorry.

Chris Messina (01:46:17):
Daily Mail. The Daily Mail in, in the UK said it's the biggest fail in campaign history. Holy and Sanders's mock the shambolic Twitter room, presidential announcement with Elon Musk that crashes five times and leaves users bamboozled.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:46:32):
It does seem like a, a strange decision to do it on, on Twitter, to be honest.

Chris Messina (01:46:37):
Yep.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:46:37):
That's,

Chris Messina (01:46:38):
Yeah. But I mean, like, he's filling the vacuum that Trump had previously. Right, right. So, had it gone well, it actually, like, I thought it was, it had the potential to be very smart, because if Trump isn't there, but then DeSantis can kind of just, you know, rile those folks up and they're looking for the game that Twitter was Right.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:46:52):
While Trump was on the platform. That's where the base is or was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Messina (01:46:56):
But if, if, you know, if neither DeSantis nor Elon are very good at Twitter then maybe that's not such a good

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:47:03):
Campaign strategy. I prepared a special story just for you, Jeff Jarvis, today, the 130th 40th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge. Probably you don't know this, Chris, but for some reason Jeff doesn't like bridges.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:16):
I'm bridge phobic. I, I started trying to walk across, I lived in Brooklyn Heights. You'd think that I would've Yeah. Hung out there and written my novels there or something. I tried to start walking across it and I said, Uhuh, I can see down. Nope, nope, nope. You can't. You can see. Did you

Chris Messina (01:47:29):
Fly? Do you use airplanes?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:47:31):
<Laugh>?

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:32):
Well, yeah. That's okay. Got enclosed.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:47:35):
They fly. They can fly. Fly. Yeah. You would not like this

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:39):
Video. I can't.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:47:40):
You would not like this video on the New York Times website at Unum, interview with Ken Burns, which immediately shows the cracks in the bridge and the water beneath No, no. <Laugh>. I love the Brooklyn Bridge. It's one of the great landmarks of America. And I just wanna celebrate it's hundred 40th birthday.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:02):
It's amazing. It's a wonderful, amazing thing. I've driven over it. Unhappily, but never gonna

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:48:07):
Walk over it. New York was inching towards its new role as a world class city, and the bridge helped put it there. You know what? I just started, I'm really excited Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:22):
Yeah. People

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:48:22):
Love it. Which is yeah. I, I mean, look, I don't, I barely know who Robert Moses is. Oh. He,

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:28):
He had just a huge impact on, on New York?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:48:31):
On New York, yeah. As a, as a, and

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:33):
On all kinds of communities that he split up. It's a

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:48:35):
Former New Yorker and so forth. Very

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:37):
Interesting.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:48:37):
Still being dealt with. Oh, interesting. But and Carol, I've read his l BJ biography. I know he is one of the great biographers, and everybody agrees. This is the biography to beat all biographies. So I can't wait to read it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:48):
Journalists love it. I've never actually read a listen to read listening to it, or it's,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:48:52):
Yeah, I'm listening to it so far. It's a lot of anecdotes, which I like. You know, it brings it to life. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Right. Stories about what, what happened. FCC Commissioner nominee, we've got a new one. The White House has nominated veteran government attorney, Anna Gomez, remember, of course for a long time. But the FCC is still undermanned because for a long time, Gigi son, who was Biden's first FCC nominee has been blocked since late 2021. Son finally pulled herself from consideration last month. She was a big supporter of net neutrality. One of the people we really wanted to get in there, but telecom lobbyists did not want her in there. So Biden has nominated Anna Gomez. Don't know what her opinion is of net neutrality. I hope she's a supporter thereof, at least. She didn't come from the sector <laugh>. She was previously a deputy administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, has worked for the FCC for 12 years. He also nominated

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:59):
Car is Back

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:50:00):
Ro I'm surprised he nominated Brendan Carr.

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:03):
I am too. Geez.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:50:05):
His car is really one of the most reactionary FCC commissioners. Yes. And Democrat, Jeffrey Starks

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:11):
Almost, don't forget now. E everybody on both sides of the platform hate the internet. So that's fine.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:50:16):
I think probably Carr is a gift to the Republicans hoping that they will finally let him fill this, fill the open Democratic seat. But I don't know. What else?

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:31):
Oh, they're laughing about DeSantis on on MSNBC right now. Yeah. Much hilarity.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:50:36):
Yeah. I, it is Sean Freud and I, I think that's probably, I, I apologize. I apologize. Oh, we sh we had Kathy Gilles on Sunday on Twitter, because of course, she wrote two amicus briefs that were critical in the Supreme Court's decisions from last week. She won one and lost one. She lost the fair use case, the, and the Andy Warhol Foundation being sued by a photographer for a print that Andy Warhol made of a picture. The photographer made Kathy's point, which so far no one else has picked up on, but I thought was very interesting, was this wasn't, this was kind of suing an intermediary. The analogy I made is, you know Michael Jackson did a song called Bad Weird. Al made a song called Fat. If I were to play fat, it would be as if I played Fat on Twit. And the Michael Jackson estate sued me for playing the parody. And that's in, in effect, what happened here. She says, the Supreme Court got a completely wrong and undermined fair use, which is too bad. Which

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:49):
Is an issue for AI too. A big issue for generative ai.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:51:52):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. But

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:54):
Before the copyright stuff was going against copyright when it came to ai, and this reverses it in a way that I think can be very damaging.

Chris Messina (01:52:03):
But it also has to be said that, that that weird Al always got permission from the He

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:52:07):
Did. And that's why it's not a perfect, it's not a perfect analogy. Right. It better to get something where somebody did a fair use app, you know, legal parody of something, and then I played the parody, but got sued by the originals.

Chris Messina (01:52:19):
Right. The other weird thing about this is that the magazine had previously gotten permission to use the, they paid for the photograph. That's right. 400 boxes. But then this is a different use. And, and this is the whole, this is the whole issue. So, and, and it's, the problem with this sort of thing also is that clearly Andy Warhol was using that specific photograph clearly. But there's a, there's a line there that where, you know, a an artist can use a photograph to the point where it's unrecognizable. And then how do you, you know, where, so are judges going to be deciding where that line is with ai, for example where, where they're, they're gonna look at something and say, oh, yeah, I can tell that that's using this artist's style. So we're gonna rule, because, because I, the judge, have decided that it reminds me of this style. Like, it, it just seems un, un adjudicated, I guess is the Well, and to your is the, is the thing that, to me,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:53:16):
To your point, Jeff I had thought the courts would uphold the right of AI to create new creations. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> by, from stuff that they had learned from existing artists. I thought that was a clear use of transformative use of the work and would easily be supported by the courts. Now, I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (01:53:34):
Well, but, you know, this course was not a case about ai. This was a case about something different. And, and, and things aren't recorded. Right. They're learned from that's right. And, and the actual work is, is discarded in a sense, out of memory. So that may make a difference. I don't know. Chris, I'm cur I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. I see you nodding.

Chris Messina (01:53:51):
Yeah. I was, you know, as as you were thinking about this or describing it, you know, it, it, it occurred to me that as we try to figure out what to do with like, static media and media, that of course, exists. You know, let's say you frame it, you put up on a wall, or you print a bunch of magazine covers of something that is static. Fair use in that context. And I believe in this case, was about whether or not the original work has been essentially usurped or replaced with something that is more or less equivalent by a different artist who then makes money or commercializes that, that reuse. So, in other words, the original photograph could have been used for the, I, I believe this was a, a like a 20 year anniversary. Yeah. Something, whether it was about print, or whether it was about the photography. I don't know. It was about Prince.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:54:39):
Wait, yeah.

Chris Messina (01:54:40):
The photo was of Prince. I don't know if it was, anyways, whatever the case was, it was an article about Prince. Yeah. I believe that the, the, the Supreme Court was saying, well, essentially, the, the Fair use doctrine really applies to things that are in sort of a different commercial context. You can take things and editorialize them. You can take things and talk about them. You can take things and, and create a derivative work that is substantially tr transformed. And of course, the substantially part is of question. But in the commercial context, I think, Leo, what what you were saying, where you would be sued by the original copyright owner is because you are essentially choosing to use the derivative work instead of the original. Although the thing that you paid for is essentially like a copy or a replacement of, of the, the, the original.

(01:55:26):
Right. So you're paying for a facsimile as opposed to the original, and therefore the person who created the original should get you know, compensation. Right. Pay for that. Right. In the case of AI artwork and going forward, AI work in general, it begs the question, if you can simply conjure up a new image every time someone looks at something, what is the nature of copyright? Our image is Amen. Amen. Do they need to be copyrighted, essentially? Like you can, you know, you can buy stills from a film, for example, right? Put on your wall, you know, it's the, the celluloid or whatever. In the future, if most graphics or images are to be generated on the fly by AI and produced based on a training model, what is it that you're actually copywriting and what actually is being sold in the marketplace? So this is a, a somewhat very backwards kind of perspective.

