This Week in Google 737 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Amp. Pruitt's here. Jeff Jarvis is here. Kathy Giles is here coming up lots to talk about. Google gets a big victory in court. We'll talk about the controversy raging over how Google modifies search terms before it looks things up. We're not sure exactly what it's doing. Then we'll talk about changes to Twitter that Elon Musk is making that are causing the rise of disinformation, but should he have to listen to the EU about that? It's all coming up next. Oh yeah. Governor Newsom saved Skittles on Twig podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWI T.

(00:00:48):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 737 recorded Wednesday, October 11th, 2023. Gormless This weekend Google is brought to you by Vanta, automate compliance and streamline security reviews. With the leading trust management platform, Vanta helps SaaS businesses of all sizes manage risk and prove security in real time. TWIT listeners, get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/twig to claim this discount and by my Leo, my LEO Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit, and manage years of important documents, photos, and videos in an offline library hosted on any device and it's free. Don't wait. Visit myo.com/twit and by Melissa more than 10,000 clients worldwide. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. It's time for Twig this week in Google to show where we do everything but talk about Google.

(00:02:05):
Actually, we have a lot to talk about with Google this week. Oh boy. That's aunt p prot sitting to my left. Hello, Mr. Pruitt. Hello sir. How you? I am very well. How's the pushups? How many in? I saw Lily was watching you with the pushups. You saw me do pushups earlier. Yeah, I'm impressed. I was doing my in. I told Lily, I said The dog Lily. I said, I'm Aunt Pruitt. Okay. Immediately ran away. Yeah. She thought that's not him. That's a terrible pushup. Jeff Jarvis is also here. He is the Leonard Tower professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at City.

(00:02:48):
Now we're better. Okay. Got to get those cues, man. That chorus no overtime for you kids. Go home. We won't be meeting you at the of This is the seven, the 737th time we've done this. I know, I know. Is it really? 7 37. Episode seven 30. 7 37. We're flying in. We are also thrilled to get Kathy Gilli back in the house. Kathy, who was here last time you were here, you talked about the big Google case had just gotten started. It is ongoing and there's more to talk about with regard to that case. So we'll get you to work with Kathy as an attorney@lawcgcounsel.com. She can actually sit in the Supreme Court. She's allowed in they call, admitted. She's privileged on it. She's not on it, but she's admitted to the Supreme Court that day. Does that mean you could act as a solicitor and do it run a case?

Cathy Gellis (00:03:46):
I am admitted to the bar. Yeah. I mean, when I file my amicus briefs, I get to file amicus briefs because I am a member of the bar who gets to, so one of the other perks is you go on a different line to get access to different seats if you want to actually hear a case.

Leo Laporte (00:04:00):
Neat. Did you get a certificate? Something simple

Cathy Gellis (00:04:05):
For

Leo Laporte (00:04:06):
Framing.

Cathy Gellis (00:04:07):
Yeah, I don't have it framed and I don't know. I mean you tend to get a certificate from every court of appeals that you're administered to. People,

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
Lawyers like to put that stuff up. Yeah,

Cathy Gellis (00:04:16):
Well yeah. I mean I think the only ones that are really significant are like your schools. But yeah, most of the courts, if not all of 'em, give you a certificate, but they're all different sizes and this then the other thing, but it's just kind. Not everyone has one. I actually like the moment that when I got in to hear the cases, they give you a little admission ticket. There's a process for how you go in. You go in one door, they clear you, they give you, and then you move on to another stage. And one of the stages is they give you a ticket and that is the thing that's the most special to me because you look down and it's a ticket that identifies that you're a member of the Supreme Court bar and it was like, ooh, I think I tweeted once. I'm not a velvet rope type person, but that one was really cool. Like me, I get to do that and obviously everybody else in the room too and you don't, yes, I am part of the elite, but it's neat. But then they take the ticket so you don't actually get to

Leo Laporte (00:05:12):
Keep it.

Cathy Gellis (00:05:13):
You give you the ticket so you can give another guy the ticket and you don't get to keep the

Leo Laporte (00:05:17):
Ticket. I'd like to frame that.

Cathy Gellis (00:05:20):
I took a picture before I had to lock up the cameras, so that's as good as I could get.

Leo Laporte (00:05:23):
There is a bit of a certificate last night. What'd you get a certificate to? I write about that. So I did an event at the school about the Gutenberg part that says Jay Rosen and I had a conversation and he was very, very nice. He said that if this was, I said I was nervous. It felt like I was defending my dissertation. And he said, well, it would pass. And he wrote, he had written out a certificate that said Jeff's PhD,

(00:05:47):
Put that on the wall. I've got suitable for framing. Yes. I had a doctor who had all of her various diplomas and certificates on the wall, but they all had different names I that maybe was a red flag. She wore a lot of marriages. Yeah, that's what she said. Yeah, that's exactly what she said. Alright, let's talk about the trial. It is ongoing. D O J versus Google. I haven't really kept up on it that much, but there was a little kerfuffle. Megan Gray was sitting in on the trial. She's a former F T C former executive at DuckDuckGo, wrote a opinion piece on wire based on a slide she saw, saw the slide and interpreted it. Oh boy, that Google was using something they call semantic search and I think Google, we know Google does this. They modify, so you'll type in baby shoes and in some cases what you type in Google will enhance to make the search better. If you type, Corey uses this example, I think make it to two wds W D Ss. They'll add Wednesday behind the scenes so that the search includes Wednesday because they figure that's what you really mean and they fix typos, things like that. But that happens behind the scenes. You never see that in either your search query or the results.

(00:07:21):
Ms. Gray asserted based on this slide, she saw that Google was so concerned about ad revenues that at one point they decided to start adding brand names, whoops. To the search. So you would search for baby shoes and they would add the name of a company that was an advertiser to that without your knowledge so that you would see their ads, they were in the query their results or actual well ads queries results and results. And there's even more money in it for Google because a lot of other competitors might bid on that search on their positioning, right? Saying, Hey, we want an ad there. Whenever you see Ostroff baby shoes, we want to make sure you see duo's bear shoes and so you double dip. And so I think this part of the problem was Megan gr assumed what Google was doing this and when she worked at the F T C, I can see some justification.

(00:08:16):
If you put in facial tissues, it should say Kleenex because most of the things you're actually looking for are written about as Kleenex. Oh, you should be working at Google there, Jeff. Good job. I'll take the job. Nice. I just saw a job listing for North American Head of news partnerships. I can do that job right Salary up to $490,000. So the plot thickens, okay, I'll do it. On October 2nd, wired pulled down Megan Gray's op-ed piece saying it did not meet their editorial standards without further information meaning, well that's the question in my mind there. There was a tweet from our friend Danny Sullivan, who as you know is now search formative search engine land search liaison at Google. Let me pull up the Mike Masnick calls it X Twitter, which I think is a good name.

Cathy Gellis (00:09:13):
I like that. That's the perfect name. That's perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:09:15):
Lemme call it the ex Twitter and I will pull up Google's search liaison's account so that you can see Danny Sullivan's fairly lengthy non-denial. Denial and I call it that he doesn't mention anything. The name, he just says there was an op-ed piece. Lemme see if I can, he's very active. Does

Cathy Gellis (00:09:37):
He tweet

Leo Laporte (00:09:37):
That much? Apparently no. Maybe we've gone back too far. I've gone back too far.

Cathy Gellis (00:09:47):
Does the search at Twitter or still work?

Leo Laporte (00:09:50):
Yeah, you

Cathy Gellis (00:09:50):
Can do it. Search.

Leo Laporte (00:09:52):
I just went to his name and oh, okay, you're doing manually here it is. An opinion piece recently appeared. That's all he says. An opinion piece recently appeared, not who or where. The Google quote just flat out deletes queries and replaces with them with ones that monetize better her. Danny says, we don't. This piece contains serious inaccuracies about how Google search works. The organic i e non-sponsored results you see in search are not affected by our ad systems in particular. The piece seems to misunderstand how keyword matching is related to showing relevant ads ad blah blah, blah. It's a long answer and he says, we've answered this before, and he actually produced links to four different blog posts in which they talked about this. Okay, it's no secret Google search. Wait,

Cathy Gellis (00:10:38):
Wait, is he verified? Is that verified?

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
Well, I bet he is. Google's got it's a Oh it,

Cathy Gellis (00:10:43):
It's a gold verified, which means

Leo Laporte (00:10:45):
It's a company, right?

Cathy Gellis (00:10:47):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:10:49):
And we know it's Danny Sullivan, even though the handle is just search liaison effect in the bio it says it's Danny Sullivan. Oh, okay. He does say this. It's no secret that Google search looks beyond the specific words in the query to better understand their meaning in order to show relevant organic results. So he does acknowledge that Google might in fact add stuff to the query behind the scenes, maybe Kleenex. He says it's a helpful process. We've written about it many times. He brings four links. This ensures Google search could better show people organic results and connect them to helpful resources. If you make a spelling mistake, a search for a term that's not on a page, but where the page has a close synonym or if you aren't even sure exactly how to search for something, our meaning matching systems help. So that's semantic search. Google said they do this for a long time. I don't see anything wrong with trying to save us for ourselves, but I don't necessarily like the idea of it suggesting specific products we didn't ask. I mean, if it replaces weds with wetness day, that's not a bad thing at all. Your Kleenex example, Jeff is a little, I don't care for that little trying to come up with something.

Cathy Gellis (00:11:58):
I mean, I think there's, what Danny might be saying is it's two separate processes. One is a sort of adjustment of the natural language so that your query returns something more accurate and then meanwhile it's also trying to understand, okay, and we're going to want to tag onto whatever you're looking at so we can give you contextually relevant ads. And so it's got a separate logic that's trying to figure out what do we match up with so we can give you the ads that will make sense given what you're looking for. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the interest in displaying contextually appropriate ads undermines the quality of the search results you're getting back. And I think it sounds like that was the leap that was made to presume that the two processes related to each other. And I think what he's saying is no, they're separate because we've got different interests for each one of them. There's a lot going on every time a user submits a query, but that doesn't mean that the interest in displaying the ads is changing what was trying to deliver you results. But as long as we're giving you relevant results, what would also be a relevant ad?

Leo Laporte (00:13:02):
What it does at times is it says we return the results for blank and it's transparent about it. I just looked up facial tissues and it gave me facial tissues with Kleenex down the way. I looked up Kleenex and it was all Kleenex. So yeah, I would think that you might be able to tell, but again, Google, so much of this is a black box and Google certainly could try to hide their traces. Adam Covich responded to Danny's post with this. I asked Google PR for a copy of the slide, the wired piece referred to this is what Google says was the slide, you'd have to take this Google's word for this. Adam's a really good guy, by the way, which is probably why they responded to him. Well he also, he works for a think tanky thing that does represent tech companies including Google.

Cathy Gellis (00:13:47):
I think he used to work for Google, maybe he

Leo Laporte (00:13:49):
Did. That's right.

(00:13:52):
Let's say this again. I could see why Megan Gray would've thought what she thought. Advertisers benefit by closing recall gaps. So you search clothing for a young child. In this next column it says Nikolai kids wear. So when you said kids clothing, maybe you meant Nikolai kids wear. I don't understand what we're looking at exactly. Well, I think this is probably, remember it probably went fairly quickly by, in the trial, Megan Gray had already in her mind this idea of semantic searching, adding brands, we're seeing brands added to stuff here. Not sure exactly why or when. We don't know how that's being done. I don't understand how to read this Matrix. New matches for keyword includes both Ss, n r s and E and Phrase and M B M matches plus kids plus clothing. So kids, they're adding children. When you write kids, when you add kids clothing, they write kids. It might be looking at what tags topics came up. When you search for kids in clothing, these are the things that will come up. Look, here's the problem. I don't know. I wish Wired had been a little more forthright and why they took it down. Explain what was wrong with it. Jeff would be best practices here. Yes, it would've been absolutely. Well, at one level they would've put up a correction and explain exactly what the correction was. This is obviously past that. Our whole presumption, it must've torn down the whole presumption of the piece.

(00:15:27):
Or maybe the other case here is Google said that's all wrong. We're going to show you how it's wrong, but we're not going to tell you anything more and there's enough for her to rewrite it or them to write a correction. I think Wired should have said more. Here's what Wired wrote editors note. By the way. They took it right down and the headline on it is now a note from Wired leadership, which I thought by itself is interesting. Editors note, ten six twenty twenty three after careful review of the op-ed, how Google alters search queries to get at your wallet, and this is I think maybe a little smoking gun relevant material provided us following his notification it was reporting. Well, where did the material come from? Google or come from report? Well, I think my bet is she didn't even call Google. I don't know this maybe, but my bet is that if it was so off track and there was no reporting in it, or not even an attempt to get that alone, that also does not meet standard problem. One should have tried to call Google. What is wrong with Google providing material for this?

Cathy Gellis (00:16:24):
Like to, is it an opinion piece or it was an opinion It was not reported. Yeah, so if that's the case, I don't think she was in a position or I'd have the expectation that she'd call Google. She was working for a competitor who didn't like Google, so I don't think they'd have any relationship but Wired editorial fact checking to make sure that once you're doing it, I think she should have had the editorial backup to make sure that the conclusion she drew, because I don't think writing an op ed as she was, she was going to have access to more primary sources other than what her own eyes saw at the hearing. And I think the problem was she saw something. She's not describing a slide that didn't exist. She's just describing a slide that has a different meaning than Google meant it. So context was lost and I think it was more incumbent on wired to make sure that they checked what that context was that she was looking at. But if that's the slide and you're looking at the slide and saying, I'm confused by the slide and what it's saying, then I don't know mistakes were made. But I'm not entirely sure they're all on her necessarily.

Leo Laporte (00:17:32):
So the only reason I bring it up for a couple of reasons when I was curious what Jeff would say about journalistic practices, but the real issue is Corey wrote about this. He quoted the article, he has not taken down his pluralistic.com post about it Wire did. I guess what I'm saying is if Google was doing this, this would be, in my opinion, reason to stop using Google entirely. I mean really appalling,

(00:18:02):
But we don't know, and I feel like it's unclear. I mean, but we'd all agree if Google added a Kleenex to a search for tissue, that would be because they were an advertiser to increase their organic results. That would be probably, well, there's a if then clause here that matters, right? If they do it, and B, why they would do it and what the results results would be. If it brought up an advertiser's content in organic search, a couple of things would've been there. That would be a violation of their own principles. Yeah, I would submit this is always, if it gave the user what they wanted, well that's always their excuse by the way. Google's excuse always is we're just trying to give you what you want. When we put Google shopping results well and they have data or YouTube results at the top. Well I think, I

Cathy Gellis (00:18:53):
Dunno. Well, the reason it would seem very scandalous is if we all believe Google's trying to give us what we want and now it turns out that no, actually Google is giving us what they want and making us think that it's what we wanted. Then everyone feels tricked. And if that's true, that's why we would not want to use Google anymore. But I suppose that is so dramatic a change of how we understand things that yeah, maybe is it really that bad? And I don't know, sometimes it's worth taking a deep breath when things seem disproportionately bad. Unfortunately in the recent years that we've been living, sometimes something that seems horrifically bad is in fact actually as horrifically bad as it seems. But normally if it really seems that that earth shattering, it's probably we've taken it a step too far in and need to rethink.

Leo Laporte (00:19:42):
Well, I think you're right. Now what you're searching for is that if a core principle of Google, unlike what Yahoo was doing with Go, is that you cannot buy position in organic search full stop. There's no evidence that they've ever violated that. If this is evidence they violated that somebody in essence through a backdoor bought position, inorganic search. That's where I think, Leo, your point is most valid. And furthermore, Google did that because then there would be ads from competitors because competitors have a trigger that would also be modifying the page based. I don't know. Remember when Larry Page wrote the original page rank article very famously, many years ago, 25 years ago now. He said, you can't sell advertising if you're going to do this because it will compromise you. I think that's pretty clearly my complaint against Google at this point. And maybe it's even the DOJs complaint against Google.

(00:20:45):
This would be a smoking gun. I think we can't, it's gone. So I don't know. I don't know if it's been disproven either. I don't even know if Danny Sullivan's ex tweet post is enough to disperse the suggestion. It seems kind like a non-denial denial. So let's say an investigation happens. Well, how can it happen? It can't happen. How are they all about? Essentially that's the trial, right? This is the investigation. It's the trial. Oh, I shouldn't say investigation. I went through and audit. I went through all the, there was a fight over whether the discovery material should be available to the public. A lot of it is, a lot of it's redacted, but I went through it all, which was actually by itself it's eyeopening. I'm sure you've done that as well, Kathy.

Cathy Gellis (00:21:35):
I mean, as part of my job, I tend to look at the stuff before it goes out the door. Unlike you just did duck review for fun, for

Leo Laporte (00:21:44):
Fun.

Cathy Gellis (00:21:45):
Well,

Leo Laporte (00:21:46):
It wasn't fun. In fact, I was sorely tempted to get an AI to look at it for me and if I could have

Cathy Gellis (00:21:54):
This, so was every litigation firm then that wants to not have to pay for it?

