TWiG 794: License to Prune - Zuck Jams, Claude + Palantir , Banjo Toss

Summary

Summary of "This Week in Google (Audio)" Episode 794: "License to Prune - Zuck Jams, Claude + Palantir, Banjo Toss"

Release Date: November 14, 2024 | Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau

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1. Personal Anecdotes: Travels and Culinary Adventures

The episode opens with the hosts sharing their recent experiences. Paris Martineau recounts her time at ConCon Main, a content convention in Mainz, Germany, where she enjoyed an exceptional schnitzel at Salzkeller in Frankfurt. The conversation delves into the art of making the perfect schnitzel, highlighting techniques to achieve a crisp, non-greasy breading. Jeff Jarvis humorously contributes by discussing his own schnitzel endeavors, emphasizing the importance of pounding the meat to the desired thickness.

Notable Quote:

• [03:03] Jeff Jarvis: "I dredge it in flour to dry it off. Then heavy cream and egg and then the breadcrumbs and right to the fryer. And that seems to work quite well."

2. Mark Zuckerberg's Musical Ventures and AI Experimentation

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Mark Zuckerberg's unconventional project—his collaboration with T-Pain to cover the song "Get Low." The hosts express their bewilderment and amusement at the endeavor, critiquing the execution and questioning the artistic merit of the outcome.

Notable Quotes:

• [09:14] Leo Laporte: "Wow. Can I play?"
• [11:20] Jeff Jarvis: "I can't believe I somehow hadn't put two and two together. That the song would include Mark Zuckerberg saying 'from the window to the walls so the sweat dripped down my balls.'"

3. Crypto's Influence on Recent Elections and Market Dynamics

The hosts analyze the impact of cryptocurrency funding on elections, particularly focusing on President Trump's involvement. They discuss how significant investments, such as those by Bernie Moreno, have swayed both House and Senate races in favor of pro-crypto candidates. The conversation also touches upon the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin, attributing their fluctuations to political maneuvers and market speculation.

Notable Quotes:

• [17:12] Paris Martineau: "It hit, it hit Leo. It hit 93 today. It's down now."
• [21:00] Leo Laporte: "I was a fool because as I've said in this show before, as a child, I bought a bunch of fake IDs for people in my college with crypto."

4. The TikTok Ban and Its Legal Challenges

A heated discussion ensues about the potential shutdown of TikTok in the U.S. and Canada. The hosts explore the legal battles ByteDance (TikTok's parent company) is facing, including court challenges and lobbying efforts by figures like Attorney General Matt Gaetz. They also speculate on the influence of lawmakers like Cory Doctorow in potentially halting enforcement actions against TikTok.

Notable Quotes:

• [26:16] Jeff Jarvis: "And if we end up having Attorney General Matt Gaetz, who is one of the few Republican lawmakers to vote against the TikTok ban, it's possible that he could direct the Department of Justice to just not enforce the rule."

5. Social Media Platforms: X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and Threads

The conversation shifts to the evolving landscape of social media. The hosts express their preferences, debating the merits of platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Blue Sky, Mastodon, and Threads. They discuss features such as content filtering, user engagement, and the challenges of managing multiple social accounts. Jeff Jarvis shares his experiences with these platforms, emphasizing the superior engagement he receives on Blue Sky compared to X.

Notable Quotes:

• [30:40] Leo Laporte: "There's going to be, obviously some profit taking at some point. It will go down, but that's the Thing. It has nothing to do with anything."
• [39:26] Jeff Jarvis: "I like to use a micro blogging site like this to get information from a very specific group of people. And I found it really hard to do that on Twitter now because the way the for you page is set up is I am being forced to read every single one of Elon Musk's weird ass posts."

6. AI Developments: Apple's Intelligence and OpenAI's Challenges

The hosts critique Apple's recent AI advancements, particularly focusing on its ineffective summarization features. They highlight the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Apple's AI-generated summaries, expressing frustration over its inability to reliably interpret user inputs.

Notable Quotes:

• [63:36] Jeff Jarvis: "I have never liked using Watch What Happens Next. It's a marvelous commentary on reality."

Further, they discuss OpenAI's struggle with its new flagship model, Orion. Contrary to expectations, Orion's performance improvements over GPT-4 are marginal, raising questions about the future trajectory of AI development.

Notable Quotes:

• [82:23] Leo Laporte: "I'm done with the hype coming from people like Sam Altman. It's kind of like Elon Musk where they're really selling something they don't have yet."
• [86:07] Leo Laporte: "I understand why creatives and others want to keep AI from ingesting their content. But when you do that, you do it at the risk of keeping the AI from being all it can be."

7. Legislative and Ethical Considerations in AI Training Data

A substantial debate unfolds around the ethical and legal ramifications of AI models ingesting copyrighted content. The hosts argue that while acquisition and transformative use are legally distinct, the scale at which AI consumes data poses unique challenges. They reference legal cases, such as Raw Story's lawsuit against OpenAI, to underscore the contentious nature of AI training practices.

Notable Quotes:

• [91:33] Paris Martineau: "And quoting at length is a separate question."
• [94:06] Paris Martineau: "OpenAI is a matter of scale. AI can read more books than I can in my lifetime in one day, probably."

8. AI's Positive Contributions: Randy Travis's Vocal Restoration

In a heartwarming segment, the hosts highlight AI's potential for good by discussing how Randy Travis's iconic baritone was restored using AI after he suffered a stroke. This initiative, backed by full artist consent and collaboration, showcases AI's capability to aid individuals with disabilities.

Notable Quote:

• [104:55] Leo Laporte: "Mary Travis delivered testimony on Capitol Hill in June saying it's the first AI song ever recorded and released with full artist consent and involvement in a studio setting."

9. Community Engagement: Banjo Toss and Interactive Segments

The episode features light-hearted interactions, including a playful segment on the Banjo Toss at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Jeff Jarvis shares his participation and encourages listeners to engage with the community through similar events and interactive games.

Notable Quotes:

• [127:11] Jeff Jarvis: "I'm thinking of ordering from the Mediterranean restaurant Yasas in addition to this."
• [130:35] Leo Laporte: "What else? Pick another story. This is fun. I'm enjoying."

10. Closing Remarks and Membership Promotions

The hosts conclude the episode by promoting their membership club, highlighting benefits such as ad-free content, access to exclusive programming, and participation in a supportive Discord community. They encourage listeners to join Club Twit to further engage with the show's content and community.

Notable Quote:

• [140:10] Leo Laporte: "Bye. Bye. I think we could call this. There's quite a few good titles. Let me look. See, that was all right."

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Key Takeaways:

• AI and Ethics: The episode underscores the ongoing tensions between AI advancements and ethical considerations, particularly concerning data usage and copyright laws.

• Crypto's Political Clout: Cryptocurrency continues to wield significant influence in political arenas, shaping election outcomes and market dynamics.

• Social Media Evolution: The fragmentation and diversification of social media platforms reflect users' desires for more controlled and meaningful engagement.

• Positive AI Applications: AI's role in enhancing human capabilities, such as restoring Randy Travis's vocals, highlights its potential for benevolent uses.

• Community and Engagement: Interactive segments like the Banjo Toss emphasize the importance of community involvement and light-hearted engagement in tech discussions.

This episode of "This Week in Google" offers a blend of serious analysis on technology and politics, mixed with personal stories and humor, providing listeners with a comprehensive overview of current trends and issues in the tech world.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for twig. This week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is back from Con in Germany. Paris Martineau is here and we will both try to cheer him up just a little bit. Why did Joanna Stern only talk to chat bots for an entire day? Randy Travis, how did he get his voice back? And Elon Musk as a font. It's all coming up next on Twig. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is twig. This Week in Google. Episode 794, recorded Wednesday, November 13, 2024. Licensed to prune. It's time for twig. This Week in Google, the show where you never know what's going to happen next. Paris Martino is here from the information where she covers the weekend. We shot a little on a little cold. I. A little cold to those. So I'm sorry. I hope you feel all right. We'll get some steam in here real quick. That might help.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. If you could hydrate the entire region of New York City, kind of bring up the humidity, that would be great for me. And all the plants.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yes, the plants. Your plants look good. The monstera is Monsteras. Looks wonderful. Yes. Also here, he's back from his sojourn in the. Where? I don't know, the communist block of Eastern Europe.

[Paris Martineau]

Where were you?

[Leo Laporte]

Concon Main.

[Paris Martineau]

I was at concon, which is the content convention in Mainz, Germany. I had the best schnitzel of my life.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw your schnitzel picture.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Incredible.

[Paris Martineau]

It was unbelievable. Place called Salzkeller in Frankfurt.

[Leo Laporte]

And when you have that snitzel, you have to have car tofu salat.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Some would argue that you must have a cucumber salad, but I went for the. The.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And it was incredible. It was crisp.

[Leo Laporte]

What made it so good? Jeff Jarvis.

[Paris Martineau]

It's properly pounded to an inch of his life, which I do, by the.

[Leo Laporte]

Way, with my schnitzel. I am a pounder. I like to pound my schnitzel.

[Paris Martineau]

It is perfectly breaded. The bread stays on it. It is so crisp that when you put the knife into it, you. When you bite into. You hear it.

[Leo Laporte]

And yet not greasy.

[Paris Martineau]

No, not at all. Just crisp. My. My. My cardiologist was still upset, but that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with this? Now? Is it veal or is it pork in there?

[Paris Martineau]

That was ve. Which I normally do. Chicken, actually. But yeah, I. When you're in Frankfurt and I, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Get boneless pork chops and pound them within an inch of their life and they come out Quite well.

[Paris Martineau]

And I saw people were responding to my. To my slathering about it, about various techniques to make. To add things to the breading. To keep the breading on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, no. It's very simple. A little Elmer's glue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was that Chachi.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I dredge it in flour to dry it off. Then heavy cream and egg and then the breadcrumbs and right to the fryer. And that seems to work quite well.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. The potato salad was just the perfect mustardy. It was just magnificent. I had the Kleine Gruner Salat before that. A very nice green salad. Little green salad.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

And then something I never had, but it's true to Frankfurt is handkese hand cheese, which in some circumstances could sound. We won't go there. And it comes music with music.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a tuba in the music?

[Paris Martineau]

No. Somehow Chopped onions.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Sing an aria to you a few hours later.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, they do. Or can certainly.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. And then a big slab of butter with my bread and two beers.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why your cardiologist was angry. Is the slab of butter.

[Paris Martineau]

Slab of butter, yeah. So I was happy. Before we get in, can I. Can I put my plug up early, please?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

So, two things. One, December 4th, I'm not going to be on the show. Oh. Because I'm going to be at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

You did this last year. Lisa went, said it was wonderful.

[Paris Martineau]

And I did for the last book last year. So this year for the web weave.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Paris Martineau]

And last year, I'm going to be very honest and frank here. It was really hard to fill the room, and they almost canceled it. So please don't embarrass me. My friends, please sign up. Please come.

[Leo Laporte]

Goodness Gracious.

[Paris Martineau]

Embarrassing.

[Leo Laporte]

December 4th.

[Paris Martineau]

December 4th at the Commonwealth Club. And then the other thing is, as.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, you're gonna be here.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not, because I'm not gonna be there. And so I can't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can hold down the fort. If you guys both want to go.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll be the Paris show.

[Paris Martineau]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish we could just stream your speech.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That could be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Per. Oh, we'll do it like we do an apple event.

[Paris Martineau]

We'll stream your speech, and Paris and.

[Leo Laporte]

I will sit and make snarky comments.

[Paris Martineau]

You can do that. It's live. Yeah, you can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

That'd be fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But Leo will be on the scene making snarky comments so that it counts. The room filled up.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he. Is he talking?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What kind of suit Is this. Did he think that was a good tie choice?

[Paris Martineau]

And the other plug is that the Gutenberg parenthesis is now out in paperback.

[Leo Laporte]

Paperback. Yeah, it's a tra. It looks like a trade paperback. Which is better than your. Better than your, you know, little pulp paperback.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no. Yeah, they did decently on this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, well, did a nice job. So, Jeff, you were flying to Germany last Tuesday. That's why you weren't here. You missed the election. Probably haven't been filled in since. About what happened.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm turning off all news. I don't want to know what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

I know nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because I go downstairs after the shows. It's about 5 o'clock. I want to start dinner. And it is my habit to turn on the news, as it has been in every generation of reports since the news began back in 1653.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm sure Hank does that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's. It is an old person thing. You don't do that, Paris, like making dinner, watching the news. That's not your thing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I make dinner and listen to a podcast, or ideally a podcaster commenting on a reality TV show and kind of a mystery science theater 3000.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever listened to Watch what Happens Next?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that sounds great.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a marvelous commentary on reality. Lisa and I have a bad addiction to a terrible show called Below Deck, which is about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's like one of the worst ones.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's about the crew of a super yacht and they're horrible guests.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you guys have to watch Traders then, because low tech people go pretty far on that show.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Alan Cummings a lot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So a star.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a Scottish castle, so what could possibly go wrong? But no, watch. What happens is these two guys and they do the voices and they kind of recap the show, and it's just. It's quite funny. It's quite funny. So maybe that's what I'll listen to from now on when I cook dinner. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Let'S start with something fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Something like line 122.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Wait, we have to go way down. Just so people know, we put together a rundown of the show ahead of time with news stories, and each news story has its own line. By the time you get to 122, something's gone wrong. Something.

[Paris Martineau]

This is one of. This is one of yours, Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is. Yes, that's why I suggested it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Unfortunately, it's on Business Insider and I haven't paid the annual 49 fee. So you're gonna have to fill us in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Search. What if you do Mark Zuckerberg, Get Low. So you know Mark Zuckerberg?

[Leo Laporte]

What is Get Low? Is that a song?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg has had a hell of a year or two with being a wife guy. He made a very creepy statue of his wife Priscilla.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which we talked about in this show. He also made a strange custom car, and now he's done something else.

[Leo Laporte]

He's in her custom cars, actually.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He dropped single with T Pain. Mark Zuckerberg did a cover of Get Low to honor his wife Patricia.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. That's a Little John song. That's a little John songs. Go. Get Low. Does he. How does he do it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Can I play?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, probably not. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Get Low was playing Mark says, or Zuck, as he calls himself, when I first met Priscilla at a college party. So every year. Oh, we listened to it on our dating anniversary. This year, I worked with T Pain, who is, of course, the king of autotune. So that probably helped a little bit in the singing department for our own version of this lyrical masterpiece. Can I. Can I. Would I. I don't think I'll get in trouble if I play some of this, would I?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, it's coffee, right? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But. Yeah, but it's not. It's not. It's not Lil Jon.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not a released version.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me. Let me go to Zuck's Instagram.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You probably get a couple of seconds in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you click the one on the New York Times, it starts in the middle, though, which is pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, let me. Let me. Wait a minute. Okay, I got the audio on. He says what people think I'm listening to, which is heavy metal. Oh, my God. What is that? What? He's John Wick.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, Meta. That was Fight Jams playlist.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we can't. But actually, what he's really listening to is. Okay, I don't. I can't wait. Is this all an attempt to keep. You can keep showing his insta, right? Is this all an attempt to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Rehab his.