(01:56:14):
Now, granted, a lot of this static content is going to continue to be produced, and we'll produce static images that we like, and then we wanna pay for it, and we wanna buy. But in the case of artificial intelligence, if someone says, oh, that's a copyright infringement on my work. Well, you could literally like roll the ice and just sort of generate a new image from the same draining data that it is substantially transformed or different, such that copyright maybe doesn't apply in the same way. And I don't know how it applies motion images, but what's a

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:56:40):
Question? This is, so from SCOTUS blog all agree that Warhol's artistic contribution is substantial, reflects an aesthetic intention not shared by the photographer Goldsmith. But for Sotomayor, who wrote the majority decision, the only relevant feature of Warhol's use is that it is a commercial licensing of an image created by Warhol, based on Goldsmith's work for a fee. It was the commercial aspect of it. So if, for instance, let's say I buy an AI generated work of art that looks very much like Thomas Kincaid paintings Master of Lights. Ooh, why would you? And then to <laugh>, then Thomas Purpose

Chris Messina (01:57:22):
Kincaid for,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:57:23):
For, for only example. For, for, for. And then Thomas Kincaid sues me saying in, and this is the, this is the Supreme Court's issue. Instead of buying an original from Thomas Kincaid, I bought an AI version of it. And that, that at is as to the use of the magazine in the magazine at issue. Here though, Sotomayor is clear, Goldsmiths works a celebrity photograph commonly used to accompany stories about the celebrity, often a magazine's. Her point of view is that instead of paying the photographer for the original image, they used the derivative image,

Chris Messina (01:58:00):
But they

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:58:00):
Didn't want the original. It took money away from the

Chris Messina (01:58:02):
Photographer. It took a knockoff bag.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:58:04):
It's like a knockoff. That's, and so in the AI example, if I use an AI that was derivative of Kincaid, Kincaid, according to this judgment, could legitimately go after me for commercial use of a, of a painting created by an ai, but derivative of his,

Chris Messina (01:58:20):
I don't know that you could, I mean, you could show similarity, but I don't know if you've

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:58:23):
<Crosstalk>, it'd have to look an awful lot like his. Right.

Chris Messina (01:58:26):
Well, well, but, but again, that's, that's human perception, right? As opposed to the actual thing. And the way in which these data sets are trained, you know, it actually is a, is, is, is an amalgamation of let's say, thousands of different, you know, types of art. And so then how do you, like then, is it fractional infringement? Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:58:43):
Right. So, right. I have to pay $10 to Kincaid <laugh> Right. At $5.

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:48):
Well, that's, that's what, that's what news publishers are, are begging for is pay us for, for any use. Right. Leo know, you raise a really interesting issue with where the, where the EU is going on regulating ai, where the intermediate liability takes a whole new quantum leap mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, where whoever created the original structure becomes liable for anything ever done by anybody with that structure.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:59:07):
So if I drive my Tesla, or my Tesla drives into a house and, and, and kills somebody, Elon's responsible, or e or Elon's programmers are responsible.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:17):
Yes. Yes, yes. And that also negates any open sourcing of it, right?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:59:24):
Yeah. You can't open source, which

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:25):
Is,

Chris Messina (01:59:26):
Yeah. How does that work for guns?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:59:28):
Oh, interesting. Oh, no, we're not gonna go there.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:30):
Video games not gonna guns.

Chris Messina (01:59:32):
That's right. Sorry. Sorry, sorry.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:59:34):
<Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:34):
You're get it straight here, Chris.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:59:36):
I know.

Chris Messina (01:59:37):
My

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (01:59:37):
Apologies. The other Supreme Court case, and actually it was both cases was Gonzalez versus Google and Twitter versus Tamana. The court rolled them up into one and said, because we have de we decided Tamana we don't have to decide Gonzalez, we don't have to decide Google. Because you know, it's the same case, which it kind of was. Remember though, <laugh> in the oral arguments for Gonzalez versus Google the Gonzalez attorney was saying Google was YouTube was actually responsible because they, their algorithm published, you know, this ISIS video and, and created thumbnails <laugh>, and that made them a publisher of the content. The good news is, while nobody mentioned Section two 30, it didn't even get to that point. Most of the decision was on detailed ruling on Tamana was written by Clarence Thomas, who actually, first of all, the justices voted nine nothing to that's big in favor of Twitter. So that's, I mean, it's unanimous. But and Clarence Thomas actually kind of surprised everybody surprised me for sure by writing a, a very well thought out piece. But it doesn't mention two 30. What it really came down to is what is aiding and abetting? And can Twitter be considered aiding in it because they were going after them on the terrorists aiding and abetting of terrorists? Well, I believe

Chris Messina (02:01:05):
That the, the, the thing was that they were essentially asserting that Twitter was aiding and abetting all terrorists Right. In jihadist activity as a result of publishing, or allowing exactly this content to be published.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:01:15):
Exactly. And Thomas was very clear that historically aiding and abetting did not you know, go that far. He says, for example, assume assume that any assistance of any kind were sufficient to create liability. If that were the case, anyone who passively watched a robbery could be said to commit aiding and abetting by failing to call the police. Yet our legal system generally does not liability for mere emissions, inactions or non feasance. He, he, so for these reasons, of course, have long recognized the need to cabin aiding and abetting ca liability to cases of truly culpable conduct. And as a result Twitter not truly culpable. It did not Aiden a bet and nine nothing, that Twitter is not responsible. This completely appoint safe for now. Well, it's safe only in the sense that they didn't say anything. They didn't touch two 30.

(02:02:07):
Yeah. Although Mike Masnick makes a very good point in Tec Dirtt saying, Thomas actually gave his, in his whole discussion of Aiden and abetting a very good reason for why two 30 exists in the first place. So Kathy's opinion was the only benefit to two 30 in this. It really does not impact two 30. But the only benefit might be that now here's a precedent that could be used to support two 30 down the road. You see, we need this because we need to protect people. In a case like this, you don't hold a platform liable for the speech of its users. So it, it was not a victory for two 30, but it wasn't bad <laugh>. It didn't hurt 30. It was reprieve. It was a reprieve. And, and Kathy said, and of course, she, she's been on the show many times.

(02:02:52):
She's very smart. She wrote the you know amicus brief for this case. She said it is possible that what Thomas said, that that could be used in further cases to protect two 30. So there may be some value to that. Just wanted to give you a follow up on that. Do watch if you get a chance, do watch the Twit episode from last Sunday. It was a really good discussion. And we had Harry McCracken and Kathy Gillis in studio, Amanda Siling from TechCrunch. And, but I really grilled Kathy on, on both all three of these cases, really. And and she could answer. She's great. She's, she's really great. So, one, one win, one loss for her. She's <laugh> one and two in, in the Supreme Court. The, should I give, should I go here?

(02:03:41):
The AI writing, novel writing tool that everyone hates is better than I expected, writes Addie Robertson in the Verge. This is actually what you were talking about Christmas. Yeah. Because Addie says it, it wa it would helped. Wasn't that Addie had writer's block? I don't know. Is Addie a guy or a woman? I don't know. They have written 150,000 words of unpublished fiction last year alone. So writer's block wasn't the issue, but it was very helpful in generating a novella, the Electric Sea. ADI says The Electric Sea was produced with heavy human guidance, but every final line was created by hitting a generate button. The story is published on Tumblr. I couldn't bring myself to read it, but Stephen

Jeff Jarvis (02:04:30):
Marche also wrote one called the death of, of an Author, which the Times wrote about this process. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:04:36):
Which is really interesting. Yeah. So the generative fiction tool is called Pseudo. Right. It's well named. I like the name. S u d o mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Pseudo Wright. Yeah. it's called Story Engine. And it can write a full novel in a few days with a little help from a human. Have you played with this? Anybody? Have you written? Written? I haven't

Chris Messina (02:05:01):
Played with it, but I, but I, but I, but I think that as is always the case with ai, places where AI generated content is applicable, press releases. S e o page

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:05:16):
Mediocre hack writing, in other words.

Chris Messina (02:05:18):
Yes, exactly. Exactly. <laugh>. I mean, there, there's a lot, there's a, most, most super popular fiction is garbage. And, and it's just, it's, it's fantasy world stuff. Right. I read recently about this Mormon author who's nobody heard of, nobody's heard of, who made 55 million last year. Just he's a guy, got this disorder where he just must write all the time. He's,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:05:39):
Yeah. You're talking about Brandon Sanderson, Stephen King. No, Brandon Sanders,

Chris Messina (02:05:42):
Steven King. No. No. But Stephen King is No,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:05:45):
But Brandon is amazing. And that article was such a hit piece on him. Yes. Yes. Really kind of unfair. Nevertheless. Yeah. He says he can't not write, he just spews it out. He very rarely edits what he writes.

Chris Messina (02:05:58):
I want that disease. But anyway,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:06:00):
I, by the way, the point is that I tried to read some of his stuff because I thought, wow, people have scuffle. It's terrible <laugh>.

Chris Messina (02:06:07):
You can't write people.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:06:09):
Is it terrible? People have laude him as a world builder, and I'm very interested in world building fiction. I, but the writing is so, God awful. I couldn't get past the first paragraph.

Chris Messina (02:06:18):
Yeah. But so much romance fiction on you can buy on Amazon. So much like, of this just sort of like fantasy world stuff is just bad writing. And really, AI should be writing it. It's just this. So here's doesn't require an entire function of

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:06:33):
Human being. The, I think this is actually kind of impressive. Here's the prompt. Eddie gave this program introduced Jack hacking at his computer, focus on vivid descriptions of Jack's squall apartment in his moral conflict. And cism, Jack pulls off a corporate espionage job by navigating a virtual world. He sends the information to his client client. There's, there's more Jack's moral conflict as he began hacking to expose secrets in a corporate controlled society, but is ending up selling him to the highest bidder in order to finance his continued life as a hacker. Use made up brand names, fictional corporate names, use detailed literary descriptions of futuristic hacking, focus on emotion and character traits. That's a nice prompt. This is, this is, this is the first paragraph generated for that. Jack sat hunched over his computer, fingers flying across the grimy keys, like deranged spiders.

(02:07:27):
I like that. I like that. It's a, yeah. No, that's good. The glow of the screen cast a sickly power cliche on his gaunt face. Double cliche, highlighting the shadows between his eyes. You've got a hat trick. His apartment was a squall den of decay, a MAs lium to forgotten dreams and lost hopes, tangled wires and discarded cliche cliches, tangled wires, and discarded tech littered the floor while mold crept up the wall, like black veins. That's not bad. I don't, I, that's, but yeah. Quite a few little cliche phrases in there. Yeah. Come on. And I wish Sean

Chris Messina (02:08:05):
Would use chat GBT to write his books. His his most recent book in 2018 called Bob Honey, who just does stuff was called by The Guardian Repellent and Stupid. And the New York Times said that called it a book shaped object. <Laugh>. He should be using

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:08:23):
Pt. Who's this? Nicholas Cage.

