TWiG 798: Great for Soup - Veo, Willow, The Onion & Infowars

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Google (Audio) - Episode 798: "Great for Soup - Veo, Willow, The Onion & Infowars"

Release Date: December 12, 2024

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau

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I. Introduction

In Episode 798 of "This Week in Google" (TWiG), hosts Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau delve into a myriad of topics spanning artificial intelligence advancements, quantum computing breakthroughs, cryptocurrency fluctuations, media legal battles, and social media dynamics. The episode seamlessly blends technical discussions with lighthearted banter, providing listeners with both insightful information and entertaining commentary.

II. Artificial Intelligence Advancements

A. Google Gemini Advanced

The hosts kick off with an in-depth discussion about Google's latest AI model, Gemini Advanced. This new model represents a significant leap in AI capabilities, integrating seamlessly with Google's search functionalities. Leo Laporte demonstrates its prowess by querying real-time information:

Leo Laporte [10:17]: "Can you tell me the latest news from Syria? The latest news out of Syria is that the Syrian government has recently collapsed..."

However, Jeff Jarvis raises concerns about the model's accuracy and reliability, noting that it sometimes provides incorrect or nonsensical information.

B. Apple AI 18.2

Apple's recent update, AI 18.2, introduces an image generator integrated with the Gemini Advanced model. This feature allows users to generate and search images directly within the Apple ecosystem. Paris Martineau expresses her interest in the privacy-centric permissions Apple has implemented:

Paris Martineau [16:13]: "That's good. So it just gives you. It just gives you that photo that you..."

C. OpenAI’s 12 Days of AI

OpenAI continues its "12 Days of AI" initiative, unveiling tools like Canvas, a collaborative writing and coding platform. Jeff Jarvis highlights the practical applications of AI in fields such as medicine and material science, emphasizing AI's role in enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing them.

Jeff Jarvis [12:40]: "They can summarize text, and the latest are being able to summarize text, even larger chunks of information that would have taken humans hours to digest into just minutes."

III. Quantum Computing Breakthrough

Google announces a groundbreaking achievement in quantum computing with its new quantum chip, Willow. This chip reportedly performs computations in five minutes that would take classical supercomputers approximately 10²⁵ years. The discussion touches upon the controversial connection to multiverse theory, although the hosts express skepticism about its scientific validity.

Paris Martineau [28:59]: "Google this week said that its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist."

IV. Cryptocurrency News

The episode covers the turbulent rise and fall of Hochtua, a meme cryptocurrency. Launched on December 4th, Hochtua's market capitalization surged to $490 million within hours before plummeting to $41.7 million, reflecting a classic "pump and dump" scenario. Jeff Jarvis critiques the speculative nature of such cryptocurrencies:

Jeff Jarvis [43:08]: "Is this what you call a pump and dump?"

V. Media and Bankruptcy Case

A significant segment revolves around The Onion's attempted acquisition of Infowars, which was ultimately rejected by a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas. The legal battle centers on ensuring that Infowars does not return to Alex Jones' control, thereby protecting the interests tied to the Sandy Hook settlement.

Leo Laporte [89:54]: "It's a shame that they are now being subpoenaed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton..."

VI. Cloudflare’s Year in Review

Cloudflare provides a comprehensive review of internet trends observed over the past year:

• Global Internet Traffic: Grew by 17%.
• Top Services: Google remains the most popular internet service, followed by Facebook, Apple, and TikTok.
• Emerging Technologies: Starlink's traffic tripled, especially in new markets like Malawi.
• Web Crawlers: Googlebot continues to dominate, while ByteDance's ByteSpider saw a decline.

Jeff Jarvis [82:06]: "All ignore us Android users."

VII. TikTok’s Legal Battle

The hosts discuss TikTok's ongoing legal struggles in the United States, including attempts to ban or sell its U.S. operations to address national security concerns. Frank McCourt's Project Liberty is highlighted as a potential "white knight" aiming to acquire TikTok's U.S. arm, though skepticism remains about the feasibility and intentions behind the project.

Leo Laporte [56:27]: "Project Liberty... developed the Decentralized Social Networking protocol, or DSNP."

VIII. AI Criticism and Casey Newton’s Article

Casey Newton's recent article critiques both AI skeptics and overly optimistic proponents. The discussion underscores the importance of nuanced perspectives in evaluating AI's potential and risks.

Paris Martineau [137:14]: "I think that the answer is very nuanced..."

IX. Debanking Discussion

Patrick McKenzie's article on debanking—banks refusing services to cryptocurrency businesses—is examined. The conversation highlights the challenges small businesses face due to banks' risk-averse policies, which often do not distinguish between legitimate enterprises and high-risk ventures.

Leo Laporte [100:02]: "Banks are being banks... they just don't want to do it."

X. Plea for Club Twit Support

In a heartfelt segment, Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis appeal to listeners for financial support to sustain the podcast. They emphasize the importance of community backing to continue delivering quality content amidst declining advertising revenues.

Leo Laporte [150:37]: "We need support to keep the show going. Join the club for seven bucks a month..."

XI. Miscellaneous Topics

A. Personal Anecdotes

The hosts share amusing and nostalgic stories about bodega cats, white elephant party preparations, and memories from the journalism field, adding a personal touch to the technical discussions.

B. White Elephant Party Gift Ideas

Brainstorming quirky gift ideas for a white elephant party, the hosts consider items like "Great for Soup" stickers and yard-long sausages, blending humor with creativity.

Jeff Jarvis [164:17]: "That's your gift for the white elephant."

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Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [10:17]: "Can you tell me the latest news from Syria? The latest news out of Syria is that the Syrian government has recently collapsed..."

• Jeff Jarvis [12:40]: "There was a recent study of scientists who used AI to create new materials in the labs. And the scientists who used the AI had, I think it was like 50% better results than those who didn't."

• Paris Martineau [28:59]: "Google this week said that its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist."

• Jeff Jarvis [43:08]: "Is this what you call a pump and dump?"

• Leo Laporte [89:54]: "It's a shame that they are now being subpoenaed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton..."

• Paris Martineau [137:14]: "I think that the answer is very nuanced..."

---

Conclusion: Episode 798 of "This Week in Google" offers a comprehensive overview of the latest in AI, quantum computing, and cryptocurrency, while also addressing significant legal and regulatory challenges faced by major tech and media entities. The hosts balance technical insights with engaging personal stories, making complex topics accessible and entertaining. Listeners are encouraged to support the podcast through Club Twit to ensure its continued production.

Stay Connected:

• Live Recording: Every Wednesday at 5:00 PM Eastern / 2:00 PM Pacific / 22:00 UTC.
• Support the Show: Join Club Twit for ad-free episodes and exclusive content.
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Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twig this week at Google. Paris Martineau is here. Jeff Jarvis is back. Yay. We're going to talk about AI today. Lots of AI news, including the new Google Gemini Advanced. Apple AI 18.2 comes out. And OpenAI continues its 12 days of AI with more revelations. We'll also get Cloudflare's 2020 four year and review, and then we're all going to help Paris pick a gift for her white elephant party. All of that coming up and a lot more next on Twig. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is Twig. This is Twig this Week at Google. Episode 798, recorded Wednesday, December 11, 2024. Great for soup. It's time for TWIG this week in Google, the show where we cover big tech, not just Google, but all the others as well. Plus a little journalism and some fun stuff thrown in with Paris Martino from the Information. Hello, Paris. Back home. I said hello.

[Paris Martineau]

I am. I continue to be at my home. Where I live.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, where you live. In your home. The home where you live.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel the others home.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a code of some kind that I'm missing. It's good to see you.

[Paris Martineau]

Someone's gonna burst into my door and, you know, extract me in second.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been watching a lot of spy shows on Netflix and I'm. I'm prepared for that at all times. For a while, I was pretty sure every time I crossed an intersection, I was gonna get T boned. I should stop watching so much tv. I think probably that's the solution. Jeff Jarvis is back. He's worried about Bridges, but he looks like a couch. In order to get the focus proper, he has to look like a couch because his logit tech Brio camera seems to want to focus on the couch exclusively. Hello, Jeff. How was San Francisco? How'd you have a good time? Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I did, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

We missed you. It's not this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I missed you guys. I was so near you. So far.

[Leo Laporte]

Micah filled in and he does a great job. We love having him on, but this is as much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Kathy Gillis came down. Oh, and lots of twit fans were there, which is always lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Kathy's gonna be on Twitter on Sunday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yay.

[Paris Martineau]

Where did Jeff used to work?

[Jeff Jarvis]

San Francisco Examiner.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no. Where was he perhaps a professor emeritus at? Come on, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

City University of New York. I'm sorry, John.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We know you're. You're a. You're a vacation sub here, but come on, come on. Paris was watching out for me. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

He is also soon to be a professor at Montclair State University.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am a fellow at Montclair State and I'm a visiting professor at Stony.

[Leo Laporte]

Brook at SUNY Stony Brook State University of New York. That's wonderful. Wonderful. So he has many credentials. Of course. He's best known for the lovely Gutenberg parenthesis for the Web we weave for magazine, all of the books you see behind you. Also, let's not forget, what would Google do, which got you on this show in the first place? That was his audition to get on the show called this Week in Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My Vanna White moment.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a good hand model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now in paperback.

[Leo Laporte]

I learned how to be a hand model on tech tv. And I used to get a manicure because we had a. Like, we'd show off stuff and I used to get a manicure. It was a 20 manicure. Expensive manicure. At one point, I knew tech TV was in trouble when the CFO said, those manicures, do you have to get a 20 manicure? I said, what? He said, you could go to the Vietnamese ladies. They're five doll. I said, what? He says, it's too expensive. I said, I'll cut my own nails from now on. Thank you very much. It was. That was a bad sign, don't you think?

[Paris Martineau]

Rough.

[Leo Laporte]

Then they took the oatmeal out of the. Out of the kitchen. And that was really. Then we knew we were in trouble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's like a Thai mink when they got a run for nice wine.

[Paris Martineau]

You had wine at work?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. We had a whole closet filled with. We had wine and beer for the. For the plebs. But if you were a senior editor and above, they stocked your credenza with liquor, mind you. You had a credenza.

[Leo Laporte]

What? That was the good old days. That's Mad Men quality. That was mad.

[Paris Martineau]

Stocked your credenza with liquor is an insane stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, that was at Plebe People magazine, which they wanted to ignore even though we made all the money. At Time, they had a valet who would go around with a cartoon.

[Leo Laporte]

Am.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I guess people who used to go into Bloomingdale's and he'd look at a couch and he'd say, that's 18 fake lunches.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Yeah. We had a Ziff Davis. They had a guy, they told me early on, when you're filing expense reports, he said the line was hide the boots. The guy expensed a very expensive pair of Texas snakeskin boots. And he put it under client service or Something like that. Right. And they informed me that the best thing to do is to hide the boots from now on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My other favorite people trick was that two guys were in concert and if one was going to be late, which he was always, he would have his friend go into his office, put some paper in the typewriter. We used to have these things called typewriters. Paris. And just put a hot cup of steaming coffee next to it so it.

[Paris Martineau]

Looks like they just stepped out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe a cigarette. Just put a cigarette butt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Those days we could start a small.

[Paris Martineau]

Fire in the waste bin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was a. We have. We should really be getting down to it because this is a busy, busy day. The news just keeps on giving. Apple and Google both pushed out updates to their AI. Google's probably the more interesting of the two they have now. They pushed out earlier this week their new video model. What is that called? Vue. That's because OpenAI made Sora available, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now Google says OpenAI has the 12 days of ship mess.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Not everybody, but this is a private preview. I can't get into either VO or sora, so I guess I'm not good enough. They're pretty awful. They're pretty awful. That's all I can say. I mean, there's. There's sometimes good. What you'll see is the good stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're going to know, Leo. It's going to fool everyone. We won't know what's true yet. I didn't put in the rundown. The Guardian had one.

[Paris Martineau]

They're going to change the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. We don't. We won't know what reality is, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Just do a search for Sora and gymnastics.

[Paris Martineau]

I literally was typing that into Twitter as you spoke.

[Leo Laporte]

It is some of the weirdest stuff I have ever experienced.

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of compelling in a way.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. You don't want an AI to generate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We saw this before. I could swear. The old Sora.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we did, but it's the new Sora.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my Lord.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better. Well, remember the old. The old one, she had 30 legs. Now she's just bending in unusual ways and floating, apparently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw somebody did it and they wanted to say, show me writing the column. And because it has no sense of reality, it had a keyboard and it had fingers, but the fingers were to the right of the keyboard, not anywhere near the keys.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I thought you were going to say they were etching something into a column.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. I don't really. Yeah. Right. Writing on a column. I don't really want to get in the position of saying, oh you see, AI sucks because honestly it keeps getting better and better in many interesting and I think useful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just not AGI. If we just didn't have that as this, as this ridiculous supposed goal and we said, hey, it's got a new trick.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'd say right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I think if we're evaluating this on a like, just as a technology that exists.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Really interesting stuff that's happening has made great leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. But it is because the people who lead these companies and the proponents of this technology herald it as the most world changing thing ever that is going to replace all jobs within like 2 to 5, like with like 5 to 10 years and completely remake reality. Then they're setting themselves up and their customers up for disappointment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And yet, I mean I can now talk to. So one of the things I think that's going to be fairly important is Google has attached Gemini. Gemini advanced to search. So now I can ask it questions that are tied to current if. Well, for instance, can you tell me the latest news from Syria? And I guess I can read it to me. Let me see if it'll do that. Well, maybe not. Can you tell me the latest news from Syria? The latest news out of Syria is that the Syrian government has recently collapsed. The opposition led by a group called Hayat Tahrir Al Sham took control of the whole country after a really fast offensive. A really fast. That was. It was really fast. It goes on. There's actually some pretty good stuff in here and that's because it's current. The point is that it's current. If I ask ChatGPT the same question, I'll do it for you right now. What's. Hold on. What's the latest news from Syria?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't have access to real time news updates or Current events until October 2023.

[Leo Laporte]

October 2023. So it would obviously not know anything. It would say, do you pay for Open Air? Both of those are. I pay for. Not the $200 a month.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. You can't even get Sora even though you pay for.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's in there because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think eventually paid customers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they said they're rolling it out. So last time I checked I could check here on the, on the computer so you can see it. Last time I checked, by the way. Now you can go to chat.com. they spend a huge amount of money to get chat let's see. Analyze images, code, summarize text, more models. No, this is. I can get all those models, but I don't think I can analyze images. I can make a plan. I can create images, but I don't think I have video unless I'm not seeing it. Let me view the tools here. Picture, dolly, canvas. No, but some people do. I think it's rolling out, is the idea right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say, regardless, the video is. Maybe that's in the parlor trick category. There's still incredibly useful stuff. Here's one. Google says that they now have used DeepMind to create forecasts. Weather forecasts. 15 day weather forecasts that are better than the best predictions, which is great and very important if you're a farmer or to predict hurricanes and so forth. Whoa. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is a good use of.

[Leo Laporte]

AI because weather is a chaotic environment. Very hard to predict because there's so many variables.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Multidimensional, as I was just reading a friend's book proposal. Multidimensional.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It can deal on a number of factors that we just can't get our little heads around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is a big step forward and I can go on and on. There was a study of women who got mammograms and the women who paid extra to have the mammogram analyzed by AI had a 20% better cancer discovery rate. That just came out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They had to pay extra? Well, however, it's just like welcome to America. It's the bank tellers, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're going to get rid of tellers and use the force you to use these machines and then we're going to charge you for the machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well that's right now anyway. But yeah, I mean that is an excellent point. They did pay extra, but when they paid extra they got 20% better results. In other words, the AI did make a difference and there's lots of these. I can go on and on. They did. There was a recent study of scientists who used AI to create new materials in the labs. And the scientists who used the AI had, I think it was like 50% better results than those who didn't. So more and more we're seeing AI be used. Not AGI, not RoboCop, not HAL 9000. But we're seeing AI used in very useful and interesting ways. And this is in just a few years. I think we can mock SORA today. We may regret it tomorrow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, I want you to take off your shoes right now and show us whether there's any sand in this office.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Let me know what's in there.

[Leo Laporte]

They're referring to this many now. Many months ago, watch on the beach I took with somebody who works in the business who did say, you know, we're going to have a very interesting 10 years. I don't think that's wrong. And he did compare it to an alien intelligence. He said you can't judge AI intelligence against human intelligence. It's like a new species. It's like a new. And that's maybe a little woo woo, but I think it's not so far off. So pixels have added new AI features. I mean everywhere you're seeing this. And Apple just now, I have to say Apple is way behind. Apple just added they something they call the image generator.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, they just added ChatGPT to the next version of the OS.

