TWiG 792: 5 to 10 People at your Door - Alphabet Earnings, RIP Foursquare, McFlurries

Summary

Podcast Summary: TWiG 792: 5 to 10 People at your Door - Alphabet Earnings, RIP Foursquare, McFlurries

This Week in Google (TWiT)
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau
Release Date: October 31, 2024
Episode Title: TWiG 792: 5 to 10 People at your Door - Alphabet Earnings, RIP Foursquare, McFlurries

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1. Introduction to the Episode

The episode, hosted by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau, delves into Alphabet's latest quarterly earnings, the retirement of Foursquare, and issues surrounding McDonald's McFlurry machines. The hosts also explore the evolving landscape of AI in technology and its implications across various sectors.

2. Alphabet’s Impressive Quarterly Earnings

Leo begins by announcing Alphabet's robust financial performance, highlighting a three-month revenue of $88.25 billion, an $11 billion increase from the same quarter the previous year (61:48), with net income soaring to $26.3 billion. This significant growth is attributed to Alphabet's expansive AI investments and the strong performance of Google Cloud.

Notable Quote:
Jeff Jarvis remarks, “The stock was up today for a while... It was up 5%,” reflecting investor confidence (62:31).

3. Google’s AI Agent Jarvis

A substantial portion of the discussion centers on Google’s upcoming AI product, Jarvis. According to Leo, Jarvis is designed to operate within the browser, automating tasks like booking flights or ordering products based on user commands (04:28). Jeff compares it to Anthropic’s recent announcements, noting similarities in functionality and raising concerns about user trust and AI reliability.

Notable Quote:
Paris Martineau skeptically questions, “I just don’t think that this is going to end up being that useful to the average consumer,” expressing doubts about Jarvis’s practical utility (07:08).

4. AI in Healthcare: Transcription Challenges

The hosts discuss the problematic integration of AI-powered transcription tools in medical settings. An article from AP reveals instances where AI, specifically Whisper AI, inaccurately transcribed medical conversations, leading to potential misinformation in patient records (10:37). Jeff underscores the risks by stating, “We don’t trust you yet...,” highlighting the critical need for accuracy in healthcare applications.

Notable Quote:
Paris Martineau emphasizes the long-term dangers: “What happens when suddenly someone has a disease or health risk noted on their medical files... What a nightmare” (13:51).

5. AI Summarization Tools and Media Impact

The conversation shifts to AI’s role in media, particularly focusing on Apple’s new feature that summarizes conversations and content. While acknowledging the convenience, the hosts express concerns over accuracy and the potential for AI to misinterpret context, as seen in example summaries that altered the intended meaning (22:46).

Notable Quote:
Jeff Jarvis advises caution: “Use it for brainstorming. There are uses for creativity. Don’t use it for anything that matters because we know it doesn’t work” (18:43).

6. Defining Open Source AI

A segment addresses the challenges in defining what constitutes open source AI. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has proposed criteria that Meta’s Llama model fails to meet, primarily due to restrictions on commercial use and lack of transparency in training data (80:26). The hosts debate the implications of such definitions on the AI ecosystem and the potential for "open washing" by companies.

Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte supports OSI’s stance: “They have released finally an official definition for open artificial intelligence... how have you built it” (80:41).

7. Digital Preservation and Copyright Issues

Jeff brings attention to the Internet Archive’s struggles with digital preservation amid legal constraints. The Librarian of Congress ruling against libraries lending video games has significant repercussions for preserving digital culture (52:36). The hosts lament the loss of accessible legacy content and emphasize the importance of safeguarding digital heritage against both technical and legal threats.

Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte states, “Copyright holders have an undue influence on the courts and on the Librarian of Congress. And yeah, that’s a shame...” (54:54).

8. Foursquare’s Retirement

The episode covers the announcement that Foursquare, once a dominant location-based service, is sunsetting its consumer app. Jeff reminisces about Foursquare’s heyday and its pivot to a location data platform that powers services like Uber (119:12). The hosts reflect on the shift from user-facing applications to backend data services.

Notable Quote:
Jeff Jarvis remarks on the sentimental value: “He told me, I happen to be a very social person... It’s sad.” (119:26).

9. McDonald’s McFlurry Machine Troubles and Right to Repair

A compelling discussion unfolds around McDonald's ongoing issues with their McFlurry machines. The proprietary software by Taylor Commercial Food Service has rendered franchise owners dependent on manufacturer technicians for repairs. A recent ruling by the Copyright Office grants a narrow exemption, potentially easing repair restrictions (114:40).

Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte ponders the broader implications: “It's like if a store had a bulletin board on it and it was able to sell everything that was stuck to the bulletin board... That’s not yours, that’s ours.” (110:52).

10. YouTube Premium and Advertising Revenue

The hosts analyze Alphabet's diversification of revenue streams, noting that while advertising still constitutes 75% of Google’s revenue, there is a growing emphasis on YouTube Premium subscriptions. Jeff questions the profitability balance between ad revenue and subscriptions, considering his own experience as a YouTube Premium user who primarily benefits from ad-free viewing (66:25).

Notable Quote:
Jeff Jarvis muses, “I hope my doctor doesn’t use it to make life and death decisions” (19:54), relating back to AI’s limited trustworthiness in critical applications.

11. AI-Generated Content and Digital Interaction

In a humorous exchange, the hosts experiment with AI-generated voices replicating their own, highlighting both the advancements and limitations of current AI models. They discuss the uncanny valley effect and the potential for AI to create indistinguishable yet mechanically flawed imitations (83:23).

Notable Quote:
Jeff Jarvis comments, “Don’t give away anything here” while interacting with the AI-generated Leo, underscoring the challenges in lending authenticity to AI voices (85:39).

12. Closing Remarks and Future Topics

As the episode concludes, the hosts tease upcoming topics, including discussions on open source AI and its broader implications. They also touch upon personal anecdotes and the intertwining of AI with everyday experiences, reinforcing the podcast’s commitment to exploring the nuanced intersections of technology and society.

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Notable Themes and Insights:

• AI Reliability and Trust: A recurring concern is the trustworthiness of AI systems in critical applications like healthcare and automated tasks.

• Open Source Ethics: The debate around what constitutes open source AI highlights the tension between accessibility and proprietary restrictions.

• Digital Preservation Challenges: Legal and technical barriers threaten the preservation of digital culture, emphasizing the need for robust archival solutions.

• Revenue Diversification: Alphabet’s shift towards subscription models like YouTube Premium indicates a strategic move to balance advertising dependence.

• Right to Repair Movement: The McFlurry machine issue exemplifies the broader struggle for consumers and businesses to reclaim control over their devices.

Conclusion: Episode 792 of This Week in Google provides a multifaceted exploration of Alphabet’s financial health, the impact of AI on various industries, and ongoing debates in digital preservation and open source ethics. Through engaging dialogue and insightful analysis, the hosts offer listeners a comprehensive understanding of the current technological landscape and its future trajectory.

End of Summary

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twig this week at Google. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau is here. And of course we're going to kick things off with Google Quarterly results. They made a lot of money in the last three months. Is that a surprise? China's richest man, TikTok's founder. And Elon builds a compound for his moms. It's all coming up next on Twig. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twig. This is Twig. This week at Google. Episode 792 recorded Wednesday, October 30, 2024. 5 to 10 people at your door. It's time for Twig this Week in Giggles, the show we cover the latest news from the Sniggleverse. Giggleverse and some Google News. Actually, there's quite a bit of Google News this week with the wonder Jeff Jarvis, who has a new role in the world. I saw plural roles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's got two, but I announced it here first.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And anybody could give a darn what I'm doing, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we care. You're writing books, which is the most important thing. And of course, there's the two books behind him, the Web 3 and the Gutenberg parenthesis. And of course, magazine, which is a book. Ish. It's a book light.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's. If you want. If you want a nice.

[Paris Martineau]

It's definitely a book.

[Leo Laporte]

A quick read with a lot of pictures. You get the idea. I'm just teasing you. As if I had something to compete. No, no. My friend Jeff's new title. His new role. He is a visiting presser at Stony Brook University School of Communications and Journalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Communication. Singular. I'll get in trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

Communication. There's only one. And a distinguished fellow. Hello, Fellow. At the center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Aren't I distinguished?

[Leo Laporte]

Very distinguished. So congratulations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I'm still. I am still Professor Mary forever at the townite Center. No, I don't. I know. I'm just trying to cue the music.

[Leo Laporte]

Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

[Jeff Jarvis]

York cannot leave Craig out. That would be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with us, the wonderful Paris Martino. Hot dog hat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lady Hatted.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

She's got a Nathan's wiener on her head. And is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That does sound bad.

[Leo Laporte]

That is just something you had lying around. That's not your holiday.

[Paris Martineau]

It is just something I had around the house.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Good to see you. Reporter at the Information. She does the weekend, has the week every week.

[Paris Martineau]

You may be wondering, is the weekend going to come and I'm. I'm working behind the scenes to make.

[Leo Laporte]

It happen this weekend. We set the clocks forward, by the way, that's.

[Paris Martineau]

I take no responsibility for that one.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your fault. I blame you. Let's talk about Jarvis. And I'm not talking. Jeff. It was only a matter of time before Google created something named Jarvis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you remember back in the day, so does Zuckerberg.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, his own.

[Jeff Jarvis]

His own AI was named Jarvis. He addressed it as Jarvis.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the story in the informacion Google preps an AI that takes over computers. That headline is a little spooky scary, not to mention the drawing of a hand emerging from your screen taking over your computer, but it's really not anything like that. Although I think it's very interesting. Aaron Wu has the story. The product is not yet announced, but Aaron's got the scoop. According to three people with direct knowledge of the product, the artificial intelligence will be in your browser and will kind of take over. You say you tell it, I need a flight and it will go out and book a flight, or I need a car and I'll go out and book an Uber or I want to buy something along the lines of this fine hat and it will find the hat and buy it. This is kind of funny because Anthropic announced something similar just, just last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ahead of that. I don't know if this is unrelated or if Google thought, oh, we, we got that too. They're going to release it. According to Aaron Wu at the Information, Google plans to preview the product, also known as a computer using agent, as early as December alongside the release of its next flagship Gemini Geminu large language model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So when I was talking about this with Jason at AI inside, it works off the screenshot, which is the same thing that Anthropic said, which struck me that that's very similar to what we've discussed about Android and the new product of working off the screenshot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so it seems like it's a new layer of how we interact. What we're doing on our screen tells the machine something that can then supposedly give us something relevant as a result. Is that what's happening here? I can't really figure it out, but it takes over your machine.

[Leo Laporte]

It reminds me of the R1, which is a product that didn't really take off and sold quite a limited number. Remember, it was that little cute little rabbit and you would. Instead of. It's a. It was kind of like supposed to be like a smartphone but instead of having apps on it, you would just tell it what you wanted to do. It turns out it was an Android device with an app, a single app, the Rabbit app on it. And you would tell it what you wanted to do and then it would call Uber for you or do whatever you know you need it needed to do to fulfill your needs. Anthropic said its product can operate different applications installed on a person's computer. Jarvis can only operate the web browser. So really Anthropic is kind of like manipulates the keyboard and mouse. Jarvis is for a Chrome browser, basically. Again from Aaron Wu. Jarvis, at least for now, targets primarily consumers who want to automate everyday web based tasks. At Google's developer conference, Sundar Pichai, for instance, suggested future versions of Gemini could take several actions on its own to help someone return a pair of shoes.

[Paris Martineau]

I have two thoughts on this one. How is this going to get around whenever I'm navigating the Internet? Because I'm an insane person and I have insane person browsing habits. I am always hit by we think you're a computer. Please answer me these riddles 3 and I don't think that Jarvis is going to be able to answer those riddles three to be able to return my shoes or whatever and then my people.

[Leo Laporte]

Are going to have to rethink their are you a robot Captchas aren't they?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, because your browser is your robot.

[Paris Martineau]

I am, but that assumes that this product gets up off the ground and becomes popular and I'm just not convinced. I mean, maybe I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I'm just not convinced that this is going to end up being that useful to the average consumer. Much like I feel like ChatGPT and chatbots as of right now are not that useful to the average consumer.

[Leo Laporte]

Wu quotes two of her sources saying this might be a deal breaker. The agent currently operates relatively slowly because the model needs to think for a few seconds before taking each action. So Jarvis will be like telling your grandpa what to do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, hey.

[Paris Martineau]

Now press the X button. Grandpa.

[Leo Laporte]

What X button. Beat two, three, four. Okay, now what? I don't think that's very. That's not going to get anybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is all. Everybody's just going, we had, I talked about this last week. They're all going, agent mad agents make.

[Leo Laporte]

Sense, but at some point it's a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bad experience, then why do it? And if you don't trust it to do it right, don't do it. But at some level, agents replace apps and at some Level generative AI replaces apps as well. You're giving commands to things and do you trust it to go off and do what you want? Does it know enough about you to do it?

[Leo Laporte]

Right, so here's the question. Clearly we understand, and I think Google understands that one of the desirable uses of an AI would be as an agent, that you would, you know, I mean, isn't that kind of what Siri is kind of supposed to be? Or Google Assistant, you talk to them and they do something for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It does something clearly irrelevant and useless. But yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we know that that's the goal from science fiction. Right? Right. So the question is, should companies release partly their products as a way of getting there or should they just hold it back till it can actually be useful? Because Siri, I think people have already decided Siri is a moron.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's, it's given cooties to audio interface for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and then now they've added, they've, you know, our Apple intelligence is out came out earlier this week and they didn't really improve Siri. But watch, they gave it a nice new visual effect on the screen. Now that's it.

[Paris Martineau]

High tech.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, Siri, you're so smart. Now let's see what Siri says. To who? Let's see what he says. See what he says?

[Paris Martineau]

I can't read it.

[Leo Laporte]

It says to Whole Foods Market. Let's see what he says. I'm talking about you, Siri. Send it to Whole Foods Market.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm talking about you, Siri.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently I just sent a text, all foods that says, I'm talking about you, Siri. But you know what? Here's the funniest part. Not again. They're getting a lot of those. Another one. Okay, so you can see it's not smarter, it's just, it's, it's attempting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And we don't trust you yet. There's another story in the run now today that ChatGPT's transcription function and transcription, you think was pretty easy. When it finds silence, it makes stuff up, it adds sentences in. Right. Well, how are we going to trust that to do things for us?

[Leo Laporte]

This is the story from AP that whisper AI is hallucinating when used in hospitals. Yeah, not so good.

[Paris Martineau]

And this is something that's really concerning me because AI powered transcription tools are being pushed at a crazy rate in hospitals and medical facilities of all types even. I just took Gizmo for a yearly checkup and my vet was using an AI transcription tool in the vet appointments.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I Had a slightly more serious doctor. Well it saves you doing the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But I went to the doctor recently and they have a. He has a thing on the wall and says I, I, you know, so he doesn't have to say it over and over. I will be using an AI oh really Transcription tool so that I don't have to be on the keyboard while I'm talking to you. It's recording our conversation. Be reassured. That is just used to turn that into text. It will never be, you know, used in any other way until the recording is destroyed stolen. But I, you know, I hope they call the original speech the ground truth. That's the start starting point for the AI here. The researcher Allison Konecki, who wrote this study at Cornell. Here's a printout of some of the things. So the ground truth was the recording said a cat to cat. Cat obviously misunderstood the text. The guy in the black coat, there was one guy called how do you get from a cat to cat? Cat to the guy in the black coat There was one guy called. Here's more ground truth. Well, if I was going to make a sandwich without a peanuts and some kind of fruit, I would really prefer a really good bakery that has to which the computer interpreted it. Well, if I was going to make a sandwich out of peanuts and some kind of fruit, I would go to prefer a really good bakery that is a really good sandwich which isn't the same thing. It's just, it's hallucinating. It's not just the pauses. It's when it doesn't understand as well. It's making up stuff to fill in the. It's being very helpful. It knows it's human. Master wants something and it's going to give you something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you're, you're at the doctor's and it says amputate his right leg. And it makes that up.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. A University of Michigan. Go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

The thing that worries me is, you know what? This could. The effects of this that could be farther down the line if every doctor is using this. If this is integrated into your medical files just as like a seamless part of note taking. What happens when suddenly you know someone has a disease or health risk noted on their medical files time and time again that didn't ever actually like was never actually noted by the medical professional. It just got in there because of a transcription error. And then we know how Sisyphean the US healthcare system is. You're never going to be able to get that removed and Right. What a nightmare.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's kind of that earlier question, which is, is it better?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sisyphean. Sisyphean.