Chris Messina (02:08:26):
Sean

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:08:26):
Penn. Oh, Sean Penn. I knew it was a bad actor. Awful. Okay. Sean Penn writing novels. I didn't know that. Yo, it's a book shaped

Chris Messina (02:08:37):
Terrible book shape. Book shaped object. That's beautiful.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:41):
That's beautiful. Oh God. I wish, well, I wish I thought of that. Oh,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:08:45):
Repellent and stupid on so many levels. Says the <laugh> <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:52):
By his face.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:08:54):
<Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:55):
They wear the Brits man. They're the Brits

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:08:58):
<Laugh>. Well, now I wanna read it. I mean, you There is such a thing as so bad that it's fun.

Chris Messina (02:09:05):
Who

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:06):
Does audio book? He reads it. That's a winner.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:09:11):
<Laugh>. should I play a little bit from Audible of of this book? Oh, please do. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I maybe, we'll, maybe we'll, we'll stumble upon A good bill will be as good as an Elon Musk Twitter space. <Laugh>, at least. Okay. Bob Honey, shouldn't be too hard to find a book named Bob Honey, who doesn't do Oh, who just, who just do stuff. It's not un audible, but maybe the sequel. Bob Honey sings Jimmy Crack Corn is <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:42):
What

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:09:44):
This was a earlier attempt by Sean Penn. Let's, let's listen. In the

Audio Book Reader (02:09:48):
Search of the Retirement Home, on the night of Sperling Colier demise found Bob's bed magnificently made with tucks and folds that had bring a Marine Corps drill instructor to DRL into light atop its trampoline type duvet, an envelope fat with cash addressed to the local A S P C A.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:10:09):
Oh, I think an AI could have written that.

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:11):
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Fat with cash, yeah. Cliches.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:10:13):
Yeah. <Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:14):
Well Chris, lemme try some, an idea out on you. Hmm. The, the, if I had a machine, I've said this in the show before, but if I had a machine that had, had, had tracked all of the relationships of these, of these unbelievable number words, come up with trillion, 3 trillion tokens mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I'd wanna query that database to see about, about our biases and connections and the predictions. It's not about creating more of the same Mm. It's about what have we already produced and what what does it tell us? Is, is there anything going on in that, that vein?

Chris Messina (02:10:51):
Wow. You know, like one of the things that I like to think about is just negative space as a, as a sort of concept to allow you to sort of understand that what lives in the, in the positive space, and this is something that Alan Watts has talked about with a, a grid of words, you imagine sort of graph paper with lots of dots, and it goes on for miles and miles. And each of those dots is a word. It's a, it's a concept, it's something that humans know. But all the negative space, all the non dot area also are filled with concepts. They just don't have labels that humans have, you know, engineered or developed. Right. Right. So, to to, to what you're talking about, there probably is a lot of great wisdom found in these hallucinations that people are so shut up, afraid of. Hmm. Because they're creating a, a adjacencies that are unexpected. That are oblique. And I feel like

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:40):
Books you should write Yes.

Chris Messina (02:11:42):
Precisely. Right. Because everything else has sort of been done. Right. And it's following, like, like these cliches that you mentioned that one time we're not cliches, you know? Yeah. Like trending topics and hashtags on Twitter at one point did not exist. There weren't these words smushed together into a new concept that is identifying something in human experience. And so that aspect of generativity, I think absolutely could be something that could be developed. I haven't seen anything specifically along those lines. However, I am starting to see people kind of mash together, either different prompts or to, you know, like, like even Adobe with what they're doing with Firefly has started to put out products that will allow you to do different types of in painting or scene changing. Yes. Or, you know, for example, there's like, you know, this object, I wanna replace it with some other object in the space. Adobe sits into the lighting, just

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:12:27):
Released a Photoshop brush to do exactly that based on Exactly.

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:31):
Have you seen drag your GaN

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:12:33):
Firefly?

Chris Messina (02:12:33):
Oh, it's so good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:12:34):
What's drag your GaN

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:36):
Go to Line 61, Leo. But

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:12:39):
Before we do that, how about a little palette cleanser, some Sean Penn reading from Bob Honey who just do stuff.

Seam Penn (02:12:46):
The America Bob drove from Woodview New Orleans was not that one of lore not the one he'd known in his earliest cross continental automotive excursions, not the one of pay later gas stations, vintage diners and two lane roads only trains remained a spirit refuge to Modernity's Craven trumpery.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:06):
Whoa.

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:07):
Oh my, whoa, whoa, whoa. Low.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:10):
I think that's a sentence. No one's ever written before. I mean, I

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:13):
Don't think it

Seam Penn (02:13:14):
Remember No

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:15):
Cliches. It's not, it's not a cliche. We could say that one.

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:18):
No, it's not <laugh>.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:19):
What, what line? 79. You said 61. 61. Let's go to line 61. It's pretty amazing. Oh, Farhad. Yes. You ain't seen nothing yet. Okay. This is drag your GaN because

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:32):
Farhad was worried about Photoshopping now was gonna be so easy. Everybody's gonna fake everything. We wanna know what's real

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:37):
Interactive point-based manipulation on the generative image manifold. This is from the Max Plank

Chris Messina (02:13:45):
Institutes like comes up with like the, the, the subjects for these things. They're completely

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:49):
Inscrutable. This is, I know a presentation at Cig Ref this year. So what am I screwed? Going down?

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:55):
There's videos.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:56):
Oh, there's video. Should I watch this one? Watch video, main demo. It's

Chris Messina (02:13:59):
Wild

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:13:59):
Accelerated. I don't know if there's audio, but I'll play it. Okay. Let's see. Here we go. Okay. They're taking a dog and they're stretching it. The

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:09):
Mouth is amazing.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:14:11):
They could just change things and make things smile.

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:13):
Well, and it presumes things, the dogs, it opens the mouth and knows where the teeth are, right?

Chris Messina (02:14:16):
Yeah. So it basically takes a two dimensional image, and then you find a point in that image of some significant, you know, sort of like, like key, what is it? Key points or in video where key frame, like

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:14:26):
Key frames. Yeah.

Chris Messina (02:14:27):
Yeah. Right. So you're doing more or less the same thing, but with a three, with a two, two dimensional image. And you're, what you would used to do is sort of like, like stretch. Remember? I'm gonna date myself like Kai power goo or

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:14:38):
Whatever. Yeah. Kai's power goo. Yeah.

Chris Messina (02:14:40):
You know? Right.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:14:40):
Except that image that just smears, that was like finger

Chris Messina (02:14:44):
Pigs. That's what I'm saying. So imagine, you know, 20, 30 years forward now, instead of just smearing it, you know, and dragging the pixels, now you actually change the content of the image based on its understanding of the subject of the image. In that example just now, there was a picture of a woman with her mouth closed and it mm-hmm. <Affirmative> like made her a smile and it produced teeth for it.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:15:03):
It's probably not her teeth, right? It doesn't know what her teeth look like. It's some GaN teeth.

Chris Messina (02:15:10):
Now the question is, could this be copyrightable and what are you even copywriting, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, like this is where that Supreme Court case is sort of like, like you do this in Warhol and sort of go between 15 different iterations and none of it's even worth copywriting because it's sort of already in the model.

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:24):
Right? Imagine Warhol with this tool Jackie Oasas, though

Chris Messina (02:15:29):
The Warhol version of the Prince photo was many versions. That's true. Yes, that's true. That's right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:15:36):
<Affirmative>. Okay. So is Dragon I mean obviously it's it's in the lab. Will they release this at any point? That's pretty cool.

Chris Messina (02:15:47):
And if the paper's out there, these techniques become Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:15:50):
Yeah. two main components featuring one a feature-based motion supervision that drives the handle point to move towards the target position and to a new point tracking approach that leverages, and this is the key, the Discriminative GaN features generative adversarial network <laugh> to keep. That's,

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:14):
And that sounds like something by kill you, that

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:16:15):
Keep localizing the position of handle. That's,

Chris Messina (02:16:18):
That's the technology behind deep fakes. Yeah. It's Sean Penn's next novel.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:16:21):
Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. Wow. So again, is not the same as a large language model. These are two different ways to take data and create something. Some ar ai, you know, capability.

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:35):
But you could imagine, stay with that for a minute, Leo. You could imagine a language model writing something, and then it provides sliders.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:16:44):
Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. Right. Just

Jeff Jarvis (02:16:46):
Don 10% for this. 5% less that

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:16:48):
Microsoft talked about that actually at build this week, they already have something sort of like that. So does Google Bard remember the bar demonstration at Google io where you decided to take the complaint letter and make it nasty? Microsoft sort of has that now in being chat. You can have choose different styles, but they really at the keynote described the fact that it could be a slider, that you could have an infinite scale mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and you could turn it up and down till you got something you liked. And that's probably this

Chris Messina (02:17:18):
Really interesting about

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:17:19):
Expensive,

Chris Messina (02:17:19):
This, this conversation too, right? Is the thing about it from the, the, the flip side of the reverse, right? Like, we're sort of talking about this from the authorship perspective. Someone who's writing something, but actually, especially with, you know, Facebook has or meta released something this week with their, their translation services.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:17:37):
A thousand languages. Yeah. Unbelievable.