[Leo Laporte]

What the hell is he wearing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's now stylish.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. All right, all right. Damn, she fine. And there he is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She can sock like something.

[Leo Laporte]

There he is with T Pain. You know, I think all records should be recorded sitting down from now on. That's very relaxed, very chill. All right, here they are. Is the sound on? But I guess he's not Playing anything. Let me see if I can get the tune. I want to hear it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is on the New York Times article you were showing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it okay?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, if you scroll down it.

[Leo Laporte]

Here, keep scrolling, keep scrolling, keep a scrolling. Here it is. Get low. Now get low.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Play and it'll maybe one more time.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Get low.

[Leo Laporte]

Get. Okay, see if you can figure out which one is the multi billionaire social media guru and which one is an actual recording artist. Oh God, I'm sorry, I can't. No, this is too awful.

[Paris Martineau]

Stop getting sued.

[Leo Laporte]

So thank goodness T Pain was there to auto tune it. Even then it was still horrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't believe I somehow hadn't put two and two together. That the song would include Mark Zuckerberg saying from the window to the walls so the sweat dripped down my balls. But it was. It did.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that in there?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what he just sung. That's what I responded to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I think talking politics is going to be better than this.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's time to. I got. Fortunately, I have John Slenina Jammer B. Here to shout at us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, hey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I hope that you. So this was a little censor.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a little experiment because people said, oh, don't talk politics this week and so we thought we'd try something different.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought this was a fun little thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I like line 122. I'm not. I'm not complaining.

[Paris Martineau]

Paris, when you push Leo to do this, did you know that he sang that line?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I didn't know. I figured out you can play the clip back and see my face.

[Leo Laporte]

As I realized until you actually said it, I didn't understand what he said.

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't either. When you get to a certain age, you don't listen lyrics anymore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Experience that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, we want to thank you all for watching today and wish you we.

[Paris Martineau]

Could talk about line 125. Mattel's big mistake.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, there we go. We are at the bot. We go right to the bottom. So Mattel has, you know the movie Wicked is getting a lot of push. Has. Have you either of you seen that yet? I saw the show on Broadway.

[Paris Martineau]

I saw the Broadway on Broadway.

[Leo Laporte]

But a great show. The first act's good.

[Paris Martineau]

Nice soundtrack.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of goes. The second track goes downhill. A second act goes downhill.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean it's classic, you know, musical theater.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, well, Paris, classic from the Disney age. Not the exact age.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I know. I mean it's literally. It's literally a redo. It's A, you know, offshoot of a classic. But yeah, it's the wizard of Oz.

[Leo Laporte]

From the witch's point of view is the whole. It's cute, it's a big. And apparently the movie, like great play.

[Paris Martineau]

To take your kids to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly, because they've got the Wicked Witch of the west and she's misunderstood and stuff. Anyway, Mattel decided, hey, this would be a great chance to make some dolls, some Wicked dolls for the kids. The problem is there's a porn site called Wicked and it's wicked dot com. And apparently Mattel didn't realize that when they made the packaging for the Wicked doll, they called it a misprint. The doll is for children four and up. But Mattel expressed deep regret, blamed the mix up on an unfortunate error and vowed to take immediate action. I think they should. Yeah, I think they should buy wicked.com and turn it into a Mattel toy site. That would really confuse the people. Anyway. Yeah, okay, that's good.

[Paris Martineau]

Looking at the titles there, it's pretty, pretty amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, @wicked.com.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No dolls I want to.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh no, they're dolls of a sort.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, wait. So I want to imagine the setup. If your wife was to walk in, you have MSNBC on one screen, then you've got Twit us on another screen and then I assume on a third screen you have hardcore pornography. Is that what you're working with right now?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so I'm looking. I don't think there is a Wicked doll site. That's the funny thing. So they, somebody just said, well, it must be wicked.com and put it on the packaging. Mattel has had to pull all of the packages, pull all the dolls, but.

[Paris Martineau]

Some were sold before they did that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, some four year old's going to get an education. I don't think there is actually a website for this. They just put it, they just put it on there, which is hysterical.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The website is Wicked movie dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, well, no wonder I could see being confused about that. Yeah, Wicked movie dot com.

[Paris Martineau]

See, you think the print is passed and print doesn't matter. Well, this was a mistake of printing and you can't go back.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't go back.

[Paris Martineau]

Not easy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's part of the problem, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will say Wicked.com has really dropped the ball on getting some.

[Leo Laporte]

There is an opportunity for some people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They, they could have had some cross promotion stuff going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they chose not to.

[Leo Laporte]

Some kid got a Wicked education, that's all I can say.

[Paris Martineau]

All right. You go to the real show now.

[Leo Laporte]

The crypto industry spending. What is bitcoin at, by the way? I. Every time I go to bed, I wake up and bitcoin is now at another, you know, massive 89.89,742. So that's a dir. That's directly since the election.

[Paris Martineau]

It hit, it hit Leo. It hit 93 today. It's down now.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Some. Some bitcoin bros. I think this might be wishful thinking, say it should hit a million, but what. The reason bitcoin's going up right now is because, of course, the crypto industry spent a lot of money during the election to get President Trump elected. After Trump went to the bitcoin conference and said he was going to fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, which by the way, got such a big ovation. Donald said it again, just said it twice because he liked the applause. Sherrod Brown, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, got booted by Bernie Moreno in Ohio, who is. Who got $40 million in the last few weeks of the election. That money, which funded ads across Ohio. One Moreno, a former crypto executive and a crypto supporter. The seat. According to the crypto industry, there's a tracker called Stand with Crypto. According to the crypto industry itself, a huge number of House. They say 272 House crypto candidates were elected compared to 122 anti crypto candidates in the Senate. 19 pro crypto candidates, including Bernie Moreno and 12 anti crypto candidates were elected. So a big majority in the House and Senate and of course, I think in the White House, although you never know.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, Baron is big into it and so Baron Trump. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He played host to a crypto officer at Trump's crypto endeavor.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but Leo Dogecoin, I mean, I'm sorry. Bitcoin went up 43% in the last month. Dogecoin, however, has gone up 254% in the last month.

[Leo Laporte]

Partly because we know DOGE now stands for the Department of Governmental Efficiency.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A Dogecoin. 40 cents right now. So I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, kind of. Although Father Robert on our network and a number of other people including Jammer B were a big dogecoin supporters and I think had quite a bit of holding in the.

[Paris Martineau]

Wasn't Dogecoin a joke?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's a meme. It was a meme coin.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just a meme.

[Leo Laporte]

As was Sheena ibu.

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is also big up. So all the, all the cryptos are up.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, my $500 is now $11,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I have 7.85 Bitcoin. I know, Leo, it's going to be a million bucks. But I figured at some point, quantum computing will come along and crack my wallet. And I will, and I will. Because, remember, I would have sold it a lot. I would have sold it when I meant $5,000. Yeah, right, right. I would have go, oh, wow, I'm rich. And then I would have watched it and I said, I could have had $700,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a fool because as I've said in this show before, as a child, I bought a bunch of fake IDs for people in my college with crypto. And I think at some point I had like three or four bitcoin and would have been nice if I had kept that instead of.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, you buried the lead. You were selling fake IDs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wasn't selling fake IDs.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was easier to obtain fake IDs if you bought in mass. So me and a bunch of friends all bought fake IDs together. And me is the most technical, technologically savvy person, was the person who actually bought the cryptocurrency.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. You should have kept it. It's like the guy who. I should have spent 10,000 bitcoins on a pizza. He's. There is a guy crying in his beer. I hope a good pizza. The funny thing is, I mean, the real problem with crypto, and this is what Gary Gensler, soon to be former chairman of the sec, was saying, is it's not an investment vehicle. It's a purely speculative vehicle. There's no. There's nothing behind it to give it some value. Even gold has some value. A stock has some value based on what it's, you know, represents the share in a company. But bitcoin is worth whatever. It's worth whatever you can get people to think.

[Paris Martineau]

And part of the real benefit of it was that it was a way to get around currency exchanges.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And then it was an instant change of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. Not anymore. Because of the gas fees and the.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And the size of them anyway. And not to mention the. But we don't worry about that anymore. The damage it does to the. You know, we'll say with AI, we.

[Paris Martineau]

Don'T care about that anymore either.

[Leo Laporte]

Anymore.

[Paris Martineau]

So ether is down.

[Leo Laporte]

Ether's down, huh?

[Paris Martineau]

Today it's up 29 over the month.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There's going to be, obviously some profit taking at some point. It will go down, but that's the Thing. It has nothing to do with anything.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, I got a question for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Even though you don't invest in stocks, because you.

[Leo Laporte]

I do. I buy.

[Paris Martineau]

I buy mutual funds.

[Leo Laporte]

Mutual funds? Yeah. So index funds.

[Paris Martineau]

At our age, leaving Paris out here, do you think the market's going to go up or down?

[Leo Laporte]

It's gone up quite a bit, hasn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

It has. It has Indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

I made $30,000 on election day.

[Paris Martineau]

Geez.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to really celebrate that from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Betting on an election day or just.

[Leo Laporte]

Holding from my holdings.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, that's another question. The. The whale who invested a huge amount in the. In that Freddie Market.

[Leo Laporte]

Freddie999 or whatever.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, right, the front. So he made money.

[Leo Laporte]

$48 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you know what he says was key to him deciding to bet all that money on Trump versus Harris, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No, why?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He said that he did. He used a specific polling method, like neighbor polling, to where he would ask. He hired his own team to do private polling of the U.S. no, he hired his own team to do polling of the US and when he asked people who they were going to vote for, they said they had, like, two main questions. One was like, who are you planning to vote for? And then two, who do you think your neighbors are interested? And for the neighbor polling people were overwhelming, at least this guy says. And saying Trump in certain swing states.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's a pretty big bet to me. Bet 25. No. How much he bet? He made 48 million.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought he bet 30. That's. That's only my memory.

[Leo Laporte]

25 million was bet by four different whales. This is on us citizens are not, in theory allowed to do this. This is on a betting site called Poly Market.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Wall Street Journal had an interview with the whale I'm talking about. He was a Frenchmen that went by the name Theo in the article.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the big four were Freddy 9999, Princess, Caro, Mitchie and Theo 4. They spent $24.7 million and obviously did quite well.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's only one for one payoff. It's not an odds payoff.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there is odds. Yeah. There's definitely odds. In fact, the odds were massively moved by these big investments.

[Paris Martineau]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, I think it's param. Is it called Peri Mutual? I don't know what it is. Horse race.

[Paris Martineau]

I had a lot of friends who were. Who were watching the betting market as if it was an indicator, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, was it? Maybe. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe it was. Maybe it was if you're willing to bet money.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, at the time I thought, oh, these guys are just crypto millionaires and money is not very meaningful to them. It's just a. Yeah. It's just a token. Of course, there is a big question mark now about Tick Tock. I don't know if this was a coincidence or intentional, but the bill to force the sale of Tick Tock said that the deadline was January 19, one day before the inaugural. Probably to protect it against whoever got elected. Right. Or what? I don't know. Will Tick Tock be saved? In the last minute, Canada now has ordered the shutdown of the Canadian. Not the app, but there. But the business itself in Canada has been shut down.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I presume that. So Congress comes in on the. What, the fifth?

[Leo Laporte]

So Congress could change.

[Paris Martineau]

Congress could. Could repeal the act between then and 20th. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, TikTok is challenging both the Canadian and the US orders in court.

[Paris Martineau]

They can get delayed in any case.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if we end up having Attorney General Matt Gaetz, who is one of the few Republican lawmakers to vote against the TikTok ban, it's possible that he could direct the Department of Justice to just not enforce the.

[Paris Martineau]

Ah, good point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Rule.

[Paris Martineau]

And this is an area where at least. I forget what you said about this, Paris, but Leo and I have been lamenting the possibility of TikTok being shut down. So this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're big fans.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

What's your stand In Paris, your TikTok stand?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I don't have any personal. I enjoy using the app. My understanding of it is just that it would be unavailable on the App Store. So I think it would still potentially work.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that the case?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it would just be. You would be. My thought is that it would be like unable to be on the App Store and downloaded. I don't know whether or not it would just have to block all users that are in the US or not.

[Leo Laporte]

The law signed by Biden on April 24th gave ByteDance until January 19th to sell tick Tock or face a ban.

[Paris Martineau]

And of course, a restraining order. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean they went to court immediately and.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. This actually is going to be an interesting question because this is love hate relationship between the new administration and social media. On the one hand, they blame social media for destroying our youth. Actually, they blame it more for censoring conservative ideas.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And at the same time, they were very effective, including, by the way, using TikTok, but especially on X. Clearly X is going to be a benefit beneficiary of the new administration. Right, yeah, certainly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'd assume all Elon Musk companies will.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's.

[Paris Martineau]

I was thinking about it yesterday. He made so much on Tesla stock going up that it wipes out his. What he paid for X.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? In hindsight, that 44 billion.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That it wasn't all his money, but the 44 billion paid for tick for X. That was a good deal. Yeah, that was a hell of a good deal.

[Paris Martineau]

It's truly. By an influence.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

We weren't going to be political.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, we're not being political. We're talking about X. You see that in the lower right hand corner of the video we are streaming right now on X x dot com. Although a lot of people have decided that now is the time. Thank you for pointing at that. You're welcome. Very nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It took me a minute because my. For some reason my thing is mirrored on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you don't. You. Your finger can't. Nor can mine, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could. Oh, wait, no, it's gone now. X gone.

[Leo Laporte]

It's now YouTube. But you could. There it is right there.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you. Two weeks ago when we were trying to do the. We were all hanging on the same thing. I. I couldn't do it. I couldn't put my hands at the same spot. It was throwing me completely. I lost all sense of spatial relationships. So I really look like I'm ridiculous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, we were all in the. In the photo that we got for that. We were all doing the falling off thing. There was a time when we were all.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I never. I never synced. I couldn't. I couldn't do it. For some reason I'm watching you and then I'm watching that and I just completely lost. I'm very bad at spatial relationship.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now are we going down?

[Leo Laporte]

So done that already.

[Paris Martineau]

Do something new.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. Can't do that for the thumbnail anymore. Blue sky got a million new users. It's now 14 point some million. It's the chief banish fishery. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Of.

[Leo Laporte]

Of.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I'm really glad. I like Blue Sky a lot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love Blue Sky. I think it's so fun. I really have been enjoying posting there. I've been.

