TWiG 788: Sausages in the Mist - CA AI Bill, OpenAI's Future

Summary

This Week in Google (Audio) - Episode 788: Sausages in the Mist - CA AI Bill, OpenAI's Future

Released on October 3, 2024

Hosts and Guests:

• Leo Laporte (Host)
• Jeff Jarvis (Professor Emeritus, City University of New York)
• Ed Zittrin (BetterOffline.com)
• Emily Drybalbus (PC Magazine)

---

1. OpenAI’s Financial Struggles and Business Model Critique

The episode opens with a heated discussion about OpenAI’s recent financial disclosures. Ed Zittrin criticizes OpenAI's exorbitant valuations and unsustainable business practices.

• Ed Zittrin [00:05:27]: "They’re going to lose $5 billion and their business fundamentals are pretty bad."

Leo Laporte challenges Ed’s perspective, suggesting that OpenAI’s investment is a bet on future Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

• Leo Laporte [00:06:37]: "The upside is AGI. The upside is a world-changing technology that's bigger than the iPhone, the PC, and the Internet all rolled into one."

However, Ed remains skeptical about the feasibility and current viability of OpenAI's business model.

• Ed Zittrin [00:07:39]: "If that's how big it is, this market is small and there may not be a major product-market fit."

2. Sam Altman: Leadership Under Scrutiny

The conversation shifts to Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, with strong negative sentiments expressed by the panel.

• Ed Zittrin [00:12:07]: "I think he’s a con man. I think he’s a deceptive man. I think he’s a terrible businessman."

Jeff Jarvis concurs, adding to the critique of Altman’s leadership and business ethics.

• Jeff Jarvis [00:12:25]: "I actually have a Google Doc with all the reasons why Sam Altman is terrible."

3. Investment and Market Sentiment in AI

The panel discusses the massive influx of investment into AI, questioning its sustainability and the motives behind such funding.

• Ed Zittrin [00:08:00]: "They’re going to lose money here. So what I care about is the tech industry and I don’t like seeing it win."

Jeff Jarvis points out the parallels with previous tech investments like Uber, highlighting the risks involved.

• Jeff Jarvis [00:08:18]: "It's a big bet. And you know what? There was a similar big bet with Uber, which turns out to be not such a good business."

4. Environmental Impact of AI Development

Jeff brings up the environmental concerns associated with AI training, emphasizing the high energy consumption and carbon footprint.

• Jeff Jarvis [00:12:53]: "All that training is incredibly environmentally intensive. So all that money you’re seeing in this is going to just burning fossil fuels because data centers basically don't run on renewable energy for the majority."

Emily Drybalbus adds to the discussion by questioning the transparency and governance of AI investments.

• Emily Drybalbus [00:14:36]: "Is Altman going to try to have a two-tier or three-tier stock structure where he’s going to get more voting power than the 7% of actual equity that he’s being rumored to be given."

5. The Future of AI and Potential Market Crash

The hosts debate the future prospects of AI, with Ed predicting an imminent market crash due to unsustainable practices.

• Ed Zittrin [00:18:51]: "It's going to hit the market. And as I said, this could be a massive crash in a year or two."

Leo counters by asserting the continuous demand for software as the world becomes increasingly software-defined.

• Leo Laporte [00:26:24]: "I honestly think there’s going to be more demand, more need for code than ever before."

6. The Role of Legacy Media vs. Independent Media

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the shortcomings of legacy media in adapting to the rapidly evolving digital landscape, contrasting it with the agility of independent media outlets.

• Emily Drybalbus [00:55:03]: "I think the Times, in a time of dying media... the legacy media has messed up is they drain the personality from writers with house style."

Jeff Jarvis emphasizes the importance of having both fact-based reporting and opinion analysis to provide comprehensive coverage.

• Jeff Jarvis [00:72:00]: "You need both, but you need analysis."

7. Community, Loneliness, and the Impact of Technology

The panel delves into societal issues such as loneliness and the decline of community bonds, attributing some of these problems to the isolating nature of modern technology.

• Leo Laporte [00:61:00]: "We're all stipulating you're correct, that it's a bad business. Nobody's saying it's not a bad business."

Ed shares his personal struggles with loneliness and how online communities have been both a solace and a source of further challenges.

• Ed Zittrin [00:61:47]: "I've had the opposite experience moments of like the depression. I've found most of my support system through being online."

8. California AI Bill and Regulatory Challenges

Governor Gavin Newsom’s veto of the California AI Safety Bill sparks debate on the necessity and effectiveness of regulation in the AI sector.

• Leo Laporte [00:131:10]: "He said we cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public."

Emily criticizes the performative nature of AI regulation, arguing that it fails to address the root causes of societal issues exacerbated by technology.

• Emily Drybalbus [00:136:43]: "It's about belonging. It's about a deep lack of community issues."

Jeff Jarvis draws parallels with the EU’s approach to AI regulation, noting similarities and differences in legislative attitudes.

• Jeff Jarvis [00:133:53]: "The EU bill does require companies to expose how their model works."

Notable Quotes:

• Ed Zittrin [00:05:27]: "They’re going to lose $5 billion and their business fundamentals are pretty bad."
• Leo Laporte [00:06:37]: "The upside is AGI. The upside is a world-changing technology that's bigger than the iPhone, the PC, and the Internet all rolled into one."
• Ed Zittrin [00:12:07]: "I think he’s a con man. I think he’s a deceptive man. I think he’s a terrible businessman."
• Jeff Jarvis [00:12:25]: "I actually have a Google Doc with all the reasons why Sam Altman is terrible."
• Jeff Jarvis [00:12:53]: "All that training is incredibly environmentally intensive."
• Ed Zittrin [00:18:51]: "It's going to hit the market. And as I said, this could be a massive crash in a year or two."
• Jeff Jarvis [00:26:24]: "I honestly think there’s going to be more demand, more need for code than ever before."
• Emily Drybalbus [00:55:03]: "I think the Times... drain the personality from writers with house style."
• Jeff Jarvis [00:72:00]: "You need both, but you need analysis."
• Leo Laporte [00:131:10]: "We cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public."

Conclusion and Takeaways:

The episode presents a critical view of OpenAI’s current financial health and leadership under Sam Altman, questioning the sustainability of massive investments in AI without clear business models or societal benefits. The panel expresses concerns over the environmental impact of AI training and the potential for a market crash if current trends continue unabated.

Furthermore, the discussion highlights the failings of legacy media in adapting to digital transformations, emphasizing the need for more personalized and analytical journalism. The societal impacts of technology, particularly concerning community bonds and loneliness, are also examined, with a call for stronger offline interactions to counterbalance the isolating effects of digital platforms.

Finally, the regulatory landscape for AI, exemplified by California’s AI Safety Bill and its veto, underscores the ongoing struggle to balance innovation with safety and ethical considerations. The panel advocates for more thoughtful and empirical approaches to AI regulation, moving beyond performative measures to address the core issues at play.

---

For those interested in the detailed discussions and expert opinions on AI, technology, and media, Episode 788 of "This Week in Google (Audio)" offers an engaging and critical exploration of these pressing topics.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris is on assignment. So we brought in not one but two people. Paris is Fred Ed Zittrin, the foul mouthed but very funny and very smart Ed Zittrin. And from PC magazine, Emily Drybalbus. Lots to talk about, Sam Altman. Ed says it's all a crock. They just raised a huge amount of money. We'll talk about that social media, where Taylor Lawrence is going and why she's going wrong and a whole lot more all coming up next on Twig. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Ed Zittrin]

This is Twig.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Twig. This week in Google. Episode 788, recorded Wednesday, October 2, 2024. Sausages in the Mist. It's time for Twig this week in Google the show. We cover all the week's news, everything but Google. Although I am informed that we have a professionally produced Google change log this week from Scooter X. He produced it using Notebook LM as a podcast. That'll be interesting. Paris Martino has on assignment in South Brooklyn.

[Ed Zittrin]

She's afraid of me.

[Leo Laporte]

You think I'm kidding on this? She literally is in South Brooklyn on assignment for the information. But she's provided us with two very qualified replacements. You heard one of them, Ed Zittran. The profane Ed Zittrin.

[Ed Zittrin]

Profane. Jesus Christ.

[Emily Drybalbus]

There you go.

[Ed Zittrin]

From betteroffline.com Every day I am punished.

[Leo Laporte]

It is always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for joining us, Ed. Emily Drybalbus is also here now working for PC Magazine. Always working for PC Magazine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Always working For PC Magazine. Currently grumpy because just sat through 20 minutes of Zoom waterboarding.

[Leo Laporte]

I did torture you, but I. There was a memo. There was a memo that said it's not torture. So there. Thank you for being here, Emily. And thanks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love being here. I'm not grumpy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay. She's at Electric Humans. Electric underscore humans. Also with us, Jeff Jarvis, professor, formerly professor, still professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School Journalism at the City University of New York.

[Ed Zittrin]

Everyone loves that sound.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody loves it. We love it. Craig Newmark especially loves it. Ed. He, he tunes in just to hear his name song.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He does.

[Ed Zittrin]

How you doing, Craig? Love the list.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've actually spoken to Craig Newmark. He's surprisingly available.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, he's on the show frequently talking about pigeons.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Iraq.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, he's a wonderful, wonderful guy. He loves his pigeons and he is a proud nerd.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, I mean that, that Makes me happy if he wasn't. It'd actually be really funny if he was a huge jock.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we kind of.

[Ed Zittrin]

He's just like. Just kind of Chicago Bears Jersey, just.

[Leo Laporte]

I kind of expect tech founders to be nerds, and far too often they are, in fact.

[Ed Zittrin]

Bros. Yeah, they're just business people pretending to be engineers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, he's the original Craig Newmark kind of started it. And now the finance bros have taken over tech, so now it's where we are. But he's. He's the og.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I was thinking Dan Bricklin is a nerd of the old school.

[Leo Laporte]

Dan Bricklin, the creator of is.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are real nerds. Sam Altman.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, not a technical guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Not really. Huh?

[Ed Zittrin]

No, he's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He dropped of the worst variety.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, exactly. He raises money.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

A lot today.

[Ed Zittrin]

Con artist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a slithery, slimy finance bro.

[Ed Zittrin]

A damp finance.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Emily. Try to outdo each other.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is he damp?

[Ed Zittrin]

He looks damp.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it because he spends time in the swamp?

[Ed Zittrin]

No, no, no, no. This is not. This is not that technical. It's just that I think most people can be divided into damp or dry. I would say I'm on the damper side. Sam Altman, damp. Brandon Marsh, famous baseball player. Damp as hell.

[Leo Laporte]

So is damp good?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, no, no. This isn't a qualitative assessment. This is just one strainer or dampness.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a measure of moisture.

[Ed Zittrin]

What's. Exactly. Yeah, it's nothing personal, but Sam Altman has a dampness to him, and I think David Roth from Defector said it really well. He always looks like he just sat in something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can I ask her?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, would you. I mean, you don't know me that well, Ed, but would you say I am damp or dry?

[Ed Zittrin]

I think you're on the dry side.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Jeff's definitely dry.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yes, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

100% dry.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Like. Like a good gin over.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yes, exactly. Like, dry isn't bad.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have published today they closed their latest financing round, valuing themselves at some vast number. What was it?

[Emily Drybalbus]

159.

[Leo Laporte]

159 billion dollars. Which is what? Double what they were not so long ago.

[Ed Zittrin]

But their previous valuations were extremely wanky. They were like $10 billion of cloud credits is used as a way of valuing this company. It's the dumbest thing I've seen. And this is this. Like, I went for a very vague title. I mean, I'm joking, of course, because OpenAI is a bad business.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Ed's latest post at where's your Ed at?

[Ed Zittrin]

And I've got some great emails about it.

[Leo Laporte]

32 minute read, so we won't read it open. AI is a, is a bad business.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You say they're going to lose anywhere 4 to $5 billion this year, which does sound like a kind of a not so good business.

[Ed Zittrin]

Well, they're going to lose $5 billion. That's, that's, that's from the New York Times reported everything I say. I try not to estimate too much and I try to like link very heavily to people. There's over 100 links in that piece now. They're going to lose $5 billion and they're going to. And that's after making $3.7 billion in revenue. So their costs are just astoundingly bad. And on top of it, their business fundamentals are pretty bad too.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me channel the somewhat damp Sam Altman and say, well, you got to spend a lot of money but the upside is great for AI.

[Ed Zittrin]

What is the upside?

[Leo Laporte]

Because the upside is AGI. The upside is a world changing technology that's bigger than the iPhone, the PC and the Internet all rolled into one.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. You mean if a frog had wings it wouldn't fall on its ass?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it doesn't have wings yet.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

We could invest $7 trillion to give it wings.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's the thing. It's like. I know you're being glib here, but that is really the point. It's. There are no signs this thing is going to wake up one day. And on top of that, the actual business fundamentals are terrible. $3.7 billion, but only a billion dollars of that is people licensing. Not like connecting to the API. Their smallest revenue stream is the most important one. The generative AI market in my opinion is much smaller than people realize. If the biggest player in town and they make a billion dollars and Microsoft makes another billion dollars licensing their models, if this is how big it is, this market is small and there may not be in major product market.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What's the rest of the revenue at?

[Ed Zittrin]

2.7 billion. And that's from selling subscriptions to ChatGPT.

[Leo Laporte]

Ed plus, what do you care? Because the people putting in this $6 billion to give them 157 billion doll all themselves millionaires who are just looking for a better return than the Dow Jones Industrial average, well they're not going.

[Ed Zittrin]

To get one because they're going to lose money here. So what I care because I care about the tech Industry. And I don't like seeing win. And I don't like watching a narrative get built that's completely and utterly false.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a big bet. And you know what? There was a similar big bet with Uber, which turns out to be not such a good business.

[Ed Zittrin]

Completely different business model. Sorry, just totally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I understand a different business model, but the idea is the upside is so good that it's worth risking our billions of dollars because we got a lot of money.

[Ed Zittrin]

What upside, Leo? What is the upside?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is an upside. The upside is AGI.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is interesting because we were talking about like Craig Newmark and now today. And back then when all these tech companies were starting, it was like, wow, they're all losing money. Why is everyone investing in them? So I feel like tech companies losing money is not new. But I'm totally open to what you're saying is new here.

[Ed Zittrin]

But also what's new about this is this resembles nothing else. It loses more money. If this is like, if Uber every. You got like 0.00001 miles per gallon, probably add some more zeros. This is like if your car crashed every time you took an Uber and you had to buy a new car every single ride. Like, this is how bad the unit economics are. And their major form of revenue, 2.7 out of $3.7 billion, is subscriptions to a production that has no differentiation. That's.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I mean, you can get free at Meta AI.

[Ed Zittrin]

Exactly.

[Emily Drybalbus]

For free, all over. And there isn't a proven market, there.

[Ed Zittrin]

Isn'T a product market, a solution to anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, developers are a really big market for these.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, they're not. No, no, no. They're actually really not. They're out of 3.7 billion. One billion is developers. That's all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they pay. They pay a lot for expensive plans. Yes, they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me suggest this.

[Ed Zittrin]

Well, which plan?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me suggest this. None of this investment is on today's business any more than the investment in Uber was in. Was on today's Uber. It is. It is all about the potential upside. And these are not in unsophisticated investors. One hopes they're not. You know, I'm sorry, Softbank. Right. Okay.

[Ed Zittrin]

They invested. They invested in wire car.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree, sun is an idiot, but that doesn't matter because he has the money and it's his money to invest.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay?

[Leo Laporte]

It's not like he's going to go say, oh, instead of that, I'd like to save the world.

[Ed Zittrin]

You asked me about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, what I'm What I'm saying is in con. Yes, it may be a bad business today, but I understand what they're. What they're saying is, hey, what if it's not? What if there is something. So really the only argument here is is AI ever going to pay off? And you say it's not, but we don't know. Right?

[Ed Zittrin]

Isn't what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about the fact that the business doesn't work. Emily, to your point, developers are not actually paying that much. They are.

[Leo Laporte]

No, the business doesn't work.

[Ed Zittrin]

73%. Okay, but where does it change?

[Leo Laporte]

It changes if AI really works and you get AGI and then it changes everything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, businesses are going to buy it. Not the developers themselves. Businesses, okay. Their business revenue is.

[Ed Zittrin]

They have 900,000 business customers. Sorry, I don't mean to talk over.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pretty good. That's pretty good. 900.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, it isn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Customers.

[Ed Zittrin]

Wait, wait, wait. You're saying internal models like. Because you're mixing up things now. Because if you're talking about business account. Okay, which one are you talking about then? Just so I'm open.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Products include models that businesses can use to build their own services.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay, excellent. So you're talking about the API cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

Compute side, for instance, Microsoft.

[Ed Zittrin]

Only a billion copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Ed Zittrin]

Copilot's a completely different thing to what I'm talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, CoPilot is open AI.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay. CoPilot is ChatGPT. There is also over here, Microsoft selling Compute Compute API access to OpenAI's models. That is a separate business. That's the $1 billion. Then there is ChatGPT plus Enterprise and Teams. That is another business. And the point I'm making is a billion dollars for the most relevant company. The company that's had thousands of pieces of earned media that is on every single conversation. That 23% of their revenue is people integrating this. That is a piss poor number.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think Sam Altman is a con man?

[Ed Zittrin]

I do. I think he's a carnival barker. I think he is seeking to accumulate money and power. I think he is a deceptive man. I think he is a terrible businessman too. He has been fired from three different companies including OpenAI and he has some extremely creepy shit he did with his.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I agree with you Ed. I actually I have a Google Doc with all the reasons why Sam Altman is terrible and it includes being. It includes everything you're saying. I just think it's interesting to pick apart why they did invest and just like actually try to figure it out. Like things they could look at could be percent growth. Like maybe it's not total money now or total customers now but the rate of growth like other things and signals they look at to figure out what's going on.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

Rich people decide to throw their money.

