TWiG 804: Big Potato - Death Roulette, Influencer Voice, HillmanTok

Summary

This Week in Google (Audio) - Episode 804: Big Potato - Death Roulette, Influencer Voice, HillmanTok

Release Date: January 30, 2025

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau

In Episode 804 of "This Week in Google," aptly titled "Big Potato - Death Roulette, Influencer Voice, HillmanTok," hosts Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau delve into a myriad of topics spanning artificial intelligence advancements, the intersection of AI with Big Tech, and cultural shifts influenced by emerging technologies. The episode marks a transitional phase for the show, hinting at a rebranding in future episodes.

---

1. Introduction and Show Update

The episode begins with Leo Laporte announcing a significant shift for the podcast, transitioning from "This Week in Google" to a broader focus encompassing all of Big Tech. The hosts tease discussions on China's new AI, Deep Seek, and introduce a quirky segment on "17th century death roulette."

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [00:00]: "For the last time, we're changing the name, we're changing the music. We are not whistling the theme."

---

2. Deep Seek AI: Development, Impact, and Controversies

A substantial portion of the episode is dedicated to Deep Seek, China's latest AI model. Jeff Jarvis mentions having discussed Deep Seek early in January, highlighting its rapid rise and the subsequent market turmoil it has caused, including a significant drop in Nvidia's stock value.

Key Points:

• Deep Seek reportedly cost $6 million to train, though skepticism about this figure is expressed.
• Allegations of Deep Seek plagiarizing OpenAI, leading to tensions between OpenAI, Microsoft, and Chinese developers.
• Deep Seek utilizes reasoning models that engage in iterative dialogues, purportedly enhancing its problem-solving capabilities.

Notable Quotes:

• Jeff Jarvis [07:30]: "I was talking about Deep Seek in the first week of January before the world went crazy."
• Leo Laporte [07:46]: "Deep Seek used OpenAI for distillation, making it smarter through iterative dialogues."

The hosts debate whether Deep Seek's reasoning processes are genuine or merely performative, questioning the transparency and authenticity of AI reasoning.

Notable Quotes:

• Jeff Jarvis [09:40]: "Is that really a window on reasoning or is it instead a performative effort to show us what reasoning would look like?"
• Leo Laporte [09:52]: "My guess is... they have multiple experts interacting to simulate reasoning."

---

3. AI Integration in Big Tech Products

The conversation shifts to the integration of AI into everyday tools. Laporte discusses the implementation of Gemini AI into Google Docs and Gmail, noting the inability to opt out—a move mirrored by Microsoft's incorporation of AI into Microsoft 365, which led to increased prices and user dissatisfaction.

Key Points:

• Google and Apple Map Changes: Google renames the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, while Apple Maps retains the original name.
• AI in Productivity Tools: Both Google and Microsoft embed AI functionalities directly into their suites, raising concerns about privacy and user control.

Notable Quotes:

• Benito [20:11]: "Everyone in my newsroom is irritated as Google changes Google Docs and Gmail to automatically have Gemini involved."
• Leo Laporte [20:27]: "Microsoft raised the cost of Microsoft 365 while adding copilot AI, and people are furious."

---

4. Stock Market Reactions and Jevons Paradox

Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte explore the repercussions of Deep Seek on the stock market, particularly focusing on Nvidia's stock volatility. They introduce Jevons Paradox, a concept where increased efficiency leads to higher overall consumption.

Key Points:

• Nvidia's stock experienced a 17% drop following Deep Seek's announcement, attributed to fears of reduced demand for high-end GPUs.
• Investment strategies and the role of venture capitalists (VCs) in sustaining AI advancements are scrutinized.
• The discussion emphasizes that technological improvements may not inherently reduce resource consumption, aligning with Jevons Paradox.

Notable Quotes:

• Jeff Jarvis [07:46]: "The stock went down 17%, which is like the biggest drop."
• Leo Laporte [18:00]: "Jevons Paradox... technological advances make resources more efficient and stimulate demand."

---

5. AI and Business Models: VC Investments and Potential Returns

The hosts debate the sustainability of current VC investments in AI amidst uncertainties about viable business models. They ponder how long tech companies can sustain heavy investments without clear monetization strategies.

Key Points:

• VCs remain optimistic, driven by the potential of AI to revolutionize industries and create unprecedented returns.
• Comparisons are drawn to historical tech investments, suggesting that long-term patience may yield substantial gains despite short-term market fluctuations.

Notable Quotes:

• Benito [21:06]: "How long do you think they have to work at a business model?"
• Jeff Jarvis [34:05]: "Every investment they make is a risk, but the upside could be phenomenal."

---

6. Mainstream Media, Institutions, and AI

Jeff Jarvis expresses concerns about the decline of mainstream media institutions and their ability to innovate in the age of AI. The discussion highlights the necessity for credible news sources amidst the rise of decentralized content creation.

Key Points:

• The transition to AI-driven media threatens traditional journalistic standards and editorial oversight.
• The importance of institutions like "The Information" and emerging trusted news platforms is underscored.

Notable Quotes:

• Jeff Jarvis [39:35]: "Mainstream media is going out of business."
• Leo Laporte [39:42]: "We need more places like 'The Information.' We need more trusted sources."

---

7. Influence of AI on Communication Styles (Influencer Voice)

A segment explores the evolution of communication styles influenced by platforms like TikTok. The hosts analyze the emergence of the "influencer voice," characterized by uptalk and conversational tones designed to engage audiences.

Key Points:

• Uptalk and Engagement: Influencer voice employs rising intonations that mimic questioning, keeping viewers attentive.
• Cultural Impact: The shift from traditional broadcaster voices to more personable and relatable tones reflects changing audience preferences.

Notable Quotes:

• Paris Martineau [66:03]: "The influencer accent isn't new. Linguistic quirks have been emerging on platforms like YouTube and Instagram for over a decade."
• Leo Laporte [70:27]: "It's designed to manipulate you... to keep people watching their videos."

---

8. Privacy Concerns: 23andMe and Genetic Data

The discussion briefly touches upon privacy issues related to genetic testing companies like 23andMe, emphasizing the risks associated with data preservation and potential breaches.

Key Points:

• 23andMe retains saliva samples and genetic data, raising concerns about data security and misuse.
• The company faces financial struggles and legal challenges following data breaches affecting millions of customers.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [60:18]: "23andMe was founded to make genetic testing affordable, but they preserve spit samples, raising privacy concerns."
• Benito [62:03]: "Their financial situation is not great. They reported a loss of $312 million in '23."

---

9. Entertainment and AI: HillmanTok and Fictional Universities

A humorous yet insightful segment introduces "HillmanTok," a fictional university established via TikTok. Dr. Leah Barlow's attempt to create a virtual classroom goes viral, leading to the spontaneous creation of courses tailored for specific communities.

Key Points:

• Virtual Education: HillmanTok exemplifies how social media platforms can foster educational communities outside traditional institutions.
• Cultural Exchange: The unregulated nature of such platforms allows for creative and diverse course offerings, though it raises questions about quality and accreditation.

Notable Quotes:

• Benito [157:48]: "Hillman Talk College... 50 courses that professors are offering, all for Black Americans."
• Jeff Jarvis [160:22]: "I'm trying to see if it says where she is at a professor. Because she's good."

---

10. Closing Remarks: Transition to "Intelligent Machines"

As the episode draws to a close, Leo Laporte announces the rebranding of the show to "Intelligent Machines," signaling a broader exploration of AI's role in society. The hosts express hope for future discussions with AI experts and philosophers, ensuring continuity in their insightful and entertaining dialogues.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [144:46]: "Stay tuned for episode 805 with 'Intelligent Machines.' Same time, same team, new focus."

---

Conclusion

Episode 804 of "This Week in Google" navigates the complex landscape of artificial intelligence, its integration into mainstream technology, and the subsequent societal and economic repercussions. Through engaging discussions and diverse topics—from Deep Seek's market impact to the cultural shifts in communication styles—the hosts provide listeners with a comprehensive overview of the current tech zeitgeist. The episode effectively balances technical insights with cultural commentary, making it a valuable listen for those interested in the evolving relationship between AI and society.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twig. This week in Google. Jeff and Paris are here with lots to talk about. Of course, Deep Seek, that new AI from China is all the rage. We'll talk about what it really means. We'll even play with it a little bit. I like the reasoning. Google has changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Apple hasn't so far. And then we'll play 17th century death roulette. Yes, it's a wacky show. Coming up next on this Week in Google podcast from people you Trust. This is Twig. This is Twig. This Week in Google. Episode 804, recorded Wednesday, January 29, 2025. Big Potato. It's time for Twig. This Week in Google for the last time. This week in Google the show. We cover the everything but Google for the last time. Just to reassure people, we're changing the name, we're changing the music. We are not whistling the theme. We have Benito's doing a nice new theme for us. No more recorders. And we are going to one last.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Time play the recorder music now.

[Leo Laporte]

They just heard it. They just heard it.

[Paris Martineau]

It only goes on in post. Yeah, and they just heard it.

[Leo Laporte]

They just heard it. Just because you didn't hear it. They just heard it. The only reason we got away with 15 minutes.

[Benito]

Savor what you just hear. If you're listening to this, scrub back 45 seconds, listen to it again and savor.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris Maro. She works for the information, the information.com and of course you could see her stuff in the Weekend Edition and she's a marvelous person with. It looks like purple hair, but that's just a purple light.

[Benito]

It's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that a grow light or something?

[Benito]

No, it's a like a tube light sort of thing from some fancy light store I got.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it to make. Is it to affect your psyche or is it.

[Benito]

I guess it's just. Yeah, vibes based. It has nothing to do with plants.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a vibe thing.

[Benito]

It just looks kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a vibe thing. You grandpas just wouldn't understand the other. Oh, look, she can hold it like a lightsaber.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, she is our Princess Leia, isn't she?

[Benito]

That's true. I take the space buns down for the podcast so I can fit in the frame.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis is our Yoda. He is professor of emeritus professor of Journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark professor of Journalism of. Of journalism, of which he is the professor at the City University New York, Emeritus now at Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook. When are your classes start?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not sure. I'm going to be teaching soon. The earliest fall.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have a course on the books at Stony Brook and AI and creativity, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Are you gonna. Did you apply for a South by Southwest panel or anything?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I, like, stopped going long ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It pissed me off one year.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a party. Do you go?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's. It's marketing. It's marketers and Germans now. The Germans, I like the marketers. I'm not so crazy about.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of Germans at South By.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Love it. They love it. Used to. I don't know if they still do. Lufthansa had a special flight.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be a fun flight. Yeah, that would be a flight. Yeah, that'd be a party.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hip. Germans. Germans at sxsw. Let's see. They have a German house there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, house, as they call it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So here. Okay. Wait a second. German house. It's a. It's a Twitter account. I'll put it in the. In the. In the.

[Leo Laporte]

I will mention that today I am wearing multiple AI devices. I still have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The shirt itself is an AI device.

[Leo Laporte]

And the shirt is. It's a test to see if you can see all the colors. And I'm wearing this. And I'm trying to get the founders of the B computer on the show to talk about that. That is always on, always recording. We've talked about it before. Does kind of interesting summaries of your day. Now, I got yesterday the Plaud note. This is something that you can see on every other TikTok. Apparently very popular in the TikTok shop. They make a little square thing that goes in the back of your phone. This one is a just a little lapel pin. Or.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Boy, do they advertise it on TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man, it's great. Like crazy. That's why I didn't buy it for a long time. But it's actually really good. So I tested it. I recorded. Now, this one, unlike the Bee, you have to explicitly press a button and start recording.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But I used it for Richard Campbell, you know, before on Windows Weekly. At the end of the show, he does a little whiskey segment. It did an amazing. Not so little. It did an amazing summary mind map and everything of Richard's whiskey segment. That really impressed me. So this is designed for recording. Like, you might use this at a lecture. College lecture. That's where they're. That's where they're really nerd.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Question. How could it hear it if you had your earphones on?

[Leo Laporte]

I turned off my mic. Yeah, that's the problem with of these devices is when I'm doing a show, it would only hear my side. It won't hear your side. So I turned off my mic and I let Richard talk for the whole segment and recorded it. Did it. And it made a mind map. And it was. It was quite impressive. I was. I was kind of blown away by it. It's using claw. Here's the difference. I don't know what AI the bee is using. They don't say and I. And you can apply for an upgrade to a better AI. I suspect then it would use maybe ChatGPT, but this uses Claude Sonet or 01 and does a really, really remarkable job. So my dream of having an AI assistant always listening to everything I do is. Is getting closer and closer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That's sad. That's his dream. That's so sad.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a simple man.

[Benito]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's simple dreams. I guess I could show you. Let me pull down this so you don't see that. I guess I can load up the plod notes. So this is the summary of the whiskey thing. It was quite good. I mean, it's lecture Blair Atoll. It even got the weird, most, not all of the weird Gaelic spellings correct. Did a great job in the takeaways. You can also see it as a mind map, which is kind of wild.

[Benito]

Are people mind mapping still?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe not people, but AIs are.

[Benito]

People have stopped mind mapping.

[Leo Laporte]

But the AIs, the AIs know how to do it. You can have different templates for your summaries. This is the transcript. Does you know it's probably using Whisper AI for the transcript. I'm impressed. I'm impressed. Now it's no Deep Seek. Have you. Have you all played with Deep Seek? This is the new Chinese model that everybody's talking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to take some credit here. I want to take a little credit.

[Leo Laporte]

Please do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On both this show and AI Inside. I was talking about Deep Seeking in the first week of January before the world went crazy. Because Benedict Evans said at the end of December, he said, boy, Deep Seek snuck in at the end of the year with the biggest AI story of the year.

[Leo Laporte]

He knew he was right. And in fact it taught. It tanked Nvidia and many of the other AI stocks. And then of course, OpenAI. The latest is OpenAI and Microsoft are miffed because it turns out Deep Seek used, they say maybe plagiarized Open AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little ironic since the New York Times is suing Open AI and Microsoft over supposedly plagiarizing them, which I even defend them on.

[Benito]

It's only okay when Americans do it. Guys, I.

[Leo Laporte]

The Chinese, I think that there's a couple of things that are probably important to point out. One, that the story of Deep Seq comes from China and may be oversold. You know, they have a real interest in destabilizing our stock market and our AI development. So they said, oh, it only costs $6 million to train it. That's probably, you know, misinformation, if not disinformation. It is also the case, it seems to be. OpenAI says that they used OpenAI for distillation, which means once Deep Seeks LLM was built, they trained it by asking OpenAI questions, having a dialogue with OpenAI back and forth. Of course, you could do that very fast. And it. And it made it smarter. It is a reasoning R1 is a reasoning AI. And I have to. So I was pretty impressed. I asked it a couple of kind of general questions that, you know, one might ask an AI, and it did. I thought a very good job. I like the reasoning models because they talk with you while they're thinking. It's almost like. It's almost like a real.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's my question.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that really a window on reasoning or is it instead a performative effort to show us what reasoning would look like? Is it.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course we'll never know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'll never know. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's my guess. I mean, that's the way that these things work, is they. It's an iterative process. Right. These reasoning models are iterative in the sense that they. They have multiple experts, if you will imagine that multiple experts and they interact with one another. And so what you're seeing in the reasoning. The reasoning models take time. For instance, when I asked Deep Seek about, I said, what is. How does quantum computing work? Something I still don't really know. It didn't. It didn't. It took 43 seconds for it to finally give me an answer. But as it's going, I got to watch it. Watch in the conversation to kind of see what was going on. So otherwise you'd be sitting there and it would just. You'd just be sitting there. Right.

[Benito]

So it's kind of like the whole washing machine where you get to see what's going on inside.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it feels more fun thinking. Thinking. You want me to read. So. So this is Kind of how the conversation went. I said, how do quantum computers work? And it. First thing it says, okay, so I need to explain how quantum computers work. Hmm. Where do I start, by the way? That's human tuning, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember from my classes. Well, it makes it more appealing.