[Paris Martineau]

When did you start on it? In. In in earnest?

[Jeff Jarvis]

A year. I'm only. I posted on it for a couple months, a year and a half ago. But then I fell off a bit. I've come back and forth every. But I really started posting the last like week or so.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I like it so much better.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've been trying to check it more than Twitter and I've been posting the same thing on X and Blue sky. And my posts on Blue sky get way more engagement even though I only have a followers. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh. I. So here's what I've been doing of lately. You know, when we closed the studio, I used to run my website, Leo FM out of the studio on a server. In fact, this box is over there and that's where the Minecraft servers were. And then we closed the studio, I took it home and I never was able to get it back up and running again. So for a while and then I realized I better probably should get my website back running. So I tried and I rebooted the machine and so somebody has kindly agreed to take over the Minecraft. So thank you, one of our club members. And as soon as that's up and running, I'll let you know. And I went to a site that I've been a longtime member of, paying five bucks a month, Manton Reese's Microblog. Are you familiar with Microblog? So what's interesting about it is it's a little blog and I have, you know, if you go to Leo fm, this is running off of Microblog. But what's interesting about it, it's also supports Activity Pub. So when I post here, it automatically goes to Mastodon and yes, Blue sky, in fact.

[Paris Martineau]

So it's a. That's a form of federation. It's the beginning.

[Leo Laporte]

So that same post, it's posse is what it is. Post once, syndicate everywhere. So if I. All the most recent posts I've put up are now on Blue Sky, Mastodon and Microblog. But they all start on Microblog. I really, I really like it. I actually upped it to 10 bucks a month just because I want. I realized I'm going to be using you as my website. I should give you a microblog. What Micro Blog. And you know, I, I'm a big fan because it is, it is both a blog and a micro blog. It's so when you go to the timeline, which is this, it's just like Twitter or anything else. Some. It's a micro blog, right? And when you. But when you also you could have a blog there and you could have posts there and you can have pages and it's kind of hard to describe because it does so many things. So Leo Microblog is my microblog, right? And Leo FM is my website. It's kind of a Confusing. I understand you can have followers on Microblog, but it also cross posts.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm in.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm Jeff Jarvis.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let me follow you then. That's good. Yeah, I forgot how to follow people. I'm sure there's. I'm sure there's a way to do it. Well, next time you post something, I can then follow you is what I'll do. There you are. Actually, it would be Jeff Jarvis.

[Paris Martineau]

There's two Leo's laporte. There's Leo Laporte at pixelfed. Oh, because you're federated.

[Leo Laporte]

That's my Pixel Fed. Is my photo. Is a photo Mastodon. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So I'm not going to follow.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm at Leo at Micro Blog and you're at Jeff Jarvis at Micro.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what I am across all the socials.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or Micro Dot Blog, slash Jeff Jarvis.

[Paris Martineau]

So how much does it cost?

[Leo Laporte]

I pay five bucks. Actually I pay ten now. But the five bucks is I think the minimum.

[Paris Martineau]

Because what I do now is most news sites have a post on X button. So I go there, I create the post and then I copy and paste that onto the four socials.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this you wouldn't have. Well, okay. This doesn't cross post.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Use the post on X button from a news site just because it's usually there.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I think it does post on X. Come to think of it, I think you can tie all your social sites into it. It definitely posts on. The other thing is when I post a blog post, I don't know, it's magic. When I post a blog post, you can comment on it. Here, let me, let me go to a post. You can comment on it. Well, it's not doing that right now. Maybe if I do it on a regular post. Here's one with, with a title, you can comment on it on other social. So you can reply to it on Mastodon, but you can also reply to it on Blue Sky. So it's kind of an interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

That's interesting. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you could, for instance, have Buzz Machine feed into it because that's the other thing is you could have your ex feed into it or Buzz Machine so you could post on X.

[Paris Martineau]

There's no length limit here.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, it's. It. Could I write long posts? Yeah. It's also a great place to photo. To post photos. I post photos here.

[Paris Martineau]

Who did this?

[Leo Laporte]

A guy named Manton Reese. He is part of the Kevin Marks. Kevin Marks World Indie Web Group. And Manton's really a smart guy and has done a really good job with this and it's pretty mature now. It's been around. I've been using it for years, and it's become really powerful and mature. I'm really. I'm really liking it. So he's Manton. So M A N T O n. So it's micro.blog/.

[Paris Martineau]

So let me play this off both of you because I get people who are. I'm still on Twitter and I have my rationales because there's people there I care about because I want to watch what's going on and so on. But I get people who really yell at me for being on there at all. What's your thoughts?

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are always going to yell at you for everything. Always true. Especially when you have an account with as many followers as you do. There is nothing you are going to be able to do in this world. It will not make a sizable number of people very mad. You can also.

[Paris Martineau]

This is why I'm so happy Paris is here.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't post on X not to get yelled at.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I get yelled at for posting on X now.

[Leo Laporte]

Not posting.

[Paris Martineau]

Not posting on X itself.

[Leo Laporte]

So we've had this debate internally at Twit because as you. We're streaming on it, we have our marketing posts to it. Lisa post to it. I. A long time ago, when Elon bought it, I immediately moved off of it and went to. And said, go to Foster.

[Paris Martineau]

You do that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do it all the time.

[Paris Martineau]

You leave.

[Leo Laporte]

But I did do it. I mean, I left it, but I. And I took all my posts off of it. And. And it says if you go to my, you know, x.comleolaport it says, don't, I'm not here. I'm on Mastodon. And he never, by the way, I'm blue check now because I don't know why, because I have half a million followers.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So humble.

[Paris Martineau]

Brag there, but go ahead.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's down, you know, it was 550,000. It's now down to 4, 885,000. So I don't know what's going on. But anyway, I keep telling. I said I was gonna say my team, but it's really Lisa. I keep telling Lisa, my team.

[Paris Martineau]

My team.

[Leo Laporte]

The team that I married. I keep saying, let's. Why are we on X? Let's get off X. And she says, no, because it's valuable place for us to be. Furthermore, we stream on X right now there's 213 people. We don't know what that number means. But the number says 213. Either watching or having watched on an X. So I think it's a good way to introduce our content to new people.

[Paris Martineau]

There's people there I care about, I'm not going to see elsewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

So I keep losing that battle, by the way. But you know, I get overruled because I would. I would have left. But I did leave. I left personally.

[Paris Martineau]

Paris, what about you?

[Leo Laporte]

But then, wait, I didn't ask Cory Doctorow and he's still there. And if Cory Doctorow, yeah, A man of principle. He. If he leaves it, then I'm going to have to say we got to get off. But he's still there and he says he can't leave. It's Anatevka. Until the Cossacks force him out. He has to stay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think. I mean, I'm not going to leave the platform. Yeah, I guess that's my answer. I'm not gonna leave X for the time being. I'm not going to be posting there as much. I find. I don't know, at least over the last week or two, I've found posting on Blue sky to be. So you really like Blue sky and rewarding experience. Yeah, it's nicer.

[Leo Laporte]

It's friendlier, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I, I mean, it's friendlier and it's also. I like to use a micro blogging site like this to get information from a very specific group of people. And I found it really hard to do that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On Twitter now because the way the for you page is set up is I am being forced to read every single one of Elon Musk's weird ass posts. Sorry, I had to mute him. He posts a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or it's strange videos I didn't want. Or it's, you know, that's your.

[Leo Laporte]

For you timeline. You could do your following timeline and it would be okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I follow so many people. It's not particularly useful to have a chronological feed from, you know, the many thousands of people I follow. I would like a. For you of the people I follow, but that's not an option. Leo, he comes up guy is. There are multiple. You can basically design whatever feed you want or subscribe to other people's feed.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that feature.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So useful. Like there's a feed I just subscribed to that is gift links posted by journalists. If somebody shares a gift link of a news article, then it populates a feed.

[Leo Laporte]

See. Then I could go to that Business Insider article you posted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's true, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they have gift links. They have such a hard paywall.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you use archived Hub today on them?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you actually. You know what I can't believe? Steve Gibson yesterday on Security now said I couldn't. It was at a hard paywall. So I just turned off JavaScript and it was fine. So he. Yeah, so there's a way around it, I guess.

[Paris Martineau]

I get Elon's posts even in my notifications.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess that puts them everywhere. Elon wants to see his stuff. Blue sky doesn't have that. Is it political though? Is it? I mean, I'm on Blue Sky. I'm not saying I'm not on Blue Sky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It depends who you are following.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I block a few people on Blue sky and the good thing is blocking still works there.

[Leo Laporte]

It does. No, it no longer works in a Twitter. It works one way. It's a one way block.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no. On Blue sky it's what they call a nuclear block where it will nuke every interaction you've ever had with that person if you block them. I think it's good.

[Paris Martineau]

And I block for some silly things because whenever I link to Washington Post, New York Times, somebody's going to yell at me. Because you're right, Paris. They always yell at me. You know, how can you send them more trials? You do this. I'm a media critic. I linked, don't click. And if they do it too often, I block them because they're boring. I want to get rid of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Functionality.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't just block jerks.

[Leo Laporte]

Just for people who don't remember, is was Jack Dorsey, when He was the CEO of Twitter, gave $15 million to a group, kind of a skunk, works to create a federated site and that ended up being Blue Sky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Jay Gray, notably, Jack Dorsey now owns 0% of Blue Sky.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's not on the board anymore either, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he's completely. Mike Masnick is on the board.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I love it that Mike Masnick's on.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If Blue sky got more aggressively federated, I, I would.

[Paris Martineau]

That would make a huge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, they're working on it.

[Paris Martineau]

They are working.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They just got some money. They're trying to. They have a team of like five people.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're trying their best.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. And they've got to deal with these sudden influxes of people and whatever comes along with that. Yeah. But it's much more interesting. We haven't talked about threads at all here. I mean, I still do it as. Yeah, it's the user interface.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have never liked using Threads, it just felt bad to me.

[Leo Laporte]

And also meta, is it not?

[Jeff Jarvis]

But also Instagram is just inherently a very, very different to me from what I want from a micro blogging news type site. They're just two totally different parts of my life. But I've also heard that threads feels very janky. It feels like very. I think my guys today was posting about how like he's been using threads for a while. He's like, was really surprised coming over to Blue sky about how much better it worked than threads.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Well, the user interface, if I want to see my notifications or my replies, I have to do one feed of that and then if I want to go off to one of them, then I have to come back almost to the beginning. I can't really interact here, I can't interact there. It's not built for interaction and conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. By the way, my posts go to both threads, Mastodon and Bluesky when I post on Microplo and it does a nice job. I was showing you my blog and then this is the threads profile and it really pretty much is the same and you can reply and you get.

[Paris Martineau]

Likes when you have a very long. Let me ask this Theo, do you decide where to post it on each post or does it always post all?

[Leo Laporte]

No, you. There's a checkbox. You can definitely do a check because.

[Paris Martineau]

If you're writing a really long post, you don't necessarily want to put that on to Blue Sky. Or you do and it just says dot, dot, dot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think it says more and.

[Paris Martineau]

You click there and it goes to your.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I can't remember, but I don't even think about it. I actually don't think about it. I just post on microblogging and let the chips fall where they may. Anyway, good. Congratulations. I mean, I think it's good. Good for you. Blue Sky. Corey says he will not move to Blue sky until they federate because he doesn't want. And I understand this. He does. You know, it was bad enough, you know, he's the guy who created the term in Shitty Fication. He says bad enough that he's on X and can't leave. He doesn't want to go to another place that might be. Did you say hey? Hey?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I said hey.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in. You know, so I. So it's not the word. It's in another longer word. I don't think that counts.

[Paris Martineau]

We're going to have to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree. As someone who likes cursing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I suggest that we change it to enclippification with a little tip of the hat to Clippy on Microsoft.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Intrudification.

[Leo Laporte]

Intrudification. We've been calling it intrudification, but that really confuses people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I really dislike that, actually. I think insidification is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. We're calling because it's, because it's not a bad word. It's a bad word within a word.

[Paris Martineau]

I wrote a whole Guardian column once about how the word bull is political speech.

[Leo Laporte]

It is now.

[Paris Martineau]

Can't talk about. Well, you know, you never could talk about politics without being able to use that word.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And to call that obscene was to limit political speech.

[Leo Laporte]

This is another thing that puzzles me about Trump. Puzzles me about Trump is he is fairly profane all the time. And it, and it's kind of his. That word, by the way, has crept into news stories because he uses it. And I think that's kind of interesting because it's not the, it's not the conservative right that I grew up with.

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't imagine, you know, Nelson Rockefeller or Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan.

[Paris Martineau]

I bet Barry Goldwater swore like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, but not in public.

[Paris Martineau]

Right. Like Lyndon Johnson. We noted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Democrats have always been swearers. They've filthy mouth, potty mouth. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break. When we come back, no politics. We said no politics with. Good luck on that with Jeff Jarvis. Oh, I didn't give you your, your new title. Oh, I didn't even get the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't even know if he introduced you.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think I even.

[Paris Martineau]

I did my plugs immediately. Which was more valuable.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. Jeff is now. I don't know. Do you have a. They used to make me a laminated card with your stuff.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't have to do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why did you prompt yourself to do this knowing that you weren't going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever had driven down a dead end and realized too late there's no way out?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I certainly didn't just decide to floor it once I realized there was no way out.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis is the. Leonard was. Is the Emeritus Leonard Tao professor for Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Address School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Did I get that almost right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Now he's at some New Jersey place.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a distinguished fellow at the center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State's Universities School of Communication and Media.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And I'm visiting professor at Stony Brook University. Stony Brook School of Communication and Journalism, suny.

[Leo Laporte]

Stony Brook.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So Two very esteemed halls of academy institutions. Congratulations. That's wonderful. Of course.

[Paris Martineau]

And while we. While we're. While we've sung our praises to Craig, I want to mention that he just.

[Leo Laporte]

100 million.

[Paris Martineau]

He pledged a second $100 million to veterans benefits, which is wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

He did it, of course, because 1111 was Veterans Day. But it also. I don't know about you, Jeff, but I thought, oh, he's richer than I realized. That's not insignificant amount of money.

[Paris Martineau]

Amen. And he has announced that he wants to give it all away. And he's doing that. And others would take a huge organization and build a nice Ford foundation building and all that. No, this is Craig and he's deciding what matters to him. And that includes veterans and cybersecurity. Speaking of cybersecurity, I emailed you guys. I think we ought to have Craig and Stacy on because indeed, his gift to Consumer Reports does involve Stacy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so great.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, wonderful. And I would like to think. I would like to think that perhaps twit brought them together.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think Craig should come on. But he either he should or all of us should wear pigeon costumes.

[Paris Martineau]

A challenge. The gauntlet is down. Craig will respond tomorrow. Craig, what do you think? Pigeon custom.