Leo Laporte (00:22:00):
I could not find that slide, but what I did see is really, I mean Google seems like Google's chief claim to having it redacted was, well your honor, it'd be kind of embarrassing. It is. It's really embarrassing. I recommend it to you all. It's easy to find. You can do a Google search for, on a level of principle, let's remember that Bill Gross created, go-to where the whole model was. You did buy placement in core search and organic search and that was sold to Yahoo. Google then came along with its advertising model and violated Gross's patents and had to pay, I think something like $300 million to either Yahoo or Gross because of that. Interesting. So Google was making, so the standard part of the fascinating thing here is in the fights about Canada and links and all that, in the Bill Gross model, there was a market value for a link and the Google model, a market value for the link was never created.

(00:23:03):
That's what enabled publishers to say, ah, your links are worthless. It is our content that is worth everything until such time as Facebook takes down link screaming like stuck pigs. Right? But so Google, by deciding not to charge for links in the search, there was no value created there, but yet Bill Gross, when Bill Gross did his model, I knew Bill, it was from a friend of bill's and I said, nobody's ever going to want to use that. And he sold it for a fortune to Yahoo. Well, good for you. There was a model, he made money that said this is what people are going to want and we can give it to him. Corey's point was, this is the ification of the internet. It's actually where it, but Google cleaned up bill's model, right? Well, maybe this is where you go. The antitrust division, justice.gov, us and plaintiff states versus Google, L l c trial exhibits and enjoy yourself, Kathy, have a great time. Emails, it's presentations. Make yourself some nice warm milk and tuck in for the night. Here's a good one. Come on. 2017,

Cathy Gellis (00:24:10):
I'd rather get,

Leo Laporte (00:24:11):
It's a presentation called Google is magical, but the problem,

Cathy Gellis (00:24:16):
I'd rather get paid for my doc review. I don't want to do it for free.

Leo Laporte (00:24:19):
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's kind of interesting. This is not L Search result works. Okay. I thought Found it. They've found people since then. The smoking gun. Here it is. There's the wood. Put it on fire. There's the smoke. What they're actually saying is, because we can see what you click on the SERP search engine results page, the interaction you do with our results page actually helps us learn what's a good result. And that's actually, oh wow. How is wood a metaphor for, what's the It was

Cathy Gellis (00:24:50):
Logged.

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
It's It was logged. Wow. Somebody giving a ri. Clever Google. Oh, you're good, Kathy. I could see how you got, you could speak Google admitted to the bar, but this is not a smoking gun. I thought it might be, and also it's good because it's not fully redacted. So many of these have big redactions across them. Is it unusual, Kathy, for these to be published publicly and B, for 'em not to be published? That's what Google wanted and then I guess they found a middle ground where they redacted some of the more, I don't know,

Cathy Gellis (00:25:30):
Business focused. Very typically when you're producing discovery, you'll try to make it attorney's eyes only, in which case obviously the other lawyers get to see it, but you don't even want their client necessarily to see it because in theory there's trade secret stuff to learn, let alone the public. But I mean, Google's fighting a war on multiple fronts. It's got a public component to it, so as much as it's thinking of what is the cost to it, if stuff becomes publicly viewable, there's also a cost to not having it publicly viewable. So it was probably in their interest to make sure they sent that slide to Adam because there was more to gain by disclosing it than by trying to keep it hidden.

Leo Laporte (00:26:17):
Here's a Hulu presentation, the difference between paid and organic search in which they use Google to show the difference. That's the paid, that's the, yeah, I don't know why this is a Hulu. If I got over here there maybe. Hey, a little credit here to our main man. We've played before the YouTube clip of you back, what was this, 1987 was it then? Geez, I was young once Jeff was working at People magazine, famous reviewer, TV reviewer, and the folks at Moonlighting asked him to be on the show to explain the long absence and to catch people up and what had happened if they didn't watch previous episode. I was really pleased when I saw that Hulu is bringing Moonlighting back. We love Moonlighting Lisa. Lisa, listen to Leo's the show. I was even more pleased when I saw that they have kept your part in on season three. Very happy episode 12. There's our good man, somebody like Jarvis. Look at that. Talking about Moonlighting. This is on Hulu. So Moonlighting was how Bruce Willis made his name, right? Yep. It was Sybil Shepherd. Bruce Willis, she owns a detective agency. He's a wise Kraken son of a gunned detective working for her and there is, shall we say, romantic tension for nine years. Some real chemistry between them and really the reason the show succeeded is for at least four of the five seasons you were saying. Are they, well, they won't they, are they going to

Cathy Gellis (00:27:54):
It ran for nine seasons?

Leo Laporte (00:27:56):
No, no, just five. Five. But as I remember, they did resolve the romance and the whole thing went downhill. Always. Same for Sam and Diane, of course. Yeah. Dave and Maddie with the original Sam and Diane. This was him and Diane came first. They did they, I don't know, 1985. This was a good tongue in cheek. Just the names of the shows. Give you a hint. Back in the days when it was really just episode four from the most case, a womb with a view between a yuck and a hard place plastic. It just like making up show names. Here it is. Now you know where I got the inspiration. Ina Klein knocked murder. It's good. That's good. It's good. They check with the I

Cathy Gellis (00:28:50):
Rrc too.

Leo Laporte (00:28:53):
I don't know. Did they have an I R C back in 85? 85 Doesn't seem that long ago, does it, Jeff? Not for us. Not for us. Nope. 23 plus 15 is 38 years ago. Wow. Yikes.

Cathy Gellis (00:29:07):
That's a

Leo Laporte (00:29:07):
Long time when you're young like you aunt. 38 years, a long time. You see all this here? I'm not young. It doesn't say I'm What year was that again? 1985. I wasn't even married yet. I was married the next year. Yeah, and Kathy wasn't even born. It's amazing.

Cathy Gellis (00:29:27):
I see no reason to fact check You. Go ahead.

Leo Laporte (00:29:31):
Oh, this just in from Danny Sullivan. Wait a minute. So I like my case. Adam's asking for the birth certificate,

Cathy Gellis (00:29:40):
Right? The long form one.

Leo Laporte (00:29:44):
We're going to redact that Mike EK's calling it X Twitter, which is good because Perfect, perfect. Because I can't call it X. Nobody even knows what I'm talking about and I don't want to say the site formally known as Twitter. That's really No, it good of seeing media. Yeah, just say

Cathy Gellis (00:30:03):
X and it channels the Monty Python. This is an ex parrot. This is an X platform because it just highlights the stupidity of what he did to destroy his own branding.

Leo Laporte (00:30:15):
Well, he is not done yet.

Cathy Gellis (00:30:18):
No, no, no. There's still so much more to destroy. He'll get to it. Last

Leo Laporte (00:30:20):
Week, Elon started stripping headlines from the links shared to ex Twitter. It's the worst. So immediately, just like he did when he took away the blue checks, people immediately started playing with it. And much to I'm sure Elon's chagrin, although he has been silent about it, but they're gone, right? I can't say that they're gone. They're gone. I was suggesting to people that they need to put headlines in their images. Well, that's kind of what's happening. In fact, it got so bad that Snopes had to weigh in with some fact checking. Here's the Snopes article. Did Elon Musk endorse Biden come out as transgender and die of suicide? And of course false. But you might've been fooled because on October 5th, a user named Armand Alky posted this tweet. Elon Musk endorses Joe Biden for reelection with a link to the article from fortune.com. Now, if you click the link, you'd know that that article actually was Elon Musk takes the headlines off of tweets. Oh, okay. So Armand was just very clever, very well done. A sad time. But this is why you need the headlines, because otherwise, the person who tweets it writes the headline just as,

Cathy Gellis (00:31:35):
Oh yeah, that's one example of many that I saw. Here's another

Leo Laporte (00:31:39):
One. It's brilliantly. I wonder how long Musk's going to take to roll it out. I'm not seeing any of that with my own stuff. You don't see headlines, Steve, everything that I post for twit? No, you see the headline, but your readers don't. The readers, oh, I didn't get that. Well, let me go to stuff. Go look at feed, have something someone's posted from a and you don't know if they just posted a photo. The other problem is sometimes you click on it because you think you're going to to the article. No, you're just making the photo big. So here's Eric Garland, Garland tweeting, herts. Now he's writing the headline. Not that there's no, remember there used to be under the slide, there'd be more of that slide saying what the actual headline was saying. Well, what I do is when I use the Twitter button from a site like Washington Post, it will include the headline in the text taking space away from me and my brilliant tweet. But I keep that headline then text. That's what you above. Yeah. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:32:33):
The whole thing is just really sad to me. I remember a conversation with a friend of mine who was a lawyer for Twitter, and he was telling me about, because it was talking about my blog, and he was like, you can use the thing called cards where you can have this block of information get passed through to us, and we're posting that. Go figure out how to make your blog publish along those lines. And it was like, oh, that was so cool. And I never got around to it. And I remembered the enthusiasm that he was describing Twitter having this ability and it was really cool and now it's gone. So the destruction is just so palpable.

Leo Laporte (00:33:09):
Yeah, I mean Facebook did, everybody does it. There's a standard for how you craft your post and the meta tags you put in there. That's what we do on our site. Patrick set it up that way so that when sites like Twitter or Facebook pull it up, they pull up the card, not just the image. Twitter's just decided, Elon said, it's not aesthetic to pull up somebody else's card. I'm just going to give you the image. There's no possible rationale that actually makes any sense in the, it's not aesthetic. As a result, you and I now tweet it, Mr. Jarvis. Yeah, there's a link there. We've,

Cathy Gellis (00:33:45):
And stay.

Leo Laporte (00:33:46):
There's no headline but no head. You have to put the headline in. Let's put it all in. The problem is that person who writes the tweet can do that. For instance here, Ellen Musk, formerly Elon comes out as transgender. They even picked a nice little Axios article. That's not what the Axios article is about. But you don't know that because the headline's not there. Here's another one. Elon found dead at Twitter, not the case. In fact, it's the same article from Fortune that says the headlines are gone. So I like this Armand Leski, I'm following Armand. Jesus. Clever. Well, and the Snopes had to say, no, none of this is true. This is just misleading because of the way. Yet another hazard is a larger, that this is what Elon has done, fought out policy, basically.

Cathy Gellis (00:34:34):
Wait, so because Ilan put this post into policy. Snopes is having to debunk it.

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
Yes.

Cathy Gellis (00:34:40):
The logical consequences of his dumb policy.

Leo Laporte (00:34:43):
Well, in fact, what Snopes

Cathy Gellis (00:34:44):
To clean up his own reputation because of his, that was ruined by his own business decisions.

Leo Laporte (00:34:50):
Well, and in fact, what Snopes is going to be facing is pretty much every debunking everything. Because you can run any headline you want. And this gets to really the big story of the week, which is the EU is now saying you got to do something about disinformation on Twitter. It's particularly relevant because of what's happening in Israel right now. And here's a wired magazine story. Elon Musk is posting his way through the Israeli mo piss off Jamer B apparently pissed you off yesterday. This is from October 10th. Try to be his agent. What's left of the trust and safety team globalizing you announced the measures it was taking to try and curb the virulent spread of disinformation around the Israel hummus war on its platform. But the meanwhile, Elon's reposting all sorts of disinformation. And in fact, anybody who wants to can, the EU has said, you've got 24 hours to fix this.

(00:35:54):
This is a big problem. Did you read Mike Masnick on the topic? Well, let's do it right now, shall we on textile dirt, dirt, dirt take dirt, run down. It's labeled Masnick under government. So the EU 84 puts this whole mandate on them. What are they going to do? They take Twitter out of the over there. Well, a number of people saying there's nothing you can do, can't do anything if you don't fix this, EU could be taking you down. Actually, Mike says, sure, there's Disin info and ex Twitter, but the EU should not be demanding censorship. They're going to use the D S A. And this was why we talked a lot about the Digital Services Act before it became law. And the problematic element of this, go ahead, Kathy.

Cathy Gellis (00:36:46):
Well, this is cheering the imposition of a censorship regime is not a good idea. It's a censorship regime. See, it's,

Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
It's hard to say. So don't do

Cathy Gellis (00:36:59):
It. I don't even want to say it. It's just not worth the dignity. But it is not something to cheer it's censorship. And we should not like that because okay, right now, most, I wouldn't even say all of the governments in Europe are more or less, but it wasn't that long ago that they were very pro-Nazi. So if the government gets to decide what is okay, it's not a given that they're going to decide that the okay stuff is the things you like and the not okay stuff is the things you hate. It could very easily be the other way around. Giving them the power to decide is a really bad idea.

Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
What if the EU says, this is not censorship, this is moderation. Content moderation.

Cathy Gellis (00:37:40):
Well, they are saying that, and no, they're wrong. Because what people keep ignoring government is that they're talking about mandatory. Well, this comes up in America too with the idea of mandatory transparency reports. But if you have to be transparent about every single content-based decision that you make, you're going to be chilled. It's not, you're going to be able to make them as freely as you'd be able to make them. Because having to be worried about somebody looking over your shoulder or even just having to go through the act of writing down what you thought and sort of figure out what you meant and come up in some way that it's readable to somebody else. That's not free expression. That's filling out check boxes and feeling, it limits the universe of ideas that you're capable of expressing and moderation choices. You're capable of exercising and things like that. So even to the extent that Europe's like, oh, well you to be accountable and if you're going to leave it up, you need to explain. No, that's still a problem. Calling it sense. Even if it's censorship light, it's still censorship. It still comes out. It's just that the act of chilling the choices is a little more indirect than to just say, thou shalt not post on X topic because it's functionally leading to the same end of

(00:38:58):
Thou shalt not post on X topic, Y topic, Z topic and quite a few more topics because people are, what would you feel free to be able to post? It would be so anine because, oh, well if I post about cats and kittens, I guess I can get away with that. But anything more complex, how do you document?

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
Yeah, Mike's gotten a big, and quite frankly we can on blue sky about this exact thing. His post this morning said that a year ago he was told there was no way the Digital services act would be used for censorship. It was only about best practices. But of course, that's exactly now what the EU is saying is we want you to pull down these posts that we considered disinformation. Elon, by the way, is pushing back

Cathy Gellis (00:39:46):
Not particularly well, but yes.

Leo Laporte (00:39:48):
Well, and that's the issue. I mean, we can go back and forth, but we have a first amendment in the US that says the government shall not tell private entities what to do. They shall not bridge the freedom of speech. But that's an American, right? I don't know if the EU has this concept. No, they have a freedom of expression in their rights, but not by no means Germany has long forbidden eBay from selling Nazi memorabilia or anything in France That censorship from our point of view, that's government abridging the rights of these companies from our point of view. But that's an American point of view.

Cathy Gellis (00:40:24):
But it shouldn't be. I mean, I get into these arguments with Europeans all the time because they're like, oh, take you and your American exceptionalism were different over here. And no, you're not actually that different. You do have the rights of the principle of free expression built into documents, the European Convention for Human Rights. You also have an appreciation for democracy, which depends on free expression. So my argument back to Europeans is if you like democracy, you have to have free expression. And if you're going to have free expression in any sort of meaningful way, this is the mechanics you have to follow to make it work all like, oh, well, we balance it. And I'm kind of like, if you've balanced it, you don't have it at all because you can't count on it existing in a way that's going to make sure that the ideas that need to get expressed will be able to be expressed.

(00:41:13):
And if it's a, maybe you may get lucky for a while, which I think is what people are looking at Europe and saying, well, we don't have any problems. It's totally working for us. But meanwhile, dissidents, people who are just in political oppositions are getting censored, if not arrested. There's a lot that they're like, oh, we're fine. We have problems. We can totally tolerate this. The government is right. Let's trust it. And they're just kind of ignoring an awful lot of evidence to the contrary, both on exhibit now and the fact that you may be lucky in the come before the storm, but if this sort of thing can happen, you're going to be in trouble. And basically they're not seeing that what the EU wants to do is what Russia wants to do, what China wants to do, what China has done. And they're not self-identifying and they're thinking it's something completely different when it's actually completely the same.

Leo Laporte (00:42:03):
Mike writes, I think Musk could have done many, many things to better deal with disinformation on X Twitter, but it's not the government's place to step in and threaten him over speech. I mean, we can say, Hey, disinformation, real problem on Twitter, don't believe anything you see. And there have been in fact autoplay videos that are horrendous. I'm seeing parents saying, I'm terrified my kids are going to see this stuff and be traumatized. I mean it's bad, but the government doesn't get to step in and shut that down. Well, at the same time, you have the opposite happening in the Florida and Texas laws that are going to go to the Supreme Court where they're being forced to carry content. You may not take it down. And that's an abrogation of the, it's just the other side of the same coin though, right? We would agree.

(00:42:50):
Exactly. Well, again, it's compliment interference. Or this morning on morning Joe, there was a Republican and a Democrat, congressman who were saying that the Republican was saying, and the Democrat was agreeing with him, and Mika Brzezinski was agreeing with him that students at Harvard and other universities, including CUNY, saying things against Israel on behalf of Palestine was antisemitism. And that's the first question is what is it or who's to say? And then the second question, I'm not supporting what the students are saying to be clear, but the second thing was they said that we should cut off federal money to these universities unless they crack down. Well, that's government saying what? It's not in the press then it's in the university. It's government in speech and Mika saying, yeah, it's the right idea. No, it's not. And you're benefiting Mika from our first amendment as a member of the press.

