TWiG 791: There's a Pony In There Somewhere - C2PA, Character.ai Lawsuit, Polish AI Radio

Summary

This Week in Google (Audio) – Episode 791: "There's a Pony In There Somewhere"

Release Date: October 24, 2024
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau

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1. AI-Generated Content Authentication with Nathan Freitas (00:00 - 26:21)

Guest Introduction: Leo Laporte introduces Nathan Freitas from ProofMode.org, a representative of the Guardian Project at the Harvard Berkman Center. Nathan discusses the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication (C2PA), an open standard aimed at verifying the authenticity of digital content.

Understanding C2PA: Nathan elaborates on C2PA, likening it to EXIF data augmented with cryptographic signatures and revision control. This standard allows for metadata to be signed, timestamped, and tracked across multiple revisions, ensuring the integrity of photographs, videos, and other digital media.

[05:39] Jeff Jarvis: “How much is too much? At what point is it no longer a native image?”

[06:14] Nathan Freitas: “You can think of C2PA as EXIF with cryptography added onto it. It allows you to sign and notarize all of that metadata.”

Practical Applications: Nathan highlights practical implementations, such as Leica’s cameras embedding cryptographic data to authenticate photos and Adobe integrating C2PA into Photoshop for tracking edits. Tools like Proof Check and browser extensions like Digimark facilitate end-users in verifying content authenticity.

Transition to Real-World Impact: The discussion shifts to how C2PA aids in critical scenarios like documenting war crimes, where authenticated media serves as robust evidence in legal proceedings. Nathan emphasizes the importance of a transition period, akin to the shift from HTTP to HTTPS, where adoption of these authentication standards becomes widespread.

[17:07] Nathan Freitas: “With C2PA as a standard, we're able to provide cryptographic assurances that media has not been tampered with, which is invaluable in legal and journalistic contexts.”

Guardian Project’s Initiatives: Nathan describes the Guardian Project’s long-standing commitment to human rights activism and the development of Proof Mode, an open-source capture tool that allows users to authenticate their media. He also mentions the Baseline project, aiming to create a notarized database of reality to preserve unaltered records of the world.

[21:10] Jeff Jarvis: “That's cool for sure.”

[21:12] Nathan Freitas: “Proof Mode is available for iPhone and Android devices, allowing users to authenticate their captures directly or import existing photos for verification.”

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2. Google’s Search Leadership Changes (26:21 - 35:23)

Prabhakar Raghavan’s Transition: The hosts discuss the recent move of Prabhakar Raghavan from Senior Vice President of Search to Chief Technologist at Google. While some view this as a promotion, others lament the decline in Google Search quality under his leadership.

[32:26] Paris Martineau: “Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of his duty as senior vice president of Search, becoming Google's chief technologist.”

Impact on Search Quality: Jeff Jarvis criticizes the shift, arguing that prioritizing revenue over user experience has deteriorated the effectiveness of Google Search.

[34:44] Paris Martineau: “I don't even use Google Search anymore.”

[35:09] Leo Laporte: “Prabhakar has been there since June 2020, and Google Search hasn't been the same since.”

User Experience Concerns: The hosts express frustration over Google's inability to efficiently "find the pony in the haystack," metaphorically referencing the struggle to locate quality information amidst a sea of less relevant content.

[35:23] Jeff Jarvis: “Google's promise was to pick the best site. But it's harder now with the volume and quality of content available.”

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3. Triscuits Name Origin (35:23 - 40:43)

Exploring the Origin: Leo Laporte initiates a light-hearted segment investigating the origin of the Triscuits name. Paris Martineau conducts research, uncovering that the name likely derives from "electricity" and the baking process used in the early 1900s.

[39:36] Paris Martineau: “The name Trisket may have come from a combination of the words electricity and biscuits.”

[40:18] Jeff Jarvis: “Here’s the ad: ‘Baked by electricity. The first snack food baked by electricity.’”

Historical Context: The discussion delves into the historical advertising strategies of Triscuits, emphasizing their unique selling point of being electrically baked—a novelty at the time.

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4. LinkedIn’s New News Banner Initiative (40:43 - 74:38)

Introduction of News Banner: The hosts discuss LinkedIn’s recent launch of a news banner feature aimed at integrating news content directly into the platform's mobile feed. This initiative includes partnerships with major news organizations like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

[71:31] Jeff Jarvis: “LinkedIn is launching a news banner according to The Information atop the mobile feed.”

Benefits for Publishers: Jeff Jarvis highlights the financial benefits for publishers, noting that Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal are expected to earn over $2 million each from the program this year.

[72:34] Leo Laporte: “LinkedIn announced the program this summer, and Bloomberg and the Journal will each earn more than $2 million from it.”

User Experience and Concerns: While some hosts appreciate the integration, others express skepticism regarding LinkedIn's shift towards a more expansive social and video platform, diverging from its traditional business networking focus.

[71:47] Paris Martineau: “It's a great opportunity for news organizations, but LinkedIn is becoming something broader.”

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5. AI in Radio: Radio Krakow’s Move to AI Presenters (74:38 - 97:19)

Radio Krakow’s Transformation: The conversation shifts to the Polish radio station, Radio Krakow, which has replaced its human presenters with AI-generated voices. This move followed an assessment revealing low listenership and overlapping content with other channels.

[94:00] Paris Martineau: “I went to the Queens County Farm Museum and heard about Radio Krakow replacing presenters with AIs.”

Public Reaction: Hosts express mixed feelings, with concerns about the authenticity and warmth of AI presenters compared to humans. They also touch on broader implications for the future of radio and media.

[95:00] Leo Laporte: “Replacing human presenters with AI lacks the personal touch that listeners appreciate.”

Technical Challenges: Jeff Jarvis mentions difficulties in accessing the AI content online, highlighting potential hurdles in audience engagement and technological adoption.

[96:00] Jeff Jarvis: “Trying to listen to the AI presenter was challenging, and the content seems incomplete.”

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6. AI Chatbots and Teen Suicide: Character.ai Lawsuit (97:19 - 132:31)

Tragic Incident: Paris Martineau introduces a sensitive topic sourced from The New York Times, discussing a lawsuit filed by the mother of a 14-year-old boy. She alleges that the boy's obsession with the AI chatbot Character.ai contributed to his suicide.

[104:33] Paris Martineau: “The headline was ‘Can AI be blamed for a teen suicide?’ focusing on a mother’s claim that Character.ai played a role in her son’s death.”

Legal and Ethical Implications: The discussion explores potential product liability, questioning whether AI developers have a responsibility to prevent addictive behaviors, especially among minors. The hosts debate the applicability of Section 230 protections and the broader duty of AI companies to safeguard vulnerable users.

[107:33] Jeff Jarvis: “The Times is suing OpenAI, and this raises questions about liability and ethical responsibilities of AI developers.”

Character.ai’s Response: Character.ai has introduced new safety features, including disclaimers and session time notifications, aiming to mitigate such risks. However, the adequacy of these measures is under scrutiny.

[116:50] Paris Martineau: “Character.ai released safety updates, including reminders that the AI isn’t a real person and notifications after long sessions.”

Parental Responsibility vs. Corporate Accountability: The hosts debate the extent of parental oversight versus corporate responsibility in preventing AI misuse and protecting young users.

[111:04] Leo Laporte: “Parents should be responsible, but companies also have a duty to protect their users.”

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7. Picks of the Week: "Nick Vember" – Nicolas Cage Movie Marathon (132:31 - 158:33)

Introduction to "Nick Vember": Paris Martineau announces her personal challenge for November—watching 31 Nicolas Cage movies, dubbed "Nick Vember." She shares her initial picks and invites listeners to suggest additional films.

[144:17] Paris Martineau: “This November, I'm embarking on 'Nick Vember,' where I'll watch 31 Nicolas Cage movies. If you have any favorites, let me know!”

Favorite Selections: The hosts discuss various Nicolas Cage films, highlighting his versatility and the stark contrasts between his performances.

[147:19] Paris Martineau: “Last night I watched 'Vampire’s Kiss,' a highly recommended Cage film from the 80s.”

[148:36] Jeff Jarvis: “Face/Off is my favorite!”

Audience Engagement: Listeners are encouraged to participate by watching along and sharing their thoughts, fostering a communal viewing experience.

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Closing Remarks

The episode wraps up with the hosts reflecting on the rapid advancements in AI and technology, contemplating their dual-edged impacts on society. They emphasize the importance of responsible usage and the ongoing dialogue between technology developers, users, and regulators.

[124:03] Leo Laporte: “Technology is a double-edged sword. It’s up to us to use it for good and not ill.”

[126:23] Jeff Jarvis: “AI uses so much energy. It’s a real problem we need to address.”

The hosts also promote upcoming segments and encourage listeners to subscribe and join their community for more in-depth discussions.

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Notable Quotes:

• “C2PA can be thought of as almost like EXIF with cryptography added onto it.” — Nathan Freitas [05:39]
• “Google's promise was to pick the best site, but it's harder now.” — Jeff Jarvis [35:09]
• “Replacing human presenters with AI lacks the personal touch.” — Leo Laporte [95:00]
• “Technology is a double-edged sword. It’s up to us to use it for good and not ill.” — Leo Laporte [124:03]

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Final Thoughts:

Episode 791 of "This Week in Google" delves deep into the intersection of AI and content authenticity, the evolving landscape of digital media, and the ethical considerations surrounding emerging technologies. From robust discussions with industry experts to exploring lighter topics like the origin of Triscuits' name, the episode offers a comprehensive look at the current state and future trajectory of Big Tech.

Listeners are left with compelling insights into how technology shapes our reality, the responsibilities of tech companies in safeguarding users, and the personal endeavors of the hosts in navigating the digital age.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for twig. This week in Google. Paris Martineau is here. Jeff Jarvis is here. And we're going to talk to a guy from proofmode.org, nathan Freitas old friend will help us understand how to tell the difference between a real photograph and one generated by AI. He's got a plan. We'll also talk about Triscuits and where they got their name. And yeah, we'll throw a little Google in too, just for fun. 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 791, recorded Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024. There's a pony in there somewhere. It's time for TWiG. This Week in Google, where we're going to talk about everything but Google. But we like doing it, and that's how it's going to be. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to Paris Martineau, who is the reporter for the weekend, the information where she covers youth issues. Hi, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Howdy.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that fair to say, all that?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it is fair to say all that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fair. Okay. I just want to make sure.

[Paris Martineau]

All that in a bag of oats.

[Leo Laporte]

All that in a bag of oats. Is that something your parents used to say when you were young and.

[Paris Martineau]

No, they didn't used to say that, but they could now.

[Leo Laporte]

All that and the baghouse. Also with us, Mr. Jeff Jarvis, who has a new job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Two of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally. What? So you can now tell us the story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my lower third should read and will read once. You don't need to do it. I just was very. So I'm a visiting professor at the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am a distinguished fellow at the center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State's School of Communication and Media. And I remain. They can't get rid of me. Emeritus Leonard Tao, professor of Journalism Innovation at the City University of New York's get ready. Cue the music.

[Leo Laporte]

Graduate School of Journalism. Hey, by the way, Craig Newmark got a little mention on Security now yesterday because he funded. And I'm. I think this is really. That's really cool. The. He's been funding the pass keys.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He cares deeply about cybersecurity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so we're all messing it up and we've got to take better care of ourselves. And he. It's. It's an issue that he really, really cares about.

[Leo Laporte]

Good on him. So he. He apparently funded the Craig Newmark Philanthropies helped fund the development in pass keys, the setting of a standard, and now this new exchange standard which will allow people to export their passkeys. Oh, so that you don't have to be all on your iPhone or all in your password manager or you can move to a new password manager or a new device. That's really important and it looks like they're doing a good job. So listen to security now from last Tuesday, from yesterday, 22 October. For the details on that, we have a special guest. I don't know if you remember our conversation last week, we were talking about YouTube's decision to add a new like little tag to videos made with a camera. The idea is this was. This is not AI, this was actually shot on a camera. Well, this is part of a larger movement that I didn't know that much about of kind of trying to authenticate content, pictures and video in a world where everything can be made up. So I got a great email from a guy we've interviewed before, Doc Searles has interviewed. He's been on triangulation because he was very active in the Tor project. Nathan Freitas, who works at the Harvard Berkman Center. He is the director of something called the Guardian Project and has an open Source project called proofmode.org hi Nathan, welcome.

[Nathan Freitas]

Hi Leo. Thanks for responding to my urgent email because I heard that last week we had some things.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, first of all, There is this C2PA standard. Tell us what that is.

[Nathan Freitas]

So the acronym stands for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication. This. You know, it's kind of funny to have a standard that has the word coalition in it. But C2PA can be thought of as almost like EXIF with cryptography added onto it. And so it adds. And not just cryptography, but also revision control. So you have the ability to sign and notarize all of that metadata that you're used to saying in a photo or a video or even audio files or other documents. It allows you to sign it with a certificate. It allows you to timestamp it with a third party cryptographic timestamp server. And then not only does it just have one event, but it can have multiple. Like I rotated it, I made a thumbnail, I edited it with AI, so it has that kind of version control and it's standard across formats. So whether it's an MP4 or a JPEG or a PNG or a MP4A, it's the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was of course one of Jeff's questions was how much is too much? At what point is it no longer a native image? It sounds like there's a. There's a. There's a history trail of what has exactly original my. And at that point I brought out my, my Leica, which my excuse for buying this 11 MP is that it had built in this authentication system. Are you aware of what Leica has done? And Adobe supposedly is supporting this in some of their apps as well.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, yeah. So I've held it and used that camera. I haven't found the budget to own one myself.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was a Leo humblebrag. Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's beautiful. It was my excuse for self paying it.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah. I have a picture.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Nathan Freitas]

Of myself taken with that camera. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm really happy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How much?

[Leo Laporte]

So this embeds some. It's like EXIF data, some additional data in the photograph that is cryptographically signed so that only this camera could generate that. I guess I presume this camera has a private key and it puts a public key in the. In the image. Is that how it works?

[Nathan Freitas]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And you could presumably follow a paper trail that would bring it back to this camera.

[Nathan Freitas]

Exactly. And so we think that's wonderful and it's amazing when, you know, Nikon and Sony and others are getting on board for us. Guardian project's been around for 15 years focused on human rights activism and journalism. You know, we've been doing a version of this work that actually inspired the C2PA standard. They call C2PA proof mode on steroids. And so Proof mode was our project. We worked with Witness, Peter Gabriel's amazing organization to create an open source app software camera for iPhones and Android that does C2PA now. But it also, you know, in some ways you could think of C2PA as an HTML and we were whatever was before H, HTML, SGML or you know, kind of pre. Pre web. Right. So.

[Leo Laporte]

But all with the same intent.

[Nathan Freitas]

Same intent. And now we're interoperable. And the difference is that you can generate and control the keys with Proof mode as opposed to your Leica. It's baked in and hard coded the identity piece.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And of course there's always this issue of, well now I'm going to take this authenticated photo and modify it to reflect. Like maybe bake the sky purple and or oh, I know, even better. I'm going to add Northern lights to my photo and say I was there. That's fake. Would that editing invalidate the certificate in the photo?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Would it?

[Leo Laporte]

How would we know what's happened to it?

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, so right now, if you open Photoshop and enable the con. So another name for this is Content Credentials. That's the easier way to say it from the Adobe branding team. They also have something called Content Authenticity Initiative. So Adobe's been out in front. There's a lot of others like Microsoft and Now, you know, OpenAI and others are getting on board with the Standard. BBC and others have used it in news applications, but Adobe has integrated this into Photoshop so that if you make edits and export it with content credentials, you'll see that chain of edits. And then you can use a tool like at content credentials.org and also our tool Proof Check can show you that chain of edits. So you know, so it's not saying you can't edit photos, especially within, you know, as Jeff would know and others, what is allowed by a news organization, you know, in terms of the small edits, but to have that there in that chain where you could roll back just like a git commit history. Right. We trust open source because we see the, the chain of git commits in a, in a repo. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of like that critical to this working. Besides the fact that the devices have to support it, the tools have to support it, is there has to be a way of. For an end user to check it. There has to be a tool that says, well, what is this? An original? What happened to it? That kind of thing. Is that what Proof Mode is all about?