[Leo Laporte]

The only drawback to that is our esteemed producer, technical director and editor Benito Gonzalez is leaving forever. Not forever, but for a month. It's gonna feel like a month.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I was gonna go to the. How long are you going to the Philippines for a Benito?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I'm gonna be there for about two and a half weeks. Oh, and then Tokyo for a couple of days.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you'll be gone three weeks?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, about three. I'm missing three episodes of two, four episodes because I'm leaving next Wednesday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so. So. How dare you. We might have to wait till 2025 for the figure out how it's going to be.

[Benito Gonzalez]

John Ashley in my place.

[Leo Laporte]

John Ashley will be here. That's good. Yeah, we have other producers.

[Paris Martineau]

If you were to do it from the Philippines, what hour would it be? What is. What time is this now? Hey.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And this is actually something I've thought about and it would be 4:00am not good.

[Paris Martineau]

No, that's not good. I watched newspaper job that started at 2am and it was the worst ever.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Worked like right now is 7:00am okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, I have my clock set to UTC so that I always know what time it is in UTC. And it's 11pm UTC. See that clock back.

[Paris Martineau]

Does anyone who actually uses UTC say 11 do a 12 hour clock or.

[Leo Laporte]

They always do the 2300, I think in the UK, which is officially where UTC began. Greenwich, meantime, they probably. What is it you say? 11pm Right? You don't have that weird European 2300 thing, right? I don't know. Who are you anyway?

[Paris Martineau]

According to the commercial already.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, according to Brando, we just began the show. It's not an official show till the Craig Newmark sings.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So we've got three more hours. Guys. Strap in.

[Leo Laporte]

Hassan. Congratulations. Hasan Ahmad just gave us $10. Thank you, Hassan. And he pointed out that Guardian has quit X as of today. The Guardian and four or five celebrities did as well. And I think mostly now he's saying X is the right wing bubble, but blue sky is the left wing bubble. Threads, because they don't have any politics becomes the non political center bubble. And you keep giving us money, Hassan, I'll keep reading your tweets. I don't know what you call them in there on YouTube, but anyway, thank you, Hassan. I appreciate it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

They're called super chats on YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Super chats. My preference is you join the club. That's all we need, seven bucks a month. If you join the club, you get.

[Paris Martineau]

Ad free so you can brag about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Of our shows, you get into the Discord, you can chat there. Of course, many of our club members still watch on YouTube. Some of them chat on YouTube. You can chat wherever you want. And we see all of it. We saw. We're on eight different platforms including TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com, discord for our club members, YouTube and Twitch. And I. I feel like you always forget one.

[Paris Martineau]

Sleepy, dopey, grumpy. You always leave.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It's like the Seven Dwarves. It's the eight Dwarves show today. We're very happy. Who said was that Craig Newmark paying a visit? Our show today, brought to you by, we're very happy to say US Cloud. Who is that? There's a ghost.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry about that.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Was my fault.

[Leo Laporte]

We're haunted when you guys left for vacation, but his body's still here. That was good. I like it. Our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. I love these guys. I had a great conversation with him. I had never heard of them. So I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. I said, tell me, what's this? What is this all about? He said, we're the number one Microsoft unified support replacement. Now if you use Microsoft Enterprise support, you might say, well, why do I need a third party? They are in fact the global leader in third party Microsoft enterprise support. 50 of the Fortune 500 use US Cloud. And I'll tell you, there's a couple of reasons. My friend at US Cloud said, well, you're going to save your business 30 to 50%. 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified Support. But I said, don't focus on that. Here's the other thing you focus on. It's better support from really accomplished engineers who really know what they're doing. And it's fast. US cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 27, 24, 7, 365 days a year. They respond faster, they resolve tickets quicker, and they do it for clients all over the world. You're always going to talk to real humans, expert level engineers with an average of 14.9 years. And that's for Break Fix or DSE. Their team is 100% in the US so your data never leaves the US. Of course they've got clients all over the world. And here's something US Cloud does at Microsoft still does not financially backed SLAs on response time. Initial ticket response average is under four minutes. That's such a relief. When, when your network's down and the house is on fire and they respond fast. That is, that's a lifesaver. In 2023, 94% of US Cloud clients reported saving a third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. I mean they're talking, we're talking Fortune 500 companies, large health systems, they can handle it all major financial institutions, even federal agencies for over 6 million users every day all over the world. US Cloud ensures the vital Microsoft systems are working. We're talking big Brands, the Trust, US Cloud, Caterpillar, HP, Aflac, Dun and Bradstreet. Under Armour. These are mission critical companies. KeyBank, even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. A director of Information technology says, this is a great quote. And within an hour US Cloud responded with, I want to say four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I'd experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice with US Cloud. And when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. ISO, gdpr, ESG compliance. For US Cloud, these aren't just regulatory requirements. They're strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. They attract investment and they ensure long term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. This is the company you want to be with. Visit uscloud.com book a call today, find out how much your team can save with not it's not just less expensive, it's better support, it's faster support. Uscloud.com book a call today to find out how much you can save get faster Microsoft support for less thank you US Cloud for supporting this week in Google. I wish Stacey were here because I would love to get her take on Matter 1.4, an update to the home automation standard called Matter that finally brings Matter kind of up to where it should have been, frankly, all along, including support for WI fi routers, heat pumps, solar panels, some much needed fixes, according to the Verge for interoperability and thread network issues. Matter is the Remember the kind of weird love child of Amazon, Apple, Google and a bunch of other home automation companies who realize that siloed home automation is useless? Sure, each of these companies would love to own the market, but they don't. And so they created Matter so that there's some interoperability. Finally, I think, and the Verge agrees and I would It's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy writing. Of course we know her very well. She's a regular on Tech News Weekly and on other shows. I would love to get Stacy's take on it because it sounds like it's a big improvement for I wonder how.

[Paris Martineau]

Into home automation she still is.

[Leo Laporte]

You think she's kind of moved on? I know no, she's still into it. Although I did ask her and she said because we do the book club still with her. She's disconnected. A lot of them.

[Paris Martineau]

An honest woman.

[Leo Laporte]

R. Yeah, well, you know, I will ask her. We're going to do another Stacy's Book Club in December, so I'll ask her at that time. Matter 1.4 update will start rolling out to supported Echo and Eero devices early next year. That's the those are both Amazon Amazon devices. Google said the company's actively working to implement the enhanced Multi Admin feature, plans to bring support for new device types in the future. In the future Apple, we'll see. Apple. We were doing MacBreak weekly and at the very end of the show a story broke on Was it last week or this week? I think it was this week that Apple's going to be according to Mark Gurman, the Apple rumor guy, who's very accurate. Oh no. Or was it Ming Chiquo another another rumor guy that Apple's Going to make a home automation wall display.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, saw that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I believe that was that. Bloomberg reported that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it was Ming Chi Kuo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Or maybe it was Bloomberg. I can't remember. Anyway, a credible story that has been to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who. Who needs that, is my question.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you live in a New York City apartment with a kitchen the size of a slice of toast. So you don't have. You don't really have a need for that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have automation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Although I do love the switch in your fireplace. But. So, you know, honestly, I think switches are not a bad thing. They work pretty well. They're very reliable. You know, if something.

[Paris Martineau]

They have a user manual.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no manual. You just look over and you go, it's off. Let me turn it on. And you flip it. But people, how much do.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo, how much in your new abode did you do automation?

[Leo Laporte]

All automated.

[Paris Martineau]

All.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can you clap on, clap off?

[Leo Laporte]

I've never. Well, luxury. So all the light switches are Lutron casetas, which means you can talk to them somehow. I don't know. Even these lights are on the WI fi. I have more than 100 devices on my WI fi.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that why you were going down the first few weeks the show was there?

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is there something we could say that would turn all the lights off in your studio right now?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not telling you.

[Paris Martineau]

Magic word.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not telling you. I haven't got the voice assistant all working. I have a server over here, a home assistant server. The home assistant green is over here. I have. I mean, of all the stuff. But it's complicated in theory, I could say, you know, turn on the studio and the blinds would close, the lights would come on, the cameras would roll, and that's dumb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's hard. No one wants to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's awesome.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And then one update breaks everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, that's where my only real smart home tech is. I've got Philips hue lights, but those have gotten so expensive over the last years. And they were never cheap. They've just gotten outrageously expensive. Now I also have wiz lights, which is not. It's W I Z.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I know, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it just sucks. I just want them to all live in as one, but I can't. I don't want to do the function so much work.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Benito's right. Then they update it and all that work out the window. Plus, I mean, I had. For a while I had hue lights in my bedroom and Hughes fixed this since. But at the time, if the power Went out. When it came back, the lights would come on full bright.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's kind of a California problem.

[Leo Laporte]

So in the middle of the night, I'm lying there and boom, all the lights are on full, and I'm scrambling. Where's the sweat?

[Paris Martineau]

Lisa is cursing. Oh, she was so stuff your lights.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yeah, it did not like we.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was like, we have a hundred things on the WI fi. What's going on?

[Leo Laporte]

She. Lisa and I had a conversation the other day. She, I think, has a force field that breaks electronics. Do you know people like that for you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, my mother.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's some people that'll that like me. I. For me, I think I'm kind of like the. The technology whisperer. You know, I can get stuff working.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you're the tech guy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm the tech guy.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't whisper. You say it out loud.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have to whisper it. It obeys me. But there are people who have just never ending. Her phone, her smartphone is always on the fritz.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is my mother. No matter what, she's always finds a way to ruin every tech product that is.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's not from, like, misuse or dropping or anything or doing anything wrong. It's just. I think she has a field.

[Paris Martineau]

I do the same thing with plants. If I. If I were in Paris's house, that.

[Leo Laporte]

That plant would monstera.

[Paris Martineau]

It would die, you know, fall over.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're surprisingly hardy. Sometimes they'll go a couple weeks without watering them and they survive.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we actually have. We had the same problem with brown thumbs. We found a easy plant where you only water them once a month, and then the pot does the rest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that seems like a lie.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so far, they're still alive. All right, moving on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, can I rant about Apple really quick? While we're still on the subject of Apple integrated stuff, I, the other week on the show, downloaded the new iOS update because I wanted to, you know, test out Apple intelligence. I can report to you. It sucks. It is perhaps the worst product I have ever used. Like, I keep trying to find things that are useful about it, and it keeps finding new ways to disappoint me. Specifically, the feature that.

[Paris Martineau]

This makes me so happy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the summary feature that is on the notifications. 1 It automatically turns on. On everything, and they are completely useless. Yeah. For instance, as I've talked about in the show before, I have wheat croak on my phone, an app at five times a day. Oh, yeah, notification that says, don't forget you're going to Die, right? And it instead of being like summarizing it by being like reminders about mortality, it says reminders about reminder. Don't forget you're going to die or something nonsensical like that. The other I will also just get. I'm seeing if I can even find it.

[Leo Laporte]

If you follow people on threads or on Twitter, the Verge had a collection of some common here's one from Jordan on Threads. Apology for subpar communication Life busy, not ready for a relationship.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, at least that is accurately summarizing a text. It inaccurately summarizes my emails and texts all the time, to the point where I've had to turn it off on most things.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see the tweet of this guy, his mom? Oh, it's blank when hike comes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it said yeah, it says here's.

[Leo Laporte]

The My mom, the hike. That hike almost killed me. The summary was attempted suicide but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palms Springs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's. I mean it's just so bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I have I this one I have. I have a ring doorbell and this is a common roll up for ring doorbell. Multiple people at front door, back door and driveway. It's from Neil I. Patel. I've seen this one all the time. Here's our own Matthew Casinelli. Let me Apple Intelligence got me so good with this summary. He says, let me. Let me click it. New features and shortcuts and other platforms. Oh well, that's pretty good. Okay, that's Matthew. That's a good summary. New features and shortcuts, right? He says, I thought I got a press release for shortcuts and then realized it was from my own discord bot. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The other day I was trying to schedule. I was scheduling a call with some sources and we've kind of gone back and forth over email on timing. We ended up landing on was like I don't know, one day, like let's say like the 11th or something. And I knew that because I'd sent the email. But then I looked at my phone summary because I'd done this on my computer and it said like so and so available for all days except for the 11th. And I'm like, that is the actual opposite of what these emails said. And it just gets it wrong and so flagrantly wrong so often.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's somewhere from this is a Gmail summary. Microsoft to Retire Gender Classifier, Experian Alerts New sex offender and TurboTax reminds me to file by October 31st.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

They belong together. Here's. Here's a gender detecting AI tool 404 Media talked about. Oh, okay. That's what that was. Experian tweet. Here's one. Movie is insane with troll brothers. Tupac shows up at the end movie, bad button on jacket in movie. It is kind of, kind of comical. Right? Love salmon might not be a good idea. Polar bears are back in Britain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It gets annoying because imagine every single notification you get is like that. You'll get two notifications. A text from someone, it'll be that and you have to click through to get a notification. That actually works. It's infuriating.

[Paris Martineau]

It is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean it's something that I am just like scratching my head as to how Apple pushed this out. Because if they had people testing this on their devices that actually use their phones normally, they would have known this is not ready for prime time.

[Paris Martineau]

All AI sucks is where we are now at the things that's being told to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, but if you. By the way, here is the sticker from our ozone art foundry. Excuse me, Tim. Apple, Is Apple intelligence supposed to suck this much?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Joe. All right, all right, all right. What else? Pick another story. This is fun. I'm enjoying.

[Paris Martineau]

We can see another stupid AI. Have you tried Google's learning thing?

[Leo Laporte]

This is the one on YouTube. The new one on YouTube.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I added this line 71.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a new LLM that's trained differently.

[Leo Laporte]

To be learning tools, more educational. Textbook style responses.

[Paris Martineau]

So I went to it and. Because you can try it out now.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

And I said explain to me the. The origins of mass media. Because I kind of know about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And you know, it had. It stated some things as if you try learn about, you can just do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And then it would say that Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, which no one really believes. And. Okay. But the thing about.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that wrong. It's wrong.

[Paris Martineau]

It's wrong in the sense that there's no consensus and it's anywhere between 1440 and 1450. And there's a lot of argument. And so if you're a student using this. Well, teacher. It said 1440.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually this is pretty good. I asked it, how is Babby made? And actually it actually. Yeah, nailed it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. There. There it goes. Yep, that's the one. You got the other. And then they come together and there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

When a daddy and a mommy really love one another. Let me give me another one. Why is the sky blue? That's something kids ask a lot, right?

[Paris Martineau]

It could be Kids or anybody. The. But the weird thing is because of the randomness of it, every time you ask it the question question, it will give you a different answer.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's. Yeah, exactly. That's something AI is trying to do, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So in this, in this application, the AI can do all kinds of wonderful things. Amazing, great, phenomenal, fascinating, entertaining things. But summarizing Paris email and teaching children is probably not it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is actually pretty good. So far at least I've learned how Babi is made and why the sky is blue.