[Leo Laporte]

Pushing a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I know that. I'm trying to. I've always wondered how to say this.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Sisyphean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sisyphean, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, how would you say Sisyphean?

[Paris Martineau]

Either way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, there's probably a right way here. And I'll bet you were right. I just hadn't heard that before.

[Leo Laporte]

That way. I've always heard the Sisyphean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Seems awkward.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's play Sisyphean says Sisyphean. Oh, but Google says Sisyphean. The other one, Sisyphean.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my. Wait a minute. No, wait a minute. That's less commonly. Wait a minute. Let's get the more common one. Sisyphean. Basically, both are okay. Sisyphean or Sisyphean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay. Both are okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess the fact that we can't figure it out means the task of figuring out this pronunciation is Sisyphean and.

[Leo Laporte]

We is left to the. As an exercise to the AI. Sorry, I didn't mean to point. Which is, should you release these things because it's only. They only get better by being out in the wild and then really put guardrails around it, like tell the doctors. Now, whatever you do, don't. Don't get rid of the recording. That's the ground truth. This is just kind of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But who's gonna go back and look at it? Who's gonna notice the mistake Was there. That's where Paris is, Right? You can. You can say, I know we didn't say that, but then that. Well, but the record says this. How do you get that. That audio? No, I can't release it because of hipaa, even though it's your words.

[Leo Laporte]

So I was talking about this earlier on Windows Weekly. Our good friend, dear friend, Cory Doctorow, who's on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, coined the term, became the word of the year in shittification. But I think that actually what's happening in the AI world is not in jittification, but in clippification. It's turning everything into an annoying little assistant. That is just wrong and useless.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you're so right. In clip.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in clippification. That's clippy. Everything is becoming kind of this idiot savant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could we have that for our show title Clipification?

[Leo Laporte]

Clipification. I think so. We'll make it the show title, I think. And what. But this here's the problem is if it's flooding the zone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

With Just. And it's not. It's not evil or bad. It's trivial.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's goblin. It's banal.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I've noticed this recently.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it anal or banal?

[Paris Martineau]

Banals.

[Leo Laporte]

I was taught banal, but. Okay, okay, a little. We gotta get. We gotta get this right here. Let's see. I know. Banal. Yeah, Banal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no alternative.

[Paris Martineau]

There is none. It's something I've noticed recently with looking at posts on Twitter. If you look under a popular post on Twitter, X, the everything app, what have you, the like 10 or 20 replies you see underneath.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody calls it the everything app. Nobody.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the thing is, if I call it X, I do have to say X, the everything app, because I think that that's very even funnier.

[Leo Laporte]

How I gotta do it.

[Paris Martineau]

The 10 or 20 replies underneath your average tweet are like. If they're garbage, they're all AI generated and they're all trying to restate the same thing in the tweet or approach it in the same way because it's clearly coming from the same model and it's just sloppy. It's slop. Beget slop. It's awful.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It's slop all the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's my friend Matthew Kirschenbaum. It's the. It's the text apocalypse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is this what happens to your. Your ex posts power Paris, is that you just get a lot of.

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't found that that much. And whenever I have posts that go.

[Leo Laporte]

Viral.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't want to have to deal with that because I think after a certain point, the notifications are too unwieldy and they have diminishing returns. However, I've noticed this on any post that basically comes across my for you page. Now you look at all the replies and it is just slop.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

It's hard to even find, like a human response. And now Twitter has introduced kind of the feature on, I guess, some instances of, like, the mobile app where you can reorder the comments or the replies underneath by most liked or most recent, basically in order to get around the problem created by making it so that anybody with a blue check gets automatically pinned to the top to where you can kind of try to surface organic replies. But at a certain point, it doesn't even matter. They're just kind of swarmed by all nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

So let the word go forth not to trust the outputs of LLMs that they're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Use it for brainstorming. There are uses for creativity. Don't use it for anything that matters because we know it doesn't work and it ain't AGI around the corner. It can't figure out what a peanut butter sandwich is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and importantly the. You as a human need to disintermediate AI. You need to stand between AIs out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But then what's the point? Real world just kind of do it yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's. No, I mean look, if I gave you 12 scientific papers and you asked AI for a summary. By the way, a new feature that is in Apple Intelligence which is now in all Macs and iOS devices of recent vintage, it has a summarize thing. You would find that useful?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah. Especially for a statutory column. I use. I honestly do that every time.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you. Do you feel like you still have to read the column and compare the outcome?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I get through 3/4 of it and.

[Leo Laporte]

I say, oh geez, I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then I put it notebook 11 and.

[Leo Laporte]

It does a good job, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It does, yeah. And that's not earth shattering. That's not vital.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You wouldn't use it to make decision life and death decisions. But to summarize and save you some time maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just hope my doctor doesn't use it to make life and us me.

[Leo Laporte]

As somebody in our YouTube chat says, AIs don't do amputations. Humans do.

[Paris Martineau]

So robots.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My. My prostate went out with a robot man. So Paris, you. You are you still. You lost Dr. Don or whatever his name was, your doctor you like Dr. Dan.

[Paris Martineau]

I lost Washington D.C. i was close. RIP.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you're still with Amazon Health?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm still with One Medical. Which is now part of Amazon. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So do you think they're going to be the first Normandy for the invasion of AI into medical care?

[Leo Laporte]

Because that'd be interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I'll ask the time I'm there. I. I'm sure that they will try and integrate some aspect of it. My understanding of Amazon's approach to this area, which is technically concierge medicine, is that it was original. Like their original interest in entering this area was build a kind of luxurious esque product for largely like enterprise clients like Google or other big companies that sell this like a one medical subscription as a service to their employees or like a benefit. And so part of the, you know, cost benefit analysis for a company like Amazon is they want to be able to offer their company, their customers, in this case being big like enterprise clients, they want to be able to offer them overall reduced healthcare spending and that often ends up being by having patients interact with doctors more so I'm not sure that that would immediately translate to introducing AI into the mix because I mean, maybe if Amazon just decides to go whole hog on the AI will make everything better trained. Sure. But right now, kind of the whole ethos of one medical or at least why I seem to like it and what the doc whenever I'm there, the doctors usually remember that I used to cover Amazon and tell me about what's just generally going up there. Me and Dan would do every time is he be like oh here's how things are going and so far it seems to be all right for them. I mean I think they might have to see slightly more patients, but so.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we talk about the Apple summary notification summary feature and how it it told a guy he was getting dumped?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I don't think we did, but that's my two exposures to it are a guy who was told in brief he was getting dumped and a guy who got a summary of his mom's text, which was originally about how she went on a killer hike and is now coming home and got a summary that said hike resulted in her death. She is now coming home. Or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy cow. So this is a feature again rolling out in iOS 18.1 to all Apple users who are using late model iPhones, iPads and Macs, here's the tweet from Nick. Got his 01. Nick is a developer for anyone who's wondered what Apple intelligence summary of a breakup text looks like and he posts it no longer in a relationship semicolon wants belongings from the apartment. Nick says, yes, this is real. Yes, it happened yesterday. Yes, it was my birthday. Oh, burn.

[Paris Martineau]

But if you read the Found in.

[Leo Laporte]

The Discord, if you read the original text, it's actually an accurate summary. That's. I mean, that's what happened. It's kind of harsh. Here it is. Oh, this is terrible. This is from Andrew Schmidt on X.com.

[Paris Martineau]

My mom, the everything site.

[Leo Laporte]

The hike. I'm sorry, the X doc on the Everything site, Apple's AI summary. Attempted suicide but recovered and hiked in Redlands of Palm Springs and the ground. Truth was that hike almost killed me. Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It lost the almost. But I guess it didn't in the sense that she did. She died and then went. She came back from the dead and.

[Leo Laporte]

Then almost killed me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, this is the thing about AI. It has no ability to have reality.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't know context. Yes, it does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Against reality, there is no reality. There is no meaning. It is the ultimate nihilist. Paris it is an entirely nihilist universe that has no meaning. That's what AI is.

[Leo Laporte]

And yet I have to say that gives.

[Paris Martineau]

That gives a bad name. Denialist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on.

[Paris Martineau]

Me and Bonito here holding up the fort.

[Leo Laporte]

I've had this feature for some time and there are some useful things. For instance, here's. It says, my ring doorbell 5 to 10 people who are at my front door, not all at once.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Damn, you're popping up. Oh, you forgot you. I love that.

[Paris Martineau]

It makes it seem like there's a gang at your front door, but it's probably just you going in and out your front door. A couple times it was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was me. So isn't that funny? But at the same time, people at.

[Paris Martineau]

Your front door is so funny.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better than like 10 messages one after another as somebody comes and goes and comes and goes. Well, I know better. I know that five to ten people.

[Paris Martineau]

Are giving more information than.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'S five to ten. Can it count? Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Doesn't it know how many people were at your door? Because it's got a camera there.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so this is what I would have gotten without the summary. I think you can see that there's a person.

[Paris Martineau]

So the five to 10 people is an Apple summary, not a ring summary.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's from Apple. That's the Apple intelligence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why is person capitalized and front door is capitalized? That very. That bothers me a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's ring that. This is the ring notification. It also capitalized person, so you're right. That's kind of bad grammar or something. But it's. Somebody was coming and going, I guess. And so. And I. And the Apple summary was a little strange.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the summary is also. They're all gone now because you only got a summary. You didn't get the notifications?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I got both. I can expand it. So I expanded the one. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm curious, Leo, does this work. Does the Apple summary work for, like, group chats?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Will it try to summarize like an out, like my group chat? Probably in an hour. Can do a couple hundred messages, depending on what's going on. Will it try to summarize that?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll have to download the new update.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you need one and you need to apply, which is weird because it'll tell you in about five minutes. Okay, you're in. I mean, it's like it's not exactly the most exclusive nightclub in the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I also want to know what it. How it. How it's going to take like inside jokes and stuff that you you only say to can you imagine Paris's feed?

[Leo Laporte]

I suspect it's going to be a source of much mirth and merriment.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. You get a lot of these screenshots in the next coming weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Get ready your x.com the everything feed will be full.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's it called? Apple. If I'm going to search Twitter for.

[Leo Laporte]

It now, Apple Intelligence or Apple AI, you could try that as well. It's pretty funny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

May need to append a correction to this summary. Washington Post Jeff Bezos criticizes the Post Slack of presidential endorsement in an op ed.

[Leo Laporte]

What? No, not exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Another one. Multiple users.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Multiple users comment about that on your recent submissiveness.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Leo, let's I want to talk about this endorsement thing because I think it's kind of interesting. Independent of whether Jeff Bezos told the Washington Post, by the way, according to.

[Paris Martineau]

The Washington Post journalists, he did so he did.

[Leo Laporte]

And a bunch of people quit and 200,000 subscribers canceled.

[Jeff Jarvis]

250,000.

[Paris Martineau]

250,000.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a substantial number.

[Jeff Jarvis]

$30 million.

[Leo Laporte]

But value and I want to ask the journalists here, honestly, if he had done this 10 months ago or a year ago, I would kind of say, yeah, you're right, a newspaper should what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everybody'S been saying candidates Marty Barron said that. Everybody's been saying that. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. But he didn't do it 10 months ago. He did it this week while the election he did it the week before the election when the editorial board had already written their endorsement and they endorsed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Other in other campaigns, but not the most important one on earth.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and they do endorse another stuff.

[Paris Martineau]

They already did and they've endorsed for decades and decades.

[Leo Laporte]

Like you know, and I admit in my research I voted already but in my research, you know, California, we have this horrible initiative ballot system. It doesn't take very many signatures to get it on the ballot and they are often very misleading in their wording. I don't know how any normal voter is supposed to figure this out, but I do a lot of research. I go to a League of Women Voters site and Ballotpedia and they list newspaper endorsements and I pay attention to that at certain level. It's not the only data point, but it's a data point and I, and I value it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, yeah, it's useful but the Washington Post has now not done this. The New York Times is not going to do endorsements in local elections. And yeah, it had value. And maybe you're Going to discrete. You know, if the Wall Street Journal likes them. I won't. Okay, that's a data point. Can I plug my piece in the Columbia Journalism Review now since it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line 90.

[Leo Laporte]

Very prestigious.

[Jeff Jarvis]

CJR where I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Matthew Ingram still there at CJR.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He left money.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, line what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

95.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, I wasn't paying attention.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know. You never do to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are liberals infuriated with the media? Can I put this in Apple Intelligence? Yes, please do. This is you talking about your own New York Times. What is your hashtag?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And broken Times. Broken Post and Product Journal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'll read this. What's your.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The argument here?

[Leo Laporte]

AI and summarize.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The right has always hated the press. But now there's a wave of criticism from the left of the press for a reason in which they're missing the big story of our lifetimes, which is the fascism at the door. And they're not covering it.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean the press isn't. Doesn't have a liberal bias.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the thing. So Marty Baron in his memoirs lamented that the posts.

[Leo Laporte]

80.

[Jeff Jarvis]

80 More than 80% of the post readers. Former executive editor of the Washington Post. And I said that. Well, that's good. You know who is what I always put. These days? I pull this. If I pulled this prop out here.

[Leo Laporte]

The American. Yes. You have the newspaper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In 1900 in New York, there were 46 newspapers accounting Brooklyn. 46 daily newspapers. Daily. People had their own newspapers, right. And that was okay. And they had their own viewpoints. And now we end up with these monopoly papers and they think they can serve everybody. And that's the myth. They convince themselves of that. Oh, we're going to serve conservatives and liberals all the same. No, you're not. No. And you're thus ill serving your primary audience. So Jeff Bezos pissed the hell out of the last people who were loyal to the paper.

[Leo Laporte]

So let's see. Get web page summaries with Apple Intelligence. Go to Safari. Click the show reader, summarize. Okay, so Safari. I have to. I'm going to pull up your article and see what Apple Intelligence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then we can make a podcast of.

[Leo Laporte]

It on Google LLM. You know, you don't really have to do any work anymore as a journalist. No, just, you know, it's going to all be done for you. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or Paris. I'm at the end of my career. Paris is the beginning of hers.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I do. You know, I feel bad for our kids because they are. And Paris is in that same age group where they're entering this time of. Great.

[Paris Martineau]

It's great. I'm having so much fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so good. So wonderful.

[Paris Martineau]

Love life.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you. You're having fun. You are having fun.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, Nick Vember is on the horizon, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I heard you already watched too. Not once.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got a bank some because I'm not going to be watching Nick Cage movies when I get done with this podcast at 8:30 at night on Wednesdays. So. Got a bank.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is the Apple summary of your article in one paragraph. Liberal readers and journalists are increasingly critical of major news organizations for their political coverage. So far so good. Accusing them of both sides ing false equivalents and sane washing bullets.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very easy for it to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Critics argue that the media should be focused on the existential threat posed by fascism and provide historical context, text to explain its roots and perils. Journalists like Jamel Bouie are praised for their use of historical analysis to eliminate the underlying issues in political discourse. Yeah, pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's obviously more than that, but nothing's wrong there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have theories why this is happening. Yeah, that's pretty. That's pretty strange.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It also does bullet points. I don't know how to do that on this, but yeah, it's pretty. So now did. Does that mean you don't have to read the article a lot?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, because it left a lot out.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And my bons and my plug in the articles for if Books Could Kill podcast is in there, which was noticed on the Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So I guess we all agree AI has some usefulness and it needs to be kind of monitored and you have to consider the output.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you have an opinion about the Washington Post?

[Leo Laporte]

What about it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you have an opinion about it? Paris and I have had ours.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree. Basically, I don't have a problem with newspapers not endorsing. They should either endorse or not endorse, but they shouldn't make the decision the week before an election. Especially if it is apparent that the reason they made the decision is they didn't like the endorsement that was about to emerge. That's what happened at the LA Times as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, I think Paris is gonna get mad at me because I'm gonna use the word nihilism here, but I think it was a cynical and nihilistic decision because either way he wins. If Trump wins, then, you know, it's kind of hands off Jeff and his mailing rates and his AWS contracts. If Harris wins, well, she's not vindictive like Trump, so he'll be treated fairly under the law. So he's kind of okay either way.