[Nathan Freitas]

Proof Mode is a capture tool. And then we have something called Proof Proof Check, which is a verifier. So we do have our own verifier where you can drag a bunch of stuff in and it'll tell you as much about it. It's trying to be a Swiss army knife tool for journalists to look at exif and also to look for AI tags. Right. So because you can also, if something's generated in ChatGPT or Runway, for instance, they do use the same standard to flag it as this was made, not with a camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Nathan Freitas]

There's also digimark has a browser extension which is really cool. At any photo in your browser that has C2P, it pops up. News organizations are experimenting with how to display this in different ways. And I've heard that WordPress will be building a plugin. So I expect this to be everywhere where there'll be the little watermark. You click on it, it tells you something. Sorry. LinkedIn is doing this already, by the way. And now YouTube this is what YouTube's doing. They're taking a tiny step, but eventually there'll be some standard view source thing and people will know what to do with it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nathan, can I ask a question here? So one thing at Google News, guys, one of the things the journalists have asked of Google and Google search for years, which I think they're starting to do now, is to show the provenance of a photo even within Google. This is the first instance of this photo that Google saw, which would be terribly useful to fact checkers and such. How does this system potentially tie into that kind of provenance of first appearance and progression?

[Nathan Freitas]

Yes, it definitely can. And I think this is how the BBC used it. It wasn't used at the point of capture, it was the newsroom editorial team signed it and said, we have validated this in the newsroom. So Google can actually use this throughout any sort of processing, editing, reconversion. It's really useful. Again, like it's not a DRM system. It's a way of doing. It's not control, it's a way of really exposing where this media file has been and what has happened to it and where it was first encountered. So this is in our work with human rights, we worked with the Starling Project and Hola Systems to do war crime documentation in Ukraine and we worked with the International Criminal Court in the Hague on this for many years in other contexts. And what's important for them in what's called open source research is to say, yeah, timestamp. This is the first time we encountered this media. It was in this format and we know it hasn't changed since because we have the hash and even have the hash on a blockchain, for instance. So we were able to submit this cryptographic docket to the Hague to hopefully persecute purveyors of war crimes through having this assurance. And I think that Google use case definitely is applicable here too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me ask you another one quickly. I mentioned before we got on the Four Corners project, I found it from Fred Richen and the idea was to at any four corner of an image, you could click there and you would get different information about the photo. The problem that Fred faced long ago was that unless the browser manufacturers were going to play along, it was going to be hard to make it work at all. So short of a plugin and short of the platforms, that is to say LinkedIn or whoever. How about the browser manufacturers, that is to say Google, are they helpful in exposing the data that's there no matter what the platform you See the photo on.

[Nathan Freitas]

That's my biggest hope. With this as a standard and also that there's full open source JavaScript libraries and Rust libraries to implement this is that it just becomes clear to everyone that this needs to be built into the cameras on your phone. It should be in the browser. And that we figure out the user experience piece of this because definitely there's been some missteps there. And you see YouTube hiding it kind of under the. More, I think Instagram. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo had to look for it last week.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, yeah. And other platforms have said this was made with AI and a photographer said, no, I just edited it in Photoshop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we get that a lot on our Instagram. Here's a example of what LinkedIn is doing. So this is from LinkedIn's blog post about this. You see on the image in the upper left hand corner there's a cr. What does that stand for?

[Nathan Freitas]

Content Crudential Credentials. Yeah, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Credentials, I guess. And then if you click on. This is the Adobe thing. And if you click on it, then you will get this chain of custody, this providence. Now, of course, if you don't see that, does that mean, Nathan, that if we don't see that on images, we should not trust them? Not yet.

[Nathan Freitas]

You know, I was, yeah, I was with. I was at Georgetown Law School in a room with a Beth von Schacht, the global US Ambassador on crime or I always misstate this, but also in some very important professors and this was their question, are we devaluing important evidence that doesn't have this? And how do we. If there's people in the world that don't have access to these tools? And I think right now we're still in that transition. Think about this also like that transition from HTTP to HTTPs, right, where there was a period where everyone said, yeah, HTTP, that's fine, it's hard to do HTTPs. And then we started to get more HTTPs and then we had, let's encrypt, basically encrypt the web. And so there will be this transition time where at some point I'll say, yep, if it doesn't have this kind of metadata, we probably shouldn't trust it. But right now we're in a transition period where we don't want to devalue things. It just requires, you know, you have, you have groups like, oh, why am I spacing on the name bellingcat, right. Amazing investigative research groups and others like at UC Berkeley and newsrooms who do important human work that still needs to be done. What this does. And really one of the professors and judges at Georgetown that I spoke with, he introduced this idea of self authenticating evidence. So by having this metadata, it's essentially self authenticating. You can trust the chain of custody and it reduces the time for us to trust it. It doesn't mean that things that don't have this shouldn't be trusted. It just takes more time to sort through them. And we're talking about a war crime, war zone and you have tens to hundreds of thousands of photos and things like the Ukrainian prosecutors have, you know, it's hard for them to deal with that volume. So the more that we can help in cases like this, we want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's great. Tell us about the Guardian project.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, so we've been around 15 years. I've been, you know, I worked at Palm on mobile devices first BlackBerry developers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You've been around a while.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Nathan Freitas]

So I was an Apple Newton user, so. Yeah, me too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep, it's back there.

[Nathan Freitas]

And I kept seeing, I was also, I've been a lifelong activist and in various kind of causes and movements. And I started seeing the adoption of smartphones by people around the world, really, you know, who didn't even have computers. And so early on I said we need to start building human rights and privacy tools or bringing existing ones to mobile phones. And so we began with things like Tor for instance, and pgp. We also have created things or worked on together projects like SQL Cipher, which is the encrypted database in signal. And then beyond those core building blocks, we work on things like Proof Mode. We also, I think last time, Leo, you had me on, we talked about the app I built with Edward Snowden called Haven, which was a open source kind of way to protect journalists. It's like a physical security app that he thought was needed. And so we build special purpose things and we work with groups like UNICEF to help ensure that what they're doing with mobile devices is also secure. So yeah, I've got a great team grant funded and it's been a great 15 years and I'm really happy to work on things like Proof Mode.

[Leo Laporte]

So I love this poster over your left shoulder. No, not that. Go back to his shot. Empower more people, Ensure better protection. Cameras everywhere. And that's really a sea change in the world in the last 15 years. The cameras are everywhere, but instead of being police cameras which are also everywhere, they're in the hands of individuals and it's, it's an opportunity to record bad behavior and share it with the World. I think that that's really a very interesting change and we are already seeing the results.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's a seismic shift in the way we experience reality.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Nathan Freitas]

Well, Peter Gabriel started Witness after the Rodney King beatings and footage as to say what if we got every. What if everyone had a camera? Right. This was an earlier era and so Witness, in the time we've worked with them and that's who made that poster said, well now everyone has a camera and there's some problems we need to work on. And so you'll notice this lovely woman's faces or whoever they are, is pixelated and blurred in back here because we also built Obscuracam, which was an easy tool on your phone to redact and blur photos. And so we worked with Witness on that. They've been amazing partner. And then three years ago we actually got funding from the filecoin foundation for the decentralized web, which is a mouthful. And they're the. They're, you know, like people like Brewster Kahle are affiliated with them and they've been great because they really support our decentralized mission. So one of the critic critiques of C2PA is that it's basically will become a centralized tracking system for every photo you take. Right. And Proof Mode is our. Our counter to that. To say the standard doesn't have to be implemented that way. It can be implemented in a much more open way. But yeah, there's. Now we're in that phase of cameras are everywhere and we've got some problems.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, that's. Yes. That Peter Gabriel, who I love even more now. Unbelievable. What an incredible person. So here's proof mode.org this is an open source project and you have some stuff going on. You talk about using Proof Mode. Is it available now for the iPhone, Android devices?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool for sure.

[Nathan Freitas]

And you. One of the. Here's a. I know we're going on a while and I appreciate it, but we have a project called Baseline. So we had this. Maybe this loops it back to Google. I know you guys talk about all sorts of things, but there was this amazing moment where we realized say with video and with photos, we're going to cross this threshold of like not knowing if a photo was generated by AI or real like that you just encounter. Right. And even historic photos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Nathan Freitas]

At some point you're not going to know. So we had this goal of funding people around the world to use Proof Mode to just document the world as it is today, like before and to have this notarized database of reality. Right. Such that, you know, we can at least have that as a, as a baseline of reality before it's all gone in a sense. And it's a little like sci fi, dystopic. But you know, we, we've also applied this to hurricane relief efforts to help people document damage to buildings because people will claim, oh, that's not real. Your, your house was not destroyed. You made that an AI. Right. We've had groups use it for conservation efforts in documenting different invasive species or illegal mining and land rights issues because again, increasingly in courts people are being countered with how do we know that's real? So baseline was one of our projects. So we've started to publish there with the goal of having a petabyte at some point of reality, notarized reality. But yeah, all the tools are open source available. This is real, it's shipping and we'd love to have feedback and support.

[Leo Laporte]

So I've downloaded it and I have it on my iPhone now. When I take iPhone pictures with the iPhone camera, will it do it or do I have to use the Proof Mode camera?

[Nathan Freitas]

So because of Apple, who we love so much, we can't integrate with. So you have to use the Proof Mode camera or you can import an existing photo and it'll add a different mark. It'll say this was not created but an it was like notarized Android. We have background mode so you can use your regular camera. And make sure to turn on the C2PA feature under the settings. It's a little hidden. There's also an interesting option we have for adding AI flags that say in your photo. The C2PA has standards that says don't let AI eat my photo basically. And so whether they respect that or not, who knows. But there is a standard, a robots txt essentially within C2PA.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. I also see on proofmode.org that there's proof mode for audio.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we use C2PA to stamp our podcast?

[Paris Martineau]

No one can change these hot tapes.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, it was, we were working with investigative, they were doing hour long interviews and that would create a huge video file. So we said maybe you take some photos and then do the rest as an audio file. So yeah, Proof Audio also is a little bit more of a prototype, but it's a really nice audio app and you know, we really want this to just be built in everywhere. Like, you know, I mean, the interesting thing is exif is there, but when you get to other audio formats like MP4 and audio, it's doesn't There isn't quite as good of or robust as metadata where there's very different metadata. And so C2PA standardized standardizes this across the file types, which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Journalists use another form of EXIF called iptc. Is this could. Does it you support that as well or is that could. What I'd love to see is that extended to include Proof mode.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, we're. We are. Well, yes. So we do look at iptc. We're adding it into our Proof check tool. What is interesting is if you have a Google Pixel phone and you use Magic Edit, the new feature, or you use the. Add the. Like add yourself to a photo feature in the pixels, the place where they. They put the line that says this was made by Gemini is in the IPTC metadata.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Nathan Freitas]

Google has decided that's where they want to put it and not.

[Leo Laporte]

Because nobody supports C2.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah, exactly. You wouldn't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Nathan Freitas]

So they're kind of hiding it. And even though OpenAI is supporting C2PA Runway AI Google's not quite there yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, let's put some pressure on them to do it. Nathan, I thank you so much for taking the time to tell us.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

To correct any errors of fact that we had last week, but no errors. It's actually pretty clear this needs to happen and this seems like the way to do it with an open source project. Proof Mode sources on GitLab and GitHub.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah. And shout out to Adobe and the whole content credentials open source project as well. They're really doing good work.

[Leo Laporte]

Are most camera manufacturers. I know Leica's doing it, but you mentioned Sony, Canon, Nikon. Are they also moving in that direction?

[Nathan Freitas]

Yep, they sure are. So let's just give them time.

[Leo Laporte]

And somebody's saying, well, if you take a picture in RAW and then you take that RAW into Photoshop and then process it, does it get flagged as AI?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's not. It doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I think right now on some apps currently, like Instagram was flagging engagement photos.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

As AI because he used Adobe.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yeah. I think it's the edits you do. I mean, like I said, the user experience part of this is kind of busted right now. For the viewer, it's going to take time. But you know what Photoshop will do is keep that log of your edits and then embed it as C2PA. And Adobe's. What is. What do they call their. They have like a Flickr, like photo sharing service.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm forgetting what it is unlike Flickr, costs money. But okay, yes, yeah, they have some.

[Nathan Freitas]

UI there that, but, but really that's the part that is, is broken and things like Four Corners should be supported and ideas like that because we need a lot of people working on that piece.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And other apps should use it. I mean a lot of people are turning from, to serif an affinity photo for instance from Adobe. I hope you're getting these app makers also involved in this.

[Nathan Freitas]

Doing the best we can. And again, I mean Adobe is the big behemoth here pushing it and they're, they're, they're, they have many reasons to do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Nathan Freitas]

They, they're because they're doing generative AI and they're trying to support great, you know, news journalism and, and so you know, I think we've been supportive of you know like we know our place in this. We're often instigators and catalysts and we love when we, we're not needed anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

So hopefully put yourself out of a job. That's a good idea. Guardian project is at guardianproject.info proof mode is at proofmode.org and Nathan Freitas, thank you so much for coming on. You, you've been doing a lot of great work over the years. That's, I'm very impressed by your commitment to that. That's great.

[Nathan Freitas]

Well, all your podcasts keep me going and I'm a club twit member so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yay.

[Paris Martineau]

Get in there. Get in the club guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the Lord's work. That's good. Hey, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Nathan Freitas from proofmode.org thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. Take care. We'll take a little break. When we come back, there's Google News. Amazingly, Cragovan Raghavar has moved on. Ed Zittrin would be happy to hear this. We'll talk about.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say Ed somewhere is Putin and Hollerin.

[Leo Laporte]

The man who ruined Google Search has moved on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He has a whole newsletter on that.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet he does. Yes. But first a word from our sponsor, our good friends at ACI Learning. You know that name, right? Or maybe you don't, but I know you know it. Pro TV well, ACI Learning is it pro, binge worthy, video on demand IT and cybersecurity training, it's the best. With IT Pro you'll get cert ready. With access to their full video Library. More than 7,250 hours of training, you'll get more than just the video training premium Plans also include practice exams. It's great to take the test before you pay for the exam to make sure you really know your material. Plus it gives you the confidence. You go, hey, I know this stuff. And you go into that exam feeling great and doing great. You also can get virtual labs which are fantastic because they facilitate hands on learning. You don't have to have a Windows machine to set up a Windows server and Windows clients and configure them. MSPs love it too. It's a great way to test integrating stuff that they're planning to put onto their onto their customers systems. This is all from IT Pro, from ACI Learning. And most importantly, they make training fun. Whether you're learning to get a cert to get your first job in IT or you're an IT professional who wants to get more certs or more knowledge to become better at your job and get a better job, or you're a company with an IT team that you're giving training to. It's really important that training has to be entertaining. It has to be fun. You don't want it to be a slog, you don't want it to be work. But that's what IT Pro does so well. All their training videos are produced in an engaging kind of talk show format with a chat room going just like ours in the background. It really is. They call it edutaining. The thing I say is these teachers are working professionals, experts in the fields that they're teaching and more importantly, they have a passion for it. And their passion, their love for the subject matter, makes it easier to learn for you and makes it more fun, more engaging for you. They pass the passion along. Take your IT or cyber career to the next level. Be bold. Train smart with ACI learning. If you want to know more, you visit info.acilearning.com twit make sure you use this twit so they know you saw it here. Oh, and we have an offer code, twit100. The offer code twit100. Twit100. Use that at checkout. You'll save 30% on your first year of it pro annual training plans. That's a big savings. Info.aci learning.com twit don't forget the offer code twit100. We thank these guys. They've been, they've been supporting us for a long time. We really appreciate it. The folks at ACI Learning thank you for supporting us too by going to that special address. Oh, I've got to Read. I haven't seen Ed's newsletter on this one yet. He. He called Prob. Okay, Prabhakar. I'll just call him Prabhakar Raghavan.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He called Prabhakar the man who destroyed Google Search. Right. He's been. Let's see, it's. Where's your Ed at? Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of his duty as senior vice president of Search, becoming Google's chief technologist.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that maybe is a promotion. Yeah. He's been there a long time. Five years, I think. And Ed, in fact, you could. There's a link in his. The man who Killed Google Search tells a story of how Prabhagara took over from Ben Gomes, the head of Search, who we liked. Who we liked, and basically turned Search into a revenue opportunity which I think everybody agrees has really in the last five years destroyed Google Search. Well, I guess his reward is he's got a better job still.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ed's put a notch in his mouse.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he really has.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if that's moral.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. I keep pressing the wrong button.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's a boy. Mo button.