[Paris Martineau]

What's Paris? Go for it. What? What? What do you want to ask it? Oh, what's an educational.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually very impressed so far. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who is my father? Not me, just. I would just type in the words who is my father? That's my first thought.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not an educational topic question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the sort of.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand you're curious about your father. Unfortunately, I can't answer that question. To learn more about your family history, you could try taking your family members or talking to your family members or looking into resources like genealogy websites or.

[Paris Martineau]

Who isn't your father.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh? What else would you like to know? Paris? I think actually when I ask it legitimate questions I think it's actually pretty good. How does it is. I'm not micro processor work. All right. I'm asking how am I known as a cpu. It's the brain of a computer. Build your vocabulary. It has a block diagram, microprocessor cycle, fetch, decode, execute, explore related content from IBM and learn computer science. I think this is. I think I can see this use Sorry, didn't mean to click on that. I could see how this would be useful in a school.

[Paris Martineau]

So do something that has some facts in it and then do it more than once.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Because that. I think you're right. I think the structure is pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Using this the election of 1860 boy, that really I think you can't learn about can't currently help with some information related to elections. Oh, okay. Well, I guess 1860s. Too soon. Too soon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Too controversial.

[Leo Laporte]

Too controversial. Oh, how about this one? How about this one? What was the Civil War? Oh, that's a good one about I'm.

[Paris Martineau]

Going to say yeah, I asked it who discovered America. That's another good one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What was the US Civil War about? Deeply divisive contact is a simple often simplified to a single cause. The roots of the war were complex and intertwined. Here's for your vocabulary, the word secession. Key events.

[Paris Martineau]

Where is how soon before it says slavery.

[Leo Laporte]

Common misconception. The Civil War was fought solely to end slavery. While slavery played a central role, the Civil War was also about states rights. And the wokey here. That's not good. That's an anti woke. No, that's anti woke.

[Paris Martineau]

I know, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Because states rights just code for slavery. Many northerners, including Lincoln initially were primarily concerned with preserving the Union. Well, yeah, but we didn't.

[Paris Martineau]

We didn't want to get political.

[Leo Laporte]

Why was the Union at risk? Well, you don't do it for your history. I mean, you still need a professor.

[Paris Martineau]

Who discovered America? Common misconception. Red X. Christopher Columbus discovered America.

[Leo Laporte]

Green.

[Paris Martineau]

Check. Indigenous peoples were already living in the Americas for thousands of years before Columbus.

[Leo Laporte]

Good, good, good.

[Paris Martineau]

Got that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Good answer. Yeah. And the Vikings is the right answer. So. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Instead of Viking, I'm just.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm joking, of course. You can't discover something where people already are.

[Paris Martineau]

It's called Columbus sitting.

[Leo Laporte]

Google has decided. Actually, let me take a break and then we'll do some more Google news because it is this week in Google for Wednesday, November 13, 2024 with Jeff Jarvis, now emeritus at the City University of New York, but soon to be. When do you start teaching at Montclair and suny?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I just had a course approved for Stony Brook for next fall. AI and creativity.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, I like that.

[Paris Martineau]

To deal with arts and technology for students.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your syllabus?

[Paris Martineau]

It's good. I've written it. I can send it to you. It's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'd like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I bet that there's a lot of interesting stuff in that one.

[Paris Martineau]

It's the course students get to look at the nature of creativity, the nature of art, the relationship of technology to it. I like how they have for self expression and how it might or might not help them.

[Leo Laporte]

That raises a lot of interesting issues.

[Paris Martineau]

And the good thing is it's not about. You shouldn't use this for this. No, it's experiment with it, play with it, see what it does. Yes, that's what I want to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Some lucky kids. Is that. That's Montclair or is that. That's.

[Paris Martineau]

That's Stony Brook.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is. Which is because. Because you know my foibles in life.

[Leo Laporte]

No bridges.

[Paris Martineau]

Right. It's not easy to get there, but I'll be doing it virtually.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you get to Stony Brook without crossing a bridge? Yeah, ask.

[Paris Martineau]

Ask that of tunnels in Manhattan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our show today. Oh, also Paris martineau from the information.com where she writes for the weekend and covers youth issues.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, there's a very interesting story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do you feel about boats?

[Paris Martineau]

It's a logical conundrum because I shouldn't like them, and I know that.

[Leo Laporte]

But they flow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know that you're not flowing.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, that's consistent.

[Paris Martineau]

But I can't swim worth a dam.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that's problematic.

[Paris Martineau]

The swimming instructor I was taken to at a young age reported to my mother. Did I tell this in the story?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no.

[Paris Martineau]

As we came back out after the swimming lesson, the instructor said to my mother, Mrs. Jarvis, your son is very buoyant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Full of hot air.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good. That makes it easier to swim.

[Paris Martineau]

So. Yeah, exactly. He was trying to get me to go to the bottom, and I couldn't get to the bottom. I couldn't do it. No. So boats, if I think about it, trouble me.

[Leo Laporte]

But you're very buoyant.

[Paris Martineau]

But I can't swim.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, something to think about.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you should take some swim lessons.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll teach you how to swim.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff, are you a swim fan? You love swimming.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you a swim fan?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't love swimming, but I know how to swim. I swim well.

[Paris Martineau]

I know these people who say, I swim every day, and that's my exercise. And I'm a swim fan of psychotic fan.

[Leo Laporte]

Which stroke would you teach, Jeff, given that he's very buoyant?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Butterfly, no.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hard work. No one's in that big a hurry. I think he should learn. He should learn the side stroke. The side stroke is the weirdest sidestroke I could do. Because it's weird.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what I like best.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you just.

[Paris Martineau]

I never got the breathing down the armpit.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to breathe with a side stroke your nose.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You just like this, and you kick your legs in a funny way.

[Paris Martineau]

My view is that evolution worked long and hard to get us out of the water. I'm not going back in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're just going under in the tunnel.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break. More to come this week in Google. Our show today, brought to you by Bit Warden. We love Bit Warden, the password manager, trusted by some of the biggest businesses, thousands of them in the world, and many individuals, including me. It's my password manager. I can tell you from personal experience, this one's the best. It's open source. I think that's really important. By the way, there were news stories saying Bit Warden's going away from open source. Not true at all. That is not the case. In fact, they're GPL license, you can see their code on GitHub and they regularly have it audited by third parties. So you know it's reliable, it's secure, there are no back doors. And honestly I think whenever it comes to cryptography and of course a good password manager is going to use strong cryptography to protect your passwords. It's important that it be open source so that you can validate it, you can verify, you can say, yeah, it does what it says it does. Bitwarden does what it says it does. And it does it easily. Conveniently. They just, they do this every year. They did their cybersecurity Pulse survey. The results are in from the 2024 survey. 92% of IT and cyber professionals, almost all of them agree that a password manager is critical for protecting business operations. I think you probably anybody watching these shows you agree too, right? You use a password manager. As more employees seek Support from generative AI tools, 63% of security professionals say they face significant challenges in maintaining proper approval for devices and applications. And 89% of respondents expressed concern over the security risks these behaviors introduced to their operations security posture. That's why so many businesses are turning to Bitwarden, the open source password manager that works great in business and is free forever for individuals. We're getting close to the holidays, of course, I've mentioned this before. Security becomes a real problem in the holidays. Social engineering with the shopping sites and so forth and links and so forth are getting much smarter. One of the real advantages of Bit Warden is it will not fill in your password on a spoof site. It'll only do it on the real site. And now with Bit Warden's new extension, where it fills in not just if you wish, it fills in not just passwords, but also credit card information, address information, contact information, same protection, it will not give your credit card to a spoofed site. Plus, if you're in business, you'll get unparalleled SSO integration and flexibility. So you get inline autofill capabilities on cards, identities and pass keys and you get SSO single sign on for your business. Look, your business deserves a cost effective solution that can dramatically improve its chances of staying safe online. That's why we love Bit Warden. We recommend it, Steve Gibson uses it. The setup is easy, it only takes a few minutes. Bit Warden supports importing from most password management solutions, so it's easy to move to Bit Warden. And as I said, it is open source, GPL licensed. It can be inspected by anybody and is always regularly audited by third party experts. And Bit Warden does something a lot of companies don't do. They publish the full results of those audits. Michael Crandall, who's the CEO of Bitwarden, sums it up best we don't need to overcomplicate security. Let's get back to basics. Empower employees with the right tools, enforce strong password habits, and create a culture where security becomes second nature. Bitwarden can really help you do that. What are you waiting for? Get started today. Bit Warden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or and I always want to mention this, you can use it free forever. It's open source, so you can use it free forever across all devices, unlimited passwords, pass keys, hardware and keys as well for free forever as an individual user. You can even host your own in a vault if you choose to do so. Bit warden.com Twitter free for individuals and we've got a free trial for teams and enterprises for all the businesses. Bitwarden.com thank you Bitwarden for your support of this week in Google. Jeff Jarvis Paris Martino on we go. Let's talk AI. I think it'd be a good time to talk some more about AI here.

[Paris Martineau]

The the information has some good stories on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the information says.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was a really interesting story this week about OpenAI is shifting its strategy because they found the rate of improvements of their new GPT are slowing.

[Leo Laporte]

This in the face of Sam Altman saying, hey, AGI is just around the corner.

[Paris Martineau]

Next year, next year AGI. But what we've slowed getting there so they must have been really close. Just jerks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The challenges OpenAI is experiencing with this upcoming flagship model, codenamed Orion, show what the company is up against. In May, Sam Altman told staff he expected Orion would be significantly better than the last flagship model. And though OpenAI had only created 20% of the training process, it was already on par with GPT4 in terms of intelligence and ability to fulfill tasks. The increase in quality was far smaller compared to the jump between GPT3 and GPT4, the last two flagship models.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's more expensive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And some researchers of the company believe Orion isn't reliably better than its predecessor at handling certain tasks. Like it may be better at language models, but may not perform previous models at tasks such as coding.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm done with the hype coming from people like Sam Altman. It's kind of like Elon Musk where they're really selling Something they don't have yet. They're really pushing it. We'll find out if AGI is just around the corner. Hey, we'll find out.

[Paris Martineau]

Have you told your beach friend that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you thrown sands in his eyes?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just, I'm just saying I'm open minded. He believed that we were going to enter a very interesting decade. It turns out he wasn't wrong.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Misused and Ms. And Ms. Promoted, but interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the jury's just out. I don't think we know and I think it's very possible. I mean this is not. This is good reporting, of course, from Amira Friday and Stephanie Palazzolo and Aaron Wu, three of the best working at the information. Absolutely good reporting. But that doesn't mean it's anything really because I honestly think that when it happens, it's going to happen abruptly. I don't think it's going to be gradual. And so I just have a feeling in my gut that. What's that? It's going to be more of a. It's not a. You know, this is the issue. It looks like, you know, these guys have said it's going to be a hockey stick or it's going to be continuous growth, but it looks like you just keep pouring resources at it more and do more training, give it more memory, more cpu. It's just going to increase steady rate.

[Paris Martineau]

They had the key insight, which was, which was transformer. They've pumped every engineering benefit they can pump into it and they've hit a plateau and they need a new insight and they don't have it yet. I think they'll come up with new insights. I think they'll figure out how to deal with things like facts, but they do not have it now.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the issues that Friday et al write about in the information is you can't get better unless you get more high quality training data. And they're running out of high quality training data. It's like we've eaten everything. We need more. We're still hungry.

[Paris Martineau]

This is really interesting. On line 76, Microsoft and together with Andreessen Horowitz put out kind of a manifesto. I think whoever was going to win the White House on AI and interesting in there, besides being open source and besides the right to learn, which I agree with, is the notion of an open data commons. It's the first time I've seen that, which is basically saying the whole industry needs data that they can use.

[Leo Laporte]

And I've been saying this for a while. I Understand why creatives and others want to keep AI from ingesting their content. But when you do that, you do it at the risk of keeping the AI from being all it can be, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is this tension and I would like to see what happens if you let AI have everything and just. Let's just see.

[Paris Martineau]

But hasn't it already, I mean, before everybody realized what they were doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe they scraped everything, but that.

[Paris Martineau]

Everything is from the people who had the power to publish the privilege of publishing for time immemorial. And it left out a lot of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Here's the thing with that though, Leo. You let the AI have everything, but I don't get to have everything. Like I don't get to read. I have to buy everything I read. I have to buy everything I consume. But the AI gets everything for free. How come?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we can train you as much as we want, but I don't think you're ever going to get to AGI. You're as good. I think it's a different thing. AI consuming content is not the same as a human consuming content at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would argue that what AI is trying to get to buy, AGI is human level intelligence. We already have human level intelligence and we don't get everything for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Why do they get two different questions?

[Leo Laporte]

One is trying to make something different, that's why, than a human.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, there's two different questions. One is acquisition. If you steal the book, then you don't have the right to read it. But if you subscribe to the New York Times and you pay them to read it, and you've now acquired it legally, then your machine should be able to read it like you, is my argument. So acquisition and use are two different questions. Then you go into copyright and whether or not it's transformative or not. And if it's used for training. The courts so far again and again are siding with the notion that training is transformative. But acquisition is a separate question. And quoting at length is a separate question.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a picture floating around of Sam Altman standing next to Aaron Schwartz. And. And I've seen the tweet that Aaron Schwartz got prosecuted for taking information that we had paid for from scientific journals and making it free and available to all, got prosecuted and eventually harassed to the point where he killed himself. Meanwhile, Sam Altman is lionized for doing the same thing, and not for public benefit, but for the benefit of OpenAI. I think it's a good point. So that's kind of your point as Well, I don't mean to diminish it at all, Benito, although I would say we are in a remarkable time where as a human, thanks to the Internet, we have access to more content than we can possibly consume.

[Paris Martineau]

Why does it need more and more and more? I think, is it. Is it the amount of content or is it the lessons that it ends up learning from the content it has?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know. I guess my attitude is I really would like to see where AI could go.

[Paris Martineau]

It's the beach talking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is the waves. This is the post from Ondine B. Sam Altman, side by side with Aaron Schwartz. I can't stop thinking about it. One was prosecuted by the US for downloading copyrighted data from one source for noble purposes. The other widely celebrated for doing this on a much larger scale.

[Paris Martineau]

What brought them together, I wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know if this is a Y Combinator class.

[Paris Martineau]

Was Aaron and Y Combinator.