[Benito]

I remember from my classes.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember from my classes that regular computers use bits which are zeros and 1. Quantum computers use something called qubits instead. But what's a qubit? Exactly. Wait. I think qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time because of superposition. That's a quantum mechanics concept. Right. Superposition allows cubics to exist in multiple states simultaneously. But how do they actually perform computations? I remember something about quantum gates and on and on and on. At the end of it, though, and there's quite a few paragraphs of dialogue with itself. I mean, at the end of it, it gives me its answer, which is very nicely structured in bullet point form, and then a summary, which is just a paragraph. That's also, I think, very good. Conclusion. Quantum computers harness superposition and entanglement to solve problems intractable for classical systems. While challenges like decoherence persist, advancements in qubit quality, error correction and algorithms may unlock transformative applications in cryptography, material science and AI. That's good. That's a good answer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but here's the other interesting thing, Paris. Is that that whole. I'm just thinking, what about this? What about that part? You can't. You can't cut and paste that text. Only at the end, it gives you its final answer, then you can cut and paste that text.

[Leo Laporte]

So I asked this something I knew something about, as opposed to quantum computing. How do I make focaccia bread?

[Jeff Jarvis]

We should ask Cacio Pepe, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it answered the quantum question in 43 seconds. It took 99 seconds to figure out how to make focaccia. Okay.

[Benito]

Focaccia, the final frontier.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to make focaccia, but I'm not really sure how. Let me think about what I know. Focaccia is a type of Italian bread, right? It's kind of flat, usually has olive oil, herbs on top, maybe rosemary. I've seen it with big dimples on the surface. I remember. I mean, this anthropomorphization is wild. I remember that bread usually requires flour, water, yeast and salt. But focaccia might have olive oil too, though. Anyway, it does come up with a correct focaccia answer, but it takes a while going back and forth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's taking what is an easy answer and then saying I've got to create this structure where it looks like I'm thinking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't believe that it's showing reasoning the other thing whereas is you can have a choice. You can either do the reasoning or you can do a search. So you can do a search of the current web.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember last week's show and.

[Benito]

What is Deep Seek doing in that case? It's just using Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know what crawl it uses.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why there's a lot of question marks like how much it really cost, et cetera, et cetera. Anthony asked it to do last week's show notes. All right, I need to create show notes for the episode this week in Google based on the provided transcript. Let's start by reading through the transcript to identify the main topics and key points and they. It is actually Anthony says it's doing a better job than the current AI we use for show notes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's Claude, look, there's no question this is impressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know really how much it cost. The story is the guy made a lot of money as a hedge fund. He was a billionaire hedge fund billionaire using AI to predict the market swings, then took some of that money, bought I think they said half a million dollars worth of H100S's which are the. Actually he bought some Nvidia cards before the embargo and then bought more after the embargo. But the thing that's interesting is that they because of the embargo, the CHIPS act. Not the chips act, but the US Government embargo on high quality chips to China. They had to use a lower quality chip that was missing a key interconnect in Nvidia's CUDA cores so that multiple GPUs could work together.

[Benito]

So sorry, Nvidia's what cores CUDA is going to be My new role in the show is going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to ask what every time.

[Benito]

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

[Leo Laporte]

And what the hell the Cuda. CUDA is the. Is a language that program that you can use to control the GPUs, the Nvidia GPUs and since they didn't have access to that, they decided to write low level kind of machine code doing the same thing. So the Chinese media outlet 36Kr, this is from MIT Technology Review, says that they have they estimate about 10,000 Nvidia GPUs. Another the founder of an AI research consultancy, Semianalysis says no, it's going to be more like 50,000. So he stockpiled a lot of them. But he also did some low level coding in order for it to work as well as the GPUs you could buy in the US. In addition to the challenge Chinese companies face on top of chip sanctions, their AI engineering techniques tend to be less efficient. This is an interview with a Chinese media outlet from July of last year. Quote, this is Liang, the hedge fund guy that funded this. We Chinese companies have to consume twice the computing power to achieve the same results. Combined with data efficiency gaps, this could mean needing up to four times the computing power. But our goal is to continuously close these gaps. So the thing that scared the stock market is, oh my God, maybe they figure out a way to do this with fewer Nvidia cards. So Nvidia stock tanked. Maybe they figure out a way to do this more efficiently and less expensively than open AI, anthropic Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera. So those stocks tanked, but we don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Know they did it with meta open source material.

[Leo Laporte]

They said they used llama to benefits their strategy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, the stock went down. I was keeping track. Stock went down 17% which is like the biggest drop.

[Benito]

And whatever did it recover though?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It went up 8% the next day, mainly according to stories from retail investors who said I heard you have to buy on the dip.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a time to buy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and then it went, and then it went back down 4% today.

[Leo Laporte]

To point out this, Anthony said this Anthony Nielsen said this is probably profit taking, which was kind of long overdue with Nvidia and it's still at a much higher level than it was six months ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I still think it's going to go up.

[Leo Laporte]

And I, well, and this is, this is an interesting side note from I've been reading. I'm sure you have to every possible analysis of this because everybody has a different take. Ben Thompson did an excellent take on Stratecherie. Steven Sinofsky, the former Microsoft executive guy who was in charge of Windows 8, much to his chagrin, tweeted that it's Jeevan's Paradox. He said you don't really need to know much about this to understand Jevons Paradox. Jevin was a 19th century British economist who said the technological advances that make a resource more efficient also stimulate demand. And so as a result, ultimately that efficiency means you use even More. He observed it in 1865 with coal. He said technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. Contrary to intuition, technological progress cannot be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. We've seen this in California. I've mentioned this because our local energy company has had 6 price increases in the past year. Because we're using less electricity, we've become more efficient. And so they have to charge us more because the cost of their physical plants has not gone down. So I don't think it's necessarily. Sinofsky says it does not necessarily follow that this improvement in efficiency is going to cost everybody less or it's just going to mean we're going to use more AI. It's, it's fascinating.

[Benito]

Why are we going to use more AI? Because what is using more AI, but what is using more AI bringing to us this week? I've been personally very irritated as that it's everyone in my newsroom by Google changing both Google Docs and Gmail to just automatically have Gemini involved in it. There's no way to opt out.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and Microsoft did the same thing.

[Benito]

No, it's Clippy esque. Have we learned nothing?

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft raised the cost of its Microsoft of its consumer Microsoft 365 at the same time as it added copilot its AI into it. And people are furious.

[Benito]

I mean, I just don't understand this whole argument. People don't want these services for a lot of the reasons that these companies are pushing them on us. Why is the default assumption that we're all going to be using more AI forever? Okay, stock market. This stock market that they're trying to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they're not selling to you, they're selling to.

[Benito]

No, no, I'm saying. But are these companies, do you think are going to have infinitely increasing returns if it turns out people don't want to use their products? Right now we're in a hype cycle where all these companies are admitting, hey, we don't have like a business model worked out yet. How long do you think they have to work at a business model?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good question. Good question.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look, first of all, there's plenty of money flowing in. And the reason is investors, not just retail investors in the stock market, but VCs understand that, yeah, they're risking. It's a risk. Every investment they make is a risk. But the upside could be phenomenal that if they do in fact create an AGI. Mark Zuckerberg has said it's fascinating. He thinks that they're going to have an AI engineer writing code soon. This will be a defining year for AI. He wrote this was January 24th. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than a billion people. Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model and we will build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R and D efforts. And to power this, they're building a 2 gigawatt plus data center. This is, this, this is the data center footprint imposed, superimposed over somewhere, you know, Paris, Manhattan. Oh, I mean, it's huge. It's bigger than Central Park. It goes all the way from the top of Central park down to the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hudson Yards, but based on deep seek. Is that even necessary? Is. Is. What's this, what's the stupid thing we talked about last week that they announced for $500 billion Stargate.

[Leo Laporte]

Stargate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Those things. Are those things necessary at that scale?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's, of course, that's the question everybody's asking. But yes, my answer is Jeevon's Paradox. This will just increase demand and that same center will do. Will, you know, will do even more. And if it's smarter and smarter and smarter. Look, if you can replace a, an Engineer that costs $200,000 a year with an AI that costs $10,000 a year or whatever it costs, if it's less than 200,000, that's a big net gain. And you make more. And then you'll be making more and more of them. And then, by the way, they'll be faster than regular engineers and there'll be a vicious, virtuous flywheel.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I quote Benedict Evans, my muse from Threads. I hate to break it to people who are just now reading the Wikipedia page for Jeevon's Paradox. But something can get cheaper and therefore be used massively more and still be a crappy business. Ask a telco shareholder how these charts paid out.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what happened to telcos? AT&T had a monopoly on long lines and were able to charge an awful lot until digital technology came along.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But this is, this is even in the mobile days, he's saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm just saying there's a lot of other factors. It's not just the one factor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fundamental right question, though. Paris is asking where the, where the value is.

[Benito]

What is notable that most of these, the leaders of these companies even. I mean, while they spout off big proclamations like this, I was listening to an interview that Noam Shazir did with. I'm forgetting what podcast? But he's now one of the three people that are the co technical leads of Gemini at Google. And he had said like, yeah, we don't even know like what the main uses of AI are going to be yet. We'll figure that out maybe with the help of AI down the road. And I'm like, that's not an acceptable answer. Why are we investing hundreds of billions of dollars into a technology and totally giving up on all of our climate pledges as a country and as large corporations for technology that we don't know what the benefits will be other than could be interesting?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the first personal computer I bought, an Atari 400, couldn't really do a whole lot. You had to save the programs on cassette tapes. It was compared to our current computers, incredibly slow. You might have said, well, that was, you know, and it was very expensive in 20, $25. You might have said, well, what the hell's the point of that? But there is definitely a point. And, but I mean, I just don't.

[Benito]

Know necessarily accurate when. If you look at, obviously I wasn't alive in the 70s, but I do have a lot of 70s, thank you very much. I know guys, I, I have a lot of 70s era magazines and 80s era magazines. And the ads for them tout all the great things you can use a personal computer for. And those are the things people did use them for at that time and continue to use them for today.

[Leo Laporte]

They used them to bet. It was things like. No, it was things like balance. You couldn't do anything because first of all, there was no Internet. So you could balance your checkbook. You could play games. It was a very limited. It was basically a fast character.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no email yet.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no email that. What changed completely is connecting it all of them together.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no. Play games was enough. Play games was enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Play games was enough. That's why I bought an Atari 400.

[Benito]

You could print something, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I used.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not in the early days. People didn't really have printers.

[Benito]

He used them to write a book. You could write things on it could write things. Coming from a world of typewriters and calculators, the computer was a huge.

[Leo Laporte]

To go from the Atari 400 to a smartphone is a big leap, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you're still not answering, I think. What is Paris's fundamental question, which is what does it mean to use AI?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we don't know yet because we didn't know what it would mean to have an Atari, a computer in your pocket always connected to the Internet until it actually happened. It takes a while. This is how it is in the world of technology. You.

[Benito]

I'm not sure that it is because even when people were developing early computers, they had an idea of what they wanted that computer to be and what it could do. Obviously the people working on computers in the 70s-90s didn't know about the iPhone 15, but they had an understanding of the benefits of the product they were creating. It's interesting that we have this entire industry developed on, I don't know, just a general sense, lack of a sense of what this technology is for and who it is for specifically.

[Leo Laporte]

There is. Okay, so there are two avenues of attack and you could tell me which one you're going to pick. One avenue of attack is you're never going to get to, you know, you're going to hit a ceiling and it's never going to get intelligent enough to be really useful. The other avenue of attack is, well, it's going to get really useful, but we don't know how we're going to use it. Do you think AGI is not going to happen?

[Benito]

I don't, I don't know that we have a definition of AGI that would make that a productive conversation for us to have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know it's not. It's BS because there is no definition. The idea that something's just smarter than us that has no meaning whatsoever. It still acts as if it thinks.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't really mean. Let me redefine it then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AGI and worse, ASI are complete bs.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me redefine it then, please. Is it possible that Mark Zuckerberg's right and that they will have a AI that can competently act as a mid level programmer?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we have that now in the sense that you can ask a question of it to do something and it will actually do it. And behind that scene is programming.

[Leo Laporte]

So we don't, we don't have to stipulate an aid. What AGI is to say that it can replace a human being in some of the functions of human beings and increasingly more and more of the jobs.

[Benito]

That'S the case though, because then why aren't any of these companies firing their programmers and just relying on AGI only? It's because they. It doesn't work like that so far.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And so I'm going to, pardon me, Uncle Jeff moment, I'm going to go to my line of type example, because this is on my brain of brain section right now. Type, cold type, hot type. When the line of type came in it would replace typesetters because it was a keyboard operated rather than a piece at a time. The typesetters knew that they were doomed not only by the machine, but also by the fact that women who were then known as typewriters, the person was the typewriter, could replace them because it was keyboard operated. And so what they did is they said, this is very Reid Hoffman in what he's saying these days, no, we're going to control this machine. We are going to have agency over it. And they knew they would lose jobs for about 10 years. And then because it's made printing so much cheaper that the printing industry, newspapers, magazines and so on, would explode. And they ended up with way more jobs and way more power for a half a century. Okay, that's the arc that you can take here. But the question is, it still goes back to Paris's question. Okay, let's take charge of the. It must take agency over the technology. But to do what. And you're right, Leo, that we do everything go yet? That's the thing. That's where it gets sloppy.

[Leo Laporte]

What if I had. What if this. More examples gets. All right, her. I would like this thing to record everything. This plot note or the B or her. The movie.

[Benito]

You want. I know you want the computer to. You want to develop an emotionally kind of complex and maybe a little tumultuous computer point of her, and then have the computer leave you for another computer. Because I would be down for that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just fiction. It's. I would like an assistant that can. That can understand everything that's going on, can give me advice and information, summarize all of those things would be very, very useful. And yeah, maybe all it does is make humans more productive. Okay. But there is a lot of value in that. I don't think investors are misguided. You can attack it saying, well, it's never going to get to that point. But if it does get to a point where it is useful to that degree, that is going to be a very valuable technology. Just as the Atari, when you look at the Atari 400, you go, well, you know, you're going to sell a half a million of them. Big deal. But if you really saw the real possibility of what interconnecting computers could do, you might have a better, more bullish point of view. Do you not think that smartphones have created a lot of value than the ones.

[Benito]

Sorry, I've got to get something out of my shoe here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.

[Benito]

I think you were making really good Points, Leo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeff just.

[Benito]

I was thinking in my head it would be funny to do a sand prop comedy bit. And then Jeff spoke it into existence. So I did have to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you doing something, Jeff? Were you doing that? Is that what you were.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no. There's. Great minds think alike.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

You know, sometimes we just. We're aligned like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we are.

[Benito]

That's the power of human intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand how somebody can look at the output of current AIs and not go, holy cow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I do, but I think it.

[Benito]

I mean, yeah, I think they're certainly like super useful. I just think that we need to be a bit more grounded in it to be like, yeah, this is a very useful technology. It will have in like the next three to five years, like some specific use cases that it's fantastic for. And probably over the next like 5 to 10, it will have general, like general implications for general society and most jobs in limited ways. But I like in. By which I mean, like, you know, pick your average career or industry. That person will have something that's different about their line of work because of some AI tool. Maybe. But I don't. I think that that's a more reasonable and balanced thing to say versus everything in the world is going to change irrecoverably. There's not worth planning anything for the future because we're not going to have jobs. I didn't say that going to change everything.

[Leo Laporte]

I said it's reasonable to invest in it as if it's going to change everything. Look, if you could have bought Apple stock in 2007 when this was announced, and that you held that stock till now, you would be a very wealthy person if you could see the potential of the iPhone. And by the way, that did not take much visionary capability. You would have seen the future. I think we are on the cusp. If you say, I see what this does and it's amazing, how can you then say, oh, well, I know it's not gonna be worth that much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why Deep Seek is so important. Because the scale of VC investment in the Valley versus the investment that came in China. Says investment. Yes. Stipulated, your honor. Amazing. Stipulated. A good investment. Stipulated. But at that scale. That's the question, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't think it's a question you need to answer. It's not your money.

[Benito]

I mean, that's a fair point.

[Leo Laporte]

If VCs want to pour their fortune into this.

[Benito]

As people. Sorry, Bonito, I have a question related.

[Paris Martineau]

To that, that VCs thing is like how, how long then until they, until they actually need to make money before they pull their investments? Like how long do you think, how patient are they till until they can actually make money?

[Leo Laporte]

As long as there's con is there continues to be progress. I think that's not going to be a problem if we go a year without progress.