[Leo Laporte]

They also added ChatGPT and actually interestingly. Well, here's a, here's an interesting thing. I can take a picture of something, let me hold down the camera thing and then you'll see that two things have popped up. Ask and search. So if I take a picture of something and search, the funny thing is the search does not use Apple Intelligence. Did you just see what it said? It said searching with Google and the ad interesting. The ask and Paul. I showed this to Paul Thuront and he said well maybe it's because that's your search engine. So I changed the search engine to Bing, the default search engine and still searched with Google. They ask searches with ChatGPT. You can't see but.

[Paris Martineau]

And is this just on the new phones or. Oh wait, no, it's got on my phone too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, this is. No, this is 18.2 which just came out today by the way. I guess it was taking a picture of the mouse. 18.2 is the latest because it says a wireless computer mouse, often used for its portability and convenience connects to Bluetooth. This particular model appears to have ergonomic features designed for comfort. What it didn't do is say what model it is. Let me take the same picture with Google Search, see if it can figure.

[Paris Martineau]

Out put it through Google Lens.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if it's using Lens or not. So it did it identified as the Logitech MX anywhere. That's correct.

[Paris Martineau]

That looks like Google Lens's shopping results. I know that because I use Google Lens all the time for identifying interesting good furniture I see out in the world specifically. And this actually would be super useful for me because then I don't have to open up.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you Ask it.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm curious as to what the permissions.

[Leo Laporte]

Are then if you can you ask it how many business lunches it costs.

[Paris Martineau]

I will, I will do that next time. I'm curious as to what the permissions are because part of. I mean I very privacy centric I think as we all are. And so I like the feature that Apple has introduced sometime in the most recent couple of OS updates where you can be a lot more selective with what apps you're giving full access to your photo library. So what I have it what Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

To where what Apple said when they announced this and I did not see any permissions by the way, but maybe I went through them too fast. But what they said when they announced it is that they asked Google but they don't give that Google any information about you.

[Paris Martineau]

That's good. So it just gives you. It just gives Google that photo that you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Google thinks Apple is asking.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. It's a privatized search. Same thing with ChatGPT.

[Paris Martineau]

I love that then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I wish I could do something.

[Paris Martineau]

Besides the lenses product is phenomenal. I mean are there other lens like products out there that you think are comparable or better for that specific task of searching products?

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting you should ask because Microsoft just announced a similar product for Microsoft's Copilot AI they call it. What do they call it? Copilot Vision. Same idea. Everybody's doing the same thing. It is a very. It's a useful way to search. To search. But Google's had image search forever, right? That's not that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I just feel like it's gotten really good in the last couple of years in a way that I've found very delightful.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. Well, the fact that it knew exactly what the mouse was and by the way, the search results included a link to Amazon. So.

[Paris Martineau]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. We are in a. This is. So today is a big day and yeah, Open AI is doing the 12 days of AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They also put up what's it called Canvas for drawing editing. Open AI makes Canvas, its editing tool available to everyone. Ah, so today they announced the Apple deal. Yesterday I think was Sora. Day before or yesterday was Canvas. Day before that was Sora. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Today is ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence which we just were looking at. They do a. So OpenAI does a little video for each of these. This Advent calendar. There's Sam Altman in his ugly Christmas sweater. There's the Canvas that you mentioned. That was yesterday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is Canvas?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's watch the replay, shall we?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, here we go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just to make it a little bit easier to see in context, what's changing.

[Leo Laporte]

We know a lot of people also use it for programming, and we've made some really exciting improvements to programming in Canvas as well. Let's check it out. That's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I've also been helping Santa with some logistics.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the other thing that's really breaking through now is the use of coding AI to do coding better and better and better. Steve Gibson yesterday was talking about this on Security. Now, he was shocked that he could have a conversation with ChatGPT about Intel x86 assembly language. And it didn't get it right at first. Steve was impressed because he said, no, that's wrong. And it came back and said, oh, you're right, it's wrong. Here's a better answer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, what's the programming challenge you do this time of year?

[Leo Laporte]

It's the advent of code.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could you have used chat?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's an interesting story. There is a real controversy going on in advent of code. People are saying, we got to start banning people, because if you look at the leaderboard, people are solving this stuff way too fast. This guy, nine seconds, the next. And these are the best, by the way. These are competitive programmers who do do it in minutes, but the next best was a minute. He had later admitted. Oh, yeah, I had AI write it. But if you go back as you go through the days, this is starting to even out a little bit. But I think more and more, the top results, people are getting a little suspicious, are generated by, like, There you go, 49 seconds, 50 seconds. And this was for day seven, which. Yeah. Oh, yeah, they get harder. So there has been a little controversy about the. And you know what? This is not unusual.

[Paris Martineau]

I wonder if they'll take a NaNoWriMo approach where they say, yeah, go for it. Use AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that, 38 seconds. An anonymous user. Yesterday's problem, 42, 54 and 57. Yeah, well, you know what? So maybe it's not. I don't know. That seems awfully fast. You want to see what day, what the day 10 problem was? You want to. You want to just see, like, how.

[Paris Martineau]

Long would it take you even to read that? Probably more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Believe me, it takes me an hour just to understand the question. All those.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All those one minuters are. Are all AI?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, some of them. Okay, so it's. It's not immediately obvious because there are people who do competitive coding. They have lots of tools.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right? You could read this.

[Paris Martineau]

Do they have historic data? Can we go back five years or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And see. See how they go back five years.

[Leo Laporte]

See the leaderboards from previous years?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. That's an interesting question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a reporter figuring out how to do.

[Leo Laporte]

See, she's smart.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, she is.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go back to one of the early years, like 2018, where there was no. There certainly was. No. Nobody was using AI at this point. So here's 2018, day one. A minute 48.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, 222. But these are competitive coders. This is all reasonable. You get to day. Remember, what was it? Day 10?

[Paris Martineau]

Day 7. 7.

[Leo Laporte]

Day 7. So it's all right. Nine minutes was the very, very fastest. Guys.

[Paris Martineau]

Starts to get, you know, higher up there.

[Leo Laporte]

53 seconds is a little bit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you going to tell us how long you are on average?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. I actually streamed them live for the first five days. I'm not in the ballpark. No, I'm not. Two hours for the first four or five days. We're roughly two hours each.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, you gotta talk to the chat, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm explaining what I'm doing. I'm talking to Chad. I'm making mistakes. I'm going, you know, excuses, excuses. Looking stuff up. I'm asking AI in this. What. How the hell you solve this?

[Paris Martineau]

Podcaster's handicap.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I had a podcaster's handicap. Thank you, by the way. Good name for the show. So let me go to chat. So Canvas sounds like it's more than just what I would have thought. Drawing. Right. Few tools. Where. Here it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's more of a writing.

[Leo Laporte]

Collaborate on writing and code. I see. So what are you working on right now? Paris, let me write me a lead for a story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lead. Write me a lead.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that right? Didn't I an extra E? Oh, Lede.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. That's the technical term for a story about what? A homeless man who turns out to be Santa Claus.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Now this is an opportunity to write a very provocative lead. Right. You could do something really good with it. Let's see what ChatGPT does with it. Homeless Santa Story. In the shadow of the bustling. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Go away. I don't want help. Oh, got it. Go away. In the shadow of the bustling city where snowflakes melted into cracked sidewalks and the hum of Christmas cheer dimmed under the weight of hardship, homeless man, how.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does Christmas cheer hum and dim?

[Paris Martineau]

How does the hum of Christmas cheer get dimmed? And how does it get dimmed? Under hardship.

[Leo Laporte]

I want under the weight of hardship. That's a triple metaphor. That is a, you know, a very difficult achievement in gymnastics. Anyway, a homeless man named Ben sat hunched in his tattered coat. His wiry beard, streaked with white cost, caught the soft glow of a street lamp, and his eyes held a peculiar twinkle. Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Does your beard catch the glow of a street lamp?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I guess it couldn't. Unless it was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It glows.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. To most, he was just another lost soul. But when a group of curious children stumbled upon him on Christmas Eve, the impossible truth. See, this isn't a news story. This is like a story story. Oh. He was Santa Claus, and this year he needed their help to save Christmas.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's when the sleigh bells come in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, tell it to keep going. What's next? I want to know what's next now.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, I want you to write something. And that's when the sleigh bells.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Google change log.

[Paris Martineau]

Write the nut graph of the story. Please tell it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Okay, good. Let's get another prompt. Okay, now write the nut graph. Do you think you'll even know?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it sure might.

[Leo Laporte]

G R A F, Right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's going to be about hazelnut.

[Paris Martineau]

Sweet. Next nut graph, for anyone who knows, is kind of like the core graph, the top of your story that summarizes what it's about to what it's going to be about.

[Leo Laporte]

The nutcrack has been added. Tying the story together and setting up the stakes. Right. Despite his mystical identity, Ben had been stranded in the city for reasons he couldn't fully explain. His sleigh had vanished, his reindeer were nowhere to be found, and his. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to play that song. And his magic. I pressed the wrong button. His magic seemed to disfalter in the cold urban sprawl. As the children listen to his tale, a mix of disbelief and wonder, they realize they might be the only ones who could help him bring back the joy of the season.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, well, how do they do it? How do the children do it?

[Leo Laporte]

So how did they do it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

See if it gets those.

[Paris Martineau]

You have to hit enter.

[Leo Laporte]

What kind of graph is that? The how do they do it Graph.

[Paris Martineau]

That's kind of the nut graph, Honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Actually, the nut graph is not tying the story together and setting up the stakes. It is solving the problem, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Or no, it is kind of like a little mini. Basically, what Jeff said is right. If you read the nut graph, you could kind of get the gist of the whole story.

[Leo Laporte]

Once the children sprang into action, they pulled together what little resources they could. Found an old wagon to serve as a makeshift sleigh, flashlights as stand ins for Rudolph's glowing nose, and even their family dog to pull the contraption through the snowy streets. Guided by Ben's fading magic and their unwavering belief, the group scoured the city for cruel clues. Along the way, they enlisted the help of a kind stranger. Blah, blah, midnight approach. Their efforts culminated Warming's heartwarming scene at the city's Central Park. Ben's magic was reignited by the children's faith and the generosity of the strangers. He transformed the humble wagon into a radiant. Okay, that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. That's not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, family dog. Prance to the grace of a reindeer. And Ben, now fully Santa, once more soared into the stories. Starry sky. I feel like I'm drunk. I don't know why I'm having a trouble. Soared into the starry sky. Deliver gifts across the world. The children watched in all the hearts full, knowing they had made Christmas possible, not just for themselves. I got goosebumps for everyone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. It's O. Henry. Should I ask him to write a story about a comb and a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's O. Henry.

[Leo Laporte]

O. Henry. So that wasn't bad. That's canvas in the end.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know. Okay, so here's the thing. I think when it comes to things like writing and art and music, it's very generic. It's very mediocre. That's not where I don't. They focus on that because it's kind of wow. That's got a high wow factor. But in the long run, you see enough of it, you go, yeah, not so wow. But. But. But finding breast cancers or creating new materials or predicting weather, better. Those are really genuinely useful things. And I don't think they're mediocre.

[Paris Martineau]

No. I think they're incredibly oppressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Speaking of things with the wow factor, did you guys. I want you to try and explain this to me, because I don't fully get it. Google this week said that its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Oh, got to talk about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a big one. This is a big one.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a big one.

[Paris Martineau]

So this is about Willow. It's like, latest, greatest quantum computing chip. It has made huge leaps in speed and reliability, performance. This is a. I'll read a passage from their. Google's announcement. This is from Google's quantum AI Founder says Willow's performance on this benchmark is astounding. It performed a computation under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 125 or 10, septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's a very long number. This mind boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa, whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what this means, but I know I've seen a lot of posts on X that say it's really big.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's what fascinates me about this, and we've talked about this before in the show, is as I understand it, I mean, quantum computing. And this is part of the, part of their advance here is the error rate. Is that not unlike generative AI, we're in an age of approximated computing rather than. Here's the problem and here's the exact answer. It's close enough. It goes at such breakneck speed, its odds of being near to truth or right, and so on. I find that fascinating because we were raised in this culture of exact computing and this is an age now of approximate computing. And how do you get close enough given the scale? So as I understand, what Google really advanced here was that they constantly reduced the errors and that was the big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there were several announcements. And yes, that was one of the announcements is that they were able to get a stable qubit, but the one that Paris was just talking about is also. It's kind of a related, but it's at the same time announcement, but a, but a different one, which is that they did a very, very difficult computation that would on a normal classical computer, take 10 to the 25th years, and they were able to do it in five minutes. Now, we're not experts in this, and maybe we need an expert physicist to explain this. I know I shouldn't base it on what some guy on X who says he's building a graduate school of blockchain engineering says.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, he's building one. He's not in it. He's building.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even know who this guy is, but he's got a very elaborate, elaborate explanation. The keys. He's. He's answering the question I have, which is, what was the, what was the computation? What is it that they figured out?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Standard computation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, but what. It's a. So it's a matrix Multiplication, I guess.

[Paris Martineau]

Here's very long thread. Here's a summary from my colleague, Anissa Garden.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Google, good. Is this on the information?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go there. That's a better.

[Paris Martineau]

Google announces new quantum chip. It's a briefing that she did two days ago. She said. Google said a recent breakthrough, which it published in the journal Nature, involved making quantum bits or quibits, less prone to errors. More of them are at qubits. Sorry. When more of them are added to a system, the performance of a system doesn't worsen, the company said. Google said that it performed a study that showed that its predecessor, Willow, could produce below threshold quantum calculations, meaning its accuracy increased as the system scaled.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That's key. That's really key. That's. That was the big discovery.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As they made it bigger, they got fewer errors, not more.

[Leo Laporte]

So that. I mean, honestly, that could end up being. We might look back and say, wow, that was the. That was the big. That was a big breakthrough. I mean, we don't know. Yeah, we don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't understand how that means that multiverses are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a bit of a stretch, but I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, well, ask. Ask Google. Ask. Use Gemini to explain.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, Gemini, who should I. I have many choices, I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gemini.

[Leo Laporte]

I won't ask Apple's image generator. That's probably not the one to ask. You were just say, ask ask Gemini Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How would you phrase the question based on what you just read? Explain how I would.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I just say, explain the latest Google quantum computing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we're going to be.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think it has up to date information. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's the point. This one does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This one does.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I would send it the paragraph from the Quantum AI Founders blog post or send it the link and be like, explain what this has to do with multiverse theory.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you explain what Google's latest quantum computing breakthrough has to do with multiverse theory? I'm going to ask that just because I don't have access to the article. Where. Where. Can you explain what Google's latest quantum computing breakthrough has to do with multiverse theory? Google's latest quantum computing breakthrough is a big deal, but it doesn't have a direct connection to the multiverse theory. It's more about building powerful new computers. With this breakthrough, Google's created a quantum chip called Willow that can solve problems way too complex for regular computers. This could revolutionize fields like medicine. You don't need material science. Oh, I Interrupted him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, wait.

[Leo Laporte]

That was impressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now say but. Your. But Google article says.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me see. Where is that?

[Paris Martineau]

I typed it into. I put the article link into Gemini and said, okay. And it just parroted the line from the article, which doesn't really explain it.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't explain it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, back to Jeffrey Schultz, who's building a graduate school of blockchain engineering.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, not an undergrad. A graduate school.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. I shouldn't get answers from X. I think we know that much anyway. Could be interesting. This is not the. This is not the place. Go find a physics podcast where they can explain this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He did. He's ex Yahoo. That's all you need to know. Who built out the video machine learning department from scratch, leading to tens of millions of dollars in incremental revenue? That's Jeffrey.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, he got incremental revenue. Right. So apparently you need to select Gemini Flash 2.0 experimental from the drop down. But I don't have a drop down. Do you have a drop down? All I have is the regular.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, hold on, I'll ask.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, I'm just looking at the iOS app. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, Gemini. No, I, I. No, it only goes to 1, 5. This is 2.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah, we all, we're all waiting to get this update anyway.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, the experimental one says this. It says this article is about Google's new quantum chip. Willow. Quantum computers are based on quantum mechanics, which is a theory that also underpins the concept of the multiverse. However, this article does not explicitly mention multiverses, which is incorrect. But, you know, you tried. You tried.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I think that's just an article writer just trying to get some attention. I don't. I don't think we have proof of a multiverse. If we do, I'll let you know. Okay, I'll be looking.

[Paris Martineau]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, I think we should take a break and come back because I just want to get. Get an update on the Hochtua cryptocurrency after.

[Jeff Jarvis]

After. I understand Paris gave you the birds and bees talk last week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she explained it to me.