Chris Messina (02:17:40):
And many languages that actually don't have a lot of recorded examples you know, to, to to train on. Now, imagine this from the receiver's end. I think this is one of the things that's, again, hard. Like we, we kind of exist again, those of us on this, on this podcast kind of are in the positive space. You know, we, we see kind of, you know, interactions. We use computers in certain ways, but there's a lot of people who don't have access to computers, who don't speak the language that computers are written, you know, in, or the interface is, is written in. What some of this allows software to do is to adapt to the user and to the user's needs or preferences in a way that previously used to be very, very difficult. Now, one of the things that you guys had talked about earlier was about how, you know, Microsoft and maybe Windows, windows 12 or something is gonna have kind of AI built in, and it's gonna be part of the experience.

(02:18:27):
But one of the things that I think is actually gonna hold back Windows in particular compared to the Mac, and especially I believe on Linux, although I don't know this, I'm, I'm completely ignorant about this on Linux, is the degree to which Apple has invested in assistive technologies over the years. In other words, you can turn on voice controls where the, you know, Siri essentially will tell you how you're interacting with a computer. There are ways where you can use assistive touch and things like that, both on, you know, your, your iPhone or your Mac. All of those things that allows computers to become more accessible to more people are the very same tools and scaffolding and structures that AI will be able to use to then manipulate your environment. So, for example, there's a product called rewind.ai. And what they do is they record everything that that goes on your screen.

(02:19:15):
And the idea is to augment your memory by seeing everything that you have seen with your eyes and capturing video recordings of those things. Now, if they're also able to and index all of the interfaces and buttons that appear on the screen, then they can see the actions that you could have or would've taken. And then the AI can learn to take the actions that you might have taken. So there's a lot of this that exists in browser automation and tools like that. But if you're able to just use common language to tell the computer what you want it to do, and it observes you doing it for one or two times and then can emulate what you've done, now you're opening up again, accessibility to a whole new range of, of, of applications and use cases. So that's, I don't know again, how much Microsoft has invested in accessibility of its platform. I don't know how much Linux has either, but I know this is something that Apple has, you know, taken pride in and has done a lot of the in instrumentation for years.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:20:08):
Microsoft is arguably ahead of Apple in accessibility. They've really put a lot of energy and effort into it. I don't know if it'll benefit them in the same way, cause I don't know if it's with the same kind of point of view, but they have you know, I've met their accessibility ombudsman and many of their ads feature accessibility. They made a place a a controller for their Xbox for people with mobility issues, things like that. They're very good at that. Hey, that,

Chris Messina (02:20:34):
That's amazing. Yeah. So as long as that exists, I, I, you

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:20:36):
Know. Yeah. Yeah. Meta did something interesting to make this I thought it turns out that there are many recordings of the Bible. So they trained on two new data sets. One that contains audio recordings of the New Testament, and then the corresponding text in 1,107 languages. Another contained unlabeled New Testament audio recordings of 3,809 languages. They then matched it up, cuz that's one of the ways you train is match the text Yep. To the speech. And they were able to create a model that can not only speak a thousand languages, but recognize more than 4,000. There are only, I should point out, only 7,000 languages it's estimated in the world. So that's a pretty good subset of of the world's languages. Pretty impressive. That's remarkable. Yeah.

Chris Messina (02:21:30):
Let me check, let me check and see if Ron's still talking <laugh>. Oh, you wanna hear something crazy, Leo? Yeah. So there, there are approximately a thousand languages. Probably around 100 of them are in Oaxaca alone.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:21:46):
<Laugh>. Right. I do know that you mentioned that when we were there. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of native languages and the native languages you know, varied over time quite a bit, I guess because they, they're lived in and, and separated enclaves.

Chris Messina (02:22:00):
They, they're 65 or so recognized ZEC languages just among the ZEC

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:22:06):
Ethnic group. Wow. Yeah.

Chris Messina (02:22:08):
Are those like dialects or those actual languages? Actual languages. So, so ZEC is a language family, and so there're, there're many are many types of zec that are totally unintelligible to other ZEC speakers. Wow. Wow. Yeah. That's wild. As UMO Echo once said, A is a language without an army and

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:22:27):
Navy <laugh>. <Laugh>. Yeah. That,

Chris Messina (02:22:29):
That's good. That's good. I like that.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:22:31):
You mentioned the Adobe we were talking about their generator, their AI image generator Firefly. It is now go, or is going to be in Photoshop in the second half of 2023. And it will do some pretty amazing things here. Some of the examples that Adobe offers for what it can do. I mean, this isn't GaN stretching, but it's, you know, it's getting there, adding a car, a car shaped cloud, and a reflective paddle of, you

Chris Messina (02:22:56):
Know, I I I literally use this I believe yesterday. So some of the work that I do currently is, is helping makers launch on product. And that occasionally involves getting into Keynote or some other <laugh>, you know, slide tool to basically produce their gallery. And one of the, the, the makers that I was working with needed an image depicting essentially a, a phone being dropped or lost. And so I went into, I, I first went to Unsplash, where fortunately the images are public domain. I grabbed that, I uploaded it to Firefly, and I was able to replace a beer can, which was, so for some reason dropping in water with an iPhone Wow. Simp by selecting the beer can and, and saying

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:23:37):
Awesome.

Chris Messina (02:23:37):
And it worked. And it like literally took like 30 seconds.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:23:40):
So That's amazing. This stuff

Chris Messina (02:23:41):
Is real and it's, it's super helpful.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:23:43):
Yeah. Incredible. When I read this this morning, I went to see if my Adobe Photography subscription, which I thought included for $10 a month, Lightroom and Photoshop still included Photoshop. It didn't, it took Photoshop out. So I cancel that <laugh>. Yeah, this, this is pretty impre firefly. I, I can't remember where Firefly's models come from is, I don't know. Who is it? I don't know who it is.

Chris Messina (02:24:09):
That's a great question.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:24:10):
When it's, when it's at

Chris Messina (02:24:11):
Home. Yeah. I would think that Adobe would want to run and produce their own. No, I mean they,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:24:15):
I think they acquired something. No, no. I don't know. Mm. I don't know. We should talk about the twi the Pentagon explosion

Chris Messina (02:24:25):
<Laugh> speaking of Photoshop Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:24:27):
And Twitter. Right.

Chris Messina (02:24:28):
And it's true. Right? So this is And blue blue checks. Yeah. This is all of it. We're bringing it all home.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:24:33):
It is all coming home. The final story. Yeah. We'll all bring it all home. So the issue was this is a fake photo. It's not clear whether it was generated by AI or just Photoshop. It doesn't really matter. Although most of the news stories I saw blamed AI for this of course. And really because that's

Chris Messina (02:24:51):
The narrative folk

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:24:52):
Devil of now the tech folk devil stock market. When this was tweeted by a phony blue checked account called Bloomberg Feed, not Bloomberg the stock market tumbled, it recovered pretty quickly. I might add in every case where it was tweeted or retweeted it, we credited Twitter sources. <Laugh>

Chris Messina (02:25:16):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:25:17):
Well

Chris Messina (02:25:18):
Just be like something

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:25:18):
Emoji. It's gotta be true. Yeah. Within an hour of it being circulated, government officials in to clarify the tweets were not true. The Arlington fire and EMS tweeted, there is no explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon. There's some, don't believe it. Believe

Chris Messina (02:25:33):
Blue Check accounts that said that. Because I mean, can you really trust them if they're not Bucks

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:25:37):
A month? Yeah. Dozens of verified accounts on Twitter with large followings spread this photograph.

Chris Messina (02:25:44):
Who's to

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:25:44):
Blame here?

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:46):
It was, but it was in what I first saw about it. The story I saw was fake photo about it up. Right. It was known that it was fake. It's

Chris Messina (02:25:52):
True. Yeah. By the time you got

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:25:53):
There, bell Belling cat, belling cat, thank God for Belling cat. Nick Waters tweeted, there are a few signs that make it an AI image, the, including the fence melds into the Crown crowd barriers. Yeah. There's is this is kind of AI looking here way

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:10):
And Musk Kate spelling cat. And so we'll never learn that on Twitter.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:26:12):
Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah. so maybe it is, maybe it is. I mean, what does it matter if it's a Photoshop or AI generated? You certainly could do it with Photoshop. It

Chris Messina (02:26:22):
Doesn't matter. It it, there'd be

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:23):
Crushing hearings if it's AI

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:26:25):
Generated Yeah. <Laugh>,

Chris Messina (02:26:27):
Right? Yeah. Right. That, that's the difference there. There's another story that the you know, that the, the U-Haul that crashed into a gate near the White House. There were a bunch of blue checked you know, Twitter blue accounts that said that it was a F B I Cyop, oh Lord. Spreading that sort of, so the Twitter so, so quote unquote verified accounts on Twitter are becoming a major source of disinformation. And so we have this reflex to sort of give credence to anything with a blue check, even though we know that now nowadays you just, you just pay for it. So this, this is one of the things, I mean, it's like,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:27:08):
But look at the headline in the New York Times. Now this, this is the headline, but Andrew, and so I'm not gonna blame it's the story author Andrew Russ Serkin, but an AI generated spoof rattles the markets. That's not the lead that it's AI generated. Yeah. That's

Chris Messina (02:27:21):
Not the story. Yeah. It doesn't matter.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:27:24):
It's really the story is Twitter

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:26):
An archive photo? It could have taken a nine 11 photo and put it up there. People would've been fooled for, for 10 minutes.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:27:32):
It may have been the first time an AI generated image moved the market according to Bloomberg. Oh, geez. It's not about, that's not ai, it's about Twitter. We just didn't

Chris Messina (02:27:41):
Know that the other ones were ai.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:27:42):
Yeah. Right Before

Chris Messina (02:27:45):
Jeff, what do you think about like the, the way in which the, the coverage not in this New York Times article apparently, but when people are talking about verified accounts on Twitter, it feels like that language now is misleading. Right? It just sort of like subscribers to Twitter Blue.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:27:59):
Yeah. Subscribers.