[Paris Martineau]

Balmoral.

[Leo Laporte]

An important rule to follow with somebody's title, Ed rights in Silicon Valley is if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn't mean anything.

[Paris Martineau]

That is actually fair, though.

[Leo Laporte]

That's correct. Anyway, back to Prabhakar, though. Ostensibly. Go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say, if you'll. For this is a quote from Ed, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphors. Google has essentially killed its golden goose search and is now in the process of pawning its eggs to buy decidedly non magical beans, by which I mean Data Centers and GPUs. With Google increasing its capital expenditures this year to 50 billion, equivalent to nearly double its average capital expenditures in the years prior.

[Leo Laporte]

So Raghavan has been there since June 2020. I think there are very few people who would not agree that in that time Google Search has gone downhill. Do we agree on that? Do we. Do we still love. I don't even use Google Search anymore.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I don't. I would put an asterisk on that because while we hear a lot of things from the public complaining about the, you know, user quality of Google Search, Google is a public company and that, I mean, obviously customer experience factors into its decisions. But I would also suggest we look at, you know, their financial reports. If Google Search is now more profitable, that could be a win for the company.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it was certainly his Job. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I also argue that the web is much, much worse. And Google tries the web.

[Paris Martineau]

That we weave judgments.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, you said that before that Google can only reflect what's on the web.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if the website, to an extent, or Google. I had a story some time ago that I put on, which was that Google was going to become selective in its crawl and Daddy, Daddy Sullivan said, no, no, no, no, it's not true. Because they've got to be very careful about that. They present themselves as all the web. You can get anything from the web here. But as long as they say that they're screwed because they got all the web and all, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but Jeff, Google's promise, The promise of PageRank was pick the best site. Well, the most among all the sites that fulfill that search.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it's harder is all I'm saying. And they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I mean, that just means they're not doing job. Yeah. Even if there is more garbage, if it doesn't find the needle in the haystack. Mix metaphors. If it doesn't find the toy truck in the garbage pile, then it's not doing its job. Right. Unless you say the web has gotten so bad that there is no toy truck, there is no pony in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No ponies are there? But they're buried under a lot of hay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but that's Google's job, is to find the pony in the pile. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What I'm saying is all of the platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

You know that joke, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Paris Martineau, the pony in the pile. No, no, I don't. I know the needle in the haystack reference, but I don't know of any ponies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are there any oats near there?

[Paris Martineau]

Are there?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I can find. There must be a pony in there somewhere. Okay. There's a famous joke about a child who wakes up on Christmas morning and is surprised to find a heap of horse manure under the tree instead of a collection of presents. Yet the child is not discouraged because he has an extraordinarily optimistic, like me. Outlook on life. His parents discover him enthusiastically shoveling the manure, as he explained, with all this manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's hard when you start with the punchline.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know, I spoiled the joke.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's kind of like Google's problem. Apparently, what you have to work with.

[Leo Laporte]

Quote, investigator says there are many versions of this joke and it's been evolving for more than a hundred years. The telltale sign of a pony seen by the Expected child is varied. Horse dung, a horseshoe, horse hair, and a bale of hay. Sometimes one child was featured. Sometimes the divergent behaviors of an optimistic child and a pessimistic child were contrasted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who has the time to dig into that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me tell you about the humble Trisket.

[Paris Martineau]

Go on.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think this was on. I feel like it might have been in Blue Sky. I want, I don't. I can't give credit, but I think I saw this on Blue Sky. Maybe it was on x.com guy says, well, I'm at a party and we're eating, you know, canapes, whatever, little poo poos. And they're Triscuit crackers. You've had a Triscuit, right? You know what Triscuits are? Oh, yeah, yeah, from Nabisco. And he says, well, what's the name Triscuit mean? And everybody goes, well, it's. It's clearly a biscuit. Maybe it's a tri level biscuit. You know, there's three layers or something like that. The guy says, no, I don't think so, and writes a letter to Nabisco. Nabisco responds, the origins of the name Trisket are lost in our files. We don't know, but we do. We definitely know it's not a tri level biscuit. The guy you have you found it?

[Paris Martineau]

I think I found. Is this where you're going? The answer to where the name Tristan comes from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you are a good researcher. So he did what Paris Martino excels at. He dug deep.

[Paris Martineau]

Line on Trisket, Wikipedia, Google. No, she went to the second sentence on the. The third sentence in the Wikipedia page.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was link bait. Probably on x dot com.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, not to keep people waiting. The name Trisket came. May have come from a combination of the words electricity and biscuits.

[Leo Laporte]

Because these biscuits, by the way, it's now owned by Mondelez Incorporated. But these biscuits were introduced in 1903. The Shredded Wheat Company began production that year in Niagara Falls, New York. And their ad. Let me see if I can find the ad, because the guy found the ad. Here it is. Here's the ad. Baked by electricity. Yes, the natural food Company, Niagara Falls. And one of the ad, he had said, using 1904 technology, they're baked by electricity. The first snack food baked by electricity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look how big they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they were bigger back in the day. Everything bigger back in the day, like everything.

[Paris Martineau]

Also, Leo, I think I found the tweet thread this originated from, because if you go to the citation on that Wikipedia thing. It's a Business Insider article that then cites this tweet thread, which is from 2020.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, that's not too bad. How did we get off on that ponies manure?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What was the link?

[Paris Martineau]

Ponies.

[Leo Laporte]

We were talking about Prabhakar Raghavan and we said that Google search wasn't. I'm going back in time. Everybody who's listening knows this. That Google search wasn't as good. And you said that's because the Internet's not as good. I said, yeah, but their job is to find the pony in the pile. And that's.

[Paris Martineau]

And I said, what are all these ponies doing in a pile? And now here we are learning about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Triscuits through Leo's brain.

[Paris Martineau]

You know what my favorite cracker?

[Jeff Jarvis]

The hat's a little tight.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your favorite cracker?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, cracker is a strong word. I really like melba toast. It's just the perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

That's awful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a perfect land.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I know. I'm not. I'm saying on its own, terrible. No, it's crispy and it's perfect for, like, making a crunchy version of like, a bagel and lox. You'd have, like, lox, salmon, cream cheese, and it's got the crispiestness of the, you know, the crack.

[Leo Laporte]

And it lacks the calories of a bacon.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't particularly care about the calorie aspect. I think that's probably why I started having them, because growing up, my mother really cared about the calorie aspect. But I've retained my love for the crunch. This is my crack.

[Leo Laporte]

The tooth on the melba toast is wrong. It seems crunchy, but your teeth sink into it. It's not really crunchy is what I'm saying.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, I do know what you're talking about there. I haven't been able to find melba toast in my local grocery store, so I've been using kind of knockoff melba toast that are a lot thicker and way more crunchy.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can't find Melba toast.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I know. It's a.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a Melba toast. Do you remember when I'm not gonna.

[Paris Martineau]

Buy a food product on Amazon? I'm not crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

I buy a lot of food products. You don't know what you're getting. I ship my mom Triscuits and Skippy peanut Butter every other month from the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Original Melba toast is right there.

[Paris Martineau]

Anything.

[Leo Laporte]

The original melba toast. I feel like Melba toast is toast flavored Styrofoam Basically, yeah. What's your favorite snack?

[Paris Martineau]

That's not my favorite snack, to be clear.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your favorite snack?

[Paris Martineau]

Sweet or salty?

[Leo Laporte]

Let's start with the savory.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I don't know what my favorite savory.

[Leo Laporte]

How about you, Jeff? We know it's cacio e pepe, but I'm gonna ask.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, that's a meal, that's not a snack.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Popcorn.

[Leo Laporte]

Popcorn.

[Nathan Freitas]

Popcorn.

[Leo Laporte]

Delicious, crunchy and it's a great substrate for almost any flavor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do. That's like, that's like putting that hazelnut crap in coffee. No. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

No. Hazelnut coffee creamer is the best addition to a coffee cream.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you cannot have that anywhere near.

[Paris Martineau]

In the yellow carton. That stuff is like crack.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When I was an authoritarian boss at Entertainment Weekly, all of two weeks, I forbade hazelnut coffee to be anywhere near me.

[Leo Laporte]

Part of the reason is if you use hazelnut creamer in a mug, it will taste like hazelnut forever after. Isn't that beautiful?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Smells like that crap room.

[Paris Martineau]

See this once again is a product of my childhood because once I had to be like 8 or something. My parents went on a month long trip to China. Maybe I think it was also during when swine flu happened. That's a part of the story. We don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They left you.

[Paris Martineau]

But they left me with my grandmother who loved drinking coffee every morning, afternoon, night, all the time. And me being eight was like, I gotta have some of that. And she was like, oh, you can't. But after like weeks of this, I wore her down and so she gave me coffee, which was just a tiny bit of coffee and mostly like hazelnut creamer. And somehow over the couple weeks I. I transitioned from drinking mostly hazelnut creamer to drinking a normal mix of hazelnut creamer and coffee. And a lifeline long addiction was discovered.

[Leo Laporte]

See map in our YouTube chat says you must try the deuce rusk bread as a Melba toast substitute on every.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, yes, it appears there's no Melba toast brand like Triscuits, so you cannot be assured.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's the question. Is Melba toast made with electricity?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a great question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That just made it cool at the time, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's exactly right. Everything was electricity. I mean if you looked in the Sears catalog of the turn of the last century, they'd have electric everything that would cure Every Ill of 1902.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. When I researching my Linotype book, it's interesting to watch the Shift from steam to electricity and what a big deal it was. And they bragged about it. And the census used to track every industry on what power source they used and how many horsepower they had.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa, that's so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Which brings me to Ben Franklin, where.

[Paris Martineau]

Our discussion was heading.

[Leo Laporte]

Always where we were going. I was gonna cleverly take Triscuits.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was.

[Leo Laporte]

And segue into Ben Franklin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is. This is this, folks. This is a twig weave.

[Paris Martineau]

The answer is a ruffle potato chip and a potato chips it called whose potato chips?

[Leo Laporte]

So not just any. Not lays.

[Paris Martineau]

No, like you want one of those kind of like the wavy. The ones with the little, like ruffles.

[Leo Laporte]

Ruffles have ridges.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, ruffles have ridges, as they say. And toffee. Toffee is my toffee. All day, every day, and be satisfied for the rest of time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ice cream sundaes.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, ice cream sundaes.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you like almond?

[Paris Martineau]

What's that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's toffee rolled in crunched up almonds.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, I do love that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good.

[Paris Martineau]

That's great. It's so good. All right, Ben Franklin.

[Leo Laporte]

Anybody listening to the show by this time is either drunk, asleep, or not listening to this show. Electric motors say the Wall Street Journal are about to get a major upgrade thanks to Benjamin Franklin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Huh. Wood Franklin apparently invented something called an electrostatic motor way back in the 1700s. Now, the motors we use right now use magnets, right? And they require rare earth magnets. They require materials that are. Yeah, problematic to say the least. But Franklin's motor did not have magnets. It used static electricity. The Wall Street Journal says the same kind that makes your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer. Alternating positive and negative charges to spin an axle. It doesn't rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. This is. Everybody's known about this for 300 years. But other than applications and tiny pumps and actuators, X on etched on microchips, the work hasn't made it out of the lab. But electrostatic motors are 80% more efficient than conventional electric motors. They also are more precise, have more control, and they don't use rare earth elements because there's no permanent magnets. In fact, they require 5% of the copper as a conventional motor. And, you know, copper is very expensive. So out of the lab in Wisconsin, C motive technologies, Middleton, Wisconsin, is working on resuscitating the electrostatic motor. It's a 16 person startup founded by a pair of University of Wisconsin engineers who've been tinkering with electrostatic motors for years. FedEx and Rockwell are both testing these motors. This could be a revolution in electric motors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How is FedEx using them?

[Leo Laporte]

Don't know because Wall Street Journal never told.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, they did tell us an example of static electricity. So you know, they got all the news that's fin to print.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm trying to put a wire on my socks right now. It's not working very well.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is Franklin's original electrostatic motor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a re. It's a rebuilt office.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, no yet. I'm sorry. This is a reproduction.

[Paris Martineau]

That's beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I would like that in my house.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you know what I want in my house? I want like an original stock ticker. Like one of those little ones that.

[Leo Laporte]

With a glass dome.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, the one that I love, the movie Hudsucker Proxy. And whenever I see that movie, it inspires me to spend hours searching for a working stock dicker, much like they have in that film.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know why they have the dome? Because they're loud as heck.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's only $4,000 a limited.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Edison and Unger stock ticker I want.

[Paris Martineau]

But think of how funny it would be if I had a stock ticker like that in my home and someone looked over to see what it was printing out and it was just like, screw you. You know, on the stock ticker you.

[Leo Laporte]

Can have a print, anything you want. I know. By the way, there are sculptures that don't non functional for less. You don't want that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but you also have a stock ticker sculpture. Why not spend four grand and get a work.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a hundred bucks for the ticker tape rolls.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I want it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want an associated Press ticker.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Well, you know, you could easily have a teletype. When I started in radio, we had three teletypes. Upi, AP and Reuters. And they were just old, you know, the old. You've seen teletype machines and they were. And if there was a big story, the bell would ring five times. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

[Paris Martineau]

And what is a teletype?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you're. Sorry, you asked.

[Leo Laporte]

Imagine if you will. It's Christmas day and you look under the tree.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a pile of shit. You look around, there's no horses to be seen.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a pony in there somewhere. Yeah, this from the Bloomfield, Nevada Antique Wireless Association Museum is a demonstration of the teletype. Here, I'll turn it down just a little Bit. Well, actually, you should hear it.

[Paris Martineau]

I think we just caused a car crash.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the sound of a radio station in the 1980s. 1970s, I guess it was.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, why would a radio station need to print things?

[Jeff Jarvis]

The news lady.

[Leo Laporte]

The news. How else you get the news?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, God.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Oh, it's worse because you would then go to the teletypes. There are three of them with a ruler. You would take the paper and rip it with the ruler. They called it rip and Read news. Because you might have a number, like, what's the softest pencil? Number three. Number two. You might have a number two pencil. We used to get these. In fact, I remember working in radio in San Francisco. These guys, these old guys would have a red, no eraser on it, big soft graphite pencil. And they'd circle the story. They'd rip it off. They'd circle it, underline it, maybe do a little rewriting minor. And then they have a stack of ripped newsprint. And by the way, this is the cheapest paper you can get, so it still has little chunks of wood in it.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

And you take this and you'd bring it to the microphone, you'd cup your hand behind your ear and you'd read the news. It was called rip and read because you were ripping it off the television.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And when I was on a newspaper, we would have these machine, AP UPI machines going. And the copy kids, previously known as copy boys, would rip off every story and then put them on the appropriate desks and move them around. Then along came computers where the feed came into our computer and we edited there. And that was a whole new thing, my child, a whole new thing.

[Paris Martineau]

I never really thought about the fact that you couldn't get the news. No. How would you get it out? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't, like, watch tv and then.

[Paris Martineau]

You can just walk outside and the.

[Nathan Freitas]

News and then read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In discord. I put up. There's tons of these things for sale.

[Leo Laporte]

A teletype.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're replicas. They're replicas. But they were. But they're like working.