[Paris Martineau]

Now I know, but I explained what that thing is. No one is better for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, ladies and gentlemen, brought to you by our friends. You know them at ACI Learning, you say. Oh, do we know them? Yes, you do, because we've been talking about their video arm for a long time. IT Pro. Remember? Binge worthy, Video on demand. IT and cybersecurity training. IT Pro is The best we know because so many of our audience members have taken courses at IT Pro, have become IT experts, have brought their teams to IT Pro to get more, you know, upskilled, to get better at what they do. It is an amazing place. With IT Pro, you get certification ready with access to their full video library. Did I say place? Well, it's online so you could actually do it from your home. More than 7,250 hours of training. And this is current training. They're always producing new content. Seven studios running Monday through Friday, nine to five to make sure that you have the latest test questions, the latest certs, the latest versions of the software. That's not all. Premium training plans also include practice tests so you could take the exam before you take the exam to make sure you're ready before you pay for those exams. And you know, I have to tell you if my experience has been those practice exams give you the confidence so that when you're ready to take the exam, you know it. When you go into that exam room, you are set, you are ready, you feel good and you do better. They also have virtual labs so you can actually get hands on learning even if you don't have a Windows machine right in your browser. Set up a Windows server. Windows clients, MSPS love this too because it's a great way to test configurations before you launch them on the client's networks. It probably it's from ACI Learning and they sure make training fun. All the videos are produced by real experts in the field who have a passion for the subject matter. And that passion is it communicates, it makes it very engaging. You become passionate. As a result. They do it in a talk show format. You can chat along if you want, just as you do with our shows. They call it edutaining. I call it pretty darn good. Take your IT or cyber career to the next level. Be bold. Train smart with ACI learning. Visit info.acilearning.com TWiT if you use the code TWiT100 at checkout, you'll save 30% on your first year of it pro annual training plans. That's a great savings. Info.acilearning.com Twit don't forget the offer code TWiT100. Twit100. And we thank them so much for their support of this week in Google. Google is suing. This is an interesting story. Or a federal regulator over supervision of its payment division, the consumer. This is the one more shot at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB they're doomed anyway. Well, they probably are. I think that that's one of the first things to go on. January 20th, uh, Google's suing the CFPB. This comes from Reuters. After the agency ordered supervision of Google Payment. Now, the whole point of the CFPB is to protect consumers against financial fraud, against predacious companies charging too much. They say that Google's payment services carry risks for consumers, such as possible fraud and mistaken transactions. The funny thing is, Google shut down Google Pay earlier this year. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, they changed it. Didn't they just change?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, that's the question. Did they shut it down or they changed the name? The agency said they've gotten 300 consumer complaints, reports of fraud scams and unauthorized transactions. It said it did constitute a finding that the company had engaged in wrongdoing. The CFPB order nevertheless said consumer complaints indicated that Google Payment had failed to investigate complaints about erroneous transfers. And that's why the law allowed for supervision even if Google has discontinued the services in question. Okay. The company said, well, your honor, as a matter of common sense, a product that no longer exists is incapable of posing such a risk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If the customer is ripped off in the forest, there's no one there to lose.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So Google might have a case here. I have a feeling a court might be somewhat sympathetic to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're trying to smash in everything they can at the last minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're not doing it anymore, but if you were, we would sure be. We would sure have something to say about it. Okay, fine. What else? Hock tua. So since we talked last, I hope we didn't encourage people to go out and buy that Meme coin. Since we talked last. The meme coin went from a value of a market cap of $490 million. Jesus. A lot of people bought it. It was launched December 4th at 10pm, quickly rose to a peak market of $490 million. The price then plummeted, trading at a valuation of $41.7 million. 91% down in 3 hours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this what you call a pump and dump?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure looks like it. Hochtua Welch says I didn't make any money on it. I wasn't. No. Nobody I know was involved. Team hasn't sold one token. Not one. And not one of our members was given a free token. So she said it was snipers that did it. Of course, somebody pointed out when we talked about this on Sunday that she did get the gas fees. She probably made millions. Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. I Love that slide of Hawkonomics.

[Leo Laporte]

Hawkenomics, baby. Get to know your Hawkonomics. This is from Haley Welch's X. What is it? X. What do we call it now? X. Twitter post. Where the money went. Seems like what all these people say is, well, let me tell you where the money went. Some people were sniping. Apparently, one wallet managed to snipe Hawk seconds after launch. So they bought it at the launch price. They bought 17 and a half percent of it. A million dollars worth. And then over the next one and a half hours, it sold 135 million Hawk tokens for a profit of 1.3 million. This is what you have to do these days, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you can do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Arbitrage. He had a million. Almost a million dollars in Solana, which is another coin, he had something called Wrapped Solana. It's crazy out there, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And yet with Bitcoin hitting $100,000, I think a lot of people are saying I should be investing in this, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, everybody. No, don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I wouldn't.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Don't consult a financial advisor.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but some of them are going to say yes, some of it. The problem is you look at the. It's very speculative, right? But you look at the amount of money some people have made, you go, well, geez, I. That's pretty good. I wonder if I could make that kind of money. Right now, it's at $101,472. It's underneath that this Week in Google logo. We don't want you to actually see it.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that any person thinking about investing in a meme coin should think long.

[Leo Laporte]

This isn't a meme coin. This is bitcoin.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, bit. No, we're talking about bitcoin. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Don't invest in meme coins. Although Doge is doing pretty good right now. Well, Leo, Leo, I am. I am. You know me. I hate all this stuff. I think it's burning the ecosystem to the ground just as AI is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But, Leo, if you went to bitcoin, you maybe you'd.

[Leo Laporte]

I should be a graduate student at bitcoin. You?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Have I spoken to you guys about my obsession with Bed, Bath and Beyond stockholders before?

[Leo Laporte]

I think you mentioned it. But. But, Phyllis, you mentioned.

[Paris Martineau]

These are people who bought into Bed, Bath and Beyond when it was a meme stock. As you know, Bed Bath beyond has since gone bankrupt and the assets have been sold to other people. There is this group of people, I'd say at least, like, hundreds could be in the Thousands of people who still believe that they have Bed, Bath and Beyond stock and that their Bed, Bath and Beyond stock, which again, canceled, is going to be valuable stock in the world. Diamond hands Ryan Cohen, CEO of GameStop Combines, buys Bed, Bath and Beyond, combines it with Gamestop and a bunch of other super stonks and turns it into the most profitable company. Wow. The world has ever seen, while also sticking it to big hedge funds.

[Leo Laporte]

That's basically.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm fascinated by.

[Leo Laporte]

That's like QAnon.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's like, oh, it is basically QAnon.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fantasy and the alien.

[Paris Martineau]

They have a whole subplot where they analyze Ryan Cohen again. The GameStop CEO's line of children books that he's released because they have the clues about. They have. They have clues in them.

[Leo Laporte]

Do your own research. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So when I was. When I was a Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, we tried to save money. Did I ever tell the story before we. They try to get rid of comics. He always got rid of comics. Then old ladies would call and say, how dare you get rid of Beetle Bailey and all that.

[Leo Laporte]

I need. I need my Dagwood.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Beetle Bailey served this country.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there was this racist.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. Racist. Served this country. So that was very good. It took me a little while.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you. So in the sports section in the Daily News, which was a sports newspaper, we ran this racist Chinese, like, fortune thing with a Chinese caricature in the worst ways. Right. And there were a hundred reasons to get rid of this. Because it was racist. We got rid of it. It turns out that it was used by all the numbers people for their bets. Right. How many hairs on Mr. Chong's head?

[Leo Laporte]

It was a giveaway. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And so we couldn't get rid of it. No, no, no, no, no. We had to keep running it.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the latest Beetle Bailey, by the way, apparently it's still being published. In fact, it's. You know what Beetle Bailey is in the 21st century.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How about. How about Dagwood?

[Paris Martineau]

Beetle Bailey definitely believes in QAnon. He's. Beetle Bailey has said where we go one, we go all.

[Leo Laporte]

Dagwood Bumpstead. I munched. I was talking about my son Henry a while ago, and I said, he makes his sandwiches are like Dagwoods. And nobody, nobody in the audience had any idea what I was thinking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Staring at you blankly right now. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is a picture of Dagwood Bumstead and his.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I know that guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know.

[Paris Martineau]

I Know those sandwiches.

[Leo Laporte]

That is a really old fashioned looking cartoon.

[Paris Martineau]

Look at his unfunny people with hair like that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I would like to get my. I think you have to use shoe polish to get your hair like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Your hair is kind of parted in a similar way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is today. Yeah, it is actually today.

[Paris Martineau]

You've got, you know, you need that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nancy. Nancy is the most unfunny comic ever done.

[Leo Laporte]

No, Family Circus.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yeah, Family Circus Rough. I know that one.

[Leo Laporte]

But you're right. Nancy never really had a punch.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nancy does not know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. Family Circus at least tried to have a punchline.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By the way, you know, Paris is policing the socials and catching me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, she is. He.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it was just. I was scrolling through blue sky because there's no problem with me doing that. And I saw a post From Jeff like 20 seconds ago and she said.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want dramatic reading. Jeff, we're literally hosting a podcast.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's true. And yet Jeff has time to screenshot and come after the broken commercial.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Joe Espito, who. Thank you, Joe, for coming to my talk as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Joe was there. Oh, nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Social media samurai. I can do it all. By the way, I did a. I did my most touristy thing in years in San Francisco. You want to guess what did you do?

[Leo Laporte]

I guess you went to Alcatraz.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

Nope.

[Paris Martineau]

No, that involves being on the water.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's true. Also. You have to like plan eight months ahead. It's a modern touristy thing to do in San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

You went to pier 39.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God no. Who do you think I am?

[Leo Laporte]

You went to the Exploratorium.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

You went up to the Coit Tower to see the view.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Appropriate for the show. A man who lives la vida Google. What would I do in the city limits of San Francisco? Did you stop by the Google building in San Francisco? Well, I did that too, but I was next door to the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But no, I don't know what there is to do. That's googly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's googly?

[Leo Laporte]

In San Francisco, you went to Anchor Steam Brewery.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's. Did you ride in a Waymo car? Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you rode away Mo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I did a Waymo.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's timely because Cruise announced this week that they're gonna kill their self driving taxi. Their robo taxi business is a terrible business. They're getting out of it. But Google's still doing Waymo. So how was it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was. It was great. I thought it was gonna be freaky. It's not at all. I only went a mile to the wonderful City Lights bookstore, where, God bless them, they have all three of my current books on sale.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a classic bookstore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're the best. They are the best. And so it was just a mile, but it was fun. And it was fun to see the wheel go around. I took video of it, which everybody does. And somebody had left their glasses. They were not just sunglasses. They were prescription glasses in the car.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I hit the call button. Like, you know, once this thing is.

[Leo Laporte]

Going right on the street.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's going to the ocean. No, I just. Some lady has left their glasses in the thing. He fills out a form and then they're going to. He says, well, okay, we're going to bring it back to the depot.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Reunite the glasses.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty cool.

[Paris Martineau]

That is fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is fun. It was fun.

[Paris Martineau]

Was it a cool driver?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's the thing. Paris. You know, normally when I sit in a taxi, I feel too privileged, like someone's driving me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You feel they're bored. They're thinking of all kinds of things.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm thinking that. But of course, there's no one driving. And then I'm thinking, well, what do I tip? No need. Because there's also no salary for anyone doing this, which is a whole other issue. But we'll.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's why I over tip, because I have guilt. White guilt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I do, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a hundo. I'm sorry you have to do this. Can I drive you next time?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what podcasting has gotten to. Podcaster and taxi driver.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's not far off, my friends. It's not far off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know, my friend.

[Paris Martineau]

Next time you're going to call into the show from the front seat of a cab.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I'm driving a cab. Well, you know, that's what George Burns said. He says, too bad all the people know how to run this country are either barbers or cab drivers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's true. Oh, that's. That's so old fart.

[Leo Laporte]

That is such a fart story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

George who? George Burns. Burns and Alan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You gotta play.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm. I'm not even going to try and guess what that is. You got a black and white show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, it was also radio.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

There was not even any.

[Paris Martineau]

They didn't even have video back. It's just someone screaming into a conch shell and hoping someone else heard it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so let's do it. Leo Say good night, Gracie.

[Leo Laporte]

Good night, Gracie. That was. That's funny. That's hysterical. Hilarity ensued.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, you probably, back in the day hadn't heard many people say things, so that would just be fun based on the novelty. Right? You're like, who's Gracie?

[Leo Laporte]

I actually. I don't know. Do you feel this way, Jeff? I often feel like I'm watching my era disappear in the rear view mirror.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, oh, try teaching.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I don't even understand where we're going, where this car is headed, but I remember back there, and it's like I'm in a new. This is a different world. That's why the AI thing is so wild.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, give me. Give me a short list of essential content, be it video or radio from your era you feel like is disappearing. And I'll watch it and review it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's this show all the time. We talk about Beetle Bailey and George and Gracie, and I mean, everything we talk about is ancient history. Now. Do you remember Tom Jones, Tight Pants?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think about it. You may, but I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember. Do you remember Martin Mull and Fernwood Tonight?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's not going back far enough. I'm gonna say she doesn't remember it. Doby Gillis.

[Leo Laporte]

Doby Gillis. No, no. Fernwood tonight. Do you ever. Have you ever heard of that?

[Paris Martineau]

Fernwood Tonight.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I.

[Paris Martineau]

You could be just making up words to me. That's how a little. I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, I got one. All right. Max Headroom.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, what?

[Leo Laporte]

She knows Max Head.

[Paris Martineau]

Know of Max Headroom?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because that's kind of become a culture.

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't seen that, but I will watch it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You'd like it. You'd like it. It's great. What, Leo? It's great.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Going like this guy wants.

[Paris Martineau]

Was this before?

[Leo Laporte]

It was before Dev. No, it wasn't.

[Paris Martineau]

So is the reason why you're responding this is animosity because you're jealous?

[Leo Laporte]

I hate him. It's a guy in a rubber head. Hate him. So what's going to happen to TikTok? So TikTok has now said, we want to go to the Supreme Court.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Place the bets, ladies and gentlemen.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It's getting worse and worse. They. They got a federal court. They asked the federal court to pause the congressional order to sell or be closed down. The federal court said, no. That's well within the power of the United States government to shut you down. It's not a First Amendment issue, It's a security issue. So now they're saying we're going to the Supreme Court. They. They also, they want to pause at least to get to January 20th because they have to be sold by January 19th. It is. It is coming down to the wire now for TikTok. There is a white knight. Have we talked about Frank McCourt? Do you know?

[Jeff Jarvis]

We haven't. I want to know what to think about this. So tell me what to think.

[Leo Laporte]

So Frank McCourt is not so loved in Los Angeles. Former owner of the LA Dodgers, but he's an interesting fellow. He created something called Project Liberty. Actually, what I know about him, I read in on Wikipedia and it's kind of interesting. Project Liberty. So he's a billionaire, right? He's one of those rich, but he's one of the good ones. I think that's what we thought of. Some others I know. Yeah. You know what? They're all bad, aren't they? So he's not loved because of the Dodgers. He does own the football club Marseille in France, and he's the founder of the nonprofit Project Liberty. So Project Liberty, and he's donated $100 million to start a school of public policy at Georgetown. He actually gave him another $100 million for the McCourt School. He. The Project Liberty, which was founded a few years ago, developed the Decentralized Social Networking protocol, or dsnp. The idea being he believes that you should be able to have social media without giving up, you know, everything to a centralized body that might sell it on. So he has put together. Now, I don't think it's enough money, but he says he's put together a $20 billion consortium to buy the US arm of TikTok. He's got the commitments for the money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Half the price of Twitter sounds like a low.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems like. It seems like a low ball, I agree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But the 44 billion was ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it's now written.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's now written down to, I think, 16 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Project Liberty, this is from Axios, has held conversations with a diverse set of stakeholders. They will begin an investor roadshow early next week. That's this week in New York, this coming week in New York City. In San Francisco, Tim Berners Lee supports it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a sign.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good sign. Tim Berners Lee is also an advocate for a decentralized web. He wants you to control your own personal data. He's got his own project to do that. And David Clark, who's a computer science and AI senior research scientist and is fairly well known so I don't know. I don't know. I. Is this better than TikTok shutting down? They will not get the algorithm, which is the thing that makes TikTok tick.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tock.

[Leo Laporte]

And I have a feeling it's also the thing that he doesn't care about because, you know, the algorithm is the controversial part of tick, but the algorithm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is the good part.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, China says, the Chinese government says we're never going to let that out of there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're not going to sell anything that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they might sell the name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the users, the US users in the name they might sell. I think Most, I mean, TikTokers are up in arms, but I think most Tiktokers, like my son, who has, I think two and a half million TikTok followers are just moving to Instagram. It's so similar.