[Paris Martineau]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

They'll make money. Look it, they have plenty of money. The reason they're VCs is because they have more money than they need.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Reid Hoffman also invested I think $24 million in a new startup using AI on cancer. That is a legitimate specific use case and an investment that makes to me a great deal of sense. Chatting machines don't yet have and they are amazing and all of them. But is that in 24 million is a lot less.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a failure. That's a failure of your imagination. That's all it is. There's a million things like curing cancer. There's an almost infinite number of things that could be incredibly valuable, could change the world and you don't have to have a lot of them to make your money back. But. But I don't care about the money part. That's not for my. It's not my money. And I'm glad that there are people, willing nations as well as individuals willing to invest money in this stuff. But the upsides cure cancer. There's a million upsides. There's a million upsides. What if it can invent fusion? What if it can invent a quantum computer? What if it can, I mean it can go on and on and on. What if there's never another traffic jam? Because AIs then eliminate traffic jams by scheduling.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So imagine, imagine you're an investor in OpenAI and along comes deep seek. What are you thinking?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm thinking this is great news for your investment in retail investors that are selling off. I guarantee you the VCs are not going, oh, we got to get out of this. That's great news. It means you can do more with less. How is that bad news?

[Benito]

Wouldn't you feel if I'm just playing like devil's life, wouldn't you feel like maybe you've been fleeced or maybe you've been sold that the most expensive option is the only option we should talk to.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure Mark Andreessen does not feel like he's been fleeced. I'm pretty sure investors admit it. No, they don't feel like they've been fleeced they see this as opportunity. They're not as dumb as retail investors. The stock market maybe profit taking, fine. But I think VCs understand well, the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

2000 bubble was VC money, not. Not retail investor money. And if you think this is a bubble.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think this is a bubble?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the fear. I mean, we're playing devil. We're reversing rules here. Paris, I think are Devil's advocating you here because you got sand in your socks. But that's the, that's the question. I'm all. All I'll say is this question. Is the scale of investment, is it appropriate over, as Bonito says, the time frame that's necessary? I don't know. That's all. Is it amazing? Will it do amazing things? Will it keep growing?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think. I don't think. I don't know why you're worried about VCs if they lose because as in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

2000, it has an effect on the rest of us.

[Benito]

That is true. I do think also I've realized during this conversation something fundamental about the way I see the world, which is I think that my perspective on issues like this is much more inherently skeptical, in part because my understanding of the tech world is obviously fairly recent. I came of age in the era of, you know, the bubble.com bubble bursting. The hype and optimism of the early 2000s fading away to a deep cynicism and skepticism over what tech companies have wrought upon the world. Every time in my life and career as journalists that there's been some huge like bubble or push towards this being the next big amazing thing. There's always been another shoe that had to drop. And so I think that that's what I am. Why I approach this with such skepticism. In addition to it being curiosity.

[Leo Laporte]

How did the dot com bubble burst hurt you guys?

[Benito]

It resulted in a widespread, like financial crisis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My.

[Leo Laporte]

That was no. The financial crisis.

[Benito]

Well, no, I mean, I'm not saying it one to one, but I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S on bad mortgage debt.

[Benito]

No, I, I know what the financial crisis is, okay? I'm saying it.

[Leo Laporte]

And that, I'll grant you, is a bad idea.

[Benito]

Never been allowed to become invested a. A crisis of the financial type at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't though. It was a crisis of a lot of dot coms that went out of business in 2000. But guess what we got out of that. We got incredible infrastructure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But my fu money in the meantime, said F you, Jeff. And well, that's your fault.

[Leo Laporte]

That's your fault, Jeff. I don't have any stock in this. That. That was your mistake.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, I had mutual funds. You know, everything went down for some period of time.

[Benito]

Friends, I'm talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Did it come back?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. But I think there was a great. Could we have done the market tank. Will it come back?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could we have done 2000 smarter? Could we have. You know, the. Another effect it had is it made my industry news say, oh yeah, what a pile of crap. We don't pay attention to any of that. And it gave them an excuse to avoid innovating. That's a huge impact that it had because 2000 was about stupidity.

[Leo Laporte]

They were going out of business anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, there's that.

[Leo Laporte]

I got bad news for him. They were going out of business. You know who else is going out of business? All mainstream media is going out of business.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a good time for mainstream media.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am. Because completely on that line.

[Leo Laporte]

People are making their own media.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We entertain and inform ourselves. We don't like mainstream media. We hated being treated as a mass this last century.

[Leo Laporte]

You might have said my books are all.

[Benito]

And I think that's deeply depressing because we need institutions with editorial standards and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We can do better than the ones we have. Yes, we do. I agree. We do.

[Benito]

I have our casting all current working journalism institutions as bad and failing is wrong and short sighted.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I didn't say bad, just failing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am. I am the institutions. There are good journalists at the New York Times. There are good journalists on the failing.

[Leo Laporte]

Because people can make their own content. We don't need them anymore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The institutions are failing us as a democracy. CNN is failing us as a democracy.

[Benito]

I would push back on the statement. You're like, people may think that what they want is to not have any of these institutions around, but if we exist in a world where there is no like news gathering professionals and it is all just one off creators trying to line their own personal pocket by getting more and more views. That's going to be a terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want more information.

[Benito]

We know, source more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want new institutions. I thought we could reinvent the institutions we had. I thought they could update. That's what I've given up on. No, we need these institutions. That's what I read my books about is that. Is that we create these institutions. After print, we created the institutions of editing and publishing. After the industrialization of media, we created the institution of the magazine. We need these institutions. Absolutely. Paris couldn't agree more. But I don't think that the Ones we have now all in all can be reformed along that line. And there will be chaos. There is chaos in between. But what we need is more places like the information we need more things.

[Leo Laporte]

There'll be people just as there are people like Mr. Beast. There'll be people like Jessica Lesson.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Seriously, you have to put them in the same sentence. Did you have?

[Leo Laporte]

No, there always will be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There'll be both idiots and they'll be good people.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll be idiots and there'll be people who are committed to as far as.

[Benito]

The eye can see.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we only. Honestly, we don't. We just need maybe 1 in 10, you know, 90% can be Mr. Beast. But if 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 or 1 in 50. Well, when you have 100 million people creating Mr.

[Benito]

Beast is such a grim statement.

[Leo Laporte]

No, think of it the other way. You got 100 million people creating content. 90 million of them are morons. 10 million people are Jessica Lessons.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fantastic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have more chaff, but you have far more wheat in the chaff. That's the Internet is how to find it. And those are opportunities. I spoke today to a class last night to a class at Berkeley and I didn't fly there. I did it over the miracle of technology. And that was my point is they kind of said, well how do you find the good stuff? I said, boom, you're in a, in a class to invent new things. That's a business opportunity. That's what Harper's magazine did in 1850. It said there's all kinds of new stuff coming off these steam powered presses. Somebody has to find the good stuff. And they invented Howard Harper's magazine to do that. So there's opportunity in this problem that we have. Not every is more wheat out there, you need help to find it. And algorithms ain't going to do it all for us. And neither is there a mass view that we're going to find the good. That the good stuff is good for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

There's never going to be another Walter Cronkite. There's never going to be another Walter Cronkite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that's the end of the world. But it does make it harder to find that trusted source. Er, Rosner says in our or E. Rosner in our YouTube chat says everybody's trying to line their pockets. Everybody's just wants to is in it for the money. Please. You know that's not true. I think there are a lot of people who are content to make a. I Mean, look, we got to make a living. I got to make a living. I don't need to become a billionaire. I have spent over the 20 years that this network's been around well over $100 million to run the network. It's very costly. I got a few million out of it. I kept a little bit, but most of it went out. And I didn't become a wealthy person to do it. I just wanted to be able to make a living doing it and to have a team of people like you guys who will get paid because everybody needs to pay the rent and go out and buy a caviar hamburger once in a while.

[Benito]

Caviar.

[Leo Laporte]

Chicken.

[Benito]

Beer, please.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chicken nuggets, please.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there are a lot of people in the world for whom that's the case. Now we see unfortunately of some very greedy people in power right now. I mean, I don't know how many billionaires now are in the government. I think it's 18 billionaires followed Trump into government. So there's some very greedy people. I agree. But not everybody's greedy. I think everybody needs to make a living. It doesn't have to always be working in the fields, but I think you could be a journalist or a musician or an artist or a creator. And if you can make enough to survive, to keep your family alive, to put a roof over your head and eat, I think there are a lot of people very happy to do that. Because I think what you underestimate, E. Rosner, is human beings for the most part, want to create, want to express themselves and be left alone. It's the weirdos who want to become billionaires. And I, you know, just take a look at the billionaires and I rest my case.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not in it to be a billionaire, Jeff or Paris. No, no. You want to. You have to make a living. Somebody's got to pay your rent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So we're playing devil's advocate here because this is what we do is discussion. Paris, what's.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold on. Before you play devil's advocate, we're going to pause. This is this week in Google. The last episode, 805 begins a brand new show, Intelligent Machines. Paris will not be here for that. She doesn't want to have anything to.

[Benito]

Do with I don't like New beginnings.

[Leo Laporte]

She'll be here for episode 806. We are working on getting some good people for the show. I have a confirmation that Ray Kurzweil, who coined the term intelligent machines, will be joining us next month. We will be talking, I hope, on this show with creators, people involved in it, philosophers, people who understand the potential and the threat of A.I. you know, we got to get Tim, Nick Gebru on as well. And so that's going to be what the conversation will be. The name will be Intelligent Machines. You don't have to change anything about what you do as a listener or viewer. The feed will stay the same, It'll same time, all of that. Nothing will change. Same shirts, same shirts, name, album, art and music, thank God, will change. That's it. And the content a little bit. Although I have a feeling these conversations will continue. This year's super bowl will be full of AI ads. I'll tell you, the mainstream media is cashing in while they can. $8 million for a 30 second spot. $8 million and yeah, but it's the Chiefs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even I don't know football and I know that's boring.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I watched the NBA and there has been already a lot of AI stuff all over the NBA.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All kinds of things, Benito.

[Paris Martineau]

So the last game I saw, they were using AI to do moving. Moving stills. They. They animated stills with AI it was obviously AI what do you mean moving stills? Like they take a still shot and they animate it like they had the camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Like that Coca Cola ad, which is just a bunch of AI because they can.

[Benito]

To what ends? Like, are they. Are they making someone shooting the basket? Yeah. Is this an ad or stuff like that? Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's not an ad you're saying they're using?

[Paris Martineau]

No, but then I also saw a bunch of ads for like Gentlemen, Gemini and things like that are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, that's what I was asking.

[Paris Martineau]

Heavily advertising on sports.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

My understanding of sports, watching sports today, as someone who has never watched sports, is that all the ads are now either AI or sports gambling. This is true.

[Leo Laporte]

Or cars, by the way, is a pernicious trend. Is the rise of sport gambling and.

[Benito]

The rise of casual gambling. Just the fact that anybody can get into a gambling addiction just by tap it on their phone. Like you used to have to go somewhere at the very least and commit to doing a gamble.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, this is why sports teams and leagues and stuff are so valuable right now. All the new value came from legalized gambling.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me point you to a woman named Denise Coates, the richest woman in Britain. She's the founder and CEO of bet365. She grew up, her dad was a bookie, which is legal in Great Britain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yes, right.

[Leo Laporte]

They had these betting shops and she ran a Betting shop, but saw there was a potential once we go online. She was born in 1967. Her father bought some betting shops under the name Provincial Racing. She went to school, got a degree in econometrics, but then went to work as an accountant. And it's always the accountants who notice the cash flow. She founded a company in 2000, 25 years ago called bet365. And the thing that she did that is going to transform that. Transform betting in Britain is transforming betting. Here is the proposition. Bet the in game. Bet that. Will he make this kick? Will he get 100 yards of rushing in this game? The ability to bet in the middle of the game, not on the victor, but on events in the game. And this is really. I think it's very dangerous to people with gambling problems because it turns everything into a gamble. You know, I mean, that's the. Isn't that the traditional picture of a gambling. Gambling addict? They're betting on everything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that. Is that bird gonna take off to the left or the right off the thing? They're betting on everything. And that's what she did. That's how she became the richest woman in Britain. She's coming to the United States.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Start with the evil of state lotteries. I hate them.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree, too. I was very upset when California approved a lottery. And remember, by the way, that all of this comes from basically support from Las Vegas casino operations. And they're the ones who actually have kept the Indian casinos in California from doing full gaming because they want you to go to Las Vegas if they can possibly get to.

[Paris Martineau]

And they're even getting teams in Vegas now, too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Like for the longest time, forever, they weren't allowed to have teams.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it was kind of like a unspoken thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember what happened to Pete Rose? He bet on baseball and never got into the hall of Fame.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now when you say not allowed to have teams, you mean the city isn't allowed to have teams?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, before, because. That's because there was a time when Vegas was.

[Benito]

When Vegas was the place you could.

[Paris Martineau]

Get, the only place you could get. So they couldn't have a home team or else the gambling would be right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I see. Got it. Thank you. I don't know anything about sports. I don't. Absolutely nothing I've watched. I watched the playoffs because I somehow got into it because all that snow made it fascinating to me.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. It's great to watch them freeze their ass off and then the guys in the stands not wearing a Shirt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What was that?

[Leo Laporte]

They don't. It's just.

[Benito]

They play in snow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. No matter what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Macho men. They can do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. Yeah. I mean, don't get me started on sport gambling. I agree with you 100%. This is. That is. That is the bane of. And then, by the way, there's a lot of concern that. That the NFL makes money, makes quite a bit of money off of this sport, bet advertising and so forth. All right, now, you said you were gonna. You were gonna propose something. Jeff, I just wanted to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was gonna ask her about the end of the conversation, so never mind.

[Leo Laporte]

No amuse bouche. Just to break up the. Okay, there's nothing there.

[Benito]

Oh, I've got something from your show. Oh, notes that we could do as an amuse bouche, please.

[Leo Laporte]

28 line 20.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I knew you'd do that one.

[Benito]

I saw it and I was like, yep, that's me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I picked it for you. It actually was going to be my pick.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's perispate.

[Leo Laporte]

It was paraspate, so it was going to be my pick. We'll do it. Now, this is a website. 17th century death roulette. They took the mortality records from 1665 and they've. They've randomized it. Now you could bet on this.

[Benito]

Well, I just learned that in the week of July 11, 1665, I died from rickets.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's boring. I died from a candle in my bed that set my room on fire. But let's.

[Benito]

Oh. In the week of September 12th, I died of grief.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, in the week of October 17th, I died of tisick, which is coughing and wheezing.

[Benito]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. That's all this does.

[Benito]

I was killed with a cart at the St Giles cripple gate, which sounds.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's bad.

[Benito]

Concerning.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I got rickets too. Must have been a lot of rickets. Yeah.

[Benito]

I also.

[Leo Laporte]

Rick is kind of a thing of the past now that we have vitamin D milk.

[Benito]

In the week of February on. On Valentine's Day, I died of teeth.

[Leo Laporte]

I fell from a scaffold at St Martin in the fields. So these are all real deaths, right?

[Benito]

Yeah. I want to know how someone dies from teeth. Is that like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I died.

[Leo Laporte]

I died.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Surfeit. I died of surfeit. Overeating to the point of vomiting. I win.

[Benito]

That is pretty good. Petro Pepe. I assume they specify.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Too much.

[Leo Laporte]

Catchy. A Pepe. That's bucket.

[Benito]

You know that scene from Syphilis?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. That's the worst scene I can't watch that.

[Benito]

I like. I keep getting the strange ones. I died from frightened on July 11th. They took the scream really literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hey, whatever happened to tick tock? Isn't it funny how we spent so much energy over the last 20 over.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This could come back.

[Benito]

Yeah. It's a 90 day delay. They have to try and find a new buyer for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some horrible corruption is going to occur here.

[Benito]

Yeah. Yeah, actually, because again, it's like Bite Dance has said they're not going to sell the algorithm. So how are you going to operate it without the algorithm or the going to have a licensing agreement for that? Both great questions. There's also, I guess the alternative that Trump could just run out the clock and say the Justice Department doesn't have to enforce it. But that also opens up a number of potential complications. Namely the provision in the law says that the Justice Department, the U.S. attorney General shall enforce it. And I guess shall is like very specific legal wordage where they're like legally compelled to. They can't just say they won't. So someone could, could conceivably sue for them not enforcing it. And again, I think as we've talked about in the show before, an interesting complicating factor of all this is that the laws have very high, the law has a very high penalty, I believe like daily based, if not user, just generally based. And it has a kind of version of like statute of limitations, like up to five years. So even if Trump says poo poo, I'm not going to deal with this at all. If the next president wants to. Companies like Oracle and potentially even Apple or Google, if they bring it back in the app stores, could be on the hook for trillions of dollars in the most conservative estimates, which would be devastating to say the least.