Chris Messina (02:28:01):
Like, and, and the, the language of verification gives them too much credence. And the fact that the media seems to have not cut up to the fact that there is no real verification except that someone has a credit card number like it

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:12):
Subscribes,

Chris Messina (02:28:13):
Right? Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:15):
Yeah. I've been trying to get the, since I'm at the master, before the master of the hashtag <laugh> you know, one of the great frustrations in life is you try to get one to take o on, and of course it doesn't cause you can't do it. So the one I wanted was eight buck schmuck

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:28:28):
<Laugh>. Nice. Nice. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:29):
You can keep flogging it

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:28:30):
And maybe, maybe it'll, it'll be hashtag on Twitter anymore. Hashtag eight buck schmuck. Now you got something. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:36):
Here's, here's a quick story. So, so when the Dead Ceiling fights of years ago, I said and I, and it was, I, I got angry. I I had too much wine and I got angry at Washington, someone does in general. And I just said, oh, F u Washington. But spelling it out you know, interact together and just get this over with. I'm sick of it. Of course, I was wrong to blame. Well, Washington, it was one party, but we'll stipulate You captured a sentiment. I did know you were expressing, you were speaking for the people. So I said it <laugh>, and then somebody said, you idiot, that's a hashtag <laugh>. I said, of course it is. Of course it is. So f u Washington spelled out. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> became a hashtag. I ended up on c s news with it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it became, became huge. It was also the first re Reuters did research. It was the first reference with Occupy Wall Street and F u Washington. Mm-Hmm. It was the first use of Occupy Wall Street in a tweet. Wow. Wow. My little bit of, of, of infamy there. Since I bet before the God of the hashtag,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:29:37):
Here we go. We did it. Right. You know, reactions now coming in to <laugh> to the failed spaces launch of a Ron DeSantis presidential campaign. Daniel Jaco, our good friend on Macan. The last two things, Elon Musk tried to launch blue up in about 30 seconds. <Laugh>,

Jeff Jarvis (02:29:58):
There's a lot of jumps, a lot of those things.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:30:00):
Thank you. Very much Twitter space's, total Landscaping from Andrew Fowler on Blue Sky. That's good. And also on Blue Sky in space. No one can hear you launch a presidential campaign from Grand Fox.

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:13):
He droned on for an hour. An

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:30:16):
Hour. Yeah. I, I don't think he's got his finger on the Pulse of America. God, I hope he, he doesn't. Anyway, let's take a little break. We've got more we'll wrap it up pretty quick. Actually. We've got your picks Yeah. Of the week. We, we don't want keep Chris here too long cause we want him to come back. Don't want him to hate it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, our show today, brought to you by my email client. Now for a long time I've said, if you really care about email, why are you using a free service for your email? Free service means you are the product, not the customer. And so many businesses, and I, you know, used on the radio show, got calls from people all the time saying, you know, my, my, in fact my, my son just the other day said, I can't get any email and I can't get ra anybody to get more space on my Gmail.

(02:31:00):
I said, son, you haven't been listening to your father. Listen to your father. If you care about email, you need to pay for a service. And frankly, you need to pay for the best service. Fast Mail. I've been using Fast Mail for more than a decade. This is email from people who care about your privacy, who people who care email to the point where many, they're a leader in email. They, they have launched many initiatives and internet standards. With, with Fast Mail, I get dkm and and, and all of the authentication protocols on any domain I choose. I can bring my domains to Fast Mail. I have so many email addresses now email from Fast mail's. Great. You have a Webmail interface if you wish, but it's real imap so you can use any client with it. You also can use their in fact, I've given up on iOS and Android clients.

(02:31:51):
I just use the Fast Mail mobile client, which is fantastic. Quick settings from the Quick Settings. Menu. Menu. You can choose a new theme. You can switch between light and dark, or as Jeff likes to do it, you could switch to light. You could change your tech size without losing the, leaving the fast mail screen. So if you're like me old and have a hard time reading Tiny Print, you can make it bigger quickly. Quick Settings is great. You also can do something, I think really important with Bit Warden or One Password. You can generate a new masked email address, which is fantastic. So that ins, not only are you creating a password unique to every site or application, you can create an an email address unique to every site or application. It integrates with Bit Warden and one Password. So that's a kind of double security.

(02:32:37):
You can with the Fast Mail app sends Snooze, you've got folders and labels. So if you like Gmail's label style, you can do that. If you like folders, you can do that. You can do both. Really fast search for 20 years. Fast Mail's been a leader in email privacy. I've been using 'em for more than 10 years. Replaced Gmail with Fast mail, great spam filtering. You have complete control over it too. You can write, I have a very elaborate spam siv script that really is effective. But they also have default settings that work so well at Fast Mail. Your data stays with you for better productivity features. And as little as $3 a month you pay for free email with your privacy. Isn't it worth $3 a month to protect yourself? No ads, no no spam. It's just the right way to go.

(02:33:27):
You can download your old data, I import it into your new Fast Mail inbox, or continue to get mail from your old address so you don't miss a message. Fast mail's moving email forward with new internet standards and open source innovations that power many email services, not just their own. Don't get left behind by substandard email providers and don't, don't run your business on a free email provider. It's worth the money for Fast Mail. I have my custom domains. They're all hosted by Fast Mail and all my email goes there. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity with Fast Mail. You try it free right now for 30 days Fast mail.com/twit. Fast mail is the best You ask the experts. They'll all tell you that Fast mail.com/twit they use, in case you're interested, the Open Source Cyrus server, they've contributed back to that project many, many times. It's a very good IMAP server, really does the job. Fast mail.com/twitch. Thank you Fast Mail for being my email service, for doing such a great job for me for all these years. I'm glad we could finally get 'em as an advertiser. We appreciate your support for Twig. You support Twig too. When you use that address, you let 'em know. You saw it here, right? Fast mail.com/twi. T W I t.

Chris Messina (02:34:42):
Enough

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:34:44):
Aunt Pruit taking the day off. He'll be back next week. I'm hoping Stacy will be back next week. I think she had to do something right. But we are so glad we could get Mike Elgan joining us. Gastro nomad.net, that's that's where he hangs his hat these days. And of course, elgan.com Isck. And he's on Mastodon at Mac Elgan. And he is in Italy for a gastro nomad experience. The Prosecco, that's right. Experience. Oh, is this, is this the Venado right there? That's it.

Chris Messina (02:35:13):
It's beautiful. That's it. I'm, I'm probably probably a quarter of a mile from that. Very, I love Italy spot. What did you have dinner, Mike Prosecco? Pizza. Pizza.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:35:24):
Oh,

Chris Messina (02:35:24):
Course.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:35:25):
Pizza

Chris Messina (02:35:26):
And salad. Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of good, really amazing foods. Phoenician food is really something. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:35:32):
They go to Morocco next El Salvador. Oh, that'll be fun. That's that's right.

Chris Messina (02:35:37):
Amira's El Sal was a brand new one. We just, that's right. Amira was born in El Salvador and she knows a lot of people. We've been there probably 30, 40 times in the last few years, and it is a really cool country that's a lot safer now than it used to be. And so now we're planning this experience and it is going to be amazing. And that's in January. So if you, if you live in Maine or New England or something like that, and don't want to freeze your honey off <laugh>, it'll be, it'll be in the mid high seventies in January in El Salvador.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:36:09):
Oh, nice, nice. Yeah. Gastro Noma place. I, I just, we went on the Oaxaca experience for the Day of the Dead last year, and it was incredible. Just,

Chris Messina (02:36:20):
Just so much fun.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:36:20):
Mind boggling. Actually, not last year. It's 2022. 2021 now. That's right now,

Chris Messina (02:36:24):
Right? That's right. Holy. A couple a year and a half ago. Yeah, something like that.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:36:29):
Time fl.

Chris Messina (02:36:29):
That was a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:36:31):
Time flies. Also with us the wonderful Christmas, the creator of the most important feature on <laugh> Twitter, the hashtag, which is now migrated everywhere. I do blame you though, for I, every time I travel now, people are, all those Instagram influencers are out there hashtagging their food, their pictures, their hashtag lavender fields sigh. When you see, know, when you see young people say hashtag amazing <laugh> <laugh>, do you, what do you like? Oh, yeah. I I thought of that. I thought that up. I owe me

Chris Messina (02:37:06):
Sometimes. You know, it's, it's so, it's such a weird thing to, you know, have contributed something that becomes part of the culture such that people don't even have the concept that there was a time where the thing didn't exist. You know, it's sort of like inventing like the, the, the dollar sign or something, you know? Yeah. What was your

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:21):
Identifying money? What was your reaction watching Black Lives Matter happen?

Chris Messina (02:37:25):
Oof.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:37:27):
Oh yeah. Hashtag bbl. M That's right. Yeah.

Chris Messina (02:37:30):
I mean that Me too. You know, Arabs, me too, you know,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:37:32):
Hashtag me too. Those holy cow.

Chris Messina (02:37:36):
There's, there's a, there's an element of, of like just like humbleness to it, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the reason why I got into working on the social web was because I wanted more people to be able to contribute their voices and to join the conversation. And the hashtag was a method by which, you know, people could do that with, you know, like what was becoming a new network. So I think there's, there's some amount of pride, there's some amount of trepidation, there's some amount of kind of just awe that it's possible, you know, especially depending on when you join these platforms and when you get involved with them to really shape the outcomes and shape how they, they turn out. So I think, you know, for, for it's taken kind of a long time, I think for me to get into the right, maybe like mental space about what it means to have contributed something like the hashtag to the internet and to culture. But to me, it also presents an opportunity to tell young people about what it means to contribute and build these places into the spaces that they actually want to be in. And they want other people to have a good time. And it's, it doesn't just happen to you, you know, moderation on these platforms doesn't just kind of, you know, it shouldn't be assumed that the way in which these things are has to be the way in which they persist

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:41):
And the responsibility we all have. Yes. When, you know, when we encourage a fight, we're making, we're making the internet. Yeah. And we're That's right. Recommending good stuff. We're making the internet.