[Paris Martineau]

Something I have found interesting is trying to figure out how the TikTok ban would actually work in practice. Some people have written a bit about this, which is the most likely we're going to see, obviously, it being banned from Apple and Google app stores, but we could also see like an outright block of access by Internet service providers, which is where it starts to get tricky because TikTok also has kind of a deal with Oracle to keep its users, like US users, data on US soil rather than in China. And so if TikTok gets. Doesn't get sold and is banned, it's. It'll be interesting to see what happens to that data.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I guess it just all goes back to China. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, Because, I mean, Oracle then would face penalties on the daily. If it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good.

[Paris Martineau]

Ostensibly hosting. Right. The TikTok data in the U.S. yeah, the project. And does it all just go back to China?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. No, they probably have to erase the drives.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, perhaps something.

[Leo Laporte]

And the big question is what will happen January 20th? Because it's on. I don't think. See, I don't think Donald Trump is going to weigh in at all on that. I think he's got bigger fish to fry. He's much more interested in what he's going to do with the border. And he's going to. Despite his mandate, which isn't much of a mandate, but despite his mandate, I think he understands he can't do everything, so he's going to do the things that he thinks are most important. I don't think TikTok is very high on that list.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the Knight First Amendment center at Columbia University, Jamil Jafar and a colleague Wrote a post wrote essay in the New York Times urging the Supreme Court to step in on First Amendment basis.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yeah, but the problem is there's a lot of precedent. First Amendment does not protect foreign nationals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Trying to support our speech on TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the issue. But, but, but you still have speech elsewhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But. Well, that's like saying, okay, fine, you don't need the New York Times. Use the Washington Post. Well, we'll shut down the New York Times. That's okay. No First Amendment there. Fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is government involvement in speech. It is exactly that. It is the press of the people.

[Leo Laporte]

I will ask Kathy Gelis on Sunday for sure. She's our. A lawyer who has admitted to the Supreme Court. She can, she can work her magic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She even got a new router for you.

[Leo Laporte]

She did. Oh, thank you, Kathy. Yeah, because she was having trouble with her Internet going up and down.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm curious as to what the Supreme Court is going to say about all this.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they're going to say no. I think they're just going to say we're not going to take the case. The First Amendment, there's a lot of precedent for the First Amendment, not. That's why we have Cepheus, the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States. They have the right and the President has the right to ban foreign entities if they deem them a security threat. That's not a question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, the Jaffer piece.

[Paris Martineau]

But what does Elon Musk think about all this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was wondering.

[Paris Martineau]

It seems to actually be a relevant question as to determining what Trump would do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting. I don't know. I don't think. I think Elon. So this is interesting because Elon, of course, wants free speech for X.

[Paris Martineau]

He opposes the tick tock ban.

[Leo Laporte]

He does. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Or at least did in April. Maybe it's changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem. Who knows?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's more than just a business thing. Right. So. So the piece in the Times, it's down in the. In the lower part of the rundown. Online123 says that the most consequential conclusion of the appellate court decision, the First Amendment permits the government to protect Americans from COVID foreign manipulation by restricting their access to foreign controlled media. Even when that means American speech is restricted to. There you go. So imagine if the government said, okay, we're going to cut off rt. The government's going to do that. I don't think they could do that at all. But it's further than that. It's affecting Americans speech. So the repellent court's reasoning deviates from ordinary First Amendment principles in a number of ways. To begin, the judges gave near categorical deference to the government's claims about the risks associated with TikTok. And of course, this is the Biden administration, not the Trump administration. But courts have recognized the crucial importance of scrutinizing government claims more closely when First Amendment rights are at stake, given how vital free speech is to the operation of democracy. When the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration's attempt request to bar the New York Times from printing articles related to classified da da, da, da, it did so even though the administration warned that publishing would derail peace talks and expose intelligent agents.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about the Pentagon Papers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pentagon Papers, yep. The Court of Appeals did not cite the Pentagon Papers case, even though the Chitcock case, like that one, involves a request to preemptively bar speech in the name of national security. They failed to interrogate the government's claim that the ban is intended to prevent Chinese government's covert manipulation of American users.

[Leo Laporte]

They accepted the government's assertions on the face of it, yes. Which is not surprising. The govern. This is the problem is the government's never told us or anybody, but perhaps, you know, the Congress why they think TikTok is a threat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All this leads us to the most disturbing feature of the ruling, which is its audacious denial that the TikTok law constitutes censorship at all. In the Court's telling, banning TikTok actually vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment. How's that for paradoxical? By protecting Americans from possible Chinese government influence over the editorial decisions that power TikTok's platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

If you had an American making the editorial decisions, oh, it would be okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But because it's Chinese government, so this protects, really, the rights of Americans to free speech. But I think they've always said that, you know, foreign governments don't have free speech rights in the United States.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Foreign governments do, but we do. That's. That's what I keep coming back to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a content on TikTok.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But our content is not posted on TikTok, as is TikTok and its algorithm. And potentially the Chinese government decide which of us is seen, which of us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is cool with that. I, for one, like my new TikTok masters. You know, my.

[Leo Laporte]

You can see how they say it. Yes, it's your speech, but it is. The Chinese are deciding who gets to talk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My book was printed. My paperback, the Gutenberg Parenthesis on sale now. It was printed in the uk it wasn't printed in the US So could the, could the US Government say, oh, no, that those Brits, they're trying to influence American brains? Nope, can't do that. It's, it's, it's ludicrous. It's, it's acting like the world doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll see. I mean, I don't know. Did the TikTok go to the Supreme Court? Have they asked for cert?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know yet. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

We will. This is definitely something we'll talk about with Kathy Gillis on. And she's been a very strong advocate of the First Amendment. Will ask.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I think TikTok has seeked a Supreme Court hearing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it does. Okay. Two hours ago, in fact, Voice of.

[Leo Laporte]

America says, oh, they just did. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Seek a hearing.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're looking for cert. And this is where the Supreme Court. This isn't shadow docket because the Supreme Court is sitting. So the Supreme Courts could respond to them. An individual justice could respond, or they could respond as anonymously or they could give it cert. They could say, yeah, we'll hear that case.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was even delays for two days. Then that changes.

[Leo Laporte]

A delay would be all they need. Right. Well, presuming you could get the president's attention and he really has a very long to do list on January 20th if you read what he says. So. I don't know. I don't know. I would be sad. I don't think it's the end of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The world if they're given cert. One thing to ask Kathy, if you don't mind, is what. What is the then pro. Would Kathy file a friend of the court brief? And what does that timetable look like? How does she get her voice in there?

[Leo Laporte]

She's probably written it. Knowing Kathy, she's probably written it already. She works for Mike Masnick's Copia Institute, tech dirt's kind of policy arm and would presumably, if she wants to file a amicus brief, would file it as the Copia Institute. I'll be very. I'm just curious. What if Mike has said anything about this? Let me just look.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, let's look.

[Leo Laporte]

Or if she's written on tick because she writes for TikTok. TikTok ban stories. Here's one from Carl Bodie. November 15th, Trump may kill America's performative TikTok Ban for the benefit of his billionaire buddy Carl Never really love the mince words.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Their headlines are so great. Which buddy?

[Leo Laporte]

Probably Elon, right? I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, how would it benefit Elon?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Let's see.

[Paris Martineau]

The CEO of TikTok has been asking Elon for his help on this.

[Leo Laporte]

President elect has not yet announced a decision on or if, or how to proceed, but some advisors expect him to intervene on TikTok's behalf if necessary, including Conway and three others. Who's Conway? Not George Conway. Who's the Conway he's talking about? I don't know. Who spoke in the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump promised in the campaign to protect the app, even though he also signed an executive order in his first term that would have banned it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that was then, this is now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. Oh, his buddies. Well, Larry Ellison is definitely a buddy. He was there. He was at Mar a Lago with Elon Musk. Safra Katz, big donor. She's the CEO of Oracle. Big donor to the Trump campaign. Jeffrey. Yes. Is of course, a minority holder of TikTok stock. He has a 15% stake in TikTok, and he's a major billionaire Trump donor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where you're talking.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the buddy, Jeff? Yes, probably. Is that the same? Yes. As in Yas Queen. Has he been Yassified? I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a great question.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's the same. Now, remember, the other person who's potentially going to benefit it is Mark Zuckerberg. Meta Instagram will absolutely benefit from the banning of TikTok. People like my son will move. Just move over there. YouTube, too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If Zuckerberg had any generosity, he would. He would come out publicly and say, don't ban it.

[Leo Laporte]

You think he would? Do you think he'd do that?

[Paris Martineau]

No, probably not.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think generosity said his first.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Name or his middle name started with if?

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. Well, we'll watch with great interest. Yeah. Forbes has an article that says Emily Baker white saying if TikTok span American data could end up back in China. Okay, great. I don't think I. That's a good question. I think they would. I don't know. I don't know what the law said or anything. I'll be very interested to see what happens. Meanwhile, blue skies benefiting. They're now talking about charging, having a paid subscription. It'll still be free, but if you wanted to, you could pay. What is it, eight bucks for a better Internet. You know, a blue sky without badge.

[Paris Martineau]

I would pay for. I would pay.

[Leo Laporte]

You love blue sky. Yeah, I don't Know I do.

[Paris Martineau]

I just enjoy using it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Videos to 60 seconds. I'd pay for longer videos. Yeah, I'd happily support them.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I had been one of the first subscribers to Twitter Blue back when it was. Yeah, Twitter Blue. Just because I used Twitter so much back in the day that I was like, of course I'd pay for this. I also loved the nuzzle like feature they had on that. I have a completely off the wall question, Jeff. Have you seen the New Jersey drones? Question mark?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

The New Jersey lights in the sky that are mysterious and no one can explain themselves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They are. I mind you, I remember I live about five miles from Trump's golf course, Bedminster. They've been seen over Bedminster, where there's also, by the way, right there, a major AT&T knock.

[Paris Martineau]

If you want to see a video of it, I put it in the rundown right above the change log. My buddy and former coworker Dave, like a week or two ago had posted videos from his mother and brother, who both live in that area of, like, New Jersey. And they were. They're crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's. Let's see. What line number did you post those?

[Jeff Jarvis]

145.

[Leo Laporte]

One, four, fiver. This is the New York Times story. Oh, no. This is video from my buddy Dave.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, Listen, there is a New York Times story.

[Leo Laporte]

It's close to a New York Times story. Something really weird is happening in Morris County. That's not an airplane. That's for sure. Not an airplane. It looks kind of big for a drone. Maybe Amazon's testing drone delivery.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, the Pentagon has gotten involved.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is that? The lights are on. They're very bright. They're not hiding.

[Paris Martineau]

No, and it's just. I mean, it's very strange. There's quite a few different videos in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of looks like a helicopter. I'll be honest with you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's been more helicopter activity around me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it looks a lot like a helicopter. I hate to tell you, I've seen.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, if it was a helicopter.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw that on my window last night. It was a helicopter. Looked just like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Have said that they don't know what they are, but that they're not US Military.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do they know?

[Paris Martineau]

They don't think they're foreign.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they have radar. That's a helicopter. Give me a break.

[Paris Martineau]

If it was a helicopter, Leo, I think they would say it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New York Post mystery NJ drones are coming from Iranian mothership offshore. Congressman suggests should be shot down.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's the Jewish space lasers. Now, I know they have shot. Yeah, just shoot at him. What the hell? What could possibly go wrong?

[Paris Martineau]

At this time, we have no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign adversary. We're going to continue to monitor what is happening, but at no point where our installations threatened when this activity was occurring.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pentagon denies, says the press secretary, Jersey drones are from Iran.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to tell you that when times get weird and tough, people kind of get a little nutty and you're going to hear much, much more of this kind of crap for the next few years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I, for one, I'm trying to keep.

[Paris Martineau]

My feet on the ground or anything. Yeah, I just think it's kind of interesting. It's interesting that a bunch of people are having these strange unidentified flying object set sightings.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's more reflection on our psyche.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're not calling it from space. If this were other states, they'd be saying it comes from outer space. But we.

[Paris Martineau]

New Jersey is just like there are drones.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just up there. There's some drones up there. I don't know what they're doing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Staten Island. He must have come from Staten Island. They're always bothering us, those people.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say, according to Lance, the Pine Bush UFO Museum in New York. This area has a. A lot of very specific things about it that result in aliens visiting us. He said it's because the ley lines connect and there's quartz in the ground in high quantities. You know, it could be, could be. Lance could be right.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you ask him how he feels about Bed, Bath and Beyond stock?

[Paris Martineau]

No, but twice during our tour he did ask our group if we've heard of this cool guy named Joe Rogan who's got a lot of guy names.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching, listening, participating in. This week in Google with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. We're glad you're here. More stories from the front. Reddit has decided, hey, everybody's scraping us, using us for their search. Why don't we have an AI based on Reddit content? They call it Reddit Answers. Redditors can ask questions and receive answers using a new AI powered conversational interface that pulls up curated summaries of relevant conversations from Reddit. That seems like a good thing as a, as an avid Reddit user, Paris Martin O. Do you think you would use this?

[Paris Martineau]

No, because I don't. I don't feel confident in its ability to appropriately. Like when I am using Reddit to get an answer for something, there's a lot of different calculations that are going on in the back of my mind, I'm like, how old is this? If I find a thread that answers my question, I'm like, was this from seven years ago?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you did.

[Paris Martineau]

Or two months ago? You know, what is the context of what this person is responding to?

[Leo Laporte]

But look at what this does. So the first thing it does, you ask a question, it gives you a summary of some of the answers, and then it gives you links to the actual Reddit thread. So you still would have the opportunity. This is just finding Reddit threads for you that answer that question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's called a search engine.

[Paris Martineau]

Isn't that just search? I could just search better. Sleep in Reddit.com and get that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or use.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Meanwhile, isn't Reddit competing with the companies it's licensing to? The Wall Street Journal has a story about them saying that their licensing revenue grew 60,000,000.3. No, 81.6 million.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They got a 60 first nine months.

[Jeff Jarvis]

First nine months, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Because what's the percentage of its overall revenue?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you have to ask me.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have a lot of revenue. I know that. It's not a big money maker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is Reddit's.

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't you ask?

[Paris Martineau]

$348 million in. So it's a third last quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

And what was the quarter profit in quarter.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And profit was 29 million.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good. They haven't made a profit in very many quarters. That may be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the current market cap?

[Leo Laporte]

Billion.

[Paris Martineau]

Great question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw my. At the dinner Paris and I attended, I saw my old boss, Steve Newhouse, who's the one who decided to buy Reddit and then turn it back to the market.

[Paris Martineau]

29 billion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amazing. He was.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say I've noticed as an avid Redditor, sometime in the last couple of days my app is updated and now I'm seeing ads in Reddit comments like every. Because most of the time I spend on Reddit. But now there are ads. Yeah, I mean, that might make me pay for Reddit. I don't know. I will say over the last couple of years, especially over the last year, Reddit ads have gotten good. And that's like never something I would really say. But they've gotten targeted. They've gotten a lot of their ads. Ads are in like Reddit lingo. Like, they fit very well into this site. They're clearly doing some, like, work on their ad strategy and the ad strategy for ad buyers, which is interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's Cloudflare's year in review. Here's some stats. Cloudflare, because they give away so much stuff, they shield so many sites, they really have kind of their finger on the pulse of the Internet. So they for the last five years have been putting out a review of Internet trends and patterns they have observed. Global Internet traffic, they say, grew 17% this year. It's kind of interesting that there's still room for growth. Google, still the most popular Internet Service overall. Open AI number one in AI Binance, number one in crypto. WhatsApp, top messaging platform. Facebook, the top social media site. That's kind of a surprise. Starlink traffic tripled in 2024. That's about what it did last year as well. I'm not surprised. After initiating service in Malawi In Africa in July 2023, Starlink traffic from that country grew 38 times in 2024. As Starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. Starlink has got to be another SpaceX home run. Googlebot, Google's web crawler responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2024. Not a surprise. ByteDance, the owners of TikTok have an AI crawler called ByteSpider. That traffic declined over the year, while Anthropics AI crawler ClaudeBot first started showing signs of ongoing activity in April and then declined after initial peak in May and June. 1/3 globally, 1/3 of mobile device traffic from iOS Android had 90% share of mobile device traffic in 29 countries and regions. Most, I would imagine all you snobs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All ignore us Android users.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but I think most, and I think Most of the iOS traffic comes from the US frankly. But there's a lot of it, right? Peak iOS mobile device traffic share was over 60% in eight countries and regions. They don't say which one. Well, maybe they do. I could click the link and get more detail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could, but.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm not gonna because this is a short show and I got a lot to talk about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Since when?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm curious, is this based on desktop and browser use? Like, obviously this doesn't account all traffic.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's all traffic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cloudflare.