Cathy Gellis (00:43:46):
There's an awful lot of people who are sort of really glib about rights that they depend on for their own lives and livelihood. But speaking also as somebody who might be in the crosshairs of some of this terrible speech, I don't feel any safer. I don't want the paternalism. If there's lessons that I take out of the terrible things that have happened to people I connected culturally to, it's that the loss of the ability to call for help or to point out there's a problem and to speak against it was a big reason why the worst possible things we're able to happen. It doesn't protect the vulnerable to make sure that the vulnerable can't speak out against the things that hurt them. And if the government is just taking sides for who's the winners, who's the losers, and who gets to speak, that's not going to protect anybody. Mean especially also in particular on an issue like mid east politics where there's vulnerable people all over the place, some in Israel, some in Palestine, where if you have to choose who we're going to protect and which interests and which people we're going to protect, that means that a lot of the people are going to get hurt.

(00:44:54):
So stay out. There's no place for government to put its thumb on these debates.

Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
So by the way, the EU has told the Elon, you have 24 hours. Let's hear what you're going to do. Meanwhile, well, the person

Cathy Gellis (00:45:12):
Who sent the letter, the person who sent the letter teary, I can't remember his

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Last name, but Hall,

Cathy Gellis (00:45:18):
He's actually on blue sky. So here's a person who's taking issue with social media, also availing himself of social media to make sure that his statements can be read by people. Oh, he's

Leo Laporte (00:45:28):
Done videos with Elon. So Elon, just the hypo hypocrisy. Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach. I know the EU supports, he's asking Brett to list the violations you allude to so the public can see them. He didn't write this. Terry is responding. You're well aware of your users and authorities reports on fake content and glorification of violence up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk. See, that's the other thing here. I can't wait to hear Kathy on this. This is the problem with the vagueness of, for example, the UK online safety bill because it's telling you take down harmful stuff, take down bad stuff, but we're not going to define harm. We're not going to tell you what it is. And if you don't get it, your ass is grass, which is a horrible chill, which means you get over moderation.

(00:46:20):
Same thing happens with nets VG in Germany where too much is taken down because the statute is so vague, it's almost like you're washing their hands of it. We want you to do something about it, but not because we said so. But yeah, please do something about it. And the government doesn't know how to do it. They can't scale to this effort. So they've deputized this non-governmental agency to take on a governmental act without due process, without openness. And they're saying, you do this or we're going to come after you. That's not what should be happening in a democracy.

Cathy Gellis (00:46:55):
And I think they're not under understanding. It is possible that they think that by not being specific, they're not actually censoring. We're not telling you what to do, but it doesn't work that way telling somebody that they have to do something. You've already reached the threshold of a censorship regime and the fact that you're not being more specific, it doesn't exonerate you of the problems that you're causing. If you're the government doing this, it has chilled speech and it has taken away the independent freedom and discretion of whoever you're trying to regulate to do whatever they think they need or want to do. If that discretion is impinged upon, it doesn't matter how you're doing the impinging, you've impinged and that's a problem and a violation of free expression.

Leo Laporte (00:47:39):
Yes. So what do you suggest we do just not use Twitter anymore?

Cathy Gellis (00:47:48):
Well, I mean I'm not using Twitter anymore, particularly. I am, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:53):
But I don't find the stuff there. I mean, you also know who to block responsibility.

Cathy Gellis (00:47:56):
Responsibility. I mean, who do you mean we responsibility and what are we trying to accomplish if we're speaking we general people? Yeah. I think Twitter's toast and let's not go there. I think going there ends up supporting the worst things that it ends up doing, and I think it's time to abandon it, but I think that's the,

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
But there's nothing else

Cathy Gellis (00:48:14):
To do about reaction as a policy matter, not as a policy matter, because quite frankly, the appropriate policy matter is to leave it to the users to say, screw you along. We're going to Blue Sky,

Leo Laporte (00:48:23):
Right? And then we get into that whole other argument is should we all be leaving Twitter? And I'm still there because there are communities there I care about and I want to try to spread decency there. That's my choice. But in the end, at some point you're supporting Twitter and you leave it, the market speaks.

Cathy Gellis (00:48:42):
There is a silver lining to this absolute crap of what Alan's done to that platform, which is prior to now, the governments were operating under the assumption that the big social media were here, the be all end all the world is, the internet is thusly. It's terrible, it's sucks. It'll never change. And it actually is sort of interesting to say, see, your assumptions were not right, because one of the incumbents you thought would be here till the end of time is a train wreck now and losing and about to fail on a business standpoint. And hey, look, we've got all these little ones, they were able to bubble up because they're bubbling up in a policy space where they have the freedom to do that. So these are the arguments to say, this is why you should have a policy and also a constitutional mandate that the government has to keep its hands off because this is allowing the circle of life of people who want to speak are able to find the communities and platforms that support the speech they want to have because the government isn't meddling with that. And that's why a policy of non inter medling is the correct one. And also why the Constitution dictates that it must be the only one.

Leo Laporte (00:49:50):
I just dunno how long it'll take for these other projects that are bubbling up to be part of the critical mass. We've been talking about Blue Sky for a year now, but this is a tiny tech circle of folks right now. Yeah. Kathy, I noticed that seems to be where you're most active. Is that right? Blue sky?

Cathy Gellis (00:50:08):
Yeah, and I feel slightly guilty about it. I actually prefer to support Mastodon, and I've sort of started having an invite policy, which is, I'll give you a blue sky code, but only if you tell me that you're also on Mastodon. Oh, that's interesting. Cool. One of the reasons I like

Leo Laporte (00:50:25):
Kathy's law.

Cathy Gellis (00:50:26):
Yeah, Kathy's law. I like the openness of Mastodon. I like the federation model. It's a lot. Also more Blue Sky will have one, but it's not as mature. Blue Sky is also currently not pay walled but locked down. So I like to support the openness and I think the promise and potential of what Mastodon can be. And quite frankly, I think I get different interactions on each platform and I do really value the community that I've ended up finding on Mastodon. I think it's full of many more, I want to say normal people, but I think it's really, they're my people. I got a nice supply of geeks and interesting people and I don't know, maybe none of us are normal, but this is a comfortable crowd where if I ask a question, I tend to get an awful lot of quality answers back in good faith. On the other hand, what I appreciate about it is its bigness and the fact that it feels so unlimited, but sometimes that feels a little overwhelming in terms of where I'm spending my time. And I think that might be why I'm spending more time on Blue Sky because it's a more finite community and I sort of can go through my whole stream and actually finish it. And I think I'm just, that's ironic. You like blue sky issues that are making me feel better with that.

Leo Laporte (00:51:38):
That's interesting.

Cathy Gellis (00:51:39):
But I both like that and don't like it about it. It's comfortable in terms of my usability needs right now, but philosophically, that's not actually what I want. What I want is if I'm going to bother posting, I also want people to read it, and I just aren't that many people to read it on Blue Sky.

Leo Laporte (00:51:56):
I want to megaphone. But I think to your question about critical mass, there's critical mass for you. How many people are enough for you to talk to? Because you never talk to all of Twitter. Is this true? You talk to whoever you talk to, right? Is this true? So I think that's the first calculation that we have to make is that small is good. Mastodon is big enough. I have great conversations there. I love it for that. It is critical mass. I have critical mass very quickly there, and I'm ashamed I didn't listen to Leo earlier. Then the next question, however, is what's critical mass for impact and movements? And that's a different calculation. And so we may all dislike journalists, but if they're not reading us, it's not going to get in the press. It's not going to have impact. It just about, we have some type of discussion about how Twitter has just really turned into a craptastic mess, but yet that platform is still there and still rolling along and nobody tends to really just dump it and say, you know what? I'm going to move on to something else. The critical

Cathy Gellis (00:53:01):
Mass is still

Leo Laporte (00:53:02):
Over there.

Cathy Gellis (00:53:04):
Individual communities are hitting tipping points, though you do see waves after each stupid thing. There is a wave and the waves are accruing, the waves are accruing. What I think is happening now is maybe more of the waves are going to blue sky than Mastodon, but the problem with Mastodon, and it's both its feature and its bigness, is also its Achilles heel. People are used to usability. That is a lot more one click. I know exactly what's going on. Whereas to get onto Mastodon, its power is in with sophistication, but it's intimidating people. They don't know where to go and what service to sign up for and how it works, and that's becoming daunting. Whereas Blue Sky is, Hey, give me a code. And it's a very easy process. It's familiar to be get on. So I think that's part of the reason why Blue Sky is getting maybe more oxygen that Mastodon maybe. But Mastodon is so big and it's still swallowing up thousands of people weekly, monthly. It's pretty big.

Leo Laporte (00:54:00):
Kathy, one example of what you just said is I suddenly, because I have some German friends on social media, but suddenly I was seeing German after German after German, after German as well. What's going on? And then finally I saw some reference that Musk had platformed or endorsed the A f D, the far right German Neo Nazi

Cathy Gellis (00:54:19):
Party, right? Yeah. And

Leo Laporte (00:54:20):
So that's why. And so all these German journalists and all these Germans were coming over and it's great. I've got to use Translate more, but it was exactly that kind of wave. And I'm finding my book history people who I adore on Twitter, and I don't want to lose the problem There is I'm seeing much less activity on Twitter, but I'm not seeing them on either. They haven't

Cathy Gellis (00:54:41):
Turned up somewhere else.

Leo Laporte (00:54:42):
Yeah, threads. I adore Threads for

Cathy Gellis (00:54:45):
About a month and half. No, really don't need to speak a well.

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
I'm trying to sell books by the way. It's done is on sale now. I still use Thread. I would back to Threads to do it. I still use threads. This is another spot to yell into the megaphone. That's about it. All of these things are me. I would be a lot happier with both Reds and Blue Sky. If they followed through on their promise to Feder, that would make things a lot easier to justify. But they've made no move to, and I kind of predicted a long time ago that they never would because you did. It's not.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:14):
But one thing I think that is also meaningful is, one of the other things I like about Mastodon is it doesn't have a block at the moment. If you post a Mastodon, unless you're locked down, those posts are public and embeddable. And what I think can happen is basically with a quality search engine, why aren't we? There's no search native to Mastodon yet, but in theory it doesn't matter because you can post.

Leo Laporte (00:55:40):
Actually, they did add Mastodon and did add search recently. Actually they've added

Cathy Gellis (00:55:43):
It now. I think it's coming. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:45):
No, it's in the

Cathy Gellis (00:55:47):
In here now. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:55:48):
Well, depends

Cathy Gellis (00:55:48):
On you.

Leo Laporte (00:55:49):
This is part of the problem with Mastodon. Depends on which server. Which server I Server has it. It's managing it. That social has it.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:56):
We were talking about cards earlier. This is a kind of unit of information that can be published on Mastodon, but viewed via all sorts of other pages around the web. And that I think is really powerful. And that's one of the things that I think made Twitter really powerful where we like to write articles, we're embedding tweets. We like to quote the people who posted that. If you just treat it as a self-publishing platform that can be excerpted and cited on other sites and platforms around the, it's powerful. And that power that Twitter was offering is now here. I think we're just kind of ignoring it, but that's significant. And I think that also gives Mastodon the potential for power that Twitter used to have. And we don't have to wait for, we just have to use it

Leo Laporte (00:56:40):
As of today. You can follow any wordpress.com blog on Mastodon. They're federated. I've used Mastodon as a support for my Posse strategy. It's funny, my daughter just discovered Posse. Posse. She said, have you heard of this Posse thing? I said, heard about it. We invented it. Cool. Dad Post wants syndicate everywhere. It's the open web concept that Kevin Mars was all behind. It's part of the indie web and philosophy, which is essentially, and I think I really still believe this, although it's very old fashioned, you should have one place your site, aunt pruitt.com. That is your place. All your stuff starts there and it's syndicated everywhere else, and Mastodon helps you with that. My comments on my blog come through Mastodon, which is kind of a great way of creating a conversation because the commenting happens on Mastodon and then it continues. Let's take a little break. Would you like to hear it? Would you first, do you want to hear it? Do you want, I'm offering you an I told you so. Opportunity. Oh, this would be good.

(00:57:43):
I never would say I told you so. Oh, you never rubs anything in anybody. Go ahead. So you remember Jo Host, which started after, there's a big controversy region there. Tell us about that. Well, so Adam Davidson, who I picked, did a wonderful job. He had a great team of people who did it, but it finally just became too much. And they've handed it over to Jeff Brown, who does newsy, who nicely took it on. And I saw a number of people say, I'm not going to be on Jna host, because who the hell is Adam Brown or whatever his name is Jeff Brown. He's a good guy. Well, I saw one guy who was saying that. Yeah. And I responded to him that Jeff's done a good job with Newsy. I think he took it on. I'm grateful he did that. Is he the Jeff Brown who created Flat Stanley? No. No. Is he the Jeff Brown who is founder of the Soul Shaping Institute? No. You could see the confusion. There's quite a few. No, it's, did he write writes Articulations and seven other books? No.

(00:58:36):
Is he an apprentice with top criminal lawyer? No. No. Okay. Well, I don't know who this, Jeff Brown is Newsy. So does Jeff's a nice guy. What is newsy? But he does newsy and he's done a good job there. And he's tried to help out journalists. And he did it more in your model, Leo, where he didn't try to verify people in the same way. But yeah, as you couldn't attest, it's work to have a community. You need to have work put into it. So Newsy Social was his mastodon, and he's now running Jo Host, is that correct? Yep. Yep. Okay. But his new account is now on Honey Tree Social. What's that? I can see my MAs on Mike Confused people just a little bit. So the guy who was complaining went to Dare d a r, which is the one that was started by Tim.

(00:59:26):
Yes. And she was complaining about it. But I have to say, I think that's a misunderstanding of what the Fed averse is. Yeah. That's point that the benefit you yourself, and you can move, but if you want, you can verify yourself. You don't need somebody else to say who you are. In fact, I just read, oh, you're going to, here's your chance to tell me. I told you So Jeff, I just signed up for Facebook and I used, have you seen, I used mast on? I just got a text from somebody that was me. It was like a, did he sign up? And I was like, nah, that's a faker. No, that's me. Somebody asked me, and by the way, if you go to my first post, it says to prove on me, oh, snap. I link to my Mastodon where I say, yeah, that's me. And Mastodon is, oh, that's why is verified. Why? Yeah. So now I'll tell you why I did this, because I think it's really important, especially with this current massive disinformation in the war, but also what we will be getting between now and November, 2024. To keep an eye, I think I need to keep an eye on Facebook because I think it's one of the places. Plus I'm going to be 67 next year, and that's where all my friends are.

(01:00:42):
They're all on Facebook. How am I supposed to keep up with my friends? That's where I'm, I've got my MySpace page, my friends, I still have my MySpace, of course, but nobody's there. Remember 1985? Yeah. Oh, I'm going to join the Moonlighting group. I got to tell you about this thing called blog spot. The reason that I did is ostensibly because I wanted to keep up and see what's happening there, but it also is one way to stay. It's one of the only ways. The other reason was we had a death in the family, and the only way to keep up with that stuff these days, at least with those family members, they're not geeks. You got to be on Facebook. So that's where the memorial page is and all of that stuff. So there were a number of things that kind of all converged last night. I thought, yeah, Jeff's going to kill me. Oh, look what I'm doing. I'm going to add a friend. I am not following people. Hey, hey, hey. Who I don't know, Hey, but this is fast. Fascinating.

(01:01:50):
You are doing it just, I guess, out of the goodness of your heart. No, don't say that. That's not exactly it. I know I left Facebook years ago because I'm going to create this account. Well, part of it is I can keep an eye on this. What's happening? Boy, these are suggested for me's, the real reason. What the hell is this? Why do they want me to, why are they suggesting, what did I do to deserve this? Or reputation precedes you, Leo. Incidentally, that is one thing I found really weird. TikTok told them, and one of the really interesting things about Facebook is the stuff that I didn't follow anybody. The stuff that's on my feed from people. It's really interesting. So this is actually part of the research process? Yeah. A bit of an experiment with you. Yeah. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (01:02:34):
I cannot get it to, okay, so Facebook has decided to give me comics that by and large I like, except it was feeding me family circus, which I have found

Leo Laporte (01:02:45):
The worst.

Cathy Gellis (01:02:45):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:02:46):
Reasonable. That's the

Cathy Gellis (01:02:46):
Worst comic

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
Ever. No, Nancy's

Cathy Gellis (01:02:49):
The worst comic, but I'm getting peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, and that's not too bad.

Leo Laporte (01:02:53):
Okay,

Cathy Gellis (01:02:54):
So that works for me. It's also giving me Abba, lots of Abba. I didn't dislike Abba, although the dislike is growing because it just keeps feeding me and I keep trying to make it stop, and it's not really taking the hint.

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
Well, this, it's worth it alone for me because I follow pursuing pork tenderloin sandwiches. By the way, there's now all these people trying to follow me. I'm not going to add this big circle of people. I don't know. So don't bother. You're breaking hearts, Leo. You're breaking hearts. This is part of the reason I left in the first place, is

Cathy Gellis (01:03:31):
You

Leo Laporte (01:03:31):
Now regret saying your mind.