[Leo Laporte]

Even in early computing, the terminal usually was a teletypes. You might have a keyboard so you could input to the computer, but the output would come out on the same paper and all that stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, I helped set up the first two screen. This is Uncle Jeff now, Two Screen Editing terminal. So you can call him Grandpa Paris. And you could have the UPI on the other. And it attached to two different boards in the pdp. Whatever it Was. And then you could move a paragraph from one to the other. That was revolutionary, people. And I was there. I was there.

[Leo Laporte]

It was kind of amazing, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. That's incredible. We've come a long way.

[Paris Martineau]

I filed my first ever news story for a professional journalism outlet in Google Docs.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that special? We're gonna take a little break and come back with another Google story that we will just skim through and pretend we did and then move on to other things like Triscuits. But first.

[Paris Martineau]

A brief. A brief aside. Before you go. Is someone asked in the Discord if I can make some more spooky noises because it's Halloween. So I'll do this to play you out.

[Leo Laporte]

Very. We can do that so well. I don't know why guys can't. We can't do that, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

See, that's pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

That was good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New talent.

[Paris Martineau]

Now you can. We can all be spooky. You're just turning it. Tuning in. Turned it off. Go turn right back.

[Leo Laporte]

Notebook LM went so wrong. Yeah, we're not real. This is all AI generated.

[Paris Martineau]

AI could never.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't think so. You don't hear. You could listen that Notebook LM for years and never hear. You might hear Triscuits though, because they can do that. But you wouldn't hear that. Our show today, brought to you by. This is actually something all of you need right now. A good password manager. And you. If I were you, I'd choose the one we use. It's open source, it's a. It's very effective, very easy to use and free for life for individuals. I'm talking about Bit Warden, the password manager, offering a cost effective solution that can dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online. Why now? Why do you need it now? Because the holidays are approaching, big shopping season. We got Black Friday, Cyber Monday. People are going to be buying stuff and the bad guys know that. So they're going to put up spoof sites, you know, like Amazon instead of Amazon that look exactly like the real thing. And you're going to be tempted to enter in your credit card, your, your address, all that information. Well, if you do it by hand, nothing's going to stop you. But if you use Bit Warden, Bitwarden will go, whoa, wait a minute, that's not Amazon. That's Amazon and won't let you do it. So that's why this is so important. Bit Warden has announced the expansion of their inline autofill. That's what they call that capability, it automatically fills in passwords. This is in the browser extension. It now includes charge cards, credit cards, identities and passkeys. And again, it's too smart to be fooled, which is awesome. That enhancement benefits every one of us. It enables a more secure interaction with web forms, for payment details, for contact info, for addresses, and more, not just passwords. Now, now, if you're a business, you'll love the single sign on integration with Bit Warden. Yeah, Bit Warden works with sso. Very flexible. You can quickly and easily safeguard all your business logins using single sign on security policies fully compatible with SAML 2.0 and OIDC. And Bitwarden makes sure it's easy to use with your existing solutions, just as smooth as can be. Thousands. This might be why thousands of businesses, including some of the world's largest organizations, trust Bit Warden to protect their online information. Bit Warden's open source code is on GitHub. It can be expected by anybody. It's regularly audited by third party experts. It's easy to switch to Bitwarden. In fact, they support importing for most password management solutions. So it's just basically a click. And I gotta say this again, and I know you use a password manager because if you're watching this show, you're smart. But if you have friends and family who aren't, and I bet you do, I know I do. Reusing the same password over and over again, it's not even a good password to begin with. Tell them about Bit Warden and when they say well, I don't want to pay for it, you can tell them because it's open source, it's free for individual users, no limit on the number of passwords, it works on all your devices across platforms. So you use it on iOS and the passwords there on Android, you use it on Mac, it's on Windows, use it on Linux, it's on Mac, it's completely cross platform and unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, and it supports passkeys, all of this for the free version. And it supports authentication keys like Yubikey, which is probably more than you need. I mean it does everything you'd want free because it's open source. I want you to try Bit Warden, I want you to use Bit Warden. And if you're a business, I want you to get started with Bit Warden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or free forever across all devices. And as an individual user, go to bitwarden, bit w a r d e n.com twit in fact, if you're really geeky and you say, well, I don't, I don't trust anyone for to keep my vault. You can do bit warden for individuals. You can have your vault hosted wherever you want on your own system, whatever you want. So that's nice too. Actually, I trust them more than I trust myself. So I of course let Bitwarden keep my vault. But if you don't want to, you don't have to. Bitwarden.com Twitter thank you Bitwarden, for supporting the craziest show on the radio this week in Google.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this the craziest show specifically crazy, because we're not on even on the radio.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. What? No one's told me that. They just point me at the microphone, say, you're on the radio now, Leo.

[Paris Martineau]

He's just reading those Teletype pages.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, gosh, that really, that really brought me back. I would love to get one of those red, soft red pencils. So this is interesting. Remember that Google lost in court in the epic lawsuit? The judge judging ruled, okay, you gotta open your app store. Google goes back. It says, your honor, if we do that in the timeframe you're suggesting, which is just a few months, all hell will break loose, security will be destroyed, and the judge bought it. Judge Donato pressed pause on the November 1st deadline. That is pretty soon. That's a week from now. Yeah, yeah, maybe that was smart. He gave him three years though. He.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I said, well, maybe not November 1st. How about 2007? Oh, okay. So starting. Yeah. So Google is ordered not to make deals with carriers or device makers that would block the pre installation of rival app stores. So they can't, they can't say, oh, you can't do it. But they are not required to do that yet until it gets through the appeal process, which as one knows, may take a few years or so. Had Judge Donato left the original deadline in place, developers would have been able to stop using Google Play billing in a week. Google also would have been barred from using financial incentives to keep developers loyal to the store. This is, you know, this is another Ed Zitterin win.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Another notch in the mouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Another notch in the mouse.

[Paris Martineau]

That mouse is riddled with holes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I bet it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, you know, I guess it's reasonable for Google to have a little more time. And since it is going to go on in appeal, you know, okay. Would have been nice. Unless the ninth Circuit denies a stay. In which case is there anything comparable going on with Apple Apple won that.

[Paris Martineau]

Case, but there's nothing similar challenge.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not how it works. So Apple's was in front of a judge, only Google's was in front of it. Jury. It was epic suing both of them for the same exact issues. The judge in the Apple case gave Apple everything they wanted. In fact, there was just one little thing about opening the App Store to other payments, and Apple appealed that to the Supreme Court. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But Europe is requiring Apple to open.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but Europe, Yes. And this will be a good experiment because if there's no massive security problem with opening the App Store. Although I have to say what Apple's doing in Europe in response to the EU's requirement is essentially malicious compliance. They made it so that no one would ever want to do it. It would cost them as much. It would be a real pain in the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and the EU saying, wait a minute, that's not what we told you to do. So that one is also kind of up in the air. Google is going to block election ads after the polls close when no one will be buying them.

[Paris Martineau]

But I do think this is labeled as a scoop.

[Leo Laporte]

Scoop says we got a scoop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everything in axioms.

[Leo Laporte]

It is in one sense it is probably important because it's obviously all the election ads are going to be bought prior to November 5th, election day. The premise here is, well, what we don't want is people buying ads saying the election was stolen. Everybody go on down to, you know, the Capitol building and storm it and all that kind of thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Harris, the vote counters, which happened last.

[Leo Laporte]

Time, two weeks away. In fact, in two weeks we'll be doing a this week in Google in which Jeff and I will either be elated or I don't know. What will you be like? If he'll be gone, I'll be gone.

[Paris Martineau]

He'll be out of here because he'll be at Con. Yes, the content convention. Jeff famously will be in the sky. The election.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Oh, you won't be here.

[Paris Martineau]

Probably shaking.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting. I'm shaking that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not good planning.

[Leo Laporte]

So the Wednesday after the election, you're going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm flying election day night to Frankfurt.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good. You know what? That's good. You can't. You won't be on pins and needles. You just say, you know, I'm not going to. I'll find out when I get there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, like, like I'm calm like that. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

He's going to be freaking out that he's not surrounded by six MSNBC screens at all times.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I can't get it over there.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you flying United?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you'll be able to watch it on United. I yo vote, as they say. I did vote, so it's too late to change my mind.

[Paris Martineau]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody should vote, though.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, everybody should vote.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't care. You're voting for. Just vote. Because you know why? If you don't vote, you can't complain afterwards.

[Paris Martineau]

And we love when people can complain. Everybody should be able to complain.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? We're going to. We know we're all going to complain no matter what, so it doesn't really matter.

[Paris Martineau]

Make sure that you're justified in your complaining.

[Leo Laporte]

Metal Metta is going to block new political, electoral and social issue ads during the final week of the campaign. So starting next week. But it hasn't announced any pause of election ads after the polls close. It does forbid candidates or campaigns from prematurely claiming victory. We are. This is so. This is such weak sauce. We are so ill equipped for what is about to happen, are we not?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm just choosing to. Ignore is not the right word. It's not like I'm not paying attention. I'm just choosing to smile and gaze into the middle distance.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too.

[Paris Martineau]

With my eyes vaguely unfocused.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly. That's the only way to do it. Yeah. Because what else.

[Paris Martineau]

What else are we going to do?

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing you can do at this point is going to change anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, nothing we can do, but, you know, General.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what we can do and we'll do and we will say is vote. Just vote however you're going to vote. We're not telling you how to vote. Just vote. LinkedIn is the news publisher's best friend. Says the Information.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I heard editors quibbling over this.

[Leo Laporte]

Headline last week on the Information. Is it like other publications where the. The editors write the headline and the author does not? Yeah. So Sahil Patel, who wrote the article, may not have intended this to be the headline.

[Paris Martineau]

May not. But you know, he's on a road trip around the country right now, so he's fine with whatever it turned out to be.

[Leo Laporte]

So as one see, that's his way of dealing with anxiety. Just get in a car and drive. Yeah, Actually get a horse and ride.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you could find it out of the tree.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a phony in there somewhere.

[Paris Martineau]

That's gotta be the show title, right?

[Leo Laporte]

So, as we know, Meta made this hollow promise to news organizations and it all went along with it, saying, hey, we will promote your, you know, your News, you will get lots of traffic. And in fact, initially, they did send a lot of traffic. Jeff, you're an expert on this. To news organizations. But then Meta decided. When was that? A couple of years ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, then the news organizations kept kicking Metta in the kidneys, and Metta finally said, the hell with you. And so. Yeah. About it.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I don't entirely know if that's the case.

[Leo Laporte]

They cut off news, basically. They said, no more news.

[Paris Martineau]

Meta cut off news, but it came.

[Jeff Jarvis]

At a time being kicked in the kidneys multiple times with lobbyists in Congress.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that's why they did it, though, is it? Or maybe it is. Was it because Mark Zuckerberg came after.

[Paris Martineau]

It came after years of Meta having to deal with content moderation scandals, you know, the Cambridge Analytical Scandal, having Mark Zuckerberg dragged in front of Congress again and again to the point where. And then, you know, to media companies saying, hey, we were promised these partnerships that we thought were going to be lucrative, but it turns out in the case of Facebook video, a lot of the numbers were inflated. You know, the reach is actually much smaller than we thought. It was a combination of all these factors that then led Facebook, now Meta, to be like, it just isn't worth us. Worth it for us to promote this content anymore. And, in fact, it would be better if we just clamp down on it so that, you know, now they can kind of argue, well, it's not our problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have another theory, which is that all publishers can thank Rupert Murdoch for this because he caused the Australian media code. And Metta said, nope, we're not going to do it. And so Metta took down News for six days and said, oh, in Australia. Didn't hurt in Australia. Yeah, that didn't hurt anything.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it happened in Canada. Right, Canada.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And meanwhile, they're disenchanted with news. They fired everybody who dealt with news. They got rid of all their grants to News. They headed that way. Canada comes and they. They really take down news there permanently. And they say, that was nice. We're back to puppies and parties and this is. Okay, so did we cover this last week about what the Canadian government was doing with the screenshots?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I think we did touch on this briefly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, never mind.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I wasn't. I mustn't have been paying attention.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what. Really, I'm hurt.

[Leo Laporte]

You know where the name Trisket comes from?

[Paris Martineau]

No, tell me.

[Leo Laporte]

LinkedIn apparently has decided. Wait a minute. This is a good thing. We want to do news LinkedIn. It's really interesting. Microsoft bought LinkedIn for a lot of money. Whether they're making money is unclear on LinkedIn. It doesn't look like it, but one of the things they've decided to do is, you know, LinkedIn, which was really traditionally the place you would network for business. Right. You'd look for jobs, you'd offer jobs, that kind of thing. They realized this is kind of, you know, what with the, with the fall of X Twitter, this might be an opportunity for us. They decided to become a social network. They decided to become a blog platform. They decided to become a video platform. And now they want to be this platform.

[Paris Martineau]

People be posted on LinkedIn.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Lisa who says LinkedIn is her favorite, her favorite social network. She posts her a lot. She posts her podcast on that. She reads a lot of stuff. She likes it for that. She's. Because it's none of the. There's none of the folderol.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Of X so forth. I mean, what I've noticed from LinkedIn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it's all, it's all marketers like all this.

[Leo Laporte]

To me, it's very. Promotional marketing professionals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, it's the online south by Southwest.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Producer Bonito Gonzalez.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say this doesn't apply to Lisa, but everybody else other than Lisa who claims that LinkedIn is their social media platform of choice is a sociopath. My opinion, other than my wife. Other than your wife.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was very ed of you.

[Leo Laporte]

A sociopath. That's going. That's a little strong.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know. Have you been on LinkedIn?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Willingly spend hours of their week on LinkedIn.

[Leo Laporte]

But Facebook's just as dopey like with everything Instagram Just as dopey.

[Paris Martineau]

I would say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

But those bit more dopey. Like I'd say, you know, there's probably a description for someone who Facebook is. I guess if Facebook is your platform of choice, you are a boomer, is what I would say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lisa Laporte on LinkedIn Calling all tech fans. We have a show for everyone, including.

[Leo Laporte]

This people who have no attention span. Yes, LinkedIn is launching a news banner according to the information atop the mobile feed. So they'll be scrolling news. LinkedIn, by the way, is maybe now doing all right. $6 billion in ad revenue. Not profit, but revenue. That's more than Snap or Pinterest. And the news organizations are loving this. According to the information video, the video ad program has generated millions for Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there's jobs for me. Jobs recommended for me right now. Copywriter at Meta.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow, you could really do a lot with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Strategy and business growth lead at Airbnb. Staff writer at the Atlantic.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now I'm scared. Now I'm scared. Toad Sloth in our, in our YouTube chat says, oh, Lisa's just looking for work. She's the CEO of TWiT, so I hope not. LinkedIn announced the program this summer with news and business focused publishers, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, NBC Universal and Yahoo Finance. Bloomberg and the Journal will each, according to Sahil, more than $2 million will earn this year from the program. That's amazing. Well, I mean, it's not in their overall scheme of things, huge. But it's still LinkedIn something this and something not nothing. All right, I guess that we've mined that vein. The FCC will. No, I don't want to do that one. Never mind. Netflix. Actually, let's go to your stories. I don't, I don't like any of these.

[Jeff Jarvis]

None of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see though. Okay. I actually have a question about X, because X is. Elon has announced that X will no longer. They're going to change the way blocking works. You could still block somebody, but they'll be able to read your posts.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is my question is how is that going to work? Because isn't there a requirement on the Google and Apple app stores that apps offer users a way to block users that are harassing them?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So the harassment is blocked, right? They can't reply you, but they can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Reach, which they could. They could talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

They could always talk about you without adding you. But they can't. They, they couldn't in the past, they couldn't read what you were posting. Now they can. Apparently that's upset a lot of people because in one day half a million people joined Blue Sky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

That day. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say this is a shows the problems of renaming your popular brand from Twitter to X. Because I just searched Block X App Store and I got a bunch of porn.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Such a terrible idea. Corey Doctorow. We were talking about this on Twitter on Sunday. Corey Doctorow was on and he's still on X posts there, he says, because that's where my. That's where peop my people are still. He has, you know, Corey Dr. O. Non consensual. Blue check is his name because he didn't like getting a blue check. I mean he's definitely not crazy about what's going on at X, but he Says, look, he's actually. He calls it Anatevka. I really thought this was interesting. Remember Fiddler on a Roof? Okay, this is. Yeah, this is a rabbit hole, but.