[Paris Martineau]

So it also accounts for like app users?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm shocked.

[Leo Laporte]

It all goes through.

[Paris Martineau]

Cloudflare is over.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I don't understand that. That's a shocker.

[Paris Martineau]

I would, I would remember if it was more browser based because remember, this.

[Leo Laporte]

Is global and I think that Facebook, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Has bigger market share globally than here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In the US it's the Internet in certain places.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Exactly. That's why. Yeah. Google is far and away the most popular search engine globally across all platforms. To answer your question, on mobile devices and operating systems, Baidu, the Chinese Google is a distant second. Bing is a distant second across desktop and Windows devices. Of course, with DuckDuckGo, the second most popular macOS copies. Here's one for you, Jeff. Google Chrome is far and away the most popular browser overall.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

While this is also true on macOS devices.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, wait, wait, wait, that's interesting. Google is the most popular on Mac devices.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. But on iOS devices, Safari is well ahead of Chrome. That's. I mean you can't. You pretty much have to use Safari on iOS. On Windows, Edge is number two, of course, because it's pre installed, it's the default. But it's still Chrome beats It is number one on Windows. Even the top 10 countries ranked by Internet speed all had average Download speeds above 200 megabytes or megabits per second. Spain, if I went and asked you, let's say we're on Jeopardy. And I say this country had the best Internet speed in the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is, this is a Family Feud question. So he said, I'll take.

[Leo Laporte]

Survey says. Survey says Spain. Spain isn't that interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

Really.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Let me see if I. 41.3% of global traffic comes from mobile devices and the majority in 100 countries is from mobile. This is I. This is why I find this one of all of the different summaries the most interesting because Cloudflare really has his fingers on the pulse picture. Yeah, they have a big generalized picture of the world. So Instagram is definitely feeling the heat from competition and seeing the opportunity if TikTok closes its doors in two months, in a month be a month, wouldn't it? A month and a few days. So they are trying new stuff. You've seen Instagram for teenagers. Now they're rolling out something that nobody does. TikTok does not do trial reels, so you can see if a reel is going to do well. This is so. I know a little bit about this because Henry kind of fills me in. There's a lot of a B testing when you put out a video. You look at the uptake of different styles and so forth. But you've never been able to post a reel or a TikTok for non followers to see how it will do. They weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So subject the rest of the world to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you want to because I guess.

[Paris Martineau]

They'Re trying to ab test performance in the Explore page.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, followers kind of color it. So you want to post the video to kind of a brand new set of people that don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, let me understand. This is it. I see two possibilities here. Is it so you don't show crap to your followers?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or is it to get a bigger audience? Audience?

[Leo Laporte]

It's to get a signal, a better signal, a clean signal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. All right. I thought, I thought it was.

[Leo Laporte]

If we only. If we only showed stuff to people who watch our shows that wouldn't give us a good idea of how our shows are doing. You'd want to show it to people who don't know your shows. And then you'd get a better idea if you were doing a comparison. Critters can share a reel as a trial by toggling the trial option. The reel will then be shared with non followers. It won't appear on their profile's main grid or reels tab. Of course, followers could see it if somebody shares it with them. After 24 hours, creators can see how many views, likes, comments and shares the real received. Then they can choose to throw it away or put it on their profile. I don't know. I think it's interesting Instagram is doing that because TikTok does not allow it. And I'm guessing that this is something creators want. You're right though, Jeff. It does say a lot of creators see Instagram as their business card, which puts pressure on the content they publish. So they're not. They don't want to test new content.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'll show my crap to the plebes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they don't want to lose followers or maybe even more importantly, brand deals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. But anyway, the whole idea is Instagram's trying to. Trying to get out there and say, hey, come over here, creators.

[Paris Martineau]

I think one thing that's really. I'm still scrolling on the cloud for a thing. We touched on this briefly, but the top five of this is Google for most popular Internet services. Google, then Facebook, Apple, TikTok, then you go down. Instagram is number seven.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's a lot of.

[Paris Martineau]

Very interesting that Cloudflare says that a TikTok even unseated Apple for number three. Like briefly throughout the year. Yeah, I remember eating Instagram's lunch and it has not been around even a fraction of the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's better.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like they have become a little inside in the last few months. I don't know about you. I see many more ads than I have in the past. Sometimes every third Tick tock view is an ad.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, are you considering the ones the affiliate links ads, because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's.

[Paris Martineau]

I think. Yeah. I mean, ostensibly, those aren't ads. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

But they are content.

[Paris Martineau]

They are. But they're an ad for.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a TikTok store ad, basically. Yeah. So the guy says, oh, hey, guys, you won't believe this, but if I had a college student, I would definitely get them this plowed note because it's amazing and it's. It's on his channel. It's not a brand deal. I mean, Henry does brand deals. This is like he's selling this in the TikTok store. But it means that everything I'm seeing on TikTok these days seems to be okay. So there's a legit one, USA Today. And now immediately he's selling something, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I mean, it's. Because it's been a big kind of money.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Elton John, Jimmy Fallon, and now he's selling something. So every other one is selling something.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I do think part of it is Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Like right now, she's selling something.

[Paris Martineau]

You just paused on these. So TikTok is going to show you more of them because it thinks you want that. That's why I. Whenever I see them, I don't. I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I swipe right away.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But sometimes you don't know. I mean, that's the thing is sometimes these guys, you think they're. Jesse, everyone's selling something on this. To me, this has really degraded my TikTok experience.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it happened. I was shocked. A bankruptcy judge in Texas has rejected the sale of Infowars to the Onion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Appointed by whom, by the way?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I think Judge Christopher M. Lopez.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Every case. Now we should.

[Leo Laporte]

This is federal bankruptcy court in Houston. Remember that the Onion offered less money to the. So the whole point of this Infowars sale.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do we know that? I'm not sure we know that.

[Leo Laporte]

We do know that for sure. Yeah. The whole bankruptcy sale, of course, is because the courts and juries ruled that the Sandy Hook families deserved one and a half billion dollars settlement from Alex Jones for lying about them. And he has to sell everything. So the Onion came along and said, look, we're going to. They offered what I heard, but I'll have to check half of what this. Unfortunately, the other bidder is an Infowars affiliate. Right. Somebody who would basically give it back to Alex Jones, who offered a significant amount of money. They were only able to raise it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was a sealed bid.

[Leo Laporte]

Total value of. No, the total value of the onions bid was $7 million including 1.7 million in cash put up by its parent company. The rest coming from the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. They essentially opted to put a portion of their earnings from the settlement against Mr. Jones towards the Onion's bid. Why? Because they didn't want Jones to continue to control Infowars and they loved the idea of the Onion doing it. Now, first United American Companies offered three and a half million in cash. So in effect, you're right, the offer from the Onion $7 million is bigger but not as much cash.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think the Onion was going to offer. Part of the Onion offer was advertising for the family's cause.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Which was an anti gun cause.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Is it by the way? Just saying. The judge was appointed in 2019, so guess by who.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The judge acknowledged the case involved lots of emotion. Thank you, judge. From supporters of the Onion and fans of Mr. Jones. He concluded that despite some good faith errors, neither side did anything wrong, but he decided to overturn it. I don't think he gave it to the other bidder though. I don't know what's going to happen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he didn't. No. There's some. Back to you. Kind of, I think to the.

[Leo Laporte]

The bankruptcy. Yeah. Judge Lopez's ruling put the fate of Infowars in limbo. Instructed the court appointed trustee to come up with an alternate resolution. Though it's not immediately clear what would happen, the trustee didn't have anything to say about it. Ben Collins of the Onion was deeply disappointed by the decision yesterday. Ben would continue. Yeah. Continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured. So they're going to continue to try to get. Get it. I, you know, Chris Matei was an attorney for the Sandy Hook family. Said his clients were disappointed too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now the one thing I don't know about this case is that indeed in a bankruptcy auction, one is trying to get the highest monetary value for the creditors.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are there other creditors besides the families?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think so because, I mean, I obviously don't know this specifically.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think there are. So here's, here's from the New York Times. Judge Lopez said the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones creditors, including the Sandy Hook families. In part because the bids are submitted in secret. It was, it was a sealed bid. Nobody knows what anybody else is Bidding. So I think there are other creditors there. I'm sure the families are by far the largest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By far the largest creditor. You bet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They were given. What's their total?

[Leo Laporte]

One and a half, 1.4 billion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So that beats the hell out of three and a half million or seven million.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that people are, some people not fans of Infowars, but people who are not fans of insowars are concerned about is that this other group would basically put Infomercial back on the air. They would buy it and give it back, which to me should be considered by the court, by the way. That is a reasonable part of the consideration. But maybe, I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe not. I put in here a very long piece that I doubt either of you read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I tried to, but it's by someone. I cannot bear.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Do you know Patrick McKenzie?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, that was a different one. Very long piece you put in here by somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's another one which I will talk about later. I put in two really long pieces. Patrick McKenzie is writing about debanking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I figured you just explain this to.

[Leo Laporte]

Me, I will explain it to you, and then I will explain the other piece to you. So you see, you don't have TLDR, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The other one's trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

So Patrick McKenzie, who works for Stripe and knows a little bit about how the banking industry works, which most people have no idea. But it all started when Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan and said, I know a lot of crypto guys who've been debanked. It's being used as a tool or weapon systematically wielded by specific political actors against private individuals without due process. So Patrick took it on himself to explain in a very long piece what's happening. He says, I previously worked for Stripe. I'm currently an advisor there. Stripe is not a bank. But many regulated financial institutions have similar considerations. If you are in finance, the short version of this is you're very risk adverse. And what you don't want to do is spend a lot of hours and employee time responding to requests from regulators. You don't want to get in trouble with regulators. So you're very risk adverse. And one of the things you really don't want to do is bank. You want to bank people like you and me, consumers. You don't want to bank cryptocurrency enterprises because you're going to get a lot of requests from regulators. You're going to get a lot of heat, and it's going to cost you A lot of money. It's not illegal to do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But what, to bank them or to.

[Leo Laporte]

Refuse to bank them? It's not illegal to do either either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Advocates, he writes, often invoke a user centric perspective of debanking, focusing on the impact on individuals and firms, which is admittedly terrible. But then they conflate it with the regulator's decisions regarding bank supervision in ways which are facially not about direct user impact. The industry doesn't call it debanking, partly, he says, out of the usual corporate euphemism concerns, but also because it's, it's, it's simply them denying a service to individuals or mostly companies, small businesses, who are going to cause them a lot of headaches. He himself was, and I'll put it in air quotes, debanked because he had his small business selling software over the Internet and received two incoming ACH transfers a day from two payment providers. The bank said, yeah, your business sounds legitimate, but we're going to give you 30 days to go to another bank. Not because they thought he was illegitimate, because they didn't want the hassle of all of the reporting they would have to do the bank. This bank did not have a small business practice at this time. Some banks do. This particular bank didn't. And it hadn't built out the higher degree of policies and procedures that would support small business banking. They wanted a bank to consumers, not small businesses. And as you can imagine, a lot of banks really are nervous about crypto, Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And so a lot of banks just. It's not that the regulators are saying hey you gotta shut these guys down. It's these KYC and AML regulations. Know your customer and anti money laundering. And they have to, he says not only do they have to follow these policies, you can over promise but you can't under deliver after you've told a regulator you'll do X. Not doing X can result in fines and other punishments even if the regulator did not tell you specifically to do X. In other words, banks have a kind of a higher responsibility in this know your customer and any money laundering regulation and they just understandably reluctant. They're also not very. They don't communicate why for a lot of probably good reasons. The typical. So he uses as an example of bodega with an alt with a sideline in alternative financial services. But I think it's worth just at least skimming this because it'll give you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A better idea of where does he come out. That debate is a he says thing.

[Leo Laporte]

First of all the term debanking is intentionally loaded and it's not the term anybody in the industry uses that. And what his point is that most of the time the reason banks refuse or end up closing accounts of people involved in crypto and defi is just too much trouble for the bank. They just don't want to do it. They're not being asked to do it. They just don't want to do it. So anyway, read it because basically I think it's very even handed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or he's just given his homework.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, all right. He says possibly plausible.

[Paris Martineau]

I was trying to get chatgpt to summarize this, but it seems to be down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, well, Broke Chat GPT. Use Notebook lm. Notebook lm. It's better.

[Leo Laporte]

Perhaps a founder might ask a friend, a legitimate business which happens to be in crypto and suddenly found my personal accounts closed. Why did this happen? I did nothing wrong. Playing the odds. The bank thinks there's an unacceptable risk that you will use your personal accounts to launder money on behalf of the business, as somebody named Samuel Bankman Free did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's Andreessen's whining about?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's the same. It's this thing. It's that a number of crypto bros have lost their accounts because their bank didn't want their business.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, where do you come down on this? Do you think that this is.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is banks being banks.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say this seems just like banks would do this normally if it wasn't crypto bs, but because the. The BS of this sort happens to be the crypto variety. It's just one more thing that they've.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. That's why he talks about bodegas, because it's not so loaded. But it's the same thing. Very few bodegas can get a bank to bank them.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow, I didn't realize that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So, yeah, I think he's basically saying this is propaganda in a sense. This is not what you're saying it is. The Biden administration shutting down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Panic, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Moral panic. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Gemini did work for this, and it's very. The summary was short, but then I asked explain the part about bodegas and I've got multiple paragraphs. I don't have to read it all.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot of work. I think the bottom line is it's not what you think it is. And the problem is most people, certainly a lot of people in crypto and a lot of us in the public don't really Understand what banks are up to and what kind of regulations they need to follow. So I thought it was a good piece. It'[e-mail] debt.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll give you the last debunking. I'll give you the last note from the Gemini. Explanation of. Explain the part about bodegas. It goes into more detail.

[Leo Laporte]

But then maybe first, some people are asking, what is a bodega?

[Paris Martineau]

A bodega is a small corner store in New York, typically, that you could go to get some grocery products. There's usually a cat there. Not for sale. It's just a guardian of the store. You could probably also get, like, beer little. It can range anywhere from, like.

[Leo Laporte]

And you might be able to send money to your relatives in another country. Right? Sometimes they do that.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, sometimes. Yeah, but that's not in everyone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You might want to go to bodega cats right now and search for that, because it's a wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't. That's a. That's a rabbit hole.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't forget to go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chopped cheese. Chopped cheese.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen. Oh, yeah. A big part of a bodega, in addition to being a store, they also have a counter where they'll make stuff. You can get smoothies. You can get chopped cheeses. You can get a bacon, egg, and cheese cheese.

[Leo Laporte]

What is that? I don't know what that is.

[Paris Martineau]

You need to New York.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you know this stuff, John Ashley, how do you not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do you not know a chopped cheese and potatoes?

[Paris Martineau]

You were born in New York City, honey. I don't know what a chop cheese.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we didn't have bodegas back in the 50s.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A chopped cheese is essentially just a cheeseburger. But, like, in a little. I'm frozen.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds good. That's because you're eating too many cheeses. Cheeseburgers. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, a chopped cheese is essentially just a hamburger. But, like, it was in a. What kind of roll was it again? It was like a hoagie roll. Hoagie roll. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't care. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's topped up.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Very delicious. Fine. Sounds good. I'm gonna have to go to New York to get one, because I don't think you can get one around here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My wife made fun of me because I would. I would go to the bodega and buy batteries. She said it's the last place on.

[Leo Laporte]

Earth you should have probably the most expensive batteries.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, they go to Target and buy them and then mark them up 100%.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, so I was a busy.

[Paris Martineau]

Guy, you know, okay, the unintended consequences paragraph from Gemini's summary of this thing to close us out. The article argues that this situation about bodegas highlights a flaw in the system. Regulations intended to target large scale financial crime can inadvertently harm small businesses like bodegas who are simply trying to serve their communities and may not have the resources to navigate complex regulatory requirements.