[Leo Laporte]

You did see that both the Blue Origin met with Trump shortly after Bezos killed that endorsement. Bezos says, oh, I didn't know that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Blue Origin.

[Paris Martineau]

I would say it's more of a cynical view than a nihilistic view, because I feel like a true nihilist perspective to this would be, it doesn't matter. Endorse who you want. Who gives a crap.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I see.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so let's get the nihilist point of view in here because it's very important. The other thing that happened that I thought was interesting is Andy Jassy, who's Jeff Bezos successor at Amazon, apparently a few days after Trump was the official nominee of the Republican Party, called him, which is, by the way, every CEO probably should if he's potentially going to be a president. You want to make nice. That's what Tim Cook does very well. Right. In fact, he just went to China and they've. At the same time, they're announcing that India is going to produce a lot of iPhones. And so he's, he's tamping down, you know, the irritation the Chinese government might feel about India making iPhones. And you, you got to play that game.

[Paris Martineau]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

You got to be a politician. Jassy, though, when he went to, when he called Trump, Mark Zuckerberg did the same thing. But at that point, Trump said, you could, you know, if you really want my. My favor, you should give money to my campaign. Now write a check. How big a check can you write? Jesse says he declined to write a check.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So one thing Bezos bought himself is the newsroom at the Washington Post going after him in every way they can now. So they had a story that Bezos called Trump after he was shot in the ear, praising him for holding his fist up afterwards.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't. I think that is the job of CEOs. They're.

[Paris Martineau]

He's not a CEO.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Bezos.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but I mean, he. He owns. Still owns Blue Origin, he owns other companies. He has some financial interest in the success or failure of Amazon. He represents many to many in many minds. Amazon, does he not?

[Paris Martineau]

Certainly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, if I were Jassy and he's going over my head and trying to make deals.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not worry about Bezos. Let's just say Jassy. It's appropriate for Jassy to call. Yes. He said the Amazon Says it was, quote, a general hello type thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you want to be crop.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi, this is Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. I just want to say hello. Hello, Andy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you know, there's transactional. You know, he's going to demand something transactional. Yeah, yeah. So what are you buying into?

[Leo Laporte]

You say, you know, I'm sorry, Mr. President, but I am not. We want to stay aloof in this, but we just want to let it. Let you know that, you know, we.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not good enough for him. That'll make him your enemy. Then it's stupid to call.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because you don't do what he wants.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Zuckerberg, who of course was under fire from Donald Trump for a long time, called Trump also after the assassination to say he was badass. The Trump was a badass.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesus.

[Paris Martineau]

That leaked very quickly after the fire call.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, I think it's interesting, Donald Trump has said Zuckerberg is much better than he used to be.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say I do think it's interesting to think about why the Zuckerberg comments leaked immediately after they were made and why it took until this. For the Jassy and Bezos.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your theory?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think that obviously people closer to Zuckerberg are a bit more either outraged by his conduct or just generally leaky. And it took until this for people in the close circles of Bezos or Jassy to be motivated to share information that they shouldn't with journalists in the same way. Or I guess it could have been the journalists didn't ask like. But I'd like to believe that, you know, it's probably more on the people themselves that are in this.

[Leo Laporte]

Traditionally and certainly after Citizens United considerably, companies have contributed to both campaigns. Right. Give not equally necessarily, but often equally to both the Democrats and the Republicans because they want to be on the good side of whoever wins.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But now you're going to get judged this way.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't politics should is. I mean, businesses are somewhat apolitical in that sense, aren't they?

[Jeff Jarvis]

But can they afford to be anymore? I mean, if young people, especially people with actual morals like our Paris say, I'm only going to buy from a fashion company that does sustainable fashion, then the company has to make a stance on that and you're going to be judged according to that. And that can spread very easily into whether you're for fascism.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Of course, if you bring in the historical perspective, the media were very complicit in the rise of Hitler because the Media barons in Germany thought they could control him. Yeah, guess they couldn't. Generals thought that, too. All right, moving along.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This will get you in trouble with. Do you have any conservatives left watching the show?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's fine. You know what I want? No. Well, I want everybody to vote, and I think to the better. Whoever gets the most votes should win. That's pretty straightforward in this country. I do fear that if Trump does not win, there will be a lot of shenanigans, as there were in 2020. But. But I hope that doesn't destabilize. You know, I will say that as a business person and a political business person. I don't have a. I don't. As a business. If I put that hat on. Yeah, let me. Let me put that hat on. I don't have a dog in this hunt. I say I don't have a dog in this fight. But I do note that we have Zero ad sales. Zero. Literally not $1 for 20, 25. And it's my opinion that advertisers, however they fall in the political spectrum, are waiting to see what happens. Yeah. And because I think in general, instability and uncertainty are just bad for the economy. So whoever gets elected that. Once that's settled, I'm hoping, as an apolitical business person, whoever gets elected that people will then say, all right, fine, it's over. Now we can buy our advertising. I hope that's the case. Otherwise the lights are going to go out here, and it's no fun. Democracy dies. As do podcasts in the darkness.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Benito, if you were good, you would have turned off the lights right then. But he doesn't roll my lights here.

[Leo Laporte]

I have my own switches.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If we were still in the studio, you could have done.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it would have gotten dark.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You need a remote control bonito.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, you guys can pick something. I've got. Do you want to talk about why apples are so good these days?

[Paris Martineau]

That's exactly what I was going to say.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we're best. This podcast is best when we talk about food, and we have many, many examples of that. We are living, according to Scientific American, in a golden age of apples. Yeah, you thought I was done by computers. No, I mean apples. The fruit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you who are listening, the image on the screen right now is fruit.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple experts. Apple Fruit experts divide time into before honey crisp and after honey crisp. Now, what's your favorite apple there, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know if I have a favorite.

[Leo Laporte]

See, when I was young. And Jeff, because you're of a similar vintage. You might remember I loved Macintosh apples. But you can't. The grocery stores don't like Macintosh apples because they have no shelf life at all. We would go right around this time of year up to the apple farms, pick your own, get some cider, come back. Those were the best apples I ever had. But you can't. You can't get them in the store.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm allergic.

[Leo Laporte]

You're allergic?

[Paris Martineau]

Have you tried the microwave trick, Jeff? Have we talked about this before?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

The. One of my favorite people I work with, Martin Pierce.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes, we've argued.

[Paris Martineau]

A lovely, cantankerous editor.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you going to bring us another Ed Zitter?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, listen, Martin on the podcast would be insane. Martin, let's get him sleep while we're doing this podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's get him. Should we. Can you help us get Martin, Piers?

[Paris Martineau]

I'll ask Martin if he wants to get on the podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

I would love him.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think he is. He is an in office freak, so I don't think he would do that. He'd want to be working. However, he's also allergic to apples, but he's found that apparently his doctor told him that microwaving the apples, obviously check with your doctor. It might be a different type of allergy. Microwaving them briefly neutralizes the compound that he's allergic to. So he every day in the office will briefly microwave an apple and then eat it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This sounds like a eccentric action.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the scent? Is he British?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, Australian.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, Australia.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the scent of a slightly microwaved apple? It's probably delicious.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, it's not as fragrant as you'd think. And I sit near the microwave, so that's how I'm intimately aware with this. But not really. You don't really notice it. I expect it to be much more juicy.

[Leo Laporte]

The journal says many of us remember the US apple market was dominated for decades by one variety, Red Delicious. Do you. Have you ever had a Red Delicious? They say it's a bold name for a bland apple. Certainly red, with a lovely rich jewel color and a handsome shape. But delicious. The main alternative was Golden Delicious. Perfectly fine but similarly uninspiring yellow variety, tart green Granny Smiths, which were from Australia. You could ask Martin about them. Started taking a decent share of the market in the 80s and that's where we were stuck. You had three varieties. Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and Granny Smith. Does that ring a bell?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. There was a time when we lived in a dearth of apples.

[Leo Laporte]

We had an apple ders, but at some point, as we are now in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A banana dearth, we need to do work with bananas.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you know the ancestor of the apple of Malice Severisi still grows wild in what is now known as Kazakhstan? Farmers began domesticating apples sometime between 10 and 4,000 years ago in the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia. This is from genetic analysis. So this is not. This is real. This is science. The cultivated variety spread quickly along the Silk Road. Breeders crossed them with another wild species, Malus sylvestris, and propagated them all over the Roman Empire. But grocery stores were really what caused the problem, because they wanted an apple that had long shelf life, that wouldn't get mushy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought apples had like an all winter shelf life and you put them in the, in the root cellar and they stayed forever.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe in the root cellar, I don't know. No, they get all wrinkly. Haven't you seen a spring apple? They're all brown and wrinkly. So. So the big transformation occurred when they crossed. Let's see. Honeycrisps has a disruptive trait, says Chris Scaltschock, a geneticist who works at the U.S. department of Agriculture's research station in Kearneysville, West Virginia. Honeycrisp's texture, the crispness, had never been combined with a high acidity, high sugar apple. It was a first that really struck North American customers specifically. Well, Honeycrisp took over. The world of commercial apples now are divided into before and after Honeycrisp. There were either the soft, mealy, delicious apples, for instance, or the hard, firm, dense Granny Smith apples with Honey Crisp. Once you've had crisp, it's hard to go back, he says. All right, maybe this is not as exciting as I thought it would be due to.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, No, I think the exciting part of this is. Features quotes from a man named David Bedford who has the title apple researcher at the University of Minnesota. And I do think that's delightful. I looked him up, he says on his website. My work is directed at the development of new apple cultivars through conventional breeding and the use of market assisted selection, with special emphasis on the development of explosively crisp apples.

[Leo Laporte]

At the peak of crunch times, he says. I've had to taste 600 apples a day. The first hundred are okay, but after that it gets to be real work.

[Paris Martineau]

Poor David.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor David.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You think it's easy. You think it's a walk in the orchard there, Paris, but it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you had a heartbeat?

[Paris Martineau]

I Bet he's never a doctor. Can't come within a mile of him, though.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. More than an apple a day. 600 apples a day. So do you like the honeycrisp, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

I like the sweet apples. What is the Galaxy apple? Is that one of them?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Gala you're talking about. The Galas are quite good. Yeah, I'm a Honey Crisp kind of guy. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Well, anyway, that was a complete waste of time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It felt like a story that'd be right for us.

[Leo Laporte]

It felt like a perfect story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was nothing weird and sick about it. There was nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

I was. It was.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. There was no, like, skin face is what we were missing.

[Leo Laporte]

It was attempting a moose bouche between the politics section.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Didn't work, Leo. But, you know, you try. God bless. Are you offended, Sorbet?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm offended. Instagram says we save the best video quality for the most popular content. Are you offended by that notion that you're the as. As your old videos get older and older on Insta, they get blurrier and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Blurrier, like they can't afford the bandwidth. That's what I couldn't get about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, did a video Ask Me Anything. He says, in general, we want to show the highest quality video we can, but if something isn't watched for a long time, because the vast majority of views are in the beginning, we will move to a lower quality video. And then if it's watched again a lot, we'll re render the higher quality video. I think. Boo.

[Paris Martineau]

I think we should have video quality for the people.

[Leo Laporte]

Video quality for the people all. Yeah, if they're older, they. We're all making fists.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're trying to give Bonito a card. Let's do it again. Come on.

[Paris Martineau]

He didn't have his finger on the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like you. It's like we're holding a giant stick. A giant invisible stick.

[Paris Martineau]

It's like we're holding a giant stick.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all hanging on. Now act as if you could fall if the stick. If we let go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm having real problems with.

[Paris Martineau]

This is why you gotta watch the video, guys. This is some great, you know, not prop comedy because there's no props, but mime comedy Meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Estimated last year it served 4 billion video streams a day on Facebook.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they're short and they're nothing. It's not like YouTube. YouTube has to serve. That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't think YouTube does that. If your video is old, it doesn't go down in quality, does it? I don't think so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it a way to, is it a slightly subtle way to drive you to new and hot?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well that's my concern. More trending, the rich get richer. Right. Or anyway higher quality. By the way, this is another one that's really offending me. Video game preservationists have lost a battle with the United States copyright librarian. Librarian of Congress ruled in favor of the esa, the Video Game association, the Entertainment Software association, saying libraries should not be allowed to loan video games given the risk of them being pirated. Now the problem is preservationists want say most vast, vast majority of games never re released. There is no economic disincentive. Those that do are typically changed or remastered in ways that make them less interesting for the study of the games. And argued, you know, there's no harm to these video game companies by lending out special collections. Just, you know, I'm sure Jeff, when you, you are doing your research for your books, you go to the library and you put in a little slip and asks for access to special collections, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I go to Columbia Library, I go to Columbia University. I go up there and you have to wash your hands. You have to put everything except your pencil away and you have do things on these, on these foam rubber things to look at things. And I can only look at them there. And it's wonderful. Yeah, it's wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

So the library review request cannot happen for video games. Copyright Office, according to the Verge, already lets institutions lend out other forms of media, even software remotely, as long as they don't lend more copies than they own. Video games are still treated differently. And the Librarian of Congress is ruled should continue to be the register, that's what they call it concludes that proponents did not show that permitting off prem access to video games are likely to be non infringing. She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing video games exemption premises limitation given the market for legacy video games. But as the researchers point out, nobody's, nobody's buying these old games. And honestly I do. I am firmly in the court of this is a form of our cultural research.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I really want to take us to something quite relevant from our friends at Internet archive on line 111.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because they just did a report on our vanishing culture. Yeah. And they do it in the context of the attack. By the way, Internet Archive is back online now. God bless us.

[Leo Laporte]

Hallelujah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they say that in the final days of preparing this report, the Internet Archive was hit with a distributed denial of service attack, taking its services offline before recovering in a provisional manner while experiences before they go on to list others that have the same problems. British Library and so on. As we increasingly rely on digital archives to preserve our shared cultural heritage, any interruption in access reminds us of the fragility of our digital landscape. Given these growing threats, it is clear that more research is needed to better understand how to protect digital libraries and protect them from all kinds of things. From, from attacks, but also from courts that don't want researchers to research. It's copyright gone mad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the real, that's really the bottom line of both those stories is that the copyright holders have an undue influence on the courts and on the Librarian of Congress. And yeah, that's a shame because the Internet, Internet culture, game culture, that is our culture in the last 20 years, that's been what most closely reflects what's going on in our society.

[Paris Martineau]

A huge loss for gamers rights.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. And by the way, thank God that the Internet Archive is back up. I hope if you use.

[Paris Martineau]

Have they restored the ability to save pages though?

[Leo Laporte]

I think so. I think they're fully up now. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you go down that report a little bit. But page 14 has a count of how many pages are dead or alive, endangered or restored or preserved. This is ongoing work to keep us going and it's the heritage we have. Page 17. 470,000 pages from the MTV News website have been preserved by the Internet archive since 1997. Because MTV has erased everything from what's passed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is this the graph you're talking about? URLs preserved in the Wayback Machine. So out of 5.4 million URLs, 26% are dead, 10% vanished. Of the alive percentage, 74%, 18 are endangered. By which they mean they're not in the Wayback Machine. 16% are accessible through the Wayback Machine and 56% are preserved. I, I guess in some other way. That's good, you know, it's better than I would have expected, honestly. Yeah, but still, that's 10% of our history gone forever. You, you know, you would think that our, our the last few decades have been recorded, preserved. No, memorialized in a way no other decades in history have been.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paper was a great archive.

[Paris Martineau]

Linkrot has really, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because it's digital. You make a really interesting point. No paper, especially papyrus, will live for thousands of years. But digital stuff really depends on somebody making sure that the format is still is compatible, that there's something they can play It. Something that can read it. It could very well be 100 years or 200 years from now. There'd be a black hole that all 100,000 podcasts that we've done here on Twitter would be lost forever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It only really takes one bad solar storm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true.

[Paris Martineau]

A few cosmic rays and one neutron have a club. Twit. Stretch goal to get every podcast episode engraved in vinyl.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. Vinyl would survive a solar storm, a neutron bomb, even being buried underground for hundreds of years. You could still play it back. And it's not. Wouldn't be too hard for an archivist of the next century.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you listen to this? In the year 6052. That's. That's why we're. Why we're there. As we.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why we're here.

[Paris Martineau]

Stretch Goal.

[Leo Laporte]

There was this thing called Nathan's Hot Dogs.