Chris Messina (02:38:50):
Yeah. Where, where we put our attention is, you know, where that oftentimes gets fed back to us and Yep. It's more and more important, especially now.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:38:57):
Well, I can't thank you enough for what you've done. We we're really glad to have you on. This is at the end of the show, we'd like to give people a chance to, you know, mention picks or things they want. You spend many hours a day picking things on product on, is there anything you would like to pick here on the show?

Chris Messina (02:39:16):
Wow. let's see. You know, I mean, like, I do end up hunting a lot of things. Actually, you know, here, I'll give you this one. I don't know when this is, this is gonna come out, but I, I can't, I can't say specifically what it is, but there is a web browser that I now use. It is called arc. I

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:39:33):
Use Arc.

Chris Messina (02:39:33):
Yeah. It's made by a browser. Yep. The browser company of New York, and they have a big launch coming up tomorrow. You should watch my Product Hunt account. You'll discover the thing that they're launching. It's very cool. And as far as let's just say the, the read write web that, you know, w was something that Richard McManus, of course, was writing about for many years. That idea, I think is coming to roost in a very real and important way. And so just, you know, it, it starts a new conversation about what the web is and, and what level of control people can have over their internet experience. So watch for that tomorrow.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:40:07):
I will as an arch user.

Jeff Jarvis (02:40:09):
Hey, we got an inside. Yeah,

Chris Messina (02:40:11):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:40:12):
Yeah. Brow. It's the browser co. So go to browser. Well, I guess you can go to arc.net is probably the easiest.

Chris Messina (02:40:18):
You can go to arc.net. Yeah. Now I believe it's still invite only, but nonetheless, get yourself on the list. Yeah. they're probably, you know, they wanna open it up soon. They've been working on the Windows version which is pretty interesting. I mean, just everything that they're doing is super you know, creative and seeing a web browser come out of the East Coast, you know, as much as, you know, you think it's a global internet. New York has different ideas about media and about content. It is also interesting that my friend Mike Krieger, who's one of the co-founders of Instagram and is now of course, working on artifact, which is sort of a, a TikTok for news, if you will, is on the board of arc. Oh. And so he's bringing a lot of his ideas into arc.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:40:56):
I, I like I use Artifact as well. We've talked about it. Very interesting. All right. I don't know if I have any invites. I don't think I do. So I just will, and I'm sure you don't. So there

Chris Messina (02:41:10):
Is, I I will say, you know, since we're talking about arc, there is a Reddit sub subreddit that I am an admin of. It's at r slash ARC browser. And every month there is a, a mega invite. Oh,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:41:23):
Nice thread.

Chris Messina (02:41:25):
And so for folks who want to get an invite, that might be a place where you could solicit such

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:41:28):
Time, right? Right now, Mac only, but windows coming, as you said. Yep. Soon. And watch for an announcement on

Chris Messina (02:41:33):
Product. And they also have iOS

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:41:35):
Tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Ios, yes. Tomorrow.

Chris Messina (02:41:36):
That's right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:41:38):
I just wanted to mention, we didn't put it in the we didn't do the Google change log, but I did wanna point out that Bard is now putting images in the search. So I asked Bard, what are some must see sites in the Veneto region of Italy? Mike, see how accurate this is obviously Venice, and there's like a map from Wikipedia of Venice. Verona. Yeah. Noman known for the Roman Theater, the Arena De Verona and

Chris Messina (02:42:03):
Romeo, and Juliet was set in Verona.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:42:05):
That's right. The homes of Shakespeare's Juliet, Caplan Lake. Is Lago de Garda close? I didn't realize. Yes. I've been to Garda. I love Garda. It's very we have friends who have a house there, the Dolomites. And there are

Chris Messina (02:42:18):
Many, Dolomites is some unbelievable.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:42:21):
Okay. So Far. Barns got em right. Palladian, Villa Villas designed by Andrea Palladio. Those are just a few of the many, many must see sites. But, and notice the images now in Bard. That's pretty cool. That's

Chris Messina (02:42:38):
Right. Yep. The, the, the thing we do, of course, I mean, we, the, the architecture and the nature is amazing. But as you know, Leo, we love the food culture, the wine culture. And this is one of the greatest wine regions in the world. It's known for Prosecco, of course. And, you know Americans know one or two types of Prosecco. There are, there are many dozens of types of Prosecco. It's an incredibly rich, diverse wine variety. And then there's a hundred other varieties. There's a famous guy who, who who hybridized grape varieties decades ago mosconi. And, and, and basically there, there's all these wine varieties nobody's ever heard of that are amazing. But w but we have these really great friends here who are winemakers, food producers, cheesemakers, all this kind of stuff, who are just geniuses. And they quietly ply their craft. Yeah. And we, and they teach us all about it. So it's just, it's just an amazing food and wine.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:43:33):
So I followed up, I said, how about the wines? And it knew I was still talking about Venado. It said, Val. Okay, we know that one. Okay. Classico suave Prosecco. Well, we know about that.

Chris Messina (02:43:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:43:47):
But it doesn't find any of the lesser known ones. So I think you're just gonna have to, to go there with Mike and Amira and find out for yourself.

Chris Messina (02:43:54):
<Laugh> the world. Here's, here's a little bit of trivia. The world's first wine critic was Pliny the Elder, ah, and you know, two, 2000 years ago. And one of his favorite wines was what we now call Prosecco. Wasn't sparkling back then. It was a still white wine. And many styles of Prosecco are still actually, but it, it's with the great variety that then was called Prosecco, that's now called Glare. And he was a huge fan. So they, it was even during the Roman Empire, they were drinking Prosecco.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:44:21):
Mike, you have some tools to fix news as your pick.

Chris Messina (02:44:25):
I do, I do, in fact. And these, I, I don't necessarily recommend these like, as to go and use these tools as your source of news, but I think it's interesting to see what what people are coming up with to fix what they think is broken about news. For example news is too stressful. News is too sensational. News is too time consuming. So there's a, a, a a, an app called One Sub, so you can find it@onesub.io, which is an app that basically, oh, no, I'm sorry. This might, this is a website. This, this is a website that gives you the news that's actionable. That's, it's on the positive side. It's, it's kind of like, it's designed to let you be informed without being freaked out about the state of the world, which I think is nice. There's another site called boring report.org. This is hilarious. This is an app. The, the, the icon for this app. The, the, the logo for this app is somebody yawning, poor,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:45:21):
Boring News, news, just what I need. Rip

Chris Messina (02:45:24):
Out. They use AI to, yeah. They strip out the sensationalism using ai. Oh,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:45:28):
That's clever. And they just

Chris Messina (02:45:29):
Give you the facts.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:45:30):
Yeah. Oh, cuz I hate the link. Fake crap, man. I just get

Chris Messina (02:45:34):
Nasty. Yeah, exactly. And you can see their example there. It's pretty, pretty alien

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:45:39):
Invasion, imminent Earth, doomed to destruction, turns it into experts, discuss possibility of extraterrestrial life and potential impact on Earth

Chris Messina (02:45:49):
Boring. And then there's another one that hyper summarizes the news called Web dot. Well, it's, it, you can find it@web.concise.app. And what this does is it strips down the news to its bare essence, and it gives you this bullet point of the different aspects of a, of a news story. So it'll take a TechCrunch article, for example, and it'll give you three bullet points that give you the main points of that article. And so, anyway, I, again, I don't, I don't recommend necessarily that the brilliant news consumer that who, who, who listens and watches this, this podcast you know, rely on any of these, but they should check 'em out to see what people are thinking about in terms of news. I, I personally am a big fan of a site called All sides.com. And I don't know if you've ever talked about it on this show.

(02:46:39):
No. But all sides.com is a fantastic resource that takes every news source. I think they, they, in their database, they have a thousand and something new sources, and they have a crowdsourced a rating about whether they're extreme left, moderately, left in the center, moderately right, or extreme right. And then they, they, they, they fold this against how the degree to which they fact check the content that they produce. And so you can really explore your news sources. And I think this is the biggest problem with news people just people just take whatever news that comes to them over the social networks, which is a terrible way to consume news. You should be aware of the credibility and the lea the bias or leaning of, of every news source that you consume. And all sides do. Dot com is a, is a, a great place to start thinking about that.

(02:47:32):
And you can also contribute your input about whether, you know, is CNN Extreme laughter, is it like slightly left of center? Whatever you can, you can you can put in your 2 cents about that. But anyway, these three, these three, all sides have been around forever. The, these three sites that I'm talking about, I think have emerged in the last week. So they're, they're all very new. You know, one, one thing it's funny for one sub, I actually worked with Jim on his launch on Product Hunt. So fantastic, fantastic. Seen that around. Nice.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:48:03):
Great. I have subscribed to One Sub now, and now I get to choose some of the people I wanna follow, I guess people most mentioned, not Elon Musk, please. No. Or Nicki Haley, but maybe Jimmy Al Sharpton maybe. And all sides great. Like, have you tried

Chris Messina (02:48:20):
The great, the summarization feature in artifact?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:48:24):
I have no, no. I didn't know it had a summarization feature. Oh,

Chris Messina (02:48:26):
It's, it's quite good. Oh.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:48:28):
You need to tell them to make that more obvious <laugh>. Yeah.