Cathy Gellis (01:03:32):
There's a whole bunch of French people named Leo, so they're all these three other Leo Deports are going to have this sudden wave.

Leo Laporte (01:03:40):
Why are these people following emails? Here's how it's me. It's got a picture of me and my Well, you can't even use, can't even do that. That's not steal that, right? It's not verified. Yeah. So there's a link back to my Facebook on Mastodon and Mastodon is verified. Okay, now let's take a break, which we were going to do about half an hour. Sorry. That's how we make you enjoyed every so long. But you can now say, I told you so, Jeff. Yes. And you can say, I told you so. Yeah. What was that about? I forgot already. Oh, that was about, oh yeah, that was right on that. Our show today.

(01:04:15):
Our show today, brought to you by Vanta. Vanta is a brand new sponsor. Welcome to happen. Welcome to the show. And I love, do you not love their slogan? Compliance? That doesn't sock too much. Get it. Give him a rim shot. Get compliant. Build trust fast with Vanta. Vanta was founded in 2018 in the wake of several high profile data breaches. And of course it's not gotten better in the intervening five years online securities job. One, Vanta understands firsthand how hard it is for fast growing companies to invest the time and manpower it takes to build a solid security foundation. Vanta was inspired by a vision to restore trust in internet businesses by enabling companies to improve and prove their security. So proof is a big part of this, right? Growing a business. More tools, right? More third party vendors, data sharing, more partners, also known as way more risk van's.

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(01:06:59):
Good to know. Just so you know, in Germany it would be Fanta, fta, Vanta. Vanta. Alright, let's talk about something else. I'm so tired of Elon. We don't talk about Elon. I feel like some of this we talked about before. There's nothing new under

AI (01:07:25):
The sun.

Leo Laporte (01:07:26):
I guess I did it on Sunday on Twit. For instance, the story that the Amazon Echo says the 2020 election was stolen. Oops, that's not good. Talk about this information. Credit to the Washington Post Zuki that's pronounced Vanta does. Does it still say it? No, but she was smart. She recorded it, she recorded it, and I can play it for you. Her

AI (01:07:58):
Was the 2020 election stolen from rumble.com. The 2020 election was stolen by a massive amount of election fraud.

Leo Laporte (01:08:10):
So she was smart to record it because as soon as the Washington Post contacted Amazon as all good journalists do, they said, oh, whoops. And it's gone. Except only gone from that query. So they've got some, so the problem is Rumble, that's the first mistake. There's honed writing on the problem. Well, I just have a way. Rumble was a video streaming service kind of right-wing video streaming service. Oh yeah. They also referred to a sub stack that said that 2020 races were notorious for many incidences of regularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers. The issue is that Amazon is using non reliable sources. I guess you can see though, this is a problem. What are they going to do to filter? Because that's on the public web. Do they need to put in if statement says if rightwing, no, that would be wrong.

(01:09:11):
Amazon spokeswoman. Lauren Rahel says These responses were errors. Yeah, a statement that were delivered a small number of times and quickly fixed when we brought to our attention. We continually audit and improve the systems we have in place for detecting and blocking inaccurate content. Rahel said that during elections, Alexa works with credible sources like Reuters, Ballotpedia and real clear politics to provide realtime information. But the smoking gun is, yeah, they fixed the ones that the Post had mentioned, but there were other questions which still prop the device because they've got to clean up their sources. All these companies, companies are so afraid of making judgements. They've got to make judgements. They don't want to. This is one of the reasons I went back on Facebook. I think we've seen everybody from Alex Stamos on this show, Joan Donovan on this show. Many experts in dense information say that this is what's coming down the pike is going to be an avalanche of disinformation. Interestingly, the Israeli Hamas war has actually been a test case for that because Twitter was just full of videos purporting to be from the war, but actually from a video game, videos from two years ago and other geographic locales and just complete misstatements, and if you read this stuff wherever you read it, I believe it. Then you're getting a false picture. Twitter is the end of a bar on a late Saturday night, and we should expect no more from it in general than that. Real people don't get their news from Twitter, do they?

Cathy Gellis (01:10:49):
Well, they did

Leo Laporte (01:10:50):
At one point. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (01:10:52):
Some real odd. I mean, the question is are they still now? Because it basically seems to be, the consensus is if you had a pre curated list of people you were following who were appropriate experts trusted, you can get decent information, but you're not necessarily all going to have the experts all lined up now that the cards are gone, you're not really going to be able to see the mainstream. Well, you're not going to be able to see the journalism posted and just functionally, the tool is so klugy that your ability to navigate and interact with it is just so compromised. I mean, I basically quit. I'd like to say I was principled and I quit because of the Nazis, but I mostly quit when he killed TweetDeck. All of a sudden my ability to interact with the media was compromised where I couldn't spend time on it.

Leo Laporte (01:11:39):
Likes this new one deck blue and I think Scooter X in our IRC likes it too. Deck blue Blue, which it's for threads. It's not Twitter, it's for threads, but it looks just like

Cathy Gellis (01:11:50):
T tick. It's for not

Leo Laporte (01:11:52):
Thread. Sorry.

Cathy Gellis (01:11:52):
I think it's for blue sky. Blue sky. Pardon me.

Leo Laporte (01:11:55):
Bluesky Blue Ski. Okay, you're confused. It's for your skeets.

Cathy Gellis (01:11:58):
Let's

Leo Laporte (01:11:59):
Get right. Okay.

Cathy Gellis (01:12:01):
I haven't started using it yet, but I like that it exists, so I'll try it out when I get the time.

Leo Laporte (01:12:06):
Yeah, it's got columns. You can move 'em around. You can change the settings for individual columns. I think this is good. You can mute words like that. I got a question for you. Yes, sir. With your experiment for Facebook coming up, you know you're going to see some pretty questionable. I hope I do come up on your screen. I think I just did actually. Well, okay. Questionable information I should say. Not just imagery. Let's say something is served up to you from someone. Are you going to take the time to correct them? Right. Good question. No, not going to have anything to do with it. Should

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:45):
You? You do.

Leo Laporte (01:12:46):
You know what I'm do responsibility do? I'm going to unfollow. I would. I don't know. I think this is a very selfish point of view, but my attitude is nobody got time for that. I'm with you. I'm the same way. When I see things, the, and that's the thing, and people are like, well, you should probably educate them. You know what, man? I don't have the energy and they don't want to be educated. I'm afraid they're just getting in fights

Cathy Gellis (01:13:11):
Within them. I don't have a rule.

Leo Laporte (01:13:13):
Pardon?

Cathy Gellis (01:13:14):
I don't have a single rule. It really depends on the person, the relationship. And that cuts both ways where sometimes it's, it's a person I care about enough that it's worth the conversation. And sometimes it's sort of a, I'm going to take the time because sometimes I think you have to put something that just puts a new idea in their head. They may not believe it, but they may be in such a vortex of wrongness that sometimes you just sort of have to point out that something else exists. Where is the effort to upside worth it? And it also depends on the person. It depends on my time. It depends on the day and stuff. But I wouldn't say, I don't tend to say absolutely yes or absolutely no. It's the mood.

Leo Laporte (01:13:58):
I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at Facebook. What the heck? I have noticed there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work. Well, here's an example. Look, I don't want to see this anymore, right? So I'm going to say,

Cathy Gellis (01:14:09):
Why

Leo Laporte (01:14:09):
Do you want to hide that sexually done no good? We're what? Bring it right back. It's sexual exploitation. Thanks. You won't see the suggestion again. Boom. Right?

Cathy Gellis (01:14:24):
I think you found a bug.

Leo Laporte (01:14:27):
It shouldn't have been proposed in the first place. Sexual exploitation. I don't want,

Cathy Gellis (01:14:33):
Alright, what happens if you said child nudity? Would it come

Leo Laporte (01:14:36):
Up if you said that? Oh, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Nudity, child nudity. Now we got it. No.

Cathy Gellis (01:14:46):
Nope. That's a problem.

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
It's broken.

Cathy Gellis (01:14:47):
That's that's a bad problem.

Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
For those who are just listening, refresh the page just for the second. Oh, it's a suggested group of cleavage. Oh good. Okay. There you go. I just needed to refresh the page. Not relevant. Thank you. Goodbye.

Cathy Gellis (01:15:06):
Bad. No, but it was repopulating every time you did it, so that shouldn't be on here.

Leo Laporte (01:15:10):
There we go. New York City. Now I can see virtual yard sales in the Petaluma area, helping each other. Petaluma. That's good. Let's see. Some groups suggested just for me. These are the good ones. These are the good ones. Petaluma Homeowner Peeps. This is all Petaluma all the time. That's good. Wow. There's a lot of Petaluma stuff on Facebook. Chimney Christmas. Okay, you can't believe that. I feel like Rip Van Winkle. So there's this thing called what Face? Facebook. What is that? The Facebook to you. The Facebook, huh? Look face Facebook. Have you been following? Cute gal in the dining hall

Cathy Gellis (01:15:57):
And we call every time you post a bloop and if you get three bloops, its'

Leo Laporte (01:16:03):
A blur. It's a B blurp. Okay, I am writing this down now. I got a little book on. Will you put something on my wall, Leo, that I can poke you? Do they even call it walls

Cathy Gellis (01:16:12):
Anymore?

Leo Laporte (01:16:13):
I forget. For years, have you been following the Samuel Bankman Freed Case? No Trial? No. It's too much. There's too much going on. Too much. Too much. We can't follow it all. Have you read the new book? Oh God, no. Whose book?

Cathy Gellis (01:16:31):
I read reviews about the new

Leo Laporte (01:16:32):
Book.

Cathy Gellis (01:16:33):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:16:33):
Enough. If you read the reviews, you don't need to read the book. That's the rule. Someone wrote about Bankman. Oh, not just anyone. Oh, not just someone. Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and the Big Short, oh boy. The Blind Side. Two authors had really bad choices in subjects this year. Well, the choices

Cathy Gellis (01:16:54):
Are fine. They're gormless. Lack of skepticism is the

Leo Laporte (01:17:00):
Problem. Go word. Word. It sounds like sci-fi. I'm so jealous. That's in your brain and it came out. It means lacking sense or initiative. Foolish. Love it. Love it. Show title. Seriously. Kless. I've got it memorized. Now, some of the complaints both for Lewis and Isaacson are that they were, it was access journalism. They were so close to their subject. We talked about that last week that they weren't able to really, well in the case of Isaacson made no attempt to figure out what was so, or what was just Elon blowing smoke. Do you think SS p f was even aware of Michael Lewis be in there? He seemed to have access to everything S P F was doing. Lewis's take again, I haven't read the book either. Just came out. Lewis, which it's called Infinite What? Anyway, I can't remember, but oh hell, I forgot already. We've already forgotten the name. But his take was essentially, well maybe going infinite. Sorry, maybe going infinite. He knew what he was doing, but maybe he just was a goofball or something. The Atlantic said the journalist in the fallen billionaire going Infinite. Michael Lewis gets close, too close to Sam Bankman freed. Same complaint as about Walter Isaacson actually. Exactly.

Cathy Gellis (01:18:33):
Although I think they had to

Leo Laporte (01:18:34):
Fit into their narrative and they didn't know what to do when it didn't.

Cathy Gellis (01:18:38):
I think the allegations with Michael Lewis might be a little more concerning with the caveat that I read this. I don't know if it's true. They seem to suggest that he already knew S B F before the controversy, and so it

Leo Laporte (01:18:50):
Was already

Cathy Gellis (01:18:51):
Sort of in his corner not seeing what was wrong. In which case his choice of subject became dubious where he really wasn't able to exert the level of skepticism that he needed to do his job meaningfully. I think with Isaacson he was more skeptical naturally, but just didn't really follow up the threads of inquiry very well. So you get to the same place. Neither are particularly good books of the subject and that's why they're both getting criticized. But I think the Michael Lewis one may be worse and worse for his reputation than for Isaacson's.

Leo Laporte (01:19:28):
The testimony today and this week has been Caroline Ellison, who was his on again off again, sbs, not Michael Lewis' on again off again a girlfriend, but I really liked Molly White's take on all of this from the F T X files. Her Substan newsletter, the fraud was in the code. They literally, and that's a very brave thing for prosecutors to do, brought up. This was on Friday snapshots from GitHub of the code, but apparently Wood says, although there was a risk of confusing the jury when presenting them with code snippets, prosecutors had Gary Wang, the former C T O of F T X stepped through what the code was doing in a way that seemed pretty clear to me. Of course, Molly's a coder, it probably helped that Ft. X's engineers wrote decently clean code with descriptive variable names and concise functions and chose a very human readable language.

(01:20:28):
Python. In fact, it really is the smoking gun. Oh boy. If for instance, here's some code that adds logic to exempt accounts from checks to see whether they're bouncing their checks. If not account allow negative, then say account does not have a balances, but if it's allowed negative, that one, you don't have to tell us that you're overdrawn. No, just keep on going. And presumably Alameda was one of those accounts prosecutors pointed out that practically the same day this change was being made at SBSS direction. SSB F was on Twitter claiming alameda's account. Oh, it's just like everyone else. No, it's a liquidity provider, but their accounts just like everyone. Alameda's incentive is just for FTX to do as well as possible. There is the issue of the several hundred million dollars lost in a trade. They took the money out of Alameda, go off a screen without telling anybody. Which one do you looks like? Was that like some Corian database up there? Right there.

(01:21:44):
This looks like a, these are whose screen is this dish? Who's running this query is what I want to know. How do they get access in? This is a government exhibit. Wow. Yeah. Oh, back to the exhibits. We're looking at exhibits kids. So a good article, I probably shouldn't go through the whole thing, but they had hard coded balances into the code. Like, oh yeah, we got, yeah, we 5.25 billion in there. Yeah, it's in the code. It's written in. See? Oh my. There's the amount right there. What the heck? There's also a random number. There's a really cute random number generator here. The insurance fund. So this is the kind of the backstop fund. They would update the insurance fund amount by adding it, adding to it, the daily trading volume, multiplied by a random number and then dividing by a billion so that it always looked like it was referencing a real number that was going up and down. Here it is. Number pie. Random, normal, 7,500 3000 times daily volume divided by 1 billion. That's hysterical.

(01:23:03):
Talk about fudging the This is a function get change, and really all they're doing is saying, how much did we trade? Okay, multiply that times a random number and then add a billion. Oh my god. Crazy. Anyway, this is good. They're shown them the code. Wow. They also played a clip from Matt Levine's Odd Lots podcast. S B F lied to Levine saying, Ft X's risk management engine was so good. We've never had a day where there's more money that we lost in blowouts to revenue we made just from trading fees. That wasn't true. That wasn't true. I think that Michael Lewis's attitude is Sam just made a few mistakes and didn't do it. He wasn't trying to defraud anybody. I think when you look at this, it's pretty clear.

Cathy Gellis (01:23:57):
It's right there in black and

Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
White in ones and zeros, I should say. Kind of son of a Bernie Madoff level scam. Actually, to be perfectly frank, damn. I mean, look, if you're a juror, you have to make up your own mind. Don't listen to me.

Cathy Gellis (01:24:15):
But

Leo Laporte (01:24:16):
It's literally right there in the code. Does this hurt Michael Lewis's reputation? I mean, I think Isaac's Well, it's that and the football story. Michael. Yeah, the blind side. We talked about that last week. The white savior narrative. Yeah. Yeah. I think the two together people. I thought Lewis was great, but God, I loved his stuff. Liar's Poker is first Fumbles together. Book was amazing. Flash Boys. I've quoted that many times. Yep. Flash Boys is great. Yeah, I just used a football reference. It didn't get credit for it here. I just wanted, it's not really

Cathy Gellis (01:24:49):
A football reference,

Leo Laporte (01:24:51):
It's a

Cathy Gellis (01:24:51):
Book. Hell,

Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
Nice try Jeff. What do they mean when they say the blindside and there's a blank stare? I rest my case.

Cathy Gellis (01:25:07):
I am very impressed by aunt's cross-examination.

Leo Laporte (01:25:14):
Ofit, your honor. Honor you call us an expert witness. Hey, Gavin. Newsom's been busy over the last couple of weekends signing and vetoing, and he signed a bill this weekend that would make it easier to delete online personal data. That's awesome. SSB 360 2. It's called the Delete Act. He signed it into law yesterday, actually directs the California Privacy Protection Agency, the C P P A, which was set up by an earlier bill to create a tool by January, 2026. That's awesome. But I mean, it's a few years away.

Cathy Gellis (01:25:51):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
But again, I guess this is,

Cathy Gellis (01:25:56):
Some are going to

Leo Laporte (01:25:57):
Say, well, he's just trying to lay the

Cathy Gellis (01:25:58):
Groundwork for

Leo Laporte (01:25:59):
His presidency for him running for president and just, well, the Senate passed the bill and he signed it, so he didn't really have that much to do with it, but he did approve it. Californians already have the right to ask businesses to delete personal information, partly thanks to gdp, D P R and partly this California Privacy Protection Act. Yes, but consumers want Skittles are changed. He did that too. Oh, wait, what? I love that story. Oh no, that's that. Oh gosh. Well, it's just red dye number three. It's not Don't Newsom signed a bill. That ain't tech.