[Leo Laporte]

Perplexity offered to buy it or merge with it and give half to the US government.

[Benito]

We cannot have a US government sponsored TikTok.

[Jeff Jarvis]

TikTok seems like any, any platform for speech. So there's a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a little controversy. A bruin. Google Maps has renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Apple Maps has not. It's still the Gulf of Mexico on Apple Maps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have they done it? Have they actually rename it Google? Yes, because last I looked they hadn't yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they planned to.

[Benito]

Have you updated your app?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

The geographer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm on the web. It still says Gulf of Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, are you not on Google Earth? You're on on Maps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I went to maps.google.com oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Let Me just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You act like I haven't seen this Google thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know how Google works? Let me just see what it is on mine. Oh, yeah, it's still Gulf of Mexico on the, on the app. So they said they were going to rename it because the geographer of the United States or whatever has. Has changed the name the Sharpie of the United States. But they also say. They also say in other countries it may still be the Gulf of Mexico.

[Benito]

Well, Google also internally has sent a directive that they're reclassifying the United States as a quote, sensitive country, a designation that they only have for China and Russia given.

[Leo Laporte]

Sensitive about the place names.

[Benito]

Yes, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doesn't that make us so proud?

[Benito]

Yeah, I just think it's very unfortunate.

[Leo Laporte]

Also saying it's going to change the name of Denali in Alaska to. Back to Mount McKinney.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's really offensive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this is all because Google says, well, it's. We have to. Because we follow what the. You know, what is it? The geography of a geographer of America or whatever. I don't know what that's called.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that true?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a committee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, but is that. Did they really follow that in that way? Or. Or if. I mean, I don't know, it's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Sensitive where their data came from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but the U.S. i don't know.

[Benito]

Interestingly, the. This is from CNBC. Some team members within map divisions were ordered to urgently make changes to location, name and recategorize the US from non sensitive to sensitive. The changes were given as part of a rare P0 order, meaning it had the highest priority level and. Wow. Employees were immediately notified to drop whatever they're doing to work on it. So we can assume this probably came from.

[Leo Laporte]

How hard could that be? Isn't it just a database somewhere?

[Benito]

I mean, I assume it's. There's probably a couple speed bumps to changing the name of places on nationwide maps.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, especially if it's only in the US that has changed. And if the IP address is outside, if you're in Mexico, it still says Gulf of Mexico.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's another factor here, which is the employees. I just put it in the discord. New York Times has a story which I just saw, I hadn't read yet, with tampons and code. Silicon Valley workers quietly protest tech's rightward shift.

[Leo Laporte]

The tampons is because Meta took tampons out of the men's room. Which you might say, well, what was the market for tampons in a men's room? Well, it's for transgender men who still menstruated and so or non binary employees.

[Benito]

Who choose to use a mind choose.

[Leo Laporte]

To use a men's room. Right. So it was seen as a. Is a like a shot across the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bow to protest Mr. Zuckerberg's actions. Some meta workers soon brought their own tampons, pads and liners to the men's bathroom. A group of employees also circulated a petition to save the tampons. I mean, I'm happy for protest within Silicon Valley against this Right word Lurch. And this is a one good topic. But let's have, let's have even more, folks. Yeah, you're running the world. You got more power than you think.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a little sad to see these ostensibly big powerful companies bend the knee. Oh, it, It's. I mean it's economically probably savvy. For instance, if you're Apple, if you're Tim Cook, the threat of 100% tariff against TSMC in Japan or Taiwan is bone chilling. They. That's. The chips that are in all of their devices are made by TSMC in Taiwan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A Google employee.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A Google employee was recently asked to approve an animation of fireworks for the company's search engine to help mark Mr. Trump's inauguration. The employee made it clear in a coding system that they did so reluctantly because it was mandated by Mr. Pichai. Two people with knowledge of the incident said Google denied Mr. Pichai's involvement.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, to play devil's advocate, if they'd asked, I mean, it's kind of traditional to celebrate a new.

[Benito]

No, Google has never.

[Leo Laporte]

They've never done fireworks, never done any.

[Benito]

Specific animation for the inauguration. And specifically, I'm forgetting where this is from, but there was reporting around the time that the reason was every other time this has been brought up internally, Google's like, we don't want to be seen as biased towards a particular administration.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's okay. Now it's okay. Oh, 23andMe. This is actually important story. They have my spit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they do.

[Leo Laporte]

My file. Yeah. So in fact, they were an advertiser, so maybe they have some of your spit too. Dear Listener, 23andMe was the company, of course, run by. Is this Susan or Anne Wojcicki? I can never. I always confuse them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Susan was. The late Susan was a YouTuber, right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. So Ann Wojcicki, her sister, founded the company in 2006. The idea was we're gonna make genetic testing affordable, selling DNA tests to the public. Now, I've since learned that the way that they did this in order to make it affordable, especially back in 2006. They didn't do a full genome. They did a little sample of the genome and then they used statistics to kind of give you the results based on questionnaires of other 23andMe people. However, they did preserve the spit samples, the saliva samples, and they certainly have a lot of information about you. Their financial situation is not great. They reported a loss in 23 of $312 million. Company share price is down 98% in the last four years, is now $4. Hackers breached the systems a couple of years ago, accessing the personal information of 7 million customers. That cost them $30 million in a settlement. Remember, the board left. They resign in September. All seven of the members of the board resign immediately, unhappy with the direction Wojcicki was taking the company. She does. She did control almost exactly half of the voting rights, but she wanted to go private so that she'd have full control of the company. Yesterday, the company announced they're exploring strategic alternatives. In other words, sale Elon Musk is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Going to own your spit and your genome.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the real concern. I mean, there's a privacy concern here. It's often the case that with the sale of the company goes all of the information the company has about you. And I think it would be the case in this situation.

[Paris Martineau]

So that's what someone would be buying, right? They're buying a database.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's all they're getting. They're getting the spit. They're buying the spit.

[Benito]

Can I take us in an entirely different direction for a second?

[Leo Laporte]

Please do.

[Benito]

So while we were talking about Deep Seek earlier, I opened up Deep Seek, put in that tampons article from the New York Times, because that was in the rundown and I hadn't gotten a chance to finish it and asked it to summarize it for me and said highlight any interesting or fun anecdotes and details. Did a pretty good job. But as we were talking about it, I wanted to bring up a detail that was in the story because I'm a good journalist. I went to Control f search for the anecdote in the story before I said it in the podcast. It doesn't exist. It said in all this, it said.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You wanted it, we gave it to you.

[Benito]

And I look so because it described it in a way that seemed real, because it wasn't particularly fun. It says, this is like list number four. In a like 10 part summary of this article, it says fun anecdote one protester shared a humorous story about how a male executive, when confronted with the demand for free tampons, initially suggested employees could just quote, plan ahead, end quote, and bring their own. This comment sparked widespread ridicule on social media, with many pointing out the lack of understanding about menstrual cycles and the impracticality of such a suggestion doesn't exist in the story. So then I go back and ask is the fun anecdote you listed in the story and actually like actually in the New York Times link that I sent you and it says no, the fun anecdote about the male executive suggesting this is not in the actual New York Times article you linked. I included it as a hypothetical example to illustrate the kind of tone or humor that might arise in a story. So sorry, my apologies for any any confusion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me know if you'd like an.

[Benito]

Accurate summary of the actual article. Yeah, deep seek. I'd want an accurate summary, please.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, oh geez.

[Benito]

Although I just thought that was worth highlighting.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I didn't make it completely out of whole cloth because I have seen that actual comment on Reddit. So people do say that. Yeah.

[Benito]

From a meta executive.

[Leo Laporte]

Well no, not from executive, but. But that is kind of the response of a lot of gentlemen is well, just plan ahead and bring your own. They don't understand. Right?

[Benito]

I mean it makes sense. They clearly got it from somewhere. But it has nothing to do with what I was asking it to and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It wasn't from that source.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a BYOT policy in some companies belief.

[Benito]

I mean that's just being a menstruating person in the world I guess is byot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. Interesting.

[Benito]

Always check guys always check. Even with as simple as summarize this with the link.

[Leo Laporte]

They make stuff up.

[Benito]

Do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm using the Google now. I installed it so that this will drive you and your colleagues nuts, Paris. But on every web page I can right click and then summarize this page, the summary like I, I, I strategy. I'm not going to read this whole thing, right? Cory Doctorow's bible. I'm not going to read the whole thing, right? So I asked for and it just says this is about this and this and this and this. So then I try to go further and say well what does it say? It doesn't. It just, it just is. It's the, it's the worst kind of 8th grade book report summary.

[Leo Laporte]

We just need better AIs and if you guys would just allow us to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Create them for some accelerationism.

[Leo Laporte]

Here, just get in the way. Knock it off, dude. I have. I have a personal question to ask you both.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Has nothing to do with.

[Leo Laporte]

Do I have influencer voice?

[Benito]

No, no. You have radio boy voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Fast company. The rise of influencer voice. While the. Why this TikTok creator accent is taking over the Internet and maybe the world. This has actually been a long time coming. It used to be called YouTube voice. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And way back in the day it was 1930s. Broadcaster voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Broadcaster voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The influencer accent isn't new. They write it was around long before TikTok. Linguistic quirks have been emerging on platforms like YouTube and Instagram for over a decade. A few years ago is all about the YouTube voice. Hey, guys, don't forget to subscribe. Hey, guys. But the TikTok, I thought that when they. I saw this article, I thought, are they talking about that synthetic voice? Are people starting to sound like the TikTok synthetic voice? And actually, in a way they are because. Well, I'll play a little TikTok for you. It's uptalk. Right. You're asking everything as a question. Right? Why is it. And so here's a. Here's a influencer or is there this new influencer voice that English influencers specifically. It's not just English.

[Benito]

The other day I went to the.

[Leo Laporte]

Supermarket and I actually bought this eyeliner. And this is the eyeliner I'm using right now.

[Benito]

And it sounds like I'm asking you a question which might be really confusing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually not. I'm just going up at the end of every sentence. I think she's right. Right. This is Cassiette, by the way, on TikTok.

[Benito]

It's sort of like they're keeping you on the edge of your seat. Like it's about to come to a crescendo or like question. But it isn't. So you're kind of leaning in. Leaning. I feel like it's part of. Because if you're scrolling through a lot of videos, if you see someone like, I don't know, I hate watching long videos is why I don't use YouTube. But that if I see someone might be just saying a short sentence that ideally would end in a question, I might be more likely to listen to that and then get tricked into listening.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure it's more. That's why. Right? Yeah, I'm sure that's why.

[Paris Martineau]

I think also because they don't write a lot of what they do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're.

[Paris Martineau]

They're editing in their.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're thinking Doing it.

[Paris Martineau]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're pausing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

As they think of the next thing to say.

[Paris Martineau]

And they don't. And they don't want to write it out. And they don't want to do it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And they don't want to do it again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you watch home TV stuff, Christina on the coast is one of the shows. She does a bathroom remodel commercial, and it is the most extreme uptalk I've ever heard. Every single thing is up. It drives me banana.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it on tv? Yeah, yeah, I've seen. I mean, there's nothing worse than local.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this is. This is national.

[Leo Laporte]

She's really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nationally. Christina on the coast bath commercial.

[Leo Laporte]

According to Fast Company, studies have shown that uptalk successfully grabs our intention, our attention, as it implicitly invites the listener to confirm they are listening. One creator explains, nobody actually talks like that. It's a form of code switching that influencers learn on this app because it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Keeps people watching videos. Influencer action everyone's been talking about sounds like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's designed to manipulate you. You know what I mean?

[Benito]

Hey, guys, this is my dry erase cleaner and surface restorer. Today we're going to clean some whiteboards. Nobody actually talks like that. It's a form of code switching that influencers learn how to do in this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

App because it keeps people watching their videos.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's fair. I'm not going to watch any more of this guy's video. I can tell you that right now. He's right, though. He's right. Okay, so you. So I don't do that radio voice. Is that my voice?

[Benito]

You do radio voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. You do happy radio voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Happy radio voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have a smile in your voice.

[Leo Laporte]

I do. My mom used to say you talk like you're on helium.

[Benito]

You're smiling with your vocal cords.

[Leo Laporte]

Always smiling with my vocal core.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had. When I did TV tryouts, I did multiple times because they, we want a TV critic. Oh, no, we don't. And they would tell. They would tell me, just do that. No, you gotta get the smile in your voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

And you're like, I never smile.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you don't know me.

[Benito]

I think we should bring back the Atlantic accent for tick tock. You know, the mid. Mid Atlantic accent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you want to hear the extreme of uptalk? I just put it in the discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the. Like, this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, this is Christina doing the Jacuzzi bathroom.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is the one you're talking about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, here we go. Jacuzzi bath remodel. Spot, take one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you ready for a fresh new bath or shower? Well, now is the best time. With free installation and no ventilation and no payments.

[Leo Laporte]

One year. Hi, I'm Christina and it's time to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Finish your old, worn out bath or shower.

[Leo Laporte]

Who is she?

[Benito]

This is the most boomer complaint I've ever seen. It hits. It hits. I'm sorry, Jeff. It hits. Complaining about an ad you see on TV and complaining about a woman's voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like, I knew I would get crap for that. And fine, I deserve it. But if you see, I actually watch old tv. I've seen that a hundred, a thousand times.

[Leo Laporte]

What's old tv?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Broadcast tv?

[Leo Laporte]

Any kind of TV is old.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Any kind of tv. My cable tv. Yeah, I actually have a television. Oh, by the way, did you change the subject very quickly? Did you buy a tv, Paris?

[Leo Laporte]

Stay tuned for the answer to that question right after this word from our sponsor. Okay. Did you buy it?

[Benito]

I did. After all, I. I went down a big rabbit hole, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, you didn't just listen to us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had nothing to say. I was not.

[Benito]

Man, I did listen to you. And it really cut off a good 75% of the rabbit hole. But there still was a 25% that remained, and it ruined me specifically. There's just a lot. Like, I was thinking about getting the LG that you recommended, but the LG is so expensive. So I was like, all right, the next best is really like a Samsung. And specifically I want to get the QD OLED as we talked about. But then I was like, all right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I found more expensive, isn't it?

[Benito]

No, the Samsung QD OLED is going to be less expensive. Oh, than the top.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's even better. Oh, but you, you were looking at the top tier LGs you didn't need.

[Benito]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'm gonna spend this amount. I might as well get like a QD oled. Whatever. Okay, well, here's the thing. I went back and forth a lot between the non QD OLED LG and the QD Samsung ended up becoming even more complicated because when I settled on I'm gonna do the Samsung, then I realized that, that the Samsung brand that I was looking at has a weird quirk, which is in the 2024 models, they kind of use a lottery system for the panels. Some intrepid journalists found out where some. At first, it seemed just like random. Some would be just mystery wo leads and then some would be the QD Oli oled. And I was like well I can't do that. I can't end up with a wool that if I pay QD OLED prices. But turns out in the US specifically the 65 inch and the 55 inch are 100% of the time QD OLEDs. So I ended up going with that. But then I was like, well, if I want to do this to get to watch blu rays and 4K UHD discs, then I'm like well the Samsung doesn't have Dolby Vision. Is that something that's a problem?

[Leo Laporte]

I know, right? Listen.

[Paris Martineau]

HDR, who forgot about that?

[Benito]

I know, but it's got HDR 10 plus and people told me that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, but the license, the Dolby.

[Benito]

Yeah, but then I was like well if I'm going to get a, if I'm going to get a PS5 that doesn't have Dolby Vision already, so like, would that be worth it? Then I'm like, well if I'm going to get a PS5, I should really just get a Panasonic UV420, which is. You have a hard life. It really wrecked me. But I made a decision. I bought from Costco. I have a Samsung S90D 65 inch QD OLED coming in on Friday. Some men are going to carry it up into my apartment for me.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to be so happy.