[Paris Martineau]

It was a beautiful time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

They once held a Fourth of July hot dog eating contest. I was there.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that where you got the hat?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it. On Coney Island.

[Paris Martineau]

Was it on Coney Island?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where else?

[Paris Martineau]

Before the back. Before the great split happened.

[Leo Laporte]

The Great bifurcation.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What was the great bifurcation?

[Paris Martineau]

It the. When our main hot dog guy got kicked out.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like. It was just like in. In heavyweight boxing where you had two champions. That's bad news.

[Paris Martineau]

It's more like Pete Rowan, Joey Chestnut, the OG of, you know, rapid dog eating, took a deal, I believe, to do a separate hot dog eating contest, I believe on Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Not done an hour already, and I haven't done a single ad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's true.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, we gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

We gotta.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We got four, folks. Oh, my God. Which is good news, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I just realized, well, we're not used to having ads on this show. We're used to just blabbing on and on without any breaks. All right, well, in memory of Joey Chestnut, I would like to tell you about our sponsor, Veeam. Make sure your data is safe. Get data resilient with the Data Resilience leader, V E E A M. Without your data, your customers trust turns to digital dust. That. Yes, I made that little rhyme up just for you. That's why Veeam's data protection and ransomware recovery. Oh, you like those two words, don't you? Ensures that you could secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens. I don't know why every company in the world isn't a Veeam customer. They are the number one global market leader in data resilience. 77%. 77% of the Fortune 500 uses Veeam to keep their businesses running when digital disruptions like ransomware strike. This is the tool everybody should be using. When I see in the headlines, oh, they had to pay the ransom because they didn't have copies of their data. I wonder, what were they thinking? Veeam lets you back up and recover your data instantly across your entire cloud ecosystem, wherever it lives. With Veeam, you might even stop the ransomware before it hits. You can proactively detect malicious activity. And this is really important. It removes the guesswork. Kind of gives you the assurance that you're doing the right thing by automating your recovery plans and policies. You do have recovery plans and policies, don't you? Veeam can help you get those. Get real time support from ransomware recovery experts, too, should the worst happen. Look, there's no question data is the lifeblood of your business. Now's the time to get data resilient with Veeam. V e e a m.comv double eam.com Go to veeam.com to learn more. I don't want to see you in the headline, so do it. Go to veeam.com and if Joey Chestnut had just gone to veeam.com. no, Joey's still around, right? He's not. Nothing happened to Joey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He was.

[Paris Martineau]

He was banned from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, because he did a deal with a. With a competing hot dog.

[Paris Martineau]

Because he did an endorsement deal with Impossible Foods.

[Leo Laporte]

Non meat hot dogs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was non meat hot dogs that were even worse if it had been pork hot dogs.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Alphabet, we should league eating went against when went out for blood.

[Leo Laporte]

We should probably mention that Alphabet's quarterly results came out today.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was just gonna suggest that.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to mention that actually it was yesterday they announced a Q3 revenue. This is three months of $88.25 billion. A big jump. $11 billion more than the same quarter last year. Get this though. Net income, the profit last year, 19.7 billion, which isn't anything to sneeze at in three months. Google made $26.3 billion this year. This quarter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The stock was up today for a while. I looked middle day at about almost. Let's see, $5. It ended the day at 2.2. It's $5. It's up at the end. Up 2.29%. It was up 5%.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. Yeah. People like. They like this. We were talking on Windows Weekly about Microsoft's results. Even better. Slightly better. It's a good time to be a tech company. Weird thing came out of Sundar Pichai's mouth, though, that I think everybody agreed might not have been the best thing to say. He said that 25% of Google's code is now being written by AIs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why is that a bad thing to say? They make AI. They want to show how useful it is more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well. Or may. Well, if you think it's doing a good job, I guess that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's their responsibility. In the end, if it breaks, then that's still their problem.

[Leo Laporte]

More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do you measure that? What, lines or what?

[Leo Laporte]

Probably by lines. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It is, of course, reviewed and accepted by engineers. Pichai said this is on the earnings call. That's kind of. I mean, you know what, it's a. It's a big statement about how well AI can generate code.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, kids don't go to get a computer science degree. Come to the new degree that I'm going to help start. That's about the humanities in AI and the Internet. And you don't have to code because the machine's going to do it for you. So you learn something else.

[Leo Laporte]

You aren't going to be teaching journalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm branching out.

[Leo Laporte]

Branching out. AI has been very good to you as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. True.

[Leo Laporte]

Operating income was also Strong. Google Services, $30.9 billion. That is up almost 30% from last year. Google Cloud, 1.95 billion. Last year, 270 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. Wow. Is that the. They said AI was so great for them. Is that. Is that where that comes out?

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it must be. I mean, what other changes were there? Google Cloud has always been a laggard to Microsoft cloud.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And Amazon the champion. Google is always a slow number three, but boy, I mean, they still are. I should point out Microsoft's cloud and Amazon's cloud did fine. But $1.95 billion in revenue compared to last year's quarter of $1 billion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does it say what the proportion of total revenue is of advertising now? Because that's been the number to watch is how.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, Google still generates 75% of revenue from ad sales. And revenue from Both search and YouTube ad sales increased around 12%, slightly lower than the previous quarter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's way down from what it was. I mean, it was. It was. It was 98%.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

This is more detail from my colleague Aaron Wu, who covers this free cash flow fell 22% to 17 billion which spending it on spending on data center and computer for AI losses from Alphabet level activities, which is kind of includes its main AI group DeepMind increased 39% to 3.2 billion in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. I was nearly twice as high as the same cost last year.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good to be the king, I guess.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

YouTube did pretty well too, right? YouTube in subscription and ad revenue for the first time crossed $50 billion for the year for that's for the year, but still what's interesting is they do not make a distinction between ad revenue and subscription revenue, which makes sense. I almost feel like the ads are there to drive you to subscribe. Do you think they make more money on subscriptions on YouTube, YouTube Premium than they do on ads? They would rather Google advertising business. So for me, am I more valuable to them as a subscriber or as an ad viewer?

[Paris Martineau]

Probably as an ad viewer.

[Leo Laporte]

Really interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess. I mean that's based on nothing but just based on the fact their business is advertised.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And probably the people who subscribe consume enough content that they'd be seeing a lot of ads.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's it. It depends on how much you actually consume.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't see any ads. Right. Because I'm a YouTube Premium.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but if you're like watching 247 they'd rather you watching the ads than pay the premium. But if you only watch a couple of it like a video a day.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm a good deal for them because I don't watch.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you wouldn't watch a lot. The thing is they would lose you entirely if you if you had no choice but to see too many ads. So it's a way to hold on to you no matter what.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But yes, you guessed that the growth in cloud was due to AI and that is probably shows. So again from the information, might as well. This is from that guy who doesn't like apples, Martin Pierce. Google may have.

[Paris Martineau]

He loves apples. He's just alert.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask him about the Honey Crisp, will you? Google may have calmed some nerves on Wall Street. On Tuesday it delivered a third quarter result showing a sharp. I should have do this in Aussie accent. A sharp acceleration in Google cloud's growth rate to a bumper 35% from the 29% in the second quarter. That's a terrible SCX and I apologize.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does it sound anything like Burton?

[Paris Martineau]

Not really, no. He sounds more bitter as Aussies do.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I would say my relationship with.

[Paris Martineau]

Martin is very similar to my relationship with you too.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not sure what that means, but I don't know if I want to dig into it either. No, I don't think we Pachai says Martin didn't quantify the impact of AI, however, which likely would help convince skeptics on Wall Street. He did credit the performance in part to the company's AI portfolio, which was helping it win new customers as well as lift usage by existing customers. The cloud units performance helped increase Google's parent Alphabet's overall top line growth rate to 15%. That's why the stock went up, because it was more than the analyst expected. 5% lifted alphabets out of favor stock in after hours trading and that 5%.

[Paris Martineau]

Now if we do get Martin on the show, he should come on next quarter's earnings, I guess for end of year earnings because earnings are Martin's Super Bowl.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's have him on.

[Paris Martineau]

At his best when companies are earning, reporting financially financial earnings and he gets to dive into the data.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, AI really supercharges search. Oh, I see where the problem lies. Investors are a little concerned that AI is going to start to make search less lucrative. So Google is at great pains. Philip Schindler, Google's business chief, says AI really supercharges search. It's good for search. A comment the US Government is sure to cite as it wants to restrain Google from using AI to strengthen its dominance in search. Martin, you are good, Willie. Meanwhile, the company's new chief financial officer replaced Ruth Porat. You may remember Anat Ashkenazi made her debut earnings call appearance with some good news and some bad news. The good I hate it when people say I got good news and bad news. The good news is she plans to bring a fresh pair of eyes to the company's operations. Oh no. In hopes of squeezing more efficiencies. Although Martin says her predecessor, Ruth Porat was not exactly a slouch in that department. The bad news is that as Ashkenazi forecasts, Alphabet's capital expenditures will increase further. You were just talking about this, Jeff. Of spending on new servers, related equipment to handle work on AI services Capex running at a quarterly rate of just above $13 billion. Here's the number that almost double what it was last year that amazed me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This week is that the CFO at OpenAI said, and they're losing money hand or a fist, we know, but 75% I think it is of their revenue comes from individual subscriptions. Most of their revenue, she said, ah, see, this is the last Question.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So there is there a business? They have 250 million active weekly users. 75% of the company's overall business comes from consumer subscriptions.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who would have thought that there's that much money? And again they lose a fortune. And so I don't know what the total revenue is. Willing to pay 20 bucks a month.

[Leo Laporte]

You're saying as opposed to business subscriptions?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, I think consumer as opposed to enterprise Big. Yeah, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But I subscribe. I pay 20 bucks a month to open it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How often do you use it?

[Leo Laporte]

Not as much as I used to. I used to use it a lot and I don't use it that much anymore. I also pay for anthropic perplexity.

[Paris Martineau]

And how much do you spend a month on AI?

[Leo Laporte]

Probably 100 bucks a month, which is nuts because I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't really use it. Well, I found Meta AI is free and Notebook LM is free.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And now. And now Apple is free, right? Yeah. All right, well so how do I.

[Paris Martineau]

Turn on Apple Intelligence?

[Leo Laporte]

I just updated my phone so you're 18:1. So now it's supposed to ask you but it didn't ask me either. So you go to your settings and you will see an Apple and brand new Apple Intelligence and Siri.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I see.

[Leo Laporte]

Hit that and it'll say oh you want it, you gotta ask for it. But within is it going to take.

[Paris Martineau]

Any of my data?

[Leo Laporte]

It's Apple paranoid data.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no they don't. They're Apple's very.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, it's complete. The models run entirely on device so a task can be completed.

[Leo Laporte]

It's as private as AI can be. They are next in the next version 18.2 going to add Chappy GPT but it will then say before you go there, oh do you want to go to Chat GPT? I can't answer this. On device we can use chatgpt but you should be aware that the privacy policy is now ChatGPT is not Apple's. I think Apple's they're making great.

[Paris Martineau]

And I also like that it says you can turn on transparency logging for Apple Intelligence to see how your data is processed. Because they're trying basically what this says, it has like a pop up for it that's fairly long and actually written quite cleanly. Saying that it tries to process almost all requests entirely on device.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

If there's ever a request that is too large to be on device, it will be sent using this private cloud compute to Send only data relevant to your request to be processed on Apple Silicon servers. That it is sent and returned by private cloud compute is not stored or made accessible to Apple. It's only processed to fulfill your request, after which point the results are returned securely to your device and not retained by private cloud computers.

[Leo Laporte]

See? Good stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're safe. It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Apple. If you trust your friend, I would say that's probably the best way to use AI. Unless you think Apple's a lion, but I don't think they're a lion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So back to our point about AI and serving Microsoft survey just came out and they said that AI is bolstering demand for cloud services. So that seems to be okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Why not?

[Leo Laporte]

And bolstering expenses because we got to build Microsoft putting Three Mile island back online because they need so much power. Let's take a little break. I need to take another ad break. When we come back, what is open source AI? What does that actually mean? You're watching this week in Google with Jeff Jarvis. Paris Martineau. Great. The hot dog lady.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A tip of the bunch.

[Paris Martineau]

I tip my bun to you, sir.

[Leo Laporte]

And I to you, milady. My hot dog, me wiener.

[Paris Martineau]

What's up, dog?

[Leo Laporte]

What's up dog? Our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. This is. I had a great conversation with these guys. I said, I've never heard of you. They said, well, you should. It turns out most companies, most enterprises figure, well, we got Microsoft licenses. Included in the cost is Microsoft support. We should use Microsoft support. But Microsoft doesn't sell support as needed. They only sell a big bundle of support and you pay for it whether you use it or not. And it turns out it's not the best, most economic way to get support. US Cloud is they're the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. They are the Global leader in third party Microsoft Enterprise support. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. And switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified Support. But I said to them, I said, are you going to focus on saving money or are you going to focus on how good you are? And they said, we're both companies Definitely care, but US Cloud does great support for the entire Microsoft stack 24, 7, 365 days a year. Here's the key. They respond faster, they resolve tickets quicker. For clients all around the world, you're always going to talk to real humans. I mean, not just humans, real engineers. Expert level engineers with an average of 14.9 years experience and that's for break fix or DSE. 100% domestic teams. Your data never leaves the US this is something Microsoft has consistently refused to do. US Cloud offers financially backed SLAs on response time. They guarantee their response time and initial ticket responses average under four minutes. And I gotta tell you, when everything's burning down, the servers are down, your network's offline, you've got ransomware, when something bad is happening, every minute counts. And a fast response time means you're going to be back up and running faster. In 2023, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving a third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. So I really want to underscore it's not just as good as Microsoft. It's better than Microsoft for about a third less. From Fortune 500 companies and large health systems to major financial institutions to federal agencies, U.S. cloud ensures a vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every day. I'm talking big brands like Caterpillar, HP uses US Cloud, Afflac, Dun and Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen us. They're the enterprise experts, right? They've chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. I heard an interview with the Director of Information Technologies, he said, and within an hour US Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right people to the call, 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 when it comes to compliance. By the way, no one gets it more than US Cloud. ISO, gdpr, ESG compliance. For US Cloud, these aren't just regulatory requirements. They are strategic impairments that drive US Cloud's operational efficiency, their legal compliance, their risk management, their corporate reputation. These standards. They believe in these standards. It's not just something, oh, we got to do this for regulations. They foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders, they attract investment and they assured long term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. US Cloud does it right. I was so impressed by these guys. Visit uscloud.com book a call today to find out how much your team can save. And again, it's not just how much you save, it's how great the support is. Uscloud.com to book a call today. Get faster Microsoft support. Get better Microsoft support for less US Cloud. We thank them so much for supporting our Show. And if they ask you, make sure you tell them you saw it on this Week in Google, please. They said, oh, this week at Google, it's about Google. We said, no, there's lots of enterprise, Microsoft enterprise users listening. Right. So I have. You've heard me complain about llama saying or meta saying llama. Their AI model is open source. We talked about a few weeks ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jason Howell's suggestion when we talked about this is that it should be open Ish.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Open ish or yeah, it's. But. Well, here's the deal. Osi, which is the Open Source initiative, is considered by most to be the keepers of the definition open source. And they have released finally an official definition for open artificial intelligence. And they say meta does not fit their rules. And I think these are good rules. I think this is something that we should ask for when it comes to AI and for an AI system to be considered truly open source. Remember, open source in the past meant you could see the source code. Well, you can't see the source code. For AI, there is no. There's source code. But that's not the most important part. They say if it's going to be open source, AI systems have to provide access to details about the data used to train the AI in a way that others can understand and recreate it. How did you get this model? How did you build it? You do have to provide the complete code used to build and run the AI. So you've got the code and the data that it's inputting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does llama do that?

[Leo Laporte]

No. You also have to have the settings and weights from the training. So. Because I mean, it's not just everything is an equal. There's, there's. And there's a lot of tuning afterwards. And you need to know that information.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doesn't that change constantly or a foundation model is a foundation. When it comes to foundation model doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it might be tuned later. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

The definition challenges. This is from the Verge. Meta's Llama, widely promoted as the largest open source ish AI model. LLAMA is publicly available for download and use, but there's no commercial use for applications with over 700 million users. There is no access to its training data.

[Paris Martineau]

So who counts as open source under this definition?