[Ed Zittrin]

Away because it's goddamn stupid Leo. And the money could go literally anywh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can give you.

[Leo Laporte]

I would not invest in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So but it's theirs. Has effectively convinced them that if they give him money then he can train these models to perform better. So it's literally, I mean classic investment. You want to throw like lighter fluid on, you want bigger flames. And so he's convinced them to do all these training. All this training. Why is that concerning? Because all that training is incredibly environmentally intensive. So all these billions of dollars are going to just burning fossil fuels because data centers basically don't run on renewable energy for the majority. So all that money you're seeing in this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go to killing the planet.

[Leo Laporte]

We're bringing back Three Mile island to pay for Microsoft.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. Yes. Insane.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Let me ask you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is one reason for an emotional reaction because we're having lots of emotional reactions here. So that's one reason of where one thing could be coming from.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Can I ask a question?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So I'm not sure what they're buying equity in right now since it's a for profit under a not for profit. Some of what came from Microsoft was in kind compute and promotion and such. Most of don't yet know what the cap table is going to look like. We don't know what the governance is going to look like. Is Altman going to try to have a two tier or three tier stock structure where he's going to get more voting power than the 7% of actual equity that he's being rumored to be given. How is the conversion going to be made from not for profit to for profit? And so what are they investing in? Under what terms at this valuation? I can't figure that part out.

[Ed Zittrin]

I can actually tell you. I can tell you. So they're investing in something called a profit participation unit which is a slice of future profits in a company that loses $5 billion or more a year. In the event that they don't after the deal they have two years from the deal closing. At that point their PPUs will turn into.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Sounds by the way a little dirty but go ahead.

[Ed Zittrin]

It does. But it's very funny to say 9 billion. It's a 9% interest loan it will become after that.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So it's a, it's a convertible loan.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think Sam Altman was that.

[Ed Zittrin]

Accrues interest across two years or whether it starts accrued.

[Leo Laporte]

I wman is an SBF level fraudster or an Elizabeth Holmes level fraudster.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think he is massively overstating the capabilities of generative AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of like Elizabeth Holmes said with a drop we could make a business. People invested in Theranos because they thought well if this works it's going to be.

[Ed Zittrin]

And they could kind of show a proof of concept.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And she didn't. She was lying.

[Ed Zittrin]

And I will be clear. Leo, since we last met, I'm actually kind of on your side when it comes to the smaller, more focused language models. I believe in the focused model story way more now having read into it, I believe that generative AI has some uses. I do not think large language models like Anthropic or OpenAI or anything that Microsoft's putting a hat on are a lasting product. And I actually believe that a lot of this stuff is going to go away in a few years because it is not sustainable. We have earnings coming up in a couple weeks. You think the markets are going to look at all this and go wow, sounds sensible to me.

[Leo Laporte]

They just, there's going to be a massive crash because Nvidia and so many other companies with the word AI in the, in the brand. If AI turns out to be nothing are going to.

[Emily Drybalbus]

AI is something in all kinds of ways. Google bigger, they've put it into everything. Translation, all this other stuff, it's the, it's the flim flam of the guy you walked on the beach with Leo, who said the generative AI was going to be everything and change the world. It's AGI that is the worst flim flam BS of all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was actually thinking this week. I had a complete different thought trajectory this week where I was realizing how many people are using LLMs and how much of a future they have. Like that's what I've been thinking about this week. So I just. If you think about like how many people have integrated them into their days, how many young people in high school, middle school, elementary school are already using them on a day to day basis.

[Ed Zittrin]

How many people use that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have had a lot of user growth and they released the numbers because they didn't report released users numbers for a while and they just did. Of course they're getting investment but yeah, more and more people are using it in all types of fields.

[Ed Zittrin]

The problem is if that's 350 million free users, that is going to that. Like, that is not sustainable. I'm not saying it's not being used by people, but if the majority of people using this are using it kind of in the free version, that's not going to work long term.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I don't think, I don't do advertisements. I mean, there's lots of business models out there. But I think the technology has.

[Leo Laporte]

Podcasting is a pretty bad business as well. Yes.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's why almost nobody makes any money off of it. And those that do are usually making it from different business lines other than podcasting.

[Leo Laporte]

So does that mean we should just outlaw podcasting and get rid of it? Or why would podcasting. The fact whether somebody makes money on it or not doesn't seem to me the only criterion. Now, I have to say, Emily, you.

[Ed Zittrin]

Made an excellent painting in your garage. Leo, they just made an excellent six and a half billion dollars into it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You made an excellent point, Emily.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, let's, let's give her some credit. No, in fact, Blind Whiz in our chat room pointed out Google has said they're not going to hit their 2030 goals, energy goals, because of training being so expensive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Microsoft as well, they're not going to make it. And Microsoft was already saying years ago how much water we're using in our data centers.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's a real, that's a real cost that all of us suffer, as opposed to the billionaires who are throwing their money after a technology that may or may not.

[Ed Zittrin]

So if this stuff falls apart, it's going to hit the market.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And as I said, this could be a massive crash in a year or two.

[Ed Zittrin]

And I don't think it will be next. I think that the horizon moves out with this funding to like a few quarters on. But it's kind of inevitable if they can't work out this problem that they've never been able to work out, the unsustainability of it, the massive energy demands, these aren't fixable problems within the next year. And they are. They're saying they're going to make $11.6 billion next year. That's more than 300% increased revenue for products that are becoming increasingly commoditized with a fallow cloud compute business. Like the sign of the cloud side, the cloud business side, the model integration side only being a billion dollars heavily suggests that there is a kind of not that much either integration or use of generative AI products. And you can extrapolate the whole Model.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all stipulating you're correct, that it's a bad business. Nobody's saying it's not a bad business. Okay, I agree. You don't have to argue that point so vividly.

[Ed Zittrin]

I'm just, I'm excited about this. This thing is 8, 000 words and it took, I took like a day and a half to write it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you're right. Eloquently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, why? Why OpenAI getting all this investment instead of Claude, which a lot of people think is better, or like why Open AI?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Sam Altman.

[Leo Laporte]

Sam Altman is a good money raiser.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Linfam is.

[Ed Zittrin]

You completely right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why did Mira Marati leave? She of course won. In fact, a number of founders at OpenAI either yosutski, they've all left the.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Nation, had kind of a catalog of all the reasons in there. And they're different. Right. It's internal politics. It's compensation. I'm sure they're getting other offers outside also.

[Leo Laporte]

So much speculation because none of these people really are talking. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Mira left right before the switch to profit for profit companies happening, which is really telling because she was about to make so much money.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I heard from a friend who is getting recruited by OpenAI right now for a position. She's been talking in San Francisco like, should I accept this position? And she got lunch with a VC and that woman told her that once OpenAI goes to for profit, some employees have only been there for a couple years, could get as much as 2 million in equity. So if you've only been there for 2 million, 2 years and you're getting 2 million, what would be getting many millions of dollars? And she chose to leave before that and she cashed out.

[Leo Laporte]

She was the temporary CEO when Sam was temporarily fired.

[Ed Zittrin]

She's also the secondary sale. There was a secondary sale that happened. She could have cashed. I don't know if she did, but.

[Emily Drybalbus]

She could have cashed some.

[Leo Laporte]

There is some speculation that her timing her leaving was timed with the release of these new quote reasoning AI's like strawberry the four. What is it? 401.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just zero. One.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Just one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just a one.

[Ed Zittrin]

And apparently there was a story where she promised. Well, no, she said they rushed it out. She was kind of the person who sits between Sam Altman demanding money for the money throne and the developers being like, I don't wanna. Sorry, what was that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, she was obviously miserable. I mean, she left her person. She left for personal reasons before she was about to make millions. Millions of dollars. She Hated it.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But there are stories that VCs are lining up at her kitchen door to back whatever she wants.

[Ed Zittrin]

She's going to raise a billion or like 100 million at a billion or something.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You're absolutely right, Emily. It's a courageous thing to do, probably because you're going into an unknown. But I want to complain about something else related to this. So Microsoft put out its new stuff, and I think it's based on ChatGPT. And they said that it new, new, new deeper thinking. It doesn't think. Ergo, it can't do deeper thinking. This is more of the Flim Flam crowd.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, this is the. Again, this is 01 the reasoning and the idea is if you give it more time to think, it can do better at math. It can thinking it's anthropomorphic. All right, fine. You know, I. I think it's a mistake to spend a lot of energy arguing semantics.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's the sales pitch. That's the flim flip.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand, but who cares if he's a Flim fan, man?

[Ed Zittrin]

They also found that there was a study that came out that said that the time. The amount of thinking. I know. Sorry, Jeff. The amount of time it takes to reset processing, sure. Whatever it is kind of tapers off. It has diminishing returns and then eventually turns into nonsense. So it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Why do so many smart people, though? I mean, I don't. I'm. This is a legit question. I'm not trying to defend it. Why do so many smart people think that there is something here and that it's worth spending time on and that this could change the world? I mean, there's definitely a lot of very much smarter people than me who are. Who are devoting their lives to this, not just at OpenAI, but everywhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think they're bored. They don't see other transformative technologies. They're like, oh, this is it.

[Ed Zittrin]

Good point, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you don't want to make the next iPhone because who the hell cares?

[Emily Drybalbus]

And crypto didn't go anywhere. And Blockchain didn't go anywhere. And bang on VR didn't go anywhere. And so is it wishful thinking?

[Leo Laporte]

It's wishful thinking.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Don't know what it is.

[Ed Zittrin]

Is. There's no other hypergrowth markets. There's no real place to put money.

[Leo Laporte]

The same thing with the VCs doing it.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. Because where else is this money going to go? The reason that they're all jumping on this, other than the fact that Big tech has no ideas anymore and they just follow each other is because where else is this going? What else could you. What's the next growth thing?

[Leo Laporte]

You almost could have predicted that as we approached the climactic decades of climate change that people would start turning to magical thinking and you know, fairy tale deus ex machina solutions because the otherwise the future is so bleak that it's not worth going on. It's the alternative to despair.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

I actually think you're right especially with tech because if you really think about it put aside like generative AI, what is that there are cool things that people could be working in climate tech, in batteries.

[Leo Laporte]

Really. What about the next. Doesn't have to be chips. It could be the next thing. We've always moved on.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Speaks our language Leo but also are.

[Ed Zittrin]

You a software engineer?

[Leo Laporte]

We invented the Steam engine. Okay. We got everything out of it. We could. Now what's the next technology.

[Ed Zittrin]

But we have millions of software developers and what are they going to do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's interesting because they're saying that ChatGPT and all this technology is going to basically make software development a non career like in 100.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, personally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I think there's something to that for sure. Oh yeah. Because a good part of it. Yeah. Could be a much higher ticket higher or salary like you're just going to not pay them as much. They're going to have fewer functionalities. They're going to need to do less creative thinking. I buy that easier job.

[Ed Zittrin]

I would buy that they would be hiring less senior engineers who could use these tools. But know enough about code. I think that there will be a horrifying crisis that follows because you'll have a bunch of code written by people who don't really understand code created by large language models that inject errors into them kind of like GitHub Copilot does. But I actually do buy, I buy that. I don't know if it's a profitable business but that is a use case.

[Leo Laporte]

I honestly think there's going to be more demand, more need for code than ever before that the world is software defined.

[Emily Drybalbus]

If your computer is. Now would you say go and do computer science or not?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Understanding technology has nothing but an upside right now, friends.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, I would agree. I, I still think so. But I, I do feel like as I always feel it's important to be well rounded and to know how to think and know how to completely pivot yourself. I would not encourage my kids to just become like code monkeys ever because that's exactly what AI is just going to do.

[Leo Laporte]

So why are people going into biotech for instance, or some other news?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Harder. It's a lot harder.

[Ed Zittrin]

A lot harder doesn't pay as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Well there. Okay, so now we found another downside besides the impact on climate. Another downside is it might be drawing the best and the brightest minds into a dead end because it's fat, it's sizzly and.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And fancy. And where they should really be focusing on something less lucrative but more value.

[Ed Zittrin]

Management consultancy's entire business model. You come out Harvard or Penn or whatever. It's the McKinsey.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a McKinsey dead zone.

[Ed Zittrin]

And also the most exciting one sign that this is a bubble is the company's most excited about it are like Accenture. When you see Accenture, that's bad sign.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it?

[Ed Zittrin]

You're like, ah, I don't know, like, like that's how I feel about SoftBank. It's like, ah, oh, I don't want them at the party that you needed half a billion from them.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, SoftBank for a long time owned PC Magazine and ZD. In fact, I worked for Softbank and Sunson, who was spoken of with reverence when he owned zd.

[Emily Drybalbus]

How was his track record over the fullness of time?

[Leo Laporte]

He's got money still.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, they had Alibaba, which was a good one. But then their last three years they've lost and they've lost like 30 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like he's lost money before. Remember he was the one who put all that money into WeWork.

[Ed Zittrin]

Exactly. We work. Lost money on Uber.

[Leo Laporte]

Uber.

[Ed Zittrin]

Lost money on Uber.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is, this, this is the dirty little secret of VC. You only need one or two massive hits to. To fund the 30 or 40 crap investments.

[Ed Zittrin]

Not if all of the crap ones are really big.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if they get bigger and bigger. Yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. And the problem is with, I don't know, inflation evaluations or whatever. But you can't. Well, this round was a minimum of a quarter billion, which is why I also Apple pulling out of this round.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the worst sign of that telling interest. What do you think that means? Why did they.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think the price was too high. I think the price.

[Ed Zittrin]

I don't think it was too high. I don't think it was the price. I think they. Because you signed the NDA and you see the company and they probably went.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's the same thing. I'm saying the price.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but ChatGPT is going to be baked into Apple intelligence. So they're. Yeah. But they're not above it and they rely for free. Right. But they have faith in the production comes along.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually think that it's not. It's more complicated than that. Chat GPT and Google's Gemini are what happens if Apple's own AI can't handle your query or they think it might be profitable to exit out and they even warn you. They're saying if you're going to Chat GPT you should be aware your data is exfiltrated. You might get the wrong answer. Apple has its own models and are trying to. Is trying to build Apple intelligence on its own models.

[Ed Zittrin]

Not and on device.

[Leo Laporte]

Open AI's models on device.

[Ed Zittrin]

I like the idea of on device.

[Leo Laporte]

Not just on device, by the way. They're creating data centers that are sealed, hermetically sealed data centers. Run it by Apple on Apple architectures so that it doesn't get exfiltrated. I think they don't like open AI. They're very nervous about OpenAI and the fact that they didn't invest in OpenAI is extremely telling. I don't think there is open AI in their intelligence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think all the on device stuff and the data center stuff is mostly a PR move because it's such a small portion of the AI functionalities. And Apple intelligence, it's like image generation. It's not the writing tools. It's not all these sophisticated things. No, it's just image generation. A couple isolated things that are processed on device and what's processed on device can go out to that private cloud compute network. So you don't really need refining.

[Ed Zittrin]

Text is on. It is on the device.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah. And translation on the Chromebooks now translation is summarization.

[Ed Zittrin]

Prioritizing and summarizing notifications. Yeah, that's all on device writing and refining text.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What the Chromebook is doing too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, because it's refining text that you already put.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stuff. Where would it.

[Ed Zittrin]

I'm actually kind of finding out because I thought that that was on device. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're. They're very unclear. So it's. I don't think.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think that's probably deliberate too. So that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And that's what's interesting. It's like what. What are they doing?

[Ed Zittrin]

It's marketing. I think they're trying to make it. They're trying to make people think, oh, Apple's in AI too. But if during the WWDC thing though, you'll notice right at the end it was like an hour and A half long. And they spent two minutes on OpenAI didn't name Sam Altman, then said, and then we'll be bringing a bunch of other models too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. Which is just like my editor in chief asked me to write something about Apple intelligence after wwdc. And I was like, what the heck is there to write? What is it like the private compute thing? I just published a piece like two weeks ago after the Globe Time event, and it was titled iPhone 16 makes us question Apple's Intelligence because like nothing makes sense.

[Ed Zittrin]

Oh yeah, I bought it because I'm a little pig, but I got it. And I'm like, this is the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Well, Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

So Apple says. Apple says in their white paper we train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web crawler Apple bot. In other words, we. They are creating their own models. They call it Apple's AX Learn framework. And that is what they are primarily using. They. The, the other stuff is kind of. I think it's a backstop so that if people really want what ChatGPT can do or what Gemini can do, or.

[Emily Drybalbus]

If they find that one of them doesn't work well and they, they're gonna, they gotta hedge their bets because Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Is really focused on their own models. I'll.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But that's also just built on Transformer, right?

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, they just added Open Air so that the, the little linking people in Wall street could be happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's just marketing maybe, but I think the fact that they didn't invest in OpenAI is kind of almost them saying, yeah, maybe that's.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, they, they saw something and went, there's no point of being. Maybe they also saw that this deal is rigged for Microsoft. Microsoft owns all of the iPad and the research.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple says we used a combination of data parallelism, tensor parallelism, sequence parallelism, and fully share sharded data parallel FSDP to scale training.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, sharded.

[Ed Zittrin]

Sharded, yeah. Apple now shard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'll just leave that.

[Leo Laporte]

We have developed two novel algorithms in post training. I believe that. I mean, certainly they can afford it and they can hire the people to do it and they have that. They're trying to do this in house.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yes, 100%, but they're super behind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You wrote a great piece about the commoditization of AI models, which I read and enjoyed. And why should Apple be able to build anything different than anybody else if they're all using the same data?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's five Key papers that every. That are widely known. Everybody's read them and that's the basis for a lot of what we're seeing.

[Emily Drybalbus]

MIT just came out with a new non. Like the kind of the first non transformer model.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Just this week. Yeah, Emily, to your point about on device or not, and in their cloud, there was a story about Altman's 7 trillion dollar world flowing waterfall of AI compute. But I don't know if you saw this, Leo, just to piss you off, the TSMC people were dismissing him, thought the idea was so absurd, they started calling Mr. Altman a podcasting bro.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw that.