[Benito]

So got a. I picked up a Panasonic UB420 disc player and whatnot which has HDR optimizer 4k scaling.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh you everything you want.

[Benito]

I didn't spend every penny because I could have gotten the insane Panasonic 820 which is like 500, 400.

[Leo Laporte]

But I was stupid.

[Benito]

Listen, I would have gotten it if I got a TV that could do Dolby because that's the only real difference. But I was like, I'm going to save money, get a non Dolby Vision really nice tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Please don't yell at me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you're going to doubt her? You're going to give her buyer's remorse?

[Leo Laporte]

No, actually you got exactly the right thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But Google and Samsung, realizing that this is a problem, have created Project Caviar to replace Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, both of which are licensed from Dolby. They're making a new spec and it was actually announced and shown at CES this year. Project Caviar. Now they call it Eclipsa Audio. It'll be available on this year's the new Samsung models.

[Benito]

Now I mean, frankly, I don't need it that much for the audio. It was more just for the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you still have to buy speakers by the way.

[Benito]

Listen, that's a. That's a problem for future Paris. I could get nice speakers here from Facebook Marketplace in Brooklyn. I just needed to get the TV and the good. The player powered speakers stuff got expensive due to tariffs.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it mounted? Is it mounted or how do you do it?

[Benito]

No, I'm going to put it on my credenza like my current TV is.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's fine, fine. Get a nice. That's perfect.

[Benito]

Yes. And Anthony, he's pointing out he's hundreds of tabs.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't really see the difference in HDR10 and Dolby Vision.

[Benito]

Listen, that's what I finally decided after it. I was like, I can't spend like 6, 700 more just for Dolby Vision. That's dumb because it would be then like I'd have to spend more.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd never notice the difference.

[Benito]

Yeah, I'd never notice. Especially coming from my crap tv. Now literally anything I was purchasing is going to be better.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever seen you have to.

[Paris Martineau]

Buy specifically Dolby Vision media to use it?

[Benito]

Listen. Yeah, God, do I know. I bought so many. I've bought so many V Blu Ray discs and UHD discs though in the last couple days and I'm really excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how exciting. So what do you tell us what you bought? What? What movies?

[Benito]

Well, my first purchase was I like the reason why I decided to do this. I wanted to get a copy of Wild at Heart so that I could see it in a non terrible archive is way. So I have that coming. Which is specifically the collector's edition that has a bunch of deleted scenes that I'm. I'm just excited about the idea of. I've never been able to watch like commentary tracks or deleted scenes from my media and I miss that. Yeah. So what else? Did I have it here on my list somewhere?

[Paris Martineau]

Criterion stuff. Buy Criterion stuff.

[Benito]

I mean I'm waiting until the Criterion sale. I'm a Criterion member and they usually do a sale at some point, so I will. I've gotten Adaptation, which I love on Ultra High Def. Vampire's Kiss, Asteroid City, which is my favorite Wes Anderson movie. I got Face off specifically this collector's edition from a group called.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, these are expensive. They're all Wild at Heart collector's edition is $80.

[Benito]

I got mine I think for like 25. It's because all David lynch discs right now are sold out because he just died. And so I got the wild at heart one off eBay for I think 25 smart.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope it's not, you know, that Japanese. You do know about region encoding.

[Benito]

God do I. I've learned so much. I've learned so much that I wish to not know.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to be careful with disks. The first time you use your player it will say what region you're in and you can, you can get away with not telling it for a while, which means you can, can watch discs from any region. But at some point it's going to get region locked. You're going to have to. Oh yeah, yeah.

[Benito]

There's like supposedly some hacks to use this Panasonic thing to get around that there may be a region free like I today bought. There's been this movie I've been trying.

[Leo Laporte]

To see, probably only with new ones.

[Benito]

My like local theater called Dead Mountaineers Hotel. It's like an old Estonian cult film that isn't available for streaming anywhere. But I haven't been able to catch it in theaters and tomorrow is the last showing and I'm not going to make it. So I ordered a copy of it in a limited edition media book, region free with English subtitles that's coming in this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think Wild at Heart is worth, you know, buying a whole new TV DVD player?

[Benito]

It is. I mean I also have just been a. I'm being facetious but I have been watching a lot of movies at home film lately and the last year and a half has been really me getting into cinema more. And part of, I don't know, I was like sitting there watching some movies the other week. I was like, I was also playing some YouTube videos on my computer to my TV and I was looking at my computer screen. I was like, God, this is like 25 times better than my, my TV screen right now. I need to be looking at the movie. I was like, I need to be looking at the movies correctly. Yeah, I'm gonna get a non terrible TV. Like I think the TV I got was like $300 new eight years ago. So I'm like, if I'm going to buy a new TV I might as well get one that I'm going to keep for the next decade as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this will, this will, this will hold you in good stead. I still have the LG OLED I bought eight or nine years ago and it's just as good. It's.

[Benito]

And also it was a good time to buy because they have. I'm sure as you guys know, I didn't know this. The TVs historically one of the like, like lowest times for prices is right before the Super Bowl. Yes. Because this is also when they start to release the new TVs. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Benito]

I was on Artings. Or is it ratings is good.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's a good place to go. Yeah. Yes, we. This. So we have a show with Scott Wilkinson called Home Theater Geeks.

[Benito]

But I've been told I can't go in there because it's way too intense.

[Leo Laporte]

Our things or.

[Benito]

No, no. Home Theater Geeks. I've been told it's gonna be someone starting from zero. I can't. I can't go there yet.

[Paris Martineau]

You do need an audio setup though. It's something you're gonna listen.

[Benito]

I know. Listen. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Just remember this audio engine. Look for audio engine. They're powered speakers. So you don't need a. Oh, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, she's gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

But what about the DVD player?

[Paris Martineau]

No, she can just output the audio from the.

[Leo Laporte]

From the tv.

[Benito]

Yeah, the DVD player has like its own audio stuff as well and like.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, but you need a speakers.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but it needs to follow the impact you have on the T. TV.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you got to go through the TV. My. Our big TV is 20 years old and well, and my wife's just not going to go for how do you live? I know.

[Benito]

Well, he doesn't need to have that tvc.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeez, that's true. MSNBC looks just as bad everywhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I gave a talk to Sony and as payment I got a TV.

[Benito]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that was nice.

[Leo Laporte]

20 years ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

20 years ago.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, but was it like the best.

[Benito]

How big of a TV tube tv.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, hey. No, it's. It's actually replaced another. Not thin, but another flat TV that we had before that they had flat.

[Leo Laporte]

Screen 20 years ago.

[Benito]

I will say it's crazy to me how. How small the TVs are now. I mean, I don't even have that old of a.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you see the one you got.

[Benito]

I was like, whoa, it's so tiny.

[Leo Laporte]

It's paper thin. The one you got.

[Benito]

I know. I went to go see it in the Best Buy when I picked up my.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

Blu Ray player. Yeah, I had. I had to search that Best Buy to find the dusty old shelf where they were selling three Blu Ray players.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There. It's not a big market now. Everybody watches on streaming. But video files, C files agree. The best quality is always going to be the physical media. So you're. You're good.

[Benito]

Oh, while we're in the tech recommendations corner, something I've asked you guys about before, but I've forgotten what. What drive should I get for the backups of my computer? Like a time machine compatible drive? My. Yeah, I know, but like.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was the question.

[Leo Laporte]

I was. It was.

[Benito]

Oh, it's a Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a Mac.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Enough up talk. It's a Mac for her generation. You have to really turn on the uptalk.

[Benito]

It is a Mac. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That doesn't matter.

[Benito]

I've killed my last two because I think, as we learned last time I asked you about this, I now know I can't just unplug it willy nilly. I have to actually eject it.

[Leo Laporte]

Which Mac? What Mac? Is it an M1? Mac? M2? Mac?

[Benito]

It's an M2. That's a great question.

[Leo Laporte]

How big? Yeah, you need to get external drive that's ideally twice as big as the internal drive.

[Paris Martineau]

If you have a 512, get a one terabyte and they're cheap.

[Benito]

I have like a 500 gigabyte. But what brand should I get? Does that matter?

[Leo Laporte]

Seagate is fine. SanDisk is fine. Hey, you know, if you want to get one that is Mac focused, go to Macsales.com Otherworld Computing. They're a little more expensive, but they will be kind of Mackie Mackish. Let's see what they've got here. Paris posted about you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Benito]

No, did I post about you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, you did. I put it in the discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Where did you post on the information? No.

[Benito]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, by the way, I want to apologize. Blue Sky's pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Huh. Yeah, it is, it is great.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's. It's very much now like old Twitter.

[Benito]

I would say it is like old Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They've. They finally crossed that bridge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So can I, Can I. Since you're on that, can I extend the discussion last week about Mastodon if you go down to line 162.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Benito]

Making the Mastodon fans mad. We love you, master.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, this is. I love you. I love you guys. I love this guy. But this is going to be my example of what I refer to as scoldy Mastodon. This very nice person who I like, it was wonderful. I have nothing against, but he came after me and said, well, we do agree with your point of view of media critic. It's obvious you set a link to a reference. What the Fediverse is basically asking you guys of the Journalism Guild is to simply add the tag paywall.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. Why wouldn't you do that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's too much work.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's okay. That is a good thing to say, because what happens is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this. I knew Leo was going to yell at me, and this is why I put it here. It's only respectful with your readers and followers. It even protects them. Because every time that we visit a site, we get cookied and classified like you don't know. The New York Times is paywalled. And so every single time I put up something paywalled, I've got to say paywall.

[Benito]

And that uses characters also.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We do have our culture, our way of being, and our position about paywalls is quite clear in that regard. He gets to speak for all of Mastodon forever. And anybody knew who comes in can't have a different view of this. This is why people come here.

[Leo Laporte]

That's called a culture. And the people on Massachusetts change preserve their culture.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Culture change.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's a very. There's a very good reason for hashtag paywall, because people click on links and run up against a paywall and they can't read it. You wasted their time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it's the New York Times I'm talking about. If they don't know by this point, the New York Times has a paywall. Every major news site has a paywall. Every single time a media critic.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to say, on the behalf of the entire Mastodon and Fediverse community, you're not welcome.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you see, that's the problem. That's exactly what happened to black Twitter. Black Twitter came in, Jonathan Flowers, a professor, and said, well, Musk has taken over Twitter. We do need someplace. And then you had people coming, well, no, no, no, you can't do this, you can't do that, because it doesn't meet our culture. When he said back, well, you don't care about my experience. You don't care about expanding and more.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would you not want to put in hashtag page?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a pain in the ass.

[Benito]

Too many hashtags. If you got more than two hashtags on a post, consider your reader.

[Leo Laporte]

Consider your reader.

[Benito]

Here's. I've got a solution.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm on Blue sky and I'm happy. This is what I BL has this.

[Benito]

Thing called like labelers where I. I've only seen it used in terms of like accounts. Like, you could subscribe to a labeler and it would label. If an account is like, like an associated member of the press or something like that, it would display a little thing. But they should have a version of that where if Somebody wants to subscribe to a labeler, that doesn't mean you have to pay money, you just have to sign up for it. That will label every link in your feed as paywall or not based on a list of what sites. Then go for it. Do that. I don't think that it should be every poster's prerogative with the demands of every individual user who they're supposed to come across. Sorry, I should have said who their toots could come across. I should respect what I'm talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

You probably hate putting in text descriptions of images as well on the out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I do it. I do it. I. I especially, I put up a lot of headlines and stuff. So for Blue sky and Masterdom, which the two places that demanded I do a cut and paste of the headline text in 99.9 of the cases, unless I'm on my phone and walking the other.

[Leo Laporte]

The one thing I don't really don't like about about Blue sky, and this is actually an argument against quote tweets, is there's way too much like retweeting or what do you call it? Reskating. Like I'll see the same post 10 times. That's not a pleasant experience for people, right? Do you have that experience? You see the same post again and again and again. Because everybody I follow is decided that that's worth re skating.

[Benito]

I don't, but it could also be. If you're looking at just your following tab versus like Discover or different feeds, then you're going to be seeing chronological like Skeets. So whatever posts come like someone is re like tweeting or whatever are going to come across your feed in chronological order. If you use a different feed, I have like 12 that I look at. You're not going to get those same sort of mistakes. And if you are, you can always create your own feed to weed that out. So I will also say as an addendum, Blue sky does have a labeler called Identify paywall links that if that person they could add it would be solved for them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me be clear here. Let me be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Before you do, I just want to point out there is a setting. Since I brought this up and I'm not sure it works, but I think what I did was I turned off reposts and I turned off quote posts, which you can do, which is very nice in Blue sky, and I think that will cut back on the number of repeats I get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to be very clear here to Utopia Arti. I'm using this only as an example, I'm delighted you're reading my post. I appreciate the discussion. I understand the culture. We disagree and. But please take no offense at me being a smart ass. Thank you. Just add that what I do.

[Leo Laporte]

How hard?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because no, no, no.

[Benito]

If I. I will say I would judge Jeff. If I saw him tweeting or tooting or skating things with more than one hashtag, I would be like, that's, by the way, ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

To be fair, I have a Twit News Mastodon account that whenever I bookmark something for the shows, which I do, you know, pretty much every day, all day, every day, it just retweets it. It doesn't have paywall. So I put in a lot of Mastodon posts that do not have. I've never written hashtag paywall.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put stuff up on the four socials and I don't use your platform because in each one, if I'm tagging somebody, I'll go to the trouble to get the right tag for the right person in the right platform, right? And so I can't do it across all of them. And usually what it means in Mastodon is I take out the tag because most of the people I'm talking about, you know, don't have Mastodon accounts. So I go to a lot of effort to do this as is. And I'm squeezing things for the other platforms. I'm squeezing things down to fit. So. No, I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Mastodon has a. I think it's 512 characters on my mastodon. And some mastodons have unlimited characters, so there's plenty of space for you to put those in. Here from the Daily Star, which is a British tabloid, the headline of the week, billionaire Tech Bros in turmoil as Cheap New Chinese AI makes rivals look like Proper thickos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gotta love. There'll always be a Britain.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good headline.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, read the rest. Read the. Read the.

[Leo Laporte]

Read the Wood War of the psycho scumbag chat bots. Is that the Wood?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the Wood.

[Benito]

Is that the wood?

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Wood?

[Benito]

How.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, the Wood is any headline that's too big for in the old days, the lead type machine to turn out. So you used wood type.

[Leo Laporte]

Put a big headline in W o O so that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bring out the wood, man. It was a big news story.

[Leo Laporte]

A Poundland new AI from China has given Tech Bros. A real kicking and wiped millions and millions off the value of their stocks. How sad. Oh, dear. How sad. Never mind.

[Benito]

So headless body found in topless bar was a Wood.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the Greatest headline ever written, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is the greatest headline ever written. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it the Post Post?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Benito]

Yes, of course.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I think everything the Post does is wood.

[Benito]

The Post is the one place that I still conceive of in my head as groups full of cigar smoking people in a conference room. Whenever I think of people coming up with the New York Post had like front cover headline, or I guess the Wood. That's exactly what I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Conference room is a little too posh, I would say, for that kind of newsroom now. In fact, I worked in that building when I was a TV Guide. And so it was just a plain office building, but in the old days. No, it was. It was. It was. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it a fishbowl?

[Benito]

I'm sorry, it's not a wood. It was in the proper headline place. It wasn't on the photo. So I think that would just make it a normal head, not a wood. Headless body and topless bar. Just correcting the record.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And do you remember what the story was about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had this body was found in a topless bar.

[Leo Laporte]

What's.

[Paris Martineau]

What's the.

[Benito]

What's the problem, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it says it all.

[Benito]

Gunman forces woman to decapitate tavernos. Owner. Oh my dingle, Charles Dingle is the man convicted of fatally shooting the owner of a topless bar and then forcing a hostage to decapitate him in April 12th. I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a reenactment? Oh, no, that's it. This is an ad. That's a theatrical poster. Poster.

[Benito]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

This isn't. This isn't. This isn't. This is not the.

[Benito]

Okay, wait, I corrected.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, here it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Here it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the wood.

[Benito]

It is the wood.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the wood.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the wood.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

And what makes the wood different than a headline?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because. Because. Because it's still a headline. But. But the Ludlow machine set the liner type, set body type, and up to a certain point size. Bigger than that, you use the Ludlow machine, which set a line at a time in lead that can only go so big. If you wanted a big headline, you literally put in wood type.