[Leo Laporte]

A perfect summary that's accurate. Except for the part that it's not the bodega that has to navigate those, it's the bank. And the reason the banks don't want the bodega business is because it's too much paperwork.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, I'd assume the bodega's lack of being able to navigate that is they're not going to be able to explain, hey, maybe here's why you shouldn't do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Yeah. I think this guy's basically saying, look, this is how it is in financial services. You avoid risk. And risk sometimes doesn't mean that you're going to lose money. It means you're only going to. It's going to cost you money in staff time filling out paperwork for the federal government because of things like know your customer and any money laundering. And I think, you know, you look into those laws and they all make a lot of sense in a terror, in a world where terrorism relies on money flow. Right. But it's not to. It's not to infer that these bodegas are funding terrorism. It's just that. Or crypto complicated. It's just that they're in the line of fire because banks don't want to take any chances. They're very risk adverse because banks have our money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We are kind of happy about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we don't want them to be risky. That's what happened to the Silicon Valley bank and look what happened to them. All right, let's. I. Do you want to do the other one? Let's do some new news stories, then we'll do the other one. What do you think about David? Very cute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a very cute bodega cat in the chat in Scooter Expo.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Scooter gives us one cat. Bodega cat, a Cheeto cat.

[Paris Martineau]

It's falling asleep in a little pile of Cheetos.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, this one.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, no, you go to the chat in the discord.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not Bodega cats of Instagram.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, Bodega would be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Scooter just gave us one.

[Leo Laporte]

Now. Are they gonna sell those Cheetos to people?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, sure. Sure.

[Paris Martineau]

They're in a bag, they're fine. Who cares if the outside of your bat was. If you're concerned about the outside of your bag being touched by a cat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is New York. Gives us a stronger immune system.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, at my local bodega, fattest cat you've ever seen, and she just lays on the ice cream fridge underneath the counters. There's an ice cream fridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Which is warm ironically because.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why it's warm. Gotta keep things cool so it's warm.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching this week. You see, we learn things, lots of things. We learn about qubits and quantum computing and why bodega cats love ice cream refrigerators. That's what this is, what you learn here on this Week in Google with Paris Martino of the Onion. I mean the information of the Onion. Have you ever wanted to write for the Onion?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I'd love that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be fun?

[Paris Martineau]

Be great. Yeah, we used to.

[Leo Laporte]

Baratunde Thurston used to be on until he became famous and doesn't want to have anything to do with us. But I think no, he would, but he's just very busy.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, Ben. I'm so happy that he owns it now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ben Collins is great.

[Paris Martineau]

Ben's a great guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Baratunde used to write for the Onion. He also wrote for the Daily show. So I'm not funny enough to write for the Onion. I feel like there would be a lot of pressure to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a certain way to do it. Yeah, there's a shtick.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a shtick. Area man. You have to start with area man. Every joke starts with aerial man. Sees drone, thinks it's ufo, calls his mother. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you just showed the point. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why, that's why I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a skill. It's a talent skill. It's an art.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

Give you a new one free.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Paris Martineau]

I'm just looking at photos of bodega cats.

[Leo Laporte]

I was all excited when I saw this story. YouTube is now turning on the auto dubbing feature for knowledge focused content. You see how we are knowledge focused content, but it's not on for us yet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Vikurin this week in Google. Alf Deutsche.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, wouldn't that be cool?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

You can. There's a button you push. These are turn on automatic dubbing and it automatically dubs English language youtubes which we're, you know, we're on your YouTube into quite a large number of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it up on your account yet? Can you go there and do it?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I looked and I didn't see it, but then I was oh, it supports English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We've got to hear us dubbed.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be cool? And I think it even does the lip sync, right?

[Paris Martineau]

That's crazy. If it, if it does the lip sync.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh please, oh please, oh please, you've got to. John, would you tell Bonito to put this on the to do list?

[Leo Laporte]

I asked. They said it's not very good. That doesn't. The voice is down so good. I think we should do it because I think it would make our content available in more countries. I think it'd be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, anyway, I haven't seen any examples of it yet. Let me see if I can. See if I can find anybody. They showed it@Google IO.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't. I never like those. I feel like those are always overselling it. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, you yelled at me for putting up one skeet during a commercial and now look what you're Doing on the discord?

[Leo Laporte]

Is she putting up bodega cats?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cats. Lots of cats.

[Leo Laporte]

Cats.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll do one last one. Hold on. This cat is protecting you for. From buying cigarettes for children.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm still in the Cheetos. I have to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That cat, that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that cat is very serious. She says don't use it to buy tobacco for miners. Do they all have cats Bodas?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You think it's a rat problem? They're trying to.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's definitely rat related. They earn their keep, but also they're just companions. There was once I went to a bodega and behind the guy on the shelf where like the cigarettes and stuff are, there was a tiny little kitten, like palm sized. And I was like, oh my gosh, what a cute kitten. And he goes one second, leans down, picks up a second kitten. It was great. Those are the sort of experiences that's New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I told you my son's going to open his restaurant in New York in the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you serious?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you were here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Salt Hank Sandwich Shop is.

[Paris Martineau]

We're going to the opening, Jack.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It's gonna be on Bleecker street in the old slutty vegan space as a pop up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or is it forever?

[Leo Laporte]

No, forever. He's got investors, he's got backers, he's gonna be executive chef and they're building.

[Paris Martineau]

A studio in the back and yell, hey, Salt.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, salts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So he's moving to New York.

[Leo Laporte]

He's moving to New York.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow, wow, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And he said initially he said, I'll get an extra room so you can come out and stay. I said, that'd be great. Then he said, dad, I looked at the rents in New York. I'm not getting an extra room.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S going to be expensive. He's going to build a studio in the back so that he can, he can shoot his videos there. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where on Bleecker Street? Oh, when did you say?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I don't know. It always takes longer. So sometime next year I think he's hoping.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that Leaker's a good place. That's a good location.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Perfect for that.

[Leo Laporte]

The Village and there'll be NYU students. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's also just.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I would have gone when I was in college for sure. I'll tell my sister who lives in that neighborhood to check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty exciting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris. You will come into Manhattan to have a Salt Hank sandwich.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I will also be there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we will be there for the grand opening. The three of us, I promise you. Yeah, yeah. That's gonna be a.

[Paris Martineau]

We should all dress like giant salt shakers. Embarrass Hank.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we find a salt shaker costume? Hold on here.

[Paris Martineau]

So within the next year. I believe so, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

The. The slutty vegan Bleecker street is temporarily closed. It's. Can I tell you, it's closed forever. That's where salt Hank's gonna be, okay? So don't get your hopes up. Bleecker Street.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Bleecker and what? Let's go to maps and you can tell me.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Here it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it's right by the Christopher Street. Oh, this is a great location.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

In 7th Ave. Yeah. Is it peakin?

[Leo Laporte]

It was not easy. It was not easy to get the. Get the place. They had to, like, audition for the landlords to prove that they would be the best people to put in there. It was very.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put in the. In the Discord a salt shaker costume. I can see Leo in this. I think I will. You may come as.

[Leo Laporte]

I will wear it. I will wear it. Is this it? Where is it? Where is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

In the Discord. Let's scroll down.

[Leo Laporte]

Scroll down. Adult salt shaker costume. Oh, it's lightweight. I like that.

[Paris Martineau]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

If I showed up wearing that, he would kill me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he would.

[Leo Laporte]

He would kill me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's on.

[Paris Martineau]

So what if all three of us showed up wearing that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, you have to be pepper.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to be Pepper.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. They have a sexy salt shaker costume in the corner if you go back.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course they do. Of course they do. Let me see. Could I wear that new? It is less expensive, though.

[Paris Martineau]

Just, I mean, less fabulous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Worcestershire sauce mustard costume.

[Leo Laporte]

They also have a Veruca Salt costume, but that's not the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you know what? I think Paris. Oh, Paris, Paris, Paris. There's a. I got it. I got it. We're coming like. Oh, hold on. In the Discord. Speed. I'm loading the punchline. Okay, there it is. In the Discord.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

We've already seen this. Haven't we done this? Oh, I did it one year. That's what. I've already done this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and this also goes to the meme. The hot dog costume meme.

[Paris Martineau]

That's pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know that, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No, what's the hot dog? I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'd like. I. I'd like you to Explain it, Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Someone must have been responsible for this guy in Austin. Hot dog costume says, we're all trying.

[Paris Martineau]

To find the guy responsible for this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're all trying to find the guy responsible for this. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

See?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why didn't you do it?

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like a New Yorker cartoon.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the thing is, there's no ketchup costume allowed next to the hot dog costume. It's against the law. No ketchup allowed.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you allow relish? Green relish?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Onions? Crunchy and caramelized.

[Leo Laporte]

Sauerkraut. Just no ketchup.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No ketchup.

[Leo Laporte]

Ketchup is just red sugar syrup. Let's be honest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's wrong. It's just illegal.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Boston Review time. Kids, here's the other story you didn't read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even Gemini is having problems finding the meaning of this.

[Leo Laporte]

So you don't like Evgeny Morozov?

[Jeff Jarvis]

More to the point, Leo, he hates me. He wrote an 8,000 word personal diatribe against me.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so I really can't stand the SOB. And the irony of this is the reason he went after me so personally and so nationally is because I dared to be somewhat optimistic about the Internet. And here he is being optimistic about a effing.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Well, maybe he was. Maybe he's going to change his tune.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he's not going to. He's a gerk.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, I'm not going to talk about it then. Even though he had responses from Brian Eno, Terry Winograd, Bruce Schneier. He got responses from some of the biggest people in. In the intellectual community.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Turn the clock back before the Cold War. Then technologists would be okay, and then we'd have a nice AI his point.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to do. I'll do a short thing and let's just divorce it from him. But his point is not wrong, which is that some people don't like the idea of AI because it was Cold War driven. Right. It came out of darpa, Net funding and all of that. And they worry that that same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think I've heard anyone say that to me.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's true. I've never heard anybody say that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've never heard anyone say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe in the circles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if you're going to complain about darpa, you complain about the Internet on that basis.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, The Internet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, go ahead, Leo, while you pointed to this.

[Leo Laporte]

So he calls. He calls them the refuseniks. And then there's the AI Futilitarians who think that AI Will never go anywhere. But the thing I liked about this article and thing I thought was interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

About this article, this is like Casey Newton's false equivalencies. But go ahead.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that his point, and I think this is well taken, is that AI is kind of driven by a certain class of questions that the drive towards kind of order. And it's true that from the very earliest days of AI, it was all about. The idea was goal driven problem solving. Right. You're going to slowly work your way towards the answer to this problem. And he says that real human creativity is not so task driven. It's more wandering in the meadow, smelling the flowers. And that because we have kind of put AI in this mindset of, you know, it's almost a bureaucratic, task driven kind of process, it's not going to be very good at some of the things that we think are maybe more important.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's another straw man. I don't think I've heard people say at all. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he's saying it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think he's making a good point and I certainly know this from the. And he quotes the early days of AI where it really was Rand Corporation. It really was kind of pushing it towards, you know, solving a specific problem. A task driven at the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what it could do. Right now it has become a rather unbridled tool of creativity. Even though it. But it just spits cliches at us.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is being used that way.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well good. He's a jerk, so forget it.

[Paris Martineau]

I would just like to say I briefly read the piece of criticism that you're discussing, Jeff from. It's absolutely absurd, ridiculously mean and way too long.

[Leo Laporte]

Who is this guy then? What is his thing? Is he a professor? What is his.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's the thing. He didn't, he didn't make it through the doctoral program. But I'm not, I'm not making casting aspersions.

[Leo Laporte]

His bio at the Boston Review says he writes on technology and politics and he has a podcast called A Sense of Rebellion. So there you go. And he's written a couple of books. Oh, he wrote to save everything. Click here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he's. He's kind of. I don't think he coined techno solutionism, but that's one of his arguments.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you know, the thing is I actually quoted him favorably in what Would Google Do? But that didn't stop him from attacking me.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, for just truly nasty things in here that I won't even dignify with.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you found the article right away. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Bad. It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. I had no idea about the feud.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sure that you're. Your points in the severity you have to stand in Solider.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Would you call it Ad hominem Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

At the very least?

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like it. Sounds like it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it was kind of a Niagara Falls for me. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Slowly. I will never quote that guy again. I thought there were some interesting points.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were going to ask about David Sacks. So I interrupted you before with mustard.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, or something, I think. And I was grateful. Thank you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we can just stay away from all of the people who have nominated positions in this new administration.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's one thing that I don't think anybody's written about, though, which is why. So David Sachs is going to have a. Is going to have a job, apparently, in the administration as an AI Czar.

[Leo Laporte]

But Elon Musk, a position, by the way, that does not exist, will have to be and may not have any role at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We may not be reporting to him, but apparently that'll be in government, as I read it. Whereas Musk and Ramaswamy are outside of government. Why? Because they don't want to divest. They don't want to deal with ethics. They don't want to deal with conflict of interest.

[Leo Laporte]

So you think Sachs will have to be confirmed by the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. No, it's not a confirmed spot. It's a made up spot.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a made up spot.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. I will be requesting all copies of his communications as soon as possible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes, I'm quite excited.

[Leo Laporte]

One thing we know about David Sachs, who is the new crypto and AI Czar and does not, in fact, really have much involvement in either industry, is that he thinks OpenAI is. What did he say? A nonprofit piranha. So. So does Elon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that's Elon's boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's. Now it's two people who are against OpenAI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we should just hope for. I just. Should I say it out loud? Oh, God, should I say it out loud? I just dread the word appointment and Jason Calacanis ending up in the same sentence.

[Paris Martineau]

No, we can't even dignify that. Strike that from the record. Cut that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. Thank you, John. Can you put that in as a curse word?

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're safe. I think you're safe. I don't think Calacanis is as much of a Trumpian as the rest of the all in podcast is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. I don't listen to the podcast. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The only reason I say that is Alex Wilhelm, who is Jason's co host now on this Week in Startups and a good friend of our network. We love Jay, Alex. He's on all the time. I asked him, I said, well, how's it working with Jason? He said he's fine. He says, not as much of a Trumper as you think. I don't know what that means.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think if he was. Jason really wants a job in the administration, but who knows?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, he just wanted one on.

[Paris Martineau]

Twitter, a part of the administration called this Week in government or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, if, if you got a call from the White House, would you, if they, if they said we have a position for you, would you, wouldn't you have to say, yes, serve our country?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. When I was at Time Inc. My editor Pat Ryan, my mentor, tried to propose me for a White House fellowship.

[Leo Laporte]

And you said no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was an administration that I did not approve of. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. Let's talk about cosa, which is now called Kospa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that changes everything.

[Leo Laporte]

You may remember privacy. You may remember that Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X.com said after working with Congress to improve protection for free speech in cosa, I think this is a great thing and we should pass it. COSA did pass. It shockingly passed the Senate 90. What was it, 93 to 3, like a ridiculous majority. But it still has to get through the House. And House leadership has at this point shown no interest in a term that is rapidly wrapping up in taking a look at the bill, Mike Masnick, writing in Tech Dirt, he says the main issue with the bill is the so called duty of care section, which has vague terminology that will encourage companies to simply remove any controversial content rather than have to fight in court after the fact about whether the content was harmful to kids. On top of that, the bill heavily encourages companies to embrace problematic age verification tools that have already been shown to be a privacy disaster. Yadi notwithstanding, Paris, I think we're still a little suspicious of age verification. Certainly he does say that the changes that Yaccarino is talking about are purely cosmetic rather than substantially. He says it adds a weird reasonable and prudent person standard which wasn't in the earlier version of the bill, even though it did have exercise reasonable care. So in other words, it's hand waving. It's, it's meaningless phrases that they've stuck in there. The real concern is that platforms are going to just like those banks that are debanking people so they don't, they avoid trouble that platforms are going to do the same thing. They're, they're going to just remove all sorts of content that might otherwise lead to lengthy draining and resource intensive legal fights, including all the negative headlines that you get with that. He says, Mike says that's why this is a censorship bill, pure and simple. They say it's not about censorship. No, no, no. In fact, they even have a section in it that says it doesn't violate the First Amendment. Honest. Mike writes, if your bill doesn't violate the First Amendment, you don't actually have to put into it, hey, don't violate the First Amendment with the bill. If anything, the new paragraph is an admission that of course the bill can and will be used to infringe First Amendment rights. So fortunately, I don't think that it's going to happen just because there's only a couple of weeks left in the session.

[Paris Martineau]

They do come back think it could happen next year? I mean, Blackburn today. Marsha Blackburn today on Fox Business said that they have the votes for Costa to pass in the House. It's just a matter of the leader and speaker actually putting it on the floor, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem.