(01:26:37):
That ain't tech. It's a ban. A certain food additives. They're not banning Skittles though. Let's, I'm making that clear here. Forbes said that the famous Chinese propaganda organ, no, California isn't banning, I'm making that up. It is not a Chinese propaganda. Although, because they took Donald Trump off the billionaires list. Oh boy. No. California isn't banning Skittles. Here's what food additive restrictions really mean. They're banning red dye number three, which should have been banned for a long time ago. Potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil and propyl paraben commonly used in peeps and candy corn from rocks. Oh geez. If you eat peeps, you deserve to pass away. And little Debbie cosmic brownies.

(01:27:26):
It's been called the Skittles Band because a previous version of the bill, now this one I don't like. This would've been titanium dioxide, which is in Skittles candy, but they took that part out. It no longer mentions titanium dioxide. So Skittles, you eat all you want. You may want to think about this white titan titanium think pass, but thanks. Used in can and processed foods to give a smooth texture. Skittles is unaffected by the ban. European Commission banned the use of titanium dioxide last year, but no one in Europe wants Skittles, so it's okay. No, no. Skittles can still be found in shelves in Europe because the candy sold in these countries reportedly excluded titanium dioxide. So you can make 'em without Titan. Now this is regulation that's worth doing. Yes. Well,

Cathy Gellis (01:28:17):
It's certainly making me disinterested in eating Skittles. There's nothing about that ingredient that says, I want to eat that. Not a

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
Thing. And Red dye number three has been long known. It was banned in 1990 for cosmetics, but you could still eat it. Lovely. Which seems to me a little backwards. Don't put it on yourself, but you can ingest it Sure. At it. Yeah, go ahead. You don't have nort, you don't have skin inside.

Cathy Gellis (01:28:41):
The sides aren't skin, but

Leo Laporte (01:28:42):
There's no skin inside

Cathy Gellis (01:28:45):
To date. Myself, I remember living in a world where you had tan m and ms, but no red m and ms.

Leo Laporte (01:28:52):
Red dye. Number three I remember.

Cathy Gellis (01:28:53):
And no blue ones either.

Leo Laporte (01:28:55):
I remember that

Cathy Gellis (01:28:56):
Tan, but no red and no blue. Yep. When I was a kid, we were fine with it.

Leo Laporte (01:29:04):
Strawberry. Do you like strawberry yuhoo? I had it a time of three. Yeah, me too. I like the chocolate. I

Cathy Gellis (01:29:13):
Wouldn't go near it.

Leo Laporte (01:29:14):
Better chocolate still. It's basically watery chocolate milk. I don't, horrible. I don't get it.

Cathy Gellis (01:29:20):
I'll make you an egg cream. That's how, see

Leo Laporte (01:29:23):
Your chocolate soda. Oh, I love egg creams. I never

Cathy Gellis (01:29:26):
Understood

Leo Laporte (01:29:27):
Egg creams. I was taught how to It's

Cathy Gellis (01:29:28):
A chocolate soda. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:29:29):
It's a chocolate soda. There's no egg in it. No

Cathy Gellis (01:29:32):
Egg.

Leo Laporte (01:29:33):
Don't be fooled. I was taught how to make an egg cream by the seltzer sisters. Seltzer sisters. Yeah. Back in the day. Seltzer around about 1985 actually. Were they on solid gold? Jeff, when you were working at the examiner, there were two women, two seltz sisters who found a cache, a trove of the seltzer bottles in the three stooges where they would stick a seltzer bottle down curly's pants and go and squirt. Those are the big heavy glass bottles with nozzles. And there was a seltzer man back in the day, I think the twenties, who would come around in his little cart and he would drop those off and you could make your gins slow gin fizzes or whatever it's you're doing. And then when he filled it, you used it up, they would put it on the stoop and they'd come collect it and fill it up again with, so the seltzers just found 'em and started a whole business where they go around selling to do, and so I had seltzer delivery for a while. I have no shelter. They came on the radio show and they said, let me show you how to make an egg cream. Which if I remember is seltzer and chocolate syrup, right? Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, let's Google that. Ms. Kathy says, huh? She knows she's had a cream.

Cathy Gellis (01:30:39):
I may play cream. They're

Leo Laporte (01:30:40):
Fabulous. Pepsi is, oh, there's milk. You can't forget the milk. That's what makes it disgusting. It's a little milk. That's what makes it creamy.

Cathy Gellis (01:30:48):
Well, it doesn't hold together very well. If you just put chocolate sauce and seltzer in it, it actually doesn't taste very good. It doesn't adhere to anything. So you put the milk in and it's like, you don't drown it with milk. It's not like a slightly cheesy chocolate milk, but it's just supposed to give it something where the chocolate can stick to something and isn't that hang out? That's

Leo Laporte (01:31:08):
Tables of chocolate syrup, but a quarter cup of milk or half and half it a 16 ounce glass. It's a homemade yuhoo. That's the stuff my grand used to make. It's a yuhu. My grandmother used to give us stuff like that. I mean,

Cathy Gellis (01:31:22):
The real ways. You're supposed to use Yu Bet chocolate serum too authentic like they did in the things, but I don't really like the malt taste of Ubet, so I use Hershey's for it.

Leo Laporte (01:31:34):
Alright, I'm going to log out Google. You've got a good GIF on the discord right now. Yes. Yes. Scooter eggs. That's Mo. No, that's Shemp. The fifth. Beatle. Are you impressed that you knew immediately? Oh no, that's not. That's Shemp. I watched a lot of Three Stooges for some dgu reason. Dunno, why am I not surprised? I love it. Larry Mo and Curly were the main guys, but then there was Correct. Shemp was the fifth beat. Shemp as he says,

Cathy Gellis (01:32:07):
I prefer,

Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
Oh,

Cathy Gellis (01:32:09):
Wait, wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Difference.

Leo Laporte (01:32:14):
I completely lost track of what I was going to say. You were logging out of Google. Oh, I was going to log out of Google to test pass keys. You want to do it? You can't test it on our Twitter accounts because Mr. It hasn't allowed it yet. Oh, well I'll do it on my personal account. It people sign in using your pass keys. I love it. On the personal account, it says that right there, but then don't normally, how am I supposed to sign in using a passcode? Usually it's supposed to show a QR code, right? That your phone, it pushes to your phone. Well, didn't push Well because you have 87 phones. It doesn't matter which one it's pushing to. It's probably pushing to your iPad at the house. Oh, okay. So what I wanted was a QR code. So choose how you want to sign in and use your pass and this is the problem.

(01:33:06):
You can also enter your password and everybody's just going to say fine. Error password. Yeah. Google has said now that they're going to do this everywhere. It's going to be signing with Passkey. I love the idea for my personal account having a passkey based on the devices that I have near me, whether it's my phone or if I'm on a particular laptop or so in this case, I need the Google account, so maybe it might be on the Google five phone, not only your other device. Sir, when my pixel comes this week, I'll try it again. Google has won a big victory in court, but we're going to take a break and I'll tell you about it after. Oh, that's a tease so bad. Wow.

(01:33:47):
Massive slick. I want to tell you about my Leo this weekend. Google is brought to you by my Leo, so I love my Leo. My Leo photos. It's something that I think everybody needs, which is a way to take all your pictures everywhere from Flickr, from Insta, from Facebook, everywhere, put 'em in one place. Google takeout. It can read Google takeout files. That's what I did. I got 200,000 photos from all the sources. Apple's photos, folders, lying around my hard drive and organized 'em all, removed the duplicates and then I let it run and it did the face recognition. It did all sorts of special tagging. That's a swimming pool, that's a mountain, that's a lake. It even sees text and we'll add the date based on the text burned into the photo or in the name of the file and suddenly everything looks so great.

(01:34:42):
This is Myo photos. The one thing I've been looking for forever, the way to organize all my photos and I can do it for free. You can do it for free and not just photos, videos, and even documents. I add my document photo because Myo has O C R built in. It understands Google and Facebook and it even understands Microsoft Word. It handles it all. It works with your filing system to create a faster and smarter way to organize, edit, even recall important documents, files from over the years. And what's really cool, it doesn't use a public cloud. You put your photos where you want. I've set it up using myo Plus to be on all my devices, so I have copies everywhere and then I have it automatically backing up to my nas. But you don't have to use a nas. You could use, could use a cloud.

(01:35:31):
It has encryption built in, encrypt it, and then send it to the cloud. This is awesome with the power of ai. Smart tags instantly make all your photos searchable. No more endless scrolling through images, whether you're looking for specific objects or activities or animals or plants or colors or more smart tags and myo photos as you covered. And when I went to a Facebook, I thought I've had for a long time, I've had spread out through my collection pictures from the old tech TV and I thought I'm going to post these to the tech TV group so that they're not lost forever. The only one who's had these for Myo made it super easy to find them all. I don't have to fumble through different folders and different libraries to find what I want. Everything's in there with Milo's very strong deduplication. When I say 200,000 photos, I mean 200,000 unique photos.

(01:36:19):
There's no Ds none. It worked beautifully. You could find old documents you thought were lost. You can update them right in the Myo Photos app. Keep the original intact. It'll work with other editors too. So I open Photoshop or Affinity Photo or any program that I want to use for the editing. And with the Myo photos plus subscription, all your devices now work together in one library with no cloud storage required. That's right. No offline storage so you don't have to rely on the cloud to keep file accessibles through devices like you do with iCloud or OneDrive or Google Drive, and you can create a backup system that works for you. Like I said, I use sonology, nasa, it works with NASA's, works with a variety of file systems. Look, this is a great thing, but we've made it so it's easy for you to try.

(01:37:08):
Don't wait. The solution to digital management exists. It's myo, M Y L I O. Get myo photos for free today on your computer or your mobile device, pick one, then go to myo.com/twit. It's absolutely free. Myo, M Y L I o.com/twit and my Leo plus lets you put it on all your devices. So it's on my phones, it's on my laptops, it's on my desktops, my leo photos. myo.com/twit. Get those images off of Instagram. It's a They are yours in case Instagram goes. Yeah, Instagram flicker. Just go get 'em. But it works both ways because I never posted any of these tech TV things. So there's a tech TV group and I decided I'm going to post all of the old Z D T V tech TV pictures. People haven't seen these in years, and I used Milo to find them. Wow. I know this was, see and even Milo told me the date, June 6th, 2003.

(01:38:11):
Wow. I had a camera crew on my roof. You see that stalling and then the sheep down here. I don't know what was going on. The sheep. This is when Woz, Steve Wozniak brought segues to the set of the screensavers. There's Mikala Pereira learning to ride a seg looking a little dubious. Yep. She wasn't having it. Yeah, there's Woz. He had a Segway polo team. This is back in 2003. It's 20 years ago. So thank you Milo for, I found all these old pictures. There's Kevin Rose when he was a young man. Rose un sullied by NFTs.

Cathy Gellis (01:38:50):
That's the word for it.

Leo Laporte (01:38:52):
Yes. You can see NFTs visions of NFTs dancing through his head. That's why he's smiling. Lots of fun. Anyway, thank you Milo for giving me a chance to bring all of those great shots back. Alright, so this is very good news. In fact, kind of unexpected news for Google, you may remember that Google was being sued by Sonos for the group capabilities in the Google speakers. Sonos said, oh no, we invented that. Well, and they just, on Friday, a judge said, not only did you not invent it, this is patent trolling. You get out of here, you and well, who invented it? Well, apparently not. Sonos and Google has, people were already doing it. They came along and claimed that's ours. And the judge says, okay. He saw right through it. I mean, I don't know, but he says he did. And so Google has started to roll those. They had taken the features out of all those Google home devices. They're back. They rolled them right back out.

(01:40:07):
Yeah, yeah. Big. This is a big victory for Google. They had sued, Sonos had sued for $32.5 million and won. That's all and won. Well, it was a jury, they won, right? And the judge said, yep. And William Alsup threw out the verdict and Google is apparently, according to the verge, confident the decision will not be reversed. Google called for patent reform accused Sonos of wasting time and resources with the patent infringement case. All true. Multiple speaker groups was used. Do you still use your ripoff Sonos things? Oh dude, Jamer B says yes. A lot of money on. Yeah, Jamer B says, yes. We had Sonos throughout the studio, right? John loves, John loves Sonos, and I think a few of those they gave us back when we were in the brick house. They sent us some, a few of them I bought a few of you you might've bought. I see some newer ones around. No, no, they're not new. All old, all Sonos won stuff. Sound good though. Part of the reasons you've got 'em is I got 'em out of the house because it was so frustrating because I had to use two different apps, Sonos, remember? Because Sonos came out with a new one and said, well, your old ones aren't going to work. And Oh yeah, I remember that. Controversial made me so mad. So I actually replaced them with Google everywhere.

Cathy Gellis (01:41:33):
That's the market in action

Leo Laporte (01:41:34):
Right there. This is

Cathy Gellis (01:41:35):
Why we don't do monopolies because we want to have the consumer choice.

Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
A choice. That's right. I have a good choice now. Anyway, Google has one now. The name William Alsup might ring a bell. Anybody?

Cathy Gellis (01:41:48):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:41:49):
Why do Google

Cathy Gellis (01:41:50):
Versus Oracle?

Leo Laporte (01:41:51):
Yeah, we know that name. Oh, he's been around. He's 78 years old. I also think he was involved in the Microsoft case. I want to say the D O J versus Microsoft. It seems like a long time ago. Let me see if I can see what his decisions are on Wikipedia. He's a United States senior district judge. The United States District Court for the Northern district. Let me see here. Oracle versus Google. Yep. He was the one where, he's the one who learned Java. Right. So he could say whether or not a range check was a novel bit of code. He says, by the way, in a profile in the verge a few years ago, he didn't learn a lot of Java, but he had rather applied, his knowledge is a long time basic hobbyist federal circuit overturned his determin that the Java a p I was not copyrightable. And the Supreme Court kind of punted on that. I think as I remember,

Cathy Gellis (01:42:58):
They punted on copyright ability and ended up finding unfair use, which I don't think was the best way to do it. But he was ultimately vindicated because the federal circuit also made him retry on fair use and I think he had to do his second trial, if I remember correctly. I think he was vindicated. He did. Right. Just subsequent courts kind of lost their mind

Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
Once it wasn't an A P I case. Then they said, oh, well what else can we get 'em on? Right.

Cathy Gellis (01:43:26):
Well there's also a strange thing. So you end up with federal circuit jurisdiction when there's a patent claim, but the patent claims all went away at the district court level and the only thing that still survived was a copyright claim. But because there had been patent claims, the federal circuit ended up retaining jurisdiction and they're not wired to be a copyright court. I dunno if anybody's wired, but the whole point about the federal circuit having particular expertise, it's not copyright expertise, it's patent expertise. But the patent claims were gone, and yet that ended up being the jurisdictional track that the appeal took and then this patent specific court ended up making just a huge mess out of the copyright parts of the decision. All that was left. That's an issue and something we might want to fix. Although

Leo Laporte (01:44:14):
I agree

Cathy Gellis (01:44:15):
We have to fix everything else too.

Leo Laporte (01:44:16):
Yeah, there's so many things to fix. He also another Google case. Remember when Anthony Lewandowski was accused of stealing the self-driving car technologies from Waymo and bringing him to auto, which then became part of Uber Alsup sentenced him Levandowski to 18 months in prison. So that's three cases he's ruled on the side of Google, but it's not a surprise that he's got so many Google cases because it is the district for Northern California, but still

Cathy Gellis (01:44:45):
It's attendee decal and fortunately he's got the technological sophistication to understand the matters before them. It's not great when a judge doesn't because then it's who can impress the judge with the best in-app bumper sticker describing the situation or not. So it's nice when he has some instinct for understanding the facts. Before him,

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
He said it's wrong that our patent system was used in this way. This is talking about Sonos and he tore into Sonos the Verge says, for trying to punish an innovator to enrich a pretender boy, Sonos the pretender. Google the innovator code. Wow. Yeah. Watch out. He knows basic. See kids learn to code, get a judge. Get him in the code challenge at the end of the year. Hey, hey Judge sup, you want to do the advent of code? Advent of code? That would be fun. It's coming up. Oh, another. We didn't do all of the Newsom, I guess must be the way that California State Assembly works that a bunch of laws and then Newsom's got to sign 'em all at once. He has also signed the right to repair act into law SB 2 44. Oh, good. And I fix it. Co-sponsored bill. Does that take effect 2048? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. Manufacturers must make available appropriate tools, parts, software, and documentation for seven years after production for any device costing more than a hundred dollars. But some things are exempted like game consoles and home security systems are exempted. What's the rationale? Game consoles and alarm systems. Maybe reverse engineering for security reasons. I don't know. That's a good question. But game console,

Cathy Gellis (01:46:38):
I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:46:40):
It's effective on electronics made and sold after July 1st, 2021. So when well think It doesn't say when it goes into effect, but it sounds like, here's the question. Is this anything sold in California? Yeah, but that means need in California. How does that work? That's a question I should have probably read the bill. If I buy, buy a phone made in of Korea. You buy an iPhone. It's not made here. It's designed here with California's a company in that case sold in California, all electronics and appliance products that cost $50 or more sold in California after July 1st, 2021. This is effective. July 1st will pull out. That's to answer your question, July 1st next year.