Chris Messina (02:48:32):
It's, so they're doing a lot of changes and updates. They've been adding a lot more. You can vow follow authors, which is kind of interesting. You can also leave comments, and the comments actually are so far nice, positive, but there's a little sparkly icon, I believe when you go to a specific story.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:48:49):
Oh yeah, I see it. Yeah. If you

Chris Messina (02:48:50):
Press that at the top, it'll say, summarize.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:48:51):
Oh, that's new. I like that. Oh,

Chris Messina (02:48:54):
It's really good. And especially, you know, they don't, from what I can tell, they don't seem to trip out the ads because they wanna be very publisher friendly. And these are the founders of Instagram of course. And so they wanna support that. No,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:49:05):
No. It's on the phone down here. I'm just telling our td pick up my over the shoulder. There it is. There it is. So I did the summary of this Verge article, and there is the summary up at the top. That's cool. Yep. So

Chris Messina (02:49:17):
Pops up at the top and it's great cuz you can avoid all of the ads and all the other kind of like, and now actually in the latest version, they have the ability to report clickbait articles. They literally call

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:49:28):
It that. Oh, good. Because there's a really Bane's so great

Jeff Jarvis (02:49:30):
About that. That's I love seeing,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:49:31):
That's Bain of the Nest. That's great. Yes.

Chris Messina (02:49:33):
So if, if, if they sort of, you know, realign incentives so that the clickbait like one reporting clickbait is useful and good because there's so much stuff out there that's just like, oh, this thing was said on Twitter, and the whole thing is a tweet and it's just like content around it. Right. Second, you know, you can add the reader mode. So that cuts out a lot of the other garbage and stuff that pops up all the time. And you can use summarization. And so you can quickly get the gist of an article and decide if you really want to d dive in. So it's, it's becoming a pretty, you know, regular staple for me in terms of my news

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:50:02):
Consumption. Awkward silence. Ron DeSantis bold Twitter gambit that flopped. The Florida governor wanted to show off his tech savvy by announcing his presidential campaign on Twitter. It quickly devolved into the conference call from hell. Yeah. Wow. That was the time summary <laugh> actually. That was good. Oh, conference call from hell. And this is concise, which is doing somewhat the same thing just pairing down the articles using ai. We're gonna see more and more of this. And I love the idea of an AI agent that knows what I'm interested in. Kind of like a, a Google alerts or mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the old tracking on Twitter that can generate for me something of value. Ultimately, I'd love AI to do our whole show rundown <laugh>. So I just show up, hey, and I say, Hey, here's what AI chose for us today,

Jeff Jarvis (02:50:53):
<Laugh>. Oh. So AI gets the democracy and the rest of us don't. <Laugh>. I get

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:50:57):
It. Jeff Jarvis, what's your pick of the week this week?

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:02):
Well, so God bless the internet archive.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:51:05):
Absolutely. They have Absolut

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:09):
Scanned in uscs optical sound effects library,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:51:14):
1954.

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:14):
1987. So this little thing for audio here, if you go down on the left, about 10 down, you'll see a crowd applause.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:51:21):
Oh, that's, I want this, I

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:23):
Wanna be able to have power to use this after I give us littley

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:51:26):
That I, I was thinking we could instead we could use liquid and mud <laugh>. No, that's,

Jeff Jarvis (02:51:34):
That one's up, right?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:51:36):
That's an explosion. So these are reel to reel tapes. Let's see. How about a how about a fight? This, this might be good for moral panic. Yeah. Oh, these are pretty, these are pretty old. Yeah, they are. These are not well recorded. You can hear all the noise and hiss.

Chris Messina (02:51:56):
You can do like a seventies like movie though.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:51:58):
It would be so fun. Yeah. You could totally

Chris Messina (02:52:00):
Canino, you know. Yeah,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:52:01):
Totally. Sure. How about bells, horns and whistles? So this is a whole box. And these are the different tapes. Yeah. In the box. This is hysterical. Let's see. Department store chimes. Oh yeah, there you go. Yeah. When department stores existed. Exactly. When they had Exactly. And when they had chimes. Only

Jeff Jarvis (02:52:22):
Leo and I are old enough to remember that. Yes.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:52:24):
Hosie on floor five. <Laugh>. All right. This is fun. Look at this. And they, I like the picture. Picture. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:52:31):
Gemer b I think we all should have our soundboards out of this. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:52:34):
Here's some animal sounds. This is, again, thanks to the internet archive for

Jeff Jarvis (02:52:43):
Pig Snorted. We gotta have some pig snorted.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:52:45):
All right, let's get some Apple users. Wait a minute. That had a slate on it. Some farmer <laugh>. Wait, is that from the Twitter space? <Laugh>. Wow. The SS E S U S C Optical Sound Effects Library from the Sunset Editorial Connect Collection. Oh, it's from the USC Cinema department. So you're right. These were old movies.

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:14):
The company was active from 64 to 87. They did episodic TV shows, like Be Witched and I dream of G

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:53:19):
Oh my gosh. 569 credits an IM db. That's a great find. Thank you. Anything else you wanna plug?

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:29):
No, that's, that's enough.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:53:30):
That's enough. Then let's go home.

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:31):
Plug plug of course. Wait, wait, wait,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:53:33):
Wait. The book is called the Gutenberg parenthesis and the website is gutenberg parenthesis.com. That's where you can go and order. Lisa was ordering it and she wanted to know where to order it from.

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:48):
What's up to you? Bloomsbury is 10% off Blackwell's, like, quite like out of London, but they, they shipped to America with even more higher percentage on

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:53:56):
One of them. Make Jeff Jarvis more money than others.

Jeff Jarvis (02:53:59):
Oh, it's, I don't make any money stuff, but it's fine.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:54:01):
Well, that's what I told her. I said order from Blackwells cuz it's an independent bookstore in the UK and we want to, and look, you save $3,

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:08):
So, and free

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:54:09):
Shipping. And free shipping. That's nice. No free shipping from the uk. That's, yeah, that's

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:13):
Actually the what, what It's a great thing, Chris cuz there are books that I, that are only in the UK and I can only get there. That's how I discover them. So they will ship from there, but they also sell American books.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:54:23):
Got it. Got it. Nice. or you can spend 27 bucks and get it on Amazon for crane. Well that'll go down.

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:30):
Wow. Well you get the price guarantee that whatever they decide what it is. Ah,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:54:34):
Okay. Go down. But is there anything about the hashtag in this book? Do I need to get this book? <Laugh> and, and assigned Cop Guttenberg? Yes. Did Gutenberg have hashtags? Yes, there

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:41):
Is. Absolutely. There

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:54:42):
Is. Wait a minute. What?

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:44):
I don't know if the index has hashtag

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:54:47):
The index. You needed an AI generated index. If it's not in there. Oops. No,

Jeff Jarvis (02:54:51):
It's not in there. Hey

Chris Messina (02:54:52):
Chris, you'll, you'll appreciate this. Speaking of hashtags all throughout Europe, people who speak languages other than English as their main language, this is the pound tag. They for, for example, if you go to the airport in France, if you an airport in France and you park and they say, okay, to get outta the parking garage, you have to do this four code and then do a pound sign. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But they call it a hashtag. They say press 3 4 27 hashtag to get out. That's

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:55:18):
Nobody knows Universal

Chris Messina (02:55:19):
In Europe

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:55:20):
Wasn't, nobody's wasn't the Ox Thorpe too? Wasn't that another

Chris Messina (02:55:24):
Yeah, the Octa Thorpe. Yeah. That didn't Chris,

Jeff Jarvis (02:55:26):
You are on page 192.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:55:28):
Oh my God.

Chris Messina (02:55:29):
I'm Look at that. Look at that. Amazing. It's an amazing thing. Well,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:55:32):
Read it to us. What does it say?

Chris Messina (02:55:35):
Yeah, let me know. First

Jeff Jarvis (02:55:35):
Proposed in 2007 by Chris Pasina as a way to bring together groups on Twitter. It was adopted to mark movements to create call response conversations, to protest, to joke, to organize otherwise diffuse information and discussion.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:55:47):
Did AI write that

Chris Messina (02:55:49):
<Laugh>? Hey,

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:55:51):
Hey, <laugh>. Well, when, when one thing we're sure of Sean Penn did not write that. No, that's great. I can't wait. So, so it's not just Gutenberg. Th this book is about,

Jeff Jarvis (02:56:01):
It's about our, the lessons we have to learn from our entry into the age of print as we leave it. So the first half of the book is a loving history of, of print and its spread and impact all the way up to, to computers. And then the second half of the book is basically four essays about lessons like creativity versus control conversation versus content mass versus community and institutions and whether they should be updated.

Chris Messina (02:56:28):
Wow. I'm looking forward to

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:56:29):
Reading this. That sounds good. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Christmas. And

Chris Messina (02:56:32):
Like, my first jobs by the way was in when I was in college I studied in Switzerland for a semester and I actually worked at a print shop as a janitor,

Jeff Jarvis (02:56:42):
So Oh, wow. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:56:43):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:56:44):
Was cold typed by that I presume.

Chris Messina (02:56:46):
I mean, well it was cold. Okay. It was, you know but Switzerland. Yeah. Switzerland. Switzerland. Yeah. But lead, yeah, there was a lead type.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:56:52):
Wow. So you have to sweep up little slugs and put 'em in the, on

Jeff Jarvis (02:56:56):
July 8th.

Chris Messina (02:56:57):
Mm-Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (02:56:57):
<Affirmative>. I'm going to appear at the museum of Printing in Haver Hill Mass. Hmm. With our friend Glenn Fleischman.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:57:05):
Well, he's done stuff there before. Did I think? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:57:07):
Yeah. Doug Wilson who did the Linotype book and, and Maron Vic who did?