[Paris Martineau]

But what happened next?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe Rand Paul, who I'm not normally a fan of Rand Paul, says COSA poses such a dire threat to our First Amendment rights that House and Senate leadership must not agree to add at the last minute to larger pieces of legislation. That's what they often do. They put it in the defense spending.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But here's the next frontier. I hate watching Maureen Joe, as I do now this morning, that's that horrible story about the chat that told the kid to kill their parents. I want to see more about that. But anyway, so now they're railing against open source AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's great.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's not exactly that they're railing against specifically companies like Character AI and entertainment or role play based chatbots.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. But we're going against the next step. Yes, you're right, Paris, but they went the next step. Then.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things that Mike says will be ironic. One of the first companies that will be harmed by Kospa is X. Yeah, yeah. So that'll be interesting. We'll see. We'll see what happens. We'll watch that with, with great interest. Get your popcorn, kids. What did you want to say? I'm sorry, Paris. Anything important? No. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Nothing important.

[Leo Laporte]

404 Media is in trouble now. We love 404 Media.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

We Support Jason Keibler and the crew. And I think it's a shame that they are now being subpoenaed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. And what does Ken Paxton want? He wants access to their reporting notes and sources on an unrelated case. So 404 did a story about Google leaking thousands of privacy incidents. A Google leak reveals thousands of privacy incidents. That was a Joseph Cox story. Paxton is going after Google saying that Google violated a Texas biometric privacy law. Nevertheless, that has not stopped him from subpoenaing 404, he says. Jason writes Paxton, subpoena seeks to turn 404 Media into an arm of law enforcement. Now, 404 is in California where there is shield law, right? I guess there are no shield laws for media. Yeah, I guess there are no shield laws in Texas, but I don't know which law holds. The lawyers say that not only is the subpoena oppressive, but the reporting is protected under the California shield law. So tell us about this as reporters, as journalists, why is this a big deal?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's a fundamental tenet of journalism that you protect your sources and that you not capitulate when.

[Leo Laporte]

But don't you want to help solve crime?

[Paris Martineau]

Not it's not journalists job to provide data directly to law enforcement or agents of the government, be it the US Government, European governments or something else. Fundamentally, the agreement that reporters make we make with our sources is we line out how that information is going to be used and what we're going to do with it. And it would be a breach of that kind of contract between two people or multiple people to then hand that data over to the state. I mean, from a completely practical purpose, like if you're not even thinking about reaching the sort of underlying agreement there that is between reporter and source, you can't guarantee that the. Let's say you hand over a bunch of documents and the state says, oh, we'll redact all the information that would potentially identify your source. You can't guarantee that the state is going to do that. There's frequently redaction errors or there could have been something left out that people are able to piece together your source. Any bit of data that gets out there is another chance for your source to be identified by people that didn't want to be identified by.

[Leo Laporte]

The sad thing about this is 404 Media. I mean, I'm sure it's a shoestring operation. I pay for 404 because I want to support these guys. They came from. Well, mother, but Jason comes from Motherboard. He's Former editor at.

[Paris Martineau]

They all came from Motherboard.

[Leo Laporte]

They all were former Motherboard. Okay. And they're just great reporters who decided, you know, once Motherboard was gone, we are going to do band together and create our own thing. And it's working. It's working. And I subscribe because I want to support Joseph and Jason and Emmanuel and Sam. And they're great reporters. They're great people. They deserve our support. And they've been on the shows. And so I just sent him an extra hundo to support this because this, and as they say, this is our biggest expense by far is protecting ourselves legally. And you can imagine hiring a lawyer to fight Ken Paxton is not going to be cheap.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And I mean they are all worker owners of this business. They've been part of this growing trend of media cooperative.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

That prioritize giving the journalists a stake in the company. They all make way reduced. I'm sure I don't know the financials, but I'm sure they make way reduced salaries based on what they were making at Motherboard, which was not that much to begin with. So that they can do journalism from their own hearts basically that they can decide what they want to publish. And they've made phenomenal decisions and you've seen it borne out. And they, I believe, announced some somewhat recently that they now have a million hits on their website a month, which is huge. Like within their.

[Leo Laporte]

That's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

They've broken some big stories. They have broken some independence. Yeah. And, and you know, we need to support journalism. I subscribe, subscribe to the information. That's why I subscribe to 404. I'd much rather spend my money with independence like that than the big, big, you know, presses like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Although I also do that just because I need access to that stuff and Bloomberg. But boy, I think it's. I mean that's what we are. Right. We're an independent, non affiliated journalistic enterprise. Do you believe in Casey Newton's phony comforts of AI skepticism?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Set Paris on this one, Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

If you describe the Casey Newton angle and then I'll take the different ones that have come out against this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like the Boston article. It's just. It puts up a straw man of two extremes of views on it and then tries to shoot them down. And the straw men are wrong. So Paris, you want to describe the straw men.

[Paris Martineau]

So let me find it here. Casey Newton basically is saying there are two different camps here in AI that there are the AI is fake and sucks camp and the AI is real and dangerous camp. And then he makes the case as to why the first camp is totally immune to evidence and has their heads up their own butts and the second camp is basically right and that eventually, you know, like AI is going to be real and dangerous, but it eventually is going to make such progress that those dangers are going to become way more important than it not working. And this led to a bunch of different pieces criticizing his piece and then Casey criticizing those criticisms and you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is exactly what he wanted.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course. Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's a good way. And I, by the way, I subscribe to the platformer too, because, I mean that was the place to.

[Paris Martineau]

I think Casey's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Dave Karp responding. You know, he had, I thought, a.

[Paris Martineau]

Really good piece on this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very, I think it's very simplifying things to say. There's these two points of view.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not on either camp. I am a little nervous about the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Camps are properly described. What Paris said to me before we got on the air is there. There's a lot of middle grounds between these supposed camps, between I won't do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm in a middle ground. I don't think he.

[Paris Martineau]

Karp writes, there's a substantial difference between it's all fake and sucks. And this cannot actually replace your radiologist, your lawyer, or the entire epa. And I think that's really reasonable is the people who are saying that Casey is reducing to this is all fake and sucks are saying, hey, a lot of the things that these companies are promising this is going to do imminently or already can do, it can't. And that's a real problem and something that we should address.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's much more nuanced than either of those positions, obviously.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it also.

[Leo Laporte]

I am a little nervous about AI especially as we start seeing more. And this is why I put the Morosov article in there is it's often. Especially now being used for military purposes.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's concerning his.

[Paris Martineau]

That because Palmer Lucky wants to put AI in charge of basically murder drones. He says yes. We really need tech journalists to ask hard questions about whether his product actually works because faulty murder murder drones deployed at the border by a government that is largely indifferent to excess casualties and a company that certainly won't be able to share those date that data could be a disaster.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

He basically just says that this is. It's too dismissive to label this entire branch of skepticism as like it's all fake and sucks because lots of money is being spent here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the other problem is that it misses the argument I have all the time is that the conflation of safety in legitimate present tense concerns and doomerism and X risk, which is BS alongside AGI. And so the nomenclature of this discussion is all screwed up and you've got to define your terms going in carefully, otherwise you're falling into traps.

[Leo Laporte]

I read an article and I'm trying to find it, but I read an article this morning by a coder who said, you know when all coders, when they're writing code, should consider some of the uses of this code and take responsibility for it instead of just saying, oh, this is an interesting problem, let me solve it. Because very often it is going to be weaponized and used against people, sometimes even in a military context. He was working, he went out of school as an intern, a project he found really interesting, solving for how to do location finding using WI fi signal strength. But the guy running the DOD contractor running the project that he was running for kept coming in and saying, but can you use it to locate phones? And they said, well, not yet, no. Well, that's something we're not really working. And he kept asking that question. And finally the guy who wrote the article, I wish I could find it here, I'm going to keep looking for it, said, oh, this is the whole purpose of this is to be able to locate phones by their wifi signal so that they can kill the person who has the phone so they can target them. And he said, this is the problem, is that we as coders, we get excited about things. It's an interesting problem, but we often don't think hard enough about what the ultimate use of this would be. And he says, this is the thing. You as a coder, you have superpowers, you're able to get a computer to do something interesting. You really ought to. You have a higher responsibility to consider what you're teaching it to do before you do it.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like the crux of Casey's argument and all the backlash can be summarized. And I feel like we even talked about this a little bit earlier on in the show. It's who should we be giving the benefit of the doubt to? Skeptics, AI skeptics that are perhaps underestimating what the technology should do, or AI hypers who are overestimating what the tech can do and when it can do it. And I think that the answer is very nuanced. Like, I think that when we're talking about companies that have raised billions of dollars. I think it's way more reasonable to give credence to the skeptics versus those billion dollar companies marketing machines. It's all about power. If this was, you know, some kid who's developed a cool AI system and is like, actually, I've done a lot with this, and I think that in a year we can do even more, and it'll be incredible. Okay, go off. That's great. But when it is someone incredibly powerful making these potentially hyperbolic statements, it deserves more criticism.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Well. And he even has the famous quote from Jurassic park with Jeff Goldblum saying the problem was scientists didn't ask. They were so excited about what they could do, they didn't ask whether they should do it. And I think with AI, that's the. This is something that is going on. I mean, we've said this from the very beginning, that this is an Oppenheimer moment. You know, that the people who are creating this, I think, have a really higher responsibility to make sure it's not going to be used against humans.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. But I will come up with my argument. I do all the time, is I think you're fooling yourself to think that that can be done.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It may not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The quest for the guardrails is futile.

[Leo Laporte]

Well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so we gotta. We gotta realize, even if.

[Leo Laporte]

Even if we, as in the United States, as responsible coders, do it, there are coders in Russia and China and all over the world who will not ask that question or do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Somebody can create a model, thinking they've thought of everything, and then somebody comes along and says, I thought of a new way to destroy mankind. Tell me how to do it. And it will.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I think that's the conversation Palmer Luckey had with himself, which is, well, you know, because Palmer Lucky, of course, created Anduril, but before that, he was the Oculus Rift guy. Made billions of dollars when he sold it to Meta and has since worked on AI in military for military purposes. In fact, Anduril, I think, was used to close the border. Right. Or to track people coming across the border. He. I think in his head, he said, well, yeah, this could be used in a bad way. This could be malicious. But I would rather develop this for the United States as a defense project, given that other countries are going to be doing this. We can't just lie down and say, okay, fine, let them. We'll be ethical. We won't develop something dangerous. We need it for defense, because they're gonna Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is a nice rationalization, you could say.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's a rationalization, but it's also somewhat pragmatic. Right. They. We know that there are plenty of nations and very good coders in those nations who probably would like to make autonomous weaponry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so. And fine, put it in Pete Hexeth's hands. Yeah, yeah. Not that. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, should we be. I mean, let's. Is it. Should we be. Okay, We're. It doesn't seem risky to say, okay, we're not going to do that. We're going to be, you know, we're going down with the ship, but we're. At least we'll be ethically clean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there's defensive and offensive uses and ways to look at this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But I think offense and defense are kind of indistinguishable when. Let's say the Chinese come up with robots. This is completely hypothetical. Robot soldiers that can, you know, I mean, one of the. One of the things that protects the United States is we're pretty hard to do invade. It's a big, big country in a lot of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If only Canada would.

[Leo Laporte]

But let's say The Chinese create 100 million robot soldiers that can invade us. Oh, but we were clean. We wouldn't want to ever do a robot soldier. Then we have no defense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think you could do research on how to destroy robot soldiers.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to have robots destroy the robot soldiers. That's a good start, by the way. This is why we have mutually Assured destruction. This is why nations with atomic weapons make sure that they can destroy the other country if it tries to attack them, because that's what's keeping us safe. We are walking on a razor's edge. Let's just face it. And the AI company that made robots as comforts for children went bust. And now the robots, Moxie, they're dying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, kid. Your friend is dead.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to think that there are very few people who bought these robots for their kids.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

And they probably. I don't know, maybe you should have the Robot go away. So, $800. The company that made them, the Moxie robot, was called Embodied. They announced this week that they didn't get their funding round and they're shutting down. So when they shut down, so will Moxie. Now I have a robot that shut down. I mean, of course I didn't give it to my kids. Do you want to see Moxie at work? Last chance. Oh, Moxie's waving her arms. Oh, Moxie made a doo doo on the kitchen table. Oh, no, that's not moxie. I don't know. I don't know. Get your kids a dog, okay? Or a bodega cat. Don't. Don't get him a robot. Although it's a. It's a teaching moment. So. Yeah, we sent the robot to a farm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's living a happy round.

[Leo Laporte]

The robot farm. Did your parents ever do that to you with a pet?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Yep.

[Paris Martineau]

I. When I was a child, my first ever pet was a betta fish. And one day I came home and it was dead and my mother was like, oh, your friend came over and overfed it and it died. And then we ended up getting a new fish. But I only realized like within the last like five or six years, I was like, mom, what the hell was that? Explanation. Of course. A friend didn't come over when I was at school and killed. She's like, oh, yeah, no, I overfed it. I don't know why I said that.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't me. I didn't do it. That's really.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you guys ever have a story in death via fish to your children?

[Leo Laporte]

Worse.

[Paris Martineau]

I've heard that this is a common first experience with death is fish for kids.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't realize that betta fish are sometimes called fighting fish.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yeah. They will attack.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't want to put two beta fish in the same tank.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You think they'd be called alpha fish.

[Leo Laporte]

Then people kill each other and we had quite a. Quite a apocalypse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

But I told Henry that a friend came over and started betting money on betta fish fighting. And well, you know what happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many did you have?

[Leo Laporte]

I had a lot. We had. I don't know. I don't know why I was so stupid. I went out, I got the tank. I got the whole thing. You know what the pet store should have said? Oh, don't put these all in the same tank.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, because then you came back and bought more fish.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More. Yeah, I did, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I didn't learn my lesson. So do not, do not combine male betta fish. Or actually male and female betta fish. Don't put them in this. The only people who can get together in the betta fish world are two female betta fishes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But how do you know as normal, right? Isn't that the way of the world?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Guys are such jerks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You can't have a male and a female. And you can't have a male and a male. Yes, the guy. It's the problem. Is it the male?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Always, always.

[Leo Laporte]

The court has decided to tell Matt Mullenweg, you cannot cut off WP Engine.

[Paris Martineau]

So now they have to roll it back, which is crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a shocker. Um, I'm not sure. I don't know. Mullenweg said he had the right to disable WP Engine's account access and make changes to the plugin for the sake of public safety.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oops. Public safety again.

[Leo Laporte]

Public safety. However, WP Engines executives said that the vulnerability was minor and was fixed.

[Paris Martineau]

The judge found merit in WP Engine's claims that Automatic's actions harmed business relationships, saying Mullenweg's conduct is designed to induce breach or disruption.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. So he's ordered him. Put it back. Put it back. That wasn't the right thing to do. Bad Matt. All right, let's. Let's break. And we will have our bits, our final bits and kibbles and bits at the end. The good stuff. The picks of the week coming up. You're watching this week in Google with Paris Martino and Jeff Jarvis. And this is the part of the show where I beg you for money, because money's a little tight around here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But if you've already given it, you won't hear this and think how nice that'll be, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Only if you're watching live, because we haven't figured out how to bleep on the live stream.

[Paris Martineau]

If you're watching live, this is what you're here for, is to hear the behind the scenes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's right. This is the part you won't see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is to feel superior to all those people who aren't giving.

[Leo Laporte]

You get ad free versions of all of our shows when you pay us a mere $7 a month, you know, So a little behind the scenes, Lisa and I are having discussions. She said, I don't know what we're going to do. We don't have any money. I said, well, we could raise the price of the club. We both thought about that and we went, nah, we want to make it affordable. Seven bucks a month. It's not even a paywall. You still get all our content except for, like, kind of the special stuff. And you can even watch that live. What we really need, huh?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like the Guardian where you. You want to reward it and you wanted people to be able to watch it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't want to. I don't. I really don't want to pay well. I just want to be able to keep doing what we're doing. But currently advertisers are so scared, even Ones that have been with us literally for seven years are not returning our calls. And I just think that everybody's a little nervous about what's going to happen in the world anyway, for whatever reason, I did see a stat that 50% of all the ad dollars in podcasting go to 10 shows. The top 10 shows. Half of all the money is going to the top 10 shows. And the rest of us are splitting the. We've done. Historically, we've done very well, but it's just not going to continue to work without the help of our audience. That's all I'm saying. And you can do it by just joining the club for seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get special programming. Tomorrow we're going to do Chris Marquardt's photo section. That's something we brought back because the club wanted it. We do a lot of club content, but we won't be able to do it much longer without your help. Twit. TV Club Twit. I don't know. I don't want to beg. I don't. But I also don't want you, you know, to say, hey, you should have told us. We needed. You needed the money. We need the money. I told you. And it doesn't go to me, by the way. It doesn't go to my pocket. I'm not getting paid. It goes to keep people like Paris and Jeff compensated. You get a minor stipend, but we need. You know, that's where the money goes. It goes to the. To people like John Ashley and Kevin King. And Benito's coming back. He just got back into town. It goes to our staff. Anthony Nielsen does such a great job. Please, if you have it, we would love it if you would participate. Join the club. You can be in the discord. You can hang out with us. TWiT TV, club, Twitter. Enough said. I don't want to. I don't want to belabor. It pays for Patrick Delahanny's son's Cub Scouts uniform. Just think of that. Poor Caden could go to Cub Scouts with no uniform and he would be so embarrassed. Just think about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oops.

