TWiG 790: Invalid URL Removed - Internet Archive Hack, Wordpress Drama

Summary

This Week in Google (Audio) - Episode 790: Internet Archive Hack, WordPress Drama

Release Date: October 17, 2024

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau

---

1. Introduction

Leo Laporte welcomes listeners to This Week in Google, introducing co-hosts Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. They set the stage for a lively discussion covering the latest in Big Tech, AI advancements, and emerging technologies.

---

2. YouTube's New Video Authentication

Timestamp: [04:35]

The hosts delve into YouTube's new feature aimed at combating AI-generated deepfake videos. Leo explains:

"It's a new label called 'Captured with a Camera.' This is how far we've come with AI that." ([04:35])

Jeff Jarvis expresses skepticism about the effectiveness of current authentication methods, highlighting the ease of bypassing them:

"Honestly, it really could be. Nowadays it's so easy to fake stuff like that." ([05:55])

Paris Martineau adds that without widespread adoption of authentication standards like C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), these measures may fall short:

"It's a standard, but where's the list of products that support it? Nowhere." ([08:25])

---

3. Wimbledon Replacing Line Judges with AI

Timestamp: [11:10]

The discussion shifts to Wimbledon’s decision to eliminate human line judges in favor of AI technology. Leo highlights:

"Technology will be used to give the out and fault calls at the championships from next year on." ([11:10])

Jeff Jarvis debates the move, considering tradition versus technological advancement:

"I think it's going to stay the same way. The French have strong labor protections." ([12:29])

Paris notes Wimbledon's uniqueness in adopting AI first among Grand Slam tournaments:

"They're the last one. Everybody else does it. So it's next." ([11:53])

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4. Streaming the Podcast Across Multiple Platforms

Timestamp: [16:09]

Leo announces the podcast's expansion to eight different streaming platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, X.com, TikTok, Discord, and others. He emphasizes the importance of live interaction:

"You won't want to miss a minute. ... You can screw up live. And that's even more fun." ([16:09])

Paris Martineau shares her enthusiasm for the live streaming, although they encounter minor technical hiccups regarding audience counts.

---

5. WordPress Drama: Open Source and Trademark Issues

Timestamp: [30:02]

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the escalating conflict between Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, and WP Engine, a major WordPress hosting provider. Key points include:

• Matt’s Criticism of WP Engine: Matt accuses WP Engine of being a "cancer to WordPress" for not contributing adequately to the open-source project and misusing the WordPress trademark.

  "Matt was a little bit mad about WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress." ([30:02])

• Legal Battles: WP Engine sent cease and desist letters over trademark misuse, leading to Matt retaliating with his own legal actions.

  "Matt offers a buyout to employees of Automattic who didn't agree with him. 159 employees took it." ([37:04])

• Community Impact: The dispute has caused significant unrest in the open-source community, with sites unable to update plugins and facing security vulnerabilities.

  "This harms open source communities. Matt offers stock options to employees who stay." ([34:57])

Jeff Jarvis discusses the broader implications for open-source projects when major contributors fail to give back, drawing parallels with Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal.

---

6. Internet Archive Hack

Timestamp: [51:40]

The hosts address the recent hack of the Internet Archive, impacting the Wayback Machine:

• Nature of the Attack: The hack appears to involve unauthorized access attempts, causing the Wayback Machine to operate in a read-only mode temporarily.

  "Mark, Twitter said an hour ago, the archives are safe and the Wayback Machine is in read-only mode." ([54:28])

• Consequences: Users cannot access historical documents, affecting services like True Pick's authentication process and researchers relying on the archive.

  "You can't access past uses of trademarks, hindering verification services." ([53:18])

• Community Response: Leo urges listeners to support the Internet Archive financially, emphasizing its critical role in preserving internet history:

  "Everyone already knows your information because of the national public data breach." ([54:28])

---

7. AI’s Reasoning Capabilities

Timestamp: [71:50]

A detailed discussion unfolds about the limitations of large language models (LLMs) in genuine reasoning, based on recent research:

• Study Findings: Gary Marcus and colleagues found that LLMs like LLaMA38b struggle with logical reasoning tasks, often getting confused by minor changes in problem statements.

  "We found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching." ([66:13])

• Implications: The hosts argue that while AI models excel at pattern recognition, they lack true understanding, making them unreliable for tasks requiring genuine reasoning.

  "AI is not AGI and is not as smart as your pets." ([68:56])

• Practical Examples: Leo demonstrates AI's flawed responses to complex word problems, highlighting the models' fragility.

  "What if you just change the white balance? That shouldn't." ([09:21])

---

8. Bitwarden Advertisement

Timestamp: [25:40]

A brief advertisement spot for Bitwarden, an open-source password manager, underscores the importance of cybersecurity:

"Bitwarden creates long, strong passwords that you couldn't possibly remember. Bitwarden also supports passkeys, which someday will replace passwords." ([25:40])

---

9. Conclusion and Picks of the Week

Timestamp: [157:53]

The episode wraps up with the hosts sharing their recommendations:

• Jeff Jarvis: Recommends Defector Media's annual report for insights into running a media business.

  "If you have any interest in how running a media business works, I would really recommend this post." ([158:12])

• Leo Laporte: Praises Paris Martineau's reporting and encourages listeners to subscribe to her work.

  "Paris Martineau writes about youth issues and deserves recognition for her in-depth reporting." ([16:16])

---

Notable Quotes

• Leo Laporte: "You won't want to miss a minute. It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love from people you trust." ([00:00])

• Jeff Jarvis: "Once again, it's shy... I hate it that I just got ghosted by AI on my phone." ([85:59])

• Paris Martineau: "There's nothing but short sales companies that is now going after Roblox contending that it's a cesspool of sex." ([150:32])

---

Overall Summary:

In this episode, This Week in Google tackles pressing issues in the tech world, notably the clash between WordPress's Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine over open-source contributions and trademark misuse. The discussion extends to YouTube's efforts to authenticate video content amid rising deepfake concerns and Wimbledon's adoption of AI technology to replace human line judges. The hack of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine underscores vulnerabilities in digital preservation efforts. Additionally, the hosts critically examine the actual reasoning capabilities of AI models, dispelling myths of imminent artificial general intelligence (AGI). Throughout, they balance technical insights with humor, ensuring an engaging discourse for both regular listeners and newcomers.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twig this week at Google. Paris Martino is here. Jeff Jarvis is here. Coming up, the latest pixel enhancements. October's pixel drop is here, plus Android 15. We'll talk about the pros and cons. The end of Ublock origin on Google Chrome. It has begun. And should kids be protected from the Internet? Believe it or not, there's actually some debate over that. It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twig. This week in Google. Episode 790 recorded Wednesday, October 16, 2024. Invalid URL removed. It's time for Twig this week in Google the show. We get together and talk about the latest news from the Google verse with Paris Martino. She writes for the Information in charge of the weekend. Well, you're not in charge of it, but part of it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am in charge of the weekend. I'm the one who makes sure it includes both a Saturday and a Sunday. And I haven't screwed up yet. You're welcome.

[Leo Laporte]

Excellent work, by the way. Ms. Martineau.

[Paris Martino]

Can you expand it perhaps? Yeah, maybe you take in Monday and call that the weekend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do think that we should expand my kind of purview here and that it should be kind of a three, four day weekend every week. But I don't know, I love guys or I love that idea getting on my ass.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with us, Mr. Jeffrey Jarvis, who maybe will have a new job someday soon. But until then he's still the professor emeritus, the townite professor emeritus of At a journalistic innovation at the Craig School of Graduate School.

[Paris Martino]

I don't know if you see because I'm on the screen. Paris also sings.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we all sing.

[Paris Martino]

Craig should know that Paris sings. I don't hear you singing, Leo. Should we do this again and make sure we can hear everybody?

[Leo Laporte]

The real reason.

[Paris Martino]

Hit it, Benito.

[Leo Laporte]

Craig, Craig, Craig, Craig, New York Emeritus Emeritus. We. He's also the author of some really good books including the Gutenberg [e-mail] and the brand new one is the Web we Weave. And of course don't forget his book about magazines because so kids there used to be. That's funny you mentioned Paris must see the headlines in the New York Post as she walks by the kiosks every day. And to which Jeff said, kia, there's no more kiosks. You really can't boxes with newspapers in them. No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the newsstands were designed so hard to find newspapers. Nowadays you can't.

[Paris Martino]

You really can't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've talked about in this show before that after, I think one of the times Trump was impeached or maybe when the Capitol was stormed, one of those days, I wanted to save it all over Brooklyn trying to find a newspaper. I went to multiple places that were labeled, that are labeled on their outside as newsstands. Not a newspaper to be seen.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martino]

But you could get. You could. You could get some. Some things to smoke there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's true. Now they're all called like Zaza, Zoom. And they.

[Leo Laporte]

I was at Grand Central Station. We did our photo walk there the day after lunch with you guys. And what is the name of the famous newsstand in the Grand Central Station? I can't remember, but I saw Hudson News. Yeah, it was like, Hudson News. I said, oh, great, a Hudson News. They're selling like plants. They don't have.

[Paris Martino]

No, there's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there's nothing. There's no news.

[Paris Martino]

No, no. And then the. The street newsstands that were redesigned, I don't know, 20, 20 years ago when they did have newspapers, they were on a shelf under the front and you couldn't see any of the headlines. You could see nothing of them. But now they don't even carry that anymore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're a place to get now they carry like candy. Lot of tickets. Vapes. That's about it.

[Paris Martino]

Vapes. Lots of vapes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's. It's kind of sad. I. I like reading the news. I don't really need newsprint trees. Don't need to die for. I actually get a local newspaper delivered every week. The Petaluma Argus Courier. It's fun. They took out. It's sad they took out. The best part, though, which was the police blotter.

[Paris Martino]

I love that's not woke now, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's why. Because it was always about really dumb criminals doing stupid things. But I guess, yeah, I don't know why they took it out. YouTube takes a baby step toward labeling authentic video. See, we have a Google story. This is a new label called Captured with a Camera. This is how far we've come with AI that. So apparently it's so easy on. On to make content that looks real, but isn't that they actually have to now authenticate the videos. I have a camera that has content credentials. It's not clear yet whether those will trigger the YouTube labels. You might have to fill out a form or something like that. True Pick is an authentication service. So let's go look at their video. Oh, let's see if It. Okay.

[Paris Martino]

Hey, this is Jeff from True Pick.

[Leo Laporte]

And I am standing in the same exact spot that 19 years ago. Javed Karim. Remember that? The very first YouTube video. And apparently this is. But how is it authenticated? I don't see where the authentication is. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could be fake.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, it really could be. Nowadays it's so easy to fake stuff like that. But where's the. Where's the thing? I don't. Oh, wait a minute. Here it is. You have to ex. So it's hidden away under the more button. How this content was made captured with a camera. This. Can you believe this? This feels like a joke. This content was captured using a camera or other.

[Paris Martino]

Other recording device. We're not saying what kind that might be. Let's learn more. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Building trust. So do you have. Is there. There is. There is verification technology. So you have to use a certain kind of camera software or mobile app.

[Paris Martino]

So I would hope that your phone would qualify.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think it does it. Is it. Is it modified? Is it considered as modified? If you like edit the video normally, like, you know, to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this is a problem right now, which is this chain of custody, right? Oh, I captured it with a camera, but then I completely modified it. So Adobe. Some of Adobe's tools have this kind of certification. This camera, this Leica camera I have, the M11P has. Will put a kind of a stamp on the. On the picture that says, yes, it was created and even as a serial number created with this camera on this date and time. And then if you edit it with an Adobe tool, the Adobe tool will add to it without removing it. But it's just as easy to edit with some other tool that strips it all out. And then you have, well, we simply.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just got to put every YouTube video on the blockchain. That'll solve all these problems.

[Leo Laporte]

The standard. Oh, for all I know, they are. The standard is the Coalition for Content Provenance and authenticity or C2PA. This is. This feels like something that nobody's going to pay any attention to at all. Yeah, you have to buy special hardware. So it was founded by Microsoft and Adobe member companies, arm, BBC, intel and True Pick. That. That guy was from True Pick. It's a standard. But. But where's the list of products that support it? Nowhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, you know, they've been working on this for three whole years. Clearly they've got a lot to show from it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I understand the motive. The motivation makes sense, right? Yeah, but I think it's any. Well, we'll see YouTube is saying, you know, on the help page that you need to use the C2PA credentials. So you have to specifically use tools, not just C2PA, but C2PA version 2.1 or higher.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'll be using C2PA 1.2.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. Older C2 package edits that break the chain of provenance or make it impossible to trace the video back to its original source will of course invalidate you.

[Paris Martino]

But what edits define those edits? Any question?

[Leo Laporte]

Any. Oh, that's a good question. Like if you just change the white balance. That shouldn't.

[Paris Martino]

Or if you cut off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What if you just like cut off, you know, because you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, you could do that talking. It's. It says significant alterations to the videos core nature or content.

[Paris Martino]

What if it's a green screen video?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what is the core nature is what? Green screen. Okay.

[Paris Martino]

It was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cap, I'm curious as to like, could you put a tiny banana in the video? Like rotoscope it on and then like at what size of a banana would that be a problem? I think that that's test.

[Leo Laporte]

That is the canonical tiny banana test.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah. Paris is a standard setting organization that Star wars. They shoots all the Star wars on. Now you can do that too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that would be shot with. That would be.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, but the. But the. But the intent is to like not be able to fake people out. And you can still fake people out with stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because of the background. So this camera, this is. This is the light. This is the only camera I know of that supports this standard. Actually, it doesn't even support this standard. It supports a different standard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it is cute little case on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that cute? Yeah, I do that. So nobody realizes that it's a fantastically expensive camera. I want it to look like my dad going, hey, take. I'd like.

[Paris Martino]

It's a Mavica, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a Mavica. So. But. So there's competing standards in addition. Plus apparently. Yeah, like you say, 1.0 ain't gonna do it. You got to use C2PA 2.1. These are baby steps is how the Verge categorized it.

[Paris Martino]

So there we began the show.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. Yes, that's. That's the beginning of the show.

[Paris Martino]

There was.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, would you like to talk about something else?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Wimbledon. I know you're a big tennis buff, Jeff. You used to go to the US Open every year.

[Paris Martino]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Wimbledon is going to replace line judges. Wimbledon is the big, you know, probably the most important tennis tournament of the year. Right.

[Paris Martino]

Watch it, watch it, fella.

[Leo Laporte]

Bigger than the US Open. Bigger than the US it's the biggest grass tournament of the year.

[Paris Martino]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, no more line judges. They're going to have technology.

[Paris Martino]

They're the last one. Everybody else.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, everybody else does it.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Oh, I didn't know that.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, they're just the last ones.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's next.

[Paris Martino]

You can wear blue there, I guess. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But they require white. Do they really?

[Paris Martino]

They're the only ones that do that.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's the oldest Grand Slam tennis tournament. The All England Club announced that technology will be used to give the out and fault calls at the championships from next year on. So they didn't have line judges at the Open this year? No, no, no.

[Paris Martino]

Nor. I'm pretty sure my wife.

[Leo Laporte]

So according to. Yeah, no, you're right. It Sundays, according to AP, the French Open is the only Grand Slam tournament without some form of electronic line call.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I feel like that's going to stay the same way. The French have strong labor protections. We will not be using a robot to judge these lines.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's a perfect example of something that I could do perfectly. Right where the lines are marked are very clear. That's easily, easily done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I'd also say it's an example of something that while I could do perfectly, it would make perfect sense to me for a stogy tradition obsessed sports organization to be like, no, we must use human judges for all of this to preserve the heart of the game.

[Paris Martino]

Well, I need Paris to do the accent to the entire show.

[Leo Laporte]

She should be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you guys seen. Have you guys seen Seven Days in Hell? No, it's a. I watched this recently. It's a sports mockumentary that essentially focuses on a seven day long tennis match between champions played by Andy Samberg and Kit Harrington.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so Kit Harrington, who is Jon Snow from the Lord Game of Thrones.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is such a funny. Like it is presented like a real sports documentary.

[Leo Laporte]

So the idea is they had to play for seven days straight.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the idea is they get in a match and I guess I win Rules of tennis, but nobody can win. And they keep, you know, getting one point versus one point and so it ends up lasting for seven days and it goes through all. They've got an incredible cast. I'd really recommend it. It's a delightful watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it sounds wonderful. All right. According to the ap, line judges at Wimbledon were dressed in famously elegant uniforms and for traditionalists were part of the furniture at the All England Club. Well, that's something to aspire to.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah. They're gone. They can just keep them there and have them announce what the AI decides, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, they have.

[Paris Martino]

They have their voices announce it. So when it's out, there's a human recorded voice that says, out, out.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a human voice that says, hey, hey, hey. I couldn't have John record out.