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, that's a good question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The straw also tries to call themselves open.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let me see.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I never.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is the right question.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there anybody hugging face? CEO Clement DeLong called OSI's definition a huge help in shaping the conversation around openness in AI. Especially when it comes to the crucial role of training data. Now that we have a robust definition in place, says Simon Wilson Wilson, creator of the Open Source Multi tool data set. Now that we have a robust definition in place, maybe we could push back more aggressively against companies who are open washing declaring their stuff as open source when it's not open washing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I don't think. I don't think Meta is ever going to be open source and so but we still want to be glad that it's freely available and you can do things like this week they showed how you can do your own homegrown notebook LM podcast through Llama Notebook Llama. I still think that's worth encouraging and so we're getting by the way, did.

[Leo Laporte]

You listen to the Notebook Llama Hilarious podcast is terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or play it. It's hilariously bad.

[Paris Martineau]

Why is it bad?

[Leo Laporte]

You'll hear Let me see if I can find it here. I probably bookmarked it. But let me see. Llama podcast. It's trying to do the same rag stuff right. And then yeah, turning into.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They just. It was really a shot across Google's bow to say you think no book album is so special you could do Dar Llama. You can do it like that with.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way they, they gave it that silly open designation. So they said, you know, well, we're open, but they're not now by the way, one of the reasons Meta doesn't do it and most people don't do it Hugging Face does release information about its training data. But one of the reasons other companies don't is they're afraid of getting sued because they're taking it from the New York Times. Everyone else oh, you don't want to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the thing. That's why it's. It's not going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Right here is an example of a podcast generated this is from X.com the Everything Company platform.

[Paris Martineau]

It's where I do everything.

[Leo Laporte]

I do everything here on X See if what do you think of this? Welcome to this week's episode of Insights.

[Paris Martineau]

Where we explore the latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence. Today we're going to dive into the fascinating world of knowledge distillation. So let's get started.

[Leo Laporte]

Joining me on this journey distillation.

[Paris Martineau]

And I'll be guiding them through the ins and outs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

An accent that doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be guiding them through.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait till you hear the guy acknowledged.

[Paris Martineau]

Just let started.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds exciting.

[Paris Martineau]

Why does he sound bored?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can you give me a brief overview? Okay, good.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course. Knowledge distillation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's terrible. Terrible. But we can do it too, says Llama. You know, it'll get better, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

When I first heard that, I thought, this is like you're at a restaurant and you're hearing the couple at the next table having a first date. You want to go over and just say, stop. Not going to work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Don't. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is the actual purpose of these, though? Like, what can you actually. What's something useful that can come out of this? I hear students say that they would love to be able to use this to have explain material to them in a way that's somewhat more compelling than having to read the material. That's what the teacher's job is. No, no, it's not the student's job. No, the teacher's job. No, it's the student's job to read the material and bring in the material. The professor's job is there to answer, question, provoke discussion, challenge students. It's not to summarize the readings. We're not. I'm not, you know, I'm no notebook. Lm.

[Paris Martineau]

But, you know, geez, you should license your voice so that your students at your new classes could hear you read every single reading to them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I heard something frightening this week. I won't say where.

[Paris Martineau]

Was it your own voice?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, hey, hey, hey. Kind of in the sense that a student in a radio journalism class submitted an interview that was done by AI they got the voice of the subject in there, but they never interviewed the subject because it was a way to get around doing the interview.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it is. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't like that at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, but students are already using these tools in ways we don't imagine. And so what do we do? Yeah, I wrote a syllabus for a new course in AI and creativity, and I think the way to do it is to actually use the tools and face these issues with the students and have discussions about it rather than trying to prohibit them. That was a showstopper.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, I think I'm trying to remember the name of the newsletter reader I told you about some weeks ago. What is it? Not overture. It was. Oh, I wish I could remember it. They just got acquired is the reason I'm. I want to talk about it by 11 Labs, which has a product called 11 Labs Reader, and it reads anything in famous voices or not. They're actually quite good.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, isn't this the same sort of thing we saw with all the voice assistants, like a Couple years ago, where they're like, whoopi Goldberg can be Siri now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but these are. But, see, 11 letters.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're summarizing best.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, this is. This is reading and then this program.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree with you. I agree with you, Paris. That's all it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Better.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's turning. It's turning a newsletter into a audio newsletter. That's all. What was that?

[Paris Martineau]

I guess my question is. And this is. I'm ostensibly someone that would be a target demographic for this because I love listening to stuff. I would ideally like to have a podcast on while doing anything that is not like reading. It is wonderful. I love multitasking, but I just. I don't know. I don't. I don't particularly trust these things to accurately summarize stuff better than I would. I assume that I'm missing something if I'm not reading it. And two, I feel like maybe I need to check out 11 labs more. But every time I have played around with one of these things, it still sounds stilted to me and noticeably like a. Like, facsimile of a human voice in a way that is, I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not engaging the uncanny valley of voice.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're really good. Really.

[Paris Martineau]

Do either of you guys listen to these regularly for hours at a time.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't listen to poc. I don't listen to humans, let alone, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't listen to podcasts, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, of course not. I make them. I don't listen to them. What do you. You don't ask a chef if he goes out and eats at all the restaurants in town. I'm busy. I'm. I'm making them. Oh, you do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They do. They do features on that all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where do the chef seat? What. What hamburgers do chefs like? Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I. I don't know if I have the 11 reader on here. It's. The voices are good. I have it on the website. Let me see if they have some samples here. See it in action. Let's see. It's just somebody. Ever find yourself distracted by your phone? I want to hear some samples.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you get, like, a classic accent? I'm the ideal choice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, this is awful.

[Leo Laporte]

ASMR content. That's asmr. Here's Luna. Listen to her. She's mysterious.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I guess that's what you get for.

[Leo Laporte]

Playing with Finn, isn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

That is not mysterious.

[Leo Laporte]

How about you like. You like Finn?

[Paris Martineau]

As a proud native of Ireland, Let's Bring a robust Irish actress.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That sounds like you on a bad day, Leo, but we'll leave it aside.

[Leo Laporte]

How about George? He's soothing. Chapter one. An unexpected party. In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. That's pretty good.

[Paris Martineau]

Still sounds robotic like it does it. It sounds uncanny.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, all right. Well, I thought they were pretty good. There is a. There is a character that AI. There is a Leo. Did we talk about this?

[Paris Martineau]

A. You.

[Leo Laporte]

Me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We did this on Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we did. On Twitter. Okay, so here's Leo laporte.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait. Oh, character AI. That's. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know about character AI? Yeah, this is. Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo laporte here, the tech guy. Time to talk computers and the Internet, home theater. It's a little mechanical, but you want to ask a question? Go ahead, ask me a question. Any question.

[Paris Martineau]

What's your favorite silly hat?

[Leo Laporte]

What is. That's good.

[Paris Martineau]

No, first, you real Leo, answer.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite silly hat is this one. The Lucho Libre Mexican wrestler hat.

[Paris Martineau]

How are you not wearing that earlier?

[Leo Laporte]

I was wearing it.

[Paris Martineau]

Silly hat bit.

[Leo Laporte]

I have an infinite number of silly hats. But let's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do we get hard out of this?

[Leo Laporte]

What? Let's ask AI, Leo. Oh, I didn't say the right thing. My favorite silly. I didn't say hat. So what? I mean hat. Now, first, I'm going to have him read the answer here. My favorite silly. What do you mean?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's kind of dismissive. I like that.

[Paris Martineau]

That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's.

[Paris Martineau]

That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That'd be Leo. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's so funny to be doing this in the mask.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite hat. I have a hat that says geek. It's a baseball cap type hat, and the logo says geek on it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we know it.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite hat.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, we know you're a geek.

[Leo Laporte]

And they say, hey, are you a geek? And I point to my hat.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, that's. That's kind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That.

[Paris Martineau]

That, that saved it. At the end. I was gonna be quite upset until the people come up to me and say, are you a dude? Can I point my.

[Leo Laporte]

Had a Lucho Libre hat.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm just waiting for the Lee cat to make a return, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute. It says, I do have a Lucho Libre hat. It has an L on the front of it, and it's a big old luchador wrestling mask. I have one of those. Wow. It's. It's. It's. It's pretty smart.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sounds like Leo going down a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, Leo's just A bender.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds just like me. I don't know who made it. Somebody. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

It does have the right. Like, Cadence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we did the investigation, remember? We. We think it's Padre.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we think it's Father Robert Balis there. Yeah. Because if you look at the name of the person who did it, he has a name. June. His. And it's RKE Jr. So June. But notice his other voices. He's got Pastor Dave. He's got Bishop Fulton sheen. He's got St. John Henry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got St. Francis de Sales. He's got G.K. chesterton. Father Chad Ripperger, who's a Catholic exorcist. Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good company here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And then there's me, followed by Dick Foker. Dick Foker. Oh, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I. I don't know who it is. St. John Newman. I don't know who it is. He's got some interesting voices.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So how do they get your. You have to do a sample. Upload a sample.

[Leo Laporte]

I've done about 20,000 radio shows.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, but I mean, what do you have to feed into character, AI to get it. To get the voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, samples. But it's easy to get samples of my voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's really easy.

[Leo Laporte]

That wouldn't be hard at all. I don't know. I think we're getting very close to really good AI voices, to be honest with you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go back in, if you wouldn't mind. And I want to. I want to try to get some emotion out of it. Tell me something that makes you angry. I want to hear.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. Understand, like, get it. Angry, huh?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's see here. Let's get angry. Okay. Should I. What should I say what I hear? I hear you're a Donald Trump fan.

[Paris Martineau]

I would just say, tell me something that makes you angry. See if it does, you know, have some pathos in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Makes you. I almost said.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're so confused.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very confused. Very confused. Here we go. He's going to get angry. Oh, he's right. This does make me angry. Holy cow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's log. It's a sermon.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean just any old thing? Well, that one thing that makes me angry is that sometimes people will accuse me of being paid to endorse a product or a service that they don't like, and they'll say, that's a paid placement. He's getting payment for it. And, in fact, I don't get paid for Any of that. I get free software and hardware that I can use in my lab. Wrong. But I am not paid for my reviews or my show or anything else that I do, so that really frosts me. Doesn't sound that angry. No, that is a word I would use that really frosts me.

[Paris Martineau]

That is. That is true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is.

[Leo Laporte]

Dad toasts my nuggets, too. Let's see what he says. This is fun. I'm having a conversation with myself. I do get paid for our ads, by the way, but I, in fact, don't take free hardware and software. So there.

[Paris Martineau]

And do you have a lab?

[Leo Laporte]

I used to have a lab. Many years ago, I had a lab. You could call my attic a lab.

[Paris Martineau]

You could, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, sometimes you'll hear an ad that you really don't like and you can't get around it. But in my program, I only run ads that are my own, so you can fast forward past them very easily. But it does bug me when people call me a sellout and don't have any proof to back it up. It's not wrong. What should we try? A happy. What's going to sound the same?

[Paris Martineau]

No. Something that makes you sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What do you like to say to Lisa on Valentine's Day?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's see. I first asked it. What makes you sad? This is actually making me sad. What makes me sad is when people say mean things about me. You know, stuff that's not true. You know a reader email that comes in and it's really just a slam. You know, you're this, you're that, you're horrible, you should be put in jail, et cetera, et cetera. And in most cases, what they say is just factually inaccurate. It really has a rich inner life that I. What?

[Paris Martineau]

Does it feel weird to hear this in your own voice?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's very creepy. You wasn't half right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I. Are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Huh?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You said I. You should be. You're not used. So you got to say you. Because you're not. I.

[Leo Laporte]

What should I tell my wife, Lisa for Valentine's Day?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What would you.

[Paris Martineau]

What do you tell your wife? It's the. The Leo that's married to Lisa is the one you're texting.

[Leo Laporte]

You're.

[Paris Martineau]

You're the chat bot Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm so confused. Here we go. What would you tell your wife, Lisa for Valentine's Day? Yes. Yes. Oh. On Valentine's Day, I tell my wife that she's the woman of my dreams, that I look forward to the time we spend together, and that I don't want any other lady in the world but her. That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the same emphatic Leo and everything.

[Paris Martineau]

It is, yeah, it's the same.

[Leo Laporte]

It's trained on. Right. It's not trained on the sad Leo. Anyway, I thought, you know, it's got a little edge, a little mechanical edge to it, which may even be intentional so that it's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That doesn't sound real.

[Leo Laporte]

Y sounding too real. 11 Labs doesn't do that. They try. And by the way, 11 Labs licensed Lawrence Olivier's voice, A bunch of famous actors voices. So, you know, I don't know. I. I think we're getting close.

[Paris Martineau]

Two things. One, someone out there should make a character AI version of Jeff based on all of his podcasting hours. We should ask it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me look.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe there is one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What about you, Patrick?

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, we don't need that. Patrick just posted in the chat that AI Leo should introduce this episode of Twig, which I think is pretty funny.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. No, there's no Jeff Jarvis. Oh. No characters found. Maybe make one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no. What we need to do is we need to take Paris's Halloween sounds and feed only that.

[Paris Martineau]

It just makes that noise.

[Leo Laporte]

We can make a generator, a woo generator. That'd be kind of fun. You have to. It said wants $10 a month. Sorry. No, not gonna do it.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry for everyone whose speakers blew out from that.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I don't. Let's take a break because I don't know what else to do. You guys come up with a fabulous bit, a piece of material that we can talk about in the next segment. How about that? I know you're going to find something good because you're good. But first, a word from our sponsor. This week in Google is brought to you this week by our friends at ACI Learning. You may say. Who are they? Well, maybe you remember it pro. For a long time, maybe almost 10 years, they were regular advertisers on our shows. Well, now they're part of ACI Learning, but they're still doing their great binge worthy video on demand. IT and cybersecurity training. It's the best in the business. With IT Pro, you're going to get certification ready with access to a library, a video library on demand of more than 7,1250 hours worth of training. And it's all up to date because they have, what is it, eight studios in their Gainesville, Florida headquarters where they record Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. So they're making new Content all the time because the software changes, the tests change, the content is always new. There's new, there's new certs all the time. So they're constantly generating wonderful new on demand videos. 7250 hours of on demand training. Absolutely up to date. You can also get a premium training plan that includes practice exams and I don't know, I remember taking the SATs. It was was such an advantage to have taken some practice exams. So you know you're ready to, to take the, the certification test before you pay for it, which is nice. There's also virtual labs to facilitate hands on learning and MSPs love it because they can try different configurations. It's basically giving you a full lab with Windows servers, Windows clients for you to learn on, practice on. But you can't break anything. Well, if you do break something, you just close the tab because it's in your browser and then you're good to go. IT Pro. This is from ACI Learning and they make training fun. All training videos are produced in an engaging talk show format that's truly and edutaining. That's what they call it. I'll tell you why. Their trainers are professionals working in the field. But that's not all. They're great teachers because they're passionate about the subject, they love what they're teaching. And that engagement, that passion communicates through to you and you get excited about it. You get engaged. It's never dull, it's always exciting. Take your IT or cyber career to the next level, whether it's for you as an individual or for your team. By the way, it is a great benefit to provide IT teams. You're giving them training to make them more useful to you, to make them better at their jobs. But they love it because they're getting smarter, they're getting new skills. Be bold. Train smart with ACI learning. Visit info.acilearning.com twit that's the long URL info.acilearning.com TWIT if you use our offer code, this is a new one. Twit 100 Twit 100. If you use that at checkout, you'll save 30% on your first year of IT Pro's annual training plans. And that's saving a bundle. That's info.acilearning.com Twitter don't forget the offer code. Twit100 we thank him so much for many years of supporting the shows we do [e-mail] twit. And we thank you as Twit viewers and listeners for using that address because then they know you saw it here. Don't Forget that code. Twit 1 00. All right, I have picked a story and now it's your turn to pick stories for us to continue on with this week. Paris is always first, Harris first. Hot dogs first in this show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, muted.

[Leo Laporte]

You know a hot dog doesn't have vocal cords.

[Paris Martineau]

No, Reddit reported it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All I can say is profitable quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

Reddit made money.

[Paris Martineau]

Reddit made money. It said that in this last quarter it made a profit of 29.9 million, albeit, I mean there, I guess there are a lot of different factors that had that whole API crackdown. It's now got advertised and going on, but it also had one revenue category grow 550% year over year, which is other revenue, which includes it's AI, the money it's made from AI licensing deals.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute now tell me again, how much did it make this quarter?

[Paris Martineau]

It made 29.9 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, and how much licensing?

[Leo Laporte]

60 million.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, 32 million from Google, OpenAI and others. That's just this quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

So Google gave him 60 for the year.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So wait a minute, they got paid 33 million and they only made 29 million? It sounds like yeah, this isn't going to be very long term profitable.

[Paris Martineau]

But you know, opening eye and Google will Both have their LLMs trained on prolific liars on the Internet posts. So that'll be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But a bunch of boys.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it not the case though that you often find the best search results depending what you're searching for on Reddit? Like if you add site colon Reddit.com to Google, it really does give you some good results. Like if you said what's the best maple syrup? That would be a good search and you would get.

[Paris Martineau]

But the issue is now that SEO fiends have found that out now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, game every, everything is ruined. And also the good part of Reddit is not the biggest part of Reddit either. Right. The good stuff on Reddit is maybe a small percentage of the total Reddit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's okay. Your search results still do that. I don't know if an AI would be smart enough to distinguish that. But I mean that, you know, like I said, if you're searching for maple syrup. Yeah, I love Reddit. I do. And you, you know, you, you know enough to ignore the doofuses, but one of the things that Reddit has going for it is karma. Right. Upvote and downvote. So the best answers, the ones that get voted up are not going to be the liars.

[Paris Martineau]

I have noticed that there. I mean, listen, as someone who loves a lot of dumb subreddits, something that I have internalized is that I'm going to be often reading a lot of made up stories and that's okay, you know, Am I the asshole? A great subreddit.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. A lot of that.

[Paris Martineau]

There's also a sub subreddit or I guess a you know, a forked subreddit called Amah, which I guess is like am I the asshole? But with slightly less stringent post a hole. Yeah, not the something I've noticed recently. I mean, because there's often really great posts on there, but they're usually text posts. Sometimes I will see the most popular ones coming up and they have like a little icon up there and I click through and it's because they have a link in one of their, like a hyperlink in one of their words and every single time it links to some dumb genai image generating site. And I'm realizing all of these are like astroturfing posts made up by this stupid 4th tier AI company to I guess boost their page view rankings. And it pisses me off. We can't, you know, I'm all right with just regular people. I'm all right with regular people lying on the Internet for karma. That's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

But companies, yeah, but a moderator to stop that. So what? Give us an example of one of your weirdo subreddits.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I want to hear this. Thank you.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's a great question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More than one, please.

[Leo Laporte]

I've recently joined Slash R Cleaning because I like to read Tales of Cleaning and there are some wild ones in there. So that's kind of fun. You know what's cool is Petaluma has a subreddit, Santa Rosa, which is just up to the north as a subreddit. There are geographic subreddits. There's a Bay Area subreddit which is kind of cool because you read about stuff going on.

[Paris Martineau]

I love the Bay Area subreddit. People are so mad in that subreddit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're mad about everything. I know, it's hysterical. I just joined the health insurance subreddit because I'm trying to figure out what health insurance I should get. I'm in open enrollment.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, here's one. 11 Foot 8. It's a subreddit about when it's the number 11, then the word foot and.

[Leo Laporte]

Then the number 8 there are 8,000 members of this.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. It's a really good subreddit. It's about when trucks go under bridges that they're too big for and they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Get the top creamed off of it.

[Paris Martineau]

Pretty fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. Here's the eight foot bridge in Needles, California. Here's a guy on a pickup truck. He's got a trailer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It says he didn't even stop at.

[Leo Laporte]

The stop sign either. Oh, not good. Nope. Got stuck. He's gonna get stuck. Oh, that's. Yeah, I mean, I guess a little bit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is there a bollard subreddit?

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody made a pilgrimage to the 12 foot 4 inch sign. Okay. Okay. That's right. That's funny. 11 foot 8. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Number 11 and number 8 cromps, which is like. Oh, this is a different. Separate than what I was thinking of. I'm looking for crunchers or I'm looking for cromps. Well, what I said was crompt, which is like crunch but with an M in there instead of a M. I'm looking for a one that's about trees. That's a cat subreddit. This is a. You know, this is part of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Problem when you know, it's amazing. I didn't realize. Here's one called Crunch mumps. That's got 28,000 members. Crumb schmumps. I don't even. It's crazy.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who's to say? Banana enthusiasts? I don't know. What? I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the problem is banana variety has gone down. I mentioned this before with your apple story. It's a real problem. We're a stubborn with one kind of banana culture.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a huge.

[Leo Laporte]

Bananas may be over.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, here's a good pairing of subreddits. Trees eating things paired with trees sucking on things. Both of which are when trees grow.

[Leo Laporte]

Around or suck on things. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is good. Steve Gibson would love this because.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he.

[Leo Laporte]

He. Oh, that's from. Mildly interesting. Which is also a great subreddit. One of the wildest tree eating things I've ever come around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is it?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. What's in there? Something looks like a propeller or something. I don't know. Anyway, we don't. We don't have to go too far down this rabbit hole. But that's good. That's good. Trees eating things and trees sucking things. They're probably. They're competing subreddits.

[Paris Martineau]

They are. Whoa. It's a little different.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is it?

[Paris Martineau]

You know, there's. There's some I believe difference in this.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a tree finding a water supply to suck on. Oh my God. The water from the far hydra. It's coming out the tree. I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like trees sucking on things is kind of where a tree is consuming a standalone free floating object. Meanwhile trees eating things is a tree versus a stationary grounded object. Yeah, but that's just my take.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a tree growing into and through a street. A street sign. That's pretty. That's pretty cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very exciting. That's better.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's good. Look at that. It came out the top. Wow. That's a nature. Oh, finds a way. Isn't that. Isn't that the story? Okay, why some of these are nsfw? Well, yeah, maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe AI really what's bringing a profit.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, selling their selling and it's really selling. What's funny about this? And it kind of bugs me. It's the same thing with X. They're selling content that people put on Reddit. Our stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like if a store had a bulletin board on it and it was able to sell everything that was stuck to the bulletin board. It's like, that's not yours, that's ours.

[Paris Martineau]

So I did, during the course of this show, download the update and then got approved to join the Apple intelligence thing. And just to see. And I got my first summary of a group chat and said expressing displeasure with Andy's posts on Facebook. And I was like, what is that? And it turns out one of my friends is saying my father says so much that he doesn't engage on politics and Facebook anymore more. And then it's just a video of all of his Facebook posts that are extremely political. That's a good summary.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good summary. I think it's good. You're going to love this. So you're. This isn't. This is your work phone. Do you have a non work phone?

[Paris Martineau]

No, this is my normal phone.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I thought you said you were worried that because it was your work. Oh, I get what you said.

[Paris Martineau]

I have both. I have two SIM cards on my phone. Sources, work stuff, one for non work stuff. I mean the actual source communication I do is on signal, so I'm not super worried about that. But yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux slams AI as 90% marketing, 10% reality.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's about right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's about right. Jeff, your story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, let's see here. Well, we could do McDonald's finally finds an unlikely savior to finally fix the McFlurry machines.

[Leo Laporte]

This mix, the saga of the McFlurry is quite fascinating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Paris Martineau]

Why does it always need so much fixing?

[Leo Laporte]

It's not so much that it needs. Well, it's probably not super reliable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It breaks. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But the peep. This limited number of people until now could fix it. There were actually was a website which I think we showed on this show probably before Paris's time that tracks non working McFlurry machines. What's interesting is when we first showed this, there were a lot of red dots way back in the day. There are a lot more green dots than before. I think we're. We're getting improvement and I think progress. This is very clear why this is not happy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

But. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there's also a dumb name for a town, but they're just not happy there for the.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that an old. Is that an old Bay Area joke? It's a dumped name for a town. I like it. So what happened is that these McFlurry machines couldn't be fixed by anybody except the company that made them, Taylor Y.

[Paris Martineau]

Taylor Commercial Food Service.

[Leo Laporte]

And they were slow to fix it and blah, blah, blah. So. So the copyright. We were talking about, the copyright librarian, she's made another ruling that could make it easier for them to keep the McFlurry machines working. @ the core of the issues, this is from the Wall Street Journal, is the software in the machines. When one encounters a problem, it's difficult or impossible to figure out what's gone wrong. Leaving franchise owners dependent on technicians from Taylor, the manufacturer. Owners of McDonald's outlets say the machines are prone to breaking. There have been complaints about long time, long wait times for Taylor technicians. Even President Trump, known for his love of fast food, tweeted this weekend, when I'm president, the McDonald's ice cream machines will work great again. A Taylor spokesperson said customers should use a company certified technician while their machines are under warranty, which typically ranges from one to five years. And then it makes parts available for purchase for those who want to do their own repair, only their parts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Our good friends at iFixit, the right to repair folks and public knowledge petitioned the Copyright office for an exception that would allow owners of commercial and industrial equipment to do repairs rather than having to wait for a technician from the manufacturer. The Justice Department's antitrust division and the Federal Trade Commission both supported the petition.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a lot of heavy hitters coming in here for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. When it comes to McFlurries, we're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fooling around this around.

[Leo Laporte]

Copyright office has granted a narrow exemption for commercial food equipment in response to petition as of Monday. Now with the exemption, you can get around that digital lock with something other than Taylor sanctioned key. A company called. One of the reasons this came up is there was a company came along, said we can fix them and we have a device that will fix it. And Taylor stopped them. So this company, Kitech, or Kite Kitsch I guess it is K, Y, T, C H had offered these devices that alerted restaurant owners about breakdowns, saying they could prevent damage if they found out soon enough. McDonald's warned franchisees off using the device, saying they weren't sanctioned and could pose a safety hazard, which Kitsch denied. Kitsch sued both Taylor's and McDonald's. Lawsuits are in settlement discussions, but of course the company is around but ceased operations after McDonald said don't use them. Well, I don't know if this copyright office's ruling makes Kitsch viable, but I hope it does. And I. And I wish you luck with your McFlurry.

[Paris Martineau]

But it only shocked that this was a tech story after all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's my fault. That's my fault.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, it's moral panic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just press the wrong button. That's my.

[Paris Martineau]

An errant moral panic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On the loose. Moral panic on the loose.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's. I gotta find. I wonder how I enter in your address to find out if the McFlurry near you is worse Working. I guess I could just scroll the map is the way I do it here. Let's see. We're traveling across the country here. We are looking for a Brooklyn McFlurry machine. There's a lot of red dots in New York.

[Paris Martineau]

Prospect Park.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So is it also Wendy's machines?

[Leo Laporte]

Can you justify some reason? When I zoom in, I see Wendy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Wendy's are working. What about the McDonald's? Are those for Frosties? Is that for Frost?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that. Maybe this machine now does Frosty's and it says McDonald's. I don't know. Maybe that. Maybe. You know what? Wendy might have been smart and gone in there and bought a big ad saying you can't get your McFlurry, go next door and get a Frosty Frosty.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, scroll down. Go a bit south.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I don't know Brooklyn that well. There's Brooklyn.

[Paris Martineau]

This is where we want to be. Yeah, yeah, there's some.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you're. You're in good shape.

[Leo Laporte]

Mostly green dots. There's a few.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The red one. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S on Fort Hamilton Parkway. Parkside Avenue, the machine is broken. Was checked 55 minutes ago. And on Utica Avenue, machine is broken. But you could go run on over to Coney Island Avenue, get a hot dog working. McFlurry machine two.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The machines have like an API.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. They ping the machines. No, he's got a way of doing it. What is it? Oh, McDonald's allows you to order McFlurries online. There's some funky way. There's some funky way he did this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's paying 3,000 McDonald's constantly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he has a way. Yeah. And then. Yeah. I think this is hysterical. Wendy's bought a big ad for the Frost.

[Paris Martineau]

That is very funny.

[Leo Laporte]

That's smart. Wendy's is good in this. They have the really excellent social media. So, yeah, I think he would order it online and then cancel it. But in. In the process of ordering it, you'd get a message saying, we can't make a McFlurry today. And that. So he. He was pinging all the McDonald's.

[Paris Martineau]

How do you guys feel about McFlurries? I always want them to be more milkshake, like, than they are.

[Leo Laporte]

I never had one. What does it come with a weird.

[Paris Martineau]

You actually have to fix that. You can't go through your life without having a single McFlurry.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know. It just feels un American.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm just glad that your McFlurries are safe. Once again, here's a sad story. Foursquare. Farewell to Foursquare. Remember, do you remember? Foursquare was very big. It made its debut at south by Southwest. Everybody was crazy about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were the mayor of, like.

[Leo Laporte]

I was mayor of many, many places. Yes, because if you checked in a number of times, you'd become the mayor. And then I used to get in fights with Lisa over who's the mayor of the brick house. And she would check in and I would check in. David Dennis Crowley, who created Foursquare. Great guy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a great guy. Wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They're going to sunset. The Foursquare app, City guide app. Later this year, they did have a replacement check in app called Swarm. See that? It was actually very smart because they made an app where you would check in, you'd become the mayor. Your friends could see where you were. I remember I was eating at a restaurant in Petaluma and Robert Scoville showed up. I said, robert, I said, how did you find me, dude?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Haunted.

[Leo Laporte]

He said, foursquare, man. So it was in a different time when we didn't. We weren't so privacy concerned. We didn't mind telling the world, hey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was the whole thing. That was the original Twitter was, you know, my update, what's happening with me? That's all that was the opposite of privacy concern. Everybody wanted to tell everybody where they were and what they were doing and.

[Leo Laporte]

What they were eating. And so Foursquare kind of, there were a bunch of clones and it kind of stumbled, but it turned out they, they pivoted. They realized, oh, all this location information is really useful. So they started selling it and it.

[Paris Martineau]

Became a like one of the biggest purveyors of location data.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Things like how the base, they powered Uber, you know, other different apps, they were behind all of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Then they created an app called Swarm because they wanted to get back in the check in business. In 2014, they split into two different properties. But now, December 15, Foursquare is going to be no more. It's kind of sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. It's the end of an era. An era where we weren't so concerned about our privacy. We didn't mind telling everybody where we were in a mo. In a post on threads, Dennis wrote I, Denz is his, his handle. I have a really good blog post somewhere in me about the danger of falling in love with the companies you build and the products you create. But it's not the right time to write it. The neglect of Foursquare's apps story has been a drum like drumbeat in my personal online experience for like five years now. And I let it affect me more than I should. AKA dude, just get over it. Easier said than done. Oh, Denz, we love you. Come on the show. Tell us what your next thing is going to be. FourSquare has over 100 million in revenue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know if that was in one year or overall.

[Paris Martineau]

Gotta be one year. There's no way that's overall. It's nowhere that's cumulative.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the question. I mean, you don't shut down something that's making a hundred million a year.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'm sure they're shutting down the app. Consumer app, Foursquare. They're not shutting down Foursquare at the location.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, there's. Yeah, just the app.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's just the consumer app.

[Leo Laporte]

The company is going to continue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's just they'll now be on the check in push of this experience.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I assume it's also on the location data portion, which has been their main business for A while.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember Gowalla? Because that, that then a few years later at south by that was the next app that people used. I really liked Gowalla too. I used all of those anyway.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Foursquare is a location platform like and sells stuff to other app makers, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Crowley is no longer involved in Foursquare in a full time capacity, according to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, but still remains co chair of the company's board and has been working on something new since August.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ooh, so you remember he started Dodgeball originally.

[Leo Laporte]

Dodgeball was the first.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I interviewed him for Public Parts, my earlier book.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do remember that dance come on the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then he got bought. He got bought by Google. He spent two years there, frustrated as hell.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they didn't do anything with it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Left Google killed Dodgeball anyway. And so they started a new, more sophisticated service which was Foursquare.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Denz, I've always had a lot of respect for you. Loved Foursquare, loved Swarm. Come on the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He told me, I happen to be a very social person who's part of a very social crew. Sounds like Paris and I live in a very social city. We're finding that when you opt in to share your location, no matter if it's a library or a bar or classroom or an airport, it tends to lead to things that facilitate serendipity. Well, those are nice days. Wasn't that nice?

[Leo Laporte]

The Internet, you know, really, this is what you've been preaching all along, Jeff, is that we shouldn't be so concerned or so worried. We should just take advantage of the Internet and use it as it was intended as a way to connect. I disagree. But I was, I used to be more open until Robert Scoble showed up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you ever met Robert Scoble there, Paris? Have you heard of Robert Scoble?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm Googling.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you know, quite the character's old friend. He was the.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, Google Glass guy. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Google Glass guy. Shower, shower, naked.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, okay. Shower. Google Glass guy. I know Scope.

[Leo Laporte]

Who was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who was called out and shamed by which Google founder was it at IO really did Larry. We were there together when he said Scoble got up to ask a question. And I think it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I do remember this. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It wasn't Sergey. Who was it?

[Leo Laporte]

It was Larry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was Larry. Yeah. Larry said, just said to him, robert, you really shouldn't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Robert's an old friend. He was the sysop of my chat for many years back in the 90s. He's now kind of a VR guy. AR VR guy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's whatever is hot this minute. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm sure he was.

[Paris Martineau]

His most recent blog post is Announcement and why the Tesla. Tesla Humanoid Robot Matters.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's very him.

[Leo Laporte]

He's very enthusiastic. That's his. That's his calling card. He's thrilled by everything. Craig Newmark. Play the song one more time. Hello, Craig.

[Paris Martineau]

Craig.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Craig.

[Leo Laporte]

Craig Newmark. Newark last week about how the Newmark philanthropies funded passkeys. They have put another $5 million into consideration.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no they there. It's he.

[Leo Laporte]

There's not. When it says philanthropies. It's just him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's him.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's his generosity, his vision.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing. The work will. So they're gonna. He's giving them $5 million. I'm sure our friend Stacy Higginbotham is part of this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what I was wondering. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That will accelerate CR's vision of a digital marketplace where safety, cybersecurity, and transparency are standard across products and services. You know what? That's Stacy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's Stacy. That's got Stacy written all over it.

[Leo Laporte]

The work will include the development of tools for consumers to stay secure from cyber attacks, which is very important to Craig.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're not. We're not adequately protected.

[Leo Laporte]

Prepared. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Consumer Reports will conduct new investigations of cyber harms, artificial intelligence systems, and privacy concerns, and will expand its evaluations of online marketplaces and fintech services. You know, our good friend Nicholas De Leon, who is the technology editor for Consumer Reports, probably will have something to say about this Sunday. He's going to be on Twitter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, perfect timing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, I will make sure to ask him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Craig used to be on the board of Consumer Reports, so he quite admires the organization.

[Leo Laporte]

They're the good guys. They really. Yeah, they are.

[Paris Martineau]

Truly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you, Craig.

[Leo Laporte]

An update on the Matt mullenweg saga.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just put this in. It's so confusing.

[Leo Laporte]

He says a fork would be fantastic. Fork away, he says. This is TechCrunch Disrupt today. He's not worried about the recent legal drama between his company, automatic, and WordPress host WP Engine. In fact, he says if there's a fork as a result. I mean, we've had WordPress forks before. Three or four times, he said. That's one of the beautiful things about open source. There can be a fork. So, you know, in effect, WP Engine already had forked the software because the version they run is different. Very, very different, he said, from WordPress Core today. If WordPress was then officially forged as a result of this growing discontent with his direction of the community and the legal bath battle over the use of the WordPress trademark, Mullenweg suggested that's the better path. I think that'd be fantastic, actually. So people can have alternative governance or an alternative approach. Well, that's why I love Mac. I think Matt's really open to all of this, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

The tech crunch. People had to be counting their lucky stars to have had him on the slate for Disrupt. Right. Is all. No kidding down though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding. WordPress core software has seen 40 million downloads in the last month. Months. So it's doing just fine. I ran a WordPress blog for a long time. WordPress.com automatic was a sponsor for a long time. We've had Matt on the show. Yeah. What do you. What else should we say? Jan Lecun, the one of the AI godfathers, works at Meta right now. He says, elon Musk, objectively, you are the biggest threat to democracy in America today.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like Jan. He's blunt.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. This partly because, of course, Elon has been bribing voters to register in Pennsylvania. I saw Elon's X post on X, the everything platform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did I just put in another story on that?

[Leo Laporte]

Celebrating. Celebrating the fact that Republican registrations in Pennsylvania were up several times more than Democratic registrations. Maybe because you offered a million dollars to people who registered and and then signed the petition. He's in a little trouble with the Pennsylvania Attorney General over that. Although interestingly, the DOJ declined to prosecute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The line above. I just put the story in from Wired. Workers said they were tricked and threatened as part of Elon Musk get out the vote effort. They were driven around in U hauls with no seats. They were told that unless they got their quotas, they would end up having to pay for their own hotels.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh God.

[Leo Laporte]

He is not the best manager ever, is he? No, no. And he has been promised a seat in the government to make the government.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's going to eliminate $2 trillion worth of expenses.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good. And then RFK Jr will become our head of the CDC. That should work really well.

[Paris Martineau]

He's the guy who fire everyone who isn't hardcore.

[Leo Laporte]

By email. By the way, Truth Social briefly was worth more than X briefly because I say because it's now down again. Trading in Trump Media and Technology Group stock was suspended several times due to volatility ahead of the election. I think Today it said that it's gone down considerably, but it's just one of those things that's up and down. I don't know what the latest is. But briefly, shares in TMTG rose 8.8% yesterday, giving it a market valuation of $10.3 billion. That's at the close yesterday, which is more than the estimated $9.4 billion valuation of X, the everything platform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So above that, we have a good Mike Mazdick.

[Leo Laporte]

My. My Mike on Elon Musk events.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that's the funny thing. So he's reporting from the board of Blue sky, and he says that whatever they call it, eme Elon Musk events, whenever he chooses to do something reckless, ban popular users, launch a poorly planned fight with a Brazilian judge, take away block feature. It seems to drive floods of traffic to Blue Sky.

[Leo Laporte]

So half a million the last I saw after Elon turned off blocking on X, the everything platform.

[Paris Martineau]

Has it gone into effect yet?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, who knows? How would you know?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't tell because.

[Leo Laporte]

How would you know?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know who's.

[Paris Martineau]

I can tell. Hold on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Trying to read me.

[Leo Laporte]

You know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

The founder of TikTok is now China's richest man.

[Paris Martineau]

No, they have not turned it on. They have one person who has me blocked that I cannot see their tweets.

[Leo Laporte]

Still can't see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay. That's a good way to see it. I got a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Who would block you? Is it. Is it the hot dog hater?

[Paris Martineau]

One could say that Mrs. Nathan, potentially.

[Leo Laporte]

Zhang Yiming is now worth. Get this. The guy who founded TikTok is now worth $49.3 billion. He stepped down from his role in charge of the company in 2021, but still owns about 20% of TikTok. Yikes. That's actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How much? 20 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

How much is he worth? Yeah, 49.3 billion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How does that compare with Elon or.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Elon's close to a trillion, isn't he? What is he? I don't know. It changes day to day depending on Tesla stock.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, but did we see The Elon Musk 176 compound?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes. He's building a place for the kids. And I think that's wonderful. He's a family man. He's playing. Building a compound for the kids, their mothers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it in Waco?

[Leo Laporte]

It's in Austin.

[Paris Martineau]

Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children, and one secretive multi billionaire father who obsesses about declining birth rates when he isn't overseeing one of his six companies. Writes the New York Times. It's an unconventional family situation and one that Mr. Musk seems to want to make even bigger. A proponent of in vitro fertilization, Musk believes strongly in increasing the world's populiz population. He is even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances.

[Leo Laporte]

Including sperm. I have some sperm.

[Paris Martineau]

Including the VP candidate, Nicole Shanahan. According to two people from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, because they dated. That's what broke up her marriage to Sergey.

[Paris Martineau]

She turned him down.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, she didn't want his sperm.

[Paris Martineau]

She said, no sperm for me.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you offer. Hey, would you like some sperm? So that's an interesting story because of course she was the VP pick of RFK Jr. But now that his candidacy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because she had all of the Google money.

[Leo Laporte]

She had money, you know. But I could still vote for him.

[Paris Martineau]

By the way you ask, how does he make these offers? Here's a detail from the story. At a dinner party held at the home of a well known Silicon Valley executive last year, Mr. Musk offered to provide his sperm to a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times. According to two people who were present for the interaction, the couple had mentioned at dinner that they were having trouble conceiving a child. Happy to assist, and boasted about his many children.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to give you some of my sperm.

[Paris Martineau]

I could. I could make a sample right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I could give you some now. I'll just be right back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can play.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a jar. Something I could put it in. Oh, my God. A Ziploc bag would work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That could be a show title.

[Leo Laporte]

So one of the mothers.

[Paris Martineau]

That block bag could work.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the mothers is the executive at Neuralink. Siobhan Zillas, Elon's brain technology startup. She's moved into one of the houses with her children. Grimes? No. Because they're in a big battle over custody. So. No. The third mother is Mr. Musk's first wife. Oh, this will go well. Justine. He has five kids. There is room in the Austin compound if they were to visit. Although he is estranged from at least one of these kids. The one who's trans, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he said that. She's dead.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically dead to me. She's dead to me. There is also my sperm.

[Paris Martineau]

There is also a big conflict between Zillus, the Musk executive who he's had children with, and Grimes. Because of a name issue, Musk took a name that he and Grimes had chosen for their daughter, Valkyrie, and gave it to one of Mrs. Zillow's twins. According to two people familiar with the naming, Grimes was so offended that she wrote a song about the episode, which she posted to Twitter. A girl cursed with my daughter's name, grimes wrote in a now deleted tweet, will now carry her mother's shame. In the end, Ms. Zillis changed her daughter's name, and while Grime and Grimes chose a different name for their child. What a freak.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So freak.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, so on the one hand, it's just comedic and weird and creepy, but on the other hand, it's just power. It's eugenics.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

It is racist eugenics, he says. I'm not saying, like, only smart people should have kids. I'm just saying smart people should have kids as well. I know. I notice a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You're like, wow, that's probably not good. This is a quote from his biography published in 2015.

[Paris Martineau]

It's also. I mean, this goes without saying, given everything we know about him, but he's not the one having to do any of the work to raise these kids.

[Leo Laporte]

The women who gave him a house, a compound. I gave you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I gave you my sperm. Isn't that enough?

[Leo Laporte]

I want the Ziploc bag back, though, if you don't mind. Views. His views, according to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're reusable. Don't you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's all the same sperm. I'm so sorry if your children are listening to this. His views seem to echo those of his father. Errol Musk, who is 78, has seven children with three women. You breed horses. Errol said in an interview in September. People are the same. If you have a good father and a good mother, you'll have exceptional children. If you have no children, I feel very sorry for you.

[Paris Martineau]

Didn't he famously have a very contentious relationship with Elon?

[Leo Laporte]

Elon?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Which explains some.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Musk's first child was named Nevada.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's normal compared to everything else.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think that rich people should have to, like, apply to be able to name their kids after states, after anything. I mean, this is the same guy who named his kid X, AI something something, right?

[Leo Laporte]

It got a little more normal. Kids using IVF before they divorced in 2008. The twins, Griffin and Vivian, who are now 20, followed by the triplets, Saxon, Damien and Kai, now in their late teens. He likes IVF because, you know, triplets. And then the names got a little weirder. He twice married and divorced the actress Tallulah Riley because she.

[Paris Martineau]

Riley is the one who he had, which I Think is one of the craziest profiles I've ever seen of a man. Maybe it's a Rolling Stone profile where this is before Elon Musk had very publicly gone a little wacky. The author was there to interview him about something relating to SpaceX or Tesla. And Elon Musk spent the entire couple days he was with this journalist just complaining about how lovesick he was because he divorced his wife. It's a phenomenal read.

[Leo Laporte]

He and Grimes had a kid in 2020 they named x ae xi or x for short.

[Paris Martineau]

The everything Everything platform.

[Leo Laporte]

The everything kid. Then he had more children with grimes and with Mrs. Ms. Zillis. And then. Oh, it just goes on and on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Goes on and on. It's unbelievable. Thank you to the New York Times for giving us the inside tea. Spilling the tea. Is that how the kids say it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is spilling the sperm.

[Paris Martineau]

Nope, that's not how they say it at all. We can start something.

[Leo Laporte]

It's over. It's over.

[Paris Martineau]

Good night.

[Leo Laporte]

Good night. Everybody. Kill your podcast went too far.

[Paris Martineau]

The Ziploc bag has been emptied and we're all devastated.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course. It's all. This is all his philosophy. A, that we're the planet's being depopulated, which there's no evidence of. And B, that and this is the real thing. Smart people aren't having kids. The poor dumb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

People are having kids.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's test Creole pure eugenics.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And we really need drink.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He just means poor people.

[Leo Laporte]

Really poor people. Well, he doesn't even just mean poor people. There's a little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's not forget where he came from.

[Leo Laporte]

Racism in there as well. Certain just they're. They're not our kind, if you know what I mean. Not our. Not our people.

[Paris Martineau]

The classic opinion to go with that hat you've got on. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, this is a Panama hat which is made in Ecuador as all true Panama hats are.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As confused it is dashing on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like it.

[Paris Martineau]

It's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, this is a Paris moment here. You both have hats on. People who appear on, say, MSNBC from certain magazines who are constantly wearing ironic hats. Hats. I have no patience. Hipster ironic hat.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

I see you.

[Leo Laporte]

I make a lot of in the hot dog hat. That question. I.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, I am well known for making silly hats to the point silly hatson. I mean, what would you consider an ironic hat.

[Leo Laporte]

Right here. If I wore hat this hat on Amazon bc, would they accept me? I don't know if it's ironic or it's warm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, let's look it up here, see if there's a definition on them.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's those little Hombergs, those little hipster hamburgers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What do you call them? Pog pie hats? Pig pie.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, no, those aren't ironic. Those are just bad fashion choices.

[Leo Laporte]

I had one. I bought one.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got an ironic thing here.

[Leo Laporte]

Bryan Cranston is the hat. Bryan Cranston wore Breaking Bad, and I had one.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, hey, if you're my friend who's in the skeeball team and you're watching, you aren't. You aren't seeing this. I. She's the first member of our skeeball team got pregnant. We've all decided to both get her normal baby registry gifts and irony poisoned ones. And the one that we're getting is this.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm, legally speaking, the editor in chief of the New Yorker.

[Paris Martineau]

She works the New Yorker. That's an ironic baby one.

[Leo Laporte]

You should get her a T shirt which says Valley Valkyrie. Maybe Valkyrie 3.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that could be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Valkyrie the third.

[Paris Martineau]

I could tell her it's an Elon Musk reference.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it piss helmet? Ironic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think a cowboy hat on someone who's not Southern is ironic.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, so like Elon Musk, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who wears it backwards?

[Leo Laporte]

He wears his cowboy hat backwards.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that was the one.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a name for it. It's called all hat no cattle. Or in Paris's case, small hat, no cat, no cattle.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break because this is really going way downhill fast. Our Halloween edition. That's why we're wearing the hats. Yeah, sure. Our show today, brought to you by Cash Fly. I'm going to be on Matt Levine's podcast, the Anycast, next. Well, in January. So I guess I have to say next year, just a couple of months. It's gonna be fun. I look forward to it. I love Matt. He saved our lives. He saved twit about. Oh, I don't know, 20 years ago. We were trying to. Turns out when you have a successful podcast, there's a lot of bandwidth involved. And we were trying to do it on a website that didn't work. And then we tried BitTorrent for a while. AOL radio was giving us the bandwidth. You remember those days on Twitter? Bandwidth provided by AOL Radio. Well, it wasn't too long before Cashfly, Matt Levine, came along and said, hey, I can help. And thank goodness they did. They're our CDN, or Content Delivery Network. For over 20 years, CashFly has held a track Record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we know how good Cash Fly is because we've been using them since practically the beginning. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, friction free site interactions. With Cash Fly. Our podcasts are closer to you. You download them directly from a server, a cash flow server that's geographically near you, which means faster downloads. And because Cash Fly stores our content, it means 100% cash hits. There's never a delay while the CDN goes out and tries to find the content downloads. It then gives it to you. No, it's always right there, right away. Cache lies the only CDN built for throughput. So they can do things like ultra low latency video streaming over a million concurrent users with latency of less than a second. It's amazing. Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster. No lag, no glitches, no outages. Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device. And the thing that made a lot of difference to us, they're very flexible in their billing. You go month to month for as long as you need as you figure out what your peaks are and your valleys. You know, bandwidth for us and probably for you, for a lot of people is very spiky. You don't want to pay for the maximum. They helped us figure out what's the best billing system. We worked it out. And then once you know that, you can get a discount for fixed terms. The point is, you design your contract when you switch to Cash Fly. Cash Flight delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. And you could do what we're doing, shield your site content in their cloud, which means you're going to have a 100% cash hit ratio. No cash misses. And man is the support great. With Cashflies elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment, your dedicated account managers with you from day one ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 247 support when you need it. The good news is you probably will never need it. They're so good, we've. I can't think of when we've had a problem with them. In fact, that's good because that means if we don't have a problem with them, you don't have a problem getting our content. That's what's so important to us. Learn how you can get your first month [e-mail] twit that's as I've said many, many times over the last 20 years. That c a c h e f l y.com twit thank you, cash Fly and Matt, I'm looking forward to being on your show in January. That's going to be a lot of fun. I think this would be a good time to get our picks of the week in here, starting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

If you want. Unless you got a story that you want to really hit. I think we got.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I kind of enjoyed how you so. So I put the kind of other stories at the bottom of what I throw to the red down. Leo just went bottom up. It was kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It was good. That's how I like doing it. Yeah. I like to start at the bottom.

[Jeff Jarvis]

None of the serious AI stuff. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Hell with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Boring.

[Leo Laporte]

What is your pick of the week, Ms. Paris Martin.

[Paris Martineau]

Let me see if I can get it is November.

[Leo Laporte]

It is McVember almost. She's got a hat within a hat.

[Paris Martineau]

A hat and a hat, as they say.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

My pick of the week is the Age of Cage. A Novel Ain't not a Novel. A kind of nonfiction book about four decades of Hollywood told through one singular career by Keith Phipps. I'm part of the way through as Nick Vember is soon to be upon us. And it's a lovely read about a lovely guy and I highly recommend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it all Nick all the time or are there other people?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, there are other people in it, but it's mostly about Nic Cage and his career and how that also tracks with kind of the development of Hollywood and the last couple of decades of cinema generally. He's also a Coppola. So it's about the Coppola in some ways.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

I have been banking a couple Nic Cage films because I already know that I'm not going to be able to watch Nick Cage film Wednesday nights, 31 days in November. I mean, yeah, there's only 31 days. I'm not gonna be able to do all of them, but I've been trying to bank some so that I can definitely get 31 in even if I don't want to watch a movie after finishing this podcast. And I recently watched Matchstick Men. Fantastic movie.

[Leo Laporte]

So that kind of. I couldn't finish it. It bugged me.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you gotta finish it because the ending is a twist.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't read anything into that. Don't look up anything about the movie.

[Leo Laporte]

I won't just finish it.

[Paris Martineau]

It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

There was something about it just. It was bugged me, but okay. I mean, a lot of his films Are make you itchy, right? Like a little.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I would say Matchstick Men isn't really one of the, like, you know, plot of it. The you get this in like the first 30 minutes is. Nick Cage is a con artist. He's got crippling OCD compulsions. He starts seeing a therapist and then reconnects with. He realizes that he has a 14 year old daughter that he never knew about.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And that's when I stopped watching.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo. You gotta watch it.

[Leo Laporte]

The OCD was like incessant. I was just. Okay, I will. I'll watch it. I will. I'll finish it. Yeah. Thank you. And the Age of Cage from macmillan.

[Paris Martineau]

The Age of Cage.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay.

[Paris Martineau]

Look at this cover. It's cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you read paper Dead tree books?

[Paris Martineau]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have an E reader of any kind? Of any sort?

[Paris Martineau]

I have a Kindle somewhere. I don't really know where it is. I prefer to read the old way.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have a favorite chair you'll sit in and read or.

[Paris Martineau]

I like sitting on my couch and reading. Ideally we're in a park or, you know, at a bar or something.

[Leo Laporte]

A divan. And you just read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So how are you on taking a book to read when eating alone in a restaurant or a bar?

[Paris Martineau]

I love that. That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do too. Do people look at you funny?

[Paris Martineau]

No, they think I'm out here in the burbs. Hot and fantastic. Smart.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, great, she's smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you prop it? What do you prop it up on?

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

That's my difficulty. I always need something to. No, no, I need to, like, prop it up.

[Paris Martineau]

Or you could just hold it like this.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm thinking I will.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just at the same time.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no. I'm thinking, one hand. I'm gonna bring a book stand with me.

[Paris Martineau]

That's crazy. If you bring a book stand, you will. Maybe you should go with a second person. But they're not there to eat. They're just there to flip the table.

[Leo Laporte]

Go. Book sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, here's the question, Paris. How often do people think they're starting a conversation with you? So. So what you read in there?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that good. Is that book good?

[Paris Martineau]

Sometimes, yeah. Whenever you like some sperm? Whenever I was rereading Infinite Jest, a lot of people asked me about it actually, and I was like, it's Infinite Jest.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're like, it's an infinite book. I have the physical book and I have it on a Kindle. And every spring I try. I start it over.

[Paris Martineau]

I Think it's a book that would be really hard to read in the Kindle because one, it's got a million endnotes and kind of part of the whole experience of the book is the disjointed. Is the disjointed experience of flipping from book to endnote having two different bookmarks in there.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the way it works on the Kindle, you can actually read the endnote without looking. Yeah. Which makes it a little easier.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then you click back.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that doesn't do it for me. You gotta experience the disjointed nature. Much like the non linear narratives throughout Infinite Jest that David Foster Wallace has intricately weaving in there.

[Leo Laporte]

He's doing the weak.

[Paris Martineau]

You gotta make life hard. Much like the Canadian eco terrorists who are wheelchair bound that are a large plot point in the end part in the endnotes of that book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't give away anything here.

[Leo Laporte]

I really should just sit down and read it, shouldn't I?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's gonna take you a long time to sit down and read it, but it's great. It's a classic and it's also just very funny. It's just a very fun book.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, I'm gonna pursue it. I. Every spring I do this. Jeff Jarvis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, because this is traditionally. This is a number. The number we have to do this week.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a huge number. I don't even know how to pronounce this number number.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't either. It's a 20 decillion in dollar fine for a Russian court against Google. That's 342 and 34 zeros, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, larger than the entire global gdp.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it could get bigger.

[Leo Laporte]

But obviously they know they're never going to collect this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Russia.

[Leo Laporte]

What did they do wrong? Just out of curiosity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Didn't. They didn't put up some content that they thought were blocking their content. So that was kind of boring. So then this might be interesting. I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I see how this worked away. Now. This is, this is actually a lesson in exponential growth. Oh, the fine was a thousand. A hundred thousand rubles a day. That's a thousand dollars a day. But it, it doubled every week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Compound interest.

[Leo Laporte]

Compound interest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Grains of rice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. This is the prize for the invention of chess. The vizier said to the creator of chess, what can I pay you for the invention of this great game? He said, no, very easy. Put one grain of rice in the first square, two grains of rice in the second square, four grains, double it each time per square and that would be more rice than the entire history of the world. Got him. Didn't get the rice. Got his head chopped off, smart ass. For being a wiseacre. So in a way this wasn't a crazy fine. It was just, you know, it's four years ago, it doubled every week and now it's unbelievable. That's hysterical. And that was removing channels on. For removing channels on YouTube. Yes. Another arcade.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A new AI product creation platform which sounds like a gimmick but I find this a bit interesting. So you can go on there and you can have AI design jewelry for you. In fact why don't you try it?

[Leo Laporte]

Turn your thoughts into things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's design something nice for Lisa.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh this is good. What should we do here?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does she like gold?

[Leo Laporte]

Silver with the name Valkyrie and a small pouch into.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh it makes you log in.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh hell to log into. Dream.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh darn.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can try it.

[Leo Laporte]

I can store bodily fluids. Okay, let's dream. Let's dream.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, continue with Google. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. What the heck?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't usually do this but in this case who cares?

[Paris Martineau]

Continue with this week in Google.

[Leo Laporte]

It is this week in Google. Okay. Do I have to do it again? Okay. What was it? A diamond. Let's see what it should be a diamond necklace but we need the fluid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pouch with a small with a locket.

[Leo Laporte]

That can hold bodily locket for the storage fresh bodily fluids. Okay. Anything else should be gold or silver or gold chain and a. And a little placard.

[Paris Martineau]

Where's the placard gonna go?

[Leo Laporte]

Re 2 so let's see. Quote 2 Life favorite. This doesn't have to be for Lisa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Favorite moms. There we go. Okay. Dream. All right.

[Paris Martineau]

Dream. I love to click dream.

[Leo Laporte]

Dream. We're designing something completely new and unique with the help of Arcade's AI models. The process can take up to 20 seconds and. And it's going to give me four different things. It's kind of like mid journey or hugging face.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's just going to send the police to your house really immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Okay. Oh, there it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Here we go. Gold vermilion. A locket. To my favorite moms. And it has a little pouch.

[Paris Martineau]

But where's the fluid going to go?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the locket. That's it. No, no no no. That's the one there.

[Leo Laporte]

Only $410. Let's look what else we can get here. This one's a little more.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. I like the bottom left. Honestly. Bottom Left is pretty bottom left.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I love that. That one's in. What's it called? The silly font.

[Leo Laporte]

Comic Sands.

[Paris Martineau]

Comic sans.

[Leo Laporte]

Favorite moms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

$2,340. Go ahead, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

But I, I think it's a little bit larger. Receptor receptacle, which is a good.

[Paris Martineau]

Diamonds.

[Leo Laporte]

10Ccs. That's all I need. All right, let's see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

$2,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, this is expensive because it's got a lot of. Okay. It's got to work on the text. It's weird that some of them worked.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So then you can allow others to buy this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, should I put this for you? Commission.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. 2.5 commission.

[Leo Laporte]

To my favorite moms.

[Paris Martineau]

It says Mooms.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, darn it. But Elon might want this for his house. One one of each for the house.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what's seriously interesting to me, this right. Is five, ten years ago, you could suddenly make a new product and you could design it and then you could use Chinese manufacturing and Amazon fulfillment.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And. But now it's back up a further level. You don't even design it. You can just say, make me something, and then they'll make it for you and then you can sell it. And you're in the jewelry business.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're going to be on QVC before you know it, but it's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Be average looking jewelry. And you know. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

If you look, you think this is going to result in just products everywhere on the Internet looking like one thing, and then you receive something completely different. It's gonna inspire a wave of drop shipping.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's by Leo for moms everywhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ladies and gentlemen, favorite moms.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite moms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, actually, if you scroll down on the arcade AI page, you see some pretty ugly jewelry. The little dog, the gold maltipoo charm.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem is they're using kind of an old AI model because most of the new AI models are good with text and they say, you know, the text is not good. Oh, yeah. These are not. Not good. No, that is. That is not something I would want you to wear, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

Nope.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The dreamer is scorpion sorbet.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a ring. This is the worst ring ever. And what's funny is the AI thinks it's a watch. It also. It put a watch winding stem on it or something. Thank you, Scorpion sorbet, for dreaming that.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's very strange that you can't even look at the products without logging in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Scorpion sorbet is very prolific.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Look at that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does that cost?

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have a price on this one. Oh, it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Join the wait list. Because it's so popular.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, do you think they're very popular?

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I found it interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Theoretically, I think this is. They're onto something. Frankly, I think this isn't a bad idea. I feel like there's more. Better implementation would make it more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it's kind of Kickstart. It's personal Kickstarter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Probably the same amount of disappointment as regular Kickstarter.

[Leo Laporte]

I predict before the end of next year, we'll have a story about Etsy adding AI design tools.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, exactly right.

[Paris Martineau]

And everyone will hate it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So imagine being the poor craftsperson who says, I gotta make this. But there's a picture.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a machine that makes it. I'm sure there's an AI machine that makes it. Do you think a crafts person is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, there's a picture of a craftsperson.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I feel really bad if. When you think about all the crap that we have made in China.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There are people, poor people who are sitting there in China making like, you know, love dolls and Pikachu necklaces. Oh, yeah. Weird stuff. Hot dog hats. There's a fat. There is a factory in China that sole output is Nathan hot dog hats. And there's. And there's some poor person that is the mustard girl. And she's got to put this. The foam mustard on the hot dog.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. It is unfortunate. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was too straight. No, you got to have more of a curve to it.

[Leo Laporte]

And the same Americans. Like, she's probably paid a nickel a day.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that was five years old. Give it away. You didn't buy that, right? They gave it.

[Paris Martineau]

I did get it for free. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What a world we've. We've created with AI and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ladies and gentlemen, hot dogs. Just yesterday, did you have one.

[Leo Laporte]

Dang.

[Paris Martineau]

I want a hot dog.

[Leo Laporte]

I do, too. They're so good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How does Steve Ben get a tan in prison? Sorry, my TV's on.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop watching TV. Actually, start watching TV.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He got sunburned. He's all modeled with sunburn. How did this happen?

[Leo Laporte]

He's out in the yard. They get to go.

[Paris Martineau]

He's always been a red guy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this is weird. This is very weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, anyway, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this thrilling, gripping edition of this week in Google. We thank you so much for watching. We do the show every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, and now 2200 UTC. Because in just a few days, put.

[Paris Martineau]

A pillow on your head.

[Leo Laporte]

Fall back.

[Paris Martineau]

That's glass.

[Leo Laporte]

It's his halo. It's beautiful. He looks like a saint, a medieval saint.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is cold type.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cold type. Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is what made cold type. If you can't see it, but there's little letters here. You see them there? Those are letters. And the light would shine. The laser would shine through it onto photographic paper.

[Leo Laporte]

That's super.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's how type was made before we had Postscript.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, laser jets. You can also watch the show by downloading a copy on demand from our website, Twit TV Twig. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in Google. And of course, the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. You will find the great works of Paris Martineau at the information where she's working on youth issues for the weekend. But I'm sure if you had a big story and were to send her a scoop to her Signal account martineau.01, she could be writing about almost anything. If they. If you got a big scoop, like a really big, like a hot politics scoop, would you be allowed to run with the story like they would say, well, it's your scoop?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think it was a big enough scoop for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be fair. So send her something good. Martin 0.01 Jeff Jarvis has a new job. He is. Oh, I don't have jobs. Jobs. He is doing some stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a visiting professor at Stony Brook University's School of Communication and Journalism.

[Paris Martineau]

And not communications.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Communications.

[Leo Laporte]

Only one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Always think I got. I got scolded already. I always think you're. And I am a distinguished fellow at the center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State's University's School of Communication and Media. And I am still, still and forever the emeritus Luthertown professor of Journalism Innovation at the Craig. Craig. Craig Newmark New York Graduate School of Journalism.

[Leo Laporte]

And look for his piece at the Columbia Journalism Review. His blog is Buzz Machine. His books are available at the [e-mail] oh, sorry, yes. @jeffjarvis.com Both the Gutenberg parenthesis magazine and his brand new one, the Web. We was at a grammatical error to say both and then mentioned three items.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you should be ashamed of yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

What should I say instead of both? Such as all. All books. His books.

[Paris Martineau]

His books are available.

[Leo Laporte]

His books are [e-mail] including such great books as the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The web we weave, blurbed by none other than Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you guys for joining us. Thank you all for putting up with us. That's really the best way to describe it. We will be back next week and we'll attempt to do a better show. I apologize.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I'm not going to be here, so you know what's next?

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, speaking about Micah Sargent, next week, I'm in mines.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that'll fix everything.

[Paris Martineau]

He's going to be at Con. Yeah, the content conference in where?

[Leo Laporte]

In where for Ex Con Main.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Germany. The birthplace.

[Paris Martineau]

Not in Con, unfortunately.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It would be better.

[Paris Martineau]

Have they ever had con at Con?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They should, but is it can. Can Con at Con?

[Leo Laporte]

Can you Con Con. All right, we'll have a nice trip to Mainz. I'm sorry, we'll miss you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm flying out on election day night. I'm gonna be crazy. I'm gonna ask for asylum when I'm there if I have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, would you move?

[Paris Martineau]

He's gonna be having shakes in the plane.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Being away from MSNBC for that long.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Who are you flying? Because many of them will have msnbc.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm gonna be sleeping all the way over.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're sleeping. Okay. You can't.

[Paris Martineau]

Will you be.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not asleep. That's crazy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I used a lot of miles for business class.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for you. Live flat. No, it's always the way to go. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Paris. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time on this week in Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye. Now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Leo Laporte]

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