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was going to brag that I'm in Club Twit, but I just found out that I didn't change my credit card, so now I have to do it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you don't have to pay for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Our hosts are in there. Our hosts are in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I do it a mere $7 a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not expensive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, now I've got the right credit card. Okay, now I'm back.

[Leo Laporte]

We were thinking $10 and I thought, yeah, I just don't, I don't want people to. I just don't want people to not be able to afford it. And if you go to a Starbucks and you get a Frappuccino, it's going to cost you seven bucks. Don't you think this is worth at least giving up one Frappuccino a month and no calories.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's calorie free. Twit is calorie free.

[Leo Laporte]

No content but no calories either. So there you go. We're just passing the hat. It's better over here now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones.

[Leo Laporte]

On us in four lines for $25.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A line per month when you switch.

[Leo Laporte]

With eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement. Due bill credits end if you pay off devices early.

[Paris Martineau]

Ctmobile.com this holiday season, surprise everyone on your list with the best gifts tickets.

[Leo Laporte]

To see their favorite artists live, thousands.

[Paris Martineau]

Of concerts and comedy shows including Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Matt Matthews, Metallica, Thomas Rhett, Trans Siberian Orchestra, Sarah Silverman.

[Leo Laporte]

And so many more. Share a memory together or give a.

[Paris Martineau]

Gift they'll never forget.

[Leo Laporte]

Find the most exciting gift for every.

[Paris Martineau]

[e-mail] gifts that's livenation.com gifts got great.

[Leo Laporte]

Ideas but no idea how to build a website? Get bluehost with their AI design tool, you can quickly generate a high quality, fast loading WordPress site instantly. Once you've nailed the look, just hit enter and your site goes live. It's really that simple. And it doesn't matter whether you're a blogger, influencer or just starting your side hustle. Bluehost has you covered with built in marketing and e commerce tools to help you grow and scale your website for the long haul. And when you upgrade to Bluehost Cloud, you get 100% uptime and 24. 7 support to ensure your site stays online through heavy traffic. Bluehost really makes building your dream website easier than ever. So what's stopping you? You've already got the vision. Make it real visit bluehost.com right now and get started today. After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and at and [e-mail] KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. Paris Martineau what do you have for us? For a pick this week.

[Paris Martineau]

I was pulling up some data from similarweb web for a different story and I realized that they're tracking daily active users on Blue sky versus Threads. A little chart and I don't know, I just found it very interesting that over the last two weeks Bluesky and Threads have been neck and neck basically when it comes to daily active use.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually impressive because Threads has albeit there are a couple caveats.

[Paris Martineau]

This is the web version of it, so a bit different. The app data is coming a bit later because they don't currently have worldwide data for iOS devices. But this is worldwide. I think it's quite interesting. My more in depth pick of the week is more of a plea of the week. The skeeball team has decided to do a white elephant party in a week or too White elephant, you know, where everybody brings a silly gift of some sort. You all have to open it. You try to steal each other's gifts. What should I bring? What is. It's got to be an interesting gag gift. I was trying. I was thinking of maybe bringing a yard of beef. Have you heard of these? Is it 3ft search Hillshire Farm Yard of yard o. You could just say yard o beef. It will come.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my good brain.

[Paris Martineau]

I got this once at a It's.

[Leo Laporte]

A three foot long summer sausage.

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of ridiculous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's for. I love that for Hank. Hank could love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, these are not good.

[Paris Martineau]

No, they're definitely not good. Oh, but it's very funny. That's the thing is it can't. I mean maybe it could be desirable, but ideally I just want. Oh no, I can't. I can't purchase Hawk to a coin. But that would be real. That's the right spirit of the game.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right? Right.

[Paris Martineau]

People have twit. If you can think of something incredibly silly that would be worthwhile.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the yard of beef is pretty dark.

[Paris Martineau]

Yard of beef right now is the current winner.

[Leo Laporte]

What you want is. So the whole idea is you wrap it up right. And then you draw numbers and then the first person goes and opens, picks it from the pile and opens it and then in and then ensues every time.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Free for all people.

[Paris Martineau]

You can steal someone else's gift or you pick a new one. You want to have something that's kind of silly but maybe desirable or something that people could get stuck with. I don't know. Yard of beef seems pretty good. It's either. I don't know why my two Jammer B says it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to wrap a yard of beef. But I think you're wrong. Jammer B. I think a yard long sausage, a little a box.

[Paris Martineau]

Like a big rectangular box.

[Leo Laporte]

I would go right to it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Because you're like, what is this strange. Why did I. Yard of beef.

[Leo Laporte]

Yard of beef.

[Paris Martineau]

It's either that or a rotisserie chicken. Is my two thoughts. I don't know why they're both.

[Leo Laporte]

How about a bodega cat?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean. Yeah, but that's the thing is some of my friends have too many cats.

[Leo Laporte]

We actually went to a white elephant where somebody gave a. Had a animal like a fish or a lizard or something.

[Paris Martineau]

Geez.

[Leo Laporte]

And we said, no, no, no, you keep. That's not okay.

[Paris Martineau]

You can't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. But it is fun. I always. All year long I think about. But nobody ever invites me to one of these. I think about, oh, I don't want that. I'm going to give that away as a never. I always, never get.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, you'd be a good person for this because you have a bunch of stuff to give away.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a bunch of crap. Absolutely. How about. You know, I think this would be a good gift. Give somebody a scary Buddha.

[Paris Martineau]

Scary Buddha could be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Scary Buddha. Yeah, that's good.

[Paris Martineau]

I like scary Buddha.

[Leo Laporte]

He's supposed to be cheerful, but he's. It depends on the angle of the light.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yeah. No, he's. He goes from intimidating to haunting.

[Leo Laporte]

I have him here to inspire me because I too go from intimidating to haunting. I would stick with a yard of beef. I think you're.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, yard of beef is the current winner.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think now, weirdly, I also get. When I do a search for that beef cattle yards. So be careful what you. What you give.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, I'm gonna get the O.G. we know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

There is a part of like, yeah, get an entire lamb of some sort from Costco. Yeah, that could be fun, but that would be hard to carry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We had so much good stuff, but we gave it all away when we closed the studio that was full of white elephant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. God, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, those are all good gift ideas. It's got to be bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I, you know, if it weren't the holiday season, I'd give you my bottle brush Christmas trees, but I can't afford to give those up. How about that telephone? That'd be good.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, listen, you're all once again giving actually good gift ideas.

[Leo Laporte]

That's too good.

[Paris Martineau]

Wrong thing. Yeah, no, it's got to kind of a burden.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a one of our listeners who's a wonderful guy. We call him Mick the Wick. He's from Athens, Ohio. He sends me every year about 40 pounds of cheese and, and actually there's usually a summer sausage in there from Ohio, but one year he sent it to the post office box. Not knowing that I don't check the post office box all that often.

[Paris Martineau]

So you had a bunch of moldy cheese.

[Leo Laporte]

Three months later I go and I get the cheese. Yeah. Jeff Jarvis, Pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, you know, you keep hearing how AI is going to take over the world. AGI is coming, it's going to be smarter than us, it's going to destroy everything. And you keep hearing the ad business is surveillance capitalism, and you add these two things together and it's late stage capitalism. It's going to destroy the earth and it's awful. But advertising is so damn stupid. If you go to line 182, you'll see what the Washington Post was advertising me. And I had no idea what it is. Now, since then, I have asked, but why was it advertising this to me?

[Leo Laporte]

Why did the Washington Post think you wanted whatever the hell that is? By the way, it's 60, 68% off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So in that case. So people responded and told me what it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it says it's a something light, a flux light.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's an optical fiber connector. They go to network switches, routers, et cetera. Anything to terminate fiber optical cable. Why is advertising on the Washington Post advertising that and then the next thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't, by the way, you don't do those things that many of our audience members do to kind of distract advertisers. You don't turn off tracking. You turn it on. You want it. I want to be tracked.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I take cookies, I take ads I don't click on.

[Leo Laporte]

Give me an advert Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's another thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Find the right model for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Advertising is stupid. Stupid. And it's not taking over the world.

[Paris Martineau]

I had this exact same experience this week where on Instagram, I got a sponsored ad for a roll of, like, labeled stickers that just say shrimp. And then I went through the carousel and they were also stickers that said a hot dog. One that says warning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's your gift for the white elephant.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my God, you're so right.

[Leo Laporte]

We've solved actually the world's problems.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a roll of staples. That is such a non sequitur. I love it.

[Paris Martineau]

That's really good, actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now you gotta go find it again.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I posted it on Blue sky, so yes, I will be buying it. It's from in stock labels and dang it, they were right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What are some of the other labels that you can get there, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

So hot dog, you can get warning. This product has not been pasteurized and therefore contain harmful bacterias and can cause serious illness in children, the elderly, in persons.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you give that to Robert Kennedy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's too valuable. You put that on everything in your refrigerator and nobody use your.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Soon, Soon. When raw milk comes into the grocery stores, you put it on that.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paris Martineau]

One that says Italian, fully cooked. I do think I need all of them is the thing. Yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, Paris, how could you not have seen.

[Paris Martineau]

I can't believe I didn't see it. But it. You're so right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so the advertising was brilliant.

[Leo Laporte]

It really was brilliant. Did you. Somebody put this in here? The Elon stickers from the New York Times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just put it in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. These are stickers that people who drive Teslas put on their car. I bought this before Elon went crazy. Anti Elon Tesla Club. Shut up, Elon. It would be embarrassing for people of a certain political stripe to be driving a Tesla right now. I'm glad I don't. There's some good stickers too, but those are too good. I don't think they fit the white elephant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

God, no.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm buying this shrimp.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you buying?

[Paris Martineau]

Sticker is $9. Hot dog.

[Leo Laporte]

How many stickers do you get for $9, though? It's got to be a ton of them.

[Paris Martineau]

500.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the beauty of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you get points for actually giving a gift that nobody takes, nobody wants? No. You want something that people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the winner?

[Paris Martineau]

I do think that. I do think that if I'm going to include in this Italian and fully cooked, and people will Fight over that because.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you do a video of your white elephant party? I think that'd be really cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I'll see what we can do.

[Leo Laporte]

I would really like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

At least. Who ends up with the shrimp stickers?

[Paris Martineau]

I will take a photo of someone with a shrimp sticker on their forehead, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Little programming note, we will be here next week. That'll be the last show of the year for the three of us. Following week, of course, is Christmas Day. We do have a best of that our talented team has been working on practically all year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you guys for doing it. Fun note, that will be episode 800.

[Leo Laporte]

The best of twig. Episode 800.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And is the next week.

[Leo Laporte]

The worst of next week is New Year's Day, and you have the day off to recover from your hangover. So this is 798 weeks without you. We'll be here for 799, and then we get the rest of the year off and we will be back. I guess that means January 6th. A day that will live in infamy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

January 8th.

[Leo Laporte]

8Th. Oh, thank God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is it?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that right? Wednesday? Yeah, January 8th, you're right. Oh, so we're not here New Year's Day. Okay, that's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we're closed New Year's Day. But we are back live the following day.

[Leo Laporte]

The following week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The following day, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis is the former professor emeritus.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, I'm still emeritus. Oh, he's always emeritus, but now I'm emeritus.

[Leo Laporte]

Former professor, now emeritus journalist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Old folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

[Jeff Jarvis]

John.

[Leo Laporte]

At the Craig.

[Paris Martineau]

Johnny, you're sleeping?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm purposely not doing it just to spite you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, spite? What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, because this is.

[Leo Laporte]

What did I do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, because Benita is coming back and I won't be here. Oh, you know, I know. We love working with you. All right, hold on one second. Craig, Craig, Craig.

[Leo Laporte]

Graduate School of Journalism at the City University. Now at Montclair State University and at the SUNY Stony Brook campus, where he is still going to be teaching journalism to some very lucky people. Are undergraduates or graduates?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't know yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you don't even know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wrote a syllabus for an undergrad course.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In art and AI and creativity.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. Oh, that should get a lot of attention. Do they, like. Do they, like, test your proposals to see if there's interest?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, they go through the curriculum committee and then they go up, and if not, Enough students sign up, it gets killed from the catalog.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, so you do have to get a certain number of. Yeah, yeah, you will. You will. In fact, if you're lucky enough to be at Montclair or suny, you ought to go right over there and sign up. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it. Don't forget Jeff's book, the Web We Weave, available bookstores now. And of course, the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine, now in paperback, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which makes it a little easier to carry around in your pocket. Thank you, Jeff. Paris Martineau writes for the Information. She covers youth issues, but I think you cover whatever. Right, because the Yachty.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, that was in some way connected to child safety because.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I guess you're right.

[Paris Martineau]

One of the tech companies. But yeah, I'm currently. The shrimp labels are connected to everything. I'm currently looking at a label that says beef. That could be.

[Leo Laporte]

Beef is good. Beef's gonna go well. Italian beef, fully cooked.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, there's a lot of them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's.

[Paris Martineau]

What's the name of this place in stock labels.com?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Because Patrick found [e-mail] which is a label that says great for soup. Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's actually huge. That will kill. Hold on. Yeah, I gotta. I gotta get in. Great for soup.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently there's a whole lot of these.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris. Paris, Paris. Did you shop? Did you go to the warehouse Labels? There's void if broken biomass.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man.

[Paris Martineau]

Irradiated is one. That's really good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Danger poison.

[Paris Martineau]

Stop.

[Leo Laporte]

But you're not going to beat the Bryn mawr price of $4.30 for 1000. Great for soup stickers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hold on. How about the one I just linked you, Paris?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no. It's sticker mania. Exempt animal specimen.

[Paris Martineau]

Specimen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Takeout. Like that one. This is sealed for safety. Oh, boy, this is great. They have a whole section on medical, shipping, healthcare labels, everyday use labels, food labels.

[Leo Laporte]

This is stock labels, everything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, this is a beautiful thing.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, let's not promote this too big. We don't want Paris to be scooped. You could use everybody. A use by sticker would be good.

[Paris Martineau]

That is pretty good. It's tough.

[Leo Laporte]

It's tough.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's too good.

[Leo Laporte]

So many.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But the shrimp were the entry. I think the shrimp speak.

[Paris Martineau]

Shrimp is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Shrimp is simple, fantastic, straightforward.

[Paris Martineau]

It says, I might be making two purchases for or purchase from two different stores because I need grape for soup, but I also need shrimp.

[Leo Laporte]

So, ladies and gentlemen, I am hoping you get the stickers of your choice for this holiday season and share it with a friend. We do this show every Wednesday 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream live. That's why I tell you the live times so you can actually watch us do this live. If you're in the club, of course you can watch on Discord, but there's also YouTube, Twitch, Kik X, LinkedIn, Facebook, tick tock. I think that's it. I think that's all of them. Anyway, that's where we're streaming. You can watch us live. There are a goodly number of people doing that right now, about 590. Thank you. Of course the majority of people watch after the fact because it's a podcast. You can get your copy of the show at the website Twit TV Twig. When you go there you'll see a link to the YouTube channel where you can find the video. That's actually a good place to share video from. Do a little clip, send along to your friends and family. Say, you won't believe what these people are up to. And of course you could subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That's the way I think you should do it. That way you get it automatically the minute it's available. Links all at the website Twit TV Twig. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who paid the bills for this show today. Thank you Club Twit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you, thank you people.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you and we will see you next week for episode 799 this Week in Google. Bye bye now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones.

[Leo Laporte]

On us and four lines for $25.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A line per month when you switch.

[Leo Laporte]

With eligible trade ins all on America's largest 5G 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.

[Paris Martineau]

CT mobile.com this holiday season. Surprise everyone on your list with the.

[Leo Laporte]

Best gifts tickets to see their favorite artists live.

[Paris Martineau]

Choose from thousands of concerts and comedy show including Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Matt Matthews, Metallica, Thomas Rhett, Trans Siberian Orchestra, Sarah Silverman and so many more.

[Leo Laporte]

Share a memory together or give a.

[Paris Martineau]

Gift they'll never forget. Find the most exciting gift for every [e-mail] gifts. That's livenation.com gifts.

[Leo Laporte]

You say you'll never join the Navy.

[Paris Martineau]

Never climb Mount Fuji on a port.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit, or break the sound barrier. Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Learn [e-mail] America's Navy forged by the sea.