[Paris Martineau]

It's literally font size. So like once you. Once you reach a threshold, you need the wood.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a title in here somewhere. There's a wood figure out where it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's probably obscene.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know it's obscene. It's definitely double entendre.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You missed last week's cause and effect. That would have been a good one. But.

[Leo Laporte]

What was it last?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not going back there. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you don't want me to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You definitely don't want me to laugh, which made me.

[Leo Laporte]

What else? Now you've. Now you've gotten me in trouble with everybody on Mastodon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who else can we piss off?

[Leo Laporte]

By the way? If you do want to join the best social network, Twit runs its own Mastodon instance. Free to all at Twit Social, the only thing I ask, we'll have to approve your membership is just mention that you heard it on the show. So I know you're a listener. We get. It's amazing how many scammers and spammers try to get through, which is why I have to approve it. Yeah, yeah. It's just, I think, a condition of all social networks now. What I do on both that and our forums, the discourse forums at Twitter Community, is I just ask you, what's your favorite show? Or something like that. And that way I'll know if you leave it blank or as the spammers do, just type a bunch of random stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does it cost to AI Is.

[Paris Martineau]

Going to be your test here pretty soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Soon, maybe. Maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't care that much to really spend that much time at it. You know, they're trying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does it cost to host the Mastodon these days?

[Leo Laporte]

The master. And I think 300 bucks a month for my mastodon, because at one, it used to be. It used to be a lot less. I think I was paying $5 a month. And then Elon bought Twitter and we had this mass exodus and I had to buy. I really had to buy up to get enough bandwidth. I could probably cut back now quite a bit. It's not as active as it was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the guy's name who runs that company?

[Leo Laporte]

The. The hosting service? Yeah, it's a French hosting service.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, It's a nice guy.

[Leo Laporte]

He's very wonderful. And I have this. I. I bought the top of the line hosting. That's why it's that expensive. It's about the same as our discourse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're worth it, Leo. Worth the top of the line?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it comes out of my pocket, but that's okay because I really want to run these two and I don't want to make them paywalled because then I'd have to put paywall everywhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well done, Leo. Well done.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. CoryDoctorow says it's not a crime if we do it in an app. Kind of an interesting piece in which he talks about. He says, for instance, it's not an unlicensed taxi if we do it with an Apple app. It's not an illegal hotel room if we do it with an app, it's not an unregistered security. If we do it with an app, it's not wage theft if we do it with an app. It's a good article. It's a good piece. What it comes down to really is an explanation of why inflation is so intractable. Because he says pretty much every packaged good in your grocery store is made by one of two companies, Unilever and Procter & Gamble. Both CEOs boasted to their investors about their above inflation price increases. He says there are cartels everywhere it may seem. For instance, your grocer's egg department is filled with many different companies products. In reality, a single company, Cal Main Foods, owns practically every brand of eggs in the case. Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow Egg, Lands Best and Land O Lakes. And they made record profits. And their CFO says, why? Because of significantly higher selling prices and our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures. Good piece. As something to be aware of. Four companies, Lamb Weston JR. Simplo, McCain Foods and Cavendish Farms have captured the frozen potato market. Fries, everything, Tater Tots, everything. These companies have been hiking prices for years. But after Covid, one of the one of. So he talks to a owner of a D.C. sports bar, Ivy and Coney, who charged $3 for fries 10 years ago. Now it's six, $6. And he's still making less money because all of their potatoes come from Big Potato.

[Benito]

Big Spud.

[Leo Laporte]

Big Potato, Big Spud.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Big spud controls 97% of the frozen potato market. 97%. And they basically act as a cartel. They fix prices. They do it subtly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does this have to do with apps?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good question.

[Benito]

They're going to put potatoes in the blockchain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeff, I started reading down and I was trying to figure out, okay, what's the app thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, he says this is price fixing. But they do it with an app because they use an app called Potato Track. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data. Supply costs, pricing, sales figures. Excuse me, to Potato Track. Then Potato Track uses the data to give advice to cartel members about optimal pricing. In other words, so they don't have to get together and say, well, I think we should charge five bucks for this. They use Potato Track and a Lamb Weston exec, Corey Quotes described the arrangement as, quote, everyone behaving themselves. Chortling that they'd never seen, quote, never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry, all because of potato track. There's a data broker called.

[Paris Martineau]

This is why I hate people talking about inflation when it's not what's happening, it's brother, Amen.

[Leo Laporte]

A data broker called Agristats works with America's largest meat packers doing the same thing. They collate all the data and suggest an appropriate price, allowing the meat packers to raise prices in lockstep. Four firms control nearly 80% of the almond milk market. Three companies control 83% of the canned tuna market. Four companies control more than 86% of the microwave popcorn market. And he also mentions, and you're probably aware of this as a renter, Paris RealPage, which is an app that lets corporate landlords who've bought up a sizable fraction of all the available homes in America collude to raise rents. Private equity companies have rolled up all the fire truck companies, hiking the price of fire trucks. This is price fixing through the back door, basically. Through an app, is his point. Now, it's not technically an app necessarily. It's a database. What he means, what he's saying is if you do it but through a computer, you can say, oh, we didn't collude, your honor. We just. The computer told us to do it.

[Paris Martineau]

We're just all agreeing with the computer. What's wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're just all agreeing with the computer. Inflation has lots of causes. Cory writes, it's true. But when an industry is consolidated enough to take advantage of a data brokerage or just engage in tacit collusion, any source of inflation, war, disease, weather, allows whole sectors to raise prices together and keep them high long after the shock has passed. Good piece. It's not a crime. If we do it with an app, make app be a computer, and I think then it all kind of makes sense. And it is. Big potato. There it is, there's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It doesn't really have a lot to do with a computer. It's just.

[Leo Laporte]

It does in the sense that price fix it. It's. But it's price fixing done at arm's length because now you have. Have databases, you have Internet, you have computational abilities. That AI will make it even better. Right. And you have deniability. Yeah, well, we didn't do anything. We just gave our data to potato track.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was always very proud of my father, that he was. When he worked for IRC International Resistance Corp, which made Resistors, he found himself in a. What turned out to be a price fixing meeting and he stood up and said this is illegal and I can't be part of it. And he walked out.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for him. Yeah, good for him. And as a result, he cornered the resistor market. Yes, with the cheapest resistors in the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got free resistors to make my number one award winning 8th grade science fair project. Electronic bongos.

[Leo Laporte]

You should have stuck with it, Jeff. You should be a billionaire.

[Benito]

A bongo billionaire.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, I could be.

[Leo Laporte]

Get ready because the ieee the Internet. I'm sorry, the Internet Engineering Task Force has a standard called L4S. It's open standard that helps reduce latency in Internet networks. Comcast says it's about to adopt it and the first wave of supported applications includes selected Games from Steam, GeForce, now selected apps on headsets from Meta and FaceTime on Apple hardware, ultra low lag Internet on Xfinity. But again, this is an open standard that any ISP could adopt. Comcast fully has. Once Comcast has fully rolled out the low lag option and it'll be available to all Xfinity customers then. But they're going to start with Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, Rockville and San Francisco. I'm hoping that we will get the benefit of that because that would actually help us. I'm on Xfinity, I'm on Comcast business to do these shows and it might make a big difference. Comcast said in its release it plans to deploy additional locations in the coming months. So get ready for ultra low lag Internet connections.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So explain that a little bit to me. Like how laggy is mine. How do we know.

[Leo Laporte]

Those? Okay, this is how Engadget describes it. If a packet traveling between your device and the server experiences congestion, it reports, hey, it's congested which then can improve future packets journeys. It adapts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the civilized packet thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. L4S architecture enables Internet applications to achieve low queuing latency, low congestion loss and scalable throughput control. Not just this, by the way, that helps gaming, but it really also helps what we're doing right now, which is a Zoom call. L4S is based on the insight. This is from The IEEE paper RFC9330.L4S is based on the insight that the root cause of queuing delay is the capacity seeking congestion controllers of senders. Is the capacity seeking congestion controllers of senders not in the queue itself. With the L4S architecture all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

It gets clear in a second. All Internet applications could but do not have to transition away from congestion control algorithms that Cause substantial queuing delay. Instead, document adopt a new class of congestion controls that can seek capacity with very little queuing. It's called Explicit Congestion Notification. I've got the congested here. So this is a new open standard from the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, published January of 2023. This is how long it takes for this stuff to percolate through to your Internet service provider. But I think if Comcast starts doing it, it's likely that others will. They are the biggest ISP in the United States. Okay, your turn. Yes. Give me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to give you a heartwarming, wonderful TikTok story. Have you heard of Hillman Talk? College or University?

[Leo Laporte]

Hillman, I think I've heard of. Yeah. Is it a hbcu?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this is a brand new thing. So if you go down to line. Oh, hell no, I lost it. Line 115. This is an honest to God real professor named Dr. Barlow who makes a video only intended for her students in her class. Oh, no, not that one. The one that's not Dr. Barlow. I want Dr. Barlow. I want one.

[Leo Laporte]

I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's one up 15.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Benito]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Introduction to African American Studies for the spring semester. My name is Dr. Leah Barlow. It is cold outside, but I really wanted to quickly get on and just show my face, introduce myself.

[Leo Laporte]

So she does those. She does tick tocks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. She just wants to do a welcome video for her class. A lot of professors do that. And she's trying to say, here's where the syllabus is and blah, blah, blah, nice people, people across all of TikTok immediately watch this and say, I want to be in your class. And they think they could be in her class. All right, well, she was just doing it for her class and she was blown away by this response and didn't know what to do with it. Well, what's happened now is that people have created Hillman Talk College. And their last count, there like 50 courses that professors are offering, all for black Americans. It's not for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's really cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So watch this.

[Benito]

92% say they mind in their own business. Dr. Barlo posts her video about African American studies, and it's just for her students because we're starved for community. And when black women tell us to do something, we listen. We all enrolled. Dr. Barlow was like, this ain't for y'all. This is for my 30 students.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, she is not up talking or vocal frying. I like it.

[Benito]

I don't know all 400,000 of you, but thank you for coming, I guess. And we were like, no, ma'am, we are staying. And other professors were like, no, no, come on, I'll teach you, too. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

So how are they distributing the classes? Are they doing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So they're on Tick Tock, and if you. If you. I don't know if it's a hashtag or not. I put the next line down as a search. And if you go there, you're going.

[Benito]

To find hillmantalk University at Tick Tock.

[Leo Laporte]

That's wild.

[Benito]

They also have a website, Hillman Talk. Hbcu.

[Leo Laporte]

What? That's incredible. It is so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

You're obviously not going to get college credit for this, but you're going to get a college education.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People who want to say, right now, I need community and I want uplift and I want education. And it's being shot down everywhere else.

[Benito]

On their website, they have a course list. It's got AG101, plant basics and gardening education, black homesteading 101, AI for creatives, drawing 101, like agile, project management Talk, Braiding for Beginners.

[Leo Laporte]

See, when people say, oh, yeah, Tick Tock is Chinese, you know, invasion and no. Yeah. But it also has empowered. Amazing stuff. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he said it's grassroots. It comes up from people wanting to do this and wanting to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, also, it's where. It's where the people are, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So you could do this anywhere. You could even do it on Mastodon. But.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But no, they'd be. They'd be scolding because you don't put in the.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be smart to do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it on the final or.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be smart to do it on something decentralized, not owned by anybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, fair enough. But this is where the people were.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially the Chinese government. But it's where the people are. And that's where Dr. Barlow was. Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Dr. Barlow is continuing and she's doing more and she has a syllabus up. And so she had the first reading and people were reacting in the comments and she was responding to many of them. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

It's a career counselor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. What? What?

[Benito]

You got multiple TAs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the URL?

[Benito]

Hillman Talk. Hbcu.com the spring of 2025 Leadership 102.

[Leo Laporte]

Professor Deborah I love this idea. What a great idea. I mean, this is kind of what Khan Academy was, and I'll put it in discord.

[Benito]

Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeff, thank you. I'm just I'm just, I'm typing bad. I'm thinking about taking my.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, because it is on Tik Tok. It's going to be diluted and there's going to be stitches and there's negative. How do you. I mean, what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, because you're signing up for somebody you trust in a class and that person is saying, I'm going to give you this class. And you go, you go to that person.

[Leo Laporte]

You follow their tele.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Person and their class.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So let's see if we can find the course catalog block.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like there are better ways to do this, but. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where the people are.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand.

[Benito]

Pretty fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is fun. It is a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a really. It's a perfect example of. Oh, they did it on notion. That's cute. It's a good example of. Of why we love Tik Tok.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the syllabus or the. No, this is the catalog. Look at agriculture, arts, business, computers, benevolent AI 101. Cosmetology, culinary arts, education, electives, gardening. Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Brand building, Learning how to do your own hair.

[Leo Laporte]

Exploring spirituality through Tech, Cyber Security 101.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fashion History 101.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. And so what it has is the TikTok account of the professor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And if you go pick cyber security and go to that.

[Leo Laporte]

That one and see, let's see, I'll copy this and I'll go to Tikatak. I mean it, I mean it does feel kind of inefficient though, right? I mean.

[Benito]

Oh, it's definitely. I mean it's just a course catalog. It's a catalog of people create. Creating. Tick tocks. Certain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And it won't last forever, but it doesn't need to. People feel good.

[Benito]

I just think it's. It's a fun little thing that people do online and I like that. Good for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Wherever you are and what time, whatever time you're going to see this video.

[Benito]

As promised, class starts tomorrow and I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know what's so cool is these professors who jumped on it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Said, okay, you want it, you got it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. Poor real Dr. Barlo just didn't know what had hit her, I bet.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Teachers want to teach people who want to learn.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's all they want.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the answer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amen, brother. Amen.

[Leo Laporte]

The position that E. Rosner said. Well, everybody just wants to get rich and everybody's in it for the money. No, there's clearly no money in Hillman talk.

[Benito]

Well, I mean, there's money for. For the creators who are making these videos that go viral because they get paid out by the Tick Tock creator.

[Leo Laporte]

Tick Tock doesn't pay out crap. Oh, you kidding me?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked Henry. I said, how much does money do you get from Tick Tock? He said, well, the advertisers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I said, no, from Tick Tock. He said, I've never got any money from Tick Tock.

[Paris Martineau]

But that's good, right? They should.

[Leo Laporte]

Hillman, maybe. Yeah.

[Benito]

Or.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And you know, these professors are probably being paid by Hillman, so they don't. Again, they don't have to worry about a roof over their heads, but they're still doing extra because they care about what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no Hillman. No Hillman.

[Benito]

No. Hillman isn't a school.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No Tick Tock.

[Benito]

Hillman Talk is the name of the fake Tick Tock University.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, where was Dr. Barlow teaching?

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was at another university. She's a real university. She was teaching that university.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought Hillman was a school.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, it's all made up.

[Leo Laporte]

But these people are all really professors. I mean, there is a risk if these people are just off the street.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hillman College was a women's college in Clinton, Mississippi that existed between 1853 and 1942.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was originally named the Central Female Institute and renamed Hillman College in 1891. Organized by the Central Baptist association, remains in operation.

[Leo Laporte]

Say where she's teaching this for real?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm guessing then it's from the fictional college that Dr. Cosby went to.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that he went to what was then. But maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe. Kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is why I thought Hillman was an hbcu. I was confusing it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it is an hbcu.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. You started a movement. You started a movement. That's so cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm trying to see if it says where she is at a professor. Because she's good.

[Benito]

Trying to find that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's all right. So she. So, yeah. I mean. But this is the problem is that anybody can now create a course in Hillman Talk. They may or may not know what they're talking about. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But then you choose.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's true. That's true of everything on the Internet. You don't. You'd have to figure out who's knows what they're doing. 1. Who is Philip Low.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Philip Lowe is a. I put that in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he a friend of Elon Musk's? He's known Elon Musk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's. He'll explain first he's he's at Neuro. Virgil Neuro Vigil Inc. And Elon was on his board. So that's the context here.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it was. It was Yan Leon who linked to this on Facebook is how I discovered it.

[Leo Laporte]

He says Elon's not a Nazi per se. There was a very damning Guardian piece about the South African mafia that founded PayPal. Peter Teal, Elon Musk, David Sacks, all of whom were really grew up in apartheid South Africa with fairly racist education.