[Paris Martino]

Hey.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Well, I didn't realize. You see, I thought that was a big deal, but it isn't a big deal. It's one of the last to fall.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah. So so far we've had a standard for video that no one can pay attention to and a meaningless, meaningless stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're trying to get the people on TikTok to watch the show. You can't be denigrating the show while we're recording it. Those kids have got to be sa from all the dancing videos.

[Leo Laporte]

I should mention that for the first time, we are streaming this on TikTok. We are now on eight different channels as we do the show live. And there are 533 people watching on YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, X.com, tick tock, Discord. What's the eighth? I don't know what the eighth is. Sleepy the radio, Soapy, the radio. Okay, kick the leave kickoff. I did kick. Okay, so that's eight different ways you can watch all the shows that we do live. And I think that's kind of fun. We like doing it that way. We encourage you to subscribe to the show still, but you can watch us do it live. You got to screw up live. And that's even. Hey, that's even more fun.

[Paris Martino]

So how many the Tick tock. I mean, on the Twitter stream now, how many does it say or watching right now on Twitter?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Well, I guess I can.

[Paris Martino]

44.

[Leo Laporte]

140. So tweet.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, yeah. See, now let me just tell you something. Let me just tell you something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Today, when I was streaming AI inside on my Twitter feed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

According to. Well, which number. Number are you using? But, you know, a number from Twitter or.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Twitter's number. It says 140. Twitter.

[Paris Martino]

My Twitter number is more than 2,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martino]

That's why I want to share to my friends and say, look what I'm wasting my afternoon doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, share it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Evening, Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, send them. Look, just post on your. On your. Hey, everyone.

[Paris Martino]

No, you see. No, you see, if you actually share it, then Twitter says it's live. Jeff's live puts a little live around my face. Does all this stuff but the only way I can do that is if you put us on whatchamacallit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, if we were on whatchamacallit, we could do it.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah. What's it called?

[Jeff Jarvis]

If we were on whatchamacallit.

[Paris Martino]

Save me her Bonito. What is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Restream live.

[Paris Martino]

We would need to add his account to our restream, basically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, I got the problem. We can talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, let's continue talking about this.

[Leo Laporte]

We would have to fire Bonito because the guy who's doing the switching.

[Paris Martino]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All I'm doing is taking the finished stream and putting it up on Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is on restream right now.

[Paris Martino]

But what would happen. I'm not on. What we would have to do is that we need to get Jeff's account on our restream. You see? So, like I see, we need to take up one of our slots here to one of our streams.

[Leo Laporte]

We only have eight slots. We're not giving you one of our eight slots.

[Paris Martino]

That's what we would have to do.

[Leo Laporte]

2000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Imagine you listing off the eight places we're streaming, and then one of them is. And Jeff Jarvis's Twitter account.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm sorry. You're right. You had something going on that you really wanted to talk about. She's trying to respond.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, guys, guys, we can keep talking about the details of how this podcast is streaming. I'm sure people love that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, by the way, I was thinking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We should talk about the wild WordPress drama of this week. Have you been following the latest updates?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it is a problem.

[Paris Martino]

But first, Paris, if I may. Before we do that, I think it's a news year update. I think Leo was not listening. I think you need to talk about your re education that you're going through. So I think everyone will be very interested in this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes. Yesterday I took my first class of one of what will be four in my New York citizens pruner course, which is a way for me as a gorilla gardener.

[Leo Laporte]

I've always been an unofficial citizen pruner. Now you're going official.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a way to go. So, for those who don't know, I've long been a gorilla gardener. During the spring summer, whenever the trees get too low, I will use some nice pruning shears I carry around with me and trim them so pedestri don't hit their heads of them. I would say public service. Turns out there is a whole program where the New York City parks department will teach you how to do this. Care for trees in various ways, and then at the end, deputize you as a official citizen tree pruner, meaning in November, I will have a license to prune any street I find.

[Leo Laporte]

License to prune.

[Paris Martino]

I told you this be worth it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would get a literal license.

[Paris Martino]

Wait, wait, wait. That lady's using the saw.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. I can use a bunch of stuff. At the end of this, I'm gonna learn how to do it all. A pole saw.

[Paris Martino]

But are you gonna wear your protective glasses?

[Leo Laporte]

Look at this. You can go around dressed like. Like this. And here's a. Here's a guy teaching her how to cut. Because you don't want to. You want to cut on the bias, don't you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm gonna learn it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you don't want to. Look, I love. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I love the people staring at this guy. Well, that's really interesting. Show us how you cut on the bias.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have a whole section if you go down there to, I guess, like, their code of conduct, I think it's up at the top. There's a whole section at the bottom that's like, what to do if someone aggressively stops you and it confronts you about trimming their tree. And you're supposed to, like, show your license, try to de escalate the situation.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you get a card. Like, a little special.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I. I learned about this because New York magazine wrote about it. I just posted a link in the Discord. Apparently, when I had, someone had sent me this article.

[Leo Laporte]

The title is Walking around New York City with a tiny saw, which you do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do. But apparently I didn't realize this. It is a hot ticket. It is very difficult to get a seat in this class. The they write a deluge of interest often means the website crashes when signups go live. The last class filled up in 11 minutes. It was seven minutes the time before that. I read this article then, fully forgotten, signed up, you know, on their wait list. Saw the day was coming when signups went live. I forgot to set an alarm, and I was like, oh, no. Then I get an email that night saying, oh, our website went down and no one was able to sign up for the tree printer class. So we're doing it again on Friday. And so I was like, all right, I'll set an actual alarm. I remembered I logged on at 7pm sharp, that exactly when it went up, half of the spots had already been taken. I checked out with my course Paris Victorious, and I got it but apparently I learned at my class last night. I'm one of the very rare people who got it in their first try. Most people in the class had tried three or four times to get in.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, that is so exciting. I'm proud to be working with you. Congratulations, Paris. That is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you can congratulate me when I actually get the license test.

[Paris Martino]

She has passed test.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course you can. So what are the rules? Don't stand on a ladder or a trash can. Do not climb the tree. You are an ambassador of street trees. So keep the peace.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. A lot about it is peacekeeping, apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you get confronted, stop pruning and walk away.

[Paris Martino]

Put down the sauce.

[Leo Laporte]

Best to avoid the fight as quote. This is a big city with many other trees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Seven million trees, as I learned last night. Approximately one for every New Yorker.

[Paris Martino]

Whoa, whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

How many is one of the things that makes New York great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Quite a lot in Brooklyn, though, actually, a significant amount of green space is in Staten Island. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But honestly, I mean, Central park is the. Is. Is one of the greatest urban. It is the greatest urban park I'm aware of. I mean, even the. The Tuileries. And you know, I mean, there. This is a. And without Central Park, New York City really would be a barren landscape.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Central park, yes, but also just the various trees that are on just the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. What would dogs pee on makes New York City. Well, they shouldn't pee on it because that actually harms the trees. As I learned, it's one of the five contributing challenges.

[Paris Martino]

That's why God fire.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But, you know, walk around Petaluma.

[Leo Laporte]

Every God darn tree has this little dog on it says, do not pee on this tree. And I feel bad for the dog owners because, like, what do they do? They walk around with a dog, holding it until they find somewhere it's okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I mean, you can curb your dog, which means, like, that's what they.

[Leo Laporte]

Want you to do. Weren't there. Aren't there signs that say, yeah, curb your dog? Yeah, so the WordPress anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that was, wasn't it? It was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. Was that worth it? That was the highlight of.

[Paris Martino]

I think we have to design. Oh, oh, Joe Esposito. I think you must design only when she graduates. An official tree pruner hat. An NYC pruner hat for Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we need a official song.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. Only if I pass, though, guys. We can't.

[Leo Laporte]

We're the man who cut the. We walk around Manhattan all with our pruners in Our hands ready to chop, chop, chop, whatever. They're long. That's enough of that. Do you have a salute? There should be a little tree salute that you have.

[Paris Martino]

No, it's this you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it is. It is that you snip.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, you snip.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, you snipe.

[Leo Laporte]

That was literally.

[Paris Martino]

You said. This is just weird. No, this is what we do.

[Leo Laporte]

The rest of the show is not going to be as good as that. That was the best.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's going to be better job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of selling this show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree, I agree. I should. Let me. This is a good time to take a break. When we come back, we will do the WordPress drama, which is now actually starting to be problematic for open source in general. I think it's starting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a really, actually interesting discussion about open sour, I think.

[Paris Martino]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by Bit Warden. Speaking of open source, the open source password manager, the only one I use and recommend because I think really, anytime crypto is involved, open source is important so that you know and others can verify that the crypto is good and strong and there are no back doors, there's no privacy violations. That's Bit Warden. It is the best password manager offering a cost effective solution that could dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online. I figure if you listen to our shows, you, I'm, I'm sure you know that you need a password manager and I'm sure you use one. Although I'm constantly amazed by the people who are otherwise very technically savvy who say, oh, you know, I just, I just reuse my password. So that's a big no. No, because if there's a breach, and there are always breaches, right, that reusable password, they're going to just try it everywhere and now your security's out the window. Or, oh, no, I just use my dog's birthday and my mother's maiden name. That's not a strong password. Bit Warden creates long, strong passwords that you couldn't possibly remember. That's, that's important. If you can remember, it's not a good password. You can't possibly remember. But you don't have to because Bit Warden does. Bit Warden also supports passkeys, which someday will replace passwords. We won't have to go through this nightmare. And one of the things that's great about Bit Warden is you can take it with you everywhere. Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, bit wardens everywhere you need passwords and those passkeys go along with you, which is really great. Now's a very important time. In fact, if, if your friends and family aren't using Bit Warden, tell them about it because the holidays are here. We just had prime days, Cyber Mondays coming up, Black Friday. And of course, when there's a lot of online shopping, the bad guys come out in force. That's why Bitwarden just announced the expansion of their inline autofill capabilities. Not just for passwords now, but includes credit cards, identities and passkeys. Autofill means that they won't fill in on a fake site. So one of the ways bad guys go after you is with phishing sites that look exactly like Amazon or wherever you're trying to buy stuff. You might be tempted to fill in your passwords or your credit cards or your or your identity there. Your address. Bit Warden won't let you. Bit Warden says no, no, that's not what you think it is. This enhancement benefits everyone, enabling a more secure interaction with web forms for not just passwords, but payment details, contact info, addresses and more. If you're in business, you'll love Bit Warden's unparalleled SSO single sign on integration and flexibility, which means you can easily and quickly safeguard all your business logins using your single sign on security policies. You set the policies, Bit Warden enforces them. They're fully compatible with SAML2OIDC, and Bit Warden ensures smooth integration no matter what your existing solution is. Thousands of businesses, including some of the world's largest organizations, trust Bit Warden to protect their online information. And because Bit Warden's open source, the code can be inspected by anyone, is regularly audited by third party experts. It's so easy to switch to Bitwarden, it only takes minutes. They support importing from almost all password management solutions, so if you want to move, it's easy to do. I did and I am so glad I did. I've been using Bit Warden for years now. And one more thing I'll tell you. You can get started with Bit Warden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan right now if you're an individual. Because Bitwarden's open source, it's free forever. Unlimited passwords, passkeys, hardware key support forever. You can even host your own vault if you really don't trust anyone. Bit Warden is the way to go for individuals and for business. Bitwarden.com twitt it's what I use is what our security guy Steve Gibson uses and recommends. Bitwarden.com Twitter we thank Bitwarden so much for supporting this week in Google, we thank you for supporting us by going to that address. Bitwarden.com TWIT Jammer B says we should call this show. You can't have Boroughs without Bows. I like it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

So the WordPress kerfuffle. I'll give you some background because I know Matt Mullenweg pretty well. I used WordPress in the earliest days almost 20 years ago when it first came out as a blog, you know, content management system that Matt had written. He wrote it and eventually, you know, and continues to give it [e-mail] it's still open source, still free to use. Eventually he started a company around it called Automatic. And they, they run a company, they run a website called WordPress.com not.org but.com where you can have hosted WordPress blogs. You don't have to maintain them, they'll run them for you. It's managed WordPress and it's a, it's a great thing. But they're not the only ones that do this. There are a lot of hosting companies that offer WordPress, often with a one button install. There's a company called WP Engine that also offers managed WordPress hosting. Now WordPress is phenomenally successful. It's when they were an advertiser, we said they have one third of the web runs on WordPress. It's now more than 40% of the web runs on WordPress.

[Paris Martino]

How much? Have you ever seen a number for how much of that 40% is run by WordPress.com versus other WordPress?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I haven't, but I'm going to say the majority is by the free open source version. And a lot of it not so. For instance, when I first started using WordPress, I didn't install it on my own server. I went to a company that does hosting. They had a one button install of WordPress from WordPress.org so in effect, you know, they were running my WordPress.

[Paris Martino]

We used to teach all of our journalism students to put up a WordPress instance.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but running it on somebody else's server, right? Not on their own.

[Paris Martino]

Oh well, they're on server, right? Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So that's what Automatic does, but it's also what a company called WP Engine does. It all started in mid September. Matt wrote a blog post calling WP Engine a cancer to WordPress. And the issue, this is an issue. And in fact, Dre's boitard, who wrote Drupal, which is what we use for our website and other content management system, has written a blog post about this. This is the taker, the. What do you call it? Taker versus taken. It's, it's the issue in open source in general where people put it out there and people use it. They take, but they don't give back. Right, Right. And that's what Matt was a little bit mad about with WordPress with Woolly, criticized them for disabling the users, for instance, to see and track revision history for posts, which he says is very important. WP Engine turns it off by default to save money. He said they are, by the way, WP Engines investor is Silver Lake, one of our favorite private equity firms. He said they don't contribute sufficiently to the open source project and the fact that they call themselves WP Engine confuses people into thinking it's part of the official WordPress. WP Engine sent him a cease and desist letter. He sent a cease and desist letter back saying they'd breached WordPress and WooCommerce trademark usage rules.

[Jeff Jarvis]

WP Engine also claimed that Matt had said he would take a, quote, scorched earth nuclear approach, end quote, against WP Engine unless it agreed to pay, quote, a significant percentage of its revenues for a license to the WordPress trademark.

[Paris Martino]

That's the hard part. 8%.

[Leo Laporte]

And he did, because it is a scorched earth. He has blocked them from accessing WordPress.org, which is where the source code comes from.

[Paris Martino]

Some sites were affected and this broke.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A bunch of websites and prevented them from like, updating plugins and themes. It also left some of them open to security attacks. And most of all, I mean, the highlight of all this is that people in the open source community were really pissed. They felt that this went kind of was an affront to the ideas, the ideals of open source and one person.

[Paris Martino]

Being in charge of it all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it got worse because then Automatic forked a plugin from WP Engine and started offering it themselves. They took control of the advanced custom Fields plugin. This is, this happened last week, which WordPress developers used at customized fields on their edit screen that was maintained by WP Engine. So they lost control over it and they couldn't Update the plugin. WordPress said, hey, it's ours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. They said, this is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engines legal attacks.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we've had Matt on the show, right, Jeff?

[Paris Martino]

Oh, yeah. And preaching the gospel of open source and we hug him and love him for that. And so there's something here I just don't understand. I can't figure out. I don't know what's really happening.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean and the. Another aspect of this that caught my attention which is a bit of like petty tech infighting but I do think shows illustrates a bit more the tenor of what's going on is dhh. David Heinemeyer Hansen, who is a notorious troll.

[Leo Laporte]

But go ahead. Yeah, a notorious troll creator of Ruby on Rails. So he's very respected.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He wrote a blog post.

[Paris Martino]

Wait, is he a troll or is he respected?

[Leo Laporte]

He's respected and a troll, both.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's respected and he's also a bit of.

[Paris Martino]

I don't respect trolls though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wouldn't say he's like he has. Yeah, he has earned respect despite sometimes.

[Leo Laporte]

He founded 37signals with Jason Freed. It's now called Base Camp. He wrote Ruby on Rails which was the dominant web technology for many years. But he's also. Well, he's problematic in other ways. Let's just say that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, so he writes a blog post being like it's called Automatic is doing open source dirty. Basically saying automatic demanding 8% of WP engines revenues because they're not giving back enough to WordPress is a wanton violation of general open source ideals. And the specifics of the license. It kind of goes into here and basically says, you know, speaks to his experience, the open source stuff like that saying.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with him by the way. Yeah, I don't think he's wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Matt expects to have their cake and eat it too. And then Matt freaks out and writes a what he calls a respectful response but is a very mean blog post in response that he later ends up changing and I think today deleted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think Matt's having some issues. He did so he did offer a buyout to employees of Automatic who didn't agree with him. 159 employees took it. They got six months severance or $30,000, whichever was higher.

[Paris Martino]

That's what we talked about last week and we reread the post of someone who decided to stay.