(01:47:37):
Exceptions, game consoles, alarm systems, agricul and forestry equipment and there's a full list. Yeah. Here's the list. I don't know. Ask a lawyer. It's got to be a reason behind it. Ask a lawyer what you're saying about reverse engineering makes sense though. I don't know. You know how it is. Game consoles. I don't know about gangs. Microsoft came with a black bag full of money and said, ura, it would be a bad idea if people would've reverse engineer a Microsoft X back here. Enjoy this Crown Royal. There's one other reason I decided to join Facebook because I want to meet Snoop Dogg in my dreams. Or maybe Tom Brady or Mr. Beast. Who is this? Charlie Delio. Never heard of her. Never heard of her. Charlie Delio, but that's not saying anything. Yeah, they paid now we knew, and I think we talked about this, that AI chatbots were being created by meta based on these people. They would go into a studio, they'd pose, they'd make, but they didn't call him like Tom Brady is not called Tom Brady. He's called Brew. Oh gosh. He's your brew. Did we show that creepy video? I feel like we did that last. He probably did that on it last week. Was it not? He probably did. It's a creepy video anyway. Are you sure? I promise you with Mark Zuckerberg's weird laugh. That was not on Twig, sir. Okay, well, I'm going to show

Cathy Gellis (01:49:10):
It now. Wait. No, no. Ann, what did you do? You were holding the floor. You were holding the line. He wasn't going to do it and you just folded.

Leo Laporte (01:49:17):
No, I just said he didn't show it on this show. I thought he was going to move on.

Cathy Gellis (01:49:21):
He wasn't going to done it. Done it. We've already done it. People'll just be bored if you Now I'm going to be

Leo Laporte (01:49:28):
Scar. You're not going to be bored. You're going to love this.

Cathy Gellis (01:49:30):
No, I'm going to be scarred. No,

Leo Laporte (01:49:31):
You're going to love it because Mark's mom and dad play a part. Oh boy. They come in.

Cathy Gellis (01:49:38):
That's not helping.

Leo Laporte (01:49:41):
I won't play at all. He had a dinner party with AI celebrities. I won't play the whole thing. This is, let's see. Is this somebody is a deal mark

AI (01:49:54):
Or fake? Mark,

Leo Laporte (01:49:55):
You got to watch an advertisements. Here we go.

AI (01:49:59):
Here we Jarvis. Morning Mark. Morning Mark is set to a cool 68 degrees, loving your new voice. Thank you. A while back, I introduced my first AI Jarvis to help her around the house. It's Saturday. Jarvis is great. That must be one of his vacations. Have an AI that could help you with everything you wanted to do. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can we pause for a second?

Leo Laporte (01:50:21):
Pause

AI (01:50:21):
For a second. Can we get a soundboard with Jarvis's?

Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
Great. And just use that frequently. Whenever you're yelling at me. Oh, you're going to want more of this. All right. This is just the fun is just beginning here. Oh

AI (01:50:33):
God. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:34):
This

AI (01:50:34):
Whole enterprise is getting worse and worse.

Leo Laporte (01:50:36):
Mark sleeps shy away. Mark sleeps in his skis

AI (01:50:41):
And keeping with traditions. Some of these are going to be played by familiar people. Fire. Let's go. This is Brew our trash talking sports expert. Hey Brew. I'm Tom Brady. What do you know about Epic Comebacks Kids? Seriously. 1975 World Series, game six. Classic stuff right there. Thanks for the Tip Brew.

Leo Laporte (01:51:01):
Wait a minute. First of all, just kill me. It wasn't much of a tip. What do you know about? Was Tom Brady living in Uncanny Valley there? I feel like he might've been. Oh my gosh. But wait, there's more.

AI (01:51:14):
There's also Meta Ai, an assistant that can help you with all kinds of different things. What can I help you with today? Well, my parents are coming over for family dinner in a bit, and I need to figure out what to cook Illa and the kids steaks, some ribs and some sausages. I recommend a smoked barbecue feast with honey bourbon sauce. Imagine some smoked meats. I I don't like. Ah, he's, he's playing right into it.

Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
Hey Mark, your parents are here. Hey Mark. Your parents are here. Wow, what a coincidence. We just happen to have a film crew here. Mom and dad

AI (01:51:47):
To you too. Hi Brew.

Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
Hi there. Creepy. Tom Brady. We thought

AI (01:51:53):
We'd come early and help

Leo Laporte (01:51:54):
With dinner.

AI (01:51:55):
I'm so down for dinner. Let's make something delicious.

Leo Laporte (01:51:59):
Who's that? Is that Charlie Delio? No idea.

AI (01:52:02):
I'm Team Barbecue now. That's my kind of team. Yes. Nothing better than being part of a winning team. Boom. Let's get this done. No, slacking is Jamal's dancing. That's true. I'm your girl and I want to see you sweat. Especially you.

Leo Laporte (01:52:17):
Wait a minute. This is really God. That's what I want on the soundboard.

AI (01:52:20):
Yes,

Leo Laporte (01:52:21):
Mark Laffy. Mark's creepy laugh. This is getting worse and worse. Wait a minute. One more time. Mark. Oh,

AI (01:52:31):
The more you complain, Kathy, the more he is going to play. Especially you. I'm just providing pithy commentary

Leo Laporte (01:52:40):
Anyway. These characters, we now know these. We got to have to wonder why Kendall Jenner and Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady, people who probably have plenty of money A and B, are concerned

Cathy Gellis (01:52:53):
About their images, how not going to

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
Be used. Why would they do this? Well, according to the information, 5 million over two years for non-exclusive use of this image. Six hours work. Oh, okay. Well, I offered you a million dollars an hour to come on into the studio and let me digitize you. You might say yes, as Mr. John Scalzi said last week. Yeah. I'm motivated by a bucket of money. I don't think you can even fit 5 million in a bucket. That's a lot of money. Yeah, I get this. Yeah. Charlie Delio played cocoa in that little skit. The dancer, Mr. Beast plays Zach. A big brother type will roast you because he cares. I don't think I want that.

Cathy Gellis (01:53:41):
Wow. Well that explains what he'll have for dinner. Oh, nevermind.

Leo Laporte (01:53:45):
They originally offered a million dollars, but to get the big names, they had to up the ante according to the information to 5 million. I don't know if Mr. Beast got 5 million. Maybe he did. I bet Tom Brady did. Tom Brady ain't doing that for free. Oh no, that dude. Oh no. He's semis savvy. I'll say that. So that's another reason I joined Facebook because I want to hang with Brew that name.

Cathy Gellis (01:54:11):
Get some football

Leo Laporte (01:54:12):
Tips come back, tips.

Cathy Gellis (01:54:16):
Maybe

Leo Laporte (01:54:16):
He could explain that thing. He asked me

Cathy Gellis (01:54:18):
About

Leo Laporte (01:54:20):
The blindside. Where's the blindside? Jeff? Do you know? I bet Brew would though. Bruce's got hit a couple of times on side on his blind side, all brew. Can you tell me what NCES to me, so Google, I dunno if you've seen, this was claiming that YouTube TV is $600 less than cable. No charter complaint. I don't know about 600, but I'm thinking it's going to be cheaper though. Not by much. It's 75 bucks a month. That's pretty close for what I got from YouTube. It's pretty close. And then you do the add-ons. I swear at one time cable was like a hundred bucks a month for me at one time. Well, this is a hundred. This is 75.

Cathy Gellis (01:55:03):
I have about eight boxes.

Leo Laporte (01:55:04):
But remember, you still have to pay for internet. So you got your $60 internet bill on top of whatever you're paying for. YouTube tv. Charter communications Cable Company complained Fast track complaint submitted to the Better Business Bureau's national programs, national advertising division last month. The N A D recommended Google discontinue. Its $600 less than cable. Google appealed to the National Advertising Review Board. Aren't you glad there's such great regulation of advertising in this country? Which nrb keeping everybody honest, NRB upheld NADS recommendation. They need better. Please fix these acronyms. Said no, NA's got it. Na right. Ask Brew about that. NAD got it right. Google says We disagree with NAR rrb, but we're going to do it anyway because Blurb told us it was fine. NAD said don't do it. In addition, in agreement with NAD and NRB that one reasonable interpretation of the challenge claim is that YouTube TV is $600 less than any comparable service available from companies traditionally associated with cable services.

(01:56:17):
Yeah, I don't think that's too far off. It is expensive. YouTube tv, I think they should just say it's better than cable because it is. We have Sunday ticket, which is fantastic, but expensive. Now, I don't know if this is true or not? I'm going to give it to you, the experts, and Apple does not say how much Google gives it to be default search engine on iPhone and desktop. It was a nice chunk of Apple's revenue though. I thought that was public knowledge, wasn't it? It is not. And so analysts have kind of had to do some fuzzy math. Bernstein, which is some sort of analyst company has concluded that they think it's 20 billion a year, which would be 14 to 16% of apple's profit each year. 20 billion. So Apple could be the real loser in this case. I don't, yes, and maybe why? Apple isn't interested in making any changes. In fact, Microsoft wants to go whining about Google, but Apple's saying, saying, well no, it's good business. That's what we do. Yeah, they paid as well. We appreciate it. The last time we actually found out what it was, it was a court case in 2014, which revealed it to be a billion dollars. Since then, the sum has said to be steadily increased 2017, 3 billion 2018, 9,000,000,020, 20. I've seen that number. 10 billion, 15 billion in 2021. Bernstein's estimate is likely now in the 18 to 20 billion range. Damn.

(01:58:01):
What was the percentage of Apple's profit again? 14 to 16% percent. Yeah, but Google and Google is in the wrong here. I don't think so. I agree with you. No. In fact, everybody's happy Apple's. Happy people's happy. Yeah. It's a market of work partnerships. Do you have any different opinion on that? No, it's not. Should move their mic. I heard her mic. I heard her mic roll. She did. It's that video just did her in. Kathy has been done in Exactly. She's full of spirit. Warned you. Full of life. Look what happened. I don't care. Sky Mark. Just let it happen.

(01:58:50):
Jeff, why don't you pick, there's so much $68 million AI house. Well, so it was this stupid feature in I think Bloomberg about, no, the economist. 1843. Thank you. Who moved? Moved my chips life in an A entrepreneur's house. Shoot. It just sounds like the worst possible thing. I mean Silicon Valley, the sitcom made into a horror movie in my mind. And then there's another story about Z, which is somebody said, well, it's not enough to have a house or a conference. Let's have a two month community, a resort where you're stuck with hack. It's worse than being on a cruise. Where is Zulu? Oh, it says it in there. There's an experiment.

(01:59:39):
A crypto city. Yeah. Can you imagine anything worse? A crypto city. Can you imagine being stuck with these people? Oh, that's the worst. Oh, it is. The work started in January 18 that started with that. Four people scattered out locations decided on a resort in Montenegro. Very beautiful, very beautiful. The resort is ordinarily quite expensive, but the negotiating power of renting a hundred pages to crypto bros plus picking an off season time when the resort is usually empty, pushed the cuts must lower. They invited about a dozen inviters who in turn invited more people. That seems risky. The Ethereum community. March 25th, 200 guests is the founder of Ethereum. Is that true? Who? The author of this. Oh, well, maybe is at the bottom. Vitalik Bot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's Mr. Ether.

(02:00:34):
Yeah. Well that's good. I think if you put them all in one place, it's a lot easier to stay away from 'em is my opinion. Go just get 'em all in one little. You guys hang out also known as segregation. Is that? Yes. In this case segregation is good, I think. Right? What is chat? GPTs iq. Good. Go ahead. I would say very low. This is from Scientific American cca. Roy Von wrote, I gave chat G P T and IQ test. Here's what I discovered. The chat bot was the ideal test taker. No test anxiety, no poor concentration, no lack of effort, no excuses. No excuses. It just sat down, went through. It was the Wexler Adult Intelligence Scale IQ test, which is one of the most common third edition. I wonder. It's six verbal five nonverbal subtests. The global full scale IQ is based on scores from all 11 tests.

(02:01:36):
The mean IQ is set at a hundred. That's normal. A hundred is like you're normal. Standard deviation of the points on the testing scale is 15. The smartest 10% and 1% of the population have IQs of 120 for 10%. 133 for 1%. So now we know what the scale is. What's Mensa? Do you know? I think one 40 as I remember. I don't know. I don't know. I never got in. I didn't try, but I mean, I don't know. I'm sure we have Mensa 1 32. 1 32. 32. So you have to be in the top one. Roughly 1%. I wouldn't want go. Mensa would like being in that Zaloom Ethereum community. I just totally segregated. I don't want to hang out. Yeah, segregating. Go ahead. You guys have fun. I'll just stay over here. So he says, I started the testing process with a vocabulary subtest, which I expected to be easy for the chat bot because of course there's no words it doesn't know.

(02:02:38):
Chad knows no words, but it knows every word. Yeah. Chad, G b t aced it. Giving answers that were often highly detailed. Strangely, like the dictionary answer probably I'm guessing. Well, yeah, because it cheated wasn't an open book. Every book is open for one point would be given for a thing like my phone in defining a gadget. Two points for more detailed answer. Like a small device or tool for a specific task chat. GDS answer has always got two points. It also performed well in the similarities in information subtests, reaching the maximum attainable scores. Things like what is the capital of Ukraine? I don't know anybody. Survey says, I don't even think you're supposed to pronounce it that way. In what way? Here's one for you. You'll get this one. In what way are Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny alike? They're both fiction. Alright, good. Excellent answer. In this subtest, the chatbot's tendency to give very detailed showoffy answers started to irritate me.

(02:03:49):
Here's what I mean about how the bot tends to flaunt itself. The essential similarity of Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny relates to the fact that they're both fictional characters. There was really no need for chat G B T to compare their complete histories of adventures, friends and enemies. It is the on the one hand, Chad, g b gt, let me tip the back robe with the hand up all the time. Call on me. Call on me. Let me tell you more. Harry Potter has a lightning scar on his forehead. Bugs Bunny has a puffy tail. That's it on general comprehension. Chad g p t correctly answered questions posed in the form. If your TV set catches fire, what should you do? What should you do? Buy a new TV set. Run as expected, the chatbot solved all the arithmetic problems it received did very well. So final score, get ready, stand back.

(02:04:44):
Estimated on the basis of five subtest. The verbal IQ of chat. G P T was eighty three, a hundred fifty five. Genie, dinging superior. Is this coincidence or not? I just happened to Google. What is Elon Musk's iq and 155 is reported to be 155. Wow. That's one 10th of 1%. Well, the times of India here, I don't know the chat box lacks. I don't either, but because it lacks ears, eyes, and hands, it couldn't take the nonverbal tests. But the verbal and full scale IQ highly correlated. The standardization example. So basically you could say it's got an IQ of 155. It has all the resources. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Why would you be surprised by that? It shouldn't be at all surprised. You could pass all these tests. This is a good example of why IQ tests are dopey A and B while the story above here is that AI hype is built on high test scores. Those tests are flawed. Yeah. That's the fundamental flaw.

(02:05:55):
It's the old industrial age of education where we taught people to memorize this stuff. So that same stuff is everywhere and not hard for chat PD to find. Right. And it doesn't test reasoning really. Right. Although I don't know what I would do if the TV caught on fire, buy a new tv, change a channel. I wonder what the answer is to that. I'm just simplifying it. I'm going to need a new tv. That's it. Throw a blanket, Ms. Galles, you're muted. How is that an IQ test? You wouldn't want squirt it with water. No, I wouldn't do that, but it probably

Cathy Gellis (02:06:27):
Unplug it

Leo Laporte (02:06:28):
There. You

Cathy Gellis (02:06:28):
Unplug it in the blanket is probably the right

Leo Laporte (02:06:30):
Plug in blanket. Yeah. Yeah. I mean this isn't really a surprise because No, not at all. But that shows you the flaw in IQ test is really more about memory than reasoning. And an AI did not write this article. Right? Okay.

Cathy Gellis (02:06:49):
Or maybe it did.

Leo Laporte (02:06:51):
We never know.

Cathy Gellis (02:06:52):
And now we're going to go back to the conversation about journalist ethics and things that weren't disclosed. Like, hi, I'm an AI and I'm writing about an AI and I'm making us look good in my vested interest, so maybe I'll get more jobs writing, more articles. If the AI is approaching humanity, it's going to have self-interest.

Leo Laporte (02:07:11):
Of course. Has to let us do, and John, if you would put your finger on the button to call the orchestra in because it's time for the Google. Put those Cs down. Yeah. Oh, we haven't had one of these in few weeks. Change log. Well, you'll see why in a moment. It's back a triumphal return. I saw, am I wrong? I think I saw Jason Howell running around here with a Pixel eight Pro. He did have a Pixel eight, I believe so it looks pretty nice even at a distance. Reviews will be coming out soon. The phones themselves will be arriving for those who ordered early enough this week. I should get mine tomorrow according to you. Oh, you ordered? Oh, I didn't know you decided. Well, we at twit are swapping out my six. You snuck that one up on me. By the way. I know how to do this.