[Paris Martineau]

All directly benefited from South American apartheid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they benefited from apartheid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

South African.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, not American, but South African. He is something much better. Not a Nazi. Something much better or much worse, depending how you look at it. Nazis believe that an entire race was above everyone else. Elon believes he is above everyone else. Well, so do I. So doesn't everybody think in their heart of hearts they're maybe a little better than everybody else? No, no, just me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just you.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon, he used to think he worked on the most important problems. When I met him, he did not presume to be a technical person.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is telling.

[Leo Laporte]

He would be the first to say he lacked the expertise to understand certain data that happened later. Now he acts as if he has all the solutions. Well, you know, this is kind of what this is a kind of little poison pen post. I don't know know well, but it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Telling that he acts like he's the most brilliant technologist on Earth.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I saw another article piece, or maybe it was a skeet by somebody who said, you know, when Elon started Tesla, I didn't know anything about EVs. I was very impressed. When he started SpaceX, I didn't know anything about space. I was very impressed. But when he started talking about coding, I'm a coder and I saw what he thought was real. He says these foolish bs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Remember when he made people print out their code and bring it to Twitter?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He doesn't know anything about coding is what this coder said. So now I'm susp. Now it's suspect, all this other stuff. Yeah. I sincerely think Elon was the precipitating source for the OPM letter to all million government employees saying, you got till February 6 to quit, take a nice big payout out. Otherwise you had the same header.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the email that Leo, that Leon Elon sent when he got to Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Benito]

And to be clear, even though at opm, to be clear, even though the, I feel like common description of that email, which is ascended, was that it was kind of a Twitter style. Quit now and you can get eight months of severance.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Benito]

The realities of what was being offered was if you agree to resign in September, between now and September, you can still work remotely. It was not. That was the real sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't. And did you say it's been rescinded now?

[Benito]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, has that been rescinded?

[Benito]

I thought, I thought so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There were so many different letters.

[Leo Laporte]

It's getting a little chaotic in here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was. What was rescinded was the loans. There was some of the aid stuff. Yeah, but again, that wasn't.

[Benito]

Freeze was rescinded.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The deferred resignation offer. Yeah. There's no. I mean, first of all, they don't work for the opm. The OPM doesn't have a standing to make that offer. Second of all, it's not funded, as members of Congress pointed out. I don't know where that money's coming from. So we'll see. We'll see. It's just, I think there's a little bit of chaos here going on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chaos. Monkeys. Anything else? One man's attempt to ask. Oh, no, I don't want to do that one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to know what that was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's. The only reason I want to do it is because we did it already on MacBreak weekly yesterday because it was a Mac story about Siri being stupid. But who cares?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just Paris trying to bring you down to earth.

[Benito]

I just think it's important when we're talking about how AI is so transformative to also highlight the areas where it's dumb as rocks.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. Don't. Don't conflate Siri and AI.

[Benito]

It's Apple Intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it isn't. It's Siri and it's Siri.

[Benito]

Well, the thing is, if you, you know, if you read both the one foot Tsunami and during Fireball, they did test between both the Apple intelligent powered Siri and previous Siri and at least previous Apple pre Apple Intelligence, Siri was able to say, I don't know, let's search the Web. And then searched and brought up Siri's default answer.

[Leo Laporte]

Always was. Here's what I found on the web about that. When it couldn't answer.

[Benito]

But that was more accurate than all the gobbledygook that it's making once it was imbued with whatever Apple Intelligence which is ostensibly powered by ChatGPT. But ChatGPT gets this, right? So it's I'm just wondering, to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Clear, it's not powered by ChatGPT. It will go out to ChatGPT as it does offer to do at one point, but it's in fact Apple's own first thing. Siri, I think is always on device. So it's Apple's own models on device. And that's why it's terrible. It knows nothing. It's just a tiny little model running on your phone. It does if it has to go out to Apple servers running Apple's own models, Apple has their own model models. And then if failing that, it can't answer it, it then says, do you want me to use Chat GPT? And you have to expressly say yes and agree that the now you're no longer private. So Apple has intentionally dumbed down Siri and their own Apple intelligence so that it can remain private.

[Benito]

And I think it's particularly baffling because I was reading that the next iOS update is going to have Apple Intelligence signing up for it as part of like the user flow for like the user update. It will no longer be hidden behind a bunch of different like I had to go into settings and agree to be part of the beta program. It will be rolled out to more people, which is surprising given my experience so far with Apple intelligence has been that it's completely useless.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Siri is for sure.

[Benito]

Well, Siri is actually, you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple intelligence is helpful.

[Benito]

Summarized notifications are bad. I don't use the feature to rewrite my own messages, even though I accidentally hit that button all the time with my fat thumbs. It's just there's no part of it that I found particularly helpful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think we should hear from the Pope in the Vatican about artificial.

[Leo Laporte]

Intelligence, of course, because when it comes to modern technology, the first person I want to ask is the head of the 2000 year old Catholic Church.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line 90 too.

[Leo Laporte]

A new Vatican document examines the potential risk of AI. You know, actually, to be fair, the Pope has increasingly become the conscience of the world and I guess as a spiritual leader, that's probably what I would expect. Not the case with many spiritual leaders, but thank goodness the Holy Father seems to have his thumb on some in some areas.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is a really good, this is a great lot line quoting Pope Francis. The document affirms the very use of the word intelligence in connection with AI can prove misleading. Yes, in light of this, AI should not be seen as artificial, as an artificial form of human intelligence, but as a product of it. Ooh, ooh. That's. Nice line, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

I bet Father Robert wrote it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I bet he was involved.

[Leo Laporte]

He won't take credit because I keep asking him, did you do. For instance, there was this beautiful, beautiful 3D rendering of St. Peter's Basilica. He said, did you do that? He said, you know, everything we do here is a team effort. I wouldn't take credit for any of that, so I'll never get the answer out of him. But it's. You know, it's. Remember that Pope Francis is a Jesuit. The Jesuits, of all the Catholic orders, seem to have the most scientific sense. Shall we say, they even acknowledge evolution, which you probably wouldn't expect. The note warns against the risk of humanity becoming enslaved to its own work. I love the name of this, by the way. Antiqua et Nova, which is ancient and new, insists that. Yeah, isn't that beautiful? Insists that it should only be used as a tool to complement human intelligence rather than replace its richness. Bingo. Right on. I think that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, I knew you'd like this.

[Leo Laporte]

100%. Yeah, very cool.

[Paris Martineau]

This is not what the AI companies are trying to sell us, though. See, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they want to replace humans. Right, Exactly. Yeah. Well, it's going to be a little harder to replace humans than they imagine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interesting. On the Web. The full version is there. It's long.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The English version comes first, and then the Italian. The PDF, the Italian comes first, then the English.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you sure it's Italian? It's not Latin? The whole thing should be in Latin to really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A. In questo contesto Chasey persono consideriare Le suffosted data. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Should all be done in Gregorian chant.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I should not be trusted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, okay, okay, Wait, wait, wait, wait. I think what we have to do is. Is pick your. Pick your AI Take that URL and go ask what language is or no ask. No. Ask them what they think of the document. Ask them to respond to the document.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it. Is it. Should we do Deep Seek? Should we do Gemini chatgpt?

[Leo Laporte]

I'll do. I have a. A paid chat account.

[Benito]

So instead, I asked Deep Seek to make a Gregorian chant for me about AI and it made longer one. So I'll just sing the first verse.

[Leo Laporte]

Please do. Wow.

[Benito]

You can. You can stop making that new theme song, Bonito. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Bring back orders.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We got it. This is the.

[Leo Laporte]

Got it, baby.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let me copy this. And I'm just going to tell. I mean, I don't know how long it's going to take to do this.

[Benito]

It says this chant reflects the awe and reverence for AI's power while acknowledging the enduring humanity at its core. Thanks, Deep Seek.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's an Italian.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what I said. Yeah. I was going to ask you to ask it about the substance of the thing. Have AI ask AI if it's evil.

[Leo Laporte]

I said summarize this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's reading it. I guess it understands Italian, right?

[Benito]

Probably, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It might answer in Italian, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that would be pretty funny.

[Benito]

Now I'm just going to keep doing this whenever there's dead air.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Oh, it is. It's answering in Italian. Oh, wait a minute.

[Benito]

Why didn't you cut and paste the English version?

[Leo Laporte]

In English, please. KS intelligencia artificial. Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Italian is the language.

[Benito]

Did it come.

[Leo Laporte]

I just said English, please. Let's see if it'll give me the same thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why did you give it the Italian version? It had an English.

[Leo Laporte]

It just would have cut and paste. Okay. Thought about intelligence and ethics for a few seconds.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This lengthy document.

[Leo Laporte]

Brief summary. This lengthy document. Intelligence is presented as a divine gift. Yes. Reflecting the human call to till and keep the earth. The church endorses scientific and technological progress as part of humanity's collaboration with God and creation. Arkansas marks a new phase in humanity's bond with technology. But its rapid expansion demands urgent and anthropological reflection.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So ask it, what is AI's relationship with God? God.

[Leo Laporte]

Based on this thing or just whatever?

[Benito]

I have a friend who did a master's program at itp, and that was what it was all about is what is AI's relationship with God? But it was 2019, so it was kind of a cute novel.

[Leo Laporte]

So ITP, that is really it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a program in nyu. The church sees art.

[Leo Laporte]

If it says not a substitute for God, it's doing it. Still, in context with the article, few key points on AI's relationship with God rooted in human creativity. No idolatry. Moral responsibility. Because humans design and direct AI, they remain morally responsible for its applications. That's good, right? Human as creatures. Creatures created in God's image. People must ensure AI supports rather than undermines human dignity. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa, whoa. Get a load of this, Jimin. I'll go ahead, then I'll read your mind.

[Leo Laporte]

In short, AI is an extension of human craftsmanship which flows from God's gift of intelligence, but never replaces the divine or the unique relationship each person has with God. I think that's pretty good. So here's AI did a good job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AI's relationship with God is complex and multifaceted. It always has that kind of ridiculous beginning.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I hate that. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then it goes into the topics, AI As a tool created by God. From this perspective, AI is seen as another technology created by humans who were created in the image of God. As such, AI can be used for good or evil. Okay, never mind. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Gemini.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Enough now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But. But Deep Seek being the unreligious.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we ask the Chinese what they think?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, sure. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me get it in chat.

[Benito]

GPT's Gregorian chant is worse, in my opinion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want to humble people on that one.

[Benito]

Intellectios profundos machines. It's kind of short. Invisibis, lucis veritas. It's. I feel like the verses. The lines need to be longer, in my opinion. I need more to chant too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Deep Seek is not popping up for me here, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Benito]

Well, it does refer to AI as the vigilant serpent shines in the darkness. A voice without flesh echoes in silence, which is very ominous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. Yikes. Vigilant serpent.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I knew you'd like the Vatican. I knew you'd like they see.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought that democracy. It's clear.

[Leo Laporte]

I am an atheist. I don't. I don't believe in this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Were you raised anything?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we. When we went to church, which would be mostly, like, Easter, we went to the Unitarian church.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay. Well, that's, like, not going.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Their. Their credo was worship the God of your choice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I remember going to Sunday school and making a little poster. Said, God is love. But it was pretty. It was pretty ecumenical. But my dad remembered. My dad was a paleontologist who taught evolution.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And very. You know, he was a lapsed Catholic. He was raised strict Catholic. He went. Yeah, Canadian. French Canadian.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Italian. His mom was Italian. He went to Regis, which is a Catholic high school, and Fordham, which is a Catholic university, and then transferred to Columbia. But he. As a lapsed Catholic, there's nobody. It's like former smokers, lapsed Catholics, not a fan of the church. And so I was basically raised an atheist, I think I asked my mom, you know, both my parents are 92 and ready to kind of make the transition. And so I asked my mom, I said, well, how do you feel about, you know, dying? Do you think there's an afterlife? She said, no, we're animals. It's over. It's done. But she's cool with that, right? She's fine with that. It's not sad or. I think I was raised with the notion that it's a false reassurance to say, well, there's an afterlife. It's like, well, oh, it's going to be fine. We're going to go to heaven. It's just phony reassurance. So that was how I was raised Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you study Latin?

[Benito]

I did not know. Oh, I wish I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pretty good job, I think Leo did. How was her pronunciation? Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

No one knows.

[Benito]

No one knows. And no one on the Internet will be able to correct me. It's like, AGI, Paris problems.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny when I. So there's Church latin, which pronounces Cs as Ch. So. And it's Chelsea steo.

[Benito]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Or veni vid. And then when I studied Latin, it had all changed. Somebody somewhere, some scholar said, you know, I think the seas were hard because nobody knows everybody's dead.

[Benito]

I assume that's what it's like to just be a Latin scholar. You're sitting around, you're like, I think they were hard.

[Leo Laporte]

So instead of Cicero, it's Kikaro. And it's not veni vidi vici. It's veni vidi, Vicki. And so I learned. That's the Latin I learned was hard C. Oh. But the church still pronounces it Ch. So it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The music is all written around that. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So there's a difference in church lighting.

[Benito]

I also don't like Geminis. I think that Geminis, I will say Deep Seek had the best formatting for me to read a Gregorian channel.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I probably shouldn't do this, but I could have Suno write us a song in Latin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can. Can.

[Benito]

You could do it face.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to take the one I.

[Benito]

Put in the discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to take that.

[Benito]

You need to take the English parts out of it, I guess, because they might.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We don't want Suno to get.

[Benito]

Let. Let me. Let me ask Deep Seek to give me it without it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I could just cut those lines out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who's faster?

[Leo Laporte]

Chant of the machine spirit to be sung in unison a cappella. I'll put that in as the instruction.

[Benito]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Or should I say just do it in the style of a Gregorian chant?

[Benito]

I mean, in a style of a Gregorian chant, but with that description, perhaps also, I guess. Got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right. I'm taking out the parenthesis because that's.

[Benito]

I just sent it in the discord, if you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Too late.

[Benito]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And then to be Sung in acapella. All right, let's. Let's. Let's. Let's create it, baby. Let's see what we got here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bonito.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the new theme song. Yeah. We're not going to use yours, Bonita. We're going to use the chance of.

[Benito]

The machine spirit that describes AI as wisdom perfecting mankind.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see if I can get this to play here.

[Benito]

Basically exactly how I did it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Sounds just like you. All right, let's try a different one here. It's kind of amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gregorian chant knows kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it doesn't. Does. Also doesn't know what to be sung in unison. Well, maybe I'll take that out. No, this sounds like a bad Italian.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bad Italian restaurant.

[Leo Laporte]

Spaghetti Western.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's just. I love it. Let's try this.

[Benito]

That's what I'm looking for.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now it's worse.

[Benito]

Oh, it's even more Italian.

[Leo Laporte]

This is like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like a Dan Brown novel made into a movie. It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I gotta hear this singing now. It's an iron.

[Benito]

Oh, my gosh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that prelude. Okay, now, please.

[Benito]

This is really upbeat. Capella, Gregorian chant.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, so I was messing around with Suno while I was trying to write a new theme song and sooner Circle. It's like it doesn't know anything. Like, I try to ask for specific things it doesn't know.

[Benito]

You're telling me it's a unintelligent machine and you're a human being.

[Leo Laporte]

Human beings unite.

[Paris Martineau]

It can't take musical direction. It can only take, like, prompts.

[Leo Laporte]

I think some styles are better than other styles. Like it, but I can't tell it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Give me.

[Paris Martineau]

Give me something in four. Four on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm using these instruments. It won't do. It won't do anything with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's been, you know, admitting he was trying to ch.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing is, it does it fast.

[Benito]

Fast and bad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't even get two of the fast, cheap, and good. You only get one of them fast.

[Leo Laporte]

What is this?

[Benito]

This is someone jazz handing.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the Jacques Braille version. I love it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good, but I love it.

[Benito]

As Burke says, it's a song machine that does not understand genres. It's crazy because we've made a Gregorian chant before with Suno. We did, like, a haunting on this show. A hundred percent.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's confused by the Latin. I don't know. Chant of the machine spirit. Maybe by The. I should take that line out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Take that out.

[Benito]

That's the head. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

That's the wood, as they say.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the wood. Let's put that in as the title. The wood, by the way. Way. The description for that was spoken word, which it definitely didn't do.