[Paris Martineau]

At least dance the wine bottles in their heads all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were a rich man, David. So remember, the story of Anatevka is periodically the Cossacks come in, beat everybody up and move on. But nobody leaves Anatevka because that's where their friends and family are. That's where their lives. Finally, at the end of the show, they do leave Anatevka because it's really gotten unt. They have to. They're thrown out the cut. The Tsar says, you're out, Jews, you're out. So they leave. They become a diaspora and they, you know, all over the world. He says, basically, X is Anatevka, that he's there, even though the Cossacks keep coming and beating him up because his loved ones are there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, same here.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's true. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Never. And he says, oh, this. The other point is he's not going to go to Blue sky because never again is he going to go somewhere where he cannot export everything and move it somewhere else. He doesn't want to go anywhere where it's a silo, a locked inside.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, see, what I do is I post.

[Leo Laporte]

He does that as well. He posts on Master.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He does these but not Blue sky tweet Threads.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But not Blue Sky. He is waiting. And maybe Mike Masnick will help this now that he's on the board of Blue Sky. But he's waiting till Blue sky truly has a federation plan. They don't yet. They promised that, but they don't yet.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, over a million new people joined Blue sky in the. Just days after. Yeah, X announced this change. So quite a few people are migrating there.

[Leo Laporte]

And the same thing happened in Brazil after X was banned. Everybody said, okay, well, they said it in Portuguese, but you get the idea. Okay, we're going to Blue Sky. And I think more than a million Brazilians went to Blue Sky. So Blue sky is now what, 12 million people? Something like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, 12 million.

[Leo Laporte]

I, you know, I like Blue Sky.

[Paris Martineau]

I do too. I think it has got everything I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Want from the interaction there. I like it better than Threads. Threads. Interactions is sucky.

[Leo Laporte]

Threads is weird. It's got. It's become. It's become kind of a thirst trap. Am I just that? Just me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the.

[Paris Martineau]

I think you're. Once again. That's like a sexy Projecting sexy photos is what he's referring to.

[Leo Laporte]

Jack Seems like there's a lot of only fans folks.

[Paris Martineau]

I assume it's the same thing that ended up with your Facebook account where because it sees you're in a certain demographic, it sees the cowboy. Typically it sees that you're a man in a cowboy hat with two horses on his chest and says I know what sort of photos you'd like to see, sir. And it's of naked women.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Trigger and I call them any other way.

[Leo Laporte]

It does. I'm not alone in this. I've seen other people observe that on threads that there are a lot of only fans people. There's a lot of kind of I don't get. Yeah, blue skies seems like it's just nice friendly. It is people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I do occasionally block someone and I think I'm glad I can.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Meta did not, immediately, according to the Verge, immediately respond to their questions about whether threads saw similar spikes after X's change of service. X also announced that they're going to let AIs scrape content unless you explicitly opt out. That's in the new privacy policy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's going to be one fun LLM.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding. Do you really. Do you really wanted. I mean Microsoft did that with years ago with Tay. Remember Tay, the AI. And it ended up being an anti Semite. So maybe not the best place to train an AI. Musk has also said that he wants to direct any lawsuits to the Northern District of Texas. Why?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Google should take a lesson from him.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple must have yeah, X's headquarters headquarters are now in Bastrop, Texas, near Austin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's far away from where that court is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's in a. Their headquarters are in a different district.

[Leo Laporte]

But he's, he's in the Western District, which has far fewer Republican appointed judges than the Northern District, which is a favored destination for conservative activists and business groups to pursue lawsuits to seek to block parts of Biden's agenda. Judge shopping so I guess Elon is Judge Elon judge shopping.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's at the judge checkout right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I bought some judges. He's in a little bit of trouble because he couple of problems here. I don't think he understands the concept of petition. For one thing. He, he was, he set up a petition supporting Trump and Vance and said every day if you sign the petition every day, somebody's going to get a million dollars. Which kind of, I think pollutes the concept of a petition.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's like, that's like a Twitter survey. It just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's useless and maybe a violation of federal election laws because. Vote. Because he says you have to be a registered voter and you cannot legally pay people to register to vote. Yeah, but you know what? This is the thing. And I see this again and again. Yeah, it's illegal. And no, he's not going to get prosecuted for this. And even if he did, he's never. Nothing's ever going to happen. This is again and again, people are really getting the sense that you can just flout the law and just do whatever you want.

[Paris Martineau]

And if you're rich, billions of dollars. Yeah, you kind of can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, the. The fines turn out to be. That's just how much it costs to.

[Leo Laporte]

Do stuff for billionaires at the cost.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not really a fin.

[Leo Laporte]

Gosh, I wish I were a billionaire. Would I be? You think I'd be a good billionaire or would I just turn into a mushmine like the rest of them?

[Paris Martineau]

I think you'd give a million dollars every month for appearing on this podcast, so. I think I would. Billionaire.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the definition of good billionaire, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, the billionaire.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I would love it if I just had. I don't know, I think it would take maybe $30 million. I could. Then we could just do this as a pro bono thing. Not just this show, but the whole Twit network.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So we now need an endowment.

[Leo Laporte]

If we had $30 million. Let's see, it costs about a million and a half. $2 million a year to run twit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Tell me about it. So, yeah, 30 million. We probably could go forever on that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know what's driving me crazy? Your cuff is not snapped uniformly.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. How did that happen?

[Paris Martineau]

Not snapped. Uniforms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

$30 billion when you dress like that, young man.

[Leo Laporte]

But do you like my mother of pearl studs?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I love this. Where did you get this from?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. I think. Well, I remember I live in Petaluma. We have many western supply stores. And I believe I got. How did you see my cuffs?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because you were gesticulating and it was driving me nuts.

[Leo Laporte]

There they are.

[Paris Martineau]

He's got the setting on zoom where he's looking at all of our wide shots, too. So that's why.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's why. Oh, yeah. See, I let your little thumbnails. For me. I don't see nothing. All right. That is the bulk of the stories that I brought to the table.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's see what we got.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the moment where we get you. Do you want to do the Sam Altman's world world story, they renamed the Orb.

[Paris Martineau]

They're bringing the orbs to your door.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So scan your eyes. So Sam Altman, founder of AI OpenAI, also has a bunch of other ventures, including the weirdest one, which is called or was called World Coin. World Coin was a cryptocurrency and they had this orb. There's a picture of the Orb from Axios, this orb. And they would go around, especially developing nations, and offer you some pittance of world Coin if you would just let them scan your iris. The theory being that they're going to create a global kind of identity system that can't be faked or hooked. And somehow it's tied in. I don't know how to cryptocurrency, because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everything is tied into cryptocurrency.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it was, and so now it's not so good. So they took the word coin out. It's just World. This is World.

[Paris Martineau]

Just Coin.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, Coin doesn't mean as much as it used to. I'm starting to think Sam Altman's just chasing whatever the gotta be World AI now. Yeah, it should be. Huh. Altman and co founder Alex Blania used a San Francisco event to unveil a series of updates, including a new version of the Orb. Oh, now. Powered by Nvidia and their newest Jetson chipset, which means it has five times the. Oh, there it is. AI performance and also uses fewer parts.

[Paris Martineau]

There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the future, by the way, humans. Too many parts. The venture says the new Orb will allow for a broader rollout, including self service kiosks. They're also creating options for people to join the project without having your iris scanned. Oh, that's good. How else would you do it? Oh, you could scan your passport.

[Paris Martineau]

What the purpose of this is? What is the purpose of this? If you're not scanning eyes with the orb, what are you buying into? Yeah, isn't it all about the orbit?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, it's. No, no, no. It's all about collecting information about people. Now, why would one want to know? They're saying, well, this way we can verify your identity.

[Paris Martineau]

It'll be a global identity.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Well. Or use your passport. The passport would allow people to verify age, nationality and passport ownership without revealing their identity. Well, wouldn't you be pretty much revealing.

[Paris Martineau]

Revealing your past?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And to what? So, yes, we know this is a human being.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently, they're also working to integrate the identity verification into other software to help combat deep fakes. I Like, I like what Nathan Freitas was talking about at the beginning of the show. That's a better way to do it. The company listed FaceTime, Apple's FaceTime, WhatsApp and Zoom as among the applications compatible with its digital ID system. I think that's compatible is a little bit of a weasel word. Doesn't mean it's doing it or it's using it or even Apple or what? Or Facebook or. Zoom has approved its use, but it is compatible. They could if they wanted to. I. This is just the weirdest thing. I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? My suggestion is not to give biometric information to any third party if you can help it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Keep your eyes to yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, the US Government doesn't now, so. Okay. Now you'll have no idea who's hosting this. Jeff. I saw you peeking. We were all covered.

[Paris Martineau]

Visual gambling on the audio podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

It's something. Like it. Nothing like it. What's your Halloween costume? Have you decided yet, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. I'm going to be the J. The RFK brain worm. I'm going to have, like, a little box around me that with, like, a brain. I got a brain fabric in so I look like I'm a brain. But then I'm going to have a worm that I make that goes around in the brain.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God, that's brilliant.

[Paris Martineau]

Going to be a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It should be your head coming out. That's what I was saying. You should be the word. You are the worm.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's smart. I am. Oh, that could be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Just have a tube. Yeah. Oh, I love it.

[Paris Martineau]

I. It was between that and a concept that only New Yorkers would understand, which is pizza rat. Well, Adams, similar. It's the rat that the city has to send packing. Whenever we got our new garbage laws earlier this year, they put out these cute little signs of a rat carrying a suitcase, and it said, send those rats packing new garbage set out times. And you also have to get a garbage bin now. And I wanted to be the rat that they said packing, but I figured that would require.

[Leo Laporte]

So even in Brooklyn, you could just put out a bag instead of having a garbage bin.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. This. This was a real.

[Paris Martineau]

You're just supposed to be putting, you know, bags out. That's how it's been the entire, like, decade I've lived here, is bags in the street.

[Leo Laporte]

It's terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

Apparently. I learned, though, New York City has been going back and forth between loose garbage bags and garbage bins for a while, and frankly, the problem is Cars. If we simply did not have free parking for any car that wants it, then we could have, like, dumpsters to put your address. Yeah, we should ban all of your stupid cars.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Suburban from the streets.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, cars have ruined America's cities.

[Paris Martineau]

They look so ugly, too.

[Leo Laporte]

They're ugly. They're polluting, they're noisy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They bring people off your plays and restaurants.

[Leo Laporte]

You could take a train.

[Paris Martineau]

Who is taking a car to a restaurant in Manhattan?

[Leo Laporte]

Do not do that.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break and when we come back. Sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have a great parking trick that I will not reveal because I don't want anyone else to know it. I'm not going to say it.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm confused by it also.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, how could you. What could you do? What? You have a. You have a handicap placard you put out. What do you. What could you do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Parking trick. And I'm not going to reveal it.

[Leo Laporte]

Parking trick.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. This is the sort of thing that, you know, Jeff's people get most of the space in New York City. And he also gets to keep his secrets, too.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why, by the way, Paris, you can net. Well, you don't have a car, but it's why you don't have a car, because you could never.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought you were going to say, this is why I'll never be able to afford a home. And I was like, I don't know how. That probably is true.

[Leo Laporte]

That too. How many. Look how many square feet Jeff has. You could have a family of 12 in his library.

[Paris Martineau]

My apartment is. Yeah. Probably the size of here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a book I want to get about the old Soviet Union and it's fairly new out and it shows a diagram of a typical building, then a typical building after the revolution and how many more units there were and a typical layout of a kitchen and how that operated once the revolution.

[Paris Martineau]

What book is this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hold on, I'll tell you in a second.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Kitchens of Soviet Union.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me look at my Amazon wish list.

[Leo Laporte]

We actually are.

[Paris Martineau]

I just got another 1970s apartment interior design book off ebay that's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Be coming in Mid century Modern.

[Paris Martineau]

We love to see it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Soviet Archeology of a Lost World.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I. I would. You know what? That sounds like a great book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not just. Well, they have an audiobook of it, but. But you don't get the diagrams then.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds wonderful. I really buy that. Yeah, that sounds really good. So we're going to take a break. When we come back Jeff will reveal his parking secret.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I will not. No.

[Leo Laporte]

And we'll pick a story, as will Paris. I think you owe it to Paris to reveal your parking secret.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's not going to.

[Paris Martineau]

For all those cars I'm driving. Actually, I drove a car last weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

A zip car probably, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Are you a good County Farm Museum? I am a very good driver. We'll talk about it after the break.

[Leo Laporte]

After the break. Our show this week brought to you by US Cloud. I talked to these guys last week and I was literally blown away. First of all, I'd never heard of them. I'd never heard of them, but they explained why you need to know about them. They are the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. So the way Microsoft, and you know this, if you're a Microsoft, you know, company that uses Microsoft, they have the way they price their stuff, it's kind of like a basket. Whether you use it or not, you pay for it. And it's, it's not the best support. Let's face it's not the fastest support. It's definitely the most expensive support. That's why US Cloud is the global leader and third party Microsoft Enterprise support supporting 50 of the Fortune 500. And why? Because when you switch to US Cloud you could save your business 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement from Microsoft Unified Support. Comparable may not be the right word. I think it's better. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24, 7, 365 days a year. They respond faster, they resolve tickets quicker for all their clients all over the world. And you always talk to real humans, not just real humans, but real experts, expert level engineers with an average of 14.9 years. Then that's for Break Fix or DSE. They get the, they make an effort, strong effort to get the best engineers and because they're a great company to work for, the best people work for them. And that's good for you as a customer because you're going to get people who can answer your question, can fix your problem and you're going to get them fast. Their teams are 100% US based, which is good be even if you're not a US company because your data doesn't leave the US and they do something Microsoft continuously refuses to do. They back themselves with financially backed SLAs on, on response time. That's a, that's a firm financially backed guarantee and initial ticket response averages are under four minutes. That's fast. You know when things aren't working, when the system is down, fast is important, right? In 2023, 94% of US Cloud's clients were. Almost all of them reported saving a third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. From Fortune 500 companies to large health systems, major financial institutions, even federal agencies, US Cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every day. And I'm talking big brands. Listen, the people who use and trust US Cloud, Caterpillar, hp, Aflac, Dun and Bradstreet, Under Armour, Keybag, even the folks at the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. That's tall, that's telling. I think I have a great quote. This is from a director of information technologies who says 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, but they brought the cavalry. I just 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 should make the right choice with US Cloud. And by the way, with. When it comes to compliance, no one gets it more than US Cloud. ISO, gdpr, ESG compliance. It's not just regulatory requirements for them. It's a strategic imperative that drives operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. It's important to you, it's important to them. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers, which is pretty darn important. And stakeholders attracting investment. It ensures long term stability, ensure success in a competitive global market. You want US Cloud, you at least do me a favor, find out about it. Do yourself a favor, go to uscloud.com book a call today, find out how much you're going to save. How great this service is, it's amazing. Uscloud.com get them on the line. Get faster Microsoft support for less faster and dare I say, better.

[Nathan Freitas]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Uscloud.com we thank him so much for supporting this week in Google and the search for the greatest parking space in New York City. Thank goodness we have a technique.

[Paris Martineau]

Have a technique and we're not gonna be able to figure out what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

A short car, maybe like a really like.

[Paris Martineau]

I like to imagine he kind of uses his height to stand the car up on its butt so it only takes up like a quarter of the parking space.

[Leo Laporte]

I know wheels that turn sideways so you can roll in sideways. He's not gonna tell us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, what did you find at. Was there a farm museum in Queens?