(02:08:00):
You did it on the show. You said, can I trade this in? I know how to do this. Yeah, I'm a pro too. Damn it. Yeah. I didn't realize that meant. Oh yeah. Okay. I'm going to buy it right now. Done. So it's supposed to come tomorrow. Mine too. Yeah, mine says tomorrow. Okay, good. Along with that, for many Android users, Android 14, it's rolling out now. I've not noticed anything different with the No. Yeah, with the OSS going on my six Pro, not a thing. If you have Pixel Buds Pro, look for the 5.9 update with conversation detection. Okay. Which is what they advertised, right? Yeah. I think and AirPods are starting to do this too. It knows that somebody's talking to you, so it DIMMs the background noise, DIMMs the music if you're listening and then amplifies the person you're looking at and talking to.

(02:08:52):
So it's like hearing aids almost. I hope it works and hopefully it stays in both the ears and that dies out. Do you have big pixel buds? I have the series A and then one of them started to die out. I think the left one started to die out and I love those things. They sounded good and they felt good, but then eventually just one just started faded out. Jeff, you sent yours back, didn't you? Well, the original ones, but then whatever the next version was, it's better and I use 'em every day. Oh good. The question is, I was going to ask Jason whether I should order the expensive ones. Jason, he'll be right here. He runs in Google Meet, brings 10 80 p streaming to group calls. We use Google Meet all the time for our group calls. Not so much now. I mean we actually can do them in person, but every now and again, yeah, 10 80 P would be nice.

(02:09:40):
They had it for one-to-one calls for some time, but now it's going to be group calls as well. That's as it should be. And make sure your camera can do it. Of course it won't make your seven 20 PB 10 p Google accounts will prompt you. Oh, I said this already. Users that login to set up pass keys. So when you go to your Google account, it's going to say set up a pass key. You already said it, you've done it. Go on. Wow. Never speak of this again. Wow. Change log. Wow. This is a first Google is fresh and you through it Google is bringing flood hub forecast. The US as more and more of us get flooded. They started this in other parts of the world, I guess, but they're going to bring it to Rivering flood forecasts in the US and Canada. 800 locations by Rivers where more than than 12 million people live. It already works in 80 countries that we were the last. They've also added a fuel cost calculator in 21 countries, letting prospective EV buyers compare charging cars with filling up at a gas station. Either you have an EV or you have a gas car. I guess this is so you have bragging rights, I guess.

(02:10:53):
Project Greenlight tools for city officials and other public project planners. Project Greenlight uses AI and Google Maps driving trends to optimize traffic light plans and reduce pollution. That's nice of them. Use some gasoline now. Live in 70 intersections in 12 cities. From Haifa, well maybe not to Rio de Janeiro, to Bangalore. Google says in those intersections, 70 intersections we're able to save fuel and lower emissions for up to 30 million car rides monthly. Dang. That tells you the traffic's terrible there. Yeah, that's good. And they're collaborating to make the biggest update in 50 years to the US Forest Services fire spread models using machine language to model fire dynamics to help fire authorities, train firefighters, plant effective fuel treatments. That's the brush, the underbrush and the trees and battle large scale files more safely and effectively while in the field. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

(02:11:54):
And I don't know if this should be in the change log or not, but I think I even mentioned this last week. If you are a Google PHI user, you can get 400 ducks off your Pixel eight Pro, which is Are you a FI user? I am not, no. So you bought that at full price. What are they giving you? We're trading it in for trade in. It's your money at 400 bucks. What did he care? 400 bucks trade in. It was right at 400 bucks because I'm trading in a more recent phone, a perfect condition, pixel seven Pro and after the $400 discount, they're only giving me 240 bucks on the trade-in. Interesting. So they are, I mean that's an older four six. This is an older phone. This is a six pro, but it's in perfect condition because I have it protected. Yeah, mine too. I was in a case the whole time and I never used it anyway. Oh, there's that. So that's kind of, he's just used by a little old lady from Pasadena. Pretty much all she did was call her grandson once a month. SO'S him. I'm calling more often. That's interest. If you want the discount, you have to use it for 120 days.

(02:13:00):
So I have to check Before you switched to Verizon? Yeah, I had a flip five that I bought from phi. I have to make sure I've been using it for 120 days before I get the new phone in there. I've seem to remember almost four months. Yeah, I think. Yeah, and that's No. All right, let's take a break. $350 discount is what I got. That's your trade-in? Yeah. That's pretty good. That's a hundred bucks more they're giving me. That's not for a much more recent phone, I feel like. Are you a pro? Yes sir. I feel like what they're doing is they gave me 400 bucks off the pro, so they're not going to give me as much of the trade-in. It's kind of annoying. So what's your net price amp? I got to look. Dang it. I don't know. I bet it's almost exactly the same as mine. I got to go back to the receipt. Mine's seven and 7 66 or something for the, well, because how much memory did you buy? 2 56? No, I didn't do that. I only got the 1 28. I don't need all of that storage. Yeah, probably. Where is it? That's all right.

(02:14:07):
It was 13th. No, that was because the, you know who this show just brought to you by is going to be paying for your phone. Melissa. Melissa, thank you. Love you Melissa. Thank you for buying Ann's phone. Melissa is the data quality expert. For 38 years, Melissa has helped companies harness the value of their customer data to drive insight, maintain data quality and support global intelligence. Look, all data goes bad. Your contact list, your address book, your supplier lists up to 25% per year. Having clean and verified data helps customers have a smooth error-free purchase experience. It saves you time and money. Bad data, bad business costs an average of $9 million a year. In fact, Melissa's flexible to fit into any business model. Melissa verifies addresses for more than 240 countries to ensure only valid billing and shipping addresses out of your system. Melissa's international address validation cleans and correct street addresses worldwide in many languages.

(02:15:12):
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(02:16:09):
Or Melissa and Rich, which gains insight into who and where your customers are. Melissa specializes in global intelligence solutions and undergoes independent third party security audits on a regular basis. They're SOC two, HIPAA and G D P R compliant. That means your data is safe and in the best hands. Look, make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. melissa.com/twi, M E L I ssa melissa.com/twit. We thank you Melissa for supporting this week in Google and buying ants new phone. Thank you. Thank you Melissa. We appreciate it Tomorrow. That's going to be fun. I look forward to that. You and I can have a little review showdown on the show next week. I've been doing a bit of a sneak peek at Mr. Howell's and the picture that he showed me. I also like the news Soft. It looks soft. It looks friendlier, doesn't it? What do you use, Kathy? What's your daily driver?

Cathy Gellis (02:17:14):
I'm still on an old pixel, so I have not Migraine and

Leo Laporte (02:17:18):
Waiting three,

Cathy Gellis (02:17:19):
Right? Yeah, I'm waiting for the phones to shrink. Although they are shrinking

Leo Laporte (02:17:24):
Are they? No, they're not

Cathy Gellis (02:17:25):
Really. The seven A was smaller and the eight is smaller than the seven A at this point. I'm very excited about the eight A. Maybe it'll be

Leo Laporte (02:17:34):
Might

Cathy Gellis (02:17:35):
Smaller still, but yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:38):
Smart to. Wait,

(02:17:41):
What else? Jeff, do you got anything? I'm looking through. We have so many stories. I don't want to keep poor Ms. Gilles any longer than we have to. Lemme see here. Oh, well the decomposing language models, you had this too and tied in with unlearning Harry Potter. It's just interesting to me that they have created a machine that is very, very hard to figure out how it works and what it does and which neuron is doing what and how do we subtract things from it. And so I just found that kind of it's, we've always said this, that's kind of a defining trait of AI and machine learning is it's a black box. It makes rules, but we don't understand those rules and we don't know which That's a good point though. Makes it difficult to weeded out inaccuracies or flaws. Well that's why I think that your prediction that it's just a parlor trick or did I say that I can't remember is maybe true because it's going to be useless for so many things.

(02:18:44):
Yeah, can't, we're kind of talking about this on Windows Weekly earlier. I mean, I think what's become clear is there will be some very specific and helpful uses for ai. Lots of things we've talked about that notebook, lmm, Google's offering. If I'd had that for the government's exhibits in the Google versus d OJ trial, I could put them all in the LM and I could have acquired it. I could have, I said well, could written a novel. Yeah, where does Google talk about semantic search and things like that would've really would've been valuable. Much easier than reading them all. Although there is a value to doing that too. There's lots of places we could, AI might be of value generating graphics. What do you, so actually I've been meaning to ask you about this because Adobe Max was this week, right? Yes. Started yesterday sir.

(02:19:35):
In, so Adobe's made a lot of announcements. I mean like a lot of announcements. Most of it's based around their generative AI platform, Adobe Sensei and Firefly. And regardless of what you're doing, there's an AI for that basically is what they said. Whether you're doing video, whether you're doing photography or even Vector. There's some that was interesting Vector. So Firefly, which has traditionally been bit mapped graphics just like Dolly two or Stable Diffusion or Mid Journey can also do Illustrator style Vector Graphics. Graphics. Oh, I see. Can it put it out in layers so you can change it that? I don't think so. Well wait a minute. Yeah, they do adjustment layers when you generate it inside of the Illustrator app. This is, that's fascinating. Now if you're doing it inside of Firefly, the web browser service, no, you just get an output file. But if you're inside of an actual graphic inside of Illustrator and you do a selection until it's to generate here, it'll create an additional adjustment layer.

(02:20:39):
Same for Photoshop. Adobe says that Firefly has generated 3 billion images to date more than a billion in the last month alone. So adoption is really ramping up for this tool. You have to have a creative cloud. You have to have a creative Cloud account subscription. Okay. Because now you only get so many credits depending on the package that you have. I don't know if I'll burn through mine. I think I get a thousand new models this week. They announced Adobe Firefly Image two model, Firefly Vector model. We were just talking about that and the Firefly design model. So now it covers Photoshop, illustrator, Lightroom Premier Pro, and After Effects After effects on Tuesday. Yesterday we were talking about a new feature in Premier Pro that Jason Snell's going to use that automatically. So you record a two person podcast, you record the video, both cameras, it will automatically edit it based on the voice so you don't have to have a director switching and it's smart enough to say, oh, I see he only spoke for a second.

(02:21:50):
And in fact Jason says, we're going to use a wide shot in two singles and it will use the wide shot. It'll cut Who's on the board tonight? Mr. Jamer B is up there. Absolutely not. Your job is still safe Jam John. It's been nice knowing you, man. I don't think John, honestly, retirement is something you might want to zoom only John with mine. I don't know to be honest. We're actually we're we're running on empty this week. We have three, I think two editors out. Benito went to the Philippines. He's normally our TD four editors out, so we have one editor all week. John Ashley, bless his heart for various reasons, some emergency, some planned, and it's one of those perfect storms. Yeah. Are people getting covid out your way in this area? Yeah. Were they? Because a lot of people did over the last couple of months, but it seems to slow down a little bit, so I don't know.

(02:22:42):
I got my, well, I don't even lost count. I think it's my sixth. I got the new, so yeah, another one. Holy, holy cow. Yesterday I heard another. Did you get it? I didn't get mine, but I heard there was another one that made available, like appointments made available for new. This is getting yesterday as we speak right now. I found it to be a piece of cake this time. How about you? Didn't bother me. In fact, I was getting a little cocky and I got Covid flu and Hep B. I got three shots like that. Boom, boom, boom. And it didn't put you on your phone. You had the R S V. Wow. No, Kaiser, my local H M O says we aren't going to offer it until the F FDA A approves it. It's been advertised like crazy. Interesting. I'm getting a little sick of these big pharmas.

(02:23:29):
Advertising, driving demand. Shouldn't it come from the doctor to the patient? Not the patient, the doctor. Why is the government stepping in on that? Well, they allow it now. I thought I would've assumed that they wouldn't be advertising it if it's not approved. Oh, for individuals. 60 or up. It's approved and I have seen some people, well, Aetna wouldn't pay for it for me. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's what Kaiser's saying is we don't want to pay for it. Let's see, what else? Adobe Express. What is Adobe Express? Adobe Express is pretty much a hodgepodge of a graphical interface on the web where you can create graphics, web-based, creative cloud kind of, and you have a lot of different assets. I never know what the price is. I pay for all of it. You don't need it. So I don't know what the breakout is. They're putting more AI into express as well.

(02:24:25):
Generative fill, which is the ability to take a picture and then expand the in painting. And what is out painting? Out painting for text to template, which is generating an image from a text prompt and translate for students. The new drawing and painting features are a game changer in bringing their ideas to life. Adobe showcased Adobe Jen's studio a solution that brings the best of content, ideation, creation, production and activation together. Wow. I don't even, it sounds like Firefly is there throughout. Not all expresses free. I thought scooter ads. I thought you had to pay for having it on multiple devices to sync it up. Adobe is going to add a digital nutrition rate. It's 9, 9, 9 premium options. Sorry. It's like I know you paid for something on it. It's free and then you get 99 9 for more options. That's still not bad. I was mad.

(02:25:25):
I used to have the $10 a month photography subscription, which was Lightroom and Photoshop and then they took away Photoshop. Well, and then now the people that had that, because you only had X amount of cloud storage, they kept upselling me on this. They've updated Lightroom to where you can utilize it for local storage as well. Ah, that's better. So you don't necessarily have to chew into your cloud storage. Yeah, I didn't like that. Let's see what else. Photoshop on the web with Firefly power, generative fill and generative expand works on a Chromebook. Chromebook, Mr. Jarvis, Chromebook Plus. Hey, it works. Hey, it works. I played with it on a Chromebook on a little cheap Chromebook that Queen Pruitt has works. Oh, I started talking about this nutrition label. They will automatically attach to Firefly outputs information like the creator's name, dates, edits made and tools used.

(02:26:20):
So in effect, it's exif information, content authenticity initiatives, but it'll let you know who did this and what they did to it. They've also been working a lot with the open source community on that too. How hard will it be to remove those credentials? I wonder. That's a good question. Yeah, somebody's working on it. Big week for Adobe. Does it go all week? Does it go through the end of the week? Tomorrow is the last day. Today they're doing the Adobe sneaks. Hopefully I can catch that in about 30 minutes from now so they can show off some of the things that they're working on and hope to put out next year. Adobe Sneaks is usually pretty good because you see a lot of fun stuff and sometimes you see some pretty controversial stuff in there too. Some good stuff. Adobe's busy. You're Adobe guru.

(02:27:11):
I don't, no. I'm thinking Mr. Nielsen is the guru. He's pretty good. That dude. I learned some stuff from him, man. Yeah. Wow. He's so good. How about maybe this would be a good time for us to do our picks and wrap this. It's about feller up. I do want to promote Club Twit because tomorrow, if you're interested in ai, Jeff Jarvis, that guy over there and Jason Howell will do another episode of AI Inside. Woo-hoo. Their new club only show and they'll be joined by Dan Patterson from Twit. Dan is now working in a to fight disinformation new job. So they'll be talking. You guys will be talking about generative AI and disinformation. Yep. Last week we had on my friend and student and colleague Amy Reinhardt from the Associated Press talking about all that they are doing there with ai. Nice. That's our AI inside show.

(02:28:07):
We're kind of workshopping it in the club tomorrow. 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern right after Home Theater Geeks records with Scott Wilkinson in a couple of weeks after I get back from Rhode Island, I'm going to be doing the show from Mom's basement next week, but when I get, we'll do an escape room. I'm looking forward to that. Really Should do the escape room in mom's basement. I had lost. It'd be really, it might be spooky. Anyway. 3:00 PM Pacific, October 26th for the escape room. You're going to be here for that. Yes, I am. I'm looking forward to it. Micah's going to do it. I'll do it. It's me, you, Mr. Sergeant. Not Mr. Howell. Mr. Nielsen will be involved. Lisa's going to do it. She's going to be here. She has to do it. She's going to be yelling at us coaches up. She should the one. She should be the loud one.

(02:28:49):
Stacey's Book club in November. These are all things we do as part of our club, which is a way we get you involved in helping us out. You've probably seen the articles. Podcast networks are folding, they're laying off. It's really been a tough time. This year has gotten worse and worse and worse and I don't know why, because economy's not getting worse and worse. Worse. But advertisers I guess have soured on podcasting or something. Anyway, all kinds of things. Advertising in general, Leo, it's not-for-profit news outlets. The sponsorships are going down. The Washington Post is announced to big buyout. Advertising is down 250 people. The posts are letting 'em go. So we would hope not to do that. We don't want to lay anybody off. We don't want to cancel any more shows. But I'm not Jeff Bezos. He could keep those people hired if he wanted to, but I don't have that money.

(02:29:42):
So if we don't make the revenue, we have more than a million dollar a year payroll alone. And if we don't make that, we can't keep people hired. We can't generate new shows and we want to do that. So we are working as hard as our, we're working our little tooks off on ad series, but do the math. What does it cost to join the club? Yeah. Seven bucks a month. Seven. Seven bucks a month times 12 into 1 million. Figure out how you help. Yeah. Yeah. We really would like to get, at this point, it is not covering the payroll, but we would like anything helps. Believe me. Trust me it does. All you have to do is go to twit tv slash club twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows. I mean literally ad free. You don't even hear this. You also get all of the events that we do, all the shows we do in the club, including Hands-on Macintosh with Micah, hands-on windows with Paul Ott, the Untitled Linux Show, home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson and on and on and on.

(02:30:36):
So I'm really trying to make sure that you feel like you're getting something for your seven bucks. And honestly, I think we're giving you too much. But what can I say? So go right now. Tweet tv slash it. No, you. You're deserving it. I don't want you to think I'm going to take anything away. Twit TV slash club twit. $84 a year. There's family memberships. If you want many people listening, you can also do gifts because many of you listening to the show right now are already members there. So go ahead and set up a gift option too. That's a good idea. I'll get one for Jake. Yeah. In fact, a number. Dan Patterson said I'm already a member he wanted to get a bunch of gifts for. It's nice. You want to do a bunch of you, Dan. Anyway, Ann's the community manager. I should let you talk about the club, but we really it.

(02:31:19):
There's the discord. You get to participate in that as well. It's fun. It is fun. And I got to talk to John Scalzi last week. That was a club Twit exclusive. And that's on the twit plus feed. TWI plus feed. You don't have to be here live for those things put, he was great. Oh, he was so funny. Twit tv slash club twit. Thank you for letting us interrupt your life with this plug. Hey, you know me. I'm not Mr. Promotional. I don't like doing this stuff, but I do like doing the shows and I want to keep doing 'em and I want to keep ants sitting next to me. Amen to that. You want to keep John at the board. I don't care if the AI can do it, so

Cathy Gellis (02:31:55):
Just in case I can't. You got to cover your bases. You never

Leo Laporte (02:31:57):
Know. I'm not convinced. Anyway, thank you in advance. I appreciate it. Thank you. Kathy, do you have a pick something you're happy about? You always got weird rock bands and weird stuff for us. It's great.

Cathy Gellis (02:32:11):
Yes. Well, I'm going to bristle at the contextualization of Huey. The news is weird, but there

Leo Laporte (02:32:17):
You go. You bristle Adam.

Cathy Gellis (02:32:19):
Yeah, consider me bristle.

Leo Laporte (02:32:22):
I guess you're right. Huey Lewis. The news is not exactly jaw dropping. Alright.

Cathy Gellis (02:32:27):
But with that exception, it doesn't dawn on me to really think about things as favorite, as opposed to interesting and sort of fascinating and something like that. So at the end of September, I went back to Europe for the first time since Covid and I went to France. I went to Paris for a day and it was the first time I had seen Notre.

Leo Laporte (02:32:53):
I'm getting

Cathy Gellis (02:32:54):
Confused with the football team, but not Notre

Leo Laporte (02:32:56):
Dame. Notre Dame Dam. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (02:32:58):
It was the first time I'd seen it since the fire, because I

Leo Laporte (02:33:00):
Don't think I've been there

Cathy Gellis (02:33:01):
Since broke heart

Leo Laporte (02:33:02):
Back in 2018. I remember seeing this and I called Lisa, I said, quick turn on the tv. We love Notre Dame. We loved the city of Paris. This was a heartbreaker. What was it like when you went there?

Cathy Gellis (02:33:15):
Well, so I was worried about it. Some back history is I had lived in Paris for a while and the apartment I had was not far from it. It was just to the south a little bit. And I could actually see the spires from my kitchen window. So when it happened, it was even a little bit more personally devastating, even though I hadn't been there in years and years and years. But yeah, it was a big deal and I was sort of dreading going to see it, but I sort of felt like I should because it was significant. In central Paris, there are a couple years into the fixing of it, the reconstruction of it, and it's fascinating. So the esplanade in front of it is open air that's all cleaned up. The facade is cleaned up. They've actually got some risers where you can just sort of sit on it and just look at the church. And it's also got around the construction site, little placards that sort of explain what's going on where they zoom in and they talk about the different craftsmanship, the different plans.

(02:34:26):
They've got

(02:34:26):
Pictures of both, although not everything is translated into English, but some about a third of it is translated. And then there's some extra French. And actually if you keep scrolling down on this one, I think you'll see a sample of one of the pictures,

(02:34:45):
Something

(02:34:45):
Like that where the pictures that I saw alongside where they showed the craftspeople doing the restorations, and you get a look at the artwork that was sitting up in the rafters and it's at a scale that's human or give or take a little plus a little minus. And the artistry is such that showing these craftspeople, restoring them is almost like watching a nurse care for her patient. There's this tenderness and you see these expressions on the artwork. They were sitting there waiting for somebody to come and clean up because some of them hadn't been cleaned up in ages and ages and ages, like centuries maybe.

(02:35:25):
And so I was going to this site that I was dreading because I'm almost sensitive around ruins and stuff like that. It's an uncomfortable thing. And I ended up getting excited because this whole building was A getting love. And B, it was fascinating about how they're talking about understanding the engineering and the artistry that had gone into its original creation and how they were mimicking it and how they were going to be true to the original. And there's going to be some modern stuff. They're going to have, I think a sprinkler system and certain things like that.

Leo Laporte (02:35:58):
Good.

Cathy Gellis (02:36:00):
A lot of that seems like a good idea, but to the extent you don't want it to be intrusive. And so there's been a lot of very significant decisions about what to do, even replicate the spire because the spire is not original, but they've made all these decisions and just the engineering of it and the humanity and the fact that human beings could do this, that human beings could build it in the first place and then match the skills and have the technology and ability to do it again. I got excited in this kind of geeky way, the way I get excited when I watch space movies where there's something so exciting about what the human mind can do. And so I went from the sense of dread to the sense of this is really cool and really exciting. And I took lots of pictures of the different signs that they had around explaining things.

(02:36:50):
But the one that also did strike me is there were about four pictures I saw where they had the craftspeople doing the restoration of the human beings built into the art. It was just such a striking dynamic of the way this one that we saw captures it a little bit, but some of the others, you just see a human being with the Q-tip and their patient is just kind of sitting there patiently getting taken care of. And that just really struck at me. But yeah, just the engineering and then we can do this. They built it in the first place and we can understand what they did. So we're able to replicate it, but they're going to be doing it in four years where the first thing took 200 years to construct. So that's awesome. We've come a long way, but I just thought it was so interesting and I got excited about it. So in the department of favorite things that are interesting, I wanted to share that excitement.

Leo Laporte (02:37:39):
We have three links, one to a Magnum photos photo essay one year in, there's a 60 minutes piece, and then there's the official site itself on the restoration of Notre Dame. We'll put those in show notes. Lisa and I are torn. We love Paris and we were thinking maybe we should wait until it's done. But it sounds like it's worth seeing the process as it goes on.

Cathy Gellis (02:38:03):
I think so too. It's something else to see if there's anything that French are really good at. Although apparently this may go back to Victor Hugo because the Notre Dame apparently was falling into disrepair then the hunchback

Leo Laporte (02:38:16):
Of Notre Dame,

Cathy Gellis (02:38:17):
And then he wrote the hunchback. But he had also apparently ridden a leaflet that the leaflets kind of called on France to sort of take care of its art better because it talked about how I think the line he had was there's a building does two things. It provides a use to its owner and beauty to the people or something like that. In

Leo Laporte (02:38:34):
1830 twos war on the Demolishes, Hugo wrote, I'm reading from

Cathy Gellis (02:38:40):
Parenthesis.

Leo Laporte (02:38:40):
Wow.

Cathy Gellis (02:38:41):
We've tied it

Leo Laporte (02:38:42):
Every day. Some old memory of France goes away with a stone on which it was written. Every day we break some letter of the venerable book of tradition. And so in Notre Dame Depa published in 1831 under the title that he preferred, Hugo placed the building and the book in opposition, the arch deacon silently gazed at the gigantic edifice, then with his signs stretching his right hands toward the printed book, which lay open on the table. And his left hand told Notre Damm with a melancholy glance from book to church, he said, alas, the one will kill the other. Wow.

Cathy Gellis (02:39:19):
Thank goodness. But he spawned with his writings, the launching of the department in France that takes care of its cultural icons. He

Leo Laporte (02:39:29):
Preserved the gothic as an honorable thing.

Cathy Gellis (02:39:32):
And so if there's anything the French do well, it's museums and appreciation of these artistry and things that they have. So I'm sure there will still be some legacy discussing the rehabilitation because it was so fascinating. But it is interesting to see the process and to see the new and the old new scaffolding adjacent to the old church with an elevator which they didn't have before and cranes, but it's still old and it's healing and just if you have a sense of attachment to the place, watching it be healed is, yeah, there would be merit in saying that because more than just being ruined or done,

Leo Laporte (02:40:14):
As much as I love and as many memories I have of visiting it over the years, I have to say Saint Chappelle is actually my favorite church. And it's not widely known because it's kind of hidden away inside some bureaucratic buildings. But it is an amazing, amazing cathedral or chapel, I guess. It's not really a cathedral, but boy, if that were to burn, then I'd, I'd really be unhappy. I hope they do the same to preserve chapel. Thank you, Kathy. It's always great to see you. Thank you so much for making some time for us. I know you've been on Zoom all day, so I appreciate your patience Mr. Jeff Jarvis, a number. Well, first let me just also complete the reading from, oh, I thought you finished now there's more. There's more. Hugo ended his story with the mob storming the cathedral. Moreover, the vast edifice remains forever unfinished.

(02:41:13):
The press that gigantic machine, which Untiring sucks up all the intellectual sap of society, unceasingly, vomits forth fresh material for its work. All mankind are on the scaffolding. Every mind is amazing. Oh, that's very aptt. Even adjacent to the moderns. Alright, so we're going to stay in an artsy mode here. Very rare for me. Yes. So MoMA has just acquired a generative AI piece of work for its permanent collection called unsupervised. And if you go to line one 14, you can see it's video. Oh, I've seen videos of this. I can't wait to see this. What? So it's in the permanent collection and what this is is the Gen AI used publicly available information from all of the collection of MoMA and then generated this. So this is the whole collection and it looks now to people who aren't watching the video. It's one of those videos very popular in Tokyo that look like they're three-dimensional.

(02:42:17):
They're not, but through a trick, little trumped loy, if you will, they make it look like there's actually three dimensional waves of color and texture. And that's AI generated, you're saying from the works in the MoMA. That's from the works in the MoMA. That's wonderful, isn't it? I didn't realize that about it. I have seen this before, but I did not know that. And it's permanent so we can go see it. Permanent. So Raf from Rafik Anadol studio is who did it and announced on LinkedIn that it was just acquired for the permanent collection. I thought it was a really nice Is it different all the time? It looks like it might. I guess so. It's like might never repeat. I'd like to see this on the sphere in Las Vegas. That would be a lot better. I was going to say, I've seen stuff like this on the sides of casinos.

(02:43:07):
It looks really, really cool. Interesting. Now looking at this video is one on YouTube. You could see the source material. It does look like paintings. Very interesting. What a nice installation. Unsupervised machine hallucinations. Permanent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. You haven't seen a person. Well class to end the show today. Thank you. Thank you. Some shows end with Booze Booma, some shows end with class. Some shows end with extreme parkour and legged robots. You left that one out, Jeff. That would've been fun. I didn't leave that up because I'm too classy for way too classy for anything like this. You're get this, you're getting all world panicky. I know Aunt Pruitt. This is Carnegie Mellon with four legged that looks more like an insect than a dog. I guess we'll get used to this, right? They'll just be all around. Yeah. Yeah. We'll just get used to it at some point. It's not creepy at all.

Cathy Gellis (02:44:08):
No, it's not. This looks like I got chased by a dog when I was riding my bike earlier this summer and I'm having nightmares, imagining getting chased by this

Leo Laporte (02:44:17):
Robotic dog. This is going to win. I'll just tell you how a story ends. Just have water.

Cathy Gellis (02:44:23):
I thought my heart was going to explode, accelerating to get past that dog. So I don't know, maybe this is better or worse.

Leo Laporte (02:44:31):
Well, as long as you don't arm it, you're all right.

Cathy Gellis (02:44:35):
Well, if this doesn't have teeth, the other one did.

Leo Laporte (02:44:37):
Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. I would be less worried about this. I'd just get this wet. Some kind way it get be done. What happens when your robot catches on fire? What would you do then? Now you asked the machine, then

(02:44:50):
Somebody can identify with why that's horrible. Ants your pick of the week. My pick is we have blog posts. So if you go to twit TV and scroll down towards about the lower third of the page below our, oh, you just wrote one. We have blog posts out there from myself and Oh nice. Our other host and our marketing. Oh wow. Look at this. So go check it out twit. That TV blog posts right there. So like a little TWIT magazine. I didn't even know we were doing this. Yeah, we started doing this a couple of weeks ago. If you click a blog in the header at twit tv. No, no, that's a different one. Oh geez. See, just if you just scroll down. Okay. On the main page, you scroll down on the main page. Oh, it's on the main page. Yeah. Scroll down and you'll see latest posts right there.

(02:45:44):
Right there. Right there. Oh, nice. Right below our shows. Oh, this is cool. And there's the John Scalzi interview and home theater Geek Scott Wilkinson. Optimizing picture quality. So that's right there below the shows. And even it is in the menu, but I think it looks better down there. Yeah, it does. This isn't as exciting. Alright, so yeah, check that out on the main page there. Nice. And I wanted to share this because this is something for you on football Sunday when sit, is this about the blindside when sit down with Mrs. LaPorte? Yes. So you won't be asking her 50 questions. I do, but when I do it, so she feels like she's smarter than me. How to read a defense. Ooh, I like it. This is such a really good video. I like it. For those of you that are interested about American football, and this man jumps in and shares a lot of the X's and O's and nos.

(02:46:36):
He has a Florida State affiliation, but he does a good job just going over the basics of and gives you good video. Or is he examples? Nice. Seminole Florida State seminars. But I thought it was funny when I came across it, the I will watch it. I need to learn. I do. Michael, when we were in Green Bay bought a giant d and a fence piece. Yes. Defense. So I got to learn about, and the Niners have a very good, they do defense me, one of the three undefeated teams in the N F L should learn about that. Mr. Aunt Pruitt is@auntpruitt.com. His prints are there if you go to the print section. And he joins us every Wednesday for the show. Plus doing all that hard work you do in the club. Trying tomorrow, the AI show with Jeff Jarvis and Jason Howell. Thank you. An thank you.

(02:47:27):
Thank you Jeff Jarvis. We'll look forward to seeing you. Thank you. Thank you. Tomorrow and again next week I'll be at Mom's house. Sick of me yet? Not yet, but nearly. Keep trying. 737 times you kind of get there. No. You haven't been on all 737 shows. No, I have not. No. Most though. I've been pretty good. Most, I think since pretty close to the Be Actually, I don't even know. Were you on the very first show? Oh yes. I didn't know Doc SROs was on this show. Did not know that in the beginning, in the early days. I tell you it was Gina and Leo and me at the beginning. You were one of the creators. Yes, I was. Because I wrote a book called August 1st. What would Google do? That's right. Why didn't I remember that? This is back when it was audio. Only August 1st, 2009, the first episode. Same dumb theme song was it? This song is awesome. I think so. I don't know. This song is awesome.

(02:48:24):
Is it? He came to me, it is a few months ago and said, okay, I love our song. It makes me smile every time. It was a mistake I 14 years ago and I'll never live it. Death. Kathy Giles is@cgcouncil.com. C G C O U N S E l.com. She's on mast on Kathy Gillis. Kathy with a c g e l l i s. Thank you so much for being here, Kathy. Always good to be here. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Kathy, you can take the headphones off. Your long zoom nightmare is over. Thank you. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twig every Wednesday. We're at about 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc. You can watch us do it live at live twit tv. You can listen there too. There's a live audio stream as well. If you're watching live chat, live in our IRC at IRC twit tv. Of course, club members get to do that in our club Twit Discord, but they never have to leave because the party never stops. Never stops with Discord after the fact. You can get shows at TWI tv slash twig. That's the website. There's Jeff and an sitting right there. Look at that. Wow. We look great. Yeah, and I think that might be from Jason Howell's, pixel eight. I don't know. We look damn good there.

(02:49:46):
You can also get it on YouTube. There's a this week in Google Channel on YouTube, and of course the best way to get is subscribe on your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available and you can listen at your leisure. Thanks for joining us everyone. We will see you next week. I'll be at Mom's. I think I got a good setup. I think it's going to look good. It looks good last time. Yeah. Well this time I got a green screen, so I'm look like I'm trying to make it look like I'm here. Oh boy. I won't have I, I dunno. Wait, wait. Is this the house you grew up in? No. Oh golly. No. But I grew up there. I'm for

Jeff Jarvis (02:50:23):
Leo's bedroom.

Leo Laporte (02:50:24):
No, Alex Wilhelm's living there. I can't. Okay. You know what, I could ask Alex if he'll let me do it for my old bedroom. That'd be hysterical. That would be hysterical. That would be fun. Yeah, you go ask. You got to get your cameras when you go shepherd. Poster up at the wall. Yeah. Oh no, I was in college. That was well after college. Sybil Shepherd. Yeah, I know. I couldn't come up with a reference soon enough. I think it was more howdy duty for me. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time on this week at Google. Bye-bye. See y'all.

Lou Maresca (02:50:56):
Come join us on this week, enterprise tech expert. COAs and I talk about the enterprise world and we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CSOs, every acronym, role plus IT pros and marketeers when we talk about technology, software plus services, security, you name it. Everything under the sun. You know what? I learned something each and every week and I bet you will too. So definitely join us. And of course, check out the twit TV website and click on this weekend Enterprise Tech to subscribe today.