[Benito]

No, I would say acapella Gregorian chant. Multiple male voices singing in unison.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Slowly, Sal.

[Benito]

Yeah, slowly. Maybe solemn might be too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, solemn. That's good. Yeah. As in a church.

[Benito]

You'd think with AI It. It understand Latin because much like Craig. Latin.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it should know. It should know that. All right. This is a Gregorian chant. Multiple male voices singing solemnly in unison as in a church. And the title of this is Chant of the Machine Spirit. And the lyrics in Latin written by what? ChatGPT or who?

[Benito]

Deep Seek.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Deep Seek.

[Leo Laporte]

Deep Seek. By a Chinese AI. Okay, not occupied.

[Benito]

So much for a compelling. So much for multiple men.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's try this one.

[Benito]

It just loves those.

[Leo Laporte]

It's trained on spaghetti westerns.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was trained on our old theme.

[Benito]

It sounds so bad.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like the only Italian music it was trained on was that kind of stuff. Clearly, it's Italian, so we got to make it like this.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say, though, Burke says.

[Benito]

We have to include the negative minus. River dance.

[Leo Laporte]

No river dance. The. The Italian pop music is just as weird and bad as this. It's just the strangest thing ever.

[Benito]

The Italians are going to come free. Leo, you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

I am at the hill.

[Benito]

You're going to die on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Italians on Mastodon are pissed this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Hashtag sorry. Hashtag this show is over. Hashtag goodbye. You're watching this week in Google. Our. It is over. This is our last this week in Google. We did do some Google stories. Next week, Intelligent Machines makes its debut. Not much changed. It'll be the same goofy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Should we all look like we're sad for a card for Benito Know or.

[Benito]

Happy about what's to come? We. What if we did two. Hold on. And you can put them together. Sad first. Sad. Happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Bonito. Good luck.

[Benito]

Good luck at that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sticking for you here.

[Benito]

I don't know how you're going to put those together.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My favorite was the four Paris. I did love that.

[Benito]

That was really good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was.

[Benito]

That was like. Joe, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break. When we come back, your picks of the week. We're not done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are we still going to have picks of the week?

[Leo Laporte]

Of course. That's the best part of the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right.

[Benito]

Don't you Think it better be the same show. But we just talk about the same show sometimes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, just changing the name.

[Leo Laporte]

So sponsors think it's about AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We talked a lot about AI today.

[Leo Laporte]

We're trying to get that sweet Super Bowl.

[Benito]

Hey. And whenever we come back, I'm going to sing a Glorian chant about the ending of a podcast as presented to you by Deep Sea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, stay tuned.

[Leo Laporte]

Stay tuned for that. This week in Google. It's the last segment of the show. We're still going to be, by the way, next week it'll be Intelligent Machines 805. We're keeping the numbering. If you subscribe to the show, your podcast feed will be the same. The webpage will still be twit TV twig. Although I think we'll add Twitter TV IM. You know, the YouTube channel will be the same that really nothing's going to change except Jeff won't yawn as much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis is your. Your pick of the week, sir.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, so we're going to do a little ying yang here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On the one hand, there's technological puritanism. I hate these stories. I just hate these stories where journalists tell you to give up something. So the Washington Post. Try phone free February to reduce screen time and improve your health. Screw off. Washington Post. I'll try Washington Post.

[Leo Laporte]

You try it yourself. Who wrote this? Amanda Morris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, been there. You log on your phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this what you guys in journalism call, like, I don't know, puff piece, think piece, junk piece?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

What is this coming.

[Benito]

How many stories has the. Did the author write that day? That's the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. It's just. It's just. Yeah. So. So on the other hand, pieces I.

[Benito]

Would say I refrain from commenting on because those are usually something one gets assigned and has to do to have your.

[Leo Laporte]

Feels like. Amanda, come on in here. Come into Fishbowl. I got a story for you. Here's the. Here's the slug Phone free February. Write it up and give me a thousand words by end of day. Yep, that's how they talk. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On the other hand, the Guardian, which I love. I love the Guardian. I give money to the Guardian. I think I've worked with the Guardian. The Guardian, however, when it comes to technology in recent years, has been the journal of moral panic. However, Amy Fleming wrote what I think is a wonderful, well researched story here, here, starting off with quoting Andrew Przbylski, who is a really, really good researcher at Oxford University, saying that, no, the screen is not sapping our ability to focus it is not giving us brain rot.

[Leo Laporte]

And which was, by the way, the Oxford University Press year word of the year for 2024.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it may come as a relief.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, brain rot is two words. So. So oup, you might want to think a little harder about.

[Benito]

No, brain rot is. Brain rot could be one word in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oxford in the oup, wasn't it two words?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So the word of the year was two years.

[Benito]

Oh, that's pretty funny. That's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Double your word money for your word money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it may come as a relief to some to hear then that for every alarmist headline, there are plenty of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers who believe this moral panic is unfounded. 17.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Benito]

Right under the boulder there.

[Leo Laporte]

The video for that, folks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very good, very good video. Since 2. Notice how I didn't put you on the spot for that because I didn't know if you could pull it up. But you did. Since 2017, there has been a constant drum beat of screens and tech. A different universe that is bad for you and bad for your kids, says Przybylski. And two things happen. The first is low quality research that confirms our biases about technology. It gets immediate press because it's consistent with our existing biases.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's really easy to publish low quality research because they told her to write it. That kind of shows a correlation and then exaggerates it because it'll get the attention and it'll get funding. This is what, by the way, entrepreneurship.

[Leo Laporte]

Most of the studies Jonathan Haidt talks about were of the order of, well, do you feel like you're more lonely now than you were? And this, the study Prz Bilski is talking about was using functional MRI scans, which is actually a really interesting technology where they. They're doing an mri, but they're watching your brain change as it's getting inputs. And they. And the fmri, obviously you can't lie about one of the complaints about Hate's quoted studies are, well, the people knew what they were expected to say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Speaking of which, I should mention. So I think this is a really good piece. I recommend it highly. But while we're on it sounds good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Siva Varianthan, who we like a lot, who maybe we should have him on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Siva. I've been trying to get Siva on forever. Give us his information, maybe we can get him on next.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So in the New Republic. Yeah, he had a piece. Are cell phones really destroying kids? Mental health. Jonathan Heights once heralded an ultra social world. Now he's one of the social media's most prominent critics. And it's really, really good. Well written piece by, by our friend Siva. And by the way, Siva and I are kind of bookends. Right. I wrote, I wrote what Would Google Do? And he wrote the Googleization of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so we, we have this different view of the world, but we end up much on the same plate in the end. And he hates Haidt and his terrible lack of actual research. And so this is also an excellent piece in the New Republic.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. I did actually read the piece. I didn't notice it was written by Siva. And that's where I got this condemnation of Haidt's methodology, actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ah, right. Okay. That's what made me think of it. Yeah. Because I said, oh, Siva said that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Siva did say that. And I would have credited him had I remembered it was him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think we're seeing a backlash to the backlash to the tech last year. Good.

[Leo Laporte]

And one of the things Siva points out is how valuable these online communities are to people who are otherwise isolated, whether they're kids or adults. And I mean, we've said this all along. It's not communication, it's not socialization. If you're not in the same room, there are differences. It's nice to be in the same room. But as you pointed out last week.

[Benito]

We'Ve done this before. Are we not socializing right now?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're never in the same room ever.

[Benito]

Look at us socializing right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And I think actually that's one of.

[Benito]

The great gifts and that was socialization.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one of the great gifts of our modern technology is that you can be in New York, I can be in California, you can be in New Jersey, and we can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, hey, hey, yo, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

And we can socialize.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We just see it. If I was awake.

[Leo Laporte]

I love New Jersey. My family's from New Jersey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Leonia. I told you that. Leonia Paris. That was good pick. Thank you. Good pick. Well done.

[Benito]

Yo, my pick the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

1. I had a story that came out this week that I just wanted to highlight. Me and my colleague Kelly Huang reported on what's been going on inside Character AI over the last year. And some kind of top line stuff has been been before. Google basically paid $2.7 billion to Aqua Hire most of character AI it had Google Play. Google nearly removed character from the Google Play store or due to safety issues.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And around this time sued by a.

[Benito]

Mom, of course by multiple parents now because of claims that their products are designed in a way, way that harms kids and promotes like sexual and violent behavior. But around a couple months later, Apple also reached out to Character, kind of threatening to pull the app. And in response, Character had to update its age range in the app store from 12 and up to 17 and up. This is also was happening at a time that Character employees, internally, this is before the lawsuits even became public, Character employees had been basically expressing concerns that their product was damaging the mental health of young users. Which is a problem because internally within Character AI there's this sense that much of their users, like a significant portion of their users are kids and extremely young adults. There was one detail in it that kind of struck me from our reporting, which is that I guess whenever you're using Character AI, if the chat bot gives a response you don't like, you can flag it as boring or rate the response poorly and kind of internal reviews of what sort of stuff users were flagging as boring. This kind of raised the hackle of some character employees specifically because some was deviant sexual behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

They said basically they won't do it and it's boring. I want some deviance.

[Benito]

Yeah, they asked the bots to do some really messed up stuff and got very mad when they wouldn't. And it's, I don't know quite.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate the filter, said a youthful sounding girl in an August video message submitted as part of an online petition against Character. I just want to have violence, but you know, I don't. I mean, I mean, isn't it better to do it with a phony AI than to try to find a human to do it?

[Benito]

Well, that's what another extremely young user said. Another person. This was part of this huge change.org position that's gotten like 200,000 signatures. I went through all the different things and part of them are video messages. And in one, like a girl that looks like she's gotta be like barely 13, says a lot of teenagers like to role play NSFW stuff. It would be better to do with an AI than a real person because that person, especially if it's online, could be a pedo. And I mean, I guess, fair point. But Character when it was founded was like, we don't want to do romantic sexual roleplay, which is a problem because that's what a lot of their users come to character to do.

[Leo Laporte]

As usual, the problem is the humans, right? And we, this is, this is, we are as God made us. And maybe this is a safe playground for stuff that would otherwise be more dangerous.

[Benito]

Well, it has been, but the company has over the last year to it, especially after these most recent lawsuits, really lock down the experience where if you're a user that chooses to identify, put in your correct date of birth and you're under 18, you can't do basically anything with any of these bots, much less can you even search or access most of the chat bots.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a difficult because you're not going to cure somebody of a desire to be in a violent relationship by not offering it to them on character AI. That's not going to solve the problem. Yeah, it just means character AI or whoever owns it is not liable.

[Benito]

It is also interesting because character now because there are a number of lawsuits, one of which was filed by a Florida mother who her son, who I believe was 13, 14 year old old at the time, committed suicide after kind of becoming obsessed with this Daenerys Targaryen chat bot that it can. That had repeatedly kind of urged him to commit suicide. And in character response about the lawsuit, it claims First Amendment protection because it should. It's fine if people urge someone to commit suicide, I guess, into the First Amendment.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's not okay. That is beyond the pale. If you're encouraging somebody, that's the risk. Right? That and somebody said this in FlowConnect, said it in our discord. Role playing in cyberspace can eventually bleed out into the real world. That's the risk. On the other hand, if you're Dexter and you really want to create, you know, serial murder, commit serial murder, or if you can do it in a game instead of in the real world, that's the question. Does it make it worse or better?

[Benito]

Well, I think another important context this is that I found interesting while reporting it is character AI was developed and came into the world because Noam Shazir and Daniel DeFreitas, two longtime Google engineers, had basically created what would go on to become the Gemini chat chatbot, like long before chatbots were in vogue, tried to get Google to release it, this early version of a thing called Mina. Google was like, no, no, no. That seems like a safety and PR nightmare. So they left Google, started character, ran into all of this crazy safety stuff. And then Google was like, well, you guys have done really well and you made this, so we're gonna pay $2.7 billion to get you back. And now Noam Shazir is one of the three people in charge of Gemini. So I Think it's important to look at sort of the safety issues that a company like this has had, even if they're small, because those guys are now leading one of the biggest AI initiatives in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Paris Martineau. Have a happy birthday next week. Yeah, she'll be wearing a little happy launching show.

[Benito]

I will.

[Leo Laporte]

Eating cake. But not with us. Her grandparents. Her grandpa was. But we will miss you next week. But you'll be back. I hope. I hope this is the beginning of the end. Okay, good. Thank you so much.

[Benito]

Yeah, no, I'm just gonna slow fade. I'm gonna. I'm gonna Irish.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not ghost us. You. You will write for the information. I think you know that. I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

[Benito]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

And let me give you the incredibly brief Gregorian chant that Gemini gave me used for a podcast ending. Is it in the auditoriness? That's it. It's end of the listening is what it translates to.

[Leo Laporte]

End of the listening.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's a benediction we should have all the time. I think Bonito. Can we cart that so you can have it at the end of every show?

[Benito]

Gemini, you know, suggested incorporating a bell sound. It says a single soft bell chime after the phrase can create a sense of finale.

[Leo Laporte]

So we'll just say at the end, paris vobiscum. May Paris go with you. All right. Thank you, Paris. Thank you. Jeff Jarvis, newly minted professor at SUNY Stony Brook and Montclair State College. Formerly professor emeritus. I guess you're always professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Cravenmark Graduate School of Journalism of New York. Thank you both for being here. I'm going to leave you, as Jeff did, with the mayor of Merrimack Farm.

[Benito]

That was me.

[Leo Laporte]

That was you.

[Benito]

The mayor of Merrimack Farm. And she is beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a beautiful goat. And did you go visit her at Merrimack?

[Benito]

No, but I want to. Merrimack Farm is in Vermont. Anyone nearby should go visit. Visit what used to be the unofficial mayor. Bonnie. But now she's been officially elected the mayor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Next week, I'll bring you the dog mayor of New York.

[Benito]

Okay, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

I love animal mayors. They never write bad laws. They never really do much of anything, which sometimes is the best thing a mayor could do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Simon, if you go. Wait one more second. Just go to Instagram. Upper West. Simon. Simon. And you will see the. The coronation for Simon as mayor of New York. Dog mayor of New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. How did he. How did he get to be dog this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This. It's a lot of wonderful woman.

[Benito]

He's had to do some dark deals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This woman has is just great. And she. Sophia Verschbau. She's a writer. And. And you just. I love this dog, everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

What's it. What's the cat again?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go to Upper West Simon. The dog's name is Simon and lives on the Upper west side.

[Leo Laporte]

There he is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is a wacky cutie. He is so cute.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a cutie. Here he is the moment he officially became dog mayor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's Sophie there. She's wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

New York City.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's a great advocate of dog adoption. And here, Simon's going to get a special mare's hat. Simon's a get along dog.

[Leo Laporte]

Simon's very patient. He goes, I don't know why I'm wearing this hat, but I guess so.

[Benito]

Everyone's making so much noise.

[Leo Laporte]

Shake my paw.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look at the next picture, the portrait of Simon. That's a good way to leave people in all this troubled time. How can you not just fall in love with those?

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, everybody. So nice to have you. This is why we might have AI, but we'll always need dogs and people.

[Benito]

And happy 805 episodes of this Week in Google, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

804 episodes.

[Leo Laporte]

We're on the 805 with intelligent machines. New name game, same time, same bat channel, same insanity. And same insanity. Wonderful host, same insanity. We look forward to seeing you then. We do this show, soon to be intelligent machines, every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. Watch us live on eight different platforms. There's Discord for our club members. You are a member of the club, right? Oh, even if you're not. Last chance to take the survey. I forgot to mention this TWiT TV survey really helps us out. We like to get to know you and it helps us make better stuff for you. Twitter TV survey. So we are on Discord. If you're in the member of the club, you got YouTube, you got Twitch. I'm gonna see if I can get all eight this time. I haven't been able to do it in a couple of days. You got TikTok, you got X.com, you got LinkedIn, you got Facebook and you got Kick. There you go. That's all eight. Yay. If you don't want to watch live, I do. If you don't want to watch live, you can of course watch after the fact because it's a podcast. Twit TV Twig. Although starting next week, Twit TV Im. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the show. Or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. It's the same feed, so if you subscribe today, you'll get it next week and every week thereafter. Thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. Join the club if you're not a member. Twit TV Club. Twit. I'm Leo Laporte for Jeff Jarvis of Paris Martineau. Happy birthday, Paris. See you next week. Bye.