[Paris Martineau]

So I this weekend went to the Queens County Farm Museum. Oh, gosh. My microphone is doing the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold on, I can still hear you.

[Paris Martineau]

It was playing the microphone noise, which was very loud and scared me, but.

[Leo Laporte]

We didn't hear it, so it's okay. So did you go to the amazing maze Maze?

[Paris Martineau]

I went to the Amazing Mazema, the Queens County Farm Museum, which is a giant corn maze, and it was delightful. I also got.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you go to the donut shop?

[Paris Martineau]

The donut shop line was too long, so I did not go.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but I bet they have apple cider donuts.

[Paris Martineau]

They have apple cider donuts. I got. I got a pumpkin spice beer. I had a very lovely time.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that maze. That's a beautiful maze.

[Paris Martineau]

It's in the shape of a monarch butterfly. Each year has a theme. It also had kind of a puzzle component, a crossword component to the maze. It was so fun.

[Leo Laporte]

A crossword?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. We're like, in. One of the ways you can get out is throughout the maze, in each of the nine, like, little sections, there is a. The answer to a crossword question, which is in your little booklet you're given as you go into the maze.

[Leo Laporte]

And Is that how you looked when you got out of the maze?

[Paris Martineau]

That is how I looked when I got out of the maze.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God, it's been days.

[Paris Martineau]

They have somebody out there on that little bridge that is like, live commentating, everybody getting out of the maze. They're like, the blue flag is coming up. They're about to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you get a flag when you go. So they know where you are.

[Paris Martineau]

So they know.

[Leo Laporte]

What color was your flag?

[Paris Martineau]

Blue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Last year was here. Is that a cool person from Brooklyn went to Queens.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true. And last year I also mentioned going to this maze in the podcast and. But last year I didn't plan ahead and think about the fact that also a cool thing in Queens is Flushing Chinatown. So this year, I extended my Zipcar reservation for the whole day and then drove my friends to Chinatown, navigated the Flushing crazy traffic, pulled my car into a weird little car elevator so I could park, and then went and got dim sum.

[Leo Laporte]

Car elevator. That's Jeff's trick.

[Paris Martineau]

I bet it is. Car elevator.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you get pumpkin spice dim sum?

[Paris Martineau]

No, it was regular. Although there was a weird hot dessert at the end that was kind of like a porridge, but not. That could have been pumpkin spice flavored.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, but a Chinese desserts are. Or not Indian desserts in China. Not good. No, no. Stick with the savory.

[Paris Martineau]

So I would like to that's not my pick of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Shout out to the Queens County Farm.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just a shout out to the Queens County Farm. That's my.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, feel like that. You'll feel so.

[Paris Martineau]

You will feel like that. Go. You know, it's October. Go to your. Find your local corn maze.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go with one out here. And man the line to get into it was amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we, we got, we, we decided never to go to our local co mates because we got thrown out a couple of years ago. Rowdy, the kids. It wasn't us, it was. We had some high schoolers, some teenagers with us and they weren't rowdy but the, the owner bullied them, was mean and threw us out.

[Paris Martineau]

So you're not going on principle?

[Leo Laporte]

We're not going on principle. But I also am not going because it's right by the highway, Highway 101 and all the traffic slows down because people go, it's a corn maze. And yes, it's a. It says it stops traffic for the whole month of October. It's very annoying. So I'm not, I'm boycotting it. Corn maze. And it's also not in the shape of a monarch butterfly.

[Paris Martineau]

Some people in the chat are saying Jeff's parking hack is that he puts a fake parking ticket on his car window.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very well known hack. That's kind of a Kramer move. Does it work?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wouldn't know.

[Paris Martineau]

He pleads the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The stuff in the chat is pretty funny.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a wonderful bunch of chat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. If you're a member, you'd be there in the discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And if you're not a member, seven bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows, special events like Friday we're going to do Stacy's Book Club. The book is by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I don't know. I was going to say no relation, but I don't know. Maybe he is. I don't know. His new book is called Service Model and it's about robots and what happens to the humans after the robots take over. It's actually funny. It's really good. So that'll be Friday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. We do stream it everywhere. We are on now eight platforms. You can watch us, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick X dot com. I think we just added tick tock. Anyway, you'll be able to watch it live if you're there Friday. But the nice thing about being in the club is you don't have to be there. You can watch it after the fact. We did a coffee thing last week that was great with a coffee connoisseur, Sarah Dooley from beans.com and Mark Prince, of course, from the Coffee Geek. They're going to come back because Sarah says we're going to do a tasting and I think what she wants to do is put together a tasting kit of several different beans so that we can all participate and learn a little bit about coffee flavor. I won't mention hazelnut creamer though. That's not going to happen if you're not a member of the club. Seven bucks a month, it really helps us. It does not go into my pocket. It goes into Jeff and Paris's pocket and Benito's pocket and all the people who put this together. As you heard, it's not cheap to do this. With your help, we can make it twit TV club, Twitter. Scan the QR code in the upper left hand corner of your screen. All right, well, pick a story. One of you.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like the corn maize count. That is my story.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's good. I'll take it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, do you have a story you want to do?

[Paris Martineau]

I can pick one if we want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go ahead, you pick one.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a little content warning before we begin. The following story discusses the sensitive topic of suicide involving a minor. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self harm, please contact the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline call or text just 988 or you can chat online at chat.988lifeline.org if you're located outside the United States, please Visit find a helpline.com to find a helpline in your country.

[Paris Martineau]

You may have seen today a story from the New York Times about character AI the chat bot which has grown increasingly popular with young users. The headline in the story was can AI be blamed for a teen suicide? Oh, and it's specifically about a the mother of a 14 year old boy who grew obsessed on these chat bots and says that it helped push him over to the edge and may have played a role in his eventual death.

[Leo Laporte]

It is so tragic. There's nothing more tragic. But it's highly likely that the AI was helping the kid with other problems. Not.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, yeah, the kid has like mild Asperger's. The thing that I think is interesting here is the article is really interesting. It's by Kevin Roos in the New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Goes into the, you know, both sides of the argument.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also, I mean, look, I feel for the family. Absolutely terrible, terrible. Story. I don't think the chat bot, you know, my daughter was obsessed for a while with a chatbot. She was sure understood her and was talking to her and stuff. But it, you know, it never said kill yourself or anything like that. It was just a computer.

[Paris Martineau]

And I mean the thing is this chatbot didn't say anything like that kill yourself. So and I don't think that if you read the complaint, which I did, the mother isn't arguing that the chat bot did that, but she is arguing. I mean, I wouldn't say Kevin Roos is even arguing it fully. It's more the headline and framing of this. It's kind of hard to get out of that pattern. The thing that I'm surprised. Well, it goes into it in a bit in the story, but I want to talk about a bit here is the complaint again brings up this product liability theory that you've been seeing in a lot of these social media addiction lawsuits where the mother and the legal team she's working with are trying to advance this case on the notion that character AI knew a, knew that a significant amount of its users were minors and had developed kind of very close relationships with this and did not take any of the, you know, responsible steps to ensure that their product was safe for those users or was designed with safety in mind. They're essentially arguing that the product was kind of negligently designed in a number of ways to be unusually addictive to young users because that makes up a large percentage of their, you know, product or user base. Which is kind of interesting and I do think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out because the usual argument that these companies fall back on section 230, I'm not sure if it will apply here because this isn't user generated content, it's a chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. This is a case where the company's totally responsible because the content was generated by the company. This is not user.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But this is interesting thing. Is it? What, what, what did the user ask for? That's what I talked about, the matrix responsibility. Is it the model? Is it the application? Is it the user? At some point there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I'm a big supporter of Section 230, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think it'll be also interesting to see, I mean to your point, Jeff, how what sort of precedents this sets for underage users and like AI products. Because in this case, I mean this, I haven't fully even thought out this thought, so forgive I mean, if it comes out a bit clunky, but you know, if a kid walks into a bar and asks for seven shots of vodka there, you know, and gets alcohol poisoning, there are a lot of people that are at fault there. And it's usually not just not the.

[Leo Laporte]

Kid, it's the kid asked for it. But that doesn't let the bar off the hook.

[Paris Martineau]

Bartender. So I mean, in this case I'm wondering, like who is the bar and the bartender? Is it character AI? Is it someone else?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, it's character AI. And I think that this is really important, that it's very clear that whether it's a self driving vehicle or you know, a chat bot, that the creators of the code, the creators of the software and the company that puts it online is always responsible. You know, Elon would love it that if you got in a wreck with full self driving on, that he's not responsible, that Tesla's not responsible, you're responsible. I don't think that's the case. And I think more and more courts are saying no, no, no, no, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'S a general machine and you can ask it to do anything. And can the maker predict everything that anyone could ever ask it to do and prevent that? Can they define everything bad that could happen and imagine that it's an impossible task? And so it's a reality. It's nice and easy to say, oh well, the machine's fault. We must do something, we must get them.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they have liability. I think it's really important. And by the way, the EU has now established a product liability.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it didn't, it didn't tell them to do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, no. Okay, okay, let me be clear. I don't, I don't think in this case there's, and nor is the parent, I think, saying anything about liability.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think the, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

A headline writer, the New York Times, not anybody else.

[Paris Martineau]

The parent is arguing that there's liability, but not for specifically holding the gun to my son's head. I think the parent is arguing the company is liable for making an addictive product that was inappropriate with children. And I do think that there could be something to the effect that like part of these arguments that a lot of different legal teams are making when it comes to product liability and social media or tech companies is with regards to children. They're saying these companies have a responsibility to better understand what age roughly their user is. You know, like if a 10 year old is on your platform, you should be able to figure that out somehow. And I do think there's kind of something to that. But I would also, I don't know, I, I hesitate to say that because I'm also against like these stringent age verification policies.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it the mother's, I mean, doesn't the, don't the parents carry some responsibility for noticing what's going on with their kid? Yeah, look at the bud. But they didn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And look at the gun cases lately with parents who are being held responsible for their kids actions.

[Leo Laporte]

I really hate to see a government step in for, with, for parental responsibility. I think it's important that parents A, are responsible and B, you know, have the right to be responsible and not have the government decide what they should or shouldn't be doing. And I, and you know, his mother's a lawyer, so it makes sense. The first thing that a lawyer would do is, you know, look for liability. She says the company behaved recklessly. The her child had created a character he named Daenerys Targaryen after the. The Queen of Dragons, the mother of dragons in the Game of Thrones. And apparently the conversation did get in fact sexual. Not clear if he edited the conversation to make it more sexual or if it did in fact get sexual. There is a log of all the. Of the conversation.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And in the complaint it lists all, almost all of like quite a lot of this kid's conversations with this chat bot.

[Leo Laporte]

But where's some. Where is the parent? Like if this kid has gone into his room and is spending hours in his room on this computer, where is the parent in this? Doesn't the parent have some responsibility? Maybe move the computer into the living room? This is what we did with our kids.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's hard.

[Leo Laporte]

She founded the Social Media Victims Law Center.

[Paris Martineau]

No, she didn't. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, she found it. Not found.

[Paris Martineau]

She found that. Which existed already. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The firm was started by a former asbestos lawyer who pivoted to suing tech companies. It is the mesothelioma of lawsuits these days going after the tech companies. Look, I guess, you know, and one of the things Kevin Roos reports is that the guys who founded Character AI left Google because they felt handcuffed by Google's safety focus and they wanted to do something a little. There's just, this is the quote. There's just too much brand risk in large companies to ever launch anything fun. So they launched something fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not a great quote. So since addiction came out, here's a.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll just add one brief code to this because I Remember seeing it in the complaint to the question of where was his parents in all of this. He they write in the his mother writes in the complaint that the kid had always been really well behaved kid who listened once you know the addictive behavior started. His parents took his phone at night and as like disciplinary measures in response to school related issues he had after it. But then he would try to sneak his phone back or look for other ways to keep using character AI such as like finding his parents old devices or tablets or a computer he could get into without his parents realizing. On multiple occasions he told his mother that he needed to use her computer for schoolwork, which was accurate only to then open a new email account for the purpose of opening a new character AI so he could keep using it.

[Leo Laporte]

He was hooked.

[Paris Martineau]

He was hooked.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

However, since addiction came up last week I put up the pages from my book the web we weave on snail [e-mail] on my blog. So just this is what I was reading from last week. It's. It's all there.

[Leo Laporte]

I you know it is. I look nothing worse. I don't know. I feel for the nothing anybody as a parent knows this is your worst nightmare. And I think you know, I know from my own experience you want to blame. You look for. You look for reasons. Right? You look for causes and you want to blame maybe sometimes yourself.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we parents often, we often blame.

[Leo Laporte]

Ourselves but sometimes there isn't, you know a cause. Mental illness can happen and you know, the kid was doing well until he wasn't and you know, I don't know if they did everything they could. I don't. Maybe they did. I just don't know if going after these companies, first of all, what would you do? How would you. I mean they'd have a disclaimer, I guess. I don't know. What would you do?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, Character AI has released some new security features as of today timed with the filing of this complaint. They said in their community safety updates. They basically they said our goal is to offer fun and engaging experiences our users have come to expect while enabling the safe exploration of topics. Our policies don't allow non sensual sexual content. We're continually training our large language models. Basically they introduced features where changes to our models for minors, people under the age of 18 that are designed to reduce the likelihood of encountering suggestive or sensitive content improve detection, response and intervention related to user inputs that violate our terms of service. A revised disclaimer on every chat to remind users that the AI is not a real person and a notification when a user has spent an hour long session on the platform. That's good with additional user flexibility.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fair.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So let me probably give you one example. Go ahead of maybe. So I talked the other day to the AI person at Shipstead, which is a brilliant Nordic media company. They're the envy of the media world, they're the smart ones. And one of the examples she said of what they've created was often blooded. I think it's the one in Sweden created an election buddy which was a just a bot that would answer questions about the EU election that was coming up, which is a big deal but nobody ever knows about it. And they got 150,000 queries in no time flat, which doesn't sound the paper much here. She said, but it's Sweden, it's smaller and they did it as rag. And so the data that it used was the data that the paper gave it. And people tried, they saw what people were asking it, people tried to push it, people tried to get it to recommend overthrow of government or whatever and it wouldn't do it because it was in a limited world. Part of the problem with these large models is they are not and cannot be limited in that way. They will go to anything. They will go to any combination of words that anybody has ever come up with before. And I don't think we want to outlaw all of them, but I don't know anything short of outlawing them that you could do that could guarantee that it won't do X, Y or Z. So if you want to just do things that have rag and say this is all it can do and it is delimited to do that, yeah, you could do that. But you're going to eliminate a lot of innovation and a lot of invention and people are going to. People who are having trouble are going to go to other mechanisms to do other things that unfortunately. Yeah, and so but it is, you're right, it is about. It is similar to the Musk allegedly autonomous driving thing is part of the question is okay, how many people have to die before it gets regulated? I'm all for regulating Elon Musk self driving because it's a lie. But in this case this is not a car. This is a general machine like a printing press that can be made to do anything. And so I don't know how you regulate it and maybe we live with that.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff's blog, by the way, and the quotes that he or the article he was Talking [e-mail] the technology, addiction, trope, phone dope is the addiction of our times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is so that was from the Times of London.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I. That and the discussion last week. I put it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you for putting that up there. Yeah. I mean, it's just a tragic story and I feel for the parent and just horrible. And when something like that happens, you just look for every. What did I do wrong? What could we do better? How can we fix it? There's no fix for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If I can segue into the next. Because I think this is related. There was a whole bunch of agent related AI stuff this week that I came across and I put in there like eight stories and a lot of effort to say to go to that, skip that next step of AI where you. One story here, it says that this might make obsolete phone applications.

[Leo Laporte]

Or that's like the R1. That was the intent of the R1, remember?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Or the web itself.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm going to Boston, you know, find me a route and make me a hotel reservation and give me a restaurant and da da, da, da da. And it goes and it deals with all of that and. But at that point, you got to.

[Leo Laporte]

Love the idea of an AI assistant. You know, that's. That's a long time sci fi dream where, you know, I mean, we can't. Most of us can't afford to have a personal assistant, but you know, a lot of very rich people and movie stars can and there's a lot to be said for a personal assistant. And maybe an AI could be your personal assistant and book things for you and do all that. That would be great. I think that's a really good use of AI. I hope it happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But to the prior discussion, it's going to be far more opaque, likely because it's taking large language models and generative AI and going to a next step where it says, I will do this for you. You have anthropic and Microsoft are all saying, we can do agents, we can do all this. Right now I forget somebody that Jason had that. It could take over your machine. It could do screenshots.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's the new thing. Yeah. Claude's sonnet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Claude's right, Claude's. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We can do mouse inputs and keyboard inputs, which is getting unfortunately close to agency. That worries me.

[Paris Martineau]

How will this work? Last week on the show or the week before, we covered that study about how AI doesn't reason how, you know, adding a simple like but clause would mess up the LLM's ability to provide reliable outputs or sensible Outputs. How does that square with. Well, it has access to my entire computer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, Mr. Benioff, you're right because Benioff says this is, this is a panic mode for Microsoft, rebranding this as agents when it's not agents yet. So it's not ready. However, it was only a month ago that Marc Benioff and Salesforce announced their agent thing. So everybody's. I watched a presentation from Meta about how they're doing community governance and they did this leading up to the oversight board. Well, now they're doing the same thing to listen to people around the world about AI and it was interesting to look at the questions they were asking people and it jumped right to agents. It wasn't about ChatGPT, it wasn't about queries, it was about how you're going to work with agents. So they're presuming that we're almost there to do that. I think it's overblown as much as AGI is, but we're going to see a lot of agent hype.

[Leo Laporte]

I have, you know, gone back and forth as you know, on AI and I think it's pretty clear it's going to be every. It's going to be both. It's going to be both a pile of nothing and very useful. And I've, and actually we've even seen that at play right now. And I think it's going to get more and more and more. AI is not going to be the ultimate solution to everything. But AI will be useful. And I don't, I think both can be true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'll be as perilous as the internal combustion engine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, talk about peril.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And. But it'll also be as beneficial. Unless you're Paris Martin O and don't want to go near one because you think that you're above driving.

[Leo Laporte]

I think most technology is a double edged sword. Nuclear power can be a nuclear bomb. You know, fission has the promise of both. I think most technologies can be both good or bad. And I think that's always been the case. In fact, that's always been kind of one of my mission statements is technology is agnostic. It's up to us as users of technology to make it, to use it for good and not ill.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Speaking of which, how small are the small reactors that Amazon is developing?

[Leo Laporte]

The modular?

[Paris Martineau]

I hope they're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that like a desktop reactor we're all going to have?

[Leo Laporte]

Not that small, but small. So this nuclear power is a perfect example of. I mean, first of all, AI uses so much Energy. It's horrific the amount of energy AI uses. And that and that stupid song that you wrote that you made into a song out of Suno, you know, used enough power to air condition 13 homes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not just power, water too.

[Leo Laporte]

Water. Yeah, it's a nightmare. And that's something we're going to really have to address. Okay. But meanwhile Amazon, Google, Microsoft are desperate for power and all three companies have either reactivated in the case of Microsoft, Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant, in the case of Amazon are investing in smaller power plants. So nuclear power has pros and cons. It is there are no emissions, it doesn't harm the environment, does create nuclear waste, but that is probably can be dealt with. The real problem with nuclear power is very expensive. That's why Microsoft is putting Three Mile island back up because it's already built. Building new ones is very expensive. So the whole idea of these modular smaller nuclear power plants, they're simpler, probably safer, but also cheaper to make. And that's something important too. This is to me a bigger problem with AI is not that it's going to suborn your children or lead you off the road, but it's going to use a huge amount of natural resources that we can't really afford to give them. I don't know what we do about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's what the stochastic parents paper emphasized is that we're looking at all this BS future shot crap when we should be dealing with these present day issues.

[Leo Laporte]

And when you ask an AI proponent of that, most of the time Bill Gates, Sam Altman and others, I think the most recent Nobel prize winner say oh no, don't worry about it because AI will solve the problem that it's created.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The thing is like AI is not.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to solve the problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AI is going to give us a solution. But that solution is going to be the solution we already know. Like cut back, cut back on fossil fuels. It's going to be that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they're going to be like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh no, AI doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Rupert Murdoch and New York Post are suing Perplexity AI for a brazen scheme surprise free riding on valuable content. I like Perplexity by the way. It's, it's, I use it for search. It does a very good job. News publishers seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously free writing and the valuable content publishers produce. It is the same. It's, it's, it's the link text all over again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, exactly. And this Murdoch started This all. Well, actually, the Germans started it all with the ready, but then Murdoch took it over and did what he did in Australia.

[Leo Laporte]

New York Times is suing Open AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. Publishers are suing Open AI. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff, did you want to rant about this?

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead, rant about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that rant. Yeah. Okay, okay, I'm gonna rant. Thanks for reminding me. I almost forgot. Paris now. I was gonna say.

[Paris Martineau]

You want to be mad?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So the New York Times is suing OpenAI. They have a vested interest in this question. They do a story today by cade Metz, former OpenAI researcher. Oh, could this be? A whistleblower says the company broke copyright law. Oh, okay. So Suchir Balaji says that they broke copyright law. He doesn't have a law degree. He has a B.A. not a B.S. a B.A. in computer science, but he spent nearly.

[Leo Laporte]

Four years as a researcher at OpenAI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he feels guilty about it now, just like all these other dorks. And so the story goes on and on. It does mention that the Times is suing Open AI, but it gives an actual legal expert who knows what he's talking about one paragraph and then brings Mr. Balaji back to go back and forth. This is a blatant conflict of interest. And this is the issue. And I deal with my book, the Web Weave, where you have media's coverage of the Internet and AI because they have a vested interest in this, because they think it's the competitor. When I think that they should look at it otherwise, then this kind of coverage plays right into the Times. Corporate.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, okay, I'm going to devil's advocate here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too. Hold on.

[Paris Martineau]

There's no way that Cade Metz is not coming at this from a meeting with the New York Times lawyers representing them against OpenAI and being like, ooh, how can I further our interests? Kate Metz is looking for a good story. Probably this whistleblower reached out to the New York Times knowing that it would be the best place for them to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Make claims, has the same interests as his publisher. That is Kate Metz's own world coverage at all.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. It's one I think deserves coverage around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This one guy who says, in my opinion, we vile. I did it for four years, but we shouldn't have. That's not a story.

[Paris Martineau]

It is if you have an employee of a hot button tech company saying on the record with willing to sit down for photos and an extensive interview, I think I did something illegal. Here's what. Yeah. That's relevant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For making a legal judgment.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the reason they're using apology is just to put a per. You know, kind of make a personal face on this and make it be more of a personable story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Boy, did they do the glam shots with them.

[Leo Laporte]

I know they did, but. But honestly, the issue, though, is genuine. And he does mention the lawsuit he.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mentions in one paragraph. The lawsuit he mentions in one paragraph what an actual legal scholar says and then comes back. And this is all this guy's perspective. And the thing is, you and I both know, Paris, lots of journalists who say AI is stealing my valuable, wonderful stuff, and they shouldn't do that. So that's the perspective they have in this newsroom. And they've got to be more. They've got to have more of an intellectual honesty then about approaching a story like this. And that's what pissed me off. This is bad journalism. Boy, that is based on one guy.

[Paris Martineau]

He's been writing about this for like two decades. I don't think he's a pearl clutch story journalist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bad journalism.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were Sucher Balaji, I would definitely take this as my profile photo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. That is a gorgeous, gorgeous shot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nobody's swiping that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Good job, Ulysses Ortega. You did a good job.

[Paris Martineau]

The rope reporter who wrote this literally wrote a book called Genius Makers, the mavericks who brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the world. He's an AI super fan, a geek. I don't think that he's one. I also. I think he's coming at this from a neutral angle. If not an angle is bad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This story could have gone to more experts, could have actually gone to legal experts, could have based it on legal people, could have actually questioned the whole question that we have here. And it's a real question. But to base this story entirely on a guy with a BA and CS who worked there for four years, as if he knows what he's talking about in the law, then misrepresents the law to the readers. It is unfair to the readers because it does.

[Paris Martineau]

I will agree with the point that I think it could be. It could have used a middle section that is examining this critically and taking.

[Leo Laporte]

Kathy Gallows or somebody, and Kathy goes.

[Paris Martineau]

I do agree on that point. I will say, though, probably where an approach like this is coming from rather than a malicious intent is probably from the fact that, I don't know. The New York Times over the last five, 10 years has gotten really obsessed with big narratives and big, like, voicey, human centric stories. Like telling everything, every news story through a human centric story.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what's going on?

[Paris Martineau]

I think that this is. With the photos attached. You can see it's very much like a attempt, like Leo was saying before, to humanify like this seemingly very imp. Like to. To make human.

[Leo Laporte]

This.

[Paris Martineau]

Human eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know what? This.

[Paris Martineau]

I've been talking for two and a half hours, guys, so we're getting some. Some words in here.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a problem.

[Paris Martineau]

A very like intangible issue which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Copyright problem I had with television coverage. Technology. Technology is abstract. People glaze over. There's no pictures. So TV always had to have pictures of a guy moving his mouse, typing on a keyboard and stuff. It's the same problem. I think the New York Times probably says, look, we got to do this coverage. It's important. Cover it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, an editor should have.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to impute some sort of copy of interest. But I think it's reasonable for an editor to say now we need to cover this story, but let's make it approachable by having a human at the center of it. Even though there really isn't a human at the center of it. This is all about machines. And so it's so abstract. They try to put a human at the center of it. I don't think that's a. I don't have a problem with that. Well, I do wish that I'd had pictures that look as good as such. Apologies. Beautiful pictures. Ulysses, Good job. You're a good photographer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gotta be. Just blow a whistle and they come.

[Leo Laporte]

He was basically an in. Let's face it. He was basically an intern. He came out of Cal and he was doing data entry for this. Yeah, I mean he is not, you know, Geoffrey Hinton. He is some. Some kid who has a story to be done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, you're absolutely right. There's a story to be done. This is not the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe they shouldn't be so focused on the human.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But we can replace all of us. We've talked about this. We had. We had Notebook LLM two weeks ago doing a podcast now line 86. It has come to this.

[Leo Laporte]

Polish radio station replaces human presenters with.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gorgeous AI you see more clam shots?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a real person or an AI person?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's an AI person. But he has a name.

[Leo Laporte]

What's his name?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, where is it? Here. I lost it. Is that Jakob Kuba zielinski picture? A 22 year old studying acoustic engineering looking for the latest news in the field of sound production.

[Leo Laporte]

With amazing cheekbones and gorgeous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is amelia Emmy Novak. 20 year old journalism student. Culture.

[Leo Laporte]

She looks Nice, doesn't she looks friendly. She's got Paris's glasses in purple.

[Paris Martineau]

I can't believe that even the AI version of radio presenters can't be established in their career. They have to be 20 and 22.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New technologies.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, 22 year old, studying acoustic engineering. So. So can we hear it? Well, it's in Polish, so we won't really get much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we do that?

[Leo Laporte]

Is there video?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think there's audio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, they took, but they. It's. It's a government owned radio station.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a reason. In response to criticism, the editor in chief of Radio Krakow issued a statement claiming no employees have been dismissed. Instead, cooperation agreements were terminated with external collaborators.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's all.

[Leo Laporte]

In Soviet Union, cooperation agreements are terminated with external collaborators. I don't know what a Polish accent sounds like, so I'm just doing it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Russian stole from the Soviet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Moreover, the decision was made after an assessment of Off Radio Krakow that found it had a listenership range of close to zero. Okay. No one was listening. While its content also overlapped with the broadcasters other channels. So they didn't have a unique product. Therefore, it was decided to relaunch it to appeal to younger listeners, hence the 22 year olds. And during that process, the idea of experimenting with AI was. I know, I mean, you know what? Can you go lower than zero listeners?

[Paris Martineau]

They'll find out.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll, you know, I mean, it can't do any worse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The great thing is after. After Armageddon, after this nuclear war, after we're all gone, this radio station will keep going.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. I want to hear it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm looking at it right now. So if you look up Off Radio Krakow. Yeah, let's see if they have a stream.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I really want to hear these AIs. The thing is that that notebook LM that we played, those people completely are believable. Here we go. Here we go. Let me play a little bit of this for you. Oh, no, that's just an article. Shoot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Playlist. Podcasty.

[Leo Laporte]

Podcast. Very good looking high chickpea. Blue eyed boy tells you about audio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, hold on. This podcast here, let's see if it has radio crack.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I think when you name a radio station off off, it probably encourages the, I don't know, the wrong idea. Podcasty. Here's a podcast. But nothing happens when I click it. Okay, well, she looks so friendly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She does, she does.

[Leo Laporte]

She looks like a nice person.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So here's the.

[Leo Laporte]

You think she's hooking up with the guy. Yeah, I bet there is.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I think she's a professional. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see that? The Olivia Hussey and the guy in the. Zafrelli's 1974 Romeo and Juliet are suing the movie company for child pornography because they were 16 and 17 when they made the movie 50 years ago.

[Paris Martineau]

I think they.

[Leo Laporte]

They say they enhanced the video.

[Paris Martineau]

They say the director, I think, forced them to do some weird stuff, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but he's dead now. And they. By the way, she said she loved Zeffrelli, in fact, went with Zeffrelli in the last few years before his death to a film festival to show the movie.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, that means nothing bad could have ever happened to her.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Yeah, maybe. Okay. It's a little. I don't know. Radio. Off. Turn off your radio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm very upset we can't listen to it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think off means on in Polish? Well, maybe doesn't mean anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's go to translate.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, it looks like it's 0ff. No, it's off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Off from Polish.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's only a matter of time before I Heart Radio replaces all of its presenters with AIs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I see no reason not to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They probably own radio. Off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait a second. If I just. Oh, hold on. Oh, if you go to off, on the upper left hand corner, there's a play button.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but is it the.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think it's just whatever is playing live like it's music. We're gonna get taken.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're now playing How Many Zeros by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

[Paris Martineau]

We're gonna get taken down for this. Pause it. This is a copyrighted song, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing like Polish radio. All right, Well, I. Honestly, I think it's just a matter of time before us radio stations follow suit. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, they. They destroyed radio by replacing humans with automation. Thirty, 40 years ago, they had just big machines in the basement.

[Paris Martineau]

They destroyed the teletypes.

[Leo Laporte]

They took the Internet, all the teletypes, and replaced it with tape machines. It was actually. When they had tape, it was on tape. It wasn't even digital. Sotheby's is going to auction the first artwork made by a humanoid robot. This is so dumb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put it there, but it's dumb.

[Leo Laporte]

I am and depend on computer programs and algorithms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the same robot that testified before the lords in the uk.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is just like.

[Paris Martineau]

Can we get that robot better clothes? Why?

[Leo Laporte]

Better face?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look at that hair.

[Leo Laporte]

What the hell is that? That's disgusting. A robot artist. I Don't think Bonita would. Why?

[Paris Martineau]

Why is the robot wearing overalls?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who's controlling the robot?

[Leo Laporte]

Aha. Elon Musk.

[Paris Martineau]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Aida or Aida said with the help of AI algorithm cameras in its eyes and a robotic arm, it's able to create art. God, that is horrible.

[Paris Martineau]

Elephant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I would submit that the robot itself is the piece of art, not the art.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly right. It was created by scientists at the University of Oxford. Oh, look, she's. She's moving. She's talking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The robot is the art piece.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the very generous.

[Paris Martineau]

I do not have subjective experiences despite being able to talk about them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You do a very good robot.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. You've missed your calling, young lady, as a robot voice.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Voiceover.

[Leo Laporte]

Get a job at an AI radio station.

[Paris Martineau]

Please hire me for your artificial intelligence voiceovers.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, ladies and gentlemen, our picks of the week as we wrap up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have a picture of myself.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got a good one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A robot.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paris Martineau]

And active users lose an average of.

[Leo Laporte]

15 pounds in 15 weeks. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom psychology and biology based approach. Sign up for your trial [e-mail] based on 3.5 study of actively engaged Noom users with minimum starting BMI of 25. Individual results may vary. Visit our website for more information. It's better over here. Now AT T Mobile.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Get four 5G phones on us in.

[Leo Laporte]

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 autopay 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 dot com. Oh, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Put it in the chat right now. There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

A picture of yourself.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This was drawn by a robot.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. When was that? That the robot?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ah, some stupid conference I went to.

[Paris Martineau]

Pretty good. Did you have to submit a profile photo for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I was live.

[Leo Laporte]

I am sitting there and you will draw me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Draw you My pick of the week, please.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do what? Your robot voice. Oh, please.

[Paris Martineau]

At least start my pick of the week this week. This is going to be too hard to do is November is coming up and I've decided that this November I'm gonna do something I've always wanted to do, which is try to watch as many Nic Cage movies as possible. So I'm naming it Nick Vember.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is so cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is my quest. And I'm gonna watch 31 Nic Cage movies in Nickvember. And I wanted to, you know, let you guys know about this. If you have any favorites that I should throw in there, let me know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's take a look at Nick's oeuvre.

[Paris Martineau]

I started Nick Vember a little early because I was sick earlier this week and was like, well, I'm probably not gonna be able to watch Nick Cage movies on Wednesdays in November because I'll be doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

I do like the unbearable weight of massive talent. If you haven't.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm excited to watch that, but I feel like it's got to come later in November after I've seen a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Of you gotta see page order.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Any kind of order.

[Paris Martineau]

No, not. No order. The. The order is going to be whatever I feel. But then I'm going to try and front. Like, I'm gonna put a lot of the good movies on weekend days. People can come and watch it with me.

[Leo Laporte]

In 2017, he made 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 movies.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the thing is, he went through a period of being extremely in debt because he spent too much money on, like, a pyramid and, like, weird animals. Yeah. So last night I watched Vampire's Kiss, a Nick Cage movie from the 80s that I highly recommend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You watched it?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, it was my early Nick Vember. I realized that I'm probably not gonna be Able to watch Nick Cage movies on Wednesday.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Werewolf Women of the couple. That sounds good. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

So this is all to say that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What you gotta watch. Yeah, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Paris Martineau]

Last night was, you know, looking on a website, some might call it an illegal downloading website. One of my friends was showing me, but I would never engage in that myself. We were looking at all of the films tagged Nick Cage to see what else I should add to my list. Just endless one came up that I've since found. I was like. It was called Elvis Found Alive. It was a film from 2012. And I was like, how does this relate to Nick Cage? Nic Cage is only in it briefly, I guess, because he at one point was married to Elvis's daughter. But as I was looking on this illegal streaming site for. At this movie, in the comments of it, it said, wow, that guy looks like Leo laporte. And let me tell you, he does. Look at the IMDb page.

[Leo Laporte]

For. What is it called?

[Paris Martineau]

Elvis, Elvis, Elvis Found Alive. It's in the. It's in the rundown.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

And it does unfortunately look like you.

[Leo Laporte]

I would say. You got to see Birdie, which was his breakout film.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And is considered by many to be a classic. There's some really. It's interesting. Nicholas Cage is like those British actors who do a lot of great movies and then just do so many terrible movies.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Here is the picture of Nicolas Cage as. You think that looks like me.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, no, that's not Nick Cage. I don't think it looks like you. But people in the comments from.

[Leo Laporte]

Where. Where is the picture?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I know. It's that one up top of the old.

[Leo Laporte]

That picture that it does.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think it looks like you.

[Leo Laporte]

But I thought somebody with gray hair and a big nose. That's it.

[Paris Martineau]

I just found like 10 people commenting to say this is kind of Leo Laporte. And I just was stunned. I was like, this is just in my everyday life, a Leo reference. And I just thought that was beautiful. It could be you.

[Leo Laporte]

I think looks just like me.

[Paris Martineau]

But Nick Cage is not really in this movie in which. Which is about Elvis actually being a government agent and being alive the whole time. I think he's briefly in a shot Raising Arizona.

[Leo Laporte]

Completely raising Arizona.

[Paris Martineau]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen amazing. I'm gonna watch some of the best. Face off is my favorite Fast Time small character.

[Paris Martineau]

He's a small bit part. And he's credited as Nicholas Kim Coppola because that was his. Because he's originally because he's a Nepo baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they all are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All the actors are.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, all the actors are these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Cotton Club. Yep. Birdie, Peggy. Got married. Raising Arizona. There's early stuff. Moonstruck.

[Paris Martineau]

Moonstruck. So the thing is, if anybody out there is thinking about watching Vampire's Kiss, highly recommend it. Insane film. It is also the movie he did after Moonstruck. And it could not be more tonally different.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I think is interesting about him. He just. I think he's a very creative feller.

[Paris Martineau]

Nick Cage is a. By his own description in Vampire's Kiss. He describes himself as a incredibly horny man and he is a literary executive in Chelsea. But he one night takes the wrong girl home and ends up bitten by a vampire. And chaos ensues.

[Leo Laporte]

That is wild. I. I think Pig is really amazing, actually. He only has like three lines in it. Mostly he just says, I want my pig back.

[Paris Martineau]

Great. Well, I'm gonna watch it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I rock you.

[Nathan Freitas]

The Rock is one of my favorites.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one? The Rock, of course. He's an Alcatraz. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are a lot of great movies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Movies.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. It's gonna be a great Nick Vember.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm sorry, terrible movies too. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

To suggest anybody else who wants to participate in Nick Vember, it's gonna be the time of the year where you can watch Nick Cage films.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you should. You know, there's no way we could do this. Copyright loss. See, I would love to stream Nick. Nick Vember.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. I would love to stream Face Off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wonder how they did it on mystery science theater 3000.

[Leo Laporte]

They used really old crappy public domain movies. I think so. Maybe they paid the. Paid the cheap license.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They were movies that no one owned anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think they were out of. Out of copyright. Con Air. Another good one. Kiss of the Spider.

[Paris Martineau]

Con Air. I can't wait for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Adaptation.

[Paris Martineau]

What a great adaptation is a phenomenal film. I'm gonna be watching that again in November.

[Leo Laporte]

You've seen all the good ones, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't seen all the good ones. I've only seen a couple. I've seen Adaptation. I've seen Raising Arizona. Face Off. I've seen.

[Leo Laporte]

I like your idea for Nick Vember.

[Jeff Jarvis]

National Treasure.

[Leo Laporte]

National.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, National Treasure is gonna be a weekend day. Yeah. Where I'm gonna force everybody to come and watch it at my home.

[Leo Laporte]

Elvis found alive. Is that Nicholas Cage as Elvis?

[Paris Martineau]

No. Nicholas Cage, despite the fact is being tagged in this movie. He does appear briefly. I think in just footage of Elvis or Elvis's daughter. Nicholas Cage does not play a role in this film. Really? I was very confused because I was like, dang, I guess I'm gonna watch Elvis Found Alive. I didn't know this is a Nick Cage movie. I do think I should watch it anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

And Margaret's in it. Joan Baez, Milton Berle, Chuck Berry. I think they just put everybody. Tom Brokaw, George W. Bush. Yeah, no, I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a mockumentary.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, you mean Elvis wasn't found alive? Shockingly, no shocking list. Let's get poor. Poor Jeff is yawning. Let's get Jeff's pick of the week before he passes out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lack of projecting again.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw you yawn. You didn't yawn.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff J. Was found alive.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. That's the look.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, this amused me. Thank you, Steve Ballmer for a concert app that made me want to scream. The Washington Post.

[Leo Laporte]

So Steve Ballmer is a former CEO of Microsoft and now owns the Clippers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Intuit Dome, a 2 billion arena that Steve Palmer built for his LA Clippers. And so this poor guy from the Washington Post who is named. Where's the name? Where's the name? It's here. Joel Stein found that he had to download the Intuit Dome app.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He received a bunch of scary emails with the subject lines that started with red exclamation points that no one would be allowed in the arena without it. And although I had purchased two tickets, one would have to be transferred to my 15 year old son's own Intuit Dom app. We had to show the tickets on the app to get in. I could not move these tickets to my Apple wallet, use a screenshot or print them out.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To use the Intuit Dome app, I had to surrender my address, email and phone number, none of which I was able to autofill. Unlike very other app I've used. By the way, if I wanted to buy anything at the Intuit Dome, they wouldn't take cash or Apple pay. He had to use the Intuit Dome. It's like being on United Airlines trying to buy a drink. The app strongly encouraged me to take a selfie for my game face ID so it could use facial recognition. It wanted my license plates for parking. And though it's not app for blood.

[Leo Laporte]

Sample, the app brags about how its zoom through tech allows me to navigate into a dome like a pro. This is not my goal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Seats use Bluetooth sensors and Ultra wideband to determine if your mobile device is in or near a particular seat, including how long you've been in your seat.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is awful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bomber, who worked on every detail, told 60 Minutes last week. I really hate it when people wait in line. Waiting in line for toilets stops people from getting back into the game. People get frustrated. But he complained that it took longer to put all the information in than to would be to stand in line for 30 toilets.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to admit, this is a trend. Like if you go to a Ticketmaster concert, you have to have the Ticketmaster app.

[Paris Martineau]

And I hate it. I hate it so much.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is worse because I think.

[Paris Martineau]

It'S also just, I mean, an accessibility issue. What if you're a person who doesn't have a smartphone and you want to go to a concert or a movie?

[Leo Laporte]

They have a very byzantine process of getting a paper ticket. Their ostensible reason is, well, there's too much ticket counterfeiting. And so we really want to have a validated way of knowing this is really your ticket. But really, of course, everybody knows they just want to get an app on your phone. Everybody just get. Wants to get an app on your phone because that's the best way to learn everything they can about you. Privacy is dead. It really is. It's just. It's not, not good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just going overboard. So he said that when he got there, the Intuit app signed him out and he couldn't get logged back in.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The attendant came over and used an iPad to look up and then she could. She could not find our tickets. They did find how refined their faces. After five minutes of recovering passwords, the nice woman said I was close enough to solving the Intuit Dome apps three riddles to be allowed inside. So he's at the hands with this. I know I sound like a 53 year old Luddite, but I asked Laszlo, his son, what a great name for a kid. Laszlo I like.

[Paris Martineau]

Good, good name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is Intuit Dom Password was. He told me it was nearly identical to the one I had picked. I hate this. 1, 2, 3.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you very much. Chris Stein or Joel Stein and his son Laszlo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Laszlo. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Not surprised. This is the way the world is now days. And this show is technology coming. It's ruining everything for the world. That was. That's going to be the title of the show. Technology's ruined everything. Jeff Jarvis. Congratulations. Say once again what you do for a living.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Visiting professor at the School of. I'm sorry, the. Yeah, the school.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you say it without Looking it up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. I'll close my laptop. Hi, I'm Jeff Jarvis, Visiting professor at the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University, a Distinguished Fellow at the center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University's School of Communication and Media, and emeritus Leonard Tao, professor of Journalistic Innovation at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're gonna have to enter all this in Benito.

[Paris Martineau]

It's gonna fill up the entire screen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. This has been in the works for some time. Glad that we can finally tell people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And, of course, fun things at these places. Working on AI things and other things.

[Leo Laporte]

Your students are always very fortunate, I have to say, because they're learning from somebody who really knows his stuff. You get to do that when you read his books. The Gutenberg Parenthesis Magazine. The new one is called the Web Weave. You can get them all at the Gutenberg Parenthesis Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You get [e-mail].

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is that new?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. Well, no, it's been there for three weeks. But that's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You're old, newish.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your hat is tight.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is cutting off the circulation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeffjarvis.com. so we should just use that from now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Paris Marno writes for the [e-mail]. if you're not a paid subscriber, subscribe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris Robot.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a very.

[Paris Martineau]

I am a robot. For the rest of this episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Her signal is Martino 01 or 01, I should say. Thank you, Paris. Great to have you and your robotic buddies on the show.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

You're welcome, Paris. We do this week in Google, every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC, live on eight different platforms. Eight different platforms. I couldn't even get the fingers right. That would include, of course, Discord for a Club Twit members. If you're not a member, Twitter, TV Club Twit. But it's also YouTube and Twitch and Kick X dot com, LinkedIn, Facebook and tick tock. Very happy to be on TikTok as well. Hello, everybody. We've. What do we have here today? Oh, you know, I don't. I used to see a number on.

[Paris Martineau]

The chat, and I don't see that viewers are infinite.

[Leo Laporte]

Infinite viewers. Thank you, Paris Robot. Tick Tock.

[Paris Martineau]

Paris. AI.

[Nathan Freitas]

AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, before we leave, I think the thread. Luke me Vanderviken in the Twitter said that. I think this may be the. I put it in the rundown in the Discord. Maybe the thread you were looking for. About test.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was it from Seth Abramson? Was that it? He's a very. He's a very conspiracy kind of guy. But not.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. This is not the one I was talking about. But this gets. You know what? There. This thought is going around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's going.

[Leo Laporte]

And for those who didn't hear, because I think it was pre show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What we were show.

[Leo Laporte]

Because was it. Yeah, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe it was pre show.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it was pre show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bushes and what. It's all just like.

[Leo Laporte]

No, this is it. This is the thread. Seth Abramson.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But basically the shorthand is that Donald Trump is a stalking horse for the Technocrats.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Manchurian Candidate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Technocrats being Elon, Peter Thiel. People like that, who believe. And I think this is true, they believe that the innovators, the Technocrats, should be running the world, not politicians. That democracy is outmoded. And, you know, if you just let them take care of things, they would take care of things. Unfortunately, mostly they would take care of things for them and their rich friends and the rest of us would just be cannon fodder for their interests. Not so great. But okay. He says, you know, really, the. The problem is not that you're not voting for Maga. You're really voting for the Technocrats to run the country. I don't know if that's true. Gizmodo. Oh, there's.

[Paris Martineau]

She's biting my ankles, so I had to bring her up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why is she biting your ankle?

[Leo Laporte]

She's hungry because she's ready to go.

[Paris Martineau]

Wants me to stop podcasting and pay attention to her.

[Leo Laporte]

Enough podcasting. AI Mommy, time to eat.

[Paris Martineau]

She heard the robot voice and got concerned.

[Leo Laporte]

Have they replaced my mommy? Thank you for joining us. If you want to watch the show after the fact, you don't have to watch it live. You can always download a copy at Twitter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cat anecdote image.

[Paris Martineau]

Just important. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pronounced catanus.

[Paris Martineau]

Cat anus Catanus.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Stream it, watch it after the fact. Twitch TV twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player and and get it automatically the minute it's available. Thank you everybody. We will see you in your containers next week. This week at Google. Bye bye.

[Paris Martineau]

Bye bye.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Jeff Jarvis]

Give you a new one free.

[Leo Laporte]

All on America's largest 5G network. Visit tmobile.com carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax qualifying port in trade and service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. You may not realize it, but every minute of every day you're enjoying your First Amendment freedoms. You can wear what you want, give out your opinion for free, even if it's unpopular. Listen to your playlist. You can put a sign out on your front lawn that says vote for Bigfoot. Someone you can believe in. Pray to the God of your choice. Or don't you have the right to hang with a posse that thinks like you do? Tell the government what you think about its policies. They're the freedoms that let you be you and they're all brought to you by the First Amendment. Learn more at freedomforum.org how do you feel when you switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance? It's like going to work on one Thursday morning and thinking to yourself, just one more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says, happy Friday. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes. Happy Fri. Yay, random stranger in the elevator. Happy Fri. Yay, indeed. Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that. Get more with Geico.