[Leo Laporte]

He was at Reddit.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't. I don't know where I'm going to guess. It's a Y Combinator picture, but I'm not sure. Others in there. Alexis Ohanian. Yeah, it's got to be Y Combinator.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. He was accepted into a Y Combinator founder program on a startup, Infogami.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Emmett Shear. They were part of the original 2005 Y Combinator class. That's who that is. The 2005. It's interesting. Y Combinator, for those who don't know, is a celebrated incubator for startups and many of the companies that you know about started at Y Combinator that Altman.

[Paris Martineau]

For a time headed.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the CEO. That's right. Yeah. That's from 2005. Wow. Oh, wow. So, yeah. I don't know why Benito, that you have that an AI should have more privileges than you. I just think it's. I mean, I'm not.

[Paris Martineau]

But you don't have the same privileges you. Not more.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's not just the AI. It's like this multi billion dollar corporation.

[Leo Laporte]

And we've talked about this, but it would be different if it were a nonprofit. Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean if my data was going to solve cold fusion or the environment, like, sure, have it all.

[Paris Martineau]

Take it.

[Leo Laporte]

But maybe it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe it is. Maybe it is. It is.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, please.

[Paris Martineau]

It's doing protein folding.

[Leo Laporte]

Please, Come on. You think it's not being used in a. Well, I think it could be used.

[Paris Martineau]

In a benefit, probably some of it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But most of it no.

[Paris Martineau]

But, you know, if a company, big or small, has a legitimate subscription to the New York Times, can they read that into the machine for training purposes? But not quoting, just morally, legally?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, again, like, that's a. I don't know. That's not a. That's not the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would say probably no, because publishers already go after other companies. I see this, at least in the media world, for using one subscription to inform a broader to do something that they did not intend with one subscription. In our case, it ends up being many people, but in this case, it is a machine that is processing the requests of many people. So it's kind of the same thing, I'd argue.

[Leo Laporte]

So Raw Story went to court, an alternet trying to sue Open AI, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully removed copyright management information when building training sets. In other words, they ingested Raw Stories information and took out the copyright status. Judge has thrown the case out saying when a user inputs a question to Chat GPT, Chat GPT synthesizes the relevant information in its repository to an answer. Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that Chat GPT would output plagiarized content from One of the PL's articles seems remote. In other words, you can't show any harm by OpenAI ingesting your content.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, again, it's a matter of scale. AI can read more books than I can in my lifetime in one day, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Computers can do things faster than you too.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, so it's a question of scale. Wasting 1 liter of water is not that great, but wasting a billion liters of water, probably pretty bad, right? So it's a question of scale, but.

[Paris Martineau]

At a level of principle. I mean, scale doesn't tend to be part of the principle. The principle is that this is an allowable behavior or it's not, no matter who does it.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think AI regulation will happen under the new administration?

[Paris Martineau]

It's an interesting question.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, this is one like social media, where there's confusion about what they want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If Elon Musk retains his role as first buddy, as he's calling it. Probably not, given his involvement with Grok AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Although remember, Elon was the one who's one of the member people who signed that letter saying we need to pause AI for six months.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the different thing. That's the test Creole Doomer crap. This is about business.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a doomer.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but that's a separate issue. What about the seals? Thiel's influence through? We were going to do Politics. Thiel's influence through Vance is also interesting to track here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, but that's kind of. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel both were part of the play PayPal mafia. And so we're presuming are allied in their goals, but I don't know if that's the case, honestly. I guess there's a lot we don't know, but we'll find out. So that's the. I'm not. I'm not getting a politics. I'm just asking the question, is the next four years going to be good for AI or bad for AI or does it even matter?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, look at what happened in California where they passed a couple of bills and the Newsom, I think, rightly veto, vetoed the last one. And I think that there's going to be an. And the EU AI law is actually, okay, a little vague, but at this stage in life, it's all right. So I think that there is a proper caution because we don't know what it is yet. And to think that it's hubris to think that we can regulate everything about it. What's the mood, Paris? What's the presumption of mood? The pulse of Silicon Valley out of the information? How are you guys covering that idea? And I'm not trying to get into politics. I'm trying to get into the fate for things like AI and these companies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that the mood overall, I mean, from an executive level in Silicon Valley is rather jubilant. They think they see the potential for a Trump administration to be incredibly pro business, pro tech. And having people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and J.D. vance in either explicit or implicit positions of power is really good for them. You know, there's. People think David Sachs could end up with ambassadorship and whatnot. And I think it's also notable that something I've just been thinking about over the last week is how different this time around is.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

From 2016 in terms of the reaction, or rather lack of a reaction we're seeing from major tech companies and their employees.

[Leo Laporte]

Would it be more valuable to society if we invested that amount of money into free college education?

[Paris Martineau]

What I think.

[Leo Laporte]

So the money that we're spending on AI right now, it's not public money. I mean, it's investors money. But. Well, I guess what I'm asking is where is the best bang for your buck? Is it investing in humans learning or is investing in machines learning?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it depends on how you're describing bang for your buck. If you're cap. Like if you're a venture capitalist or someone who's trying to turn their non profit into a for profit business, probably the best bang for your buck is going to be investing in technology that you could then monopolize, dominate and extract the most value out of. If you are thinking of it from a social capital or good perspective, then yeah, investing in something like education or a public health campaign or you know, public works would have more.

[Leo Laporte]

If you gave free college to 100,000 people, would you be more likely to come up with a cure for cancer than if you gave the same amount of money to a bunch of machines? Maybe you could do both. I don't know. You're right. It's really the question is where the money comes from and what the expectation is. Is it a public good or an investor's good.

[Paris Martineau]

The other issue I was talking to an executive in the SUNY system about just this, this week. And we need to be able to provide every single student with AI so that they can experiment with it and learn from it and figure out what to do with it. But the university can't afford to pay 20 bucks a month for 650,000 students.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And so this is a question of open source. The university has enough compute resources to be able to take a llama model and do something with it, but it can't do the most cutting edge things. And are the faculty and researchers in a position where they could do tremendous things if they had those resources? Very interesting. And so right now you have media companies holding up the AI companies. You have Springer and News Corp and companies saying pay us billions of dollars because our content is valuable. What they're really doing, as I've said on the show before, is buying silence for litigation and legislation. What can we accomplish if we put that technology in the hands of students and researchers and entertainers and others? That's the kind of resource that we could talk about in terms of a public good. I don't want to say the word utility, but where Paris was headed. If you're investing in something, you're investing in a road to somewhere. That's a road to somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Claude. AI Anthropic has done a deal with Palantir and aws.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

To process data for unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies, which some say is a little ironic because Anthropic was created specifically to do safe AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, safe in their definition is not doing the world. That's different from doing a few people with your weapons. Yeah, right. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's Tim Nick Gabriel tweeted. Or X, look how they care so much about, quote, existential risk to humanity.

[Paris Martineau]

Remind me, Leo, the Paris, the protest at Google that got them to pull back, I think that was Jedi Project Maven.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Maven, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So remind me what that is. And I'm asking because I'm curious whether this deal and Anthropic might cause a similar kerfuffle.

[Leo Laporte]

Project Maven was a Pentagon project, according to Wikipedia, involving using machine learning and engineering talent to distinguish people and objects in drone videos. It was for battlefield command and control.

[Paris Martineau]

And Google had to give that up because of the employees protest. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they were the US Military AI project.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Bingo. So here we are again. Right? And the question is how much, to Paris's point, about how much times have changed, have they changed so much that we will not see a protest out of Anthropic because of this?

[Leo Laporte]

Here's another cost that's kind of interesting. This is from Marketplace. Funding for climate tech startups is waning. Much of it's moving to AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Same as energy. All of the energy goals that we had are flying out now because we're restarting power plants and need more energy just for AI, which is Benito's point about scale and wasting water.

[Leo Laporte]

Marketplace says climate tech companies globally raise more than $10 billion in equity financing in Q3, 2024. That's 1/2 of what AI firms raised more than $20 billion in the quarter. It's interesting. You know, of course investors are going to go where they think they're going to get the best returns, right? Yeah, but when you talk about public welfare, maybe that's not the best place to put it. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, one thing I was talking about with this, with this executive is, you know, he says the company is going to go for profit, but right now they're not going for profit. They're going for capital. Yeah, that's why Altman keeps saying that it's around the corner so we can get more money to try to get there.

[Leo Laporte]

We are talking about AI, Google and the world with Paris Marineau from the information, Jeff Jarvis from wherever points south.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anywhere there's yelled at on the Internet.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Being yelled at on the Internet. Soon to be professor at Stony Brook suny. Stony Brook and Montclair University. Great to have both of you. Of course, Jeff's books are available at Gutenberg Parenthesis.

[Paris Martineau]

I missed you guys last week.

[Leo Laporte]

We missed you too. But it makes me feel good to know you had the perfect wiener Schnitzel. It was worth it.

[Paris Martineau]

It was a salve for the soul. It was just what the thing about it was, too. If anyone goes to Salzkeller in Frankfurt, be warned that it is full every single night. I bet I was at the door for about 10 minutes while the nice woman at the door was dealing with somebody's table and all kinds of stuff. And finally I said, oh, just. And she said, oh, no, no, we're full. Oh. And I said, oh. And then an old couple came in, and they said, oh. She said, no, we're full. And I said, just one place at the bar. I said, I'm an American and I'm flying back and I want to go. She finally took pity on me, and there was one spot at a weird bench at the bar, and it was heaven. So over to Salzkammer, reserved wine, wine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And wine and reserve.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I whined. I whined. I was shameless. I now had everything for having a schnitzel.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's something good that AI has done. Randy Travis's beautiful baritone was lost. AI helped him sing again.

[Paris Martineau]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know that Randy Travis had lost his voice.

[Paris Martineau]

I hadn't either.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who's Randy Travis?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my country music icon. Randy Travis.

[Paris Martineau]

He's an icon. Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

He's an icon. Ah. He suffered a stroke in 2013 and resulted in aphasia. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is he as much of an icon if you suffered a stroke over 10 years ago and you guys didn't know?

[Paris Martineau]

Cynical, nihilistic point you have there, young lady. Yes, but he's not our kind of icon.

[Leo Laporte]

So would Lisa.

[Paris Martineau]

Would Lisa have gone to a Randy Travis concert?

[Leo Laporte]

She hates country music.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, she does?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

I think you assume that because she comes from the country, she's a music fan, but no, she hates country music.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

No, she likes heavy metal. I like country music. Sure. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really? She likes heavy metal, or is that a bit?

[Leo Laporte]

No, she loves heavy metal and hair bands.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you're gonna love Lisa when you.

[Leo Laporte]

When you read her parents, you should meet her. She's quite a character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess what the. AI did. They cloned Travis's vocals and created a new song for her. It's the first for him. I'm sorry, it's the first. Well, I'm mentioning. Because Mary Travis, I'm not sure if that's his. That's his wife was the one who kind of commissioned all this. Mary Travis delivered testimony on Capitol Hill in June saying it's the first AI song ever recorded and released with full artist consent and involvement in a studio setting. His label, producer, musicians and vocalists and Randy were all present. That's pretty wild. They. He didn't sing it, but they got some, some AI to generate a voice that was his voice because of course there's a lot of recordings of his voice to do it. And Randy was thrilled about that, I guess. Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

[Paris Martineau]

See AI for good.

[Leo Laporte]

AI for good.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Hey, that's used creativity AI as a tool, not AI as a thing that makes the thing at the end. You know what I mean? They're using AI to integrate into their production process.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we all agree the best way to use AI is as a tool as opposed to in and of itself. Yeah. It's in conjunction with humans. What else? Particle launches an AI news app to help publishers instead of stealing their work.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm on Android and it's on Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, Particle. I'm not familiar with this.

[Paris Martineau]

It's from a former product person at Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Sarah Baikpor. But it looks a lot. What I can see from the web version is it feels a lot like Perplexities Discover. It'll point you to many links and they think they'll send traffic there, but we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

I very much like Perplexity. In fact, I used their election site.

[Paris Martineau]

On Election, which I heard was very good.

[Leo Laporte]

It was quite good. Yeah. And it was AI, but then it would have footnotes linking to articles and so forth. I thought it was quite good, which.

[Paris Martineau]

Is I think where we're going to end up. So one thing I was fascinated by this, if you've heard this yet. Of course, when search engines came, we had. The industry of search engine optimization arose and filled convention halls. There is a new industry, Generative Engine Optimization Geo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's the next thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

God.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And what does it do when it's at home?

[Paris Martineau]

It wants to get you discovered and linked to from chat engines. But how it does that I have no idea. Yeah, there'll be a lot of snake oil sold.

[Leo Laporte]

YouTube is allowing you as some YouTube creators to restyle licensed music in 30 second clips using AI to change the mood or genre on command. I haven't been able to play with this.

[Paris Martineau]

Permissioned from the artist Singer. The artists are permissioning here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an expansion of YouTube's Dream Track AI feature. But unlike creating new tracks, which is what Dreamtrack does, it will change up elements in a song.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mark could have done this for his wife.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. The artists who've agreed to participate include Charlie Puth, Charlie xcx, Demi Lavalle, Only Charlie. Only Charlie's involved. And John Legend. Apparently YouTube approaches.

[Paris Martineau]

Should I know Charlie Puth?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. I don't either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I vaguely know of Charlie Puth. I think that that's all you need to know.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, Paris says that that's all I need to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently, YouTube approached major music labels with an offer to use their songs to train AI models. And this is who agreed. Be watching with interest. I haven't seen it yet, but we'll play with it as soon as we can, since we can. Any other AI news? I'm not going to do the story in the Wall Street Journal. Joanna Stern says, I spoke only to AI bots.

[Paris Martineau]

It is the class. I put it in there. Only because you have noted how every Joanna Stern story is has Joanna Stern throughout. And it is a classic of the genre.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. My new friends are just hilarious. She writes, one suggested I de stress by taking up knitting. Now they're asked what's for dinner? Right after giving me a meatball recipe. And then there's the one who cheered Rose all day.

[Paris Martineau]

None of which makes any sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I don't know what the point of this story is, but apparently she spent like all day talking to bots. And there you have it.

[Paris Martineau]

That's all she spoke to?

[Leo Laporte]

That's all. She didn't talk to any humans. No, except her camera operator, sound man and producer. But other than that, editor. An editor? Yeah, but other than that.

[Paris Martineau]

And publicist.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically, it's the story of my life.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're all robots.

[Paris Martineau]

We're bots to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. She found a very nice. Yeah, of course. How do I know you're. You're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We met in person.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I did. That's right. Yeah. She actually gave it a head and some hair.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, geez.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't like that.

[Paris Martineau]

No. This is trying too hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Co pilot Gemini. A open AI And I didn't see the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, come on, girls trip.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, come on.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's funny how she sees friendship as what it gets for her. Like how it's not the other way. It's one way for her. Like, friendship is a one way street.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paris Martineau]

She was taking over Paris's role without having a proper license. She was cutting down a piece of a tree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That's really Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

How is that going, by the way?