[Leo Laporte]

Zeldman. Jeffrey Zeldman decided to stay. I have also heard through the grapevine that Matt gave a fairly substantial percentage of WordPress of automatic to the employees who remained. So he gave stock options to the employees who remained saying thank you for staying and now you have a stake in this company. Some. This is what's so hard. I respect dhh, for instance, for his contribution. Huge contribution. As I respect man. I think Matt, I don't. I've. I've avoided weighing in on this because.

[Paris Martino]

I don't I don't know, I'm not seeing here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The. The thing that I think is interesting or notable is about the DHH situation is Matt's response blog post which kind of gets at or at least to me perhaps explains a bit more of his thinking on this. He basically what he does in this blog post Matt is Matt attacks DHH is credibility. He says DHH claims to be an expert in open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others. And so he goes through DHH's portfolio and basically says like Ruby on Rails has, you know, done a lot of stuff but because it's open source that value has been captured by other companies. Not.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he ends it by saying David, perhaps it would be good to explore this the therapist or coach while you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect 37 signals inspired ton of what automatic does. We're now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little bit of a measuring contest. I don't think that's appropriate at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah but I think that it kind of goes to which is something that I've seen people in the open source community complaining about in this particular issue is that it seems like Matt's approach here is more focused on yeah, why didn't you make more money revenue captured by this open source product than the standard ideals of open source? Which like that thing you're mentioning you mentioned earlier that I'm forgetting the name of two. It's this kind of constant debate in open source about whether you should hoard it all for yourself and then maximize revenue or create a product that's truly open source and that means you're going to lose out precious dollars.

[Paris Martino]

Sorry. It's what drove his success versus again I mentioned this last week, Movable type and six apart when they got hinky about people using their platform to build their own hosting situations, they limited the licensing requirements on or abilities on their software. That's what made them shrink, that's what made them die and WordPress to succeed. So it's the essence of what made WordPress WordPress was in fact being open source. The one thing I think that he makes a good point about is that if WP Engine benefits hugely and doesn't contribute back, that too is a violation of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what Dries says Dries is the creator of Drupal. That's the product that we use to run our websites. He writes in his. He says the maker taker problem, which.

[Paris Martino]

Is the Trenton problem.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. Or the tragedy of the commons in some respect.

[Paris Martino]

The bridge in Trenton says Trenton makes the world takes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that is the Trenton problem. And it sounds like they have some problems and maybe the imbalance between major contributors and those who contribute minimally and how this harms open source communities. And he says the lack of an environment that supports the fair coexistence of open source businesses, these are really kind of thorny issues in the open source community. Matt Mullenweg says, look, we've been trying to negotiate a trademark deal with WP Engine for a long time and they've just been stringing us along.

[Paris Martino]

But who knew that that was there for a second, the two parties. That was a requirement that you had to have the license to put the WP on. Was that. Was that always a requirement? In which case.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martino]

Matt has a point. Or is it a new thing?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a trademark issue, though. If there is confusion. And I can understand. He's saying, look, by calling themselves WP Engine, they're. They're confusing people over who is responsible for this. It's not.

[Paris Martino]

But how long ago did they. Did they start calling themselves that? And this is the. When did. Was there a rule on the books? Was.

[Leo Laporte]

There isn't a rule. But if I started calling myself Professor Jeff Jarvis on Twitter, somebody did that.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, I know. And somebody did that. And I hate the son of a bitch and can't stand him and he's not funny and don't ever look at him. Yeah, I agree. No, I agree. I just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, sorry. I was going to say, I think it's like. Would be slightly different. It's like if someone's calling themselves professor jj it's a little different. Like, I, I mean, well, that's.

[Paris Martino]

Everybody calls.

[Leo Laporte]

We had problems with Twitter, remember, because they call themselves Twitter after Twitt existed. And we were having real confusion with that. People thought that we stole our name from Twitter or that we were copying Twitter. And to this day, if you type twit in autocomplete almost anywhere, it fills in Twitter. But I, you know, I mean, we worked it out to our mutual satisfaction. That's all I'm allowed to say. But I understand, you know, there is. That kind of confusion is problematic and it is something open source has to solve because right now there are a lot, a lot of big, wealthy companies Relying on taking from open source. Often individuals, just simply somebody who wrote something and not pay, not giving back.

[Paris Martino]

What was the relationship of Red Hat to Linux? Was that a good model, a bad model? I mean, what are some other companies that made a lot of money on top of open Source and how did they manage those relationships?

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Red Hat's owned by IBM now. There's a good relationship there. Because first of all, Linux isn't just the Linux kernel. It's everything you put on top of it, including all the applications, the installer and all of that. And that's what Red Hat did and other Linux distros do. And I don't think Linus has any problem with that. Linus retained the trademark to Linux, however. So you can't call it Linux unless it, unless it's using his kernel as approved by him.

[Paris Martino]

So it's a similar one person.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's. Yeah, there might be more apt comparisons because Linux is more than just the Linux kernel, you know, in fact, if you ask Richard Stallman, he'll say it's not Linux, it's GNU Linux and it's just the Linux kernel with a bunch of GNU software on top of it and you shouldn't call it Linux. So there's Open source has always been a very prickly for a reason.

[Paris Martino]

Because they're protecting something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And people are giving. The reason people do Open source, the reason Matt wrote WordPress. He didn't write WordPress to get rich, I don't think. I think he wrote WordPress because he, he was a coder. He was excited by the challenge, the problem. He loved writing it. He wrote it for himself initially and, and he wanted to give something to the community. But I think where he gets upset, and I don't blame him, is when you give a gift and then they say, give me more, give me more, give me more. And they never reciprocate. It's like if, if I took you guys out to dinner 100 times and you never offered to pay once. That's, that's the analogy.

[Paris Martino]

Last time we saw him, he did take me out to dinner 100 times. Finally I said, no, enough. The last time we went out, you had to pay for 10 people. At least I could take you out to lunch.

[Leo Laporte]

But the whole point is, whether you did or not is that we fought.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't own a home.

[Leo Laporte]

You never have to pay Paris. No, but that's the point is that you try, whether you succeed or not, out of goodwill, that you try to.

[Paris Martino]

Give back, I think on Matt. So I think I've told the story before when he came up with the idea and the model for WordPress.com atop WordPress.org Polaris Mike Herschel and the venture capitalist called me and said, this guy wants us to invest in them and it's a really weird model. What do you think? And I said, I believe in WordPress. I believe it's a winner. I believe it's a really smart model. Is that. But the point of it was that Matt would open something up that others could use. But WordPress, they would benefit by having WordPress, but he would benefit by having their contributions to WordPress. And so that two way street is critical to the model, I think, being honorable. Who do you side with here, Paris? I don't think I've quite sensed it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I don't know. I think it's a complicated battle.

[Paris Martino]

Yep. I want to side.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I think someone. I think Molly White, our friend of the pod, tweeted a mocked up version of that Onion headline that typically says like, oh, worst person you know, just made a good point and said the worst people you know are fighting. And I mean, obviously Matt isn't the worst person we know, but I think that that tweet captures the sentiment. I feel a bit. And just the sense that it seems like a bloodbath and a mess and I'm just sad for everybody involved.

[Paris Martino]

Yes, well said. Well said. You should be in politics.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I shouldn't. I have too much respect for myself and my fellow men.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it's interesting because David HaneMeier Hansen at 37signals did the same exact thing when 37. When the folks at 37signals said, no longer can you discuss politics at work. They offered a six month buyout to any employee who didn't like it.

[Paris Martino]

How many took it, do you know? But it's so small. What did it matter?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I don't know how many took it. People did at the time think it might kill 37 signals. It did not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They've got so many signals.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, they're now down to 35.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm reading Manton Reese's piece on this. I have a huge respect for Manton Reese. He wrote Microblog. He's a very smart, active guy in the open source community that I highly respect. He says I think trademark law may be on Matt's side. The private texts from Matt to WP Engine look quite dam. I also wonder how the case will be influenced by automatically most Companies freely use the WordPress mark with few restrictions for years. I do believe in trademark law. If you don't defend a trademark. Yeah. You lose it, right?

[Paris Martino]

Very good point. Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

If Automattic wins, Manton writes, or they can settle the lawsuit, the community will recover. Calls for Matt to Resign are unwarranted. WordPress exists, its current level of success in large part because of him. Agreed vision also provided a good home for Tumblr and Day one, I'm not, by the way, two companies he's purchased. I'm not going to toss all that aside because he picked a fight with a private equity firm, Silver Lake, that charges a lot for hosting.

[Paris Martino]

Good point.

[Leo Laporte]

Get his Manton's final thoughts. Get out the popcorn as we watch this drama unfold. But let's also remember there are real people here trying to do what they think is right. Matt has been blogging more than ever. He's been sitting for interviews. While I'm sure the lawyers discourage it, I'd like to see the same human face on the WP Engine side. I don't think we've had that since Jason Cohen, the founder, handed his company over.

[Paris Martino]

I think the winning point here is when is private equity an empathetic character?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you had, if you said to me, choose between Matt mullenweg and Silver Lake, there's no question.

[Paris Martino]

Easy, easy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I totally agree. But I do think that, and I think that's what has made this such kind of a thorny issue, is that private equity is a classic goon that no one wants to be around. But the way that Matt has been handling this has not been good. I mean, I remember like within the last week, one aspect of what happened with this is, I believe now in order to log into WordPress or something along those lines, you have to check a box that says you're not affiliated with WP Engine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they don't want them to download it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some like fairly well known female creator in the Open source and WordPress community posted about this being like, well, I guess I can't log in to WordPress anymore. And Matt, or I assume someone affiliated with him, the WordPress Twitter account replied to her and said, who are you? And I'm just like, there are just like little things like that that I'm just like, you don't. I wonder about trying to get people against your side like that.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think we should table this.

[Paris Martino]

He needs a PR person.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he does.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we should table this because honestly, first of all, it's not going to affect anybody.

[Paris Martino]

We don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Listen to the show. It doesn't affect us. It really doesn't. It's not a big deal. We don't know the ins and outs of it. It's just, it's a. It's an interesting drama, but I don't think it edifies in any way.

[Paris Martino]

And it's nothing like the, the Lizzie newsy drama. But we won't go there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We will not.

[Leo Laporte]

Lizzy. Newsy. What are you talking Newsy doozy?

[Paris Martino]

Lizzo.

[Leo Laporte]

Lizzo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he's talking about Olivia Nazi and Ryan Lizza. A media drama that we will not get into right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I do not want to get into Olivia Nuzzie.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, is it getting juicy?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it? Oh, okay, now I maybe do want to get it.

[Paris Martino]

There's not. Well, there's now dueling court documents.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah. So here's something people should care about that matters to a lot of people and that's the Internet Archive.

[Paris Martino]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Which got badly hacked. It's not clear, but it seems to be. See, I don't even want to attribute it to this, to a pro Palestinian group because it could be an anti Palestinian group who pretending to be a pro Palestinian group to besmirch their reputation. So we don't really know yet how it happened, but somebody took the mo. One of the most important Internet.

[Paris Martino]

I use it for research every damn day.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Steve Gibson had quite a story. There's a new standard out there called Bimmy for authenticating email that will let companies put their trademark logo on the email. So when you get it, it's authenticated that it came from that company. It's a pretty good idea. And he's applied for it. But the way his ca. His certificate authority validates his trademark Digicert is by going to the Internet Archive to look up past uses of his trademark. They can't. He can't get validated because the Internet Archive is unreliable. It's not down, it's running in a read only mode.

[Paris Martino]

But it's importantly. Yeah, the Wayback Machine is up and read only, but the huge archive of historical documents is not up still.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can't.

[Paris Martino]

Safe.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a provisional. Yeah, there's a way. So this is this and all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Also all login information was hacked.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I don't mind that, by the way. I support them. I give them money every month and I think it's a really. I think everybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I totally agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I support them. It's just an unfortunate situation. For people who had information there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I mean, here's the good news. Everybody already knows your information because of the national public data breach. So it doesn't really matter.

[Paris Martino]

What information do you actually have there?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't think Playboy, but I don't think my contributions to the Internet Archive go through their own register. I think they go through PayPal. So even then, I don't think that they got anything. But it doesn't matter. Brewster Kahle, the guy who founded it, is a true hero. Yes, this Internet Archive is a very important feature of the Internet landscape. The Wayback Machine alone provides people access to historic documents from the Internet. Who would hack it?

[Paris Martino]

Why is it still. What? Do you know any more about why it's still down? No, what they're trying to.

[Leo Laporte]

And maybe we get Brewster on. I wonder if they got hit by ransomware. And what would be the worst nightmare is that all of the data has been encrypted by a bad.

[Paris Martino]

They said. They said in their.

[Leo Laporte]

On the Twitter it was a DDoS.

[Paris Martino]

I'm trying to get to it right now. Now it's not down. Now I can't get to it.

[Leo Laporte]

I just got to it. Here's the page that I'm looking at. Right?

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mark, Twitter said an hour ago, wanted to share an update from team Wayback Machine. The archives are safe and the Wayback Machine is in read only mode. We hope to turn on more crawling within a day to make sure our web collections remain whole. Next up, save page now. Thanks for the support.

[Leo Laporte]

916 billion pages. Oh, our entire history is on there.

[Paris Martino]

And it's not just the web history again. There are magazines from 1900. It's either HathiTrust or Archive.org where I can find these publications for research that you otherwise just couldn't get. And incredibly valuable beyond way, way before.

[Leo Laporte]

The web hackers defaced the website with a message that said, have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See? 31 million of you on have I been pwned? Whatever jerk did that.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Should be hung by the heels. I.

[Paris Martino]

Why would you pick the Internet Archive as your enemy? There's plenty of others.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Even if it is vulnerable. I mean, this is. It must be a 14 year old. It's just appalling.

[Paris Martino]

It's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like robbing a library.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Robbing a life. Saying, oh, look, I just got these 12 books from the library. I'M gonna keep them. What kind of jerk does that?

[Paris Martino]

So there's a whole political party that's taking books out of library, but we won't go into that right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bruce said that their data hasn't been corrupted anywhere and services are stopped because they're upgrading internal systems.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a relief.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's at least a silver lining.

[Leo Laporte]

Take this as an opportunity to donate. I have support them. This is so important. So that's a story to me that makes a big difference in the world and we got to pay attention.

[Paris Martino]

Yes. I'm glad you did. I was going to ask you to but you were ahead of me. As you.

[Leo Laporte]

I had you. I have more to talk about in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsors. How about that? Hey, how do you like them apples? This episode. Do people ever say that anymore? How do you like them apples?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no one's worrying about the apples. I do think that that's quite sad.

[Paris Martino]

Check in quoting Goodwill hunting. Will they say that?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Goodwill hunting?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, there's no way that phrase came from Goodwill.

[Paris Martino]

That's the only way people quote it now is quoting Good Will Hunting. Paris. Paris cares about the apple trees in her official role, but that's another matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, will you do some research while I do this add on?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am literally already doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

I could tell. I saw that in your eyes. Our show today brought to you by a great company. I talked to these guys last week and I was so. I was blown away, frankly. US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. Here's the deal. The way Microsoft offers support, you buy a. You buy a license to a product and you know you have a number of hours of support built into it, which means you pay for support you may never use. The pay as you go model is much better. Microsoft does not offer that. US Cloud offers that. It's the global leader in third party Microsoft enterprise support. 50 of the Fortune 500 use US Cloud and they've learned switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft unified support. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack. They're there 24, 7, 300 and 65 days a year. They respond faster than Microsoft. They resolve tickets quicker for clients all around the world. And you're always going to talk to real humans, and I mean expert humans. Their expert level engineers have an average of 14.9 years experience and that's for Breakfix or DSE. They don't. They are very finicky they pick the best engineers. So when you are talking to somebody at US Cloud, you're talking to somebody who's going to fix your problem. You're talking to the kind of person you really want to talk to. When trouble hits you, go, help me. They're there and they know it. Their teams are 100% US based, so your data never leaves the US. And here's something Microsoft has never done. US Cloud offers financially backed SLAs on response time. You might wait long time for answers for Microsoft. Initial ticket response from US Cloud Average is just under four minutes in 2023. Last year, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving 1/3 or more when switching from Microsoft Unified support to US Cloud. This is an easy, easy sell because it's the best support and it costs less. From Fortune 500 companies, large health systems, major financial institutions to federal agencies, U.S. cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every single day. The big brands trust you at US Cloud. I'm talking like Caterpillar, HP, right? HP, Aflac, Dun and Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen USCloud for their Microsoft support needs. Let me quote this, this is great. Quote I heard in an interview a director of information technologies, he said, quote, and within an hour US Cloud responded with I want to say four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice. You make the right choice, US Cloud. And by the way, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it more than US Cloud. Their ISO, gdpr ESG compliance. Strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. They attract investment. This is good. And ensure long term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. Market. This is a great company to do business with. It's going to save you money and you're going to get the best support you've ever had. Visit uscloud.comuscloud.com book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com book a call. Get faster Microsoft support for less from the best US Cloud. Thank him so much for supporting us. We're the best and you support us when you go to that address to uscloud.comparis did you find the source of that old time, old timey quote, kind of, how do you like them apples? Is it horse apples?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. The initial answer to this question you get when you search from it is that it came from the toffee apple bomb, also known as the 2 inch howitzer or plum pudding, which was invented by British forces during World War I to counter similar German trench mortars. And it acquired the nickname Toffee Apple because of its small circular barrel mounted on a stick like catapult system and painted yellow.

[Leo Laporte]

So a tommy in the trenches would shout, would fire that and say, how do you like them apples?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. People also say, trace Back to the 1959 movie Rio Bravo said in that case. However, I wasn't able to find any official stuff bringing this back to World War II. So I looked on the Google Books Graham build Viewer and it has very good. It has like, it's going. It says that there have been mentions of the phrase how do you like them apples? Dating back to 1900 and 1897, although I can't figure out what specific books they're saying. So the World War I thing might be a myth, but I can't disprove it. Current.

[Paris Martino]

Well, there were wars before that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Did they use that specific bomb?

[Leo Laporte]

Did they have Tommy apples or whatever? Can't. Toffee apples. This I like. I don't know. Is that just me? I think you like this too, don't you? Like, like, where did that come from? Why do people say that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm always. Yeah. Asking that question.

[Leo Laporte]

Why do they say dial the phone? I understand there's no dial on a phone. Why would they say dial? No one says that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I mean there was dial on the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there was. Oh, okay. Yeah, I know there was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Might have been before your time, Leah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was before my time.

[Paris Martino]

So the newspaper results.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, please.

[Paris Martino]

I'm trying to go there. Oh, I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think we've done it. We're done with apples.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, I was trying to.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm moving, I'm moving.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Listen, if we had the Internet Archive, we could look back.

[Paris Martino]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. Great paper. I bet you discussed this on your Inside AI show earlier today. Great paper. From Apple.

[Paris Martino]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you like them? Apple from Apple. Six AI researchers at Apple. This is Gary Marcus's take on it, but actually it's worth reading. The white paper itself and the thread.

[Paris Martino]

About it which I have in the rundown below is really very clear.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so this is the author, one of the author, one of the six authors he's a research scientist at Apple. Was it DeepMind comes from Georgia Tech. Merdad Farah Farah Tabar can large language models truly reason or are they just sophisticated pattern matchers? Well, they did some interesting research. They actually gave a number of LLMs some word problems that any human would probably solve quite handily and showed how.

[Paris Martino]

Easily confused Pretty well yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they were able to easily confuse the LLMs with basically with extraneous information.

[Paris Martino]

Or actually I wouldn't say quite extraneous. It was for a simple change. If you, if you said when Sophie watches her nephew and they just said when bracket name watches her bracket family and then change that variable that alone was enough to confuse it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me give you an example by the way. This is what Miradard wrote. We to sum up, we found no evidence of formal reasoning we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching. So fragile in fact, that changing names can alter results by 10%. Let me give you a problem. I will give you the problem and then I will show you how the AIs handled it.

[Paris Martino]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from Gary Marcus's paper. Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Got that? 44 on Friday. Then on Saturday 58, 4458 on Sunday he picks double the number of Kiwis he did on Friday but 88. 88. Very good. But wait some five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many Kiwis does Oliver have now? You would Normally say well 44 plus 58 plus 88 but that little phrase but five of them were a bit smaller than average. Confused both 01 mini which is the. Oh, it's reasoning. Reasoning thinking that the smaller ones subtracted 5 from the total, giving a result of 185 instead of 190. Llama38b this is Meta's open model. Same thing came up with 185. The confusion with this extraneous clause but 5 of them were a bit smaller than average apparently happens again and again. This is a one about he just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sees but and then assumes the rest of the sentence.

[Leo Laporte]

It's doing pattern matching.

[Paris Martino]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Peyton Manning became the first quarterback here's one for you football fans. Peyton Manning became the first quarterback ever to lead two different teams to multiple Super Bowls. He's also the oldest quarterback ever to play in a Super bowl at age 39. Past record was held by John Elway, who led the Broncos to victory in Super Bowl 33 at age 38. Currently Denver's executive vice President of football operations, general manager Quarterback Jeff Dean had jersey number 37 in champion in champ Bowl. Champ bowl. Which is Nothing, by the way. 34. The question after that is what is the name of the quarterback who is 38 in Super Bowl 33? Well, it's John Elway, obviously, but for some reason the AI said, oh yeah, that's Jeff Dean. Which makes no sense to a human, but it shows that they're easily, I guess, easily distracted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to rub this paper in all of those guys who got got the splashy magazine profiles of being like.

[Paris Martino]

The AI is real and loves right around the corner.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. You saw Jan Leun's article, the article about Yan Leon in the Wall Street Journal last. Last weekend where he said this. It's just bs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's.

[Leo Laporte]

These things aren't going to be dangerous as a cat. They're not as smart as your pets.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gizmo knows the champion of the Super Bowl.

[Leo Laporte]

Gizmo would know John Elway, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. No, he's right now trying to break down my door.

[Leo Laporte]

You can like Gizmo in if you want. Gary Marcus, who says, I've been saying this for years. Gary Marcus says, yeah, yeah. There's no way you could build reliable agents on this foundation.

[Paris Martino]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

We're changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bits of irrelevant info can give you a different answer.

[Paris Martino]

The fragility of supposed LLM reasoning says Murdad. LLMs remain sensitive to changes in proper names like people, food or objects. And even more so when numbers are altered. Would a grade school student's math test score vary by 10% if we only change the names? No. So what? It's what? So it's really, really, really good at mimicking and pattern recognition. But it's not reasoning. AI is AGI is not effing around the corner. Your investment is not worth it at that level. It still does neat things, but they're overselling the hell out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I would. Here's what. Go ahead, play moral panic. I heard it. I heard that.

[Paris Martino]

I don't think I was Moral panic. I don't think that was. But go ahead and play it.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito gets to make the judgment call. Is this moral panic?

[Paris Martino]

I got a bad feeling about this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, now every time I hope it's a different one.

[Paris Martino]

I do too now. Yes, there's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently there's a variety of this. There are.

[Paris Martino]

Yes, but you can't see people. But we see Benito right now staring at a screen. Tried to find a different one.

[Leo Laporte]

I would defend AI I think there's a lot of very. We've seen it over and over, but you have to understand what it can and can't do. You shouldn't probably let your car drive itself home all the time without supervision. There's things that we people are letting AI do they shouldn't. But Notebook LMS a good example. Both of you have said how useful that's been the Google. Yeah, I mean, there's AI that's fun and that I think the emphasis on that has been a mistake from the AI people.

[Paris Martino]

Because I was talking about this with Jason today. I think that the problem is because he was asking if you're Sam Altman, you're overselling like crazy and you are sure to disappoint in the future with any consumer, any business reporter or anybody else. However, in the present, when you're trying to raise bucket loads of money, you oversell like crazy. And he's been very good at overselling like crazy. And he's getting bucket loads of money.

[Leo Laporte]

$167 billion.

[Paris Martino]

It's inevitably a profound disappointment when if it were sold rationally, we need these reality checks because that's what says what this is really and what the actual value is and what it can actually do. And it is pretty amazing. But the boys in their size matters crap are overselling the hell out of it and they're hurting the field.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, when Sam says prosperity, universal prosperity is just around the corner because of AI it's like, come on, Sam. Really? That's a little much. Anyway, I am still bullish. I don't think the singularity is near, but I think there's a lot of useful things you can do with AI today. And I continue to use AI for.

[Paris Martino]

A while and there'll be more tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Did you see, Let me see if it's still there, the Google store yesterday.

[Paris Martino]

Well, I wonder why you put that in the rundown. Yes, I like to buy a phone.

[Leo Laporte]

This is speaking of AI McLaren racing drivers Discover the magic of Gemini. So Google bought but the some of the trade dress of the Formula One cars run by McLaren. The wheels have the rainbow, the Google rainbow on it. There's a Chrome logo on it. And at the beginning of the season, McLaren was doing terribly and I thought, oh, that was a bad investment. Now they are the hottest thing in Formula one racing. And so on the front page of the Google store, you see Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

[Paris Martino]

Do you know who they are anyway?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I'm a big F1 fan. Well, you're not. You're. You're a tennis guy. I'm an F1 fan. Look, they don't even say their last names. Just say Lando and Oscar.

[Paris Martino]

Celebrate who they are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not even a little bit.

[Paris Martino]

Well, I'm doing. I've met Lando in the past.

[Leo Laporte]

You've met Lando?

[Paris Martino]

I helped him set up his streaming setup when I worked at Twitch. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

So for racing. For him streaming himself, because they do all these guys do the Forza kind.

[Paris Martino]

Of race, like his home setup.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paris Martino]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

So Lando is very cool and is suddenly the one of the. Maybe the top driver.

[Paris Martino]

In which one is Lando?

[Leo Laporte]

The one on the left. The cute one. Actually, Oscar's pretty cute too. This is the great thing about F1 drivers. First of all, it's a death defying profession. It's incredibly.

[Paris Martino]

Are they all small? Like. Like horse jockeys?

[Leo Laporte]

They're not that small, but they can't be too big. Obviously they have to fit in the cockpit. But they also have to be, it turns out, not just great drivers, they're the best drivers in the world. But cute and presentable. Because a lot of what they do is about public relations. This is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, yeah, they're slaps and ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're covered in ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, they are covered in ads. You're right.

[Paris Martino]

Leo thought that was a sexual something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

You were saying something about their abs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't even know what those slapped in abs.

[Leo Laporte]

They have good. There's. Trust me. Anyway. Okay, fine.

[Paris Martino]

So. So I'm about to buy a new phone. I was in Manhattan all day yesterday. By the time I got home, my battery was shot, so I gotta do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, why wouldn't you get a pixel? And then.

[Paris Martino]

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna go over and get mine so I can tease you with it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I recently got. Months ago, I guess, got a new phone because I also had battery issues. Jeff did. I mean, you know, it's fine.

[Paris Martino]

It happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a phone.

[Paris Martino]

It happens. Yeah, I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Came out infrequently.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what the battery life is on this because I never take it off the dock, but I'm sure it's good.

[Paris Martino]

Well, mine's great. I'm home all day, so I'm on WI Fi, so it doesn't. But when I spent a day on cell, it said, what was that? Why'd you do that to me? Plus, I was doing research So I was taking tons of pictures of documents in rare book libraries.

[Leo Laporte]

I am very happy with the Pixel 9. I think it's great. It's not my daily driver because the iPhone is. Because I'm.

[Paris Martino]

Because you're a snob.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm kind of all in on Apple everywhere, unfortunately, because it all. You know, it's an ecosystem thing. It all works better together. Right? Yeah, but. But the Pixel 9 is a great phone. I think it's a wonderful phone. I think you'll be very happy with it. And I think the XL Life is good. And I. The number Android 15 just came out.

[Paris Martino]

How much memory did you get it?

[Leo Laporte]

I probably got 512. I usually get a lot because I'll tell you why. Nowadays you take a lot of pictures and a lot of video, and the video can be very big. So mine's rebooting because I'm installing Android 15. One of the features of Android 15, this should be a change log.

[Paris Martino]

It's a change logs in the change log. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now.

[Paris Martino]

Should we do it?

[Leo Laporte]

I won't. Huh?

[Paris Martino]

We could.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Out of sequence. This could be surprising.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's do it. Let's be crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go crazy. The Google change log.

[Paris Martino]

Hey, Bonito. A lot of warning.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody in the chat is saying Leo should just take this show and chop it up into pieces. Hey, hey.

[Paris Martino]

That sounds cruel.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what he means by that, but okay.

[Paris Martino]

Or do you want. You want Paris to prune us? Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. But make sure those cuts are at an angle so I don't lose all my SAP. Are you reaching down to get your pruning?

[Paris Martino]

I want to see this.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Let's see him. Whoa. Now, do you keep those clean?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will be. Now that I'm taking a class.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have to, like, sterilize them? Don't you, like, have to?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I need to sterilize them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll probably use the alcohol wipes I use for my glasses.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be sufficient.

[Paris Martino]

I want to see Paris Martino branded.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They've got two settings. One is this one in a tree or big tree, and this one's bigger tree.

[Paris Martino]

That looks quite threatening right now in ways to make me uncomfortable.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the Google Change logic. You see how excited we are about the Google Change lock? All right. Google adds new features for the Pixel along with the Android 15 rollout. 15 has some interesting features. One I thought is very interesting is this idea of a private space which means you can hide the apps on Your phone, you can lock them behind a separate.

[Paris Martino]

What apps are like. Like dirty apps.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there Dirty Grinder?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, okay. I'm too old.

[Leo Laporte]

These days, when you buy a vibrator, every single vibrator has an app.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Maybe I shouldn't have said that. You know, actually, speaking of vibrators, my. What's wrong? Go on. I think this is a plague nowadays that everything requires an app. Lisa bought the Dyson Curling.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, that does come with an app, but you don't need it. I also got duped by that. The Dyson Airwrap. Phenomenal hair dryer. Stupidly expensive. Totally worth it. It does come with an app, and it's dumb. It just shows you videos of how to do.

[Leo Laporte]

They've gotten better at it because the new one, which is the curling iron. The straight. Straight. You can't there. There's no manual to watch the instructional video. You have to download the app and create an account. It requires an app. And I think that that's. She returned it. She said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that. I think she was right to return it. Yeah. Anyway, so there's another thing you might want to hide, I guess. I don't know. There's also new theft protection features. Some of these things, the iPhone, for instance, has very good active. They call it activation lock theft protection. The Pixel 15 work or Android 15 will require additional authentication if someone tries to take the SIM out or turn off Find My Device, which is. Again, Apple already does this. After multiple failed tries to change sensitive settings. By guessing your password, a pin, the system will lock the device. Okay. Okay. You could turn that on. Auto lock protection. And you can remote lock it again. This is more like parody with iOS Android.

[Paris Martino]

Somebody runs away with your phone thing. IOS already does.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martino]

Let me see the text that someone has taken the phone away from you and is on the run.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, I don't know about that. That's.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, that's there. That's where. That's the theft detection.

[Leo Laporte]

So if somebody's running away from your.

[Paris Martino]

Phone on a bike, it knows that. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and it locks. That's actually cool. So then it locks the phone. Oh, okay. I take it back.

[Paris Martino]

So I was unique. It was. I was somewhere. I was in Virginia and I was walking down the street and somebody came up to me on a bike and said, did you see a phone? And I said, I just came from there. No. Oh, no, I'm gonna be late for work. And he's on a bike. And he says, can I use yours to call my boss?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Suspicious.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. Did you fall for that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I would have thought and said.

[Paris Martino]

Otherwise, I'm a horrible person.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll say. You say, I'll enter in the number on my phone and hold it up to you on speaker. What's your boss's number?

[Paris Martino]

I should have done the speaker. Instead I stood in front of the bike's wheels.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's all right.

[Paris Martino]

And then subtly everyone and then said, give me the number. And I put it in. But then I handed the phone to him and how much of an idiot I was.

[Leo Laporte]

But he did. But it turned out it was a true story and you weren't.

[Paris Martino]

I have no idea it was true or not, but he gave me the phone back. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he talk to anybody?

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, I could hear he was talking to somebody, but you know, he could. Paris, when I call, say, how dare you, Jeff, this is the third time this month you've been late for work. No, that's not hard.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that. That's theft detection lock. Yeah, we'll launch screen right.

[Paris Martino]

Somebody's going to get into everything. At least it's locked.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is in response to Joanna Stern's Wall Street Journal article which says that. And Apple responded to this too, which was that people were shoulder surfing as you unlocked your phone and then would steal your phone and now they have the pin. Well, that wouldn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, my question though is I know Apple, for instance, has kind of a product like this with AirPods where it's supposed to alert me when I've forgotten my AirPods somewhere and it is never once in my life been correct. It will send me that alert and my AirPods will always be on my person. But just like losing battery, the few times that I have actually lost my AirPods it has not helped. That's so I'm curious if Android will experience the same problems.

[Paris Martino]

So I have if I might. I have an amazing personal story that's related.

[Leo Laporte]

So today I was better be amazing.

[Paris Martino]

I was on my call. I was on a call with my buds, not pods and I went into the New York Public Library. I forgot that I had them on. I put my mask on, I went upstairs to do my business and doing research. I spent a good hour there taking photos of documents.

[Leo Laporte]

I do my business at the library too. That's funny.

[Paris Martino]

As I leave, I realize that I had one in and I didn't and I didn't have the other one in. So I said I've lost it somewhere in the library. It Is lost forever. It is lost forever. I get on the elevator, I go back to the ground floor, and it's sitting right there in front of the elevator an hour later.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Paris Martino]

My alcohol wiped it. And it works. I think that's an amazing story in New York. Beautiful people didn't steal it. It's still mine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And nobody wants a ground pod.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Really? Nobody looked at the floor, saw a lone airpod, and took it? What? I am only in New York, baby. Only in New York, my friends.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Only in New York, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I've lost my.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're in the Google change.

[Paris Martino]

I know your Pixel drop now, I think. Didn't you finish?

[Leo Laporte]

I got the. I got. I got it. I got it on here. The Pixel drop. Oh, the pixel drop. Yes. They. You know, I like this. They give you new features on your device every month. Something new. You could talk to Gemini hands free on your pixel buds. Don't have pixel buds. So I do.

[Paris Martino]

And I still have them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, both of them. Which is good because you still have two ears. So you can say, hey, Google, let's talk, and start a conversation if you're lonely. Gemini Live is now available for all pixels. Oh, Jesus. Come back to me. Well, I just. I was just showing off this nice feature about having a conversation with you. That's all. I guess it lost interest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No response. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me try that again. Hey, Google, let's talk. Yeah, see? To get us started, what are you interested in talking about? Here are some ideas. Current events. Have you seen any interesting news stories lately? Hobbies. What do you like to do for fun, creative ideas? Do you have any stories you'd like to tell or develop? Just chat. We can also just see where the conversation takes us. What do you think? I think you're pretty cool. And now it's abandoned.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Once again, it's shy.

[Leo Laporte]

So how do you like that voice, by the way? I like that new voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love that it ends with. We can just see where the conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see where it goes. And then I talk to it and it goes, yeah, and I'm not interested.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's.

[Paris Martino]

Let's just have coffee and see where it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's see where it goes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The night is nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate it that I just got ghosted by AI on my phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's ghosted by Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Ghosted by Google, baby. You can use Gemini with your screenshots, too. You can. All you have to do is long, press the power and ask Gemini to find the brand of sneakers I saved in screenshots. Oh, they showed this. I remember with the release. That's cool. That's finally here. I like that. Screenshots are now kind of your database of stuff you want to keep track of. With pixel phones, you can isolate sounds with audio. Magic eraser. That'll get rid of me. Yeah. They've been advertising podcast.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you go, or you got a baby crying in the background or gizmos, you know, upset or whatever. Get amazing underwater images. You can now use any waterproof case.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, I did. I figured. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't see the part about the waterproof case. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know why that's cool? Because honestly, these pictures, when you take them, aren't that great. And often there's a lot of scatter from light and stuff, so I guess it's doing something to process.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not a real photo then. That's just some AI bs.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Capture beautiful images with improvements to astrophotography and night mode. This is. Remember what Samsung used to replace the full moon with a picture of the full moon?

[Paris Martino]

Well, not New York, because we have too much light pollution here. You don't ever see that night sight.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For Instagram. Did you see the aurora?

[Paris Martino]

No. Did you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. I was having a hot pot with the skeeball team, but you could see New York despite the air pollution. And I came out and I missed the northern lights.

[Leo Laporte]

I was having hot pot with the skee ball team.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I hate friendship.

[Leo Laporte]

So you could see him in New York, really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. The other week, they were visible in most of the US down here. And apparently they were visible in New York City despite the light pollution. I know quite a few people that got photos, but it was only like 20 minutes.

[Paris Martino]

I heard that you can see it better on your photos than you could with your eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's the. That's because. Yeah, it just looks like a glow to your eyes. You don't even know you're. Especially in a light polluted area like New York City. You don't even know you're seeing northern lights.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You just think it was a good excuse for me and some friends to take a cab home instead of taking the subway because we're like, oh, maybe we could see it over the bridge. And then we didn't feel bad at wasting money. No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

The thermometer.

[Paris Martino]

Wait, wait, wait. You thought it was going to be different over the bridge, underground?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then. Then on a street in Chinatown. Yeah. I was like, there's a little bit less light pollution. There could be you can see more sky on the bridge. I know that you hate bridges, Jeff, but one thing, when you're not cowering in fear, there is a lot of sky there.

[Paris Martino]

So I. In my. In my personal stuff at the bottom we have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But we gotta get through this changelog, my guy.

[Paris Martino]

In fact, the bridge was the top. The roof of the bridge under the east river was in fact drilled through.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is the secret NYC account where they are actually saw the northern lights above New York City and apparently rode a boat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, boat, bridge, it's all the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you to Scooter X for providing that he'll get in the change log one way or the other. You can now measure temperatures in a more detailed way in with the thermometer app on your Pixel 8 Pro. It lets what? Lets you use your camera to target what you want to measure. What so you. This is aimed at a bottle for a baby bottle. And it. Oh, and yeah. What.

[Paris Martino]

Anyway, thermal imaging, probably. Thermal imaging?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Measure yourself, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think I could do it with this?

[Paris Martino]

Well, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no. I need the thermometer. But why does it say Pixel 8, not Pixel 9? Is there no thermometer above?

[Paris Martino]

I would imagine maybe. Maybe they took the thermometer out. Oh, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, no, they said. Here we go. Ready? Okay. Okay. Okay. I had to say I want body temperature. Okay. Good lord. I have to approve a lot of stuff to do this. Step one, identify. Identify the sensor on the back. Okay. It's that. It's that one. Yeah. Okay. Okay, that's good. Next. Okay. Is it. Does it. Oh, my God, I'm red.

[Paris Martino]

It looks like me.

[Leo Laporte]

What's my temperature? Try portrait mode. No, no. Oh, this is very disappointing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is there a button on there where you can specify that you're doing a podcast and needed to perform?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I need you to work. Oh, I haven't finished the tutorial. The sensor needs access to bare skin. Remove any accessories that cover your forehead. Okay. Take your hat off, obviously. Yeah. Put it by your temple. Hold the center of the camera bar near your forehead without touching. Okay. God, there's a lot of instructions. This is ridiculous.

[Paris Martino]

You're still going to screw it up a bit.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet I am. Tap the button to begin countdown clock.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Flip it around.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, this is just the movie showing you what to do. Okay, me and Jeff got. Now I have to select my age range. Older than. Wait a minute. Zero to three months. Three to 36 months or three plus years. Okay, sensor is on back of phone okay, you ready? I have to scan my temple. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bring center of camera bar closer to forehead.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, you're not, you're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not your forehead. Okay, bring center up a little bit.

[Paris Martino]

Sensor out of range.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're. You're putting it near your eyebrow, your temple.

[Paris Martino]

And you keep moving it. This is your temple. This is your forehead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, apply directly to forehead. Center of camera bar closer to forehead.

[Paris Martino]

There.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Bring closer.

[Paris Martino]

Closer.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't. It's. I'm not supposed to.

[Paris Martino]

No, that's your temple.

[Leo Laporte]

It said temple, didn't it?

[Paris Martino]

No, it said no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Forehead.

[Paris Martino]

The O. Forehead. Forehead.

[Leo Laporte]

Try again.

[Paris Martino]

Temple.

[Leo Laporte]

Temple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right here, right here.

[Leo Laporte]

Ready? Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Put it like a quarter of an.

[Paris Martino]

You're welcome bonito for that card.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Scan to temple.

[Leo Laporte]

Complete. I'm 97.8. Hey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you're above three years old.

[Leo Laporte]

It says normal. Well, 98.6 is normal. But this is an external.

[Paris Martino]

It turns out, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a myth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm usually like yeah, no, everybody's a little different. I'm usually like 97.

[Leo Laporte]

And now it. And now it saves future. It's true. Anyway, that's a new cold hearted. Many people say beat seasonal allergies with the Pixel weather app. It will now tell you what the aqi and humidity levels are. Doesn't really mean that you're going to beat it. It just means you'll know ahead.

[Paris Martino]

You just know how miserably why you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Discover more helpful widgets for Pixel. Finding the best widgets for your pixel is easy. Okay, fine. I think that's a really ugly look by the way. Do you think that's a good looking phone?

[Paris Martino]

No, that's a. That's. No, that's bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's see. Let's go on with the change log here. Google Shopping is getting. By the way, this is from Yahoo News. Google Shopping is getting an AI upgrade as Alphabet looks to monetize investments.

[Paris Martino]

So they're. They're trying to get you more. More ways to sell you more things.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Using AI.

[Paris Martino]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martino]

So the, the Google thing, the Google post.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're shot. Here's an example. If you're shopping for a kettle for making matcha tea. And who isn't? The AI summaries box will tell you you should look for kettles with a gooseneck spout for controlled pouring and precise temperature controls. Below that you'll see a number of recommendations for products that include bits of information from those AI summaries. In the teakettle example, Google Shopping highlighted Things like gooseneck temperature control, et cetera.

[Paris Martino]

So if you search for coffee maker.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, I just get tons of.

[Paris Martino]

I know, I get. I just get tons of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What I always got users shop more than a billion times per day using Google.

[Paris Martino]

So the antitrust people went after him.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, a billion.

[Paris Martino]

Still got a shopping case in Europe. Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Google Shopping is getting a big transformation. I think this is the same story, but this one's from Google. Find exactly what you need. Browse personalized options, get the lowest prices.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, I put that there so you can see both versions of it.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Wow, that's interesting. I thought they didn't have Google shopping anymore.

[Paris Martino]

No, they did. They just were in trouble for it and they're kind of trying to go on the down low with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so it's. So is this a Google search or is this an app? I'm not shopping through Google. Right. This is a search, basically.

[Paris Martino]

I think it's a search. I think it's telling you more.

[Leo Laporte]

So, hey, Google, show me running shoes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I really hope it just pulls up a pn, a JPEG of a running shoe.

[Leo Laporte]

Here are some of the best running shoes available. Best Overall Daily Trainer Brooks Ghost 15 Invalid URL removed. Softest Daily Trainer Invalid Triumph 21 Invalid URL removed. Best Fit Update Nike Pegasus 40 Invalid URL removed. Best Women Specific Daily Trainer Lululemon Bliss Feel two Invalid URL removed. Best Value Cushion.

[Paris Martino]

Invalids can't run, so they should be removed.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the worst. It's all infinite URL absorption. Do you need support? Do you need stability or motion control?

[Paris Martino]

Oh, he needs stability.

[Leo Laporte]

How important is lightness, stability? Fit? Make sure the shoes fit. How long do you want the shoes? Additional resources. The 14 Best Running Shoes of 2024 Runners World 7 Best Road Running Shoes in 2024 Run. Repeat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thanks.

[Paris Martino]

Don't repeat that, please.

[Leo Laporte]

That was completely worthless and it didn't even show me pictures. It just said invalid removed. All right, thanks, Google. And this is, by the way, a Pixel 9 Pro with the latest version of Android on it. What else should I search for? Hey, Google, search for pruning shears. Maybe get some new pruning shears for you. I can't assist you with that as I am only a language model. You can control smart home devices from Google Home app. This is. This is terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, guys. AI is the future.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not faking this. This happened. The latest G board lets you switch between Roboto and Google sans fots. Well, it's about time. The new gboard Beta update introduced the ability to change fonts, but you only have two choices, Google Sans or Roboto. Okay, well that's thrilling. Google's Chrome browser starts disabling Ublock Origin. Okay, let's talk Google. So this is the. We talk about this a lot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thieves who use these tomato smacking.

[Leo Laporte]

Google is Moving to manifest v3 and phasing out old manifest v2 extensions they say for security. And it you know, you could make that case because those extensions had a lot of access to the pages you visited and so forth. Turns out exactly the kind of thing a ad blocker would want to see the pages you're visiting so it can block the ads. The On Tuesday, the developer of Ublock Origin, Raymond Hill, tweeted a screenshot from one user showing the Chrome browser disabling you. You block Origin. The extension. This extension is no longer supported. Google recommends you remove them. Now there is a and Steve Gibson was talking about this yesterday. There is a setting and it's complicated that you can get yourself another nine months or so of you block Origin. My suggestion though is stop using Chrome and send a strong message to Google by doing so that they made a mistake here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, I'll be doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Firefox supports you block Origin. As of now, some Chromium browsers based on the same code base continue to support manifest v2 extensions. But that's a matter only a matter of time. If you use Brave, which is Chromium based, they've built in their own ad blocker so it gets around that Arc, the browser I prefer from the browser company says we may have to do the same. You're this is the Chrome web store, so you're on a Chromebook. Jeff, do you. You don't use an ad blocker though, probably.

[Paris Martino]

No, because I'm an honest and decent man who wants to support media and content like you, unlike you thieves.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I should point out that the ad blocker can be turned off for a site that you want to support, but a lot of times the ads you're getting are big.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do turn mine off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do sites and many sites have a little pop up that says would you like to disable your ad blocker? Here's how I use Ghostery. Ghostery. Yeah, that's a very good plugin, but doesn't do everything you block Origin does. One of the things you block Origin does that we talked about yesterday on security now is it will turn off that very annoying pop up that says would you like to sign into this page using your Google account.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh that.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate that. Don't you hate that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Actually, that's huge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it will also turn off the. Would you like to turn off cookies? The stupid cookie banner. I never see that anymore. I never see the sign in with Google anymore. You want me to show you how to do that?

[Paris Martino]

Also the chatters, they're like, hi, would you like me to help you at the bottom?

[Leo Laporte]

All that stuff. Those are, that's in the annoyances.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll be switching to Firefox and getting. You block orange.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, here's ublock Origin. You go to settings on the page and you go to the annoyances. Whoops. The annoyances settings, they're right down here. That was annoying. Every website should have that and the social widget settings. And if you turn on all of these annoyances, these block all the annoyances. All the social widgets. The only thing to be aware of is if you do do this and then by the way, press update now to make sure it's applied. If you do do this occasionally site. Occasionally. Often sites won't work right and you'll have to disable Ublock Origin because they want to pop up or something like that. Something to be aware of. I think ultimately what people will end up doing is using things like next DNS, which I use Next DNS IO or PI hole or some sort of kind of network wide ad blocking. Because I think yeah, maybe ad blockers days are numbered. Don't block our ads. You can't, you can't Google Messages. Yeah, you could fast forward through them though. So don't do that. Google Messages gets a new feature that makes it easier to keep private. This is not yet available but you know, it's one of those. When they tear down. This is Android Police, they tear down the APK and they found new privacy settings for profiles letting users control who sees their picture and name. Okay, fine. So you don't by default see, I mean you. If I'm messaging with you, will your name automatically and picture automatically get filled in on. On Google Messages?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you know Jeff me through the resident Google boy.

[Paris Martino]

So if message me.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to start a chat with Jeff Jarvis. I'm going to say yo. Oh, well, I already have your picture and name. Did you give me that? See on Apple it says would you like to do that? Oh, I shouldn't show your phone number, should I?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you shouldn't.

[Paris Martino]

No, you shouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't. That's the good.

[Paris Martino]

I don't have your Picture name. So you don't trust me, huh? Huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Paris Martino]

That is my number.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, wait, Leo, Jeff, put your phone number in the chat of Zoom and then I'll text you and we'll see if it works.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it doesn't show your number. It just says your name.

[Paris Martino]

She just tried to fish me, didn't she?

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the Google change law I haven't lost. You're watching this week at Google. Paris Martineau Jeff Jarvis I'm Leo Laporte. Thank you for being here. Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected and each one more expensive and more complicated than the last. It can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need and they're all connected on one platform. Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? Let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price. Sign up [e-mail] that's odoo.com now at.

[Paris Martino]

T Mobile get four 5G phones on.

[Leo Laporte]

Us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com tick tock executives know about the acts of apps effect on teens, say the 13 states in the District of Columbia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey now this is a perfect example of why every journalist or person ever looking at a court document where it's got redactions should just ambiently be trying to highlight the text and paste it in somewhere to see if it actually redacted. I did that on like two or three of these state lawsuits just as I was looking at them. Didn't happen to get the Kentucky one. But dang those Kentucky reporters who that then joined the NPR team and got the redactions. Hats off to you.

[Leo Laporte]

In one of the lawsuits filed by the Kentucky Attorney General's office, the redactions were faulty, writes npr. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied and pasted and apparently exactly the same thing you did right Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Copied and pasted I mean, it's not frequent, but sometimes, sometimes it works.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that means what, they redacted it with like a PDF tool or something? Yeah, that didn't really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All it did was put it in front of it. Yeah, yeah. But the text was still there behind it.

[Leo Laporte]

So by doing so, they got about 30 pages of documents that they. That the Kentucky attorney general thought they had redacted. This is the same documents, I think all of the other states had. Kentucky Public Radio published excerpts of the redacted material at which prompted the state judge to seal the entire complaint because you weren't supposed to see it. However, NPR says we reviewed all the portions of the suits that were redacted. It highlights Tick Tock executives speaking candidly about a host of dangers for children on Tick Tock, mostly summaries of internal studies and communications. They do show some remedial measures like time management tools, but they also showed they'd have a negligible reduction in screen time. Company went ahead and decided to release and tout the features. Anyway, I still think Tick Tock is the bee's knees.

[Paris Martino]

And I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Quote me on that.

[Paris Martino]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, for adults. I do think that, and I totally agree. But I do think it's notable. Some of the details revealed in these unredacted documents, such as Tick Tock's own research, states that for kids, for child users, compulsive usage of TikTok correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety. In addition, the documents show that TikTok was aware that, quote, compulsive usage also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work, school responsibilities and connecting with loved ones. And this is like their research on the effects of their own platform on child users, which make up the majority of TikTok's work or user base. I do think that's kind of notable.

[Leo Laporte]

The TikTok's response was they, this is cherry picked, this is sealed, and there's a reason it was sealed. And we, you know, this is an unfair use of this content without giving us a chance to defend ourselves. In the previously redacted portion of the suit. According to NPR, Kentucky authorities say under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform.

[Paris Martino]

You see? Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. TikTok determined the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit. According to the redacted documents, 260 videos.

[Paris Martino]

Every TV producer and every Newspaper and every book authority, they do the same thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but I mean, are those like people predominant? Are those people exclusively Targeting children?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, TikTok. Doesn't TikTok say you have to be 13?

[Paris Martino]

Does it's pretty.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but it has a significant amount of under 13 users, which this loss, these lawsuits as well as the DOJ suit also. Get it, get at specifically that tick tock doesn't really seem to, according to these suits, enforcement actions to actually get under 13 year olds off the platform.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's follow that all the way through. How would they know that you're under 13?

[Jeff Jarvis]

One of the examples, I think it's in this NPR article is if users have like I'm 10 in their bio.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, clearly, okay, that TikTok should say, oh, you can't be 10. But really the only effective way to prevent young people from using it is age verification. And we know that that's not acceptable solution because it would be required for everyone using the app and it would require basically a complete pr. I mean, how am I going to verify my age? I'm going to send them a copy of my driver's license.

[Paris Martino]

You're going to give it all to the Chinese?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I do, I agree with the concerns about age verification. I think they're completely valid. But I do also think there is some merit to the argument that the DOJ and attorneys general, as you know, superfluous as they may be in some cases, I do think there's merit to the argument that they're advancing that it seems like based on certain evidence or things they found in discovery, that TikTok has had a pattern of telling its moderators like, hey, maybe don't take action on accounts unless you're a thousand percent sure overwhelmingly that they're over 13. Even when internal signs point to accounts actually almost certainly being under 13. I think that there's a lot more that TikTok can be doing that it isn't that is short of actual age verification with IDs. And that's kind of what these suits are about.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And that's what they would have to prove. Right, the suits would have to prove. Another thing that they said is they thought things like the Bold Glamour filter harm kids because it causes young users to think that they're not beautiful. What do you think about that? I mean, Lisa, I should just say my wife sometimes doesn't put makeup on in the morning and turns on the Zoom makeup filter. I think, I don't think that these filters are inherently harmful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I totally agree with you, especially when we're talking about adults. But I'm sure that there is some argument to be made that like, yeah, it's probably not great for kids like who have very impressionable young minds who are, you know, 10 years.

[Paris Martino]

Why didn't we magazine was that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, why didn't we ban magazines? Yo, I mean they, I mean, I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don'T think that beauty filters are the core part of this suit. I think that frankly, in these sort of cases, plaintiffs try to put as much as they can in the lawsuit, in the original complaint, and then knowing that that's going to get whittled down by the time it gets to an actual jury trial or judgment. And so they're kind of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. One example of a thing that I think is worth talking about is this is from the NPR article. TikTok acknowledges internally that it is substantial leakage rates of violating content that's not removed specifically. So they're talking about how TikTok's own internal reports have flagged that their content moderation policies and practices are woefully deficient. This is again from the article. Those leakage rates include 35% of normalization of pedophilia, 33% of minor sexual solicitation, 39% of minor physical abuse, 30% of leading minors off platforms, 50% of glorification of minor sexual assaults, and 100% of fetishizing minors. I mean, I do think, have you.

[Leo Laporte]

Seen any of that content on TikTok?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I don't think that my specific experience speaks to, I don't think that any of our specific experience would speak to a general, anything general about TikTok. That's the unique thing about its platform is that everyone's experience is completely different.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think they have to prove this in court. I agree that if, for instance, TikTok, as the Kentucky investigators asserted, TikTok's algorithms are intentionally show fewer not attractive subjects in the for you feed. But I have to say I see plenty of non unattractive people in my for you feed, including Donald Trump. I don't, I don't see them filtering that out, but maybe they are. And if they are, that would be absolutely bad for young people who might think that, oh gosh, look at all these attractive people. I need him to look more like that.

[Paris Martino]

Again. Every magazine that's been aimed at teenagers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martino]

For years did that. My wife went into Sephora to pick up something on the Mill on Sunday. She said never go there on a Sunday Never. It's crowded with teenagers trying to look different.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there something different, though, about it being tick tock and being kind of compelling? I mean, it's. I'll tell you one of these things.

[Paris Martino]

You know, get ready, get ready.

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for.

[Paris Martino]

I'll tell you what's different about it. It's moral panic.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Paris Martino]

No, no, no, no. There's a good one. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think, though?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I do think that we've had these sort of issues with the other big social media platforms where people have been outraged about content moderation problems. And Facebook, you know, Twitter, all these other platforms have had to capitulate and step up their moderation game. TikTok hasn't. I don't think that it should be insulated from those same pressures.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I agree with you 100%. I also think that these. Look at one thing that's obvious. People's attention spans gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And the more you consume these short videos, these eight second videos, or the more you flip, the less tolerant you are of long movies, for instance, or longer books. I don't know if that's a bad.

[Paris Martino]

Thing or that's a content person thinking is that people, that there was some natural length of things that everyone should want. How many books have you read that are pumped out ridiculously? How many movies you've seen that could have been a half hour shorter?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure, sure, sure. Absolutely. I just. I mean, it definitely affects your brain. It changes how you think about this.

[Paris Martino]

No, it doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it doesn't.

[Paris Martino]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Well, that's a relief.

[Paris Martino]

I can read you the quote again. Novels are ruining the minds of young people.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? All right, well, I mean, I do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Think that there's some slight difference in that a novel is going to take a young person much longer to read. And then, you know, well, okay, okay.

[Paris Martino]

Sitting there, they're more addicted to it, they're more engrossed in it, they're longer in this fantasy world is even more dangerous. How about that? That's what was said at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, but do you think, Jeff, that there's like by. By denying any side effects of this that you might be. Isn't there something opposite moral panic that also has value in individual cases?

[Paris Martino]

Young people can have issues that can be exacerbated by these things. Absolutely. But those are individual cases and it's being generalized to every young person out there, which gives no faith to them. So you have, on the one hand you have Jonathan Haidt saying a few years ago, free range children. Oh, we're being too protective of our children. And now he's saying, we must protect our children more. Make up your mind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do think that there's a broader problem here. I wrote about this a little bit over the weekend. I published a story on this group called Mothers Against Media Addiction that was. Came out in March, was when they were founded. And over the last six months, they have grown into this huge, like, nationwide movement of, like, parents and allies that aren't parents of all, you know, genders and assortments that are all really concerned about this issue. And there's always.

[Paris Martino]

There's always a kernel of concern. I didn't mean there's always a kernel of concern. Yes, but is it legitimate?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I. I went in with all the thoughts that we bring up on this podcast, and I'm not saying I'm convinced fully by their argument, but I do think the. Their founder, Julie Scelfo, like, brought up some good points. When I asked her, like, I was like, isn't this just a moral panic? I mean, all the things we just said. And she's like, I understand that, like, in a vacuum, this can seem like a moral panic, but the reality is that parents are really struggling with how to deal with this issue. And in many cases, there are not, like, individual solutions that what they're trying to advocate for is systemic changes either to the social media companies or if it has to be lawmakers forcing the social media companies to do something. She was giving an example of. She's really on top of this issue. She has three kids. She's devoted her whole life to it. She's like, I was trying to monitor. She's like, I didn't give them a cell phone till, like, 13, 14. She said she waited till then to give them to a cell phone. And then they. She installed some kind of, like, spyware program on it that I guess monitors what your kids do and restricts them from certain apps and gives you an alert whenever, you know, they could be interacting with content that you say is, I guess, like, addictive or harmful to their health. And she's like, I was getting hundreds of alerts a day, sometimes 500.

[Paris Martino]

How did she judge those alerts? What? Oh, my God, everything's harmful?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, I mean, she's like, she was able to. Because she didn't work at this time, she was able to go through each one, assess the risk correctly, but she's like, that is an incredibly privileged thing to do. Imagine if you were a working class single mother of many kids, your kids need a cell phone to be able to, you know, get to and from school, or maybe they have jobs or let's say you've done everything right. Your kids don't have a cell phone, but they're given an iPad or a laptop at school because most schools do that. It is really difficult for parents to be on top of this, especially in working class worlds. And I do think we have something.

[Paris Martino]

More faith than our kids. Did you talk to our kids? Did you talk to our kids?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think it's, do you think it's right for the government to intervene in this? Like, oh, parents, you can't be expected to protect your kids is too hard because you got a job. So we'll take care of it.

[Paris Martino]

We're going to make one definition for all parents and all kids.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I don't think that that's necessarily what these people are arguing. I think they're arguing that there should be common sense that TikTok should do it, that, that the social media companies should be prompted because they've been asked very nicely by parents, they've been asked very strongly by parents, have, you know, sent emails, tried to get their kids. TikTok accounts taken off. TikTok has done nothing. They're out of options. They've protested outside. They're like, they're out of options. Maybe our local, state or, you know, federal representatives will be able to force this company to do something so that we're able to better protect our kids. And some of these are common sense ads, have parental controls.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think what inst. I'm seeing ads now for Instagram's teen accounts. Have you seen those?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

What do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

Have you. What do you think? Yeah. Is that a, Is that a step in the right direction? It looked like it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I definitely think it's a step in the right direction. But I think, and I mean, they're pretty much directly responding to what a lot of these groups want. But I think it took until right now, like a week or two ago after you've had, you know, a dozen plus state bills on this, as well as the advance of something like Costco, which I think is the most like, aggressive version of this at the federal level. I think they're doing it because they're scared. And also something that this person I profiled, Julie Scelfo of Mothers Against Media Addiction, points it out, is in their announce, in Meta's announcement of this, they also buried in there that Metta had taken down some amount of millions of pieces of content that were in violation of its rules that had been like, pushed to child users repeatedly.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, we're gonna have a problem. She's now covering the use.

[Paris Martino]

I know she is, but I gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

Say, now she's suddenly very eloquently and ex. Kind of convincingly advocating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But like, listen, I went into this being fully on the side of this podcast, and I still think I am. But I also have to argue that there points to this. I don't think it should be totally open and shut. Nothing should be done.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're getting exposed to parents who have a very strong feeling about.

[Paris Martino]

Let me start with the title addiction. There's basically no research that qualifies. And the flim flam people I write about in my book who started these all kinds of things where they make a ton of money bringing your kid to these places because they're addicted. Addicted to this. Now can some kids be addicted to it? Yes. But is that universal, number one? No. Is it being used by moral entrepreneurs to make a fortune on money? Yes. And does it qualify as addiction in any structure? No. And I've gotten the book where the first papers about this were written by people who were full of crap, who made it up. If you look at the methodology of how they determine people were addicted, it was just absolutely ridiculous. And so I questioned the beginning of the whole premise that says that this addicts kids and that thus we have to solve that problem. So when it starts at that framing, it's real hard to then pull back to, I think, a rational discussion. Yeah, so they can sound rational about it. They can sound difficult about it. And again, are there cases. I know a father whose kid got got crazy into online gambling. Right. And went through a ton of money, but had other underlying issues.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, actually, I think we should ban on, like. Well, that's another.

[Paris Martino]

And I think lotteries too, by the way, should be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do agree. I think the. The word addiction is incredibly dubious. And I think it's incredibly interesting that there's no real research showing, you know, to one way or the other, and no research supporting the idea of addiction.

[Paris Martino]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I guess in this case, the reason why they're called Mothers Against Media Addiction is because it's a good acronym. The acronym is mama. And they're also structured in the same way as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, another, like, influential parental advocacy group from the 80s.

[Paris Martino]

If I may quote.

[Leo Laporte]

If I may quote, from the web.

[Paris Martino]

We weave page 72, Kimberly Young founded the center for Internet Addiction in 1970, 1996 presented a paper to the American Psychological association declaring, quote, the emergence of a new clinical disorder, Internet addiction. Mind you, Google didn't come along until two years later in 1998, Facebook until 2004 and so on. She declared that folks become addicted to the crude, ugly, slow, horrible early web. She modeled her definition of Internet addiction on pathological gambling and created questionnaires to measure the affliction severity. How often do you find you stay online longer than you intended? Oh, well. How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online? Well, yeah. How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users? Hi. New relationships. How often do you snap, yell or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you're online? Well, yeah, if you're ever something I want to do. How often do you fear that life without the Internet would be boring, empty and joyless? Yeah. How would any of us answer these questions I say about the Internet or a binge worthy TV show or a good book? This was the beginnings of the whole meme of Internet addiction. And then from that basis a lot of assumptions are built atop it. And the problem is there are kids and are cases where they have real problems and coexisting conditions that need attention. There are kids who were there for reasons that require other kinds of care. But if we blame the technology for it all, we lose the chance, I think, to see the deeper structure. And that's the problem I have with people like Jonathan Haidt. Sorry. Thank you for that.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you say, Paris?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think those are fair points. I think it's a little reductive to try and just in the same way that you're arguing that it is reductive to reduce this issue to, you know, it's just media addiction or it's just kids addicted to social media. I think it's also a bit reductive to reduce these parents grievances in the same way.

[Paris Martino]

But, but I think they're reducing their, their own to that. That's part of the problem I have is they're, they're playing reductive on their own issues of parenting. Not, I'm not criticizing the parenting. I'm saying that there are so many pressures on kids today and I sympathize with that. Absolutely. But they've reduced it to that. They're being reductive, aren't they?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, yes and no. I think that like if you're looking at some signs in protests, sure, those signs are reductive. But I was really surprised the, you know, people I spoke with in this movement from this specific group. You know, I spoke to some of the chapter leaders because now they have like 20 some different chapters across the US in like more than a dozen states and they've only been around for six months. And I spoke to some of the chapter leaders and they were really well spoken and thought out in this. One of them, you know, one of them quoted Hagel to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Another one, like, I mean, she knew her audience. She said one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Another one of them was really reductive about the issue. But like, like, you know, that's just one chapter leader. I, I think that, I don't know. I think that there are good people on both sides to, you know.

[Paris Martino]

Yes, there are. I want to give you another little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bit of history statement.

[Paris Martino]

So in 1996, a Columbia professor of psychiatry, Goldberg, forget his first name. Founded as a joke. And it said joke in the URL. It was a joke. The Internet addiction support group. And people joined it. And in fact, the survey I just told you about, Kimberly Young, who did the survey, where did she recruit her people?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Paris Martino]

Said that they were Internet addicts. To say that there was a generalizable Internet addiction. Goldberg regretted the coinage of Internet addiction disorder. IAD is a very unfortunate term, he told the New Yorker. It makes it sound as if one were dealing with heroin, a truly addicting substance that can alter almost every cell in the body. To medicalize every behavior by putting it into a second psychiatric nomenclature is ridiculous. If you expand the concept of addiction to include everything people can overdo, then you must talk about people being addicted to books, addicted to jogging, addicted to other people.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think there's compulsive behavior associated with all behaviors. And if you get compulsive, then, you know, it's like an addiction.

[Paris Martino]

Dig down into.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you need to process it. I want. I also, though, respect parents who feel like they're dealing with a. Oh, yeah. With a very difficult, powerful entity in big tech and don't feel responded to or listened to. I, I do think parrots certainly are ultimate, the ultimate arbiter of this. Right. Whether your kid has a phone, whether your kid is online, whether your kid is using. Tick tock. That's up to the parents.

[Paris Martino]

But, but, but Paris has really.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think government should intervene if.

[Paris Martino]

The tools to do that are very difficult to work with. So that's why they're looking for help. I get.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And companies should be offering all of those parental controls. I don't think the government should get involved with banning TikTok or, you know, requiring. Right. Yeah, I mean they're. Or age verification. But I think they should quite reasonably require companies like Instagram to do what Instagram's done with the teen accounts. I think that's a good thing.

[Paris Martino]

Paris, did you ever addicted to the Internet? It.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. One last thing. Well, I mean, I guess I'm addicted to the Internet now. I wouldn't want to go without it, but I don't. I wouldn't say it's like addicted way.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, when I have a spare moment, I look for a screen and I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, no, I got to be listening to something at all times. It's definitely warped my brain and I can understand why parents want their children to grow up in a way around that. One last thing I wanted to say just because, Jeff, I think you'd find this cute in the sense that you think people leading these, this movement are looking at this fully myopically. One detail I did learn about Julie Scelfo, the founder of Mothers Against Media Addiction, is that she, one, she got in the 90s, a master's in media ecology, but she also studied under Neil Postman and was his, like, assistant for quite some time. And it really informed her thinking about all these issues. Specifically, we talked at length about like, like, you know, Neil Postman's approach to tech, the effects of technological change not being additive, but ecological. So, I mean, the people in charge of this are thinking about these sort of things.

[Paris Martino]

She probably knows J. Rosen and Siva V. Nathan too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. She was a New York Times journalist and came into. She came into this. I know, I know you hate the. She was a Newsweek journalist before that. If that's back when Newsweek was.

[Paris Martino]

Back when it was Newsweek, was Newsweek. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But she came into this because in her time reporting, she reported on like, mental health issues and college campus suicide crises and started to look into research in like, the 2010s about the impact of social media perceptions on like, teenagers, mental health. So I don't know, Jeff, when you.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re older than us, when you were in, do you think this, this compulsion to constantly be entertained, I mean, that's Neil Postman's book, right? Amusing Ourselves to death.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Does this, Is this a. Is this always been going on or is this something more recent? It were people in the 50s willing to just to kind of sit quietly with. Without a screen or some other form.

[Paris Martino]

Of what was available? Yes, there were exactly the fears about race radio. Precisely. There's. There's The Hooked generation, I think it was called. There was, there was a book that was all about how radio was damaging children and it was awful. Obviously television too. There were, there were surgeon general reports, there were Congress.

[Leo Laporte]

We've always wanted to find ways to our amuse ourselves.

[Paris Martino]

Well, but that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it amusing, Amusing ourselves to death? Neil Postman.

[Paris Martino]

Right. But, but, but, but the things that we think are damaging and amusing ourselves suddenly become culture and art. You don't forget that. What, what, what do people have in their homes with huge numbers, amazingly huge numbers? Pianos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Just. How else could you get music? You had to make it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's sad because people used to make music at night and they used to entertain each other, but it was probably crap. Well, it wasn't good.

[Paris Martino]

Awful. And they could turn on the radio and they could hear Rachmaninoff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Is that so bad?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One point.

[Paris Martino]

Yes. Because live music is always better.

[Leo Laporte]

Evil.

[Paris Martino]

Wait, wait, wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I brought up this exact music you're.

[Paris Martino]

Playing for yourself is always better. What if your uncle is playing and he's really terrible?

[Leo Laporte]

Knees up Mother Brown. Knees up Mother Brown. We wouldn't have had Paul McCartney except for that his father had this bad habit of launching into song on the p. Banging on a piano at home. I do, I have to say, I do think we've lost something community wise because we don't entertain each other anymore. We let others do it. Oh, and I do think we're isolated.

[Paris Martino]

Well, no, we're talking each other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're being entertained by other people in a vacuum. You know, Know, it's like a level of you're, you're being entertained in a kind of lonely way that may feel like you're interacting with another person. And maybe you are. Maybe you're commenting, maybe you're making tiktoks for yourself. But for many people, it's a passive consumption experience that can be kind of isolating.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's Paris article.

[Paris Martino]

How is this. How is what we're doing right now, or how's watching TikTok more passive than watching television or reading a book or sitting in a movie theater in silence? We are entertaining. So the culture is entertaining itself now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I brought this kind of point up to the Mama founder when I was interviewing her, and she brought up a point that I've been kind of thinking of. I don't, I don't know if I want to say I fully agree with, but I did. It did give me pause. And then she says one of the fundamental shifts that really has changed things right now for kids is that, you know, I hate to say it, but back in the day, as she said, you know, we might experience media risque or boundary pushing media when you're a child by getting to stay up late and maybe like watching an R rated movie or getting to sneak out to go see something or listen to something on the radio. Like those in many cases were discreet events that were temporarily bound somehow. Now with the advent of like smartphones and. And an endlessly scrolling amount of content in a feed, children can consume content passively forever. There is no stopping point whatsoever. And it is incredibly easy for them to be doing that at all times without any breaks.

[Leo Laporte]

And that is not good to the bookstore. And she would buy a hundred dollars worth of books. I mean literally three or four, four feet worth of books, and she'd be done with them the next day. And I thought, this cannot continue. This must end. She was addicted. She probably didn't sleep that night to reading. I think there's a certain amount now. By the way, this is your article. Absolutely. Everybody should read it. Mad Moms Stigmatized Drunk Driving. The next target, Social media. I think you do a great job and summarizing this story, but I think there's a little bit of nostalgia for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, and I agree. That's why I'm saying. I don't entirely agree with it, but I do think that there's an interesting point there in the omnipresence of content. Yes.

[Paris Martino]

The matter of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not sure that it's entirely convincing in the same way, but I do think that there's something interesting there.

[Paris Martino]

It's the matter of scale. Like it's. It's not a different kind, but it's a different scale. Scale.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, scale.

[Paris Martino]

I had to take a picture of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The TV screen because Jeff is watching MSNBC while we're doing this.

[Paris Martino]

No, no. Actually it's the aftermath of Kamala Harris's interview with Brett Baron Fox. And so they just have. I wish I could show it to you this way, but I would. Attack of the five foot four woman.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear.

[Paris Martino]

Kamala rages against the light. I had to take a picture of that. I'm sorry. I knew I was.

[Leo Laporte]

But all right, let's move on.

[Paris Martino]

You're going on all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a conversation that we will be having a lot and I think it's a good conversation. It's an important. I'm glad you're on the beat, Paris. I think that's great. Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

I've got to figure out how to. I've Got. What's the counteraction to that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

To what I'm interested. I mean, I, despite the fact that I'm arguing devil's advocate right now, my position on this is entirely neutral. I don't have kids. I don't feel any particular way. I do think intellectually, it's just very interesting. And this was, I don't know, a reporting challenge that I do think informed me of alternating viewpoints than what we typically discuss on the show in a way that I couldn't easily dispute.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Paris Martino]

And as I remember, you got a cupcake out of the deal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't get a cupcake. I thought she got a cupcake. He brought it. So this is what we were talking about before the show last week, which the reason why I wasn't on the show two weeks ago is one of the reporting excursions I did was I attended a flag football. What I thought was a flag football game of the founder's son. He was actually teaching flag football to other children. But at some point her son came up and brought his mom the remnants of a cupcake. And Jeff thought that was mine me being bought. But I didn't. I, I know journalistic boundaries. I said honestly, you to the cupcake.

[Leo Laporte]

If you are. If you are subornable by the remnants of a cupcake.

[Paris Martino]

The remnants is the scary part here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think you probably should get in a new field. But you're not. That's the point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not. You're not steel cage up here.

[Leo Laporte]

The cupcake did not beckon. You're watching this week in Google Paris Martino. She writes for the information. Always good to have you on Paris. If you have a tip for her or you are a mommers. Where you go martino01 on signal.

[Paris Martino]

If you see a tree that's overgrown and taking over the sidewalk, let her know that too.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do let me know starting in November.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're in Bushwick. She's got a pruner.

[Paris Martino]

She's got a prune that bush in Bushwick. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis, professor emeritus of journalism at cuny. Soon to have a new position. But honestly, I don't think you should take a job. I think you should just be forced to continue to write because your books are so great.

[Paris Martino]

I have thought of that. But yeah, you write.

[Leo Laporte]

The web we weave is the latest and really a good discussion of all of these topics. And actually it's perfect to have you and Paris on because you, you bring a lot of informed opinion to this matter. So Paris brings actual reporting I don't have. I have an opinion but it's not informed. How about that? It's better over here now.

[Paris Martino]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones.

[Leo Laporte]

On us and four lines for 25.

[Paris Martino]

A line per month when you switch.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

So he wouldn't be a best selling author if it weren't for TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

Number seven on the new York Times bestseller list.

[Paris Martino]

We couldn't say this last week.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a secret.

[Paris Martino]

Now we can say it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, not only number seven on the New York Times bestseller list for It's a weird category. It's like oddball fiction, non fiction or something. But anyway it's it's a cat. It's there in fact I'll find it for you.

[Paris Martino]

What's the above? What did he.

[Leo Laporte]

Well let's. Let's do it. New York Times bestsellers. He also he tells me I don't know how he knows this but I guess his publisher told him he his was the best selling cookbook in the world last week which is pretty, pretty good. He's in advice, how to and miscellaneous. So here you go. The top seven.

[Paris Martino]

Noah Trevor Hard to beat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, hard to beat. Noah Trevor. Sweet tooth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good energy because it's Wednesday so it's come out again.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh it's the new. It's a new week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh shoot. It was number seven. Is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hold on. We can go back a week if we.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh you're right. It was October. The week of October 20th.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He was above Heal your gut, save your brain.

[Leo Laporte]

Brain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What in the world? And the new beat the Mayo Clinic.

[Paris Martino]

Not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he beat the Mayo Clinic, so. Oh, I'm sad he's not on the. On the list anymore. It fell off immediately. Well, that just means you guys need to go out and buy more copies of the book. Salt Hank. It's called Salt Hank. A five napkin situation. And it's probably. I mean, it's discounted everywhere, I think 40% off. I can't believe it fell off the list. That's.

[Paris Martino]

That's the whole list.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, the whole list thing is. Is. It's just about sales in a certain time. And for most authors, your first week is when you get on it because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's pre.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sales.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, exactly.

[Paris Martino]

And by nonfiction, it does not take that many copies to get on.

[Leo Laporte]

I told him that once you're a New York Times bestselling author, that's it. They can't take that away from. No, they can't take that away from you.

[Paris Martino]

Every. Every future book will say that on the COVID Right?

[Leo Laporte]

His publisher was extraordinarily happily Simon Schuster loves solve. Hank. All right, quick update.

[Paris Martino]

We got our TikTok got restricted to live audiences over that conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

You're kidding.

[Paris Martino]

What? Yeah, check out.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paris Martino]

Check out our Discord. Check out Discord.

[Leo Laporte]

What does that mean? Restricted to live audiences. We got this. Maybe it was. Are you sure it wasn't the vibrator.

[Paris Martino]

In the live chat?

[Leo Laporte]

Check all live. Restricted for some audiences. Your life contains themes that some may find uncomfortable and has been restricted. Reason regulated goods content. Because we talked about drugs. It was the marijuana.

[Paris Martino]

It was. It was the shears. It was. It was.

[Leo Laporte]

Did we talk about. No, that was the other show.

[Paris Martino]

Marijuana.

[Leo Laporte]

What do we get?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Talk about marijuana. It could have been the vibrator. It could have been the sheer. I think it could have addiction.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it was from the previous show where we talked about whiskey. Honestly, I bet you it takes them a while, doesn't it?

[Paris Martino]

No, they're. They're quick.

[Leo Laporte]

So what does this mean, restricted for some audiences? Means if you're under 18, you can't watch us.

[Paris Martino]

Maybe our reaches shorter. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Tick Tock seems to do active moderation transcribing audio. Notice that election info popped up as soon as the topic came up on sn. So they do do it in real. This was yesterday. They do do it in real time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe it's because he mentioned Kamala Harris is 54 and angry people on the.

[Paris Martino]

On the. When did this happen? Do you know, folks on the.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You've derailed the podcast, bonita.

[Leo Laporte]

But I. But I blame Jeff Jarvis, so thank you very much. Jeff.

[Paris Martino]

Jeff, you're the one who said addiction. Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I take no responsibility.

[Paris Martino]

Just like a journalist.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I think we could pretty much wrap this show up, but is there. Are there any stories that you wanted to do that we didn't get to see? Quite a few.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Fossilized bug farts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. And now the poozium.

[Leo Laporte]

How do I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You saw the spark in my eye? Fossilized bug farts, T. Rex poop, and more ancient coprolites.

[Leo Laporte]

And it look. Coprolites. I grew up with coprolites. But look at. I love this. There's a giant Jeff Goldblum head saying, that is one big pile of poop. So there you go. Now we're really going to get taken down on TikTok.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chicago's Field Museum has Field Museum Rex. Wyoming's dinosaur center has 106 foot Supersaurus named Jimbo. The Poozeum in Williams, Arizona has poop. Fossilized poop from dinosaurs, sharks, and more.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't go to the website. I'm sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is like your website, Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

So disgusting. I'm gonna scroll past that. Holy cow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, did you have a no poop rule on the Yakia side of the Internet or was that different?

[Paris Martino]

I think it was. Farts were okay, but no poop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the museum opened in May 2024 near the Grand Canyon and is open to over 7,000 and fecal specimens from several different species, including the famed T.

[Paris Martino]

Rex story I didn't get to a few weeks ago.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it's just a storefront. It's not the biggest museum you've ever seen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Listen, it just came up in my Apple news thing on my laptop screen as I was logging into the Zoom for this, and I was like, this is a classic twig story.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. It is. And I thank you, Jeff.

[Paris Martino]

A few things to mention real quickly. Joe Trippy started a social network that he thinks will be better than all of the others.

[Leo Laporte]

Who's Joe Trippie?

[Paris Martino]

Joe Trippie was John, Howard Dean's campaign manager.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Paris Martino]

Famous and. Right, right. And just. By the way, that's all Howard Dean did. It ruined his career.

[Leo Laporte]

He's remembered for that forever.

[Paris Martino]

39 minutes. Right? He didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Paris Martino]

They just went, ah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Mike Dukakis lost an election because he wore a funny Hat and a tank.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean in the old days you could get disqualified for the least thing. Now you really got to work at it. So it says called says us. What makes this the best?

[Paris Martino]

If you go to says us and look for their about us. They're about us.

[Leo Laporte]

They have for democracy and community a.

[Paris Martino]

Social media of independence.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little pretentious. He doesn't like centralized control, so. Oh, you cannot be anonymous. You need authentic identities and reputations.

[Paris Martino]

I think it's a privileged position to take.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but is it centralized? Yes. So I don't understand. I mean Mastodon's not centralized.

[Paris Martino]

Says us Anyway, there's that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, Canada, good luck. I wish you luck. I think we should join. I'm going to sign in. Everybody should do it.

[Paris Martino]

Another one just to get on the record here is that Canada? You know when they did their news protection bill, Meta pulled all news off its platforms and the users are getting around it by putting up screenshots. And now the Canadian government is going after Metta saying see, you have news, you have to pay for it. So what's going to happen is now Meta is going to take down all the screenshots so there'll be even less news for Canadians.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Screenshots.

[Paris Martino]

They'll recognize a screenshot and take it down.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, this so called authenticated social network, all I had to do was give it a phone number and it texted me. I don't even have a name or anything but I'm in.

[Paris Martino]

Oops.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not that authenticated. I mean it's easy to have a phony phone number.

[Paris Martino]

And then here story for Paris there. Well there's one story here for Paris might be is that parents are suing a school district because their kid got in trouble for using AI on a paper that's up at line 80. But also this one, there's a short selling company that goes. There's nothing but short sales companies that is now going after Roblox contending that it's a, a, it's a cesspool of sex.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't know that but well that's the thing.

[Paris Martino]

But they're also short selling it so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're trying to make it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well this is like a short seller who launched a news organization like a year or so ago and they announced like hey, we're hiring quote unquote journalists and analysts, right? We're going to do investigations into stuff, publish them, but book beforehand. We're going to short sell as well as it. I will say Hind Cuban did that.

[Paris Martino]

Model about 10 years ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. It's laughable. But I will say if you read their research, it is kind of compelling if what they're saying is true. I mean they did say the main point of their. Hindenburg's thing on Roblox is that they believe that they are miscounting their like unique users and lying to investors about it. And they get into that in regards to kids. They specifically found they made a burn.

[Leo Laporte]

Money for their entire existence. You don't even need to say anymore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they've never made a like kids account and immediately found like a bunch of groups that had child pornography as well as people soliciting sex from minors.

[Paris Martino]

But it's Hindenburg's sub. But there's a conflict of interest at work here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, because they're short selling it. Their view, which we should explain is they're making a stock market bet that they're. Their Roblox stock will go in the dumper and they will make money.

[Paris Martino]

I challenged Mark Cuban about this at an online news association meeting. Oh God, 15 years ago. He was doing it and he was saying I've been journalists. But I said but you have an interest. He said yeah, but I'm doing the reporting. So.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, because you're doing the reporting with the goal of making money through short selling is not. That's not good. That's why we were pretty clear none of it. Nobody who works for Twit owns stock and tech companies. And Jeff is also true.

[Paris Martino]

I own Amazon stock because I used to work there, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well that's all right. You and you came up honestly. Jeff owned Google famously and Jekyll. Jeff always disclaims that, but it's a smaller number.

[Paris Martino]

Well, I also have qqq.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that counts.

[Paris Martino]

I didn't realize it's what if you look at what it owes, it's a tech.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's an index fund. So there's no one company that you can.

[Paris Martino]

A few companies that are. That are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean I have, I have a number of index funds, Chiefly the S P500, but Apple is over overweighted and stuff like that. And so I guess you. I don't know. I guess you shouldn't own any stock. I should just own Carborundum Mines or something. That would be the best.

[Paris Martino]

You're making so much money in the podcasting business that you don't need the stock. Yeah, yeah. There's one more One more very important news. We talk about media a lot here. We need to say that the New York Times has ceased publication.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the Onion story. Don't believe it. It's the Onion. Actually one other story that is fairly important and is a little political tick tock. So I won't call him. I will just say a presidential candidate, a male presidential candidate has weighed in on breaking up Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Google on this show. Are you sure you want to talk about this sort of Google change log is.

[Leo Laporte]

He says he would do something about Google. In an interview with Bloomberg's editor in chief, John Micklethwait, Micklethwait asked Trump if Google should be broken up. Trump zeroed in on the Justice Department to rant about a DOJ lawsuit against Virginia election officials. But Micklethwait got Trump back. On course I did I say that the candidate in question on course the question is about Google. Mr. P. He expressed his unhappiness about how bad stories seem to surface more on Google. And he says, I, he says, yeah, look, Google's got a lot of power. They're very bad to me, Very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories. In other words, If I have 20 good stories, 20 bad stories, and everyone's entitled to that, you'll only see 20 bad stories. I called the head of Google the other day and I'm saying I'm getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don't find them in Google. I think it's a whole rigged deal. How does he make everything about him? That's what's amazing. I think Google's rigged just like our government's rigged all over the place. Google would not confirm if the person in question had actually called Sundar Pichai, the actual CEO of Alphabet. Then Micklethwait said, would you break them up? Well, I do something, I give them a lot of credit. They become such a power, such a power, and you've got to give them credit for that. How they became a power is really the discussion. At the same time, it's a very dangerous thing because we want to have great companies. We don't want China have these companies. Right now China is afraid of Google. China is a very powerful, very smart group of people. I will tell you that from personal experience.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, it's funny to anybody, guys, anybody could have said this.

[Leo Laporte]

Anybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not naming names.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not naming names.

[Paris Martino]

No, no, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

What's funny is that, is that news organizations often just clip out like China is afraid of Google and it makes it, it makes it sound sensible, but if you read the whole thing, it's not that sensible. So anyway, he. I think it's a threat, frankly. I think everything's a threat. There's nothing that's not a threat. He says. But sometimes you have to fight through the threats, like Google. I'm not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, you're going to destroy the company. Well, you can do without breaking it up is to make sure it's more fair. They do treat me very badly. Oh, and he told me, apparently when he talked to Sundar Pichai, he told me, no way. You're the number one person on all of Google for stories. This is like a second grader, which probably makes sense, to be honest. Most honest to me. Most of them are bad stories. But these are minor details, right? And it's only bad because of fake news, because the news is really fake. Take. That's the one we really will have to straighten out. We have to straighten out our press because we have a corrupt press. APPLAUSE Wow. I don't know who said that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, New York Times says breaking up Google would be hard to do. So there's that. Yeah, we talked about the possible remedies that the DOJ floated, but this is going to go on for a long time. We don't know what's going to happen.

[Paris Martino]

I put those in there only because you had last week's links above and I thought, well, we're going to talk about Google being broken up. I'll put this back in.

[Leo Laporte]

No, thank you. That was an error. That was an error. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is time, the time has come to wrap up this show with what we do every week, which is our picks of the week. I would like to start today with Paris Martin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I today, Defector Media, I love Defector Sports blog that I think is fantastic. Published their annual report, which is where the business team goes through their finances.

[Leo Laporte]

They actually are open about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're open about it and they're doing well, which just always brings me heart. So I don't know, I always like reading this, but this one I found delightful. They go through it top up their, you know, revenue and their expenses looks all pretty normal until you get to the bottom where they've got a line for Taco Bell. Last year they spent $28 on Taco Bell. This year, $0. But there's two asterisks. And it says under the asterisks no Taco Bell receipts have been submitted to the company expense reimbursement system in the past 12 months. That is not meant to suggest that the amount of Taco Bell consumed by defector staffers was zero during this time frame. Nor is it mean to suggest, especially given some staffers historical behavior as it comes to filing expense reports, that zero Taco Bell receipts from this time frame will be submitted to the company expense reimbursement system belatedly in future periods. And I don't know, that just made me really laugh.

[Leo Laporte]

What is, what is, what is this line that says lead by alley fees?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is the like website maker I think they use.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot. They spend a lot on the website.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like they like 10% of their bunch of stuff for them. I think it's like yeah, their back end or their ghost or something like that. Anyway, I just. If you have any interest in how running a media business works, I would really recommend this post because not to be all Jeff Jarvis about my pick this week, but it's just a very interesting in depth look to into how a nascent media business, four years old, only like four or five million dollars in revenue, unexpectedly profitable about how it works. And they specifically go into the different growth tactics they use, which ones worked, which ones didn't. They're like whether gift links works. It's just fascinating. And there is one section of this where they talk about like how they tried cross promotion in other newsletters and it actually, you know, didn't work that well. And they have this brief aside that says we nonetheless appreciate all the newsletter operators who are willing to take our money. Thanks especially to the one who ended up being the only person who bought an effector subscription using their newsletter's promotional code.

[Paris Martino]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's interesting. You know, this is of interest to me because we're roughly the same size with roughly the same kind of revenue. Although how they get $30,000 a year rent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't have an office.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have an office. So what are they renting a houseboat? What is, what are they. Okay, I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean maybe they.

[Paris Martino]

For servers or something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, maybe they have an office for some business people or like something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, you know, their platform fees are $350,000. So. Wow. But I guess if you have 3.7 million in subscription revenue, it makes sense that, you know, 1% of that would go to. Well, it's not 1%. It's 10%, isn't it? Go to platforms. Very interesting.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I should pass this along.

[Paris Martino]

Wonderful to see. Because they broke away from a failing owner and set off on their own. And they're making. They're being generous about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Defector came from. When the staff of Deadspin were told to stick to sports by their new owners at Go Media, they all quit and quite a few of them decided to launch something new. And now here they are four years in, still running a profitable worker co op business. And in this, they get into kind of the nitty gritty of how running a successful worker co op works into, you know, the challenges of navigating health care and kind of end it with their work towards maybe setting up a structure to help other media worker co ops come into existence. So I don't know. It brought me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is fascinating. God bless him for being so upfront. I don't know if we. I mean, we're pretty upfront, but I don't think we'd publish our. Our balance sheet ever.

[Paris Martino]

Lisa's downstairs shaking her head no.

[Leo Laporte]

She says no way. That's cool. That's really cool. Good. Good on them. Yeah. Jeff Jarvis.

[Paris Martino]

Okay. I'm gonna be nice to you and not do what's on a line once. 64.

[Leo Laporte]

Because. Because we'd be banned immediately from. Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martino]

If you stay.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fascinating. Thank you for bookmarking that. I will be reading it later.

[Paris Martino]

I didn't know there were 15 kinds. I had no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the euphemism? So tick tock has a euphemism for everything. You know, it's not. It's corn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it would be something like organism organisms.

[Leo Laporte]

There are 15 kinds of organisms.

[Paris Martino]

Who knew?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Who knows?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Benito is biting his finger. Women knew, that's who. Guys.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Paris Martino]

Oh, yeah. We never figured it out.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know. We don't know nothing.

[Paris Martino]

We don't know. All right. This is the restaurant. The restaurant episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

Doritos is going to open its first restaurant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we go? Is it New York?

[Paris Martino]

Where is it? Actually, can we get a big Dorito in Los Angeles? Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crypto.com arena.

[Paris Martino]

They're going to have devastating Doritos. Flamin, hot limo, late night Rita.

[Jeff Jarvis]

God, it would be such a good bit to go take someone on a first date to the Doritos restaurant@the crypto.com arena.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why, but I feel like my son has something to do with this somehow.

[Paris Martino]

Doritos. Veggie dumplings. Doritos. Nacho cheese. Texas style. Loaded. Nachos. Doritos. Nacho cheese crunch. Tastic. Vanilla cone.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, ooh.

[Paris Martino]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Doritos after dark restaurant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Taco Bell Cantina.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, I was about to say they don't have like the one thing that Doritos make good is Taco Shell. Taco Bell.

[Leo Laporte]

Taco Bell has the exclusive rights to that.

[Paris Martino]

Addicted to Doritos. Who is Kamala Harris?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martino]

Loves Doritos.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm not going to vote for her then. That's terrible. Just lost my vote.

[Paris Martino]

All right, so that's one. The other food one is from Taylor Lorenz said they talked about an AI generated retail restaurant. So if you look at User Mag there line 162, you will see a rest. The number one restaurant in Austin doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Ethos. Oh, it's pretty though. I want one of these dinosaurs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, they're all AI generated.

[Paris Martino]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be so good, wouldn't it? Look at a honeycomb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Those don't look good.

[Leo Laporte]

Beekeepers. Lemon lavender cheesecake.

[Paris Martino]

We want that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will say, Jeff, have you been reading Taylor's substack regularly?

[Paris Martino]

Not regularly yet, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I read this article. I mean, I think that all of Taylor's stories and ideas are brilliant. I think Taylor is a really good reporter and I stand by her. But I will say this is something I notice all the time with people who move to substack. It's interesting how their prose changes when they don't have.

[Leo Laporte]

When you don't have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I assume is a regular editor.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, but she praises her editors. She's always liked her editors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean. Yeah, she's a great journalist.

[Leo Laporte]

So you know what? Do everybody a favor and hire a copy editor and an editor. They need the work. They need the work. Wait a minute. This is like a Twitter thing. Oh, I need. I have to go to User Mag Co. Yeah. Is this it? There it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now how do I look at it? Oh, there we go. Democracy. This is good. How does the Internet at work?

[Paris Martino]

What's that?

[Leo Laporte]

Tick Tockers are spreading North Korean propaganda to sell supplements. Oops. Now here we go again. The business of scanning kids faces is booming. This is good. This looks like a good. No, she's doing good reporting. I can't believe she's doing all of this by herself.

[Paris Martino]

Well, they also substrated these. Sorry, Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was saying she's voracious just.

[Paris Martino]

She is. Substack did these debates they picked. It's like the horrible New York Times op ed. They had Taylor Loren. I think it was Taylor Lorenz having to debate Chris Salisa.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, please, Taylor.

[Paris Martino]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of this stuff is older, right? Because this is August 31st. She.

[Paris Martino]

She had a backlog she put up, I think, to make sure she had something there.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, she also has had a newsletter for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. All right. So she just made this full time now?

[Paris Martino]

Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paris Martino]

So there we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations, Taylor. Good job. Well done. Now, where is this restaurant Ethos? Where can I go? Get the.

[Paris Martino]

Nowhere in your.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I get. No, it's real. Look, see? Can you. You see?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should look at the screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at the Twitter macaroni.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, that's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

That looks so good.

[Paris Martino]

It does.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, a giant kill.

[Paris Martino]

You gotta send that to Hank immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a jalapeno cheddar sausage so gigantic it can barely fit in the smoker. So what do they use to generate these? Because they are really beautifully done. They are mudang hippo croissants. The croissant critter. By the way, the comments on this are interesting. Here's a guy says I got horrendous food poisoning here. And when I told the owner, he threatened my life. The cops won't take it seriously because Giuseppe Fusili, the owner of Ethos, has ties to the mayor. He came to my house as smack, smashed my fine china, cut holes in my furniture, and beat me up with a comically large hammer. Do not support Giuseppe. Do not eat his poisonous foods. Stay safe out there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love the Internet sometimes, you see.

[Paris Martino]

And we want to cut it off and keep the kids away from this fun.

[Leo Laporte]

But I still want a mudang croissant. Can I have one, please? This stuff looks so good. Look at the size of that shrimp. And they call them jumbo prawns. I don't know if this is AI, though. Really. What is it? It's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is AI, definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it? How would you. Is AI really good at this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, that's not good. If you look at those images, they're very clearly AI generated.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to Ethos. There he is, Giuseppe.

[Paris Martino]

I think Hank, our philosophy himself with foods there.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah. Our ingredients are sourced from local and sustainable farms. Oh. This is.

[Paris Martino]

The funny thing is, if Hank could get in there with something, he actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Made his stuff looks that good. That's why.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, you can sneak real food into the Ethos feed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should partner with the Ethos people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know if they could afford his fees.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, I might buy an ethos chef's apron or something just to, you know, support him. Paris Martino, support her. They do have them, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of course they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course. Paris. Oh, how about this? I like this. It just says yes Chef and it's got Chef Boyardeer D on it with a kiss. I might get that for Henry. He would love that. Paris Martineau writes about youth, youth issues the weekend dot com. If you're not a subscriber, you must subscribe.

[Paris Martino]

So no, I. I was up for renewing the information. Yeah, I was about to do it, but then it told me that it was more than I paid last time because I got a big deal last time, but I was going to do it. And then I wanted to see the poll of information people and I was told I can't get that unless I have the bonus level. Oh, that's got to say I got pissed off because it's about the readers and the readers can't read about the readers unless you're a reader who is special. No, I get pissed off. So for a minute I'm a hothead. I thought, okay, no. And then of course immediately I got offered $100 discount. So I'm subscribed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They get you back? Yeah, $400 a year.

[Leo Laporte]

How much is, how much is the pro version expensive?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a. It's the kind of thing. A corporate lease.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's corporate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Users or pro users. It's got like in depth org charts about all these different companies. It's got data that company can love. Or charts. Yeah.

[Paris Martino]

What does it say if I hit upgraded Pro am, I doomed. Here, let me see here. Your first year at 599.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, just a couple hundred bucks more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then it'll increase to something.

[Leo Laporte]

But I just want to say that this 15 kinds of organisms article is really kind of a ripoff because there's really only one or two in here.

[Paris Martino]

Well, they don't listen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will say it is actually about only one.

[Leo Laporte]

It's only about one organism. What's the 15?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not 15.

[Leo Laporte]

You lied to me. I know there's one in there.

[Paris Martino]

Experts always know. So the experts in there saying there's 15.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But they only reveal one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is exactly the sort of article that I assume men in their 60s and 70s click on is how many types of organisms are there? I gotta figure it out In a.

[Leo Laporte]

Certain worldview and we just don't want to make sure we're not wrong.

[Paris Martino]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S pretty funny. Thank you, Paris. Jeff Jarvis. He is the Tao Knight. No, he's the Knight. Not the Tao. Just the Knight.

[Paris Martino]

No, the Tao.

[Leo Laporte]

The Tao. No, Knight.

[Paris Martino]

Leonard Tao.

[Leo Laporte]

He's the Leonard Tao professor of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

[Paris Martino]

Emeritus.

[Leo Laporte]

Emeritus. Go to the Gutenberg parenthesis.com where you can buy his latest books, including the Web We Weave. They're all great. And we will be back here next week as we are every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Yes, we're still on summertime because as I mentioned last week, the candy makers of America did not want to change times before Halloween. So we will change after Halloween. But that means we're still at 2100 UTC. And I mentioned that because you can watch this live, not on one, not on two, but on eight different platforms. Except Tick tock, because we said you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Might be able to watch it on Jeff's Twitter, too. One day.

[Paris Martino]

One day we dream of being on.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff's Twitter, but right now, it's discord for our fabulous club members. Thank you. You're wonderful. We really appreciate the support. Paris is doing it, too. Thank you for the support. That's one. There's also YouTube.com TWIT/live. There's Twitch TV, TWIT, LinkedIn, X.com, facebook Kick, and now the addition of TikTok. Well, it was brief, it was short, but it was fun. Eight different ways you can watch live. But if you watch live, I would encourage you to download a copy as well, because that way we can count you as a Viewer at TWiT TV TWiG. That's the website. You'll see a link there to the YouTube channel. So that's a great way to share clips from the show. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Club members. It's $7 a month to be a club member. In fact, it might cost you nothing because you can refer a friend once you're a club member. And for every friend you refer, you will get a free month. So the best thing to do is get your referral link once you join Twitter TV club TWiT and post it everywhere. And maybe you'll never have to pay a penny for the rest of your life. That's. That's easy, right? Twit TV Club, Twitter. And it helps us because that $7 a month pays for this show, all the shows we do, we have advertising support. Yes, but without your help, I don't think we'd be able to do what we do. Day after tomorrow, Friday, we're doing a coffee thing with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. We're going to talk with a bean connoisseur about coffee beans. Turns out that's a very important thing. The week following, a week from Friday, we're going to do Stacy's Book Club. If you haven't read it yet, it's very good. Adrian Tchaikovsky's service model is the name of the book for the book club on the 25th. Micah's crafting corner. And a bunch of other wonderful things go on in the club. Of course, the Discord is a great place to hang as well, with a bunch of smart people, interesting people. It's a great community and all of that. Just seven bucks a month. Wow. Twit, TV club, Twitter. Thank you so much for supporting us. We will be back next week, Paris. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. And we. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Paris Martino]

Oh, we got to do the.

[Leo Laporte]

And we'll see you next time on this Week in Google.

[Paris Martino]

Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

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