Chris Messina (02:57:12):
Oh, nice. I backed his book. Yeah. Oh, wait for, yeah. I'm looking forward to getting that. That's gonna be amazing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:57:18):
Yeah. July 8th shift happens meets Etto Shk <laugh>. That real word that will be,

Chris Messina (02:57:26):
That is a word shaped blob <laugh>. That's,

Jeff Jarvis (02:57:28):
That's that. Oh, you don't know. Okay. Well third time the keyboard on the Linotype was different. Uhhuh. And so when they wanted to just clear a line, they would go down the keys and it would pop out a line. And the keys spelled Edan sru lu.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:57:42):
Wait a minute. I've always known Edan shd Lu as in order the most common letters in the English language. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:57:48):
That was the theory. That's why they got picked in that order. But that's not necessarily true

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:57:54):
The case. Oh, that, that's gonna hurt my Wordle score. Cuz that's what I'm using <laugh> to figure, figure out what I should pick and word you. You're kidding me. E t a o i n s h r d l u are not the most frequent letters in order. They, they're

Jeff Jarvis (02:58:09):
They kind of are, but there's some variation on them. You should ask Chad g. Pt.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:58:13):
Should, should I ask Bart or Chad? G p t? Both. Both. Okay. Let's ask Chad. D p t what are, how, what's the question? What are in order? Maybe 12 Most of frequency of popularity or frequency of use? Of use. The top maybe the alphabet. <Laugh>. Okay. 26 letters. <Laugh> in the English. I gotta say English right, because it's gonna be different. Yes, it's true. True. in the English. What? one more

Jeff Jarvis (02:58:45):
Z in the

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:58:45):
German in the English. Irvs is English misspelled. Why does it Oh, cuz it's not capitalized. Let's not capitalize. It'll figure it out. Yeah. In the English alphabet. It, it'll vocabulary. That's better. Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't, I'm trying to think of a word. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:59:03):
Actually you wanna, you wanna know what it is in chat? J p t in your entire?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:59:08):
Well it's, it only has its corpus to look at. What else would it look at? Well, that's, here we go, ladies and gentlemen. According to chat. J p t e t a o i n s h r d l u. Whoa. Alright. Shall I Bard the same thing? Because I think it just confirmed what I have thought all along. Irrespective, you're gonna have to use this at your at your talk. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I just want to point out here it's some good trivia. <Laugh>, let's see what Bard says. Bards comes up with something different. We're in trouble. <Laugh>. Exactly. E a r. Ah, t i n o s h d l u. So see, I

Jeff Jarvis (02:59:48):
Think, I think that the other one just went with common knowledge. Just made stuff

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:59:53):
Up. Oh, common.

Jeff Jarvis (02:59:54):
No, just common knowledge just counts. Where's Google comes

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (02:59:56):
To Murray. Google said this list is based on analysis of letters occurring in the words listed in the main entries of the concise Oxford dictionary.

Jeff Jarvis (03:00:04):
What tells you where it founded to?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:00:05):
That's, yeah. Lemme see when, lemme look at, lemme look at what open AI said maybe it no citation. No citation, huh?

Jeff Jarvis (03:00:15):
Ooh.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:00:15):
Hmm. Well now we've got a conflict, an AI battle. I mean, AI cage matches are something I'm here for, for sure. <Laugh> AI cage match. Oh, you know, Bard just pulled this from an article. That's, that's why. Hmm. That's why so well,

Jeff Jarvis (03:00:32):
And which one do I trust?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:00:34):
The article, right? Excess. Yeah. Pdf.Com Relu. Yeah. That's a, it's an article, huh? Because it gives us, it cites it. Whereas chat You

Jeff Jarvis (03:00:44):
Used Neva one last time, Leo. Just from

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:00:47):
Oh man, I'm gonna be so sad. It's gonna be so sad. Trackers be gone. It says t h H E I n e N N t

Chris Messina (03:01:01):
R E. <Laugh>. What the hell?

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:01:02):
E r.

Chris Messina (03:01:03):
Alright.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:01:04):
It's, well, I didn't say single letters. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. So it's

Chris Messina (03:01:09):
Just the other one figured it out.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:01:11):
It's Dip Fongs or something. <Laugh>. I don't know what's, I don't know what it is. Thank Chris for being here. Really appreciate it. I hope you'll come back. We love having you on. Yeah, you just fun. Fantastic. Have a great day. Can keep up the wonderful stuff you're doing and we'll watch Product Hunt tomorrow.

Jeff Jarvis (03:01:29):
Three hours of your life. We're grateful for the contribution.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:01:31):
Shut the hell. Yeah. You'll never get back. Yep. <laugh> Jeff Jarvis. Thank you.

Jeff Jarvis (03:01:36):
Well, Mike, what time is it there Mike? Now two in the morning. Geez.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:01:39):
Oh God, I forgot about that. It's

Chris Messina (03:01:40):
Two 18. Damn. Wow. It's, it's alright. No, it's no big deal. No big deal.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:01:45):
Jeff Jarvis is a Leonardtown professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark. Craig Newmark graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. We are required to read that contractually every single time he's on Buzz machine.com. Thank you. Jeff Gutenberg parenthesis.com for the

Chris Messina (03:02:03):
Book. Craig

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:04):
Craig wasn't pleased last time when you, when you made

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:06):
I know. He sent me a nasty note about pigeons. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:10):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:10):
No,

Chris Messina (03:02:11):
Don't get. Yeah, I think he's, doesn't he, isn't he doing pigeons on Macedon or Blue Sky or, I think he's

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:16):
Doing pigeons everywhere. Going somewhere. He has a Pigeon Rescue Foundation. I know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but I said foolishly apparently that maybe it'd be nice if Craig put some more money into, what was it?

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:28):
It was preserving cultural archives or something

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:30):
Like that. Yeah. Instead of saving the pigeon. Cause

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:33):
Cause things were gonna get dying off on YouTube and they just upset You

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:37):
Didn't like that at

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:38):
All. Craig listens. He knows.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:40):
I'm sorry, Craig. You know I love you and I I love your pigeons. Let's see, what did he write? He wrote,

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:48):
He just sent a picture.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:49):
No, he sent a picture of an angry pigeon. Oh

Jeff Jarvis (03:02:51):
No, the

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:52):
Header was, and then, and then he sent a picture of Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, I sent that. Oh, okay. Good. Was

Chris Messina (03:02:58):
Like, wow. That's, that's threatening

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:02:59):
<Laugh>. So this is what Craig said, just a pigeon giving me the evil eye.

Jeff Jarvis (03:03:03):
The the header. I can't remember what the, what the, what the topic line

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:03:06):
Was. It just said watch out Leo. Oh no, you said that.

Jeff Jarvis (03:03:11):
Yeah, he said it.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:03:14):
GFK would like a word. What is gfk?

Jeff Jarvis (03:03:17):
It's the nickname of the bird. I can't remember what to stands this for. Oh, okay. I

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:03:20):
Should know that Ghost Face Killer would like a word. That's

Jeff Jarvis (03:03:23):
A, that's a ghost face killer. That's right.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:03:26):
That's more of a threat than you, your thing. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (03:03:28):
Yeah. I did, I

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:03:29):
Did. Mr. Elgan, thank you so much for staying up late with us in the Veneto. I appreciate it.

Chris Messina (03:03:35):
The wife. It's my pleasure. Leo, can I, can I do a 32nd pitch

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:03:39):
Plug? Kevin's thing. Kevin's thing man. Cause

Chris Messina (03:03:43):
We talked about these things. Hello. So his product is his, he hello chatterbox.com is the thing, it's called Chatterbox. It's an educational product where kids build a smart speaker, kinda like an Amazon Echo or something like that. And then they teach it how to talk and interact. It's the only educational product that I know of that uses both chat, G B T and also Stable Diffusion. It's the's.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:04:07):
That's new. That's cool.

Chris Messina (03:04:08):
Kids are Protect. Yes, it is. Kids are protected from, you know, objectionable content and so on like that through the chatterbox system. But the most important thing is it teaches kids how AI works. It demystifies AI and it gets them to use it as a tool. And what they end up with is actually a computer that they can use that has no screen that can do anything they want it to do. It can turn on lights, it can do a million things. They can customize it. And this is great for schools and educational environments, whether it's homeschooling or whatever. And also individuals can buy it and, and build it themselves. I think this is a really great product for kids to learn about ai. Especially now that everybody's talking about ai. Kids are, you know, having AI write their essays and stuff like that and nobody really understands it. So this takes kids at the age of around eight years old and up and really teaches 'em what AI is, how it works, and how it can be used for educational purposes instead of, you know, the opposite.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:05:09):
Really cool. Do you,

Chris Messina (03:05:10):
Are, are you connected to the, the, the founders of the Makers? I mean, this is the kind of thing I'd love to get on product. This is my son, my son Kevin, in Invent. Oh, funny. You should ask. There we go. Well have him, you know, reach out and I'll get on production for you. Wonderful. Yes, that would be great. Absolutely. Thank you.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:05:24):
Yeah, good. Making connections. Look at that. Good. Good. Look at that. Who needs ai?

Chris Messina (03:05:29):
Another Twig, miracle Twig.

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:05:31):
<Laugh>, thank you so much everybody. Thank you all for being here, for joining us, for being a part of the conversation. We do Twig I think one of the most interesting shows in the world, frankly. And I hope you will tune in and tell your friends. We do it. You can watch it live if you want, every every Wednesday, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc. But you can also listen after the fact at twit.tv/twig. If you wanna send a clip to your friends, use our YouTube channel. If you go to twit do TV slash twig, there's a link right there. Or just look for youtube.com/this week in Google. And it's very easy to send clips and since everybody has access to YouTube, that seems like a good way to do it. Of course, the best way for you to get the show would be to subscribe in your favorite podcast player, cuz that way you'll get it automatically. You don't have to remember, you just go, oh, I know I must have a new twig. It's here. It's here. We hope you will come back next week. We thank you for being here. We will see you next time on this week in Google. Oh, bye everyone. Chow Chow.

Chris Messina (03:06:29):
Chow

Leo Laporte/Mike Elgan (03:06:30):
Chow. Listeners of this program get an ad free version if they're members of Club Twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows Plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the twit plus feed with shows like Stacy's book Club, the Untitled Lennox Show, the Gizz Fizz and more. Go to twit.tv/club twit and thanks for your support.