[Paris Martineau]

How's it going?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Great. I had my final class on this weekend. I think somebody posted in the discord earlier a photo of me with my saw, I can repost it. So let me use a big saw. And I'm taking a test this weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

For people who perhaps don't listen to every single show.

[Paris Martineau]

Damn you.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Catch us up. So the lore of this is that I have long been a gorilla gardener. In the spring and summer months, I carry around a little pair of pruning shears and I trim low hanging branches. I recently learned there's a way to go legit, and it's by taking classes offered by the New York City Tree. The New York City Parks department funds this group called NY Trees that does a citizen pruner course. So I've been taking courses over the last couple of weeks on how to properly prune and care for New York City street trees. It was mostly virtual, but the last one was in person this weekend, the Upper west side. And I just posted in the discord a photo of me with the big saw that they let me use to cut.

[Leo Laporte]

That is a big saw. Whoa.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't mess with Paris Ranger. Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow, that's me. So I've got to take a test. I'm probably gonna do it this weekend and then I'll get a license to a smaller saw and another glove.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you allowed to walk the streets of New York with that saw?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I will.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd go the other way if I saw somebody. You look like the grim reaper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's not normally that big. I extended excited to cut down a bridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was doing a three point cut to cut a larger branch to make sure it wouldn't fall.

[Paris Martineau]

Is the, is the test at a tree or over a piece of paper?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's, it's virtual. It's like an online test just to.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask you if you know trees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have to, I have to identify common street trees. I have to answer questions about pruning, care for them, different things like that.

[Paris Martineau]

I put a story in the rundown to this effect because it brings this together with Google line 138.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I was still looking at Paris and her giant saw. Hold on, hold on. I gotta move on. Is that your motto, by the way? Now don't feel guilty, feel healthy. I think that's appropriate.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you change the setting? It's kind of perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pretty good, right?

[Leo Laporte]

What line number now?

[Paris Martineau]

138.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, we are really down in the weeds here. I don't think we can go any lower. This is from new scientists Google Street.

[Paris Martineau]

View fortunately subscribes to where only go.

[Leo Laporte]

So far, but Perhaps map how 600,000 trees grow down to the limb. They created digital twins of living trees that then they. What do what with? They they.

[Paris Martineau]

Then they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Simulation could help city planners better predict how seasonal foliage boosts cooling or when growing branches may require trimming.

[Paris Martineau]

So this is going to. This is Paris's new boss.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

They're using it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I mean, a big part of it is you need the human touch. You've got to see if people are wrapping Christmas lights around trees. If someone's put up weird memorial in a tree, if there's, like, you know, letters scratched in there, do you respect.

[Paris Martineau]

Those things or you scold them for. For daring to do those things?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Respect memorials. Obviously, if someone has scratched their initials into a tree, there's not much you can do to it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If someone has Christmas lights around a tree and it's too tight and seems to be causing girdling in the tree, then you might ask the store owner.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't just cut them off and say you were causing girdling. I. No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You try to be respectful of local communities.

[Leo Laporte]

By the power vested in me by the Parks and Recreation department of the city of New York, hereby liberate this tree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will be able to do that. If I pass, though, I'll be pretty powerful.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a license and a big song.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you have to report your activities back to hq?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm kind of, you know, you're on your own.

[Leo Laporte]

Although, like, yeah, she's a license to.

[Paris Martineau]

Prune in from the cold.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If there are things that go on that are above my station, I would report that to City Park.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what is your station, though? What is your station?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, general tree Street, Tree care, which in New York City means the trees that are on the sidewalks, not the trees that are, like, behind a gate in somebody's yard.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the station. I mean, anything in regards to the tree, is it, you know, healthy? Is it. Does it have pests? Are there, like, suckers growing out of it? Which is like a type of branch that is kind of unhealthy for it. If the branch. If an offending branch is, like, too wide, though, like, if it's like, I don't know that wide, it.

[Paris Martineau]

Branch elephant.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think there's a certain call to the parks department, a synergy between the fact that you are now have a license to prune and you're on a show called Twig?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I hadn't even thought about that.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Oh, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A license to prove that's huge. Yeah. So somebody else Coming together.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody needs to help. Chris Wallace here he is quitting CNN to pivot to streaming and podcasting, he says, because he wants to be where the action seems to be. Who wants to tell him?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, no, what I think what happened is he. I'm forgetting who reported this. Cnn. His contract renewal gave him a pay cut.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So he is getting seven figures, which if my math is correct, is at least a million.

[Paris Martineau]

He was going to be. Wasn't he going to be a star of the CNN streaming thing before that one?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Probably.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. By the way, I didn't know this, but I'm really glad to learn. Tucker Carlson tells me that Joe Rogan invented podcasting, which I felt fascinating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good for him.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you see the stories about Tucker Carlson and the demons?

[Leo Laporte]

It was in my notifications, actually. Apple Intelligence, what filled me in.

[Paris Martineau]

He was. He. He says that he woke up bloodied because demons had attacked him, scratched him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that happens to me all the time.

[Paris Martineau]

He has four dogs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the dogs are on the bed, interestingly. So.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe it wasn't demon dogs.

[Leo Laporte]

Tucker Carlson says Joe Rogan changed American history by inventing podcasting.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my Lord.

[Leo Laporte]

He created. He created the genre of podcasting.

[Paris Martineau]

There's no justice.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no justice. There's no justice. Anyway, Chris Wallace, 77 years old, leaving behind a seven figure God bless salary. According to the Daily Beast, he cited influential podcasters Joe Rogan and Charlamagne Tha God as a model. He wants to.

[Paris Martineau]

I think, wow. Of Charlamagne the God and I think of him next.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Those are the two podcasters that I often think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Hi, Gizmo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gizmo is scrambling. She just wants to show her butt to the camera.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on, Gizmo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've noticed that with cats. And then we realized at least and I were talking about this, why did they do that? And then I realized they're. They're. That's because they trust you. They're looking out to the outside world to see where the threats are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they know you're okay behind me. They'll be able to. She'll be able to take.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, there it is. Oh, I've seen it again. Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re watching and I'm sorry about it.

[Paris Martineau]

Tatus came back.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching this week in Google. Did I make.

[Paris Martineau]

What do advertisers say about that, Leo? About containers? Would they like not to be around that?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, katanas is great for brands.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in the contract. We will not be anywhere near catanus.

[Paris Martineau]

Within seven minutes of any containers.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching this week in Google with Paris Martineau and Jeffrey Jarvis and Gizmo and Gizmo the wonder cat. I think just a couple more stories and we can wrap this up. Give me, give me, give me something important in this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nick Carlson, the top editor, the former top editor of Business Insider is starting a new media company that get this is all about pivoting to video.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, he said Paris not to say pivot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I'm so sorry. It's about short form video.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For Dynamos. And Carlson says, quote, we're not pivoting to video. We're cannonballing into the deep end.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Paris Martineau]

So Leo says, don't come in. The water is not warm.

[Leo Laporte]

He's in. He is. Clearly he thinks is going to be on Tick Tock. Right. This is why, by the way, you can't get rid of TikTok.

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The new company Dynamo is betting big on grow the growing popularity of video on platforms like YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn. He wants to be there, produce, quote, cinematic video stories for those platforms focusing on business journalism for a core group of strivers and Dynamos.

[Leo Laporte]

No, this happens all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, wait. No, no. He's quick to assert that his company has more in common with Mr. Beast than Facebook Watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, you know, don't count it out.

[Leo Laporte]

This is so common where you get these mainstream media types like Chris Wallace. Yep. And this guy Nick Carlson saying, oh yeah, we're gonna go. Because they don't get it. They don't get why tick tock and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels are popular. They. And they just. It's a flop. It's like Quibi. He's basically started the next Quibi for business people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The startup will avoid political stories and that the content will be evergreen, designed to be relevant months or years after it was published.

[Leo Laporte]

Nick, do you lift? He looks like he lifts. I'm just saying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Probably does lift.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

His trainer is probably.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's his pitches for some videos that could be on Dynamo and 4. Dynamos. Two examples of stories with memorable characters and great writing that could be illustrated by compelling footage. 1. How do massive container ships shrug off giant waves? 2.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why have sculptors recently cast mask such meme worthy statues of popular athletes like Dwayne Wade and Cristiano Ronaldo?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the content people crave.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a brown shoed square trying to find relevance in a media world that has left him in the dust. Good Luck, Nick.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Well, these people always think that the medium is the thing and not the content.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They don't get it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Those two things you just described. No one is going to watch. Who wants to. Who cares why container ships can handle big waves, Right? No one cares.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The thing is that in itself is not interesting. Maybe you can tell that story in a very interesting way.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? If Veritasium did it, I'd watch it. Exactly.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's what I'm saying. Like, that's what they don't understand.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't get it. Maybe they do, but I bet they don't. Hey, I'm looking forward to this. The new Apple TV movie about sbf. Samuel Bankman Friedman, what's going to be written by Lena Dunham of the Girls. It's Michael Lewis's best selling book. Michael, Lena gonna write it.

[Paris Martineau]

Still a little too in love with sbx. Yeah, I. Michael Lewis has fallen in my view as a result.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, it'll be interesting to see how that one turns out.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Apple does something to everything it produces that sucks the life out of it somehow. I don't know. Really.

[Paris Martineau]

I think there's good stuff on Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

The Slow Horses is quite good. Did you. Are you a Ted Lasso fan?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I was not a Ted. I didn't know. No. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what do you like on Apple tv?

[Paris Martineau]

Severance. What?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Severance.

[Leo Laporte]

Severance. Yeah, that's coming back next year.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, well, the morning show.

[Leo Laporte]

Until the giant shark, I watched something I liked. I know it. Yeah, the morning show was terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

I liked it at the first, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Apple TV has some of the worst movies that have ever been created on there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Wolves isn't bad. Did you like Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Wolves? That was pretty good. It was.

[Paris Martineau]

I came home from Germany and I just wanted to not watch nudes. I didn't want to watch politics. I wanted to watch entertainment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And I went through Netflix and Apple and Amazon and it's all disappointed dystopian.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw the same thing. It's either sci fi or it's horror.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Basically it's just nasty or comic books. I love. I love the Diplomat. That makes me excellent show. But there's only a few episodes, so I've got to, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Are you sitting there in your boxer shorts and eating candy and watching binge? Watching Netflix? Is that what you're doing? Is that how you're saving your soul?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he's having Cacio e Pepe from Trader Joe's.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. There you go. Much better.

[Paris Martineau]

I saw a restaurant the other day. I walked by and saw the menu. They had cacio e pepe pizza. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that's wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Pasta does not belong on pizza.

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Or maybe they were just doing the cacio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that would just be cheese pizza. With pepper.

[Leo Laporte]

With pepper.

[Paris Martineau]

With pepper. No pepper pizza.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a pepper pizza.

[Paris Martineau]

Peter Pepper picked the pepper pizza.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's. I think this is. I think it's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was gonna say we're producing great content here.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we gotta. We gotta call it a day. I'm gonna call it. It is. It is 424 and I'm gonna call it. We. You are watching this week in Google and our don't say goodbye yet because it's time for our picks of the week next. As always on the picks of the week, I like to start with Paris Martino.

[Paris Martineau]

This is probably this weekend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I did something that I also you might recall me telling you about last year I went to the annual Goannas canal banjo toss Brooklyn folk festival.

[Leo Laporte]

What fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, folk players gather to toss banjo, a banjo tied to a very long rope into the Guanus canal and the rope has one foot but foot by foot marked out and it's then you see how many feet you threw the banjo.

[Paris Martineau]

Let me guess, Let me guess. Paris. The banjo disintegrates within 30 seconds from the pollution in the canal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean it did get quite strange feeling.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, did you try throwing water? I mean, yeah, I threw it 35ft this year which is 10ft less than last year. But you know, I'm regressing it. You're getting old water. But this year I learned that they have a banjo toss the game available on at least the iPhone, I think also the Google play store. I linked the iPhone game and it's quite fun. You could throw the pen Joe, as many times as you want into the Guanas canal. And I believe in the game. It doesn't have the latest interesting update which is in reality the Gowanus Canal, a super. A federally designated super fund site is now surrounded by luxury condos. Yeah, that's a fun spin to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it have a scent and odor to it or is it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it was.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's more of the kinds of chemicals that fizzle when you touch them. I think it's that kind.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

It is a super fun.

[Leo Laporte]

And is this a sign of disrespect for the banjo or is this a sign that's a good question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's definitely a sign of respect. It's put on by a, like, folk group, a folk school. I believe that the Brooklyn. It hosts the bro. They host the Brooklyn Folk Music Festival every year, which is a huge group of people who, you know, are folk musicians themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to the Brooklyn Folk Festival Banjo toss. The only official banjo toss on the planet.

[Paris Martineau]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, there's a banjo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that's the special throwing banjo. It's red and doesn't have any holes in it, so water logged.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

So it's not somebody's beloved banjo.

[Leo Laporte]

How do I do that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not someone's regular banjo. Oh, are you playing?

[Leo Laporte]

Look at these people. They really look scary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that would be me.

[Leo Laporte]

There we go. I've thrown the banjo. How many feet? Hey, watch where you're throwing that banjo. Oh, I throw it to. I don't know, but I think I can't see anything. I can't see anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, that.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a bird, but you can't see where it lands.

[Paris Martineau]

This is pretty frustrating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not sure it's supposed to be on the Mac. I think it is an iPhone game.

[Paris Martineau]

I see.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see. I see vertical.

[Paris Martineau]

We've lost some verticality.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they were missing some of the scenery. Oh, there's a whale.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow, that's one sick whale. That place.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fudgy. Whatever you do, don't put your fingers in your mouth. Good advice if you're at The Brooklyn banjo. 55ft. I beat your record. All right, nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So get out there and beat my record, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

What fun. All right, that's a good game. I like it. Jeff Jarvis.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, we got a few things. I'm fascinated by this story. We have Wonder. Do you have wonders around you?

[Leo Laporte]

Wonder?

[Paris Martineau]

So Wonders is a delivery kitchen? No, with like 20 different restaurants using names of various famous chefs. And you could order from. If you want pizza and Lisa wants Middle Eastern, no problem. You just order what you want from Wonder. You go pick it up or it's delivered to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the same ghost kitchen. And they're all not real restaurants that exist. They don't exist outside of one.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, but really I've had it once.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they've raised like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is like Mr. Beast's restaurant where it's just real and a pop up.

[Paris Martineau]

Good brand. Jose Andres puts his name to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that's different.

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

And what's his name? The chef? I can't remember his name. So they just bought Grubhub for $650 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What a brief aside. Before we get into this too much, I think it's important to remember that the startup Wonder began life as a mobile kitchen and food delivery startup that would use custom made vans to where if you wanted food from Wonder, they would park the van in your driveway, cook the food in the van, bring it to you. And buying grubhub.