[Ed Zittrin]

I didn't see, you know, how bad it is. Like TSMC companies like in chips, they don't give a rat's ass about all of the fluff. TSMC can to some extent print money. So if they met with Sam Altman and he just waffled on, they probably looked at him and said, well, I mean, they called him a podcast bro, which is such a good insult as well, because he's terrible on the mic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't really even.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's too complimentary.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, it's not.

[Ed Zittrin]

It's great as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's too positive.

[Ed Zittrin]

But also they just looked at him and went, what would a white guy do?

[Leo Laporte]

I think we podcast are a pretty damp bunch of people. That's what I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he's like a dark web podcaster.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Ted Joya. Joya, the honest broker. I want to talk when we come back from our break about his piece. Are we now living in a parasite culture? In the new consumer economy, you get consumed. And he has a theory, by the way, about why AI is of such great interest to these big companies like Google, Microsoft and so on. But we will take a break before we get to that. What a fun panel. Ed Zittran, it's great to have you. Ed is in the world of pr, so you can. Everything he says is basically suspect. Better. Offline.com is his website.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just love seeing how bad he's getting.

[Ed Zittrin]

Beautiful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I need to mute myself. I'm giggling.

[Leo Laporte]

Millie, am I wrong that we consider PR the dark side?

[Emily Drybalbus]

It's the damp side.

[Leo Laporte]

The damn side.

[Ed Zittrin]

The damn side. I like that. The other day I referred to Edelman as the Habsburgs of pr.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Complimentary. What are these? These insults are not going far enough.

[Ed Zittrin]

I can't say what I actually think.

[Leo Laporte]

Because he isn't reminded me of Maria Teresa. Okay, Emily Dry Bulbas is also here from PC magazine. So Great to have you both. And of course, Jeff Jarvis Paris is on assignment for the information. Apparently there's something big going on in South Brooklyn.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think it must be a new coffee shop opening.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she's getting some interesting assignments. She'll be back next week and I'm hoping. I'm waiting and we haven't heard from him yet that my son's going to call in just to plug his cookbook, a free ad. This is what you get when your father has is a podcast bro for his new cookbook which came out yesterday. I finally got my copy. It's been so long it was delivered to the wrong address. I had to go to the studio to get it. Salt, Hank, A five napkin situation. Well, I hope get to talk to him in just a little bit. Our show today, brought to you by Experts Exchange. Well, if you don't like AI, if you like human intelligence, you will love Experts Exchange. A network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals who can give you industry insights and advice from people who are actually using your tech stack. Right. They know this stuff. I talk to people who know instead of paying for expensive enterprise level tech support or going to those other sites where you get the snark. I've heard this question before. Why would you ever want to do that? Or you shouldn't do what you want to do, do what I want you to do. This is Experts Exchange, the tech community for people tired of the AI sellout. In fact, Experts Exchange says they're ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. I have to, I have to acknowledge it. It is the best kind of intelligence. Experts Exchange gives you access to professionals in every field of computing. We're talking coding, Microsoft Azure, DevOps, AWS. I can go on and on. And unlike other places, there's no snark. Duplicate questions are encouraged. There are no dumb questions because their contributors are tech enthusiasts who actually get off on answering your question. They understand that the real benefit, the real reward for developing an expertise in an area is paying it forward is sharing your expertise with others who also want to learn. And they love doing it. It also helps that they get good karma points and there's even CPE credits available to them. One member said, I've never had GPT stop and ask me a question before, but that happens at Expert Exchange all the time. Experts Exchange is proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. If it's not human, it's not a community. Right? You're going to love it. Their expert directory, full of Experts to help you find what you need, including many people who listen to our shows, like Rodney Barnhart, good friend of the show. He listens to Security now and other Twitch shows. He's a VMware V expert, Edward von Billion, who is a Microsoft MVP and an ethical hacker. Here's a guy who really knows his stuff. There are Cisco design professionals. You can even get management advice. There are executive IT directors there and more other platforms. This is really important. We just that we just learned last week that LinkedIn was going to sell everything you post there for. For AI training. So many, so many platforms do this. Reddit $60 million from Google so that's they can scrape it right. Other platforms betray their contributors by selling their content to train AI models. I want to tell you this at Experts Exchange, your privacy is not for sale. They stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide. And this is the unequivocal statement they have never and will never sell your data, your content, your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train LLMs moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in their threads. It's by people for people. It's Experts Exchange. Experts deserve a place where they can share their expertise, their knowledge, their secret, hard earned secret info without worrying about some corporations stealing it to increase shareholder value. And humanity deserves a safe place, a haven from AI Experts Exchange. They are so confident that you will appreciate the community there that you'll get value from it. They're offering you now 90 days free. No credit card required. 90 days free. Ask all the questions you want. E-E.com Twitter 90 days free. Don't even give them a credit card. I think you're going to like this. E-E.com Twitter we thank experts Exchange so much for supporting the show. And we thank you for supporting the show, by the way, because when you go to that address, they say, oh, they heard it on twig. Oh. E-E.com on we go with. What a prickly little panel we got here today. I'll tell you.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Emily, are you okay if you talk about that piece? Jesus, what a pile up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you just read it, did you? Yeah, I don't like thinking about Parasite. I don't know who this guy is. Is he a.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Let me tell you first, let me tell you first, okay, because. Because if you first look at his bio. Oh, he. He's a jazz critic and a music historian. But wait, after graduating as an advisor to five Fortune 500 companies working for BCG and McKinsey he worked on Sandhill Road.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's a VC.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He's known as the guy with the piano in his office.

[Leo Laporte]

So from that he's a jazzy vc.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He'S now going to criticize all of business because he's cashed out. Go ahead, Leo.

[Ed Zittrin]

Who. Who is this? Where do we have a link to this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the Honest Broker. I think it's on. Is it substack or medium? I can' Gioia, Gya or Joya.

[Ed Zittrin]

Oh, this guy. I get sent his every so often. And you'll read it and it's present at the beginning, and then you'll see it slightly get weird and then there's a paywall.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a weirdness in this. I'm not going to read the weird part. It's having to do with ticks and laguardia. But he does make, I think, a valid point, which is, I heard that. I heard that.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It's the very. Before you begin, it's See what my antenna go up when. It's the variation of, well, if you don't pay, then you're the product.

[Leo Laporte]

This kind of is.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Which drives me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

He says, just take a look at the dominant digital platforms and consider how little they actually create. What does Facebook actually create? Almost nothing. It relies on 3 billion users to create content. Ugh. Their word, not mine. Then monetizes those people and their unpaid labor. I don't disagree with that. What does Google actually create? Look how it destroys newspapers while doing zero journalism itself.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Bite me.

[Leo Laporte]

Ed is rubbing off on you. Jeff, I just want to say this is.

[Emily Drybalbus]

This is the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know it's everybody, okay?

[Emily Drybalbus]

This is the sanctimoniousness of content. Our content is so valuable. How dare anyone touching it. All right, pain is a fortune.

[Leo Laporte]

How about this one? What does Spotify create?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Transaction.

[Leo Laporte]

One person, a single. Okay. He says Spotify CEO is now richer than any musician in the history of the world.

[Emily Drybalbus]

My jazz is so valuable.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Daniel Ek makes more money than Taylor Swift.

[Ed Zittrin]

Because this one's right, though. Like, the Spotify example's right.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

They are a parasite.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Parasite. But he's also.

[Leo Laporte]

What does Tick Tock create? Nothing. Now, I have not an insight.

[Ed Zittrin]

This is like a decade old.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I understand, I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's the insight. No, wait a minute. This is the. This is merely here 3. The foundation.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It better be good. Leo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Where are you going?

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, come on, Leo, go there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not me, it's Ted.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I Think. I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you gonna make it out?

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the problem.

[Ed Zittrin]

The movie Parasite Kill me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he does have. Well, parasite. It's a little.

[Ed Zittrin]

A little too fantastic movie. That means nothing related to this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they lived in the basement. They were kind of parasites, right?

[Ed Zittrin]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

They would get up in the middle of the night. The refrigerator. That's a literal parasite.

[Ed Zittrin]

But the suggestion is the rich people are the parasites on the cyst. Oh, my God, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is reversed anyway, these big companies, and we've said this many times. You're right. This is not a great insight. Twitter is just a platform. The content comes from its users. And to the degree that Twitter monetizes that they're monetizing your work, I think it's really true of YouTube. Sure, there are people make a lot ofMONEY on YouTube. YouTube definitely trumpets those people. But the vast majority of people on YouTube sweat blood to create content for which they make no money. Who makes the money? Google. TikTok is exactly the same. My son has 2.5 million followers on TikTok. How does he make money? He has to do cookbooks, sell products because he never got $1 from Tick Tock. So that. But that's not a. That's not. No, he never made any money from Tick Tock.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll ask him. But nothing significant. No, the way Ted writes is even well paid. Influences.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this the point of the blog post?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Hang in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Still feeling a little.

[Ed Zittrin]

Can you get to it?

[Leo Laporte]

The point is they're running out of content and that's why they love AI.

[Ed Zittrin]

I wrote this newsletter in God damn March.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God, Ed is already.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Well, forget Ted Joya. Tell us, Ed, why do these platforms love.

[Ed Zittrin]

They love it because they can just flood the zone with. They can keep people on the system and have them add more stuff. The more stuff there is, the more convoluted it gets. But the more time you spend on the platform. Are we watching the Internet die? Was the piece when I wrote this goddamn point. But because Ted Giardia. Flipping.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Ted Giardia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I think it's a little bit of a.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just read one more. Couple more paragraphs. Okay. It's no coincidence that these parasitic platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand they are killing their hosts when the host dies. AI generated content can replace human creativity. Or to be blunt about it, the host will die because of AI generated content. And then the web billionaires won't even need to toss those few shekels at artists. It's every parasite stream. The host can die, but the leech still lives on.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's nonsense. That's. I'm sorry. No. If they think they're going to fill their social networks with AI, that is a dumbass's opinion. Written by a dumbass and published by a dumbass. Sorry, that's just such a.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the kindly. I am also a dumbass.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, no, no, no, no. You're actually trying to look at this in an intellectual way.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I really. I finally realized what my job is, by the way. It came to me yesterday. My job is merely to throw chum into the water and then sit back and let you guys get all frothy.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Just like a media person. Just like algorithm. You're the algorithm.

[Ed Zittrin]

Talk about charming, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead, circle. Circle. I threw the chum in. Go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Emily was saying.

[Ed Zittrin]

Emily had a middle ground. She was saying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh well right now I've written about recently that YouTube and all these platforms are giving are creating AI creator tools. So like if you make YouTube videos, you can have more AI to create fake backgrounds to augment your videos. So it's. Right now the goal is not to just flood YouTube TikTok, blah blah blah with like pure AI content. Although kind of mix.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of the algorithmically most successful stuff on YouTube is AI generated garbage. Right.

[Ed Zittrin]

Which is the point I made in Are we watching the Internet die? A piece which I wrote months and months ago, March 11th.

[Leo Laporte]

It's eating itself like our Boris.

[Ed Zittrin]

It is. It is creating. What happens is AI generated content becomes popular on the app on the algorithm, thus perpetuating more AI generated content. @ that point, it's no longer about what's popular. What's popular is decided by the algorithm. But if AI generated stuff used by these AI powered tools which have a. General Corey Doctorow made a really good point about this, my podcast. He said AI generation is more conservative. It kind of turns everything to the median mediocre.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

And everyone's making the same thing with the same tools. Removing backgrounds in the same way so they create more content. Which you point Emily. But at this point it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Stuff made for the algorithm by AI tools that were built to make the algorithm happy. It's horrifying and bad.

[Leo Laporte]

It isn't.

[Ed Zittrin]

Well, I mean the parasite side is the stuff he said at the beginning, which is not trench and insight. It's just. God, I hate people that do this. I spend too long writing my Blogs. But at least I goddamn research stuff. He's just there going, what if it's this? Yeah, well, and then I get sent his crap by my book editor, which I don't want to see.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Ed, if you really. This would be a great book title.

[Ed Zittrin]

I already have a book coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, do you? What's your book about?

[Ed Zittrin]

It's called why Everything Stopped Working.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Beautiful. Perfect.

[Ed Zittrin]

About that. Yeah, yeah. It's Penguin Random House, 2020.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm gonna buy it. I'll write about it one day.

[Ed Zittrin]

Thank God.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you haven't written word one, have you?

[Ed Zittrin]

Well, I mean, we've just signed the contract. Like, I just. I just made the deal, man. Come on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And also, congratulations. Congratulations.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not wrong. That, but. And by the way, you would agree with this, Benito, Benito Gonzalez has always chimed in on Suno. We've used Suno to make music. He says Suno. Ed. Ed Giardia says Suno has digested essentially all music files available on the web to create a technology that replaces human musicians. Corey's right. The music is mediocre. And Benito, I think your point was it was quite well taken. We make music because we like to make the music.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yes. It's the craft of it all.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Process.

[Ed Zittrin]

Like, it's like. It's how I feel about AI generated writing. When you write it. And even with like AI generated research, it's the process of doing something makes you better at it. By writing and getting feedback, but also just the process of forming thoughts and putting them onto a page, you become a better writer. That is what people come to you to read.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but Ed, the way I become a better writer is by ingesting all your writing.

[Ed Zittrin]

Exactly. But it's a very. That's a very Silicon Valley way looking at the world, it's like, well, a writer, right? They just read a lot of words, right? Remembered them all and then put them down another way.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. That's how artwork, art is just like, I saw everything and now I can pay anything. Even though it all kind of has the same kind of dead eyed thing. I will say Grok is the funniest image generator. You can go on to Grok and you can say, please generate me an image with a lot of copyright violations and it'll have Shrek, Garfield, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm amazed that Elon has sued by Nintendo yet. Grok is not yet.

[Ed Zittrin]

By the way, I pay. I pay for Twitter, but I donate everything to the Trevor project. Okay, so you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't Like Sam Altman. But you're plugging Elon Musk.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's why I'm sending it to the Trevor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I feel like Elon walks. An evil man could run like, yes, there you go.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think that they're very different monsters. Elon Musk is like, yeah, horrifying. Horrifying. Bog creature, Sexist, racist, asshole. Sam Altman is like a McKinsey machine. Yeah, he's like a McKinsey and damp bog beast. And he just kind of damp bog.

[Leo Laporte]

Beast, but he's a puffy vest made.

[Ed Zittrin]

Damn Altman. There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Damp Altman.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So the problem, Leo, with this piece to me, is, and I'm sorry, I'll plug my current book, the Gutenberg parenthesis, is that it's this idea of content. And the content is where all the value resides, is an industrial ego of our industry. And I just don't think that it's as valuable as we think. And the problem with AI, in the end is that it will commodify all content because it'll make a whole bunch of crap. And it's not a problem. The value doesn't lie there. Emily. When you write something, it's about telling me information that is valuable. To me, your writing is very good. But. But the fact that now 100 people will go and rewrite you just to get their own clicks is what's killing the web, as Ed has said. And that's because it's content oriented. And the business model behind it is all content oriented. It's the attention economy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I mean, if I could write a book, one thing I might write it about would be just. I think the way to combat all this is just making sure we have really compelling experiences offline. We still have good taste in content. Like, you want to see images that make you feel something, you want to read that something that makes you feel something. We want to have cultural experiences. Like, we need to just keep doing all those things and not just sit at home on our computers and our phones regurgitating and consuming AI generated content. Because if people like it, they'll keep doing it and spend their whole day looking at that stuff, which is what these companies want. So as long as people have interests outside of this crap, we should be fine.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah. They have lives and they have needs. And I argue in journalism, we've got to worry about understanding their lived experiences and bringing the value to their lives and their communities.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think there's going to be a backlash that we're going to? The pendulum will swing the other way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I'm thinking we should hope for that. I think we should make that happen. We should get people out of their house. We should get people off their phone, into events with their neighbors, the. To the park, family events. They should be pursuing hobbies, you know, Hobbies. What a thing. You know, things that don't involve screens.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think the being on the computer is fun. And if people enjoy being on the computer, that's great. I think that you were right that people need more hobbies, but there need to be new ways to meet people because right now we don't have those. Like, we are. We are in a time when meeting people and making friends has never been harder.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Is that a cry for help because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They'Re everyone on their computer at home?

[Ed Zittrin]

No, no, genuinely, seriously, like. Yeah, I've. I have always had trouble making friends. I've always felt kind of strange in the world. I've always felt kind of lonely. And I've made a lot of my friends, a lot of my relationships online. And it's like, I don't think that. I think that people vastly overestimate. Oh, sorry. Underestimate. How difficult it is to make friends these days. And I think that, Emily, you're right. People should go and do that, but there is very little infrastructure to actually make that happen. And I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I think it's interesting, but you're not really making friends online person. But they can't come to your house and help you. They do mount furniture or. What do you mean? You real like. Oh, not just online relationships. Like, you just meet them there and then you meet up in person.

[Ed Zittrin]

Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got it. All right, that's fine. Just everyone has a different style, right? Some people will do that. Some people will. I've played a lot of intramural sports in my adult life. I've made friends there. You get a drink after the game, stuff like that, or volunteering or people who go to religious types of events. I don't know. There's. It just depends on who you are and what you like.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. It's just not that easy, though. Like, it's. It's not really not.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And I'm going to argue that it's easier than when Leo and I were young, you know, you think that, oh, well, we can just go down the corner and meet somebody. Especially if you're a little weird. It's real hard to find people who are like you. And you look, back in the early days of dating, there was much stigma to using things like New York Review of Books or personals but there was a huge amount of that because it was kind of the only way people could meet. I have a friend who went to live early in the Internet days, went to live in Japan, and when she came back, she was just shocked that every one of her friends was using online dating. This was new to her because she was gone for seven years. And it just happened in that time. And there are mechanisms. I mean, Leo and I are friends because we met online.

[Leo Laporte]

How did we meet?

[Ed Zittrin]

How did you two meet?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Well, actually, no, actually, I knew of you because son Jake had me buy your books. But then you called me because.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I said, google what we want to do. You had written a book called what would Google Do?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I thought, well, if the guy's written a book with the name Google in the title, he must be an expert.

[Emily Drybalbus]

There's riches here, there's value. So, Ed, I'm agreeing with you. It's hard, but I'm not necessarily suggesting that it's harder now than it was before the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

You may actually have kind of focused on one of the biggest issues in the modern world today, which is lack of community. And there are. There are people. There are people who will say, well, that's what happens when you become a godless, hedonistic society, when you abandon your churches. I don't know if that's true, but it is certainly the case that community is a very powerful. I know this because I just saw Lululemon ad all about community. And that's very powerful, very important. And. And by the way, it was a great ad until I saw it was for Lululemon. I went kind of.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Well, not to get too serious, but Hannah Arendt would argue that when people become, yes. Isolated from their communities because of hate and fear and such, they become lonely. Not in the sense of the Surgeon General saying people aren't getting dates, but in a much more profound way. Then they become vulnerable to the siren call of a cult and authoritarian.

[Leo Laporte]

That's when we want a strong man to come and save us. Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So it's really about in what will Google do? I write about the contrary is how do you have a pluralistic society? And a sociologist named Kornhauser says that when you end up in that position where you have no connections, there's nothing to compete with the draw of the elite of the fascist versus if you have many connections across various things, which is what Emily listed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Then you have to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is exactly what I was saying. We need to have competing, you know, parts of our attention it can't just be. All we do is sit at home and we scroll through AI generated content on our phone. We have to have something compelling outside of this technology to balance it, because when we. The Internet should still be useful. I don't want AI to ruin it, but it is just going to be a garbage life and a garbage Internet experience if all we bring to it is just eyeballs on AI generated content. Like, you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Ironically, what does bring people together is tragedy. Somebody in our discord, Fiddik Vien, is talking about North Carolina and Hurricane Helene and the community that forms around these kinds of tragedies really shows the best of us. It's when we really do show that we still have that instinct, we still have that ability to bond together, to drop our differences and to help one another. It's too bad it requires tragedy to.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Do that, but it doesn't just require. I'll give you an example from this week. So because of this show, Joe Esposito, who's in our discord, who's wonderful, who makes mocking pictures of me. But that's okay. I forgive him. I was on his podcast for.

[Ed Zittrin]

Podcast.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, that's podcast. And I was on it. And it's as if we were friends already because we have you, Leo, in common.

[Leo Laporte]

The parasocial relationship is real, is genuine.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It is. It's very real. I've made a lot of friends that way.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But Ed's still right that if. I mean, I also have a. I'm married and I have a family and, you know, so that I have a structure around me that I didn't have for a lot of years. And it's hard to build those kinds of relationships of mutual support.

[Leo Laporte]

Is technology one of the things that's causing distancing?

[Emily Drybalbus]

I would argue it's the opposite.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think that it's not technology that's. I think it's a religious. I think it's like the death of religion and walkable cities and communities in general.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You could say cars have ruined.

[Ed Zittrin]

Cars have. Like urban expansion has. I mean, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

We all live at a driving distance from one another, which makes us inaccessible to each other without a car.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. And.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I think that it is correlated a lot with technology. Like a lot of the metrics that seem to have, or at least the way people who've studied it, have correlated more time online with loneliness, suicide, reporting, unhappiness. That seems to be like just a correlation where maybe some of this stuff, cities and cars, is kind of a Bigger trend but there does seem to be an effective technology specifically.

[Ed Zittrin]

I agree though I am I like this is a weird case. We'll say I realize I am the anecdote rather than the rule but I have had the opposite experience moments of like the depression. I've had some like mental health difficulties. I've found being online has severe. Has like changed my life and helped me especially because like I didn't make friends growing up. I couldn't do it. I. I don't know. I didn't get really diagnosed with anything. They. I was just a strange large child and. And now I'm a slightly smaller, much stranger adult. But I'm proud of who I am. But I've also found most of my support system through being online. That being said, I also got online in a really weird time. I got on with like CompuServe, a beautiful gold PCM IA card. Made a lot of friends through EverQuest.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Let me ask you a question and I mean this seriously. Oh sure you are. You have high standards. You don't suffer idiots at all easily.

[Leo Laporte]

Or podcast hosts or podcasts for that matter.

[Ed Zittrin]

No online gave you assumption. I was not like that growing up.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Became that you became a sour bitter adult.

[Ed Zittrin]

I'm not bitter at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Part of becoming an adult unfortunately.

[Leo Laporte]

From retcon5 in our club twit. This is an older article, but it's from the Guardian. Is America suffering a social recession? Most this from Anton Ceballo writing Americans report having less sex, fewer friends and a loss of trust in each other and society. This is from polling of course. The decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair and poor health more generally. In August of 2022 the CDC announced US life expectancy who had fallen to where it was 2030 years earlier. Whereas life expectancy in Europe is. Has rebounded to pre pandemic numbers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lot of that is from opioids actually it is.

[Ed Zittrin]

I also wonder if that number might have gone up from actually diagnosing people as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we maybe weren't aware of these issues of.

[Ed Zittrin]

And a willingness to actually seek mental health services people did not have 30 years ago. But I think that there are a number of different factors and I do believe the Internet could make it worse. I think especially if you have, if you're. If you have self image issues. Instagram can be like that. There isn't really a ton of compelling science behind it. Like there's a lot of warring different academic disciplines on this. But I think what we're all saying are all parts of the same problem. Like I don't think it's any one thing. I don't think the Internet on its own is making people lonelier. But a lack of community in real life means that people who are online and lonely might go into horrifying things like ngtow young men who are disenfranchised with the world instead of, I don't know, like seeing that the world can be unfair and taking a fair minded view at it. They'll find an Andrew Tate. They'll find an easy, comfortable, pre packaged thing built to allure them. That is where social media can be extremely damaging. But social media in and of itself is Here's a conveyance of a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

A book from 25 years ago, Robert D. Putnam, a political scientist. The study was called Bowling Alone the Collapse and Revival of American Community. It documents the decline of sociability in the US since the 50s by tracing the dwindling number of Americans frequenting religious and civic organizations, volunteer work, sports clubs, hobbyist groups and so on. American community is on the decline, which.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Led to the founding of meetup.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Emily Drybalbus]

That inspired it. Yeah, but I'm still gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Meetup change everything? No, it was a good idea.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You have a pug, man, you can find punctures and you know the great story that Clay Shirkey told about Meetup is that. Is that when Scott Hyphen started it, they had to put a schedule out because they wanted to try to get people on the schedule. But then when enough people came to enough meetups, they could just open it up as a platform. And the number one trending meetup was witches. Good, because witches couldn't find witches to.

[Leo Laporte]

Have other magic for that other Wiccans.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Only if you do it together.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it.

[Emily Drybalbus]

If you get the spell. I'm trying to ask you the question. But, but didn't. Oh, didn't the Internet open up the universe of people you could find that you would like and respect more than gee, I happen to live in one neighborhood or I happen to be in one building and this is who I got.

[Ed Zittrin]

I must say something very depressing. I did not have friends up until the age of like 17.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Wow.

[Ed Zittrin]

The people at my high school were horrible. I despise all of them to this day. And I remember all their names. Yeah, now you understand.

[Leo Laporte]

My list buddy in the US said where was.

[Ed Zittrin]

But what I'm. What I'm saying is I. I made friends. Oh, maybe I'm actually kind of agreeing with you. Like I would have made Friends on my street, if it was safe to walk outside and make friends. It was not a safe neighborhood. There was no intramural activity I went to. There was only school. And school was the only place for me to socialize. I'm not religious, never have been. Why would I believe in God? And it's thus, where was I meant to go? I was a fat child. I wasn't sporty. I didn't really have hobbies. I was too busy being depressed. So I really feel bad for you. Don't I? Like me, having these conversations means that someone listening might feel better about themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Ed Zittrin]

Amen.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What changed it for you?

[Ed Zittrin]

What? Going to Penn State. I went to Penn State when I was. When I was in college for an exchange year, and it allowed me to break the cycle. And then I moved to America because I was just unhappy in my environment in England.

[Leo Laporte]

But also the problem really is the uk.

[Ed Zittrin]

Honestly, you can blame England for a hell of a lot of things. I think that's a great place to start.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But the accent. The accent works.

[Ed Zittrin]

Accent's brilliant. The rest, it's like the social stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's usually a good move for someone.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you grew up in Margaret Thatcher's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Move to the U.S. yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You grew up in Margaret Thatcher's England.

[Ed Zittrin]

Which was not a John Major more than anything. But yes.

[Emily Drybalbus]

There's a fascinating story that I saw in Dietzeit a week ago that in the two states in Germany that went to the far right party, the AfD Women or Young women move out. They just leave because they have their ax together and they don't stay around. And then that leaves the young men behind who are losers in that sense and feel like that become vulnerable to the siren call of these guys. And then there was. There was a column in the New York Times at the Washington Post, either today or yesterday, that was trying to argue that not all men, not all young men are misogynistic. But it was really a reverse argument. What it was saying was, well, it looks worse because the women really have their act together and they're acting differently and the young men aren't. And so it makes them. It pitches the kind of statistics.

[Ed Zittrin]

Again, it's not men's fault for men acting the way they do. It's just women are.

[Leo Laporte]

We do the best. We do the best we can.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's the incel.

[Leo Laporte]

We do the best our testosterone brains allow us.

[Ed Zittrin]

Least manly thing in the world. Just being like, well, women are too good. That's why I suck. Jesus Christ.

[Leo Laporte]

One thing I have learned in my advanced state is that each gender has its own issues.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh God. Yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

We as humans have issues and humans are genuine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

Subjected to things.

[Leo Laporte]

But do you. We're going to take a break. But is there. Do then we have a consensus here.

[Ed Zittrin]

That I think we kind of do with.

[Leo Laporte]

Something's gone wrong in our society.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do too. I'm just not in. In some cases I'm not. It's hard in your case, Ed. Like if you had just grown up 100 years earlier, you may have also blossomed as an adult.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not necessarily because of the Internet. So it's just your story is so worthwhile and valuable. It's just hard. I don't think we've Quite, quite.

[Ed Zittrin]

It's an anecdote though. I recognize mine is not the typical experience.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe more typical than you think.

[Emily Drybalbus]

From alone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do think the Internet is not just a mirror for society's problems. I do think it creates new problems. I think algorithmic driven feeds create their own problems, which is a certain field of thought. There's people who think platforms are innocent. This is a whole section 230 debate. If you know.

[Ed Zittrin]

I literally just had this on with MIT economist on my podcast about 230. I know exactly what you mean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Exactly. So I'm in the camp that I think the algorithm does produce its own unique effect and it's not just kind of guilt free. So.

[Ed Zittrin]

Fully agree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do. I believe that technology is creating unique and new problems.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So would you also agree that the Internet creates opportunities that otherwise didn't exist?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of course. But I just find that so frustrating. Like there's just. It's just you don't know the percentage of good to bad and so you're just saying, well let's just keep perpetuating all this bad on the chance that the good stuff.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Same argument made for television. Made for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. It's very complex. Yes.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah. And. And.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it doesn't undermine the problem. The. For the fact that there are problems means they should still be solved. Not that like we should just let them.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Not blame the Internet as a way of solving it. That's not necessarily going to be productive actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But there are ways to regulate the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

You can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There are ways to improve.

[Leo Laporte]

You could blame tv. The fact that people go home and spend four hours sitting in front of a screen alone. As much as you can blame anything else.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. But there. There are ways.

[Ed Zittrin]

The television doesn't randomly change the channel to keep you watching.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't need to. It is a Self perpetuating machine that ratings mean it's going to get closer and closer to what will keep you stick stuck.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They put regulation on television. Like for example, you can't just.

[Leo Laporte]

No regulation.

[Emily Drybalbus]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. You can't just watch like you don't just watch hardcore porn on average like news.

[Emily Drybalbus]

In Germany you can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In Germany you can probably. But there are things they don't show on tv. Like it's not just like we just let these, you know, technologies just free for all. We put some shape around it. We figure out how to improve society with them. You don't just be like, oh well.

[Leo Laporte]

Well there's very little regulation on television. I think the regular. The only thing that regulates television is societal mores.

[Ed Zittrin]

It's just a different thing entirely. I'm not sure what you're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And no one watches tv. I'm just saying no one has a tv. Like no one pays for tv. No one watches the algorithm. So you algorithms specific.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. 50 years ago, before there were computers for you to sit and watch six hours a day, there was a television set which I could tell you people sat and watched six hours a day and had I think much of the same effect of alienating you from your society.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm much higher. They're higher like extremism today because the algorithm is making people going in rabbit holes.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's a mistake to blame the algorithm for extremism and I think the risk of doing that is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're so completely disagree with.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Does not. The research in my upcoming book out next week, the web we weave really argues with that creating niche communities specifically for.

[Ed Zittrin]

For niche extremist groups who were perfectly.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Normal beforehand and everything was. Yes.

[Ed Zittrin]

They just couldn't find each other quite as easily.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So they've studied on YouTube that people who begin in a certain subject on YouTube by the end have a more extreme viewpoint of it because once you start getting one suggested video, it takes you down. Down.

[Emily Drybalbus]

There's a lot of contrary research that actually show people don't go to those extreme videos through YouTube's algorithm, but instead through outside links through places like Breitbart. That's how most of the stuff is found. It's in a much larger ad on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

YouTube from Breitbart or. What do you mean?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh no, there's links from extremist sites and they use YouTube as their library. YouTube is not getting people to those bad places. Outside is getting them there and YouTube is the solution. Let me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

YouTube has more. Has extreme content on it and people are just going down video Libraries, millions.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Of young girls and thousands of young boys are novelized into idiocy. Our magazine warned in 1880, novel readers are like opium smokers. The more they have of it, the more they want it. And the publishers delighted at the state of affairs. You go on corrupting publication, understanding and making fortunes out of this corruption.

[Ed Zittrin]

We've been here Socrates who was like, oh, we can't teach people to read or I forget this bloody point. It doesn't make sense. In this example, if the algorithm is showing a bunch of right wing wank on Twitter, more people are seeing right wing extremism, which by and by and large will. If someone is already leaning right, if someone is lonely and disenfranchised and looking for someone to blame, they will start blaming minorities.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Look at the underlying cause of why they're lonely and disenfranchised.

[Ed Zittrin]

How about we look at the goddamn algorithm? How about we actually hold these companies responsible?

[Emily Drybalbus]

How do we disagree?

[Ed Zittrin]

Just why?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Because of freedom of expression. Section230 is our first amendment for online. And all the voices who were not heard in mainstream mass media run by people who look like me. Old white men all these years now have their voice. And it is certain parts of society that want to shut them up now. And they use this regulation and this panic and this moral panic to do so. That's why.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, everyone agrees Section 230 is very imperfect on both sides of the aisle.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's fighting words.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, everyone does not agree that with.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who think it needs a lot of work.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh yeah, because they both want to go after tech companies and think they're evil.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you saying that people want to go after white guys with regulating the Internet?

[Leo Laporte]

Emily, I want to be very clear about this. I want to be very clear about this. This. Without section 230, about half of the things I do with Twitter we couldn't do. We couldn't have a chat room, we couldn't have a twitch social Mastodon instance. We couldn't have the discord. So many things we couldn't do because of liability issues. I don't think she's really important. Section230 does not just protect big companies that don't deserve protection.

[Ed Zittrin]

She's not talking about repealing it though.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, any change to it is very risky because the liability issue for small.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Legislation and it's worked very well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You think it's likely that something founded in the very, very, very early days of the Internet can still Meaningfully regulate the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

This country still runs in a constitution that's written almost 300 years ago.

[Ed Zittrin]

And it runs in a serious manner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Serious flaws with it.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It's.

[Ed Zittrin]

It like it. The constitution is regularly used.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You want to open it up, you open up the constitution. Our current politics. See what happens.

[Ed Zittrin]

I mean, our current policy. So we just never change it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, yeah, I don't get it. You guys just don't believe in evolving.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a mistake to think that there is a universal agreement. The section 230 is flawed. Yes, it universal. And I will fight to the death to not change 231 bit. It is vital to the kind of expression we do here at TWiT. And I don't think we're a big company trying to take advantage of people. So it's very easy for the right and the left to say, well, look at big tech. We need to do something about them. That's not what this is about. Section230 protects little guys. And it's really important.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And publishers too. Publishers who complain about they're protecting.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're gonna take a little break and come back with more. I will continue the chumming in just a moment. But we got a great panel. We got a fiery panel here. And Emily, I'm proud of you. You're. You're. My wife said Emily's holding her own in this sausage fest. It is a bit of a sausage fest. I apologize. Emily from PC magazine. It's great to have you, Emily. Yeah, she's gonna come in here and slap me upside the head any minute now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not afraid of the sausages in my midst. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Good, good, good.

[Ed Zittrin]

Sausages in My Midst is a really good book title.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's very accurate for the tech, the male dominated industries in which I've worked.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's like Jane Goodall, but it's not gorillas. It's sausages in the mist. Is that what I'm learning?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How to tame them and socialize them so they can socialize the sausage?

[Leo Laporte]

Ed Zitt is also here. His company is better offline.com and that kind of says it all, doesn't it? He also has a fantastic newsletter and podcast, as you might have figured out, because he's a podcast bro.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As am I. Jeff Jarvis, also here, professor emeritus from the City University of New York, author of so many great books. The new one is when? Soon.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Next week.

[Leo Laporte]

Via next week. The Gutenberg parenthesis is the site. Gutenberg parenthesis.com. the new book is the web. We, we, blimey, must reclaim the Internet from moguls, misanthropes and moral panic. And it is exactly what we're talking about right here. Our show today, brought to you by the good folks at Spit Warden. Oh, now I look, we can put aside our differences because there's something we all agree on. Internet security needs to be better than a post it note on the side of your screen. You need a password manager. You need a way to create and remember long, strong, non memorable passwords. Bit Warden's the best because it's open source. It offers a very cost effective solution that can dramatically increase your chances of staying safe online now more than ever. We've got Prime Day coming up in a week. Then it's the holidays. It's Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That means the bad guys will be out in force during all this online shopping. Trying to confuse you with with phishing sites that look exactly like your favorite store. And this is why Bitwarden has expanded. They just announced this. The inline autofill capabilities within their browser extension, not just passwords, now includes cards, identities, pass keys. And the thing about this is when you use Bit Warden to fill in a web form, whether it's payment details or contact info or addresses or whatever, it makes sure that the site you're on is the site you think you're on. That it is not a impersonator, is not targeting you. It is not a phishing site that protects you more than almost anything. Now, if you're a business, you're going to love Bit Warden too. You get unparalleled SSO integration and flexibility so you can quickly and easily safe law safeguard all your business logins, including your single sign on security policies. This is all built in. They're fully compatible with SAML2 and OIDC. And Bitwarden ensures smooth integration with whatever solution you're using. And let me tell you, I know all of you because you're smart. You're all using a password manager. But I know also all of you, certainly all of us have friends and family who don't, who won't, who say, no, no, I'm just going to use the dog's name and my mother's maiden name and my birthday. Who could ever guess that those people need to know about Bit Warden? And if they say, well, I'm not going to pay for a password manager, tell them Bitwarden is open source, free forever to individuals. That means unlimited passwords, every platform, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. That means pass keys. It even means hardware keys all free forever because it's open source and if you're in business, join some of the largest organizations in the world who trust Bit Warden to protect their online information. Because it's open source, Bit Warden can be inspected by anyone. You can go right to the GitHub and look at the code. They are regularly audited by third party experts. This is the way to do it. Switching to Bit Warden is easy. It'll only take a minute or two. They support importing from most password management solutions. And if your brother in law is still using his dog's name and his mother's maiden name, it's very easy for him to start using Bit Warden replace. They help you replace all those bad passwords with good passwords and be protected. What are you waiting for? It's time. Get started with Bit Warden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan for your business or get started for free across all devices forever. As an individual user, this is the password manager I use. It's the one I recommend and I've used it for years. Steve Gibson switched to it a couple of years ago. We're very happy bit warden users bitwarden.com twitter that's bidwarden.com twit we thank him so much for supporting this week in Google. Who getting hot in here? Paris Martino has the day off but we've replaced her with a couple of thermal blankets. It feels like Ed Zittrin is here. He's only a little damp. Emily Dry Bulbas and of course Jeff Jarvis. What about Taylor Lawrence? She's been on the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is an interesting one isn't an interesting story.

[Leo Laporte]

As you know, she is leaving as you know, she was at the Washington Post before that the New York Times. She's leaving the Washington Post to start her own newsletter which will be called User Mag. She says it will create cover the creator economy covering who has power on the Internet and how that power has been yielded. She's going to continue hosting her podcast. Power user huh?

[Ed Zittrin]

You said yielded or wielded?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yielded.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what I said. I've lost. I've lost control of my mouth. She who has power on the Internet and how that power is being wielded. Wielded.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Okay American accents.

[Ed Zittrin]

To me.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to be able to publish whatever I want whenever I want and I want to get the upside of breaking news. Now I'm going to leave this to Jeff because I don't want to wade into this meer but there may be another reason she left the Washington Post.

[Emily Drybalbus]

There was an Instagram that she had that used the meme and it was a meme.

[Leo Laporte]

And so she was at the White House. She was at that social Create the Creators Summit that the president did. She did, as everybody we know did, did a selfie with herself and the President in the background. Now, I haven't seen the Post.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I have you.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see the original post?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, yeah. And it's because it was, it was screenshot immediately. And what was it? It said a war criminal and. Right. But that was the meme and it was around and it was to a few friends. So among the friends, she was extending a joke. This some personal. I presume was not a great friend. It got out, it got into right wing media. You can imagine everything that happened then. So the Post said, we're going to investigate. We never really heard what was going on. It wasn't a case where they said, off with your head immediately. But Taylor has also been, after having left the Times, she's been very critical of the Times from the Post, which they don't like very much, either of them. And so she is her own person. I respect her immensely. I subscribed immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

She's been on this show because I.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Think that she covers the Internet not as a technology, but as a human venture and understands empathetically, especially with young, young people.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a little problem with her because she often makes herself the story.

[Ed Zittrin]

I agree on that. And also I felt like I consider Taylor a friend, but tell her this to her face. I think it's extremely goddamn rude the way she put her leaving thing. I think it's insulting to the people at the Washington Post. I think it's insulting to people at the New York Times, people that have helped her, helped her grow her career. I think immediately just biting your thumb at the mainstream media while describing in detail literally what the Washington Post tech desk, which is one of the best in the industry, does every single day, and then acting as if it's unique is just insulting to her former colleagues.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And they kicked her in the rear end on the way out with a snarky story that brought up all this stuff again.

[Ed Zittrin]

And that isn't her colleagues, that wasn't the tech desk.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It was somebody at the Post. Sure, but she didn't even know.

[Leo Laporte]

So the Post sent at the New York Times.

[Ed Zittrin]

Oh yeah. The way that they've made this immediate story is bullshit for Taylor, pardon my French. It like making this like the David Falcon thing on NPR was just nonsense.

[Emily Drybalbus]

This isn't Exactly. So she's also a media post and I'm hoping criticism.

[Leo Laporte]

The Post officials statement was. They sent this to the Times. We are grateful for the work Taylor has produced at the Washington Post. She has resigned to pursue an a career in independent journalism and we wish her the best. She did not get fired according to this. And I don't believe about that. Right. I mean, by the way, I've been trying to go to her site and it's blocked as a malware site, so.

[Ed Zittrin]

Damn. Damn, that sucks. I'm sorry. If that happened to my blog, I would. I would start my car in the garage. Sadly, it's an electric car, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I start my car usermag. Co I get malware and phishing. This site is blocked because it is a known security threat.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay, that's bad. That sucks for her.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's a typo, but this is the link directly from the New York Times. Maybe they're doing this.

[Ed Zittrin]

Oh, it might be the forwarding like crap they put on top of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Emily.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I typed it in by.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Emily was trying to speak.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead, Emily.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're so sweet, Jeff. Thank you. Well, more power to her. I think anyone who goes independent after having, you know, some serious institutional giants supporting you until now, like, that's a huge leap. So good for her on that. I think. I wish she had just embraced that instead of saying she's going to be like an antidote to the Washington Post or I think she can just do something different and not have to trample on where she came from. And for that reason, it felt more of like a rage effort. And that's never good. You shouldn't start something just because you want to, like, make fun of somebody else or. I just. It didn't feel right.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, I think it's a very mature thing to say, Emily. And you're right to that extent. However, in the chum structure here, I can't wait for Taylor to also be a media critic. I spent two hours recording a podcast yesterday with David Falkenflick, which is not out yet. And it was uncomfortable because I'm criticizing the New York Times and the Washington Post and big old media. And he's extremely defensive of it when I. When I'm trying to press him to be in a position as a media writer to look at what's happening right now with the huge wave of anger at these institutions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and he's just defending them instead, which is bothering me. And he did go after Taylor, I think, in a very unfair way.

[Ed Zittrin]

No reason.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He was used by the right wing. He had to be sophisticated enough to know that. And I frankly dread when this podcast is going to come out because it's going to be edited down to nothing. And he filibustered a lot because he put a radio guy in front of a microphone. And they never stop. Right, Leo? And so, yeah, Taylor is her own character. I think that I've seen other cases like this where she started as a blogger and then they try to say, oh, you're cool. Come into the institution. And she never fully, completely fit in the institution because she saw the Internet her way, wanted to cover it her way, and got in trouble with the institution that way because of her social media. She covers social media. She's a creature of that social media. And then she gets in trouble for being what she covers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but it's fine. She doesn't need to fit the institution. Like, she can just be not right for that role. And there can still. The Washington Post can still exist. Like, it's fine.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. There's no reason that both can't coexist. A flood, like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I'm hoping to hear her voice about.

[Ed Zittrin]

What is she fixing. She's describing literally what everyone else says ever whenever they leave a major media outlet. Every single time.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Maybe that tells us something in that.

[Ed Zittrin]

It says they are big opportunity in claiming that you are the expert while the Legacy Media isn't.

[Emily Drybalbus]

50 years. 50 years in this career. That's how I fell.

[Ed Zittrin]

Never a great start to a point.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And I now worry that I have. I now worry, Ed, this is going to be like your confession earlier. I now worry that I have wasted my professional life in this field that is utterly right now broken. Legacy media, incumbent media, I have lost great faith in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, what would you like to see change?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Well, I do it. I started a program in engagement journalism, and 10 years of that set out graduates who are really changing news in good ways. But the school that I just quit, I quit because they screwed up the program. And my colleague who ran that program that I started is now elsewhere, and I'm going to help her run it elsewhere. But we went through that because that institution. Oh, no, you can't be mean to the New York Times. You can't criticize the New York Times. And so I see this happening all around, and I think the New York Times right now is severely broken, which disappoints me tremendously because I did depend upon it. I did think it was Wonderful. And I don't know what they're doing in the face of fascism. And I think that's what Taylor also sees. And I think she should be bloody well free to talk about that and to bring that perspective from the inside outside.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me play a bit of her video. I can't get to her website.

[Ed Zittrin]

Like 100. Like apples and oranges. Sorry, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, yeah, Leo's start like a couple breaks in like a couple of minutes and. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or not. My background in independent journalism.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Handy that Emily can see your screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Not Gamers dominate online coverage. Let's start with that. Here we go.

[E]

There's a reason that some of the biggest Internet culture stories today, from crypto scams to bad behavior, from YouTube's biggest stars to thoughtful cultural commentary about online niches, comes from content creators, not the traditional media. And I don't think that's a failure or reflection on the many brilliant and amazing journalists still working in the traditional world. Literally every tech reporter I've worked with has been so amazing and brilliant, and there are so many talented culture reporters who have been laid off because the business model of legacy media is so fundamentally broken. That's also a lot of really amazing editors at certain places that get. But we now live in this world where politicians can post their way into office, where memes fuel the stock market, where the boundaries between mainstream culture and Internet culture are so deeply intertwined that it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The Internet isn't just another beat. It's a living, breathing ecosystem that transforms rapidly and unpredictably. The pace, the culture, the very nature of how information spreads online is so fundamentally different than anything that ever came before it. And legacy media in its current forum is simply not built to cover this world. These institutions were designed for a different era where news was slower, more centralized, where a few gatekeepers could control the narrative, where reporters certainly didn't have direct access to their audiences in the same way, and where institutional power prevailed. But the Internet has blown all of that up. And as the landscape has evolved, it has become clear to me that the legacy media is no longer the right primary environment for the type of work that I want to do. I've always operated in this weird, liminal space where I've been labeled a content creator, an influencer as much as a journalist. And the truth is that I'm both. I've always been both.

[Leo Laporte]

That's always been my problem, by the.

[E]

Way, not set up for people like me in today's media environment. These Silly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And she's not wrong between who's a real. She's gonna fight this with a substack.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

We're all Barry Weiss is worth. God knows that Barry White you really.

[E]

I don't need a job. Oh I can't stand year old institution to reach people, break news and have an impact on the world.

[Ed Zittrin]

And do you think Barry Weiss has done any of this?

[E]

Are those who have taken their I.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Can'T stand very Weiss. I shouldn't have even brought it up. But yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It kind of feels like she just didn't get the time. She just. She wanted to be the star reporter or something at the Washington Post. I think every writes on niche topics. She should work for Vice or like so correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Or she should do what she's doing right now or just do what she's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doing and that's fine. Why does she have to just.

[Leo Laporte]

She's right that may that the media that she worked for isn't really designed to cover the stuff she want the way she wanted to cover it.

[Ed Zittrin]

Why not?

[Leo Laporte]

She's absolutely right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Why not?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh God. This is what I've. I lived through where I watched the New York Times just dismiss.

[Ed Zittrin]

We're talking about Taylor Lorenz at Washington Post.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you.

[Emily Drybalbus]

She was at the New York Times before Ed New York Times. She kind of couldn't survive there. I think she had because they. They thought the New York Times thought blogs are awful and terrible. And I got into public arguments with the then editor of the New York Times. I can show you the whole thing. And then they suddenly said oh no, these are cool. And they had somebody starting blogs. They started blogs and they brought people like Taylor and then they said oh no, we don't like this.

[Ed Zittrin]

Not how Taylor got hired at the New York Times at all. Jeff, what you talking about? She never had a blog.

[Leo Laporte]

She had the Atlantic before she was at New York Times. But. But I think the problem stuff that she covers mainstream media considers ephemera and to some degree compared to the stuff that they like to cover the Congress and the White House stuff, it is ephemeral. I think it needs to be covered. I think she's right. The place to cover is not in Washington Post or New York Times or the Atlantic.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But why not?

[Leo Laporte]

She can write it. She wrote her book. I thought the book was very good society.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's a snobby way to look at the Internet. That is a huge force in.

[Leo Laporte]

I just think it moves too fast for these things. And the other. There's another bigger Problem.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's what's, what's wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is, which is the economics of mainstream media are that there has to be a big corporation that owns it, that's behind it. If it's not Jeff Bezos or the Salzburgers, it's Comcast. And that's a problem because those big corporations have a huge conflict of interest.

[Ed Zittrin]

And I would, I. Thankfully Substack is invested in by trustee Star wars and Horowitz.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe she made a bad, she made a bad choice on platform.

[Ed Zittrin]

Barry Weiss.

[Leo Laporte]

She was already, you know what, she posted this on YouTube. You could probably make the same case that YouTube isn't the best place to be either.

[Ed Zittrin]

Worse on.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to say where if you want to reach a large audience, I mean we just do our own thing and we post it everywhere and we're not dependent on anybody.

[Ed Zittrin]

Go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I just take issue with this term mainstream media, which has just become this buzzword in the past like five, ten years, particularly with people like Elon Musk or other right wing people just using that to get a platform and say I'm right, I'm better than all this, you know, and it's just suspect to me. And I, it's not specific enough. So like I work for PC Mag. I don't think that's, that's been around for 40 years. But I don't think anyone considers it like mainstream media. Like if you're talking about the Washington Post, you're talking about the Washington Post or you're talking about New York Times, just mainstream media is like just disparaging, I would say just journalism in general. And I don't, I don't like that. I don't think that's useful.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I talk about incumbent media, that is to say legacy.

[Ed Zittrin]

But it's still the same thing though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not useful. It's a buzzword.

[Ed Zittrin]

And it's also something that I consider inherently manipulative. Also this is a personal thing.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It's also not mainstream because it doesn't include a whole bunches of our society that are not represented in these media outlets. So mainstream itself is a wishful by those media outlets.

[Ed Zittrin]

But also there's a very big thing and this is just a personal one. If I did a big launch of a new property and I got a bunch of media attention and everyone was talking about, you know what I would have done? Published a goddamn blog.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Lead by example.

[Ed Zittrin]

That, that is actually upsetting to me because you know what? And again taser mate. But you know what? This is just oh, you got all the attention. We didn't even put something out there. Legacy media is publishing all day. They are. They have more barriers to publishing than you do. Where, where's the blog? And that's the thing if you want to do. If she ends up just doing more influencer bonke made thing wrong with donkey like the Washington Post had or influences doing things with the government. What change is being made in the coverage? What is being done differently? Because I agree with Emily, the whole like I'm against the legacy media thing is just kind of thin. And quite frankly, if she doesn't do anything different, she's just part of the legacy media. She just kind of grew out of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is the classic argument like I, I'm the only one who can save the media or something. And that's always, always suspect which they won't tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

What would be the path that you would recommend to her also make a living published.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, she's not gonna make. I mean she can make 130k per year at New York Times or she's not gonna make that in her sub stack, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, she might. People make more than that on stack. That might be one of the reasons she's on substance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, good for her then.

[Leo Laporte]

They probably offered her a pass a packet of money. I would guess they didn't.

[Ed Zittrin]

They would have announced it like but also just.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they announce every.

[Ed Zittrin]

They always do. No, they do. They do joint PR stuff. I don't like how they run things. I don't like who they give money to. But that's how it works there. Here's the thing she could do, and this is not me being an asshole, publish stuff. That's how you actually build a business.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Publish where she will, she will publish.

[Ed Zittrin]

She said, one to three times a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what you have to do.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Videos and do podcasts.

[Ed Zittrin]

The people that I work with are iHeartRadio and Cool so Media. I know it's funny saying iHeartRadio is like they're the most legacy media. But what they've got going on with cool zone media with like behind the bastards, 16th minute, weird little guys and better offline, is that they give you a fairly long lead time to build an audience. That's actually how these mainstream media companies should be doing it. They should effectively be doing loss leading operations for years to build up an audience for each person so that they don't lose people to substack.

[Leo Laporte]

They hate that though. I'll tell you why they hate that. Because those people then become a brand and do leave anyway.

[Ed Zittrin]

Unless, of course, you make the conditions for them. So it's good enough to stay.

[Leo Laporte]

They always do.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's rare. And who gets them?

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, because Robert Evans left. Robert Evans left. Famously left Cool Zone Media after Behind the Bastards became one of the top 20 podcasts in the world. I remember that happening when it didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Like.

[Ed Zittrin]

Here's the thing, Leo. You can't just unilaterally assume that things will never change just because they don't confirm your biases. Don't. I know that sometimes you have to accept that there are different ways of doing things.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just telling you, Ed, from. From deep experience, the reason these companies don't want to build up a big byline, a powerful byline, is because they invest all that money, and then that byline, whether it's Taylor or Ends or whoever you were talking about, who I've never heard of, goes out and does their own.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I sat in those meetings in Conde Nasty.

[Ed Zittrin]

Never invest in our writers then. Great stuff, but Jesus Christ, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, that's why they don't do it. They don't do it because you're saying.

[Ed Zittrin]

They should or they shouldn't, though. Because maybe that's.

[Leo Laporte]

You're saying they should and I'm telling you why they don't.

[Emily Drybalbus]

They don't.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay.

[Emily Drybalbus]

There's a lot of saying they should do, but.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay, then.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Ed Zittrin]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It hurts his bit. Us, we've done. We've. We've invested lots of money into young talent who's then gone off and said.

[Ed Zittrin]

Well, I'd like to actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Hundreds of thousands of dollars, which for us is a significant amount of money.

[Ed Zittrin]

Did they provide you value when you were giving them that money?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Well, I don't want to. I mean, I don't have any ranking. Like, I don't want to. Hold on. Excuse me. I wish I had that microphone button they had at the debate last night, you dumb God. We had a lovely guy who I still. I still deeply respect and love. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a very, very successful podcast. Halfway, you know, it was building, we were starting to make money on it. He decided, I want to take this to YouTube. And we let him, because I'm a nice guy and I'm not going to say no, but. And he did not do as well. But that's not the point. The point is that was sunk. That money was sunk. It's gone. And this is what every. Every media outlet considers yeah. You build up a byline. The real risk is that that person leaves and it's hard to keep them. I don't know what you have to offer them to keep them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's the same as any business, though. You invest in your talent, you train people. Sometimes, let's say that you're training an engineer at Facebook. You tell. You teach them everything you know. You invest huge amounts of money in their salary and their training. Then they go get a job at Apple or here's the big company. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the big difference on media. You're doing it in public. And everybody knows if you promote a byline, if you put a name, everybody knows that name, and suddenly you are a commodity. It's a lot different if you're an engineer. By the way, this is why for years the video game companies wouldn't let people put bylines in their video games. They were terrified.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah. Newspapers and magazines did not have bylines for many years. Time. I was at Time Inc. When Byline started there.

[Leo Laporte]

Now is that a good idea? I don't know. I'm just saying. I'm only responding to your statement as said that they should do this because I'll tell you why they don't. Yeah, maybe they should do it. I'm not saying they should.

[Ed Zittrin]

Okay, cool. Then we actually agree. Like, I know why they don't. And I agree with that logic. And that's exactly why they don't. The problem is the.

[Leo Laporte]

As it makes them mainstream media is this kind of what they're exactly what.

[Ed Zittrin]

They did with Taylor. It's exactly what they did with Taylor. They gave her. They helped her do media like they. They gave her these. And she does. By the way, Taylor's great with. She goes out and she gets it on her own. But guess what? They also took advantage of her. Her presence. They built. They took advantage of the byline just as she did.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

Like, then that's kind of it. I just wonder what. She can't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's mutual. Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

If you're. If you're Andrew Ross Sorkin and you run deal book and you're on CNBC and you run conferences, you're thanking Sam God knows how much. And they keep him in because he builds a franchise there and he has the freedom to do it. If you're a columnist at the New York Times or the Washington Post, you've got a pretty nice gig.

[Ed Zittrin]

Be as racist as possible and they won't do anything. Like you can. You can say that people. People aren't human like you can call for shooting protesters. It's great being at what New York Times is brilliant these days. Well, so pissed off about those opinion comments, by the way. Like the worst.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me ask you, Jeff, because you, you see the inside operations, is it kind of that they want the opinion columnist to stimulate exactly that response?

[Ed Zittrin]

I'm actually really curious about this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the point of it. They want people to be pissed off.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So I. To an extent, yes. But let me, let me give me a second here for a little nuance on this. A rare moment of nuance when I complain about the New York Times, the Washington Post, people on Twitter and the socials say they're in the tank for Trump. I say that's too simple. Or they say they just want to get people angry. Same thing that's said about Facebook or about Twitter or anyplace else. And I say that's too simplistic. I think something more nuanced and different is going on. My theory about the Times goes in a few ways. One is about the death of mass media. I'll spare you that today. You can read my book. The other one, Jay Rosen at New York University wrote in 2017 that he noted the moment when the majority support of the Times shifted from advertising to subscription. And he said, this is going to cause a change in the relationship of the newsroom to the public. And he was very right and very prescient, as he tends to be. But it happened in a paradoxical way. Is that when A.G. sulzberger, the sixth generation publisher of the Times, says that he values independence above everything else. My theory is that what he's trying to prove when he pisses off the audience is that he's independence of them. You don't own us. And that that's kind of a newsroom ethos. It's been true of journalists for years. If we're independent, if the business ever asked you to do anything, you go out of your way.

[Leo Laporte]

I do the same thing with Lisa. I don't do anything to cultivate an audience. If I can help.

[Ed Zittrin]

To be fair, I do the same thing with my newsletter. I'm just like you little kids.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think that the Times, in a time of dying media, I mean, the Times, God bless and it's winner take all. The three top brands in news in the U.S. new York Times, Washington Post and Wall street journal take 63% of all online news revenue they own. Take most.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, that's not a good metric. All the rest, I mean, there should be more Local papers. The New York Times should be for New York.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And the New York told the New York Times isn't New York anymore. A and B, it competes with every metro paper in the country because every metro paper in the country, almost with some exceptions, is owned by hedge funds now who've cut it to the marrow, who are all crap. That's been the case for years when I used to edit the Sunday San Francisco examiner Chronicle in San Francisco.

[Ed Zittrin]

The examiner, yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Remember that? I'd go to have brunch on Sunday morning because, hey, it was, you know, not that long ago. And I would carry with me the Sunday New York Times. People would say, where did you get that? This Chronicle sucks. And I'm thinking, I just spent all last night putting it out, thank you very much. So it's been ever thus to an extent. But the Times competes with all those local papers. Emily.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I used to get both the Chronicle, examiner and New York Times when I lived in San Francisco.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So I think, I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't the Internet solve this by creating a huge variety of voices? I mean, do we care that there's only three national newspapers?

[Emily Drybalbus]

In terms of survival? Yeah. In terms of making money and being able to support the actual journalism, yes.

[Ed Zittrin]

Only so many people.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, you can't have a local newspaper that's Internet only you can.

[Emily Drybalbus]

San Francisco Standard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, there's tons of them. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So hasn't that solved the problem? I mean, you're talking about problem.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It helps. My main question, do I still care about the big old legacy media or just say no, only about the new ones. I care about right now. About the new ones.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think you should care about the content that speaks to you. It should be evolving.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you shouldn't care where it comes from though, Right?

[Emily Drybalbus]

What's my favorite block?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there's a level. There's a level of trust that comes with having an institution behind you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Emily. Though I think that's exactly the point is that we no longer trust the New York Times for these reasons.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's the problem. And. Or we know.

[Ed Zittrin]

I trust we still do. I think plenty of people do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do. I do.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Sure. Of course.

[Ed Zittrin]

Like, here's the thing, the New York Times gets all of this stuff. Oh, we don't trust the Times anymore. That Open AI story that came out, that was really the foundation of my, of my piece. I just put out 87 page post, my 972 minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's. It's just 32 small minutes. Aaron Griffith and Mike Isaac of the Times, two of the hardest working reporters out there and they have the resources from the Times to get it done. But also being at the Times, they will get. Read more. But also people will actually trust it. People will be better informed. There is a necessity to have trusted outlets. I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what people always tell me is pay no attention to the op ed pages at the Journal and the Times because the reporters there are quality and have high integrity.

[Ed Zittrin]

And Jeff Horowitz at the Wall Street Journal, he has done some of the most incredible stuff about Facebook and Wells as well over there. I forget, I like Berbergin, Tom Dotin doing some of the best enterprise stuff. I mean, Kashmir Hill, Forbes, I think she was at. She was at Gizmodo as well. She's probably the best writer on fashion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are not just solo operations too. Like what you get at an institution. You get editors, people who can make sure that what you're putting out is correct, that it's written well. It's a higher quality structure with people who are experienced and, you know, relatively young. And like having more experienced older people around her could help her, you know, guide her in the right way. So there is, you know, use or maybe a time and a place for institution and maybe there's a time and a place for her to be on her own for a little bit.

[Emily Drybalbus]

If I may go back to my, to my prop here, this is the all the newspapers in America in 1900, in New York, there were a few.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, the print in that is probably so small you need a magnifying glass.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a cool book.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That looks very cool book. And so what happened, I think, in part two was that when television came along and killed the second and third papers in town, people felt trapped. When I was starting the online sites for advance, for County, Nast and their newspapers, and I did a focus group in Cleveland, the people in Cleveland, the new houses had bought the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then the other paper died. And that happened 30 years before. And they were still bitter that they were stuck with one paper. They didn't have a choice. And so their anger came out in a way that I think is also happening with the New York Times is people feel trapped by it because they don't have that many choices. And I try to. I read the Guardian, I read the ft, I read the Journal, which pisses me off constantly. I read Politico, which pisses me off as much. But I also try to read Teen Vogue. I read the 19th, I read the griot. I read other places as well. I read weird German papers trying to find some more voice out there. But that's a lot of work and people aren't going to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think you're unusual in this.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I'm very. I'm weird, I'm freaky. I was freaking out.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a low information electorate a problem?

[Emily Drybalbus]

I don't think the problem is information. This is my weird theory is it goes back to Hana Arant before. I think it's about belonging. I think it's about deep lack of community issues. I think it's about Ed talking about loneliness too. And I think that that's. How do you imagine a journalism built around belonging?

[Leo Laporte]

What often happens is you find a community and that community has a belief, belief. And so you participate in that belief.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But you didn't have just one size fits all you had. You know, there was a newspaper for Finnish sailors which cared about what Finnish sailors did. Right. And yeah, had value to them. And when I was working the Daily News, the Daily News had one set of readers in Queens and the New York Post had a different set of readers before it was completely garbage. And the New York Times had a different set of readers and the Queen's Chronicle different set of readers and so on. And you go back in the days when you had the Brooklyn Eagle and other things people had, it wasn't an echo chamber, it was that you had something that you felt.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm gonna bet that there is a Finnish fisherman's blog out there that is a wonderful gathering place for Finnish fishermen.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's the hope I have.

[Ed Zittrin]

Can I get we do something personal here? So my newsletter is about to hit 44,000 subscribers. When I started 300. I've been writing the same crap the whole time and I've made it very personal. I've loved if it. If it bleeds, it leads. Talk about my depression, anxiety, loneliness throughout these things, even in some of the more rigorous analysis things. Because who gives a crap? Like I. I talk about what I want. No one pays me for this. And people love it. And we have like a growing Reddit for Better Offline. I talk about my own stuff. I get mad at manga on Better Offline sometimes and I have my email address on there and anyone listening, I think juju Jitsu Kaizen, complete mess at the end. Anyway, people really respond to this and I think what it is is. And the big. The one thing I will say that legacy media has messed up is they drain the personality from writers with house style and I feel like that's why the Op ed columns are so aggressive. That's why. Because there they're allowed to have personality. So you have this amorphous New York Times style where it's just same with Wash po to an extent, but. But they open it up. Like Jeff Fowler over there is allowed to have a lot of fun. I love that. And Shira Vida as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lot of people don't want personality in reporting. They want facts. They don't want, you know, your opinion.

[Ed Zittrin]

There's more character to it, I think, is what I'm saying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it's a very slippery slope.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Let me tell you a funny story about the Times. When we, the Times wanted to get into local blogging, and as the journalism school that was right next door, we said, well, let's go together. And we started a blog in one neighborhood in Brooklyn. And they had. The Times, of course, had to devote two or three people to this. And they ins. We said, well, we're going to go and get all the people of Brooklyn to write for this and talk about their lives and talk about events and all that. The Times insisted on trying to edit them all into Times Ease. They couldn't understand that there was a value in their voices and their experience and their perspective because that's all they do. And that is what they do of value. And they do add that to the writer's value so that they were incapable. And in the end they said, well, this is too expensive. Well, it wouldn't be if you didn't try to edit everybody. What?

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is why people love Studs Terkel.

[Ed Zittrin]

Well, we need to get back to the days of like.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Have any idea who Studs Terkel is? Either. Either of you ever heard of Studs Terkel?

[Ed Zittrin]

Not like a basement.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, but I kind of wish my name was Studs.

[Leo Laporte]

Read his book Working. You can find it at your local library, kids. It's a great book. Where the voices of the people are.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He did oral history Industries.

[Ed Zittrin]

But one thing I will say is I do think for industries, Emily. I think you're right. There can be a slippery slope when it gets into that. So you have opinion writers with verticals. You cover AI and EVs, right? Someone like, also your work has character and opinion in it. Like, that's great. I think legacy media needs those columns. We need. I choose a random one like Eric Benderoff. Remember Eric? Whatever happened to Eric Bender off of the Tribune? I think he was. He was a take columnist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I do both. Like, I do news and Then if I have an opinion that's categorized separately on the site. Yeah, there, there is a clear distinction. If I'm writing about the news, I'm writing about the news and the numbers and what happened in the series sequence of events that I'm aware of. If I'm putting my opinion on how the iPhone 16 launch was dumb, that's. That's separate.

[Ed Zittrin]

And I want to hear that from you.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I want to know that's how you have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you will, I'll let you know. But you need, you need to have, you know, straight up news so you can read mine opinion and see if you agree with it because you also have this. The information. So is that you need both, but you need analysis.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think that that's what's missing because you have, for example, this open AI thing. The legacy media has failed on it. They've done the reporting real well. And I think the tech industry has this problem across the board. They're really good at the reporting. Some of the best tech reporting in the world is happening, happening right now. Some of the best finance reporting within tech's happening right now. And there is bugger all analysis and mastheads like the Times and the Journal could be doing really incredible work analyzing this stuff, saying the kind of things I'm saying. I refuse to believe I'm the only person thinking this way. I know I'm not like, I'm not unique and there should be more of it and there definitely should be in the legacy media. And I don't know if they don't want to. There's probably not a fundraiser. It's not like, oh, they're trying to do something. It's just they don't want to. They want to keep the objectivity, which doesn't exist. And I just feel like what Emily does is exactly. It needs to be like reporting and analysis opinion from the same person trying to digest it. Who knows if I agree with them or not, but God damn, give me something. Tell me a little bit about what to think about what I'm seeing. Help me digest it. More than just a few facts lined up. And I think this is where the Times kind of fails. The Post again has done much better with this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think people think the Times has become too opinionated. So that is why people don't like it. Well, I thought it was very interesting and I think a little unnecessary that they supported Kamala Harris. Like why. Why do we have newspapers like supporting political candidates? I.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's part of their culture and tradition. Yeah, that's Just part of ag.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't really like that.

[Ed Zittrin]

I don't disagree. I just like they've done it for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Like every, every newspaper I've ever read has endorsements in election.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just paying attention this time.

[Leo Laporte]

It goes way back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In fact, I didn't like it.

[Emily Drybalbus]

They were party related. The New York Tribune was a Republican paper and the transparency was all there. Everybody knew that. That was their perspective. Horace Greeley fought against slavery. He also fought against alcohol. And everybody knew that was his stand and that's how he did it. The thing about the New York Times is because it's no longer a New York paper, it's just said that it's not going to endorse local candidates anymore, which means it's not going to help you with that position. Look at the mayor we have in New York. We need help. But yeah, I think it's an outmoded need. It's a tradition that's been going on forever. But so much opinion out now. You don't really need them to say, we think this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, well maybe that's why I didn't like it.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I was like, there's another way to look at this. I would say so. So in the Springfield cats eating cats and dogs, horrible libel. Jamel Bowie, who's a brilliant columnist I think on New York Times, he's like.

[Ed Zittrin]

He'S an example of what everyone.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He should. So he's brings content.

[Ed Zittrin]

Incredible poster too.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So. Yeah. And his tiktoks are amazing. So in TikTok he brought the history and explanation and he explained that as blood libel and as, as, as the roots there. Now, now that is the kind of context in history that I think people need. But you don't see that because that seems too out of bounds in the New York Times. And so the New York. So I had this discussion with Falkenflick just, just yesterday where. Well, the Wall Street Journal sent someone to Springfield and they fact checked and they found out that the cat was actually in the basement and wasn't eaten. And they stopped at. Sorry, you put your ears. Hands over the ears of the cat. So they stop at the idea. We fact checked. So now our job is done. Well, no, if you ever think that Ed is a difficult guy, just.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody likes Ed. Somebody likes him. Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What's the, what's the name? Ed.

[Ed Zittrin]

This is how. Yes. Like how's moving Castle?

[Leo Laporte]

Howl's moving Castle.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You get a reference? I have no idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds very British.

[Ed Zittrin]

No, it's an Animated based on a Welsh book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't it Studio Ghibli?

[Ed Zittrin]

It is, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's super.

[Leo Laporte]

So some sort of weird. Oh, how like do you like consuming media? Like Ginsburg's poem Howl.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a really interesting discuss because we do have like just different generations. So it's, it's cool.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Imagine poor Paris here.

[Leo Laporte]

She calls it the show show she does with her grandpa.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Actually dads her by two dads.

[Leo Laporte]

She says dads, but she's being kind. Yeah. Well, that's a perfect example is that newspapers endorse candidates.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It's like, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't know that. That's all they do. That's their. That's one of their biggest roles. Did Scooter X do a podcast changelog?

[Ed Zittrin]

It did.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I have it.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have it?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a break. When we come back, it's one kind of changelog. It's podcast change log. You're watching this week in Google a very unusual version featuring how old the cat. Ed Zittrin from Better online, better offline, sorry.com which is coincidentally online. Ms. Emily Dry, bulbous, who is putting up with his sausage fest beautifully. Pcmag.com and of course, Jeff Jarvis. Everybody knows the Studs Turkele of New Jersey. After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and AT&T. @t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. Months. How do you feel when you switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance? It's like going to work on one Thursday morning and thinking to yourself, just one more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says, happy Friday. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday, random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with Geico feels just like that. Get more with Geico. Thank you for watching. We appreciate it. We want to encourage those of you who watch and enjoy the show, a slim and growing shrinking number. But nevertheless, if you do enjoy the show, I want you to make sure you check out Club Twit because it's a way you can support this kind of content. God Knows no one else wants to support it. Just go to Twitter, TV Club Twitter. $7 a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord, you get a whole lot more. And I think mostly you get the good feeling to know that you are helping us stay online, doing the things that we do best. So thank you. And we have a new referral plan. Thank you, Patrick, for reminding me. Twitter, TV Club Twit slash Referral. If you're already a member, tell a friend when they join, you'll get an extra month free. Yeah, TV slash Club Twit slash referral. We do have some special events coming up in Club Twit. We're going to do Stacy's Book Club. Stacy Higginbotham, you know, does return for the book club that'll be coming October 25th. Looking forward to that. The book is really good. It's called a service model and it's. I'm loving it. Read by the author. So it's not yet in our schedule, but we have decided on October 25, the week before coffee time, we're going to do a reprise of our coffee show that I did, this time featuring a connoisseur of coffee beans who actually has a company called Beans with a Z sends out coffee from remarkable roasters all over the world twice a month. So that's kind of cool. We'll talk about the beans and Micah's crafting corner October 16th. Lots of things going on. If you're not a member, please join Twit TV Slash Club Twit. And I'm going to do some other things we're working on. We did a Chris Marquardt segment which is available to Club Twit members on the Twit plus feed. He's a photo review. We're going to do that every month when I get Dick DeBartolo on and Johnny Jett and some of our other regulars to say hi. Meanwhile, it is now time.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Are you going to explain it first?

[Leo Laporte]

Should I?

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, I think you should.

[Leo Laporte]

So Notebook LM is a very cool thing from Google. We actually had the creator, one of the creators, on the show a few.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Months ago, the editorial director, Steven Johnson.

[Leo Laporte]

Steven Johnson. The idea is it's something called retrieval augmented generation. You provide the documents and then it does a summary or lets you ask questions, that kind of thing. In this case, a new feature of Notebook LM is it will create a two voice podcast out of the materials you give it. Scooter X, who is a longtime club member, is in our discord. He was a mod for our IRC for many years and has always provided us with many additional changelog links.

[Emily Drybalbus]

More than we can ever.

[Leo Laporte]

More than we can get to. Has made his own Google Change log using Notebook lm. So because I hate doing the Google Change log, I am going to at least this time give it a shot. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for Scooter X's Google Change Log.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah, the Google Change log.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't wait to hear this. Well Google fans, are you ready for another deep dive? This week it's all things Google because this is not Scooter X by the way, they really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think I've seen this many updates and announcements in such a short.

[Leo Laporte]

Time frame ever same here. And they cover so much ground too. We're talking everything from AI powered email features to self driving taxis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It really highlights how Google is present in so many different aspects of our lives.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, enough, enough. Let's get to the change log. That's a great point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Free. Perfect podcast like this takes so long.

[Leo Laporte]

Gmail, what can you tell us about these new.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Okay, so this is 10 minutes long, which is good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everyone's saying this is such a cool tech, but it really generic.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think it's only cool for people who don't want to read actually or in some other way ingest information that for some reason they've got podcast brain. And the only way they can understand something is if they have two hosts jib jabbing about it. Thank God those people exist because I'd have no way to make a living otherwise. But Scooter X says it took about three minutes to build it. Tell you what, we could just put it in the show notes and leave it as an exercise for the listener.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Do me a favor, Benito. Can you just skip forward to any random point just to see if.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's just see once they start actually.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Saying I don't have a scrubbing tool. Okay.

[Ed Zittrin]

Geez.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You are behind.

[Leo Laporte]

We didn't give you a scrubbing tool.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Not any cabin doesn't exist or I haven't found it yet.

[Leo Laporte]

I might have a. So. So where's the link? Because is it in the. In the show notes?

[Emily Drybalbus]

No, no, I got it straight from Scooter X. He sent it to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you put it in the rundown anywhere?

[Emily Drybalbus]

No, I can't. It's an audio file.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I can scrub it.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's okay. It's okay. I.

[Ed Zittrin]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I just feel bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Scooter X, we're going to set up ecstatic elastic in our Discord is going to set up a GoFundMe for a scrubbing tool for. For Benito. And soon he will have his own scrubbing tool. Okay, I was hoping for 10 minutes of rest, but I guess I'll have to get back to work now. What do you want to talk about, guys? Anything we've done.

[Emily Drybalbus]

No stories.

[Leo Laporte]

Fidelity is coming. Value of Twitter. It's investment in Twitter, but by 79%. Remember, Elon paid $44 billion for it. Fidelity, which was one of the big investors, they put almost 20 billion into it through their blue chip fund, have marked it down now to $9.4 billion. Does it even matter? Elon is almost a trillionaire.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What's wrong with the world? You want to know what's wrong? Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I think that's why Sam Altman wants more money. He wants to beat Musk to that.

[Ed Zittrin]

I think that we can destroy these guys with a really simple bit of legislation. You should not be able to leverage stock options. If you do. If you weren't allowed to leverage stock options, Elon Musk and Sam Altman would not have anywhere near as much money. You should not be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could also make being a billionaire illegal. You could just take the money over a billion and literally everyone would be fine.

[Ed Zittrin]

Just to be fair, I also agree with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What about carried interest? How would you fix that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

If they keep tax going, they. You just take it.

[Leo Laporte]

Tax a sucker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, they would. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's problematic for employees who get stock options as part of their compensation package because then they own. They owe taxes on something that they haven't yet realized.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Well, that's, that's. That's for unrealized gains. That's different. Carried interest is the venture capitalist. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

I don't care about them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

No, I think. I think unrealized gains is wrong because stock can go up and down or go up and down. I think it's a bad plan.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a grab by. By governments. Okay, that was. That was fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What other topics do we have?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, here's one. Governor of California, the second one, has decided to veto the AI safety bill.

[Ed Zittrin]

He's an evil man.

[Leo Laporte]

Really. So it's really interesting, the different points of view on this. He said, and I don't think he's wrong, that it would be bad for California's economy because it. And I think maybe there's something to be said also for the notion that what is AI Safety and how do you assure it? And are we really trying to do.

[Ed Zittrin]

Something that's not even what they're doing with it. It's. I don't think he should have vetoed it just because that, that doesn't seem to really be particularly democratic in my view. And also it's very clear who.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to the United States where the veto is a.

[Ed Zittrin]

But at the same time, the actual harms of AI right now are not any of the things they're freaking out like you should have this legislation, you should make it so that. And they did actually agree with this one training data. They did the training data bill.

[Leo Laporte]

So now that's appropriate. This bill is really based on sci fi dangers. You know, they say, well you gotta have a kill switch in case Robocop goes crazy.

[Ed Zittrin]

What open AI wants you to believe, they want to be like, oh, we're gonna create the special robot that comes and steals your chest beating.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Like. Newsom described the bill as well intentioned but noted its requirements amounted to stringent regulations that could burden the state's growing and leading artificial intelligence companies. Oh no, he was lobbied hard by a lot. Scott Weiner is the California senator from the Bay Area who proposed this wiener.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Adding him to the sausage.

[Leo Laporte]

You said wiener. But even, I mean a lot of people lobbied hard against this. Elon Musk thought it was a good idea, which to me seems like like enough reason to veto it. But who were some of the people that were hitting hard on Gavin Newsom to veto it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I read the opinion. It was a multi page letter from Anthropic CEO that he supported it as well. And the one phrase in that that stuck with me is he said it would be a feasible burden. The different types of testing that they would have to do and the transparency requirements for just the data and how the system works. Because basically I think what this legislation would do would kind of hold accountable all the testing that OpenAI says they're doing or Google says they're doing. And Anthropic basically came out and said yeah, we are doing that. So if you want to, you know, enforce it, we're fine with it. And so remember with me, yeah, the.

[Leo Laporte]

People who supported this bill like Anthropic were people who are big on AI safety.

[Emily Drybalbus]

These are, and let's put it Jeffrey.

[Leo Laporte]

Hinton's of the world. All people who, who are kind of living in that sci fi fantasy word. You can say the word test Creal.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Which just communicates nothing to anybody. It's worse than studs Turk, Google. Anyway, people Google. He by the way, signed a bunch of other anti, you know, AI bills.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But this one, the others were good. This is false comfort. If you think that, well, we can make AI safe. You cannot anticipate every bad thing that every bad actor would do with it henceforth. And so it's a lie. You put companies in positions where they have to lie to say, well yeah, it's safe and yeah, I can go to jail, but actually who knows what some bozo is going to come along and have it do. And so it's part of the knee jerk reflex in a technology development.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually like this thing that Newsom said. He says, okay, we cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public. But he said we got to, we must settle for a solution that is not informed by an empirical trajectory analysis of AI systems and capabilities. Basically agreeing with you, Ed, that people are saying, well, because it's this, it's going to be this in five years. It's going to be this in five years. He says he will work with the legislature on, on kind of something a little more sensible during the next session.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I mean it's just a little fishy to me that he. Another what he said before the empirical trajectory thing was that he didn't think the bill should be targeting AI companies over a certain size. And I do think it's interesting that all those companies were lobbying him to not approve it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And also there is some credibility to the size thing because if you have more money, more data centers, you are creating more powerful technology. So I don't know. I think the fact that he said there's a problem and then he had all this influence. He's also trying to run for president someday probably. There's just a lot of like personal motivations and I just, we.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a long standing tradition early on in the Internet not to regulate it prematurely like before. We really understand it. Maybe we should be careful about regulating it. And I think that that is not a bad kind of.

[Emily Drybalbus]

This is, this is Masnick's.

[Ed Zittrin]

Thankfully that approach has led to no harm.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but we didn't know what, we didn't know what we were going to.

[Ed Zittrin]

So we didn't think about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, maybe we should think about it. I'm not saying we shouldn't think about it, but I think it's hard to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Know is already regulating it. You're fine.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But their bill is a lot better. Their laws.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Mazda says my key takeaway from watching the debate over 1047 and other AI bills play out over the last few months is that a lot of people feel that one, social media is bad, bad and two, they missed the chance to regulate it when they should have. And three, they don't want to do that with AI and therefore four, they want to overreact and aggressively regulate AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Just exactly what we were just saying.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Perfect management. It's just perfect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But what, what do you guys think was over regulating specifically about the bill?

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think that trying to imagine that at the model level, as opposed to the intermediary application level or at the user level, which is critical. If a user comes in and asks to make child porn, who should be responsible for that? The model maker or the user?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Section230man. Yes, right, I see.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So there's a. There's this same thing. Watch out, I'm going to go into Gutenberg. Same thing happened with print. When print started, they beheaded and beheaded and burned the technologists, the printers. Then they went after the publishers and the booksellers and finally they said no, no, the author is responsible. And Foucault says that was the birth of the author as we know it now where responsibility came in. So now the reflex is the same that they say, well we've got to make these AI models safe and we've got to make them guarantee they're safe and then we're okay. But they can't honestly say they're safe. What then define safe, by the way, it's all motion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is very similar to some of the provisions in the EU bill. So the EU bill does require companies to expose how their model works. I think they even have to show like a regulated, like you pass the EU act like criteria. So there's a lot of similarities. But you said that one.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like he was increasingly anti tech, especially big tech from America.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think it's going to harm them in the long run. It's going to hold them back. Just as you know, their kind of reluctance to invest capital has held them back in the, in the VC space.

[Emily Drybalbus]

That's why they don't have their own Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is not necessarily a model for how we should operate in the United States. Let me read on. Because Mike says some more things. He says we're living an age of a. And this is to the conversation we've been having all day today. We're living in an age of a raging tech moral panic mostly because other is going horribly wrong on a societal level. But no one wants to do the hard work of actually fixing that, because that's hard and people are used to those problems. But tech is new and therefore, if we could just blame the tech and regulate the tech, surely we'll be doing something good. It's not serious lawmaking. It's performative nonsense from unserious people.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I agree with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was his best line.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike's a very good writer and I think he's very smart. He's often really smart about this stuff. So I don't think we've lost anything by losing that bill, let's put it that way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Said he's going to pass another bill, so I don't.

[Ed Zittrin]

He won't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Ed Zittrin]

I just. I don't trust him to.

[Leo Laporte]

You're right. He's probably getting a lot of money for campaigning from these big companies. There's totally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's thinking long term. I mean, he's probably not. I can. I can give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not purely evil. But certainly every politician has really serious personal motivations. And whether or not that benefits the public depends on the situation. So we might not really know, like, what would have happened if he passed this.

[Emily Drybalbus]

He very cleverly signed those other bills. So he thought, I'd regulate AI. Look at all I signed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Brilliantly done. It was very, very cleverly done. And he waited and he listened to lots of people. But the real problem too is this. Is this nomenclature of safety in the doomers in anthropic and teal and musk and all those is they. They've corrupted the word. It's not about the environment that Emily talked about before. It's not about the labor that goes into it. It's not about the labor that's going to be lost. It's not about the bias. It's about going to Mars and not destroying mankind before we do. It's BS of the highest order. It's the worst sales stuff that goes on. And you know, I just saw an FT headline because I cheat and look at headlines sometimes in the show, OpenAI asks investors not to back rival startups such as Musk's xai.

[Ed Zittrin]

The thing is, this is actually where the mainstream media has failed. This is one which I will point out and say the failure is theirs. The AI conversation has been actively irresponsible. The way that generative AI has been discussed, the unashamed hype that has been built. And really publications like CNBC and actually mainstream TV are actually really to blame here. I think people like Marcus Brownlee doing the ABC show. I think that the multiple different publications that have just blindly accepted this technology that is based on theft, destroying the environment and burning capital, which without really actually having a good output, that really matters. Like, there is no good thing to point out. And there's a lot of. Of people just saying, well, yeah, they burn all this money and they destroy the environment, and they're going to keep destroying the environment, but what.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Meanwhile, Kevin ruse writes his BS about. About. About ChatGPT, falling in love with him and all that crap. And he knows better. He knows.

[Ed Zittrin]

I give. I give him some credit because he returned to his crypto story and he basically returned to his crypto story. And when Chris Dixon was on, he gave him the business.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Really? He.

[Ed Zittrin]

Absolutely, yeah. He laid into him, Casey Newton, a coward, a massive coward, a corporate shield. Mark Zuckerberg shield. I don't care. Come at me, Casey. He made Kevin Roos back off. When Kevin Roos was cooking, he was cooking Chris Dixon on the New York Times podcast. He was holding his feet to the fire for the first time. Someone did it in case Newton's like, oh, no, we couldn't.

[Emily Drybalbus]

What was the basis of the. Of the. Was it just. You're selling bs?

[Ed Zittrin]

It was his. No, he was saying, hey, look, you say that Andreessen Horitz doesn't have tokens. They don't hold tokens, but here you do. And he was pointing out real specific stuff. And it just sucks. It sucks. The harm of these things is so obvious. Way more obvious with crypto, with AI. It's just too many people have carried water for these companies. Yeah, it's disgusting.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Meanwhile, I have a scrubbing tool, so let's listen to a little more of Scooter X's Google change log. Can you not hear it? What's going on?

[Emily Drybalbus]

No, I don't know. It's not coming through here.

[Leo Laporte]

Google is trying to improve the experience for Chrome Ace users.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Totally. Which makes you wonder, totally. What could they possibly be cooking up next?

[Leo Laporte]

It does. This week has been a whirlwind of Google updates, but I think one thing's for sure. They're committed to being innovative. That's for sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree. And they're always striving to improve their.

[Leo Laporte]

Platforms, too, which is throw up. I'm sorry, I can't, I can't.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You were so hoping you could replace the change log.

[Leo Laporte]

I was really hoping I could do the changelog with this guy, but no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think this Notebook ll thing was a good, like, kind of shock. Value. Like almost the first time you use ChatGPT, it was like, wow, I can spit out all that. This had the same effect, which was cool. But then the hype. It burned bright and it burned out.

[Leo Laporte]

As does most frankly.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It's like my entire manuscript and it. And I put it twice the first time. It was actually pretty good. It actually was not only a decent summary, but it also was interestingly structured. Right. Then I put the same manuscript in again and it was awful. It thought it was a bunch of.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a random stochastic.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Right? Exactly. It doesn't think or think deeply. This one.

[Leo Laporte]

How about this one? What do you think of this one, Jeff? All right, we're going to take a little break and wrap it up with your picks of the week you're watching or listening to this week in Google. What a panel. Wow. A lot of fun. Ed Zittrin is here. His newsletter and podcast are@better offline.com and his manga commentary. So.

[Ed Zittrin]

Jiu Jitsu Kaisen. Very unfair.

[Leo Laporte]

Jiu Jitsu Kaisen. Very unfair. I don't know what I just said. He.

[Emily Drybalbus]

But they're going to be mad at you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, whatever it is. He's also got Ohtani's balls behind him, and I think that that's pretty impressive. He knew. He knew Ohtani was going to be a big deal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Atani is. That's a new thing for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's exciting. Emily Dry Bulbas knows who Ohtani is. She's@PC mag.com. you must have a baseball lover in your family.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I just came across the reporting in the Athletic, which was a good acquisition by the New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

It was, wasn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Speaking of.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So you pay for the full package at the New York Times?

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even know there were different packages.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, it's. It's shrinkflation. At the New York Times, they had sports, they took it away. They had food, they took it away. They had games, they took it away. And they charge you for all of that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because all I really want is food and games.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I have all access.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything. Does that include everything? All accessing.

[Emily Drybalbus]

You. You probably do pay for the. Too much. Yeah, It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It says $6 every four weeks. That seems like a reasonable amount of money to pay for quality independent journalism.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah. You got some kind of deal there.

[Leo Laporte]

I must be grandfathered.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think you're. Yeah. You're retired.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I got news, games, cooking, audio, wire cutter. The Athletic. I got the whole freaking thing, man.

[Ed Zittrin]

I got it all stack you have home delivery, too?

[Leo Laporte]

That's for my mom. I get the Sunday Times sent to her at her old age home. I don't know if she even knows what it is. It's just a pilot newspaper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I don't think I pay for the cooking stuff, which is. It might be separate.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the cooking stuff.

[Emily Drybalbus]

They have it all in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

For everything.

[Leo Laporte]

I must be all in.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Coverage. It's good.

[Ed Zittrin]

You didn't bite on that one, did you?

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It. You know what? I. I need something because I can't watch cable news anymore. It's like. Like, that's.

[Ed Zittrin]

Do you watch the all in podcast?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, I don't listen to their podcast. Did you see the dailies going behind a paywall?

[Ed Zittrin]

Which the. The Barbara.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yeah. They're putting all the Michael Bar.

[Leo Laporte]

The daily. We could. I could start doing a daily parody and put it behind a pay wall.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Meanwhile, the Onion is going back on the video.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I just wish the best for the Onion. I just hope the Onion keeps thriving.

[Leo Laporte]

And they went back to Prince, which is kind of so cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We just need more humor writing. We all need to lighten up. Read something funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis is also here. Professor emeritus from the City University of New York and the author of many fine volumes, including his latest, the Web Wherever. While we must recline the Internet for Mogul's Misanthropes and Moral Panic and defend.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Section Two Third Basic books.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a good book.

[Ed Zittrin]

Basic Men. That's. That insult doesn't even count. I was just trying to get that. Wasn't that actually. But I don't actually think you guys are basic at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Henry's book is published by Simon and Schuster. You got a good pun for that, Mr. Ed Zitrin? Huh? Huh? Salt. Hank. A five napkin situation I came up with.

[Ed Zittrin]

I'm not gonna say.

[Leo Laporte]

So I personally. I like the giardia one. That was good. Good. What's the reason Book, Ted. Giardia What?

[Emily Drybalbus]

What's the cost for Ted's book? I mean, Ted's book.

[Leo Laporte]

Ted's book.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Hank's book.

[Leo Laporte]

Hank's book. I don't know. It's 40% off everywhere, so I don't really know what it costs. Look at. This is my boy. This is my boy. And a brisket. That's a boy and a brisket.

[Ed Zittrin]

I'm so hungry. I've been podcasting for three goddamn hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we're gonna torture you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a little cruel to show recipes and gorgeous at the End of a three hour podcast over dinner time.

[Ed Zittrin]

Another podcast to immediately following this on the NFL.

[Leo Laporte]

On the NFL. What are you talking about? Here he is frying up shrimp. All right, we will take a pause that refreshes and then come back with the final thoughts. Our picks of the week as we continue with this week in Google. It's better over here at&T customers. Switching to T mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existence existing phone.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And give you a new one free.

[Leo Laporte]

All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrier freedom to switch today. Pay off up to 650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to 830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax qualifying port and trade and service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. All right, you all want to eat dinner? So let's get the hell out of here. Emily, you had a thing this week. You want to talk about technology and moving?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, so I had an interesting just brush with moving technology. I moved this week and I don't know if you guys moved recently, but there's just so many worst.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you hate moving?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is the absolute worst. I had a very rare good experience with like if you guys ever use pods anyone here.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's the thing that they park this, this like container outside your house, you throw everything in it and then a truck comes and drives it across the country. Country.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And basically I did it something with U haul too. It's all very remote, very online. So just you go on pods.com, you just put in where you want to go and then they just tell you when they're coming, put the thing down and then they actually stored our stuff for a couple months and then delivered it to a location later.

[Leo Laporte]

How far did you move?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I moved from Chicago to New Jersey.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, New Jersey.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Welcome. Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

It is the Garden State. People don't realize that wonderful here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So that was amazing just to be able to like do that online. This giant container just comes and then they pick it up and then that's it. And then U haul. I had this crazy experience where it's almost all remote pickup now for trucks. So they literally just send you to an abandoned parking lot.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it was just dark out. We were driving down the highway. Yeah, it was very crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Christine is over there.

[Ed Zittrin]

It was totally like that flickering light is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was like that There was just a tiny, sketchy little authorized U Haul dealer sign. And you just turn into this parking lot, and it's like you just. They send you on basically a scavenger hunt in the parking lot. It's like, go to this tree, like, your lockbox three on the tree. And then you have to type in the code that they give you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like EV charging.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it worked. It was. And it was actually better than. Way better than actually going and checking into the U Haul station, getting the truck, which is so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

So I bought a bunch of U Haul boxes, and it says on the box, return anything you don't use for a refund. Except the U Haul store I bought it from had a big sign that says, we don't buy your boxes back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Classic.

[Ed Zittrin]

The old ketchup release.

[Leo Laporte]

The other thing is, it had a QR. QR code that says, scan this and you'll know exactly where your boxes are and what's in them and all that stuff. Which means, of course, you had to download a U Haul app, and then you have to enter everything that's in the box into the app. So I don't. I could have written it on the side.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a mixed bag. Like, yeah, I had a great experience picking up and dropping off my truck to random parking lots, which miraculously worked. But also at the same time, like, when I ordered this service, I said, I want to go from point A to point B. And they were like, yes, we can do that. Here's the price. And then the day before they call, and they're like, oh, actually, you're gonna have to pick up the truck from a different place. And it's just like, well, that's not what I bought. So I don't know how they can just change it. So it's not perfect, but it was. It was. The technology was better for me than actually going in person and dealing with U Haul. So I thought that was cool.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Have you watched the Seinfeld about the rental car?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, you look it up. Look it up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will, I will.

[Emily Drybalbus]

They say it's reserved. Means that it's reserved that I have my car. I can't do Seinfeld. But, yeah, you know how to take the reservation, but you don't know how to keep the reserv.

[Leo Laporte]

A little Seinfeld memory there.

[Ed Zittrin]

What's the deal with generative AI?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, if anyone's listening, who's moving? I'm happy to talk to you about moving tips because it's. It's painful.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're all. You're all unpacked. Are all the boxes unpacked?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nope. We just moved yesterday and then I got the invite to be on this podcast and here I am but three hours.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So you're surrounded by boxes right now. Is that. Basically.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so grateful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is an empty. I cleaned out this room and I got the desk set up so I could be here tonight.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the wallpaper.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I think it's really cute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. An easy way to add some background, but. Yeah, that's why it looks a little empty and weirdly lit.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. Why did you move from Chicago to New Jersey?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the PC mag office is in New York City and I'm like, right on the train into New York. Just half an hour. Perfect. Yeah. I'm from New Jersey. Technically. I've lived all over, but I was born in New Jersey and my parents and family are from this area, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. So you're back home?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pretty much. But it's a little weird. After living in Chicago, I lived in Seattle, I lived in la. And it's like such that weird feeling of like, coming home. And it's just that's.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I didn't think I was going to do this right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know. And I'm like, I'm actually sitting in a house that's mine in New Jersey. Like, how did I get here?

[Ed Zittrin]

I've actually heard a lot of people from New Jersey said the same thing. You always end up, hey, yo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's really sad, but Hotel California. But my work is here, my family is here. So it's just that it is a nice place to live and I hate that.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I know. Same here.

[Leo Laporte]

Sam. I wore.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Married a Jersey girl Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

I call him Sam. I've. I've somehow conflated Ed Zitron with Sam Altman. Now, Ed, I wore both stamp in your honor. This nice manga like shirt. I don't know what it means.

[Ed Zittrin]

That is that. That could be anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Can the. Does the back say anything? Wait a minute. Hold on, I'll turn around.

[Ed Zittrin]

Just looks like the same design for. Did you get this in, like. Where'd you get this, Leo?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this from like the 90s?

[Ed Zittrin]

It kind of looks from a flea market.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It reminds me of a Chinese character, like tattoo. It's that kind of vibe.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah. It looks like like a. A gambling addict from. From Arizona would own this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Giving dart tournament vibes.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I had lunch with Leo in New York, and it's New York. I've known New York well. And he. He's wearing this avocado shirt and people are actually talking to him. Hey, nice shirt. Yeah. What do you. What do you do?

[Leo Laporte]

People don't. I think it is something. It's like Yu Gi oh. Or something. I think it's somebody something. Anyway. Ed, did you want to. Huh.

[Ed Zittrin]

That's definitely not Yu Gi.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, not Yu Gi oh.

[Ed Zittrin]

Just gonna say that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's.

[Ed Zittrin]

Did I want to what though?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you want to pick anything for the. You know, at the end of the show, we do a. I don't know, you can talk about something you're really excited about or something like that.

[Ed Zittrin]

I know, like, I complain, criticize OpenAI and all this, but you should read Mike Isaac and Aaron Griffith's piece on Open AI. Just come to your own conclusion with it and then read my piece afterwards. Of course, you should really. You should really give it a look because those two have managed to crack something that the information kind of hinted at back in July, but they couldn't get. Couldn't quite thread the needle. They got a ton done. But, like, those two found something at like the. It's like the perfect kind of reporting just as the round closed. And I give the tech industry a lot and the tech media quite a bit of. But, like, you got to give credit where it's due.

[Leo Laporte]

Good link. Give me a headline to search for on Google or something like that.

[Ed Zittrin]

That it is. Open AI is growing fast and burning through piles of money.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it.

[Ed Zittrin]

Fantastic headline as well. Honestly, Open AI should be crapping themselves, Mike Isaac being on the cases. That's. That's not that He's. He's very, he's very good and he will doggedly chase down stuff in a way. In a way that's a lot of fun to watch. And also, yeah, he's gonna. That. That if anyone's going to crack this open, it's him. But also Aaron's fantastic as well.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the best. We know Aaron well. She's been on our shows many times. Yeah, we two, two very good people. Yeah. Nice. All right. That's a good pick. If you really want to know what's going on. Jeff Jarvis, pick of the week.

[Emily Drybalbus]

How.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Howl's here. Hello. How Cats always seem to have the look of kind of. Why are you doing this to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I definitely just heard Ed mutter, you're a pretty boy.

[Ed Zittrin]

Put in the mic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We heard that. We heard that. It was romantic over there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, Mr. Oh, he's going to pause on the fish and everything. Jeff Jarvis.

[Emily Drybalbus]

All right, see, I'll give you a choice you can have a rant about San Francisco or a wacky keyboard.

[Ed Zittrin]

Wacky keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well I guess the wacky keyboard is spoken.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So that's line 104.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Google showcased a bizarre double sided Japanese keyboard that it won't sell. It's a merbius strip.

[Leo Laporte]

Why did they even.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I don't know. But there's a video below.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow, that's crazy looking.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It is crazy though, isn't it? You gotta fast through the. Through the bs.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go through the BS to the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like an ergonomic.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you could use it as a Reese.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I don't know why they just did it because it's Japanese so they have, you know, so many characters. What do you do do? And so they decided to invent it as a Mobius.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How about a keyboard that comes to me like I just put my fingers up and it moves around and finds them.

[Emily Drybalbus]

They have one guy there is playing it like. Like an accordion almost.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got a cool keyboard from the PC Mag office. It feels like a cloud when you use it.

[Ed Zittrin]

This is. I. I feel like. I feel like I'm connected to the matrix when I use this. I'm so powerful.

[Leo Laporte]

What kind of keyboard do you use, Ed? Tell me.

[Ed Zittrin]

Zsk.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Emily Drybalbus]

The problem with yours, Emily is you connect it to a PC.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it will work with any to anything.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Well, that'd be okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But you what kind of keyboard is it connected to?

[Emily Drybalbus]

An old PC.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I thought I would learn more about a different type of computer. Okay. Lofree. Oh, it's very lovely. It's a mini keyboard too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have a mini keyboard as well. This is a logi from Logitech. It's little. Little bit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also silent so I can furiously type away while the show is on.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, I just make a bunch of noise.

[Emily Drybalbus]

No, nobody made more noise than our previous co host. She could bang a keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

Stacy was a keyboard banger.

[Emily Drybalbus]

She killed him. She killed him.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, this was a really interesting fun show and I think I learned quite a bit it so thank you very much. Emily Drybalbus is at PC magazine. Is there anything specific you cover or is it everything now?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I cover electric vehicles and AI. Just general tech industry as well. But I would say electric vehicles are my specialty. Everyone's writing about AI so there's just. I take bite off what I can chew.

[Leo Laporte]

I want you to do an expose. I drive a BMW i5 all electric electric EV scratched it really deeply. And I was. You know, I figure if car gets scratched is no big Deal. I'm going to continue to drive it. Lisa says, no, no, you got to get it. We've got to bring it in. We brought it to the auto body shop. They looked at it and said, oh, we can't fix that. I said, why not? He said, it's an ev. BMW won't let us touch evs for bodywork, for a scratch. No, you have to bring it to BMW.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, that's so wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Expose. Huh? I'm just giving you a little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll be your Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it. There is a somewhat of an explanation which is it's very easy to break evs, you know, in weird ways with, with electricity. But I think they could you take.

[Emily Drybalbus]

It through a car wash or not?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course you can.

[Emily Drybalbus]

So Emily, did you drive an EV from Chicago to Jersey?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I flipped.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Oh, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it an electric plane?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not yet, but the first ones are flying out of Chicago, actually the United Space there. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

GM gains on Tesla with fresh EV lineup, strong Q3 sales. Tesla's been struggling a little bit. This is your latest article in the Next Car publication at PC magazine. I will read this religiously. That's a Chevy. That's that new Chevy Equinox. That is a nice vehicle. Vehicle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, my sister in law just bought one. It was. It's really, really nice.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, I'll go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you want to know about evs, follow me. That's why my username is Electric Underscore humans. So it's on Tick Tock, it's on Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

And you like your Volvo XC Ed Zitrin.

[Ed Zittrin]

Yeah, it's a, it's a car. It goes backwards, forwards, side to side, doors open, mechanical doors got clunk like clicky buttons on it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I actually love that because I feel like people think EVs are so much more different from than other cars.

[Ed Zittrin]

Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's exactly what it is. It just gets you where you need to go. That's the point.

[Ed Zittrin]

Plug it in at home, it charges, drive around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The steering wheel has better acceleration.

[Ed Zittrin]

Nothing weird happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nothing weird.

[Ed Zittrin]

The screen doesn't turn off at random like when I had a Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

You will like the latest Christopher Mims piece. Then touch screens are over. Even Apple is bringing back buttons.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think Tesla's what I think that's good when it comes to Tesla because those screens are so hard to use. You have to tap through like five.

[Leo Laporte]

My son drives as a Model 3 or no, as a Model Y and he says, I have no idea how to open the glove compartment. There is Literally no affordance to open the glove compartment. You have to go into the screens and dig down and find the button.

[Emily Drybalbus]

I saw a story the other day about. About. Do you have to. Because after the flooding, do you have to have a plan to be able to get out of the ev?

[Leo Laporte]

Can you.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Is it not mechanical? If the electric goes, you can't open the door. Are you trapped inside?

[Ed Zittrin]

No, you have to strip something off of it, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it depends on the ev. So almost as far as I know, every EV has an emergency mechanical release for the door for this very reason. People don't read their car manual, so they don't know it it. And unfortunately, it's a little late when you're sinking in five feet of water to read you the manual, but there's almost always a manual release. In fact, if you have an ev, be a good idea to kind of look it up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I always carry in every car a hammer.

[Ed Zittrin]

Let's carry one on me anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know what works really well is car handles. Like, I don't think we really needed to innovate on that regular door handle.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the reasons I bought the i5, the Volvo.

[Ed Zittrin]

The Volvo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like the Volvo. The i5 is a 5 Series BMW. They make it with a electric motor. They make it with a gas motor. Same car. So it's got handles, it's got buttons. Get all those.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Those work well. Those are good things.

[Leo Laporte]

I like buttons. I do, I do, I do. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now done with this show. I thought it would never end. I'm sure you felt the same, but yes, you can go get dinner. Thank you, Emily and Ed and Jeff. Really actually a fun show. Somebody said in one of our chat rooms, if this were the only show I listened to all year, it would be worth my money.

[Ed Zittrin]

I would drink. I would drink hemlock.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Emily.

[Ed Zittrin]

My pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks, Jeff. Thanks to all of you, Scooter X. Thank you, Scooter X, for your change log.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Thanks, crew.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks to Benito Gonzalez. Namaste.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Namaste, everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

That's me recognizes the podcaster in you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Touch your third eye.

[Ed Zittrin]

The killer in me is killer in you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everyone calm.

[Ed Zittrin]

Smashing Pumpkins. No. Okay, those before swine.

[Leo Laporte]

We do this week in Google. Every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Watch it live on Seven. Count them, seven streams. Twitch, Twit, which is the Discord, YouTube, X, Kick, LinkedIn and Facebook. Seven different ways you can watch live. We're on Kick.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

No one watches it. On kick every once in a while. I'll see you 702 people watching live. Thank you to all of you. Most people, though, watch after the fact. You can download shows at the website Twitter TV Twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated of course to it, which makes it easy to share clips. Best thing to do subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you get it automatically the minute we're done on a Wednesday afternoon. Benito is going to go in and edit out all the swear words and we'll get it out to you a little bit later.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This time.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S better over here at and T customers Switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Give you a new one free.

[Leo Laporte]

All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax, qualifying port and trade and service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. How do you feel when you switch to Geico and save on your car insurance? It's like going to work on one Thursday morning and thinking to yourself, just one more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says Happy Friday. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with Geico feels just like that. Get more with Geico. Why choose a sleep number?

[E]

Smart bed Can I make my side softer?

[Leo Laporte]

Can I make my side firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep number does that cools up to.

[Emily Drybalbus]

Eight times faster and lets you choose.

[Leo Laporte]

Your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number setting.

[Emily Drybalbus]

And now during our Black Friday sale.

[Leo Laporte]

Save 50% on the Sleep Number Limited Edition Smart Bed plus free home delivery.

[Emily Drybalbus]

When you add a base and cyber Monday to find a store near you, visit sleepnumber.com.