[Leo Laporte]

So apparently grubhub was owned by a company from the Netherlands.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Called eattakeaway.com or just eat Takeaway. Or Just Eat Takeaway. Oh, yeah, I missed the just. And they sold it for $650 million, which would sound to me like a lot of money.

[Paris Martineau]

However, what did they pay for it, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

7.3 billion just four years ago. So it's a little bit of a fire sale.

[Paris Martineau]

It is. It is indeed. Wonder. So we have new ones coming around me. Have you. Have you eaten there? Eaten from their Paris?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

I did once. I picked up Hoboken on the way home. Yeah, it was very good. Nice and easy. We wanted. I wanted. The other night I was. I came home from meetings in New York and I said to my wife, why don't we try the new Wonder? It's one on the way home. Good thing we didn't do it because there was a horrendous traffic jam and it took me two and a half at home, so.

[Leo Laporte]

But it doesn't bring it to you. It's a can.

[Paris Martineau]

You can do delivery. But you. I order it online. Look at the menu. The menu is pretty amazing. Don't go one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The menu for the one near me has Wing trip, which is Wings Comita Lime salt Fresca. Or I guess maybe it's just called lime salt. It's a Mexican place. Royal Greens Salad Street. The Street Bird by Marcus Samuelson, I guess, who's a big.

[Paris Martineau]

He's a very big deal chef. Yes, Very big deal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tejas Barbecue Burger, Baby bellies, Fred meat and bread.

[Paris Martineau]

Bobby Flay steak.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, yeah, Bobby Flay steak. It goes on at. Room for dessert. Okay. Defara Pizza's in here, which is a real restaurant. Yeah, that I guess it says we.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T currently deliver to your address. So. No, I can't get Wonder here. In California, we have the Petaluma Food Taxi. That's our local.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's see, locations. Where are they?

[Leo Laporte]

So they're all over Manhattan.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut so far.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, well, Rhode island. That could be good if I can get it from Wait, so what did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You get from there, Jeff?

[Paris Martineau]

I just got some hummus and I think I got a chicken hero sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm confused. So when they say they've got Wing trip, is it from Wing Trip or is it a wing trip like one.

[Paris Martineau]

Kitchen and they Wing Trip doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

There is no such thing as Fred's Meat and Bread, right?

[Paris Martineau]

No, they make up these restaurants, but it's an incredible variety of choice.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of an interesting name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's like the. It's like a diner.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. So there is no Atlanta hotspot called Fred's Meat and Bread? That's just something maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's look it up. Is there a frenzy?

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of an like Amazon fake Amazon. It says they. They partner with world renowned.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I think there actually might be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Prague Street, Atlanta.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So they have their recipes and then they have some chefs in this pop up kitchen.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, yeah. Who are trained and actually many recipes.

[Leo Laporte]

It makes sense. Except that was the problem Mr. Beast had is that the quality was all over the place because they don't.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, because Mr. Beast just did a crappy deal. This is, this was. This is good stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's good.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, they say it's wonders.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The main stain by Mark Murphy is sold out of muscles for the day.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know if. I don't know if I would get pickup mussels. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I wouldn't. But I think it's interesting that they're sold out of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they never had them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I had lunch yesterday with a friend in the new Moynihan train hall in New York under the old post office by, by Penn Station. And it's nice. And I thought sushi train station. Sushi is just one little baby step ahead of gas station sushi. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you missed an important fact. Wonder CEO is Mark Lore, who is. He was the president and CEO of Walmart from 2016 to 2021 because Walmart bought his company Jet. Remember Jet? They were trying to compete with Amazon. He found a Jet to compete with Amazon. I think he was a former. Oh yeah, that's right. He started Diapers.com which Amazon basically undercut until they couldn't afford to go on and then bought them for a song. So they went to Amazon and then left Amazon to create Jet, which was going to beat Amazon and didn't. But Walmart bought it for a lot of money. 3 billion.

[Paris Martineau]

2. There was a way because, well, Walmart.

[Leo Laporte]

Said this is exactly. Oh, we got E. Commerce now. So. Mark Lore. That's interesting. That's a. He's a big. He's a big name. He's the founder, chairman and CEO of the Wonder Group.

[Paris Martineau]

And they're expanding like crazy. I'm getting one that's going to be very. Here's why I'm so happy. Because no matter how long we blather on about the world, they're open till 9:00 Eastern. And so I can go over to the next town and I can have an order in and pick up my dinner.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Wonder. You know who else Wonder owned? Blue Apron, our former sponsor. Oh, the food box. Which they bought for a pittance. As well.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Blue Apron.

[Paris Martineau]

Doing neat things. But they will say real losers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cabal.

[Leo Laporte]

Cabal.

[Paris Martineau]

So that was one thing in my. In my list.

[Leo Laporte]

He's definitely won by one by losing, so good for him, you know?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So then we have new research suggests people are getting more bored.

[Leo Laporte]

I was really hoping you were going to do the dumbass. Dumb.

[Paris Martineau]

That was my next thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Ask you whether that was political or not.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's perfect. It's perfect. Research suggests people are getting more bored. How do. How do we know this and what does it mean?

[Paris Martineau]

I think it means they're more boring.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I've always thought boredom was a cover for other stronger emotions, like anger.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My mother said only boring people get bored. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

There, that's your mother right there. And. And that's why you have a big break now.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, well, the next one was that Elon Musk, as you know, has been doing jumps in the shape of.

[Leo Laporte]

X. Oh, is that what it is? He's doing X?

[Paris Martineau]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

So he does X. I had no idea.

[Paris Martineau]

And so if you. If he's the beginning of a font, why shouldn't he be a font?

[Leo Laporte]

So they've created a font called Times New Dumbass.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey. And you can download it and use it.

[Leo Laporte]

That is awesome. I know. It's okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't. Okay, so all this time I've seen him leaping around like a nitwit. That was X. He was doing an X.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's doing an X. I didn't realize that.

[Leo Laporte]

What is wrong with him? There's something very strange.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not normal. Wrong. It's weird.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no, I agree.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Pretty sure all billionaires are pretty weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they get that way because everybody's, you know, kissing brain worms. Yeah, nobody's kissing my butt.

[Paris Martineau]

Next he'll be singing with autotune.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. They are all weird. You're right. We started the show with weirdness. We're ending with weirdness. Thank you very much, Benito. We will see you in a month.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. Bonito. Bon voyage, Benito.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're going to miss you.

[Paris Martineau]

Good Horizon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have fun.

[Leo Laporte]

By the time you come back, AI will have taken over and we will no longer need your services.

[Paris Martineau]

Or ours. We'll all be gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, we'll all be gone.

[Paris Martineau]

No book. LM is us.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a good time. You're visiting family and then in. Just Japan, just for fun.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, just. I'm all visiting friends in Japan. I have friends in Japan.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, that's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of on the way home, right?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, yeah. That's why I do. That's why I do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. Well, we'll miss you, Bonito. I don't know. It's not the same with that. He's the conscience of this show and we need you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He keeps us on track, keeps us.

[Leo Laporte]

Keeps us from buying the BS that the tech community is peddling this week. Jeff Jarvis is proudly emeritus at the City University of New York, where he was the townite professor of innovative journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Now professor professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook and Montclair University. And I can't wait to find out more about your classes. There's his books right behind you. The Gutenberg parenthesis, the web we weaves the new one and a magazine all at Gutenberg parenthesis dot.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, nope. Now, jeffjarvis.com.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right, you've got the new site. Jeffjarvis.com Paris Martino writes for the information.

[Paris Martineau]

She writes and reports for the information. Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good. I didn't ever thought of that. The reporting is different from the writing.

[Paris Martineau]

They're both important. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

But what makes Paris such a good journalist is she does such good reporting.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a reporter and a writer at the information. You can give her a tip so she can write about something exciting. If you go to Martino 1 on signal and send her at. Don't use your work phone. Send her a sender a deep scoop. Be deep throat. Give her something juicy. Martino one. Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Gizmo. Thank you, Jeff. We do this week in Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you, Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Everything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was gonna say thank you, Jeff. Because I'm gonna get queso from wonder. Oh, I love queso and never Any place there. New York City has a dearth of queso. And this might just.

[Paris Martineau]

How far away is the. Is the wonder from you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not far.

[Leo Laporte]

I made it.

[Paris Martineau]

Are you doing delivery?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm probably gonna walk.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, one more question. Did you vote early and get the special sticker?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what's the special? There was a special sticker in Brooklyn too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, hold on a second. Let me find it. I'll post it in the chat right here. There was a special Halloween sticker.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, very cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A pigeon is holding a jack o'lantern and wearing a hat, which is cool.

[Leo Laporte]

And it says Halloween vote. But you only get that if you vote before November. Is that the deal?

[Jeff Jarvis]

To vote on October 31st, you actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Have to vote on Halloween. Nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

She went to extra effort and got up early. Was there a long line to get the special sticker?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, there was literally no one there. And I got there 30 minutes after the polls opened.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Paris Martineau]

I was telling her she's dad, who gets to airport early. I was telling her she had to get up, she had to get early, she had to get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I thought about it and then I forgot. When the more actual morning came, until I realized it was like 15 minutes ago, I was like, oh, I gotta get my bike. And I biked over there and then.

[Paris Martineau]

Cool. There was no queso tonight. Bless your heart. That's. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I made queso for the first time a few months ago when we had a special event at the house for our club Twit and Micah ate pretty much the whole pot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could be me.

[Leo Laporte]

Queso's pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, one of the best things.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you make me want to make queso. I need to go get some Velveeta, though. You can't make queso without velveeta.

[Paris Martineau]

Which restaurant has the queso? Paris?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I'm ordering the one from Tejas Barbecue because I like a Texas Mexico. But the Mexican restaurant also has queso.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I like Tex Mex because it has peppers chopped up in it and stuff like that. Yeah. In fact, that's where I first had it in Austin, Texas. Ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us. We do this week in Google on Wednesdays, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us live on eight, count them, eight streams. Of course, our club members are watching in the cozy confines of the Discord. Great place to hang with some really smart people. If you're not a member of Club Twit, go to Twit. TV Club Twit. Seven bucks a month. But it's more than just a discord. You get ad free versions of the shows. You get special programming. We've got a book club coming up and Micah's Creative Corner. Whole lot of fun events and it helps us out a lot. So Twit. TV Club Twit. But you know, even if you're not a member, you can watch us on YouTube. We're at YouTube.com twitch live, twitch TV, slash live, kick X, Facebook, LinkedIn and another one. Tick tock, Tick tock. I always forget Tick tock and tick tock. And I hope you will watch this live. But you don't have to, of course. Most people watch after the fact because it's a podcast. Chris Wallace just discovered those. You know, that's the future. Thanks Joe Rogan. Thanks, Joe Rogan.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you, Joe, for all grateful Joe.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all so grateful to you. You need to go merely to the website Twit TV Twig to download a copy or go to the YouTube channel dedicated to this week in Google. That's a great way to share clips. Or open up a podcast client and search for this week in Google and subscribe. There's audio or video or both. Thanks everybody. Have a great week, you two, and we will see you next week. Oh, wait a minute. Most important thing, buy your tickets to the Commonwealth Club to go see Jeff Jarvis. He's going to be speaking December 4th.

[Paris Martineau]

Be here, unfortunately, but I'll be there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fine. We record the show is there. Here's the website commonwealth club.org and it is event number says in the URL, but I can't remember. Just search for this. How we reclaim the Internet. Absolutely. Want to go. That's fantastic. Everybody should go to that.

[Paris Martineau]

5:00Pm Doors open 5:30 to 6:30. The program.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Well, I might be able to make it if we did a short show that day. Oh, whip up to San Francisco. I'd like to see it. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on this week in Google. Bye Bye.

[Paris Martineau]

So Paris, I'm thinking you might. You know the cornbread with orange honey butter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know, but then I'm like, what do I want to get as a main? I'm well, so there's so many options.

[Paris Martineau]

Because you can order pork sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

I love pulled pork.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ordering from Yasas by. I'm thinking of ordering from the Mediterranean restaurant Yasas in addition to this.

[Leo Laporte]

Are these all good? I mean, how could they be good?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the same kitchen that's my question.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't get it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm going based on Jeff's recommendation that it was.

[Paris Martineau]

I've only eaten once. But, Leo, if you've ever been to a New Jersey diner, it has one page menu.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'll tell you, the cheese, you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don'T order the, like back half of the menu.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically, it's like the Cheesecake Factory. It's all frozen. And they just thaw it out.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it doesn't seem to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, it's really interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, the bread I got with. With my. With my hummus was really good. They were tzatziki hummus. It's pretty amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Well, we don't have it out here. It's only. It's a New York thing. Yeah, well, you know, now that it's all right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you ordering from them tonight, Jeff?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'm not because they're. The one that's closest to me is too far away. There's a new one opening next month near me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I'll let you guys know how.

[Paris Martineau]

I do want to know? Don't curse me. Do they have cacio e pepe? That's what I'm gonna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They've got pasta that.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's so easy to make cacio pepe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't so easy if you don't have the ingredients. It's not.

[Paris Martineau]

But this is interesting. There's not a search that's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is the top search. Restaurant, cuisine or dish.

[Paris Martineau]

There is. Oh, I didn't see that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, thank you, Paris, for helping your grandpa's figure out how to use the Internet. We'll see you next week. You can maybe help me set time on my vcr.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bye, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye. Bye. I think we could call this. There's quite a few good titles. Let me look. See, that was all right. We didn't get political. It was pretty mild. I think that was. It was entertaining without eschewing any, you know, serious topics. Pounding my schnitzel. I love queso CEO brainworms. Times New Dumbass. Only boring people get bored. Losers Cabal sucks the life out of it somehow. The pruner who came in from the cold. I like License to Prune. Don't girdle the trees Only Charlie's. Everything for a schnitzel. It's sucking painful new ways to disappoint me. Technology shouter. Full bright. Can you clap on? Come off. It's just Craig. This is another thing that puzzles me in shootification. I'll leave Twitter if Corey leaves a wicked guy. There were a lot of titles I kind of like Licensed to Prune or Very Buoyant, which was another one. Oh yeah, what do you think? Very, Very Buoyant or Licensed to Prune?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I like them both.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, gonna go with License to Prune, I think. Here we go now.

[Paris Martineau]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones.

[Leo Laporte]

On us and four lines for $25.

[Paris Martineau]

A line per month when you switch.

[Leo Laporte]

With eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com how do you feel when you switch to Geico and save on your car insurance? It's like going to work on one Thursday morning and thinking to yourself, just one more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says Happy Friday. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that. Get more with Geico Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite Podcasts with Libsyn ad, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